Salvage the Bones

Junior. And then, Your mama didn’t make it. The searching dog barks one last time before the rain and wind tighten like a choke collar and silence him. China growls in answer, but swallows it when Skeetah kneels before her, takes her face in his hands, and smoothes her ears back so that her eyes are slits and she grins and her skin pulls tight and her head could be a naked skull.

China squeals and jumps up into a bark, skitters back and forth across Skeetah’s bed, over his knees; this is what makes me look up from my crouch on Randall’s bed, from my stomach, from me trying to burrow into myself, to safety. China looks to the ceiling, her teeth gleaming in the dark, ripping barks.

“China, what’s…?” Skeetah reaches out to grab her, to stop her from curling and running, and there is a loud, deafening boom. When it comes, China leaps from Skeetah’s bed and rushes to the door as if she would rip the wood to splinters with her teeth. Skeetah yanks the door open, and Randall is running into Daddy’s room with a lantern, Junior clinging to his waist while the wind yells outside and the house shudders. There was no need for the lamp; there is a hole in the ceiling in Daddy’s room, the trunk and branches of a tree tossing in the opening. It is a large bush growing wrong. China barks, her nose to the wind.

“Daddy!” Randall runs forward into the wind and rain streaming through the gaping hole, the gray day fisting through it. Daddy is on his knees in front of the dresser, pushing an envelope down his pants. He stands and sees us.

“Go on!” Daddy says. He waves at us, the bandage on his wounded hand flashing light. He is slack and then tight like a clothesline catching in the wind, and he shoves us out of the ruined room and into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind him. Junior will not let go of Randall.

“We’ll stay in the living room.” Daddy says this as he slumps over on the sofa, pushing his head back into the cushion like Mama pushed hers back into the pillow, baring his neck. He’s blinking too much.

“Your hand,” Randall says.

“It’s fine,” says Daddy. “We going to stay here until the storm’s over.”

“When you think?” Skeetah asks.

“A few hours.”

China squeals and barks again.

“She knew,” I say.

“Knew what?” Daddy’s face is wet, and I don’t know whether it is water or sweat.

“Nothing,” Skeetah says.

“About the tree,” I say at the same time. Skeetah rubs China’s neck, and she gives a swallowed growl and sits, lays her head along Skeetah’s thigh and up his hip, her nose to him.

“She didn’t know nothing,” Skeetah says, and then he and China step as one, a new animal, toward the light opening of the hallway where the wind whistles in a thin sheet under Daddy’s door. They are going back to Skeetah and Randall’s room.

“Come in the living room, Skeet,” Daddy says. He rolls his eyes, closes them. Bares his teeth. “Please.”

I pick my blankets up, wrap them around me, and sit where I had lain. Skeetah walks back in with China, sets the bucket and China’s food and leashes and toys in the corner of the living room farthest away from Daddy, next to the TV. Skeetah lays his blanket against the corner, makes a chair, and China drapes herself across his lap, long and white, and lays her head along her paw and begins licking the pink pads of her feet. Skeetah rubs her, sets his small kerosene lamp down, and in the half-dark, China gleams butter yellow with the flame.

“Junior,” Randall says, “I know you ain’t pee yourself.”

Junior leans over, touches the ground beneath his butt, his face in his thighs.

“I didn’t do that.”

“Then why it’s all wet over here?”

We have been sitting in the living room, terrified and bored. I’m trying to read by the oil lamp, but the sound of the words are not coming together over the sound of the wind and the rain relentlessly bearing down on the house; they are fragments. Jason has remarried, and Medea is wailing. An exile, oh God, oh God, alone. And then: By death, oh, by death, shall the conflict be decided. Life’s little day ended. I shut the book, don’t even mark my place, and sit on it. I am cold. Skeetah and China look like they’ve fallen asleep, his hand on her flank and her breastbone on his knee, but when Randall says this, their eyes open to slits at the same time. The half deck of UNO cards that Randall had been attempting to teach Junior how to play stick to the floor around Junior’s legs. I shrug out of my covers; the thin stream of air that whispers from under Daddy’s door brushes past me like a boy in a school hallway, insistent and brusque, and Why are my shorts wet? Is it gone? Am I bleeding? Shouldn’t I be cramping? I stand. The floor underneath me is dark.

China rolls to her feet, her teeth out, and Skeetah grabs her by her scruff as she lunges. He holds her still. He stands, looking calmly about the room.

“It’s water. It’s coming in the house,” Skeetah says.

“Ain’t no water coming in the house. Wood just getting a little damp from the rain,” Daddy says.

“It’s coming up through the floor,” says Skeetah.

“Ain’t nowhere for it to come from.” Daddy waves at the room, waves like he’s stopping one of us from giving him something he doesn’t want: his antibiotics, a letter from a teacher, a school fund-raising brochure.

“Look,” Randall says, and he walks over to the window facing the street and bends like an old man, peering out. “Lot of trees on the road.”

“But you don’t see no water,” Daddy says.

“No.”

Skeetah and China walk past Junior, who stands where Randall left him in front of the sofa. Junior is picking up each foot, setting it down; he looks at the bottoms as if he cannot believe that he has feet and that they are wet. He pulls his shorts away from him, but they stick anyway. Skeetah peers out of the window, with China next to him.

“There,” Skeetah says. Randall and I run to the window at Skeetah’s side, but Junior is there first, and we are all over each other, our feet wet, the carpet a soaked sponge where we stand, Daddy looking at the window like it isn’t boarded up, like he can see through it.

There is a lake growing in the yard. It moves under the broken trees like a creeping animal, a wide-nosed snake. Its head disappears under the house where we stand, its tail wider and wider, like it has eaten something greater than itself, and that great tail stretches out behind it into the woods, toward the Pit. China barks. The wind ripples the water and it is coming for us.

There is water over my toes.

“The Pit,” Randall sighs.

Daddy gets up then, walks slowly over to the window, each bone bent the wrong way in each joint. Randall moves so Daddy can see out of the crack.

“No,” Daddy says.

I shift, and the water licks my ankles. It is cold, cold as a first summer swim. China barks, and when she jumps down from the window and bounces, there is a splash.

“Daddy?” Randall says. He puts his arm over Junior, who, cringing with his eyes wide, hugs Randall’s leg. But for once, Randall’s arm doesn’t look like metal, like ribbon, like stone; it bends at the elbow, soft, without muscle, and looks nothing but human.

“Daddy!” Junior squeals, but he buries his face in Randall’s hip, and Randall’s hip eats the end of the word. Junior rises an inch or so; he must be on his toes. The water is up to the middle of my calf.

“Look,” I say.

There is something long and dark blue between the trees. It is a boat. Someone has come to save us. But then I squint and the wind lags clear for one second, and it is not a boat, and no one has come to save us. It is Daddy’s truck. The water has picked it up, pushed it from the Pit. The snake has come to eat and play.

“Your truck,” Skeetah says.

Daddy begins to laugh.

The snake has swallowed the whole yard and is opening its jaw under the house.

“Open the attic,” Daddy says.

The water is lapping the backs of my knees.

“It’s stuck,” Randall says. He is pulling at the string that hangs from the door of the attic, which is in the ceiling