Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward Page A

smoke. Skeetah grabs the bucket and his nest egg of food that he stole from the house.
    â€œYou can’t just kill the thing,” Randall says.
    â€œYes, I can.”
    â€œYou can make it better.”
    â€œNothing can make parvo better. Puppies don’t survive that. And if I don’t get rid of this one, the others will catch it. And then they will all die. You think Junior can handle that?”
    â€œNo. But they got to be another way.”
    â€œThere ain’t.” Skeetah hauls the bag over his shoulder along with his BB gun, holds the bucket in one trembling hand. “You know basketball, but you don’t know dogs.” He walks away. “Tell him something, I don’t know what—but this one got to go.”
    â€œHe too young, Esch.” Randall’s hands look graceless without a basketball in them. He looks like he doesn’t know how to hold them.
    â€œI know,” I say. “But we was young, too.” He knows who I am talking about.
    â€œI keep catching him climbing up on barrels, looking through the cracks, too scared to go inside. Staring at them puppies. China start growling and I pull him away, and I can feel his little heart beating fast. And thirty minutes later I catch him up there again.”
    I shrug, lift up my hands like I have something to give him when I know I don’t. I start to trot toward Skeetah, who is walking deeper into the shade under the trees on his way to the Pit.
    â€œCome on!” Skeetah calls. Randall strikes at the air; it looks as if he is passing an invisible ball.
    â€œShit,” Randall curses. “Shit.”
    Skeetah has stolen this: bread, a knife, cups, a half-gallon jug of punch, hot sauce, dishwashing liquid. He sits them next to the bucket, and he dusts off two cinder blocks with a grill laid over it that he and Randall made into a barbecue pit when we were younger. The steel is burnt black, the stones burnt gray. His rifle hangs by a strap from his shoulder, its muzzle digging into the backs of his legs when he walks.
    â€œWhat do we need that for?” I ask.
    In the bucket, the puppy murmurs. It is lonely.
    â€œCome on,” Skeetah says.
    In the woods, animals dart between the valleys of shadow. Birds trill up through pathways of sunlight. Skeetah cuts through it all, his shoulders curved. He leans forward when he walks, studies the ground. I am noisy behind him, my feet dragging in the pine needles. I kick up my knees, try to set my feet down easy, but I am off balance. What would be the baby sits like a water balloon in my stomach, makes me feel set to bursting. My secret makes me clumsy. Skeetah stops, kneels in the needles and crackling leaves; underneath, it all rots and turns to dirt. Skeetah shakes his head at me and looks up into the trees. We wait.
    Before a hurricane, the animals that can, leave. Birds fly north out of the storm, and everything else roams as far away from the winds and rain as possible. The air has been clear these past couple of days. Bright, every day almost unbearably bright and hot and close, the way that I feel when Manny is sweating over me: golden, burning. Insects root under our feet, squirrels leap from tree to tree, crows glide between the tops of the pines, cawing. The beat of their wings sounds soft as the swish of Mudda Ma’am’s broom when she sweeps pine needles from her sandy front yard. Skeetah watches them the way he watches China: like any second she might speak, and he’s sure when it will happen, she will reveal all the answers to all the things he has ever wondered about. Daddy’s crazy, I think, obsessed with hurricanes this summer. He was convinced last summer after one tornado touched down at a shopping complex in Germaine that the Gulf Coast would be a new tornado alley. He spent the entire summer pointing out the safest places in the house to crouch. Every time he caught Junior in the kitchen, he made him practice the tornado drill