in the summer league to get one of those scholarships for it either. I know you want to go, just like you know Daddy don’t have it.” Skeetah fizzles, his hands down by his side. Now he’s just trailing bitter, sulfurous smoke. “You ain’t the parent,” he mutters.
“This is stupid,” Big Henry says.
“I’m the fastest,” Junior says as he yanks on Randall’s arm.
“Shut up, Junior,” I say.
Randall pulls Junior to him and puts his hand on his head the same way I put mine on Skeet’s when he was wiping off the blood. Junior quiets, turns to face us, and Randall’s arm is around his neck like a scarf. Junior’s still smiling; he still thinks he’s about to run with us.
“You ain’t running nowhere, Junior.” Junior’s face pulls. Randall’s arms cradle him by the chest. Randall looks down at Junior’s head, wipes away moss caught in his hair. “You’d do that for me?” Randall speaks to Junior’s head, so at first I don’t know who he’s talking to, and then I remember Skeet, who is nodding next to me now. With each dip of Skeetah’s head, sweat drips unimpeded from his crown, past his strong nose, his downy upper lip, to fall from his chin like a weak summer sprinkle.
“Yes,” Skeetah says, still nodding. “Yes.”
Skeetah sketches the plan. It is what makes him so good with dogs, with China, I think, the way he can take rotten boards and make them a kennel, make a squirrel barbecue, make ripped tile a floor.
“You too big to be out there in that field.”
“Wasn’t going to go anyway,” says Big Henry. Skeetah shrugs.
“So you stay here in the woods with Junior. Shut up, Junior. This is serious. You ever heard of Hansel and Gretel? Well, that’s who own that house, and they want to fatten you up like a little pig and eat you. So shut up and stay in the woods with Big Henry. And if you sneak out like you did last night-shut up, Junior, I saw you-I’m going to catch you and whip you. That’s if the white people don’t eat you first.”
“You want me to help you get in the barn?” Randall asks.
“No, I don’t need no help. Besides, you too tall. You going to be at the edge of the field, right by the fence, and keep watch on the whole field. You see anything, you whistle.”
“What about Esch?” Randall says.
“Esch going to be in the middle of the field, laying down by them stumps right there: she got a better shot of the driveway than you ’cause she going to be closer. If she see something, she going to whistle. And loud, Esch. No baby whistles.”
“I knew how to whistle with my fingers in my mouth before you did, Skeet,” I say.
“I know,” he says. He glances at me when he says it, and he and I both know that he is telling the truth. “Well, all right. Is everybody ready.” He says it like that, like a statement rather than a question. Skeetah is not giving us any room to not be ready. “All right, then. Once you see me come out that window, I want everybody to start running. Don’t look back. Run.”
There is a line through us all, stringing from one to another across the field; Skeetah with his knees bent, his back a black ball, running toward the barn window. Me on a low rise, grass tufted up unevenly around me in bunches, lying like a snake in wait behind the tree stumps. Randall hidden in the woods behind me, crouching behind a large, low bush with leaves the size of my fingernails. And Big Henry and Junior, even farther back behind Randall. When I left them, Big Henry was bouncing back and forth on his feet, and Junior was squatting on the ground away from him, his feet splayed out in a Y, digging with a stick to raise the pine needles into peaked roofs.
The cows rip bunches of grass away, feed steadily, chewing and swallowing and yanking. The egrets flap, walk in small couples. One leaves its mate to wander over to me, pecking between each step so that his beak is another leg. It walks him closer. I hiss at it so it stops. It is whiter than the other egrets. Its feathers are soft, downy, as if it is younger, recently born; a fluffy, warm body beats under the down. I hiss again, and it is a flailing pillow, beating away. The cows ignore Skeetah as he runs by unless he brushes too close to their salad plate, and then they skitter away a few feet to settle. Skeetah crawls under the other edge of the fence and sprints to the window he showed me, a leaping shadow. His hand moves to his face and away again, and I know that he must be taking out the razor. He jumps and pulls himself up onto the window’s ledge, balancing with his feet braced against the wall, and he begins to fiddle with the window. My underarms feel flushed and swampy.
“What is he doing?” I talk myself into hurrying him. “Now, Skeet, do it.”
He wrenches it, but the window will not open. He slides down the wall and puts his hand to his face again. Grabbing the hem of his shirt, he yanks it over his head, wraps it around his arm, and jumps back up on the ledge. With one arm holding him up, he elbows the window with the T-shirt. It breaks. He elbows it again, and it shatters. Skeetah is all forearms and knees, truncated thighs and twisting shoulders, and then he is black as the shadowy interior of the barn, and then he is gone.
“Thank God,” I whisper to the egret, who will not leave me, and pecks in a suspicious circle near my foot.
What I can see of the road is empty. The trees are moving so it seems like they are a green, shimmering curtain in the distance, the road fading to a dark green velvet line in the middle. I stare at it, try hard to see something, run my tongue over my lips again and again, twist it into a wave to ready it. My arm feels like it is going dead, so I roll to the side, glance at the road. Is that blue, a flash of metal like a dying star? But there is nothing. I hiss at the bird again, wonder why Manny didn’t come by, wonder when he will come again, if he will want more from me next time. If I can get him to look at me in the eye again. To not walk away from me.
The pain is sudden, sharp. It shoots through my hips and I squeeze my legs together and wonder why my bladder feels like a soaked sponge. I can’t help it. I have to pee. Again.
“Shit, Skeet,” I say to the side of the barn, the empty shimmering road. I will hold it. It shoots again, and I rock my hips side to side in the grass, squeezing my legs. Sometimes when I move like this, squeeze like this, it helps. The pressure eases. It lasts for a shake of my head, a nod at the still empty road, and then it is back. Unbearable, a tadpole grown to the confines of its egg. Pressure. I can hold it. I can’t.
I stand up, look back toward where I know Randall is crouching in the green. Maybe I can pull my panties and shorts to the side and pee that way. I pull the elastic at the crotch, but they are too tight. I cannot face the road and pee. It is impossible. Randall and Big Henry, and farther back, Junior, will see me. I can deal with them seeing a flash of shoulder, of leg, even a nipple, but I cannot bare myself in this field, my butt facing them, and pee. It will only take a moment, I tell myself. Jumping into a squat and facing Junior and Randall and Big Henry in the woods, I put my butt as low to the ground as I can and yank my shorts down in wedges until I feel the air on my skin. I force the pee out, and it hits the grass as strongly as a rush of water out of a water hose. It beats the grass low. The baby and the pee are one, there when I forget they are there, when I forget so well I think they might be gone. I start to inch up my pants, but they are stuck, and I’m trying to miss the wet-pee grass when I hear it, and I wish I hadn’t. Randall’s whistle, high-pitched and sharp, short. I yank my shorts all the way up, fall forward on my hands, and turn my head to see a silver grille, a dark blue blur, growing to fill the driveway.
Skeetah’s arm is the first thing to break the surface of the window. The truck is pulling up the driveway and rounding the side of the house, and I am crawling backward on my hands and knees, the cows nervously shuffling away from me, the birds waving them on, my egret familiar making squeaking sounds at my side as it abandons me, when the door to the truck opens and I rise up on my legs, still bending low, still backward. There is a dog in the bed of the truck, and it is leaping like a doe, barking to call attention to itself, again and again and again, its fur long and shaggy, the color of the cloud dark sky above me, its dark head pointed toward me in the field, its nose intent on our line.
The white man is the first to get out of the truck. He slams the door behind him, waves his hands at the dog as if he is casting out a fishing net for perch in the shallow tides on the beach at night. Someone has bound my feet with barbed wire: I cannot run. Skeetah’s upper body is hanging out the window when the dog leaps from the truck, growling to a bark like a shovel dragged along asphalt wearing away to stones. Skeetah falls face forward, lands on his forearms and his head, crumples to a roll and then rises. His feet kick backward behind him and he is running as the man looks toward the other side of the barn that he cannot see, follows the dog, who is bounding around the barn, the color of a storm wrapped in rain. Skeetah is running with one arm above his head, back and forth as if he is beating the air with his palm, and I realize that he is telling me to run, and I turn to sprint while the man behind us is yelling, “Hey! Hey! What are y’all doing in my field? Hey!” And while he is too old, hair the color of his dog’s,
