touch the earth. He is saving it from making that flat, collapsing sound, again and again. His lips turned down at the corners, smiling.
“No. She forgot me.”
Skeetah bends, turns on the tap in the tub, lifts the hook for the shower. The spray from the water is cold, a fine mist.
“How long you going to keep China on the chain?”
“Long as it takes.” Skeetah kicks his shoes across the floor; once, twice. “As long as it takes.” He peels his socks away like banana peels, and the smell of them is rotten. My stomach shudders.
Big Henry is perched on the hood of his car. Marquise sits next to him, leaned over almost double so that he looks like a crab, all back and arms and legs, as he rolls a blunt on the blue metal. China faces Big Henry, tongue lolling pink and straight as an exclamation mark. She smiles and then grimaces, over and over, so that she has two faces. The pink of the Pit on her coat is overlaid by a brown scum, which etches the lines of her muscles in her shoulder, haunch, and back clean and clear as marker. Big Henry lists sideways, tipping lightly as if he is on the verge of running. I put my hands in my short shorts, look down at the tennis shoes that I have scrubbed until they are as close to white as they can get: off white, a dirty cream the color of egg whites cooked with pepper. Big Henry turns away from China, who is grimacing again. I sit close to Big Henry’s windshield on the other side of Marquise, who scoots forward to make room for me.
“You think he ready?”
“Who?” Marquise asks.
“I wasn’t talking to you, fool.” Big Henry laughs before biting it off with glances at China and me.
“Skeetah?” I ask. Big Henry shakes his head across the careful shifting and picking and measuring that Marquise is signaling with the hitch of his back.
“Randall.”
Right now Randall would probably be squeezed into the bathroom with Skeet, either hissing at him to hurry up and get out of the shower, or washing off with a rag and soap over the sink, dripping suds all over the counter, the floor, the toilet, taken to ignoring Skeet, probably thinking about the game. He has been too tall to wash in the sink for years.
“He fast. He’ll be ready soon.”
“I mean the game.” Big Henry smiles a little then, just a dimpling at the corner of his lips.
“Oh.” I nod, my face hot. “He been practicing all day. He ready.” My sweat is making the backs of my thighs slick; I am sliding along the metal like mud gone downhill in a bad rain, coming to a slow, sticky stop on Marquise’s back.
“Well, damn, Esch, I didn’t know you wanted me like that.” Marquise turns and smirks around the blunt he is licking shut. He winks at me, his tongue white at the edges, bits of the cigar paper flaking off and sticking like food. I know that wink, that grin. He smiled like that when he was done when we had sex for the last time about a year ago, when he was wiping himself, turned away from me; he threw that smile like salt over the shoulder. I grip the seam where the windshield joins the hood, and I pull myself away from him so that we are no longer touching. I do not like his smile.
“Leave her alone, Marquise.”
“I’m just fucking with her.”
“Too hot out here for you to be fucking with anybody.”
I slide down the side of the car, stand, look down so I can pull my shorts so they are not bunching in my crotch, showing me. When I finally look up, Big Henry is looking at me with the same dazed half intensity he showed China, as if he is staring but thinking of something else. I shrug, and then when I realize there was no question asked, I shrug again.
“I’ma get Randall.” I break into a walk and stutter to a run. Feel them watching.
When we leave for the game, Daddy is asleep. I leave a full cup of water and a packet of crackers on the bedside table and push his bottles of medicine closer together so they are easier for him to reach. He sleeps with his mouth open, his face slack with medicine, and drools. Where Junior’s or Randall’s sleep faces are babyish, fat and smooth, Daddy’s sleeping face is Skeetah’s: puckered, the skin pulling: the face frozen in fight. From the dresser, Mama beams at me, hands caressing Daddy, smiling.
I am glad to be sitting in the backseat by the window in the car, Junior’s bony rump squirming on my lap, Skeetah in the middle pulling at the blunt, Marquise next to him at the other window, opaque through a cloud of smoke. Big Henry’s head could be any other boy’s head under his baseball cap, and Randall leans on the headrest, his eyes closed, everything still but his eyelids jumping like dragonflies. I do not think that he is dreaming. Junior shifts, and I hold him tight; he is my shield.
The summer league game is in the gym at St. Catherine’s elementary school. Ms. Dedeaux told us once that the elementary school used to actually be the black school for the district before the schools were desegregated in 1969, after the last big hurricane, when people were too tired finding their relatives’ uprooted bodies, reburying them, sleeping on platforms that used to be the foundations of their houses, under tents, biking or walking miles for freshwater, for food, to still fight the law outlawing segregation. Daddy went to this school when it was all black, and Mama, too. On one of their blues nights after I had danced myself to shaking, Mama told the story of how they met, that Daddy would not stop pulling her hair in the hallway, making fun of her little-girl pigtails since the rest of her was so grown, and of how she turned around one day and hit him in the chest so hard he lost his breath. Then he stopped pulling her hair, but started leaving her presents in her desk, instead: pieces of pecan candy he’d stolen from his grandma, whole pecans wrapped in newspaper, blackberries dusted with ditch dirt, hot from the sun, leaking black juice. That was their beginning.
Now there’s construction paper taped in makeshift galleries along the wall by the door. They flutter in the wind driven by the industrial fan, and at the concession stand a woman with finger waves, a gold tooth, and lips the color of azaleas rolls her eyes at Junior, who drags his feet when we pass her. Moles fade to freckles in a messy paint splatter across her face. Bags of potato chips are laid out on her folding table in rows, one against the other, orderly and even. I grab Junior’s bony shoulders and push him to the top of the stands where we sit.
The inside of the gym is dark, the steel ceiling beams lost in a humid haze like cloud cover; it is hotter here at the top of the bleachers. Big Henry sits next to Marquise, who sprawls on one elbow and tries to wheedle a sports drink out of him. Randall is already on the court doing drills, tossing the ball to his teammates as they weave in and out of each other in knots and make lay-ups, palm rebounds in lazy arcs. Skeetah sinks into the bleachers until his butt is resting on the floor, his legs kicked out so that his soles are to the court, his arms spread wide across the seat behind him. The corded gather of him eases. He wipes his forehead with the hem of his shirt and it beads again. He nods languidly. He is smiling, his teeth white and even: glistening bone. He is high.
“You’re surprised I came.” Skeetah speaks to the court, his smile grown slack. He blinks solemnly.
“Yeah.”
“What’s been done been done.” Skeet shrugs, his shoulders rise and settle like sleek feathers. “China going to come back to me. To herself. Soon.”
“You bring them back by her to feed yet?”
“Yeah. I held her muzzle shut. Every time she move her head toward them, I pop her on her nose.”
“You think the other three puppies going to make it?”
“Fucking right they going to make it.” Skeetah lays his head back on the bleacher behind his shoulders. He swallows and his Adam’s apple slides like a mouse down the gullet of a snake. “This ain’t beating me.”
Junior is tapping me on my leg, beating out Morse code.
“Esch?”
“Go ’head. Stay away from the concession stand.”
Junior smiles, teeth missing in the front, and then swallows it and tries to look trustworthy enough to stay away from the snack table.
“And don’t try to steal nothing, neither.”
Junior squeals, his mouth turned down at the corners to plead.
“No.”
“Here.” Big Henry is reaching into his pocket, cupping loose change like marbles. He drops the coins in Junior’s hand, which Junior cups and holds before him. He leaps down the stands. His T-shirt billows behind him like a limp flag.
