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.
“Skeet. What you fixing to shoot?”
“Wasn’t enough cans of meat to steal.”
“I 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.
“Shhhh,” 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.
“Gotcha,” 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.
“I’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.
“You want him to come tonight, don’t you?”
“Who you talking about?”
“You 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.”
“No.” 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.
“Y’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.
“Shit,” 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 own filth, growing pink and fat, but the smell of them and their nest was like this animal’s stomach: raw, full with shit. Skeetah is right.
He tries to pull the innards out, but they hold, so he tries to cut at the strings holding them, and he cuts the intestines by accident.
“Oh, shit,” Skeetah says, and he drops the animal and the innards and the knife on the bloody plastic bag and he steps away, his hands on his knees, his head hanging down. There is sand in my throat, and I cannot breathe.
“Jesus, Skeet.” I run off behind a small gathering of trees, as far as I can make it away from that smell and that slime, and I fall and throw up the eggs, the rice, the water, everything I have inside of me until there is no food left, until my throat feels empty and I cannot stop heaving up air and spit, but still I am not able to throw it all up. Inside, at the bottom, something remains.
By the time the meat is done cooking, has turned brown and small with as many hard edges as a jewel, the boys have come. Marquise is slicing at the meat with his own pocket knife, slapping small chunks onto pieces of bread that are turning soggy with hot sauce. Skeetah makes a sandwich, passes it to me, before making his own. The meat is stringy and hard, tastes of half red spice from the hot sauce, which has turned the bread pink, and half wild animal. I bite and I am eating acorns and leaping with fear to the small dark holes in the heart of old oak trees. The sun had set while Skeetah and I were looking for wood for the grill; the sky burst to color above us, and then the sun sank through the trees so that the color ran out of the sky like water out of a drain and left the sky bleached white to navy to dark. I overloaded on wood for the fire; Skeet had to keep grabbing the squirrel out by its foot, his hand wrapped in his shirt, because he was afraid it would burn. But the fire is large enough that I can see all their faces in the dark.
“It’s good,” Marquise says.
“It tastes burnt,” says Skeetah. Big Henry, beside him, laughs.
“It tastes like shit. I can’t believe y’all eating that.” Big Henry gulps more of his beer, which is so warm the bottle doesn’t even sweat water in the hot night. “Might as well give that little bit of nothing to the puppy.”
I hardly chew the sandwich, just bite it small enough to get on my tongue, wet with spit, and swallow. Skeetah hands me the half-jug of juice, and I swallow a mouthful of warm colored sugar. I am not hungry, but it is better when I eat because I don’t feel so sick. If I throw up again, somebody would ask me what my problem is. And I don’t want to have to speak the lie, to be convincing. To have them looking at me and asking. I pass the jug along to Marquise. This is the closest drink to real fruit juice we’ve ever had in the house. Mama used to put it in the cart while I rode in the basket through the grocery store, wedge the red punch alongside me in the seat so the jug turned my leg cold. But I liked it, because later in the truck that didn’t have any air-conditioning, my leg would stay cold, like a piece of ice melting in my hand.
The puppy in the bucket scratches and Skeetah sits over him, his head hanging low, staring. Every once in a while, he’ll touch the rim of the bucket like he wants to reach in and rub the puppy, comfort it, but he doesn’t.