“Do it!” I dig. I am sweating, hot under my arms. I am burning. “Junior!”
“All right.”
Junior’s smile is gone. His mouth pulls tight at the corners, baring his bottom gums. That is his crying face. His back is narrow and hard as a ruler. He leans over, lets the puppy roll from his hand. It tumbles on its side, stops, and sweeps its head along the floor. Junior yanks his arm away, cradles it to his chest, and refuses to look at me. Instead he gazes at the puppies, whispers furiously through his downturned lips.
“That hurt, Esch. That really hurt.”
“What if Skeet had come in? What if China had woke up?”
My hands feel weak now that they are not gripping Junior. When he was a baby, Randall and I would pass him back and forth on the sofa, feeding him, rubbing his stomach, palming his head. Randall said that he frowned like Mama.
“You made me bleed.” Junior spits on his hand, rubs it back and forth across his forearm where I have left red marks that look like winking eyes. “You didn’t have to do it so hard.”
“You don’t listen,” I say. Junior never cried when he was little.
“Still.” He wipes his spitty hand across his eyes.
“You never know,” I say. China huffs in her sleep again. “You know that Junior, don’t you?” My hand flops in China’s direction. “You know her.”
China sleep-growls again, high and sharp. I touch Junior’s back, feel down the marble chain of his spine. He yanks away, still holding his arm, and looks at me, his eyes like the dark heart of an oyster. I look back to China to make sure she is asleep, make sure that her puppies aren’t straying too far away, make sure that my shirt is still pulled away from my stomach. I am tired again. Junior sits on his legs in the dirt, far enough away from me so that I can’t grab him, but still next to me. I had expected him to run under the house.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
Junior bends over and braces himself on his arms in the dirt, his butt in the air. He nods at the puppies. When he was a baby, this is how he would fall asleep on the sofa, in the bed with Randall. The puppies are swimming blindly, as if through very deep water, away from China, toward him again. I wonder if he has been sneaking into the shed when we are gone with China, whether he has already been playing with them.
“Can we go to the park today?” he asks. Daddy beats the coop twice, then swears. He is hung over. He will be mean. I peel back the top of the sausage can, take one out, and hand it to Junior. China rolls on her back to face the wall, to escape her puppies in sleep the best that she can, and I nod.
“Yeah, we can go.”
When we were younger and Mama had to get us up in the morning for school, she would touch us on our backs first. And when she felt us twitch under her hands, felt us move toward morning, she would softly tell us to wake up, that it was time for school. When she died and Daddy had to wake us up, he wouldn’t touch us. He’d knock on the wall next to our door, hard: shout, Wake up. When Skeetah comes back out to the shed in a black wifebeater and jean shorts, he’s already sweating. He wakes China like Mama used to wake us. The puppies roll away from him. He puts them in a larger box, where they scuffle and scratch unseen.
“She needs to get up,” Skeet says. When we tell him that we are walking to the park, he is resolved. “She needs to work it out.”
Skeetah puts her on a leash and then picks her up, slinging her over one shoulder. Her hind legs tangle in his thighs and make it hard for him to walk. He hasn’t done this since she was a puppy. Then she would smile over his shoulder, licking the salt from his ear and neck. Now she frowns, her eyes half closed, nodding to sleep. A thin line of spit stretches to his back. Skeetah hoists her up again and again, and it is only when we have rounded the house, circled an old tub, the husk of a car I never remember seeing run, and jumped the ditch to the ragged asphalt road does he set her down. Pines sway on both sides with a sudden wind, and China lists with them. She is shaking. Her white hair dusts Skeetah’s shoulders, which look hard. He is frowning. He yanks at her leash.
“Come on.”
Junior bumps me in the side.
“I’ll be right back.” Junior says, and then he is running away toward the house.
China looks desultorily after him. Skeetah yanks her leash, again, and begins walking. She drags herself into motion, pads after him. The chain pulls at her ears, circles her head like a garrote. Skeetah walks leaning forward and doesn’t look back. A hawk circles over our heads, riding a draft. It glides down in a spiral and then flaps off and vanishes in the feathery tops of the trees. Our house is the color of rust, nearly invisible under the oaks and behind the rubbish, lopsided. The cement bricks it sits on are the color of the sand. I follow Skeetah, who is walking so quickly, his figure dwindles in the high, hot day. I expect Junior to come back with a ball, but then I hear the grab and grind of bike tires, and he is peeling down the road, standing up. The dull black bike wobbles from side to side with each pedal. It is too small even for Junior to ride. When he swerves next to me, I realize it has no seat. This is why he is standing. I laugh.
“Where did you get that from?”
“Found it,” Junior huffs. His smile is more like an exhale, and then he is huffing again, wheeling away from me to ride circles around Skeetah. Where China would have usually chased anyone on a bike, she saunters, head down, and ignores Junior. Skeetah ignores her in turn, walking straight ahead, his back curved, his silhouette one tense, worried line. The leash remains taut. I run to catch up with them.
As we walk into the center of Bois Sauvage, away from our Pit, the houses appear gradually, hidden behind trees, closer to one another until there are only ragged lots of woods separating them. We walk past Big Henry’s incongruously narrow shotgun house. Marquise’s small pink house, which has only three windows and sits in a yard so clustered with azalea, seems like one more faded flower. Rich boy Franco’s house is green, and for some reason, someone in his family has painted the bottom two feet of the tree’s trunks in his yard white. Some older boys named Joshua and Christophe have a blue-gray house with a screened-in porch along the side with bougainvillea grown to riot under the oaks in the yard, and then there is Mudda Ma’am’s yellow house faded to tan, choked with wisteria. Manny’s trailer is on the other side of Bois Sauvage, away from this side of the neighborhood: the small Catholic church, the haphazard cemetery Skeetah mowed, the county park with the dirt parking lot, which strives to impose some order, some civility to Bois. It fails. The woods muddle the park’s edges. Mimosa trees arch over it with a basketball player’s long, graceful arms and drop pink flowers like balls. Pines sprout up in the ditches along the edge of the park, aside the netless basketball goals, under the piecemeal shade of the gap-toothed wooden play structure sinking into the earth, beside the stone picnic tables with their corners worn smooth by rain, even in the middle of the baseball field overgrown with grass. Maintenance workers, usually county convicts in green-and-white striped jumpsuits, come out once a year and halfheartedly try to trim back the encroaching wood, mow the grass set to bloom, the pine seedlings. The wild things of Bois Sauvage ignore them; we are left to seed another year.
Junior whoops away from me, the rubber of his underinflated tires sounding like a saw grinding through a stump. He swoops down in the ditch and upward, his bike sailing for a moment in the air before he lands, with a jolt so jarring it almost pinions him to the non-seat. He glances back and crows in pride, and then fishtails into the park. Skeetah still resolutely drags China, whose tail and head hang low in shame. He does not follow Junior into the park toward the basketball goals where people are playing.
“What you doing?”
“I’m making her walk it out.”