“All right,” Daddy says. Daddy throws up the hammer and Skeetah moves over to the side of the attic where I can’t see and starts wrenching. I huddle over my leg, rubbing at the marks Skeetah’s left in my skin. The first board comes away fast. I look up to see Skeetah flinging it through the hole in the ceiling, and it lands too near Daddy’s feet. I jump out of the way. “Watch out, boy.”
Daddy hands me the plywood and motions toward the door. The other piece of plywood cracks and comes away, and I look back to see Skeetah sending it sailing through the ceiling like a paper airplane, directly for Daddy, who ducks.
“Shit!”
“Sorry,” Skeetah says as he jumps down, landing like a cat. The board has clipped Daddy, bounced off the wall to clatter to the floor. Skeetah is smiling.
“Gotdamnit, boy.”
“I said I was sorry.” Skeetah’s not smiling anymore, but when I push my board through the door, I smile into my shirt, because he has that same look on his face as he did the day he mastered the razor eating, and I know it’s for me.
Into the woods to the east of us, about a mile through pine and oaks so big and old their arms have grown to rest in the dirt, there is a pasture full of grazing cows. A wooden and barbed-wire fence rims the pasture. In the middle sits a big brown barn, and next to it, a small white house with a high sloped tin roof and small windows. White people live there.
Skeetah found the place one day by accident while we were playing an all-day game of chase in the woods, running in circles, hiding and seeking for hours in teams. He stumbled into a clearing where the pines had been cut brutally away so that stumps dotted the field beyond the fence like chairs that no one would ever sit on. Egrets picked their way through the grass, attentive and showy as fussy girlfriends at the cows’ sides. When I came crashing out of the woods, I forgot to touch Skeetah, startled at the way the sky opened up at the field, the way the land looked wrong. There was too much blue. A pickup truck slid soundlessly out of a shadow in a gap in the woods, which I figured must’ve been their driveway, and a cow lowed. An older white man and woman got out of the truck when it parked, waving away the cloud of dust they’d kicked up. Off in the distance, we heard a dog bark.
“Come on, Skeet,” I said.
He stood a moment longer, squinting at the house, his head to one side.
“I’ma leave you,” I said, and I turned to trot off back into the soft underside of the woods, the green reach of the trees. It wasn’t until I was deep in the gloom of the forest that I heard him running so quickly to catch up with me that I looked back scared, thinking the white people who lived in that house on the edge of the black heart of Bois Sauvage had come after us, but saw only Skeet jogging, his face so calm. He wasn’t even breathing hard.
This is where Skeetah says we are going when he comes into my room, changed out of the jeans he was wearing in Mother Lizbeth’s house into a T-shirt the color of pine needles and dark brown Dickies that have holes in both of the knees. He doesn’t have any socks on under his tennis shoes.
“You got to change,” he says. “Wear something green or brown or black. Don’t wear nothing white or tan.”
“Why not?”
“You got to blend in.” Skeetah leaves to wait in the hallway, and I dig through my drawers until I find a black T-shirt and a pair of black basketball shorts that Randall gave me because they were too small for him. They originally had the St. Catherine high school logo on them, which means he stole them and that they were practice shorts, but they’re so old that the dragonfly blue writing at the bottom that would have made them unacceptable to Skeetah has flaked off and left a faded gray shadow where it was. I pull my hair back into a ponytail, put on some black socks and my tennis shoes, smooth my big T-shirt over my puffy stomach. Skeetah knocks on the wall twice, and I know this is his way of telling me to hurry up.
“Let’s go.”
We run out the door, scatter the chickens before us, and they whirl about like crape myrtle petals blown loose by summer rain. Brown and rust red and white, the only sound the swish of their wings. China interrupts, barks.
Away from the Pit, the pine trees reach skyward, their green-needled tops stand perfectly still. Once in a while, they shiver in the breeze that moves across their tops. They seem to nod to something that I cannot hear, and I wonder if it is the hum of José out in the Gulf, singing to himself. The breeze doesn’t touch us down here. Down here, the air is thick and hot. The trees are so dense that there’s only a little undergrowth, and the bushes fight for their bright spots on the hard-packed, shadowy earth. There are birds, like yesterday, but these are small and brown, so small that they could fit in the middle of my hand or in the maw of China’s mouth. They are following us. As we walk through the wood on an unseen trail, the tiny birds fly from tree to tree, chattering sharply with each other, keeping pace with us. In the dense air, the oaks stand apart from the piney clusters: solemn, immovable. Spanish moss hangs from their arms, gray as an old king’s beard. Skeetah grabs my hand, and I almost jump away from him, surprised at the feel of it around mine, his fingers hard, the small calluses on his palm from China’s leash now dry and scratchy as old bread. He pulls and we run through a corridor of pines, oaks, birch, birds. I can’t help it. I lean back against his pull, and I laugh.
We fall into a pace. My face feels tight and hot, and the air coming into my nose feels like water. I am swimming through the air. My body does what it was made to do: it moves. Skeetah cannot leave me. I am his equal. Skeetah sprints a little faster, and when the slack in my arm is still there because I am still at his side, he looks back at me quickly and smiles widely. There, silver. He has a razor in his cheek. Is this how Medea ran with her brother, hand in hand, away from their father’s hold to join the Argonauts? Did every step feel like the running leap a bird takes before flight? When we come to the edge of the clearing, he lets my hand go. I sink to my knees, lean forward, and bury my face in the pine straw, breathing in the baked sap of the fallen leaves, feeling the sweat dripping off of me everywhere. I need to pee; there is a wet weight that makes me think of the baby. I find a bush. When I come back, Skeetah is flipping the razor over his scarred knuckles, his shirt in his hand. He wipes his pale head, drying stinging sweat. I don’t want to bare my stomach, so I don’t wipe my face with the hem of my heavy shirt. Beyond the barbed wire and the lolling cows, the barn and house sit, small in the distance. The house must have been added on to over the years because it is uneven: on one end of the house there is a lean-to shed, and with the roof of the sloping front porch, it looks like a ship manned by rowers on each side. We are here.
“You got to keep watch.”
“Where you going?”
“I’m going to see if I can get into the barn. See that little window on the side? The one right above that trailer?”
“Yeah.”
“I bet you they don’t even lock them.”
“Why do you want to go in a barn?”
“They got cow wormer in there. I know it.”
“You can’t give your dogs cow wormer.”
“Yes, I can. Rico was talking about it when his dog and China was mating. Say that’s the best kind of wormer to give a dog. Make them a little sick, but it knock all of them worms out. Everybody does it.”
“So you going to steal it?”
“I can’t lose no more.”
“Well, how I’m going to let you know if somebody’s coming?”
“You see that group of stumps right there? Them three all huddled up next to each other close to the middle of the field?”
“Yeah.”
“You going to lay there, and if the white people come, you going to whistle. And then you going to keep low and start running to the woods.”