Manny would sit on a milk crate or a tree stump and say, My cousin Rico got a fire dog. Probably about the same age as yours, but bigger. More muscle. Got a killing jaw. Skeetah would ignore Manny, or glance at him while he was dragging China through the sand, around the junk by her teeth locked in a bike tire, and say, Really. Yeah, Manny would say, and his white teeth would flash in his glass-burned, beautiful face. Yeah. China would squeal a dog’s squeal and bear down with her haunches, make Skeetah stumble toward her. We’ll see, Skeetah’d say.
Rico called China small-time until he came to the Pit with Manny one day and finally saw her: knee-high, stout as any boy dog but still sleek with muscle, and her long neck and head like a snake’s. Skeetah had her climb a leaning tree and then shred a half of a car tire, pulling it so hard the wire in the rubber made Skeet’s hands bleed. When they mated, China had let Kilo lick her from behind, let him mount. Smiled like she liked it. The tendons had stood out in Skeetah’s neck, and he squinted so that it looked like his eyes were closed. Kilo had placed his big mouth on her neck like he was kissing her and slobbered on her. She’d snapped at him, figured it for a hold. Hated the submission of it. She nicked him, snapped at him until she threw him off. She’d drawn blood: he hadn’t.
“What’s the dog name? From Baton Rouge?”
“Boss,” Skeetah laughed. China snorted into the dirt.
“Well, Kilo been fought from Florida to Louisiana. Broke a dog leg once. They better be ready.”
“You seen it?”
“What?”
“The break?”
“No, Rico told me.” Manny waves away a gnat, inhales strong on the cigarillo, and blows smoke in a fog in front of his face. “Y’all need to start a fire out here. Why y’all always got so many bugs up here on the Pit? Gnats so bold they out in the middle of the day. Fuck the evening time.” He drops the cigarillo; it smokes a pencil thread and then smothers in the sand.
“We savages up here on the Pit. Even the gnats. Mosquitoes so big they look like bats.” Skeetah nods at me and Junior. “You better watch out. Junior look puny but he’ll sucker-punch you in the neck and leave you choking. And Esch-” Skeetah stands when he says it, and China circles him, sniffing in the dirt, “You see how boss China is. You think the other girl on the Pit going to be weak?”
“I ain’t saying either of them weak.” Manny still hasn’t looked at me. “But you know China ain’t as boss as she used to be.”
“What?” Skeetah’s tendons are showing.
“Any dog give birth like that is less strong after. Even if you don’t think it. Take a lot out of an animal to nurse and nurture like that. Price of being female.” Finally Manny glances at me. It slides over me like I’m glass.
Skeetah laughs. It sounds as if it’s hacking its way out of him.
“You serious? That’s when they come into they strength. They got something to protect.” He glances at me, too, but I feel it even after he looks away. “That’s power.”
China is licking Skeetah’s hand like she licks the puppies. Skeetah pushes her head away but she keeps at it, and he looks away from Manny. The tendons in his neck smooth. The menace leaves him; if he were a dog, his hair would flatten.
“To give life”-Skeetah bends down to China, feels her from neck to jaw, caresses her face like he would kiss her; she flashes her tongue-“is to know what’s worth fighting for. And what’s love.” Skeetah rubs down her sides, feels her ribs.
“You wormed her yet?” I ask. Does Manny think that of me, that I am weak? That there is a price to this body that swallows him, that pulls at him and takes him until he has nothing left? Is Manny glad because he will never have to pay it?
“Naw. She wouldn’t take the Ivomec earlier. Spilled it.”
“You know how to mix it?” Manny slid his lighter into his jean shorts pocket. His muscle shirt was white as his teeth. Shaliyah must have washed. I wonder if he ever told her that about weakness. If he ever called her female, bit it off at the end like underripe sugarcane when he said it?
Skeetah looks up at Manny, his hands dropping, his jaw loose.
“What you mean, mix it?”
“Fuck, you going to kill the dog.” Manny smiles like he wants to laugh. I swallow and realize that I want to push him, to place my hands flat on the muscles of his chest and shove him for looking that way at Skeet, for insulting him. For saying things he doesn’t know he is saying about me. I want him to fall over backward, straining his bad arm, and then I want to bear him down in the dirt. Make him touch all of me, for once. “You supposed to mix the Ivomec with cooking oil and then give it to the dog. And don’t try doing it with water if you ain’t got no cooking oil. Then it won’t mix good.”
“She didn’t take none of it this morning.” Skeetah is holding China’s head still, prying her eyes wide, peering into them.
“You sure?” Manny is still smiling.
“I’m sure.”
“And she only need a little bit. You got a medicine syringe?”
“Yeah, I…” Skeetah pauses. “I got one yesterday.” Looks at me. I figure Randall done told Manny what happened with the farmer and the wormer and the dog, but I know that Skeetah doesn’t want everybody to know either. Less people that know, the less people that talk if the farmer ever wanders through the wood our way, asking questions. We live in the black heart of Bois Sauvage, and he lives out away in the pale arteries, so I don’t think he will ever come here, swinging his cane like an axe, his dog foaming, probably a rifle in the back window of his gleaming, tinted pickup truck. But I know Skeet would say, But still.
“You need half a cc for every twenty pounds. What, China about sixty-five pounds? Give her one and a half.” Manny pulls his arm across his chest, shrugging his shoulder as he does it. Stretching out the wound. This is what he does when he is bored. He looks away from Skeetah and China, beyond Junior, who is peering into the dark shed where the puppies are dozing on their new tile floor, to the woods. Never at me. “Any more than that and she could go blind. And any more than that, she could die.”
Skeetah pulls China to him by her haunches and pries open her jaw, sniffing at her tongue. He has turned from lover to father. She, his doting daughter. I draw a line through the sand with my toe, pull my hands from the pockets of my shorts where they had crept to cup my stomach, trying to expose me so that Manny will look at me like he looks at China. Junior begins whistling into the darkness of the shed, like he would call the puppies to him, lead them into the light, to a new brother, and burrow with them under the house like his lost dogs.
“Get away from the door, Junior,” Skeetah says. China licks his breath, tasting his words. “Esch, we got oil, right?”
Daddy keeps a two-gallon jug of vegetable oil in the cabinet for frying oysters or fish when he can catch them or his friends give them to him, but I don’t think China will like the taste of it. I stick a finger into the oil and rub it across my teeth. Too metallic, too bland. But the bacon grease Daddy keeps on the counter in an old coffee can, the metal waxy with residue: that tastes like drippings. That tastes like the next bite is going to be salty crunchy bacon, tender in the middle, burnt at the edges, stiff as a twig. This she will like.
Skeetah has found a big cardboard box, cut it in half, and lined it with material, and I can’t tell whether the material is old clothes or old sheets or old towels, because under the dogs they are just dark gray rags. The bottom of the box reads Westinghouse.