Salvage the Bones

“And it wasn’t your game to fuck up. What am I going to do about camp?”

“If he would’ve said that shit to you, you would’ve jumped him, too.” Skeetah grimaces. “And the way he looked at Esch!”

“Rico fucked with Esch?” Randall, who has been pacing a ditch into the muddy yard as he argues, stops.

Skeetah snorts, glances at the window where I’m sitting, but the sun is too bright outside. He can’t see me. His mouth twists like he has bitten into a peach seed, and he laughs once, a bitter, loud bark.

“You don’t know shit, do you?” Skeetah readjusts his thumb over the hose so that the water shoots out in two hard sparkling streams. Where it hits China’s side, it sounds solid. “You ain’t got to go today. This ain’t got nothing to do with you. Why don’t you go shoot?”

Randall shakes his head, shoves his toe into dry dirt. The dust puffs and drifts in the still air. He looks toward the bathroom, and I sit back so that the tank of the toilet is cool and slippery through my T-shirt.

“I’m going,” I hear him saying. “You made a promise. You said you would pay for camp if they lived,” he says louder.

“All right!” Skeetah yells. “You kicking up dust, Randall!”

“You just like Daddy. Always crazy for something.” I hear the side door off the kitchen scratch open and close as Randall leaves Skeetah to walk into the house.

The water stops. I lean so I can barely see out of the window. Skeetah is on his knees before China again, squirting the last of the soap on her coat, rubbing her whiter than white: she is the cold, cloudy heart in a cube of ice.

“Look at you, shining,” Skeetah breathes into China’s ear. “Cocaine white.” He brushes her, his hand a blade. “Blinding.”

The few dirt-scratched yards and thin-siding houses and trailers of Bois Sauvage seem a sorry match to the woods, like pitting a puppy against a full grown dog. Here, there are swimming holes that are fat puddles and some the size of swimming pools fed by skinny clear creeks, but the earth makes the holes black, and the trees make them as filthy with leaves as a dog is with fleas. There are clusters of magnolias that are so tall and green and glossy, they are impossible to climb, and the air around them always smells like peaches. There are oaks so big and old that their arms grow out black and thick as trunks, which rest on the ground. There are ponds that are filled with slime and tall yellow grasses, and at night, frogs turn them teeming, singing a burping chorus. There are clearings where deer feed, startle white, and kick away. There are turtles plowing through pine straw, mud, trying to avoid the pot. Marquise told us once that he went out into those woods with Bone and Javon after a hard rain to find some mushrooms they could take, and they came across a wolf, lean as a fox, dirty gray, who looked at them like they’d shot at him, and then disappeared.

The trail that leads into one of the deeper parts of the woods is up the road away from the house. China leads us, relaxed at the end of her chain; the leash is dull steel, the collar chrome. Skeetah stole it. He has reshaved his head, and he wears a hand towel around his neck like a scarf. Big Henry carries Junior on his shoulders, and Randall trails, a big stick in his hand, which Skeetah laughed at him for picking up when we were jumping the ditch, saying, That ain’t going to do nothing against these dogs. Then he pointed at China and said, But she will. Randall carries the stick anyway. Marquise is probably already there with his cousin. Crows caw. I listen for the boys and the dogs somewhere out in these woods, but all I can hear is the pine trees shushing each other, the oak bristling, the magnolia leaves hard and wide so that they sound like paper plates clattering when the wind hits them, this wind snapping before Katrina somewhere out there in the Gulf, coming like the quiet voice of someone talking before they walk through the doorway of a room.

A cloud passes over the sun, and it is dark under the trees. It passes, and the gold melts through the leaves, falls on bark and floor: foil coins. Soon we reach a curtain of vines, which hang from the lowest branches to the needle-carpeted earth, and we crawl. Skeetah dusts China’s breasts off, waves us on. We have been walking for a long time when I hear the first tiny bark.

“You tired?” Randall asks.

“No,” I say. My stomach feels full of water, hurts with it, but I will not tell him that. I push aside a branch, let it go, but it still scratches my arm. Medea’s journey took her to the water, which was the highway of the ancient world, where death was as close as the waves, the sun, the wind. Where death was as many as the fish waiting in the water, fanning fins, watching the surface, shadowing the bottom dark. China barks as if she is answering the dog.

The clearing is a wide oval bowl, which must be a dried-up pond that grows wide and deep when it rains; the bottom is matted with dry yellow reeds, and the trees grow in a circle around it. The boys and their dogs talk and smoke in clumps, pass blunts and cigarettes from one to another, ask How old is yours or Where you got that collar or How many she done had? There are around ten dogs here, around fifteen boys. I am the only girl. Marquise’s little brother Agee is here, and he and Junior begin competing to see who can climb the fastest up a gray, low-limbed tree outside the circle of game dogs and game men. The dogs are brown and tan, black and white, striped brindle, red earth. None of them is white as China. She glows in the sun of the clearing, her ears up, her tail cocked. The dogs nap, pace, bark, strain against the leash, and lean out into the clearing where they will fight, trying to get into the sun, to feel it on their black wet noses. They will all match today, one dog against another. The boys have been drawn by gossip of the fight between Kilo and Boss to the clearing like the Argonauts were to Jason at the start of his adventure. They will throw their own dogs into the ring, each hoping for a good fight, a savage heart, a win, to return home from the woods, their own dangerous Aegean Sea, to be able to say, My bitch did it or My nigga got him. Some of the boys are nervous; they put their hands in their pockets, take them out, swing their sweat rags in the air and swat at gnats. Some of the boys are confident: shoulders round and grinning. Big Henry wipes at his face with a sweat rag he’s pulled out of his pocket, and Randall leans on his stick, frowning at the frolicking dogs. A hawk circles in the air above us, turns, vanishes.

Marquise is standing next to a boy who must be his cousin; they both are the color of pecans, both have their ears pierced with gold loops, and both are short, but the cousin is a little fatter. His T-shirt is so big it swallows him.

“What’s up?” Marquise asks. “This my cousin Jerome.”

“Cuz told me about y’all little problem.” Jerome glances at Marquise, and then wipes his head with a rag, already wet, that he’s pulled out of his pocket. “You ain’t got to worry.” He flicks his leash and his dog, Boss, gets up from where he has been laying in the sun, walks to Jerome’s side and sits. He is black all over with a white muzzle.

“You said he was big, cuz, but…” Marquise’s whisper trails off to a laugh. “I didn’t think you was talking this big.”

Boss is huge. He is fat and tall, and his front legs are so bowed the front of him looks like a horseshoe. Where China’s hair is silky, Boss’s hair is coarse, so coarse that I can see the fight scars on him that have healed, black and fat as leeches. He lets his tongue hang out, smiles. His sides whoosh out and in as he pants, and he breathes so hard, he ripples Jerome’s shirt.

“Where the other dog at?”

Marquise rises from petting his own dog, Lala, whose ears he has clipped and put earrings into, loops like his own, to nod across the clearing. Marquise never fights his dog, Lala. She is a soft tan color, and she is almost as clean as China. She lays in pine, cocking an eyebrow at us. Skeetah once told me that Marquise’s dog sleeps in the bed with him, in the house, every night. Skeetah had shrugged and sort of smiled when he told me, but the way one side of his mouth had gone up while the other side of his mouth had gone down made me think that if Daddy weren’t here, China would sleep at the foot of Skeetah’s bed every night, too.

Across the clearing, Kilo is straining at a leash that Rico holds. He is sniffing at the ground, looking as if he is amazed, and then digging his paws into the dirt. It flies up and out between his back legs: he is tunneling through the dry grass and down through the bed of the pond. I wonder if there are frogs down there, dry and cool, hiding in the cracked mud. If they are trying to flatten themselves to hide from the sharp paw. Rico is half in the sun, half out, laughing toward Manny and some other older dark boy who has worn white shoes that look new to a dogfight in the woods. Rico’s grill is bright, but Manny, his arms folded, is more gold than Rico’s smile, and I hate him for it.

“I done fought Boss all the way from Baton Rouge to Pensacola,” says Jerome. “He won more than he lost.”