Salvage the Bones

around the building to the gym, so I walk slowly, but then he walks slower so he doesn’t leave me, and it takes us ten minutes to walk around to the front.

“You okay, Esch?” Junior asks.

Desultory claps flit out like small evening bats. Occasional whoops. It sounds empty.

“Yeah.” I am breathing through my mouth. In the bathroom, I cried so hard I felt nauseous. Kids are milling around the gym door like our chickens, and I expect Junior to run off with them, to leave me to duck into the gym alone, but he doesn’t. He loops his arm around my elbow like he is escorting me, and I keep my head down, my eyes half closed so all I see are anonymous legs, tennis shoes, gold-sandaled feet as Junior leads me up the bleachers. We circle Big Henry, sit up and to the side of Skeetah so that Junior and I are farthest away from the crowd and the floor, up here in the dark. It is only after I sit that I realize that Manny and his girl and Rico are sitting a few seats below us and to the right. Manny is leaning forward, away from her, as if he would run down the bleachers and into the game. His shirt pulls across his shoulders, his tense back, and I look away.

“Esch?” Skeetah asks. He is a little less high now, his eyes a little less dull.

“I’m fine.” I try to say it loudly.

“Fuck that nigga.” Skeetah touches my knee lightly, punctuates what he says with a nod. It is as if he is touching the sadness in me with his hand, so I move my knee away, smash my lips together. Already I want to cry. He touches my leg again, with one finger this time: lightly, quickly. “Fuck him.” He spits this at Manny’s back, loud enough for Big Henry to hear.

“What’s up?” Big Henry asks. I shake my head and look down.

Skeetah slaps the bench with both hands. It echoes loudly. Rico, who was elbowing Manny and talking, his hands like birds, turns at the sound, smiling to show his gold. Manny shakes his head, but Rico gets up anyway, ascends the stairs two steps at a time, and stops in front of me and Skeetah. In the gloom, his teeth shine.

“I heard your bitch had our puppies,” Rico says.

“Our puppies?” Skeetah asks.

“Yeah, ours. I thought we was splitting them down the middle.”

“Really.”

“They healthy?”

“Why don’t you ask your cousin if they healthy?”

“I want to see them.”

“Ain’t nothing for you to see.” Skeetah sits up slowly from his recline. He hunches over when he speaks, his shoulders curved, his muscles gathering.

“What you mean?”

“It was China’s first litter. Lot of them born dead, and lot of them done died.”

“Manny say one look just like Kilo. That’s the one I want.”

“It’s dead.” Skeetah stands, and he is barely taller than Rico, who is standing a bleacher below him, and half Rico’s size. But Skeetah tilts his head to the side, squints at Rico, and I know he’s not scared, that he will never be scared. “China killed it,” he says, and there is a lyric in his voice. He almost sings it when he says it, gleeful.

“Well, then I want another one.”

“All they got left for you to have is the runt.”

“What the fuck I want with a runt?” Rico laughs when he says it. It sounds as metallic and hard as his teeth.

“Well, that’s all I got. That one and a black-and-white one. Both small.”

Skeetah is omitting the white one, the one that is a clone of China.

“Manny?”

“Yeah.” Manny walks up the stairs to us, looks at Skeetah and Rico. I ignore his black eyes.

“Thought you said Skeetah got a white one look just like China.”

“He do,” Manny says.

“Ain’t it a little early to be trying to claim one of my bitch’s puppies?” Skeetah says. He is leaning forward, straining at the leash. “They a week old. You know like I know that if they make it through the first six weeks, then they ready to go. So until six weeks go by, you ain’t got no fucking business claiming shit.” Skeet is smiling, and he is rubbing his thumbs with his fingers, his hands clenched loosely as if he can already feel the sting of them on Rico, on Manny. I know that’s who he really wants: Manny. Big Henry and Marquise move with a loping, easy purpose, to flank Skeetah.

“Y’all little Bois Sauvage niggas really think y’all run shit? I will fuck y’all up.”

“Everybody just chill out,” says Manny. “It ain’t even got to be like that.”

“Fuck you!” Skeetah’s voice carries, sliding up in pitch, and it breaks his face in pieces. “You a dirty motherfucker!”

“You going to let that little nigga talk to you like that? If I was you, I’d beat the shit-”

It is what Skeetah has been waiting for Rico to say. Skeetah punches Rico. He does it with his whole body, raining down on Rico’s wide, sweaty face with the steady fury and quick power of the small: fierce as China. The referees on the floor are blowing their whistles, and people are standing up around us, like they are doing a wave. Manny tries to catch his cousin Rico, and Big Henry reaches out to grab Skeetah, but then Manny has pushed his cousin back into Skeetah, volleyed him like a ball, and Manny is punching Skeetah, and Marquise is on Manny, and Big Henry slides his body in between them as a barrier, to stop it all, but then Rico punches him, and they are brawling, falling down the stairs, ripping the crowd like fabric.

Randall is in the middle of the court, wrestling the ball from the huddle that one referee is screeching into his whistle over, when he stops, distracted by the rumble of the crowd, and sees the boys beating one another down the bleachers, Junior and me arm in arm, running down the edge of the stands for the door. Randall looks lost on the court, the ball cradled in his limp hand. The other referee is blowing his whistle at Skeetah and Rico and Manny and Big Henry and Marquise, who are fighting their way along the side of the court now, the crowd carrying them out of the door in the kind of frothing waves we only get before hurricanes.

“Get out of here, Batiste!” Randall’s coach yells at him: the green hand towel he has been using to mop his face snaps like a flag in a bad wind. “That’s your people, ain’t it? That’s you! You’re done! Go on!”

Randall lobs the ball at the wall of the gym, and it ricochets back onto the court. Players that aren’t frozen by the fight try to catch it. I pull at Junior’s arm, and we are the first out of the door; he is fast. Randall jumps in the middle of the fight as it spills out of the door, begins screaming at all of them, calling names, pulling them from their fury one by one until he stands in the middle of them, taller than all of them, black as iron, rigid as a gate.

“What the fuck is wrong with y’all?”

“Who the fuck you think you is?” Rico yells. Manny has him by his shoulder, pulling him backward away from Randall.

“Let me go!” Skeetah says. Small scratches mark his face in beads. Big Henry is holding his arm, and Marquise stands next to them, breathing hard, glaring. “I’m going to kill that motherfucker. He ain’t getting nothing from me!”

“I’m going to see your little bitch-ass tomorrow,” Rico sneers; his lips are bleeding. “With your fucking dog.”

“You know you can’t fight no dog just had puppies.” Big Henry steps toward Manny and Rico, stumbling forward with Skeetah. Big Henry’s lips are swollen at one side, puffy and wet.

“I knew I didn’t like this bitch for a reason,” Marquise bites out. His forehead is bruised.

“Fuck that,” Skeetah says. “Fuck that. He ain’t getting none of my puppies.”

“Skeetah”-Randall leans in to Skeetah, his hands still raised-“you fight her tomorrow in that dog fight and Kilo win, them puppies die. You know that.”

“Kilo ain’t going to win,” Skeetah yells, and jerks against Big Henry, who holds him with both arms, hugging him.

“You can’t,” Big Henry says.

“My cousin coming with his dog, Boss. He’ll fight for China. If he win, then fuck you,” Marquise says.

“And if I win?” Rico asks.

“Then fuck you,” Skeetah says.

Randall elbows Skeetah in the chest, points one finger at Rico as if he would shush him.

“Then you get a puppy,” Randall says.