Salvage the Bones

Big Henry nodded, swung the machete he had in his hand, the blade dark and sharp.

“In case we had to cut through to get to y’all,” Marquise explained.

“Where’s Skeet?” Big Henry asked.

“Looking,” Randall said, hoisting Junior farther up on his back.

“For what?” Marquise asked.

“The water took China,” I said.

“Water?” Big Henry asked, his voice high at the end, almost cracking.

“From the creek that feeds the pit.” Randall said. “The house flooded through. We had to swim to the old house, wait out the storm in the attic.”

I wanted to say: We almost drowned. We had to bust out of the attic. We lost the puppies and China.

“We need a place to stay,” I said.

“It’s just me and my mama,” Big Henry said. “Plenty of room. Come on.” He flicked the machete blade, threw it to Marquise, who caught the handle and almost dropped it.

“You all right, Mr. Claude?” Big Henry asked Daddy.

Every line of Daddy’s face, his shoulders, his neck, his collarbone, the ends of his arms, seemed to be caught in a net dragging the ground.

“Yeah,” Daddy said. “I just need to sit for a while. My hand.” He stopped short. Big Henry nodded, placed one of those big careful hands on Daddy’s back, and escorted us through the milling crowd, the crumbled trees, the power lines tangled like abandoned fishing line, to his home. He looked at me over his shoulder, and the glance was so soft, so tentative and tender, I wanted to finish my story. I wanted to say, I’m pregnant. But I didn’t.

Amongst the older women in hair curlers and oversized T-shirts and slippers, the girls in sweatpants and tank tops, the boys riding their bikes, the men gathered in clusters pointing at each other and at the sky, I saw Manny. He was sitting in the back of a white and silver pickup truck parked half in, half out of the road, surrounded by the tops of ripped trees. He was staring across the crowd at us, and from that far away, he was all muscled shoulders and golden skin and black, black eyes. There were wide smears of mud all across his legs, his chest. He raised one forearm in a short, stiff wave. Randall hunched over next to me, eyeing Daddy’s and Big Henry’s backs.

“Is it him?” he whispered.

I nodded, looked down at the ground.

“I knew you had a crush on him, but-” Randall cleared his throat. “I didn’t think he’d do anything about it.”

“I wanted to,” I said.

“I’m going to beat the shit out of him,” Randall said, the words whistling out of him.

A girl separated herself from the crowd, sat down next to Manny on the truck, laid her head on his shoulder. Shaliyah. Manny sat there stiffly beside her, still looking at me, at Randall, waiting for a wave, a nod, anything. I slid my fingers into the crook of Randall’s elbow, and Junior’s leg rubbed the back of my hand. His skin, and Randall’s skin, was warm; I walked so that Randall was my shield, my warm cover, my brother.

“No, Randall,” I said. “You don’t need to. I already did.”

Randall snorted, but he didn’t let Junior go, and he squeezed his forearm to his waist, folding my arm into his, pulling me with him. We walked to Big Henry’s front door together.

Big Henry’s mother, Ms. Bernadine, is half Big Henry’s size, with wide hips and thin shoulders, and now I know where he gets his careful hands. She settled Daddy on the sofa in the dark, hot house, unwrapped and cleaned and rewrapped his hand in the light from the open door and the open windows. Her hands were small and quick as hummingbirds, and just as light. She made potted meat sandwiches, and when one of her brothers brought over a small generator, she hooked the refrigerator up to it from an extension cord along with a small fan, and this she put in the window in the living room, and pointed it at Daddy’s face, which was gray and twisted.

Marquise had run up to the house to find Skeetah and took his dog along: Lala gleamed like melted butter, untouched by the havoc of the hurricane. He said when he got to the house, Skeetah heard his dog barking and came out of the woods. Skeetah was wearing wet, muddy shorts he’d salvaged from the wreckage, but he was still barefoot. When Marquise tried to get him to come down to Big Henry’s house, he’d asked for Marquise’s lighter, said he’d camp out at the house because he was waiting for China to come back. Marquise had argued with him, but Skeetah ignored him, so Marquise left. When Marquise told us the story, he chewed the inside of his cheek, looked ashamed that he hadn’t been able to drag Skeetah down into Bois. “He’s stubborn,” Randall said. “You can’t make him do nothing he don’t want to do.”

That night, when people with working trucks and chains were clearing the streets of trees and burning wet, smoking bonfires, we slept on thin pallets on Big Henry’s living room floor, and his mother whispered to Big Henry in the kitchen: “Ain’t they one more?”

“Yeah,” he said. “He’s looking for his dog.”

“As long as they need,” she said. “At least they alive.”

“Yeah,” Big Henry said, and I knew he was looking at us, Junior under my armpit, sweating and twitching in his sleep, Daddy still as a stone on the sofa, Randall laying facedown, his head buried in his folded arms, almost diagonal in the small living room. One or two sodden bugs whirred outside, and I wondered where Skeetah was, saw him sitting before a fire, his head cocked to the night, which had turned hot after the cold air left by the storm passed. Waiting.

Big Henry and his uncle Solly, the one who brought the generator and who is tall and skinny and has blurry home-done tattoos up and down his forearms, are talking in the doorway. The sun has burned away the last of the clouds of the storm’s wake. It arcs through the door, slides past Big Henry, and burns my face.

“That bridge is washed out.”

“The old one over the bayou? The first or second one?”

“The little third.”

“What about the bridge on the east side?”

“That one’s okay. Road’s full of water, they say. But you can drive through it.”

“What it look like?”

Solly clears his throat. Spits.

“It’s bad.” He clears his throat again. “Real bad.” Solly shrugs. “Where your mama say I need to put that tarp again?”

Big Henry leads him outside to show him the bad spot on the roof. He is barefoot, and his feet look white and tender as a baby’s.

“Esch.” Daddy’s voice from the sofa sounds like he has a Brillo pad lodged in his throat. I turn my head just so I can see his face out of the corner of my eye. This is the way you approach a bristling, unfamiliar dog.

Daddy makes a low humming noise. He sits up, folds his useless hand and his good one over his stomach. Looks at the dead TV.

“What Skeetah said. Is it true?”

I look at the carpet, fuzzy and maroon, that grows fluffy at the edge of the sofa he lays on; no one has ever stepped on it there. I nod, an inch’s slide of my head, into the pillow.

Daddy makes a clicking noise in this throat. Clears it and swallows.

“I shouldn’t have pushed you,” he says.

He rubs his good hand over his face like a cat cleaning its jaw and nose. His nose and cheeks are greasy and shine in the dark. I am quiet, feel every inhale and exhale like an explosion.

“It… happened,” Daddy breathes and stops.

I am blinking quickly, a feeling like boiled water splashed over my chest, soaking up my face.

“I’m sorry,” Daddy says.

I want to say, Yes. Or I know. Or I’m sorry, too. But I squeak, small as a mouse in the room. Wonder where the baby will sleep, wonder if it will lay curled up in the bed with me. If I will teach Junior to give it a bottle, the way Daddy taught us. He is old enough now.

“How long has it been?” Daddy asks.

“I don’t know.” My voice is so high it sounds like someone else is talking, like I could turn my face and see another girl there, lying on the floor between her brothers, answering these question.