by Jesmyn Ward
“You know Rico going to be there. Fighting Kilo.”
Manny begins flipping the silver and red lighter again when he mentions Rico. The image, which looks like a tattoo, reads Hearts on Fire, and pictures two hearts diagonal to one another, going up in flames. His lips kiss the cigarillo and he pulls. China blinks and yawns. There is a movement behind my breast that feels like someone has turned a hose on full blast, and the water that has been baking in the pump in the summer heat floods out, scalding. This is love, and it hurts. Manny never looks at me.
“Well, I hope Kilo ready. Marquise told me some of his cousins from Baton Rouge been talking shit about how they got a boss dog, and they bringing her out to fight, too.” Skeetah rubs China on her side, smoothing her fur over her ribs as he squats over her. Her tail thumps once, raises dust, lies still.
“Kilo always ready.”
Rico is Manny’s cousin, the boy from Germaine who bought his dog, Kilo, to mate with China. Rico’s big red muscle of a dog with a killing jaw. It was Manny who talked up Kilo to Skeetah. As China grew older, her pulpy puppy muscle hardened like a pearl in the stomach of an oyster, and Skeet’s devotion was the living muscle. She grew lean and strong. Manny would talk shit whenever we were all out under the trees as if he could lessen the wonder of Skeetah’s prized dog. He thought he could dim her, that he could convince us she wasn’t white and beautiful and gorgeous as a magnolia on the trash-strewn, hardscrabble Pit, where everything else is starving, fighting, struggling.
Manny would sit on a milk crate or a tree stump and say, My cousin Rico got a fire dog. Probably about the same age as yours, but bigger. More muscle. Got a killing jaw. Skeetah would ignore Manny, or glance at him while he was dragging China through the sand, around the junk by her teeth locked in a bike tire, and say, Really. Yeah, Manny would say, and his white teeth would flash in his glass-burned, beautiful face. Yeah. China would squeal a dog’s squeal and bear down with her haunches, make Skeetah stumble toward her. We’ll see, Skeetah’d say.
Rico called China small-time until he came to the Pit with Manny one day and finally saw her: knee-high, stout as any boy dog but still sleek with muscle, and her long neck and head like a snake’s. Skeetah had her climb a leaning tree and then shred a half of a car tire, pulling it so hard the wire in the rubber made Skeet’s hands bleed. When they mated, China had let Kilo lick her from behind, let him mount. Smiled like she liked it. The tendons had stood out in Skeetah’s neck, and he squinted so that it looked like his eyes were closed. Kilo had placed his big mouth on her neck like he was kissing her and slobbered on her. She’d snapped at him, figured it for a hold. Hated the submission of it. She nicked him, snapped at him until she threw him off. She’d drawn blood: he hadn’t.
“What’s the dog name? From Baton Rouge?”
“Boss,” Skeetah laughed. China snorted into the dirt.
“Well, Kilo been fought from Florida to Louisiana. Broke a dog leg once. They better be ready.”
“You seen it?”
“What?”
“The break?”
“No, Rico told me.” Manny waves away a gnat, inhales strong on the cigarillo, and blows smoke in a fog in front of his face. “Y’all need to start a fire out here. Why y’all always got so many bugs up here on the Pit? Gnats so bold they out in the middle of the day. Fuck the evening time.” He drops the cigarillo; it smokes a pencil thread and then smothers in the sand.
“We savages up here on the Pit. Even the gnats. Mosquitoes so big they look like bats.” Skeetah nods at me and Junior. “You better watch out. Junior look puny but he’ll sucker-punch you in the neck and leave you choking. And Esch-” Skeetah stands when he says it, and China circles him, sniffing in the dirt, “You see how boss China is. You think the other girl on the Pit going to be weak?”
“I ain’t saying either of them weak.” Manny still hasn’t looked at me. “But you know China ain’t as boss as she used to be.”
“What?” Skeetah’s tendons are showing.
“Any dog give birth like that is less strong after. Even if you don’t think it. Take a lot out of an animal to nurse and nurture like that. Price of being female.” Finally Manny glances at me. It slides over me like I’m glass.
Skeetah laughs. It sounds as if it’s hacking its way out of him.
“You serious? That’s when they come into they strength. They got something to protect.” He glances at me, too, but I feel it even after he looks away. “That’s power.”
China is licking Skeetah’s hand like she licks the puppies. Skeetah pushes her head away but she keeps at it, and he looks away from Manny. The tendons in his neck smooth. The menace leaves him; if he were a dog, his hair would flatten.
“To give life”-Skeetah bends down to China, feels her from neck to jaw, caresses her face like he would kiss her; she flashes her tongue-“is to know what’s worth fighting for. And what’s love.” Skeetah rubs down her sides, feels her ribs.
“You wormed her yet?” I ask. Does Manny think that of me, that I am weak? That there is a price to this body that swallows him, that pulls at him and takes him until he has nothing left? Is Manny glad because he will never have to pay it?
“Naw. She wouldn’t take the Ivomec earlier. Spilled it.”
“You know how to mix it?” Manny slid his lighter into his jean shorts pocket. His muscle shirt was white as his teeth. Shaliyah must have washed. I wonder if he ever told her that about weakness. If he ever called her female, bit it off at the end like underripe sugarcane when he said it?
Skeetah looks up at Manny, his hands dropping, his jaw loose.
“What you mean, mix it?”
“Fuck, you going to kill the dog.” Manny smiles like he wants to laugh. I swallow and realize that I want to push him, to place my hands flat on the muscles of his chest and shove him for looking that way at Skeet, for insulting him. For saying things he doesn’t know he is saying about me. I want him to fall over backward, straining his bad arm, and then I want to bear him down in the dirt. Make him touch all of me, for once. “You supposed to mix the Ivomec with cooking oil and then give it to the dog. And don’t try doing it with water if you ain’t got no cooking oil. Then it won’t mix good.”
“She didn’t take none of it this morning.” Skeetah is holding China’s head still, prying her eyes wide, peering into them.
“You sure?” Manny is still smiling.
“I’m sure.”
“And she only need a little bit. You got a medicine syringe?”
“Yeah, I…” Skeetah pauses. “I got one yesterday.” Looks at me. I figure Randall done told Manny what happened with the farmer and the wormer and the dog, but I know that Skeetah doesn’t want everybody to know either. Less people that know, the less people that talk if the farmer ever wanders through the wood our way, asking questions. We live in the black heart of Bois Sauvage, and he lives out away in the pale arteries, so I don’t think he will ever come here, swinging his cane like an axe, his dog foaming, probably a rifle in the back window of his gleaming, tinted pickup truck. But I know Skeet would say, But still.
“You need half a cc for every twenty pounds. What, China about sixty-five pounds? Give her one and a half.” Manny pulls his arm across his chest, shrugging his shoulder as he does it. Stretching out the wound. This is what he does when he is bored. He looks away from Skeetah and China, beyond Junior, who is peering into the dark shed where the puppies are dozing on their new tile floor, to the woods. Never at me. “Any more than that and she could go blind. And any more than that, she could die.”
Skeetah pulls China to him by her haunches and pries open her jaw, sniffing at her tongue. He has turned from lover to father. She, his doting daughter. I draw a line through the sand with my toe, pull my hands from the pockets of my shorts where they had crept to cup my stomach, trying to expose me so that Manny will look at me like he looks at China. Junior begins whistling into the darkness of the shed, like he would call the puppies to him, lead them into the light
, to a new brother, and burrow with them under the house like his lost dogs.
“Get away from the door, Junior,” Skeetah says. China licks his breath, tasting his words. “Esch, we got oil, right?”
Daddy keeps a two-gallon jug of vegetable oil in the cabinet for frying oysters or fish when he can catch them or his friends give them to him, but I don’t think China will like the taste of it. I stick a finger into the oil and rub it across my teeth. Too metallic, too bland. But the bacon grease Daddy keeps on the counter in an old coffee can, the metal waxy with residue: that tastes like drippings. That tastes like the next bite is going to be salty crunchy bacon, tender in the middle, burnt at the edges, stiff as a twig. This she will like.
Skeetah has found a big cardboard box, cut it in half, and lined it with material, and I can’t tell whether the material is old clothes or old sheets or old towels, because under the dogs they are just dark gray rags. The bottom of the box reads Westinghouse.
“I took it from behind the hall at the church,” Skeetah says. He is sucking the Ivomec into the medicine syringe. It is colorless as water. He is sitting on a toolbox rusted and kicked to bad angles, the Ivomec bottle between his knees. When he shifts, the toolbox crunches against the metal inside like a mouth grinding its teeth. He recaps the bottle, slides it into his pants pocket. Manny is gone, but Junior is standing in the corner, his hands folded behind him, leaning against the shed wall.
“Where’s Manny?”
“Said he had something to go do.” Skeetah holds the syringe in one hand, the coffee container of bacon grease in another. He wobbles.
“He said he’d be back,” Junior pipes up. He rocks on his feet and slams against the shed, shaking the tin.
“Junior. Stop it. Shit, I need a bowl.” Skeetah turns to me. “Can you get me a bowl, please?”
“Junior, go get him a bowl.” Even though I have to pee, the melon under my shirt ripe, I still don’t want to leave the shed.
“He asked you,” Junior says quietly, intent on the puppies. They are blindly pitching themselves out the door of the box, headlong.
“Junior, go ’head.”
“No.”
“Esch, please.”
In the house, I hardly sit on the toilet. I lean over and mouth my knees, feel the tender skin above my kneecaps with my lips. Outside, the rooster crows at the middle of the day, his call cutting through the hazy buzz of the insects. Nausea digs at me. Manny has left; I don’t want to think of him, to know he is somewhere out there eating up all the sunlight, smoking a cigarillo, passing purchases to customers at the gas station, his hands brushing Shaliyah soft as marsh grass, but I do. I walk in shadow on the way to the shed. Where I can’t avoid the sun, where it touches me through the branches, it burns.
Skeetah pours a palmful of the bacon grease into the bowl and then squirts in the Ivomec. He mixes it with his finger. Even though we are in the shade, the heat is worse in the shed, like the inside of a hot fist. Junior and Skeetah are both glazed with sweat, and Skeetah blinks like he’s about to cry because the sweat runs like water from his scalp to his forehead into his eyes. I am trying to see whether the Ivomec is mixing well in the bowl when there is an eclipse of light in the doorway and Skeetah looks up and past me, pissed.
“Move out the way of the door. You blocking all the light.”
It’s Manny. Both of his hands are on the top of the doorsill, and he leans into the door, stretching his body like taffy. All I can see is the shadow of him and the white of his smile. It feels wrong to not be able to see his face, seems wrong that he is as dark as me now, that he would be washed dark by the sun behind him like ink set to bleeding over waterlogged paper.
“Anybody seen my lighter?” Manny’s voice is as distinct and sharp as the corners of the toolbox Skeet sits on.
“No.” Skeetah is stirring the medicine with his finger. “Move.”
“You, Esch?”
I shake my head.
“You put it in your pocket,” Junior says, and Manny leans on the doorjamb, fishes in his pockets. Light diffuses through the room. I see Manny’s profile, his glass-burned side, and then he stops fumbling and turns to us and his face is dark again. I want him to grip my hand like he grips the dark beams over his head, to walk with me out of the shed and away from the Pit. To help me bear the sun. To hold me once he learns my secret. To be different.
“I didn’t see you over there, Junior,” Manny says.
“Thank you,” Skeet says. The oil has absorbed all of the Ivomec. The mix is off-white, creamy. Skeetah tastes it.
“You shouldn’t do that,” shadow Manny says.
“Don’t you have somewhere to go?”
“I’m just trying to help you out.”
“You could help me out by moving out of my light-in or out.”
“I’m out.” Manny shrugs. “I’m going to look up under the trees. Ain’t no way I’m coming in; China don’t like me.” China is sitting before Skeetah, ignoring how close I am to him, intent on the bowl with the bacon grease in it. She is panting, her tongue dripping water.
“China likes everybody.” Skeet is sucking the mixture back up into the syringe.
“Okay.” Manny laughs. His smile again. Each time I see his teeth, nausea elbows me. Manny steps away and the light floods in and I want him to leave, to come back, to never have been. China is dancing on her hind legs because Skeetah is standing, the syringe in his hand.
“Here.”
I press the bowl to my stomach.
China is hopping on her hind legs. What tore through the gray dog yesterday is now a woman approaching her partner on the floor of the Oaks, the first lick of the blues guitar sounding from the jukebox, a drink in her hand. China lands on her front paws and pushes back up. Skeet crouches, places one arm around the back of her neck, twining his hand around her jaw, tilting her head up.
“That’s my girl,” he says.
China grins. Her tongue flashes out like a wet, whipped rag.
“I know my girl,” Skeetah breathes. With his other hand, he tilts the syringe to her lips.
China barks, nods. Her front legs rest on his chest like a lover’s. She flings her head back in submission, supplication.
“Good bitch,” Skeetah says.
China nuzzles the syringe, licks.
“That’s my bitch.” Skeetah closes his fingers, the medicine disappears, and he withdraws. The puppies twitch and nuzzle at their feet. China accidentally steps on the orange one, and it yelps.
“Always my bitch,” Skeetah says.
Outside, Manny is pacing the yard, running his feet through the sand.
“His bitch must’ve gave it to him.” Skeetah breathes this into China’s coat; from the doorway, she is the dusty lightbulb in the room. Junior is creeping along the wall, trying to get closer to the puppies. In the yard, the dust from Manny’s searching feet billows up and obscures him, turning his white shirt, his golden skin, dark as a bruised peach.
I’ve heard girls at my school talk. These are conversations I snatch from the air like we take down clothes that have crusted dry on a clothesline. The girls say that if you’re pregnant and you take a month’s worth of birth control pills, it will make your period come on. Say if you drink bleach, you get sick, and it will make what will become the baby come out. Say if you hit yourself really hard in the stomach, throw yourself on the metal edge of a car and it hits you low enough to call bruises, it could bring a miscarriage. Say that this is what you do when you can’t afford an abortion, when you can’t have a baby, when nobody wants what is inside you.
In the bathroom, I bend over standing and knead my stomach, knead the melon to pulp, but it just keeps springing back: ripe. Intent on bearing seed. I could find something big enough and hard enough to jump on: Daddy’s dump truck hood, Daddy’s tractor, one of the old washing machines out in the yard. We have bleach in the laundry room. Only thing I wouldn’t be able to find is the birth control pills; I’ve never had a prescription, wouldn�
�t have money to get them if I did, don’t have any girlfriends to ask for some, and have never been to the Health Department. Who would bring me? Daddy, who sometimes I think forgets that I am a girl? Big Henry, one of the few of our friends who has a car? Manny? Teeth-in-the-dark Manny? If I took care of it, he would never know, I think, never know, and then maybe it would give him time. Time to what? I push. Be different. Love me.
These are my options, and they narrow to none.
The sun set hours ago, and I am sitting on the toilet seat, pulling the towel that Randall tacked up for a curtain to look out in the yard. I see Skeetah dragging wood to the door of the shed. The bare bulb burns outward, shining on the dirt he kneels in. He is prying nails from wood. Insects swarm at the edges of the light. The frame for the kennel that sat for days, wedged into the dirt like a fallen scarecrow, is upright again. He is building her a house. He is watching over her, gauging her for sickness. He knows love.
“Gotdamnit.”
Daddy’s pickup eases into the yard so slowly that I can hear him curse above the gurgle of the engine. This is how he drives when he is bombed-out drunk. Very slowly, and with his brights on. His headlights break the golden bubble that encases Skeet and flood the yard with light. Skeetah raises the arm with the hammer and shades his eyes. Daddy parks parallel to his dump truck, which has sat rust-barnacled and silent since I attempted to crank it this morning. Daddy leaves his headlights on and gets out of the truck.
“I said, gotdamnit!”
Daddy tries to punctuate this by slamming the door of his truck, but he fails. His hand slips from the metal, and it closes so quietly I can’t even hear it from my seat on the toilet next to the window.
“Gotdamn Van’s Salvage,” Daddy mutters, “didn’t even have the part I needed.” He leans against the side of his truck like it’s a human being, speaks this almost as low as he used to on the nights he came home dazed drunk when Mama was alive. Mama would walk out to meet him, gather him to her like a child. She was only a few inches shorter than him and could bear all of his weight. He would whisper to her as they walked up the concrete slabs that made up the steps to the front porch. We never heard what he said to her. I imagine that he told her that he loved her, soaked tender with moonshine.