Up close Daddy smells like vinegar, like salt. That is his fresh alcohol smell.
“You see that there?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s the clutch. That’s the brake. Put this here in neutral. You don’t need to do nothing to this. But when you turn the key, press the clutch and the brake at the same time.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t touch nothing else.” His hands are like mine, like Skeet’s. That’s where we get these flat wide fingers from. But I look at his face and his collarbone punching up through the neck of his shirt like knuckles, and I can’t see anything else he ever gave me. He walks around the side of the truck. Minutes later, Junior clambers up the side of the truck.
“He say start it.”
I press and turn. There is a click and then nothing. Junior drops and runs, reappears climbing.
“He say again.”
Again I press and turn. This time there isn’t even a click. A fly buzzes into the truck, decides to try my arm. I wave it away.
“Shit!” I hear muffled through the machinery.
“Ask him if he want me to do it again.”
Junior doesn’t even bother climbing down; he leans out and yells. His little muscles stretch out like shoestrings. When he was a baby, Randall held him the most, and I did the rest of the time. Daddy fed him until he figured out me and Randall could do it. He taught Randall the right ratio for the formula, how to heat the bottle up in a pan of water so that the milk didn’t get too hot, and then he went back out in his pickup, trying to find yard work and odd jobs. Afterward, Randall mixed the bottles, kept them filled in the refrigerator so he or I could feed Junior. Whenever Skeetah held him, Junior would cry. When we went to school, Daddy brought Junior to Mudda Ma’am, who had white hair she’d braid into pigtails and loop over her head, and who I never saw wearing anything other than a housedress. She watched kids for money while their parents were at work. She watched Junior until he was old enough for Head Start, which is when her memory started going, so she let the kids go with it. Tilda, her only daughter, moved back in with her to take care of her, but mostly spent her time wearing a dirt path between Javon’s house and her own for crack. I wonder if Junior even remembers Mudda Ma’am. He never talks about her, never says her name even when we walk down to the park and see her wandering amongst her azaleas like a child losing at hide-and-seek. Sometimes I wonder if Junior remembers anything, or if his head is like a colander, and the memories of who bottle-fed him, who licked his tears, who mothered him, squeeze through the metal like water to run down the drain, and only leave the present day, his sand holes, his shirtless bird chest, Randall yelling at him: his present washed clean of memory like vegetables washed clean of the dirt they grow in.
I press, turn, wait.
“Stop!” Daddy is waving the wrench in the air, but the truck is so large that I cannot see his head over the hood, only his black hand, the dirty tool. “Get out. It ain’t ready. Go.”
I jump down, Junior already tailing me.
“Go get me another beer, Junior.”
“Y’all always leaving me, Esch. Wait!” Junior says, and he runs to the house, leaving a dust ghost trail behind him.
“She need some time to herself.” Skeetah is saying this. China is beside him. She is snapping at gnats. And with his arms crossed over his chest and a baseball cap high on his head, there is Manny. Every time her mouth shuts, he tries not to, but he flinches. I see it in the balls of his shoulders.
“You should give her a bath or something.” Manny tosses out the comment. Shrugs and justifies the jump when China snaps and shakes her head at what she has missed.
“I will.” Skeetah kneels, runs his hand down China’s chest. She looks up and her whole body shimmies like a woman dancing down at the Oaks, a blues club set on six acres of woods and a baseball diamond in the middle of Bois. They host baseball games for black town teams every Sunday during the summer. Once, when the outside bathroom stalls were broken when we were younger, Randall walked me into the blues club during a baseball Sunday to use the bathroom. He and Skeet and I had spent the day begging quarters from our friends to buy pickles and soda at the concession stand, hanging from the chicken wire that backed the dugouts, watching the away team clap and whistle and kick at their bats and throw practice shots while Mama and Daddy were in and out of the blues club.
“I think that’s the dirtiest I’ve ever seen her,” Manny says.
China has a little blood from the other dog, Twist, on her still at the corners of her mouth like lipstick. The red dirt of the Pit has given her a pink gleam, like a barely cooked shrimp still gummy with sea. Manny ignores me and Junior, who is trying to jump at a tree branch and touch it like a basketball goal. The lighter Manny carries in his pockets to smoke his cigarillos dances over and under his knuckles. That is his nervous habit, the thing that he does but does not realize that he does when he is doing some things and thinking of others.
“I’m waiting until right before the fight to clean her. So she be shining on them.”
On the day Randall walked me through the Oaks, all corners and smoke and the bowling of beer bottles hitting tables, he had gripped my shoulders so hard they hurt. Mama had been on the dance floor; I’d never seen her dance before that, and I never would again. She was dancing with a man, not Daddy, while Daddy sat at the edge of the floor and watched. She had shook like China, threw her head back so water glistened down her throat, and her body ran in curves when normally she was all solid. She was beautiful.
“I thought you wasn’t going to fight her, her fresh with milk and all.” The lighter stops, and Manny flips it up in the air and catches it. He lights a cigarillo and wedges it in the corner of his mouth and talks around it.
“I ain’t. But I’m going to take her. Can’t let niggas forget who she is.”
China lays down in the sand indolently. Her breasts, still swollen but maybe a little less now, lay flat before her like a pillow. The skin where her breasts separate from her rib cage is wrinkled-her nipples are a pale pink so colorless they are almost white. I haven’t ever touched her chest, but if I did, I would imagine that her teats would be soft and cool against the heat of the day. She does not lay her head in the dirt and huff like other dogs, but stares at Manny and me instead. Like she knows.
“You know Rico going to be there. Fighting Kilo.”
Manny begins flipping the silver and red lighter again when he mentions Rico. The image, which looks like a tattoo, reads Hearts on Fire, and pictures two hearts diagonal to one another, going up in flames. His lips kiss the cigarillo and he pulls. China blinks and yawns. There is a movement behind my breast that feels like someone has turned a hose on full blast, and the water that has been baking in the pump in the summer heat floods out, scalding. This is love, and it hurts. Manny never looks at me.
“Well, I hope Kilo ready. Marquise told me some of his cousins from Baton Rouge been talking shit about how they got a boss dog, and they bringing her out to fight, too.” Skeetah rubs China on her side, smoothing her fur over her ribs as he squats over her. Her tail thumps once, raises dust, lies still.
“Kilo always ready.”
Rico is Manny’s cousin, the boy from Germaine who bought his dog, Kilo, to mate with China. Rico’s big red muscle of a dog with a killing jaw. It was Manny who talked up Kilo to Skeetah. As China grew older, her pulpy puppy muscle hardened like a pearl in the stomach of an oyster, and Skeet’s devotion was the living muscle. She grew lean and strong. Manny would talk shit whenever we were all out under the trees as if he could lessen the wonder of Skeetah’s prized dog. He thought he could dim her, that he could convince us she wasn’t white and beautiful and gorgeous as a magnolia on the trash-strewn, hardscrabble Pit, where everything else is starving, fighting, struggling.