has arms that are too short and a belly, and his face is already red from trying to sprint so that he has given up on running in the middle of the field, his dog is all fire, combustion and spring. Skeetah catches me, wheezes, “Run,” so I stop looking at the man, the woman who’s out of the truck now, her hands on her pink-clad hips, her hair bright red, and the man walking toward us through the field, swinging his right hand as if there is a cane there, limping. I run. The dog yelps excitedly, yards from us.
“Hey!” the man yells to the dog. The last I see of him he is turning, still gesturing with no cane, toward the house. The wood opens and swallows us. Big Henry and Junior are gone, as well as Randall, who is all bounding grace ahead of us, his head low, his legs flying out back behind him like black ribbons. The dog’s bark catches in the back of its throat, rips on its teeth on the way out. My heart is gushing, and my arms and legs are stinging. I feel the pee weight at my center. I would run it away.
“Hey!” We hear the man yell again, his voice muffled in the blanket of the woods. Then rifle shots. “Twist!” he calls. “Twist!” The voice dwindles to nothing in the threads. My feet catch, hold, and kick the earth. Skeetah runs next to me in the funny way he’s always had, his hands like blades. Every time the dog barks, it’s as if his teeth are grazing my neck. My skin is tight with fear.
“Come on,” Skeet says, and he is moving in front of me, leaving me. I stretch my legs, reach with my heels, to gain ground. The dog rumbles behind me. Slipping through a clutch of pine trees ahead is Big Henry: Junior clings to the bulk of him, his head turned backward to watch us. His face is immobile except for the jarring of Big Henry’s run, which shakes his mouth open with each running step. I expect him to be crying or screaming, but he isn’t. He knows this frantic run before this ruinous dog. Big Henry pounds the earth now, footsteps heavy for once as he tears through low bushes like a startled bear. Randall dodges the trees like a point guard. The dog snaps and I swear I can feel his saliva on my legs, and then I see that Skeetah has scooped a branch in his hand, holds it like a bat but then swings it backward like a golf club.
“Faster than this,” Skeet stutters all at once. I know I am, the secret in my stomach be damned. I stretch through my toes, my arches, my heels, my tendons, my calves, unlock the hinges of my knees, the fulcrum where my thighs meet my hips. This is that other thing that I can do.
“Halfway!” Skeetah yells as we pass a cathedral of oaks, leaving clouds in the dusty chapel at their middle. The dog yips with each bound. Still there. I expected it to lose interest, to bound off, but it will not, inexorable as hovering thunder.
“Get!” Skeetah yells, and swings the branch again at the dog. I am even with him now, but still we cannot lose it. We come to a hill, barren of pines but slick with needles; at the bottom, Big Henry is picking himself up, one arm grabbing at the ground and one hand in a white grip on Junior, who has not let go through the fall.
“Go!” I yell. Randall is prying Junior from Big Henry, who is still soundless, and now we are a pack, Randall our lead, signaling us through the widest gaps through pines, over the smallest bushes, around the staunchest oaks. The saw palmetto cracks like whips at our shins. The dog’s barks turned high-pitched:
China is the shushing sound, the finger laid against the lips in admonition. She is on him, a white blur against gray, snow on cloud, the biting cold. Unforgiving. She is one great tooth. Twist’s growl meets with hers but already he is turning, rolling to a ball, screaming. Randall runs to the top of the steps with Junior, who is still staring, his mouth still open, and I have stopped at the foot of the steps, Big Henry on the roof of his car, to watch Skeetah lurch out of his run, his arm still outstretched, and pivot to watch. Twist screams again, and there is a frantic lick to it. China grips him and arches her back, digs in as her whole body jerks toward the other dog. It looks like she is giving birth again. Twist’s scream turns to a squeal. She has him by the neck. Skeetah is smiling.
“Skeet!” I yell. I slap him on the back, his muscle like dinner plates between the flat plane of his shoulder blades. He looks at me, surprised, the smile startled from him.
“What?”
“She’s going to kill him.”
He looks back to China, who is curved in two, a fang, and is jerking moans out of the other dog, who is in fits against her, bleeding.
“Stop it,” I say.
Skeetah puts his hands in his pockets, fingers what I now see are shapes there, big as curled fists. The cow wormer.
“He’s going to hear it hollering, and he’s going to follow it here,” I say over the grunting and the squealing. Twist is rolling like a tornado.
“Stop!” Skeetah barks and lunges toward China. “China!” He yells, “Hold!” and he grabs the thighs on her two back legs and pulls. She jerks her head once, viciously, and then lets go, flinging her head backward so that blood rises and glitters through the air before falling to droplets in the sand, a light shower of red. Twist jumps and runs, limping like his master, away to the pit and past, his panicked yelp like a siren receding in the distance, off to some other emergency. Behind him, he leaves red rain.
THE FIFTH DAY: SALVAGE THE BONES
Bodies tell stories. This is what I realize when I burst in on Skeetah in the bathroom in the morning, bladder full with early morning pregnant pee, and see him standing in front of the mirror. Skeetah is shirtless. He is tracing cuts across his stomach with two fingers, the way he checks China’s mouth after a fight for tears, missing teeth: lightly, sensitively. The way other people put their fingers in cupcakes to lick the icing.
“Come on,” he whispers, pulling on a shirt. The light in the bathroom is gray because the sun is not yet up. We slide past each other and he stands outside the doorway, which I leave cracked, as I pee. I flush, put the toilet seat down, and sit, pushing down on my stomach, feeling it push back against my hand. Hoping but knowing all at once that it was not a dream. Skeetah shuffles in the hall, and when he realizes I’m not leaving, he comes back into the bathroom. I’d seen his shirt ripped after Twist ran away, but I didn’t know how badly he’d been cut.
“When did that happen?”
“When I came out the window. I was in a hurry.”
I push my stomach in, and nausea moves through me. What should I tell him?
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I had to pee.”
He picks up an Ace Bandage so old it’s faded white and pulls the hem of his shirt over and behind his neck so it hugs his shoulders like a shrug. He’s so skinny it’s loose on him.
“It’s all right,” he says.
The wrap is one of Randall’s, probably used on his knee, which he’s troubled so much his coach told him he needed surgery. The school will pay for it, but Randall keeps putting it off because he doesn’t want to lose any playing time. After games, his knee swells up like a water balloon.
“I whistled once I saw them.”
“I know.” Skeetah is holding the wrap with one hand, trying to wind it around his torso with the other. The wounds are angry; there are four of them gouged into his stomach and side. He is failing.
“Let me,” I say, and I grab one end. Skeetah lets it fall. His head is closer to the color of the rest of his body now. When I fell asleep last night, he was in the shed with China, laying her floor, resettling them in. The kennel is still three pieces of wood hammered together at bad right angles, rooting into the dirt. “You put something on it?”
“Just took a shower.” Skeetah mumbles this into his underarm. “Then I poured some peroxide on it. From China’s bottle.” That’s the other thing he does with her after fights, wipes at her cuts with a towel he’s washed, bleached, and dipped in hydrogen peroxide. She smiles lazily like a woman in a new Fourth of July outfit being complimented.
“This clean?” The wrap looks dirty, worn thin.
“I washed and bleached it last night,” Skeetah sighs. I wrap the bandage once, and I expect him to flinch from the cloth, but he doesn’t. For once he doesn’t smell like dog. He smells like the constant wind that pushes the tide
