door, still standing on his bike, and Big Henry folds his big paw over Junior’s. Big Henry taps the gas and then eases, and this is how we follow Skeetah and China, who are both running now, both sucking dark and blazing bright under the setting sun and the scudding clouds, all the way home.
The puppies are whining for milk. They have been listening to Daddy hammering at the coop, dismantling it nail by board, into the pine-black evening. They writhe against each other. Skeetah lifts them out one by one by their necks, sets them on the floor before China, who is still nosing the ground. He has not taken off her chain yet, so it pools in the dirt next to her, as heavy and sharp as a bike chain. She breathes through her mouth, but something wet seems to catch at the back of her throat with each exhale. She nods with each breath. Her legs are still, but the sweat Skeetah worked up on her catches the red dust on her coat, channels it so that it runs down her back like watercolor paint. Under the bulb, my arms seem blacker, seem dirtier than I’ve ever seen them. I pull my hair back, tie it by taking a tendril of hair from the bottom and knotting it around the rest. I want it out of my face. Mama was wrong: I have no glory. I have nothing.
“Randall!” Daddy yells. It is strange to hear the night without his hammering.
“Yeah,” Randall says from the doorway of the shed. Big Henry is beside him. Junior is clinging to Randall’s back, grasping at his shoulders, his biceps, losing his grip and sliding with the sweat. Skeetah looks toward the door, shakes his head at Daddy’s call, China’s chain slack in his hands. She looks as if she is eating the earth.
“Come here.”
Randall sighs, grabs Junior’s forearms while he bends over and hoists him back up.
“Yeah, yeah.”
I slide into his place in the doorway next to Big Henry so I can see everything. Junior is licking his fingers as Randall walks, swiping them in Randall’s ears.
“Ugh. I told you to stop.” Randall rubs his ears, but I know he can’t get the wet out. “I’m going to put you down.”
“No, Randall. Please.”
“Well, then stop. That shit is so nasty.” Randall stops, links his long arms into a seat under Junior’s butt, and hoists again. “What?”
Daddy has only knocked down one of the chicken coop’s walls. The chickens wander drunken and bewildered around his feet, seemingly mystified that he is dismantling their house, even though they haven’t roosted in it in years. In the half-light from the bulb from the shed and Daddy’s headlights, they look black. Daddy lets his hammer fall, and the chickens scatter, fluttering away like leaves in a wind.
“The storm, it has a name now. Like the worst, she’s a woman. Katrina.”
“There’s another storm?” Randall asks.
“What you think I been talking about? I knew it was coming,” Daddy says.
“What?”
“I want you to get on my tractor and I’m going to direct you to this wall right here.” Daddy points at the longer wall. “And we going to knock this damn thing over.”
Randall hoists again. Junior’s face rests on Randall’s shoulder.
“I can’t drive that thing.”
“All you got to do is put it in gear and press the gas. You know how to steer.”
“We got to do it in the dark?”
Daddy steps to the side and I can see his head, barely coming up to Randall’s shoulder. His face says he is smiling, but his voice says he is not.
“What you mean, ‘We gotta do it at night?’ That depression out in the Gulf done became a hurricane. We ain’t got enough wood to board the windows up and you going to sit here and ask me why we gotta do this at night?”
Randall is silent. Junior is sliding again.
“She headed toward Florida. She come up slantways and who you think she going to hit?’
“Florida,” Randall sighs. “Don’t they usually fade out after they hit?” Randall doesn’t hoist Junior, who is trying to clutch at Randall’s waist with his feet. Junior is losing. Junior’s chin disappears behind Randall’s shoulder, and his head sinks to Randall’s shoulder blades. “All’s I’m saying is that you could drive it better than me.”
“I know I can.” Daddy waves away the compliment. Usually when Randall gives them, they work. “But I can’t see to get it at the right angle. If you do it, I can tell you how to hit it so that the whole thing comes down at once.”
Junior’s feet are at Randall’s knees. Junior comes down in the dirt and barely catches himself. I want to call him back to the shed because I know he’s getting on Daddy’s nerves and will only make Daddy worse, but I don’t. He is the Patroclus to Randall’s Achilles tonight.
“Come on.” Daddy walks into the darkness without waiting to see if Randall follows. Randall rounds the corner with his hands linked behind his neck, shaking his head. Junior shadows him.
Skeetah releases China from her chain, and then loops the metal around and around his forearm and shoulder until it is a solid silver wing. China pads to her corner, flops down all at once, instead of her usual graceful sitting first, the gentle roll onto her flank, her side. She lays her head on the linoleum that Skeetah must have swept clean, because she does not raise dust. Skeetah walks toward the door, lays the chain on the oil drum, arranges it just so, lingers over the links. He cannot bear to look at her.
“You think that did it?” Big Henry asks.
“I don’t know,” Skeetah says.
“Maybe she just tired,” I say to them, because I hope the words will pull Skeetah’s brow smooth, untangle the yarn-knotted furrow of it. Hope that they will make him stop looking at his hands. Big Henry shifts from foot to foot, leans on the door jamb. When he moves, the locusts and cicadas and grasshoppers sound loud, disgruntled.
“You ran her for a while.”
“Yeah.” Skeetah plays with the links the way he used to play with liver, with oatmeal, with beets from the can shaped like tubes of cranberry sauce. This was before he grew older, before his knees gained muscle and his shoulders knotted and he began shoveling his food, lima beans or mushrooms or chitterlings, as if he didn’t care what he ate anymore.
“And she still nursing. She probably just tired.”
Daddy’s tractor growls from the darkness, bullies the insects. It rolls over branches, discarded plastic garbage cans, detached fenders. They crack and break. Daddy leaves splinters. Randall and Junior follow in its wake, stumbling through the detritus. Skeetah shakes his head.
“He’s going to have them out there all gotdamn night.” Skeetah grabs China’s bowl from where he has secreted it high on a shelf; it is so high he has to stand on his toes. Randall or Big Henry could have grabbed it without even reaching. Daddy leaves the tractor running and swings one leg over and is down. Skeetah pours China’s food, sets it on top of the drum. “Hold on.”
Big Henry moves to let Skeetah walk out of the doorway, and then he smiles at me. The moon shines like a fluorescent bulb behind his head. A piping wind blows, and where my hair escapes and touches my face, it feels like a spider’s web unanchored, adrift. Randall climbs up the tractor and sits. Junior hoists himself up and begins scaling the metal.
“What you doing?” Daddy asks Junior.
“Helping Randall.”
“No you’re not. Get down.”
“I won’t be in the way.”
“Get down.”
“Please.”
“I said no.”
Randall scoots forward on the seat, motions behind him.
“He can sit behind me. He won’t be in the way.”
Junior is leaning back to please Daddy, to make him think that he is on the verge of obeying, of jumping off, but still he grips the seat with his hands, and he does not step down.
“Please, Daddy.”
