“Yeah.” I breathe. My stomach flutters. I will watch Skeet kill his own. “You know I’m here.”
Eating is different now. I hunch over a bowl of eggs and rice in the kitchen and I eat but feel like I am lying to myself and Skeetah, who is stealing food for our night in the woods. Every bite is another lie. Food is the last thing I want. Skeetah pulls more plastic bags from under the sink and wraps them around the one holding the food so that the bundle is opaque as a spider’s egg sac, and I can’t see the mix of things that would be our hurricane supplies that Skeetah is filching.
“Look good?” he asks.
I swallow. I nod.
“We should take a jug of that water.”
“You know Daddy done probably counted them.”
“We’ll tell Randall to tell him that it was them beers he was drinking yesterday. Made him miscount.”
“Randall ain’t coming?”
“Don’t know. But you know Randall tell Daddy whatever.”
Skeetah puts the bundle of bags under his shirt. He looks pregnant now.
I skim the belly of my bowl with my spoon, slide the steel along all the curved places. The rice clumps; the eggs are bundled. It all disappears, and I wonder what I am feeding. I imagine the food turning to mush, sliding down my throat, through my body like water through a storm drain to pool in my stomach. To make what is inside me grow to be a baby in the winter. And Skeet smiles at me and holds the door open, waiting for me to walk through, and he is blind.
Junior is pulling planks of plywood across the yard. He yanks them up and hauls, walking backward through the dirt. Daddy has them scattered all around, pulled from other places on the Pit, and has lain them on the ground. Junior is piling them, and every one leaves a trail of crumbling wood behind him since they are eaten through with black, rotting blotches. Junior is leaving a trail of bread crumbs. He is covered in dust, and it makes him look rolled in chalk. His thin gray shorts sag on him, hanging to the middle of his shins. They must be an old pair of Skeet’s. He drops a board, and it claps.
“Where y’all going?” Junior asks.
“None of your business,” says Skeet. He walks into the shed, and I follow.
“Go on, Junior.” I say. He doesn’t need to know that the puppy is dying. He doesn’t need to know that young things go, too.
“You ain’t the boss of me,” Junior says. I try to block his slide into the curtained doorway, but he crawls under me and sees Skeet handling the sick puppy, which doesn’t swim now. The puppy’s head rolls to the side, and he raises an arm, but I don’t know if that is Skeet’s fingers pulling him like a puppet, or the puppy, fighting.
“Get out of here, Junior! You so bad,” Skeetah says. He pulls down a bucket from one of the high shelves and lays the puppy inside, and then puts it back up so China can’t reach it. She growls, and Skeetah places his fingers in the middle of her forehead, shoves. “Shut up.”
“I’m telling Randall that you fixing to do something bad to the puppy!” Junior runs outside.
“Oh Lord,” I breathe.
China watches, reclining on her side. The puppies feed from her, and she is still, stone. Only her eyes shine like an oil lamp in the light. I should know that’s who she is, know that she’s often still as an animal ready to attack, but I’m not. Her tail does not wag. I can’t help the skin puckering over my stomach, up my arms.
“We’ll leave him up here till later tonight. If it’s the parvo, hopefully he too far away to infect the other ones.” Skeetah wipes his hands on the front of his holey tee. His shirt comes up over his ribs, his thin, muscled stomach. “Shit. The germs. I need to go wash my hands.”
I’m sitting on the steps, waiting on Skeetah, when Randall comes out the trees. He bounces when he walks, and it’s like the darkness under the green gives him his pieces one by one: a chest, a stomach, hips, arms, and legs. Last, a face. Junior is a voice behind him, riding on his back, his feet flopping over Randall’s stomach, leaving white dusty marks like powder with his soles.
“What’s this Junior talking about y’all trying to drown one of the puppies?”
I feel a quick wave of nausea.
“I don’t know where he got that from.”
“He say y’all put it in a bucket.”
“The puppy got parvo.” I say.
“They was going to drown it in the bucket!” Randall hoists Junior up, so when Junior says this, he is the flash of a face over Randall’s shoulder.
“And we wasn’t fixing to drown it in no bucket.” I say.
“Well, what y’all going to do with it?”
“Take it to back to the pit.”
Randall lets Junior go, and Junior hangs on until he can’t anymore, until his legs turn to noodles and he is sliding down Randall like a pole. We three are quiet, looking at each other, frowning.
“Go on, Junior.” Randall says.
“But Randall-”
“Go.”
Junior folds his arms over his chest, his ribs like a small grill burnt black. He needs to put a shirt on.
“Go.”
Junior’s eyes are bright. When he runs away, his feet make little slapping sounds in the dirt, and leave clouds of smoke. Skeetah grabs the bucket and his nest egg of food that he stole from the house.
“You can’t just kill the thing,” Randall says.
“Yes, I can.”
“You can make it better.”
“Nothing 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?”
“No. But they got to be another way.”
“There 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.”
“He too young, Esch.” Randall’s hands look graceless without a basketball in them. He looks like he doesn’t know how to hold them.
“I know,” I say. “But we was young, too.” He knows who I am talking about.
“I 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.
“Come on!” Skeetah calls. Randall strikes at the air; it looks as if he is passing an invisible ball.
“Shit,” 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.
“What do we need that for?” I ask.
In the bucket, the puppy murmurs. It is lonely.
“Come 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 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.