shoulder to lean on. Junior is watching a rerun of
We left Skeetah in the shed last night. He did not run with us to the car. When we came back to the house, he was asleep in his bed in the room he shares with Randall, wrapped up in his sheet, so I only saw the lump of him. He wore his shoes still, and they stuck out of his blanket like bristles on a toothbrush. In place of the curtain he’d dragged a piece of tin he’d salvaged, probably from Mother Lizbeth and Papa Joseph’s roof, and wedged it across the doorway of the shed. China was a lump, as pale as biscuit dough, laying out in the dirt, her chain attached to a car’s half-eaten skeleton. He’d separated her from the puppies. When I woke up this morning, he was gone. And so was China.
Daddy is propped up on pillows when I walk into the bedroom, a bowl of chicken noodle soup on a potholder before me, a little of it dribbling around the edges. He is eating crackers one by one, placing them between his lips and then pulling them in. His chewing sounds like crumpled notebook paper. I put down the bowl and the spoon on the night table, cluttered with a glass of water from the tap, a Budweiser can he’s been using as an ashtray, and his medicine for pain and infection. His arm is resting on a hill of old blankets and crocheted pillows, which Randall piled last night. Daddy is watching the thirteen-inch black-and-white television sitting on the wide, mirrored dresser across from the bed. He hasn’t changed a thing here since Mama died: there are small glass candleholders with tall peach candles wedged into them, and two small bunches of fake flowers in squat vases that look like cups that Mama placed at both ends of the dresser. There are pictures of us, Polaroids, which Mama wedged between the glass and the frame of the mirror. There is one picture of her and Daddy standing chest to chest, in a frame. Her hands are on his shoulders, her hair ironed straight and pulled back smooth, her dress cut open in the front so that it shows her collarbone, as dense and burnished and beautiful as a brass doorknob. She smiles without opening her mouth. Daddy doesn’t smile at all, but his hands are around her back, and he has that serious, prideful tilt of his head that Skeetah has when he is standing with China at a dogfight, showing her off before the mad scramble, the cutting barks and teeth.
“Play with the antenna,” Daddy says. His voice sounds dry as the cracker. He leans over and pulls a wicker tray from next to the bed and drags it across his lap. The bowl wobbles in his left hand. He spills some of the soup on the potholder when he sets it down.
There is only static. I grab the right antenna, yank it up.
“Down,” Daddy says.
The box fan in the window is not pushing any air in the room. Every day seems hotter than the last. I grab the left antenna, split them one from the other like a wishbone.
“There.”
“Katrina has made landfall in Florida… miles from Miami.” It is the local news. The weatherwoman is speaking with the anchor, and she is pointing at the interactive screen before her, but the television is so old and the resolution so bad that the map looks like concrete, and the storm, an oil stain.
“Early reports say that there are some dead. Does anyone… idea of where… projection of storm?” Mike’s voice is even, smooth, when we catch it through the static.
“… unclear. The storm is currently a category one… could weaken… could change.” The woman’s hair is light; she may be blonde.
“So what would you advise our listeners to… Rachel?” The TV gives a static moan, so I split the two parts of the antenna further.
“… prepare as well as they can for the storm. Katrina is on the… if it does not weaken… moving northwest, they should also prepare… government will issue orders for mandatory evacuation.”
“So what does this mean?”
“This means that our viewers may… preparations to remain in their homes for the hurricane, and instead may want to begin… possible evacuation.” Rachel appears to be smiling.
“I can’t see, Esch.”
I step aside. Mike turns to the camera.
“… highways will be open for evacuation. It is better to leave earlier… hours… stuck in traffic.”
“You’re still in the way,” Daddy says. He blows his soup and stirs it with his spoon, but he does not eat, and instead he lets his good hand drop behind the wicker across his lap.
Mama smiles serenely from the photo. She has no idea that three years later, she will be bleeding to death in the bed that Daddy now lays in with three of his fingers missing. In one of the Polaroids, I am dancing in the kitchen. It is at one of Mama and Daddy’s parties where his friends, and one or two of hers, would gather to drink beer and eat oysters and potatoes, fried golden in the same oil and silt and salt. Mama would plug in the cassette deck radio in the kitchen, put in tapes by Bobby “Blue” Bland, Denise LaSalle, and Little Milton, and I would dance while the crowd clapped and laughed at my jerky hand-swinging, all of us sweating in the kitchen. Mama would say,
“Preparation… key,” Rachel says.
I shut Daddy’s door.
China is breathe-barking. Every time she inhales, she exhales with a bark, flat and strong as a slap. The sound is carrying through the woods. On the back step, I hear her as if she is drawing closer, but I do not see her appearing with Skeetah at her side. There is only the day, hotter than the one that came before it, dense as water approaching boiling. And then her voice catches. There are other dogs, in the woods near the house, on the other side of the Pit, down the winding, gravel-eaten length of the street, and they bark with her. They ring her like a chorus. Their voices crackle across the sky, all places at once. Somewhere out there, I know, Skeetah is in the middle of these dogs, pulling them to him. He is the hand on the leash. He is the palm. He flexes and they come, he looses his grip and they spread to the red dirt, the pines, the creeks, the oaks. They howl. They hack.
China gives a great shout, and all at once, they are silent.
Randall’s game is today. I wipe the bathroom mirror with my palm, and the glass cracks at the edges, the reflective surface flaking away like glitter. I oil my hands, rub them through my hair, which calms into ringlets. I pick two bobby pins that Mama left in a plastic case under the sink, and I slide them into my hair behind my ears, so that it frames my face like a pillow. Junior is singing along with the television, the words indecipherable, his voice higher pitched than a girl’s. I smile, turn my head to the right, to the left. This is what I look like, I think. This is the lie. Skeetah is a smell before I see him: the oily sweat of dog, pine needles growing green, and an unwashed stink like milk set too long out in a hot kitchen. He stops in the doorway. I run Vaseline across my lips, rub them together, try to make them glossy.
“What was that noise?”
“What you talking about?”
“China, barking like crazy.”
Outside, Randall is dribbling. I can see him out of the window, shooting, throwing the ball at the house when it rebounds, catching it, throwing it again. The sun is directly overhead, pouring down into the clearing where he practices. He is warming up. The ball is not full with air, so each time that he touches the ball, it is more like a slap.
“Nothing.”
The neck on Skeetah’s shirt is stretched as a bib. He looks down at it, shakes his head, grabs it with both hands, and pulls. The shirt rips. The newly sprouted hair on his head is prickly as Velcro.
“It didn’t sound like nothing.”
The shirt is black, so what is wet on it is sweat. It could not be blood. I would know. Skeetah drops the tee, and it slaps wetly on the tile. The smell of him moves through the room like smoke from burning wet leaves.
“She forgot.”
“Forgot what?”
“Who I was yesterday.”
“Don’t you mean she forgot the puppy?”
Randall catches the ball each time it springs from the backboard and throws it back up. He is not letting it
