“Preparation… key,” Rachel says.
I shut Daddy’s door.
China is breathe-barking. Every time she inhales, she exhales with a bark, flat and strong as a slap. The sound is carrying through the woods. On the back step, I hear her as if she is drawing closer, but I do not see her appearing with Skeetah at her side. There is only the day, hotter than the one that came before it, dense as water approaching boiling. And then her voice catches. There are other dogs, in the woods near the house, on the other side of the Pit, down the winding, gravel-eaten length of the street, and they bark with her. They ring her like a chorus. Their voices crackle across the sky, all places at once. Somewhere out there, I know, Skeetah is in the middle of these dogs, pulling them to him. He is the hand on the leash. He is the palm. He flexes and they come, he looses his grip and they spread to the red dirt, the pines, the creeks, the oaks. They howl. They hack.
China gives a great shout, and all at once, they are silent.
Randall’s game is today. I wipe the bathroom mirror with my palm, and the glass cracks at the edges, the reflective surface flaking away like glitter. I oil my hands, rub them through my hair, which calms into ringlets. I pick two bobby pins that Mama left in a plastic case under the sink, and I slide them into my hair behind my ears, so that it frames my face like a pillow. Junior is singing along with the television, the words indecipherable, his voice higher pitched than a girl’s. I smile, turn my head to the right, to the left. This is what I look like, I think. This is the lie. Skeetah is a smell before I see him: the oily sweat of dog, pine needles growing green, and an unwashed stink like milk set too long out in a hot kitchen. He stops in the doorway. I run Vaseline across my lips, rub them together, try to make them glossy.
“What was that noise?”
“What you talking about?”
“China, barking like crazy.”
Outside, Randall is dribbling. I can see him out of the window, shooting, throwing the ball at the house when it rebounds, catching it, throwing it again. The sun is directly overhead, pouring down into the clearing where he practices. He is warming up. The ball is not full with air, so each time that he touches the ball, it is more like a slap.
“Nothing.”
The neck on Skeetah’s shirt is stretched as a bib. He looks down at it, shakes his head, grabs it with both hands, and pulls. The shirt rips. The newly sprouted hair on his head is prickly as Velcro.
“It didn’t sound like nothing.”
The shirt is black, so what is wet on it is sweat. It could not be blood. I would know. Skeetah drops the tee, and it slaps wetly on the tile. The smell of him moves through the room like smoke from burning wet leaves.
“She forgot.”
“Forgot what?”
“Who I was yesterday.”
“Don’t you mean she forgot the puppy?”
Randall catches the ball each time it springs from the backboard and throws it back up. He is not letting it touch the earth. He is saving it from making that flat, collapsing sound, again and again. His lips turned down at the corners, smiling.
“No. She forgot me.”
Skeetah bends, turns on the tap in the tub, lifts the hook for the shower. The spray from the water is cold, a fine mist.
“How long you going to keep China on the chain?”
“Long as it takes.” Skeetah kicks his shoes across the floor; once, twice. “As long as it takes.” He peels his socks away like banana peels, and the smell of them is rotten. My stomach shudders.
Big Henry is perched on the hood of his car. Marquise sits next to him, leaned over almost double so that he looks like a crab, all back and arms and legs, as he rolls a blunt on the blue metal. China faces Big Henry, tongue lolling pink and straight as an exclamation mark. She smiles and then grimaces, over and over, so that she has two faces. The pink of the Pit on her coat is overlaid by a brown scum, which etches the lines of her muscles in her shoulder, haunch, and back clean and clear as marker. Big Henry lists sideways, tipping lightly as if he is on the verge of running. I put my hands in my short shorts, look down at the tennis shoes that I have scrubbed until they are as close to white as they can get: off white, a dirty cream the color of egg whites cooked with pepper. Big Henry turns away from China, who is grimacing again. I sit close to Big Henry’s windshield on the other side of Marquise, who scoots forward to make room for me.
“You think he ready?”
“Who?” Marquise asks.
“I wasn’t talking to you, fool.” Big Henry laughs before biting it off with glances at China and me.
“Skeetah?” I ask. Big Henry shakes his head across the careful shifting and picking and measuring that Marquise is signaling with the hitch of his back.
“Randall.”
Right now Randall would probably be squeezed into the bathroom with Skeet, either hissing at him to hurry up and get out of the shower, or washing off with a rag and soap over the sink, dripping suds all over the counter, the floor, the toilet, taken to ignoring Skeet, probably thinking about the game. He has been too tall to wash in the sink for years.
“He fast. He’ll be ready soon.”
“I mean the game.” Big Henry smiles a little then, just a dimpling at the corner of his lips.
“Oh.” I nod, my face hot. “He been practicing all day. He ready.” My sweat is making the backs of my thighs slick; I am sliding along the metal like mud gone downhill in a bad rain, coming to a slow, sticky stop on Marquise’s back.
“Well, damn, Esch, I didn’t know you wanted me like that.” Marquise turns and smirks around the blunt he is licking shut. He winks at me, his tongue white at the edges, bits of the cigar paper flaking off and sticking like food. I know that wink, that grin. He smiled like that when he was done when we had sex for the last time about a year ago, when he was wiping himself, turned away from me; he threw that smile like salt over the shoulder. I grip the seam where the windshield joins the hood, and I pull myself away from him so that we are no longer touching. I do not like his smile.
“Leave her alone, Marquise.”
“I’m just fucking with her.”
“Too hot out here for you to be fucking with anybody.”
I slide down the side of the car, stand, look down so I can pull my shorts so they are not bunching in my crotch, showing me. When I finally look up, Big Henry is looking at me with the same dazed half intensity he showed China, as if he is staring but thinking of something else. I shrug, and then when I realize there was no question asked, I shrug again.
“I’ma get Randall.” I break into a walk and stutter to a run. Feel them watching.
When we leave for the game, Daddy is asleep. I leave a full cup of water and a packet of crackers on the bedside table and push his bottles of medicine closer together so they are easier for him to reach. He sleeps with his mouth open, his face slack with medicine, and drools. Where Junior’s or Randall’s sleep faces are babyish, fat and smooth, Daddy’s sleeping face is Skeetah’s: puckered, the skin pulling: the face frozen in fight. From the dresser, Mama beams at me, hands caressing Daddy, smiling.
I am glad to be sitting in the backseat by the window in the car, Junior’s bony rump squirming on my lap, Skeetah in the middle pulling at the blunt, Marquise next to him at the other window, opaque through a cloud of smoke. Big Henry’s head could be any other boy’s head under his baseball cap, and Randall leans on the headrest, his eyes closed, everything still but his eyelids jumping like dragonflies. I do not think that he is dreaming. Junior shifts, and I hold him tight; he is my shield.