“You tired?” Randall asks.
“No,” I say. My stomach feels full of water, hurts with it, but I will not tell him that. I push aside a branch, let it go, but it still scratches my arm. Medea’s journey took her to the water, which was the highway of the ancient world, where death was as close as the waves, the sun, the wind. Where death was as many as the fish waiting in the water, fanning fins, watching the surface, shadowing the bottom dark. China barks as if she is answering the dog.
The clearing is a wide oval bowl, which must be a dried-up pond that grows wide and deep when it rains; the bottom is matted with dry yellow reeds, and the trees grow in a circle around it. The boys and their dogs talk and smoke in clumps, pass blunts and cigarettes from one to another, ask How old is yours or Where you got that collar or How many she done had? There are around ten dogs here, around fifteen boys. I am the only girl. Marquise’s little brother Agee is here, and he and Junior begin competing to see who can climb the fastest up a gray, low-limbed tree outside the circle of game dogs and game men. The dogs are brown and tan, black and white, striped brindle, red earth. None of them is white as China. She glows in the sun of the clearing, her ears up, her tail cocked. The dogs nap, pace, bark, strain against the leash, and lean out into the clearing where they will fight, trying to get into the sun, to feel it on their black wet noses. They will all match today, one dog against another. The boys have been drawn by gossip of the fight between Kilo and Boss to the clearing like the Argonauts were to Jason at the start of his adventure. They will throw their own dogs into the ring, each hoping for a good fight, a savage heart, a win, to return home from the woods, their own dangerous Aegean Sea, to be able to say, My bitch did it or My nigga got him. Some of the boys are nervous; they put their hands in their pockets, take them out, swing their sweat rags in the air and swat at gnats. Some of the boys are confident: shoulders round and grinning. Big Henry wipes at his face with a sweat rag he’s pulled out of his pocket, and Randall leans on his stick, frowning at the frolicking dogs. A hawk circles in the air above us, turns, vanishes.
Marquise is standing next to a boy who must be his cousin; they both are the color of pecans, both have their ears pierced with gold loops, and both are short, but the cousin is a little fatter. His T-shirt is so big it swallows him.
“What’s up?” Marquise asks. “This my cousin Jerome.”
“Cuz told me about y’all little problem.” Jerome glances at Marquise, and then wipes his head with a rag, already wet, that he’s pulled out of his pocket. “You ain’t got to worry.” He flicks his leash and his dog, Boss, gets up from where he has been laying in the sun, walks to Jerome’s side and sits. He is black all over with a white muzzle.
“You said he was big, cuz, but…” Marquise’s whisper trails off to a laugh. “I didn’t think you was talking this big.”
Boss is huge. He is fat and tall, and his front legs are so bowed the front of him looks like a horseshoe. Where China’s hair is silky, Boss’s hair is coarse, so coarse that I can see the fight scars on him that have healed, black and fat as leeches. He lets his tongue hang out, smiles. His sides whoosh out and in as he pants, and he breathes so hard, he ripples Jerome’s shirt.
“Where the other dog at?”
Marquise rises from petting his own dog, Lala, whose ears he has clipped and put earrings into, loops like his own, to nod across the clearing. Marquise never fights his dog, Lala. She is a soft tan color, and she is almost as clean as China. She lays in pine, cocking an eyebrow at us. Skeetah once told me that Marquise’s dog sleeps in the bed with him, in the house, every night. Skeetah had shrugged and sort of smiled when he told me, but the way one side of his mouth had gone up while the other side of his mouth had gone down made me think that if Daddy weren’t here, China would sleep at the foot of Skeetah’s bed every night, too.
Across the clearing, Kilo is straining at a leash that Rico holds. He is sniffing at the ground, looking as if he is amazed, and then digging his paws into the dirt. It flies up and out between his back legs: he is tunneling through the dry grass and down through the bed of the pond. I wonder if there are frogs down there, dry and cool, hiding in the cracked mud. If they are trying to flatten themselves to hide from the sharp paw. Rico is half in the sun, half out, laughing toward Manny and some other older dark boy who has worn white shoes that look new to a dogfight in the woods. Rico’s grill is bright, but Manny, his arms folded, is more gold than Rico’s smile, and I hate him for it.
“I done fought Boss all the way from Baton Rouge to Pensacola,” says Jerome. “He won more than he lost.” Boss lays down in the pine straw again, snorts into it, so it flies up like feathers in front of his face. “He ready.”
I edge in the shade next to Randall, who is stabbing his stick into the clay earth, again and again. Big Henry plucks his shirt away from his front, airs it out. He grins at me. Skeetah stands in the sun, the only boy in the yellow clearing who braves the light with the dogs. He ignores us, looks past us off into the woods, still as China at his side, who ignores us and looks off as well, standing, never sitting. I wonder if he has trained her to do this, to stand at his side, to not dirty even her haunches with sitting so that they gleam. China is white as the sand that will become a pearl, Skeetah black as an oyster, but they stand as one before these boys who do not know what it means to love a dog the way that Skeetah does.
The boys meet in the middle of the circle, careful to keep their dogs at the edge; they hand their leashes to friends. They huddle to hammer the matches out.
“What the fuck you mean, you want Boss?”
“Yours is too big for mine.”
“He a puppy, but he scrappy.”
“She can take on any of them. She ain’t weak.”
“I say a two-fight limit.”
“I say three.”
“Who gives a fuck what you say?”
“I say two, too.”
“Sugar got at least two in her.”
“Homeboy got three.”
“Ojacc can fight every one of them and whip all they asses.”
A chorus of groans.
“Buddy Lee, too.”
“Truck’ll run all y’all over.”
“Do you see Slim? Do you understand what he’d do to Kilo?”
“Ain’t noboby for Kilo but Boss.”
“Wizard want in on Kilo.”
“I said Kilo ain’t here for nobody but Boss.”
“Y’all heard the man. Kilo ain’t here for nobody except Boss.”
In the middle of the dead circle, the boys snap like the air before a storm. Skeetah and China stand at the edge. The boys’ arguing rises to an angry buzz, and the air that had been still before swoops and tunnels through the clearing, raising dust, making the boys close their eyes. Maybe Daddy is right; maybe Katrina is coming for us. Big Henry covers his nose with his rag. Did Medea bless the heroes before they set out on their journey? Did she stand on the deck of that ship like I stand in this clearing, womanly ripe, and weave spells for rain to cloak their departure, to cloak her betrayal? Had Jason told her he loved her? Manny holds Kilo’s leash and stares at China. Skeetah and China do not move.
“Let’s go,” Marquise says.
Skeetah and China leave the circle, stand to the side of us, but a little away, a little closer, Skeet’s shirt darkening wetly at the neck, down the middle of his back, China still except for her ears, which flick away gnats trying to land.
Skeetah fought China as soon as he figured she was full grown, at a year. There was always a clear winner to those fights with dogs owned by boys in Bois Sauvage, in St. Catherine. She has fought every one of these dogs. Except for two of her beginning fights, where China fought but still bled more than the other dog and had part of her ear sliced, she won by bearing down on the other dog, by grabbing his throat with her teeth, her face a fist. The other dog would yelp, and Skeet would call her off, and that is how everyone would know that China had won.