Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward Page B

we were all taught in school; kneel, fold over your thighs, tuck your head between your knees, cover your neck with your bony fingers to protect the soft throat underneath.
    Skeetah takes his gun off his shoulder, cocks it. He holds it loosely at first, his eyes moving back and forth like he is reading something written in the air between the trees.
    â€œSkeet. What you fixing to shoot?”
    â€œWasn’t enough cans of meat to steal.”
    â€œI ain’t cooking it, Skeet.”
    Skeetah shoulders the rifle. He points the gun at the sky. The wind moves a little in the tops of the trees, and then dies away, like a person leaving a room. The trees are silent with longing. The gun begins to scissor back and forth. Skeetah points, following the squirrels scampering through the trees. They are fuzzy and gray, fat with summer food.
    â€œShhhh,” he says. “We need something to eat.”
    A branch creaks. The tops of the pines rub together as the wind comes again, but the oaks do not move. The squirrels like the oaks best, run along their black, hard branches highway overpasses. These are their solid houses; they will withstand a storm, if she comes. The smell of baked pine is strong.
    â€œGotcha,” Skeet says, and he shoots.
    The shot rings off a pine, making a solid thunk that sounds like a punch. Skeet winces. The squirrels melt in and out of the dark blotches, round the bends of the trunks, disappear, reappear. When one with a half-missing tail appears at the V of the oak and slides over it to scramble down to the ground, Skeet fires again. The squirrel loses its grip, curls into a ball, and rolls down the trunk, leaving a ribbon of red. Skeetah stands and runs toward it, firing again. Its half tail twitches, and it lays still on the earth. It is big for a Mississippi squirrel.
    â€œI’m not cleaning that.”
    The crows fly away, screaming. The insects scream in chorus in the tops of the trees.
    Skeetah picks the squirrel up with both hands, tries to hold the body together so it won’t fall apart in pieces. Blood squirts out of it with a pulse. The heart.
    â€œYou want him to come tonight, don’t you?”
    â€œWho you talking about?”
    â€œYou know who I’m talking about. And it ain’t Big Henry.” He flings a bit of fur away that was dangling wetly like a red earring from the animal’s hide. “Ain’t Marquise, neither.”
    â€œNo.” I shake my head. Skeetah grabs the rest of the tail and pulls. What was left of it before he shot the squirrel comes away like bristles from a brush.
    â€œY’all don’t look right together,” Skeetah says, studying the bloody carcass. He is so hot his nose is sweating. But we are , I want to say. He makes my heart beat like that , I want to say, and point at the squirrel dying in red spurts. But I say nothing, and Skeetah shrugs and lifts the squirrel up like an offering and begins walking back to the pit.
    When we get back to the campsite, Skeetah lays the squirrel on the plastic bag, and he pulls out the knife and cuts the head off. The blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. He pitches the head into the underbrush like a ball, runs the knife in a jagged line down the squirrel’s chest, and then makes a cross across the animal’s arms. He is ruthless, quiet, focused as China before a fight. Skeetah pulls hard, and the skin balloons away from the flesh underneath, stretching, stretching, until it is a wet limp rag, and Skeetah flings it away. Fur booties remain on the squirrel’s feet, but Skeet cuts those off and tosses them after the head. The animal is no more than meat, now, thick as two pork chops laid together. Skeetah slices at the stomach, and what comes sliding out is blue and purple, like so much wet yarn.
    â€œShit,” Skeet breathes. The smell of the animal’s insides is everywhere. When Daddy used to keep pigs, they shat and ate and rooted in their