breaking wood and breaking glass. When he pulls his fist back, he’s split the skin, smashed it, and he leaves blood on the board. He holds his hand. His face looks like how I imagine the glass behind the board looks; hard and lined, each piece sliding away from the other where they split, black in the cracks. His eyes look wet. “Shit.” The blood pools in the valleys between his knuckles, rolls to waterfall between his fingers. He looks at me. “I couldn’t do it even if I did have a crowbar.”
“You ain’t Skeet,” I say. The taste of my tears is like raw oysters.
“We have to, Esch.”
“It’s too thick.”
“We have to try.”
Randall knees his chest like he is putting on pants and then he kicks his heel hard into the center of the plywood where he dented it. The glass behind it shatters. He kicks again and the wood splits; it sounds like a shot. Randall stops, and we both look around, scared, but there is no old man swinging a gun like an axe, no pink-dressed woman, just the cows lowing in the barn in the dark, the wind rustling past the trees, the air so wet and hot it could be rain.
“One more time,” Randall says, and then he kicks again, all of his muscle straining against the hot day, the sealed gingerbread house, and the board cracks in two but will not fall because of the nails, and Randall is crouching on the ground, clutching his bad knee.
“The wrong knee,” he says, and blows on his kneecap like he’s scraped it bloody and he is trying to blow away the pain and grit, like Mama did to our scrapes when we were younger. If the scrapes were on the front of our knees, she would put our dirty feet in the middle of her chest to clean the wounds, and we could feel her heart beating, strong as the thud of the ground when we walked, through our soles. “Look inside.”
I put my eye to the slit and there is darkness and the gauzy blow of curtains. Under the darkness, there is the empty smell of potpourri and Pine-Sol. Two fingers can fit through the crack, nothing more.
“There’s nothing there. It smells clean. Probably took everything when they evacuated.”
Randall rubs the skin around and below his knee.
“She looked like the type of woman that wouldn’t leave nothing to spoil.”
Randall laughs, but it is dry and scrapes past his throat like brown leaves scratched along the ground by wind.
“Come on,” Randall says.
Randall clutches his hand to his chest when he walks, hopping on his bad knee. I stop at the edge of the clearing and look back at the barn, the cows safe inside it. I can see them brushing against one another in the rank hay dark, their wet noses turned up toward the ceiling, wondering where the blue has gone, the bitter green grass, their bird familiars. How they’d crave the touch of a wing.
On the walk back, it is weird to see Randall walking without swinging his long loose arms. The wood is a sleeping animal: still empty. It is all wrong. I hear the rustling before Randall does, and I have to reach out to stop him, since he has been watching his bad knee.
“Look.”
It is China. She drops something rust-colored and then shoves her nose in it from side to side like a screwdriver. Then she points with her head and dives into what she has dropped, rolling in it; she moves like smoke, the pink pads of her feet waving in the air. Her eyes are squeezed shut and she wears a wide, gum-bearing leer. Her fur is turning red.
“What is that?” Randall asks.
China must hear because she stops her squirming mid-roll and springs up, water frozen to ice, her lips sealed, her tail out. She sees us, looks down at her prize, and then raises her nose to the simmering sky and barks, once. Then she runs away.
It is a dead chicken, opened raw and still warm. I imagine that it looks like the inside of my throat, pink with salt and blood.
“That’s ours,” I say, but Randall is silent as he starts walk-hopping toward the Pit and the house.
“What are you doing?”
Randall says it like he’s been at the park all day, running himself darker and straighter on the court, running himself until all he becomes is muscle and breath. He is tired, and he stands in the doorway of his room, the hall light on overhead, staring. It was a long walk. I shuffle down the hall, alcohol in hand, a wet paper towel for his fist, which he holds close enough to his face to suck. Junior sucked his knuckles until he was two, then he stopped.
Skeet is sitting on his bed, and China has her forelegs on his lap, her nose up; when her neck moves, she is graceful as the spider lilies that grow out on the bayou, bending out over the water. She is licking Skeetah’s chin. There are pink smears from the chicken on her jaw. Skeetah is smiling, the kind of shy smile I haven’t seen on his face since he used to steal packets of Kool-Aid when we were younger and suck the bitter powder, his teeth electric blue or blood red. The puppies sigh and whine in their bucket, which is in the corner of their room along with the fifty-pound bags of dog food, the leashes, the half-shredded tires, China’s blanket.
“I’m bringing her inside for the storm.” Skeetah doesn’t look up.
“Fuck no,” Randall says.
“I ain’t leaving them in the shed.”
“Why not?”
“It ain’t strong enough is why not.”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with it.”
“It’s too flimsy for them.”
“This is a house, Skeetah. For humans. Not for dogs.”
Skeet looks up. The shy smile, gone. He stops China’s licking by muzzling her with both hands, and she is as still as any of the wrecks in the yard. The scabbed-over wounds on her make her look as rusted as they are.
“I’m not leaving them out there.”
Randall’s face shatters then, and all that’s left is an open window.
“I’m telling Daddy.”
“Fucking tell him then.” Skeetah is all teeth. He lets go of China and stands, and she slides off of him, lands squarely, follows Skeet out of the room. All three of them stand in the door of Daddy’s room as Randall yanks it open and goes in.
“Daddy.” No sound. “Daddy!”
Daddy lays on his side with his back to us like he’s just fallen from something tall, a tree or a fence, and has shattered bone. He rolls over to face us, drags himself up on an elbow.
“What?” This sounds ripped from him, as if he is speaking around the pain. “What do you want?”
“Skeet trying to bring the dogs inside for the storm.”
“Inside?” Daddy’s eyes shine in the dark like an armadillo’s. “Inside what?”
“Inside the house.”
“No,” Daddy says. He lays back on his pillows, rolls toward his hand.
“No,” says Skeetah. He elbows past Randall, stands in front of him. China weaves through at his thigh, sits, her tongue out, looking almost like a normal dog. “I’m not leaving them out there.”
“No?” Daddy faces him, lurches up on an elbow. “What you mean, no? I said they couldn’t stay and they can’t!” He would be shouting if he was better, but he stops for breath between every other word, and what comes out is in wheezes.
“If they go, I go,” Skeetah says.
“What?” Daddy breathes.
“If they go out in the shed, I go in the shed.” Skeetah steps farther into Daddy’s black room, and he is a blankness in the dark, his voice coming from no face, no head. China glows like white sand on a moonlit river beach.
“You ain’t going out in no shed”-Daddy coughs, his throat dry-“with no dog.”
“Yes, I am.” The darkness moves. “And if Randall try to stop me, we going to fight. All of us.”
“Don’t make me get up.” Daddy swings his legs over the side of the bed, pushes up with his good hand, but his feet get tangled up in the sheets, and he tries to untangle them with his bad hand, and then yanks it back up and wobbles, high from the pain medicine. He lists like he’s drunk.
Skeetah moves to leave Daddy’s room and comes into the light from the lighbulb in the hallway like a swimmer
