It’s Daddy on the floor of the bathroom. Daddy with one hand on the back of the bowl, one knee on the floor. Daddy looking like he’s about to dive into the toilet, lose his tongue.
“Daddy?”
“Get Randall,” he breathes, and then his back curves and he sounds like he’s being ripped.
The hallway is still dark. Randall is in his bed, Skeetah isn’t. After the match yesterday, he washed China under the lightbulb outside the back door. He rubbed her down and then sat on the back steps and dabbed antibiotic ointment from a dirty crumpled tube into her where Kilo had torn her and made the flesh show. Her leg and shoulder and her ripped breast looked like meat, and Skeetah took the same worn-out Ace bandage he’d wrapped his side with and cut it in thirds. He wrapped her leg, her neck and shoulder, her stomach, and pinned. She stood, eyes slits, panting easily, letting him patch her up. Every few minutes, she would wag her tail, and he would rub her somewhere it wasn’t red: her feet, her back, her tail. He must have slept in the shed with her. I have to shove Randall twice before he wakes up, his eyes rolling white, his arms up to guard his face.
“What?” he says. “What’s going on?”
“It’s Daddy. He in the bathroom throwing up.”
Randall looks at me like he can’t see me.
“What?”
“Daddy. In the bathroom. He’s sick.”
Randall nods at me, blinks. He’s waking.
“Said he needed you.”
By the time we get to the end of the hallway, Randall is bouncing, shaking the sleep off his arms and legs. Daddy has laid his head on the toilet, his face turned to us, his eyes closed, his arms hanging knuckle down on the peeling tile so that they look like sapling pine trees.
“I’m sick,” Daddy moans. “Can’t stop.”
“Come on, Daddy.”
“No.” Daddy tries to push Randall away from him as Randall bends over, grabbing Daddy under his arms, but Daddy is weak, and his hands fall away like dry branches. “Got to stay by the toilet.”
“I’ma put a garbage can next to your bed.” Randall tugs Daddy up, gets his chest in the air, but Daddy’s legs drag, and Daddy hangs there limp as sheets on a clothesline before they’ve been stretched and pinned. When the grandparents were still living, Mama washed all the sheets for both houses at once, and there was so much bedding that Daddy had to hang extra lines. Mama would walk through and hang them bunched first before spreading them. The sheets were so thin we could almost see through them. They made cloudy rooms, and we played hide-and-seek in them. In the winter, they made our faces wet and achingly cold, but in the summer, it was so hot the sheets didn’t stay wet long, but we smashed our faces into them anyway, trying to find the hidden cool. Mama yelled at us for dirtying them once when we left muddy prints on them; afterward, we let our hands hover over them, shoved our noses into them to see if we could see the other person running down the next billowing hallway. Now, washing and hanging clothes is me and Randall’s job: I don’t even think Skeetah knows how to work the washing machine.
“Grab his legs,” Randall says, so I bend and lift. Daddy is heavier than he looks. His eyes are closed and he is wheezing into his bicep; his breath gargles in his throat. “Come on.”
I have to back down the dark hallway, so we shuffle slowly. After Mama died, Daddy taught Randall and me how to use the washing machine. It was our job to wash the sheets, to hang them up. At first we only washed them when Daddy told us to, and later we washed them when they’d get so dirty we’d wake up often in the middle of the night, itching, scratching a shin, an ankle. This is how we hung the sheets in the beginning, when we were both too short to put them over the line: the wet sheet sagging in the middle, us counting and lifting and flinging the damp cotton at the same time hoping it would catch. Daddy’s ankles feel smooth as oranges. I don’t expect them to be so smooth.
“One, two, three,” Randall says, and we are lifting and rolling Daddy onto the bed like our sheets. For one moment, Randall is half his size, thin as a stretched belt, his knees big as softballs, all bone and skin, and we are children again, and Mama has just died and we are hanging her sheets. My eyes sting. Daddy leaves a wet trail across the pillowcase. He moans and holds his bad hand.
There are more beer cans on the nightstand, half empty. They shake when Randall kneels next to the bed, looking for Daddy’s medicine, which is on the floor.
“Your hand hurt?” Randall asks. Daddy rolls on his side, facing us, and I go to the bathroom and come back with the garbage can and put it under his nose next to the bed. There are candy wrappers and wadded-up toilet paper at the bottom of the can, but it is mostly empty. Randall turns on Daddy’s bedside lamp, reads the bottles to see which is his pain medicine. He is big and dark and every inch of him is pebbled with muscle, and sometimes I wonder if Daddy is amazed at how this tall machine of a boy came out of him and Mama. Sometimes I wonder if he’s amazed at Randall. And then I see Manny, almost as bright as China in the clearing, and wonder what will come from him and me: something gold and broad like him, black and small like me, or something more than either of us. Daddy came to one of Randall’s games, once, and stood by the gym doors the entire time, nodding to himself with his baseball cap in his hand, frowning at the court and half watching the game. He left before halftime.
“Daddy, it say here you wasn’t supposed to drink alcohol with these antibiotics. Or with these pain pills.”
Daddy shakes his head and lays still.
“Beer ain’t nothing,” he croaks into the pillow. “Just like a cold drink.”
“It’s probably why you throwing up.”
“I can’t lay here.” Daddy’s good hand is shaking. “Got to get the house ready.”
“Esch, get some water.” Randall grabs a can, crushes it in one hand with his long fingers, which closes like a spider. “And take these with you.”
I load the beer cans into my shirt. Daddy mumbles. When I come back with the water, Randall is handing Daddy his pills, and Daddy is at least up on an elbow, even if the side of his head is smashed into the headboard. He gulps down all the water and the pills as if taking it down fast will stop it from coming back up later.
“The hurricane,” Daddy says.
“You tell us what to do,” Randall says, and then asks me to get Daddy two pieces of bread for his stomach and put them on the table.
The breeze has become a wind today, its gusts stronger, harder than yesterday in the woods and clearing. With my fingers I find a flashlight in the metal storage box on the back of Daddy’s pickup truck along with a hammer and a drill. The nails are are all along the bottom of the box, like feathers and hay in a chicken coop. The windows first, Daddy had said. You have to cover all the windows. Picking the nails out is slow; I prick my finger on one, suck it, but there isn’t any blood, just the pain. I wonder if China’s ruined nipple will feel like this in her puppy’s mouth when it heals: hard, healed over hurt.
Skeetah walks out of the door of the shed and slides the tin slab he has been using as a door back in place. He turns on the water at the faucet, bends and drinks, lets it run over his head. When he comes over to me, the water is streaming in beads down his neck, down and over his collarbone like Kilo’s red shawl.
“What y’all in Daddy’s truck for?”
“He sick,” I say.
Randall is leaning half in and half out of the truck, tuning the radio to the black radio station. His legs are so long that they rest flat-footed on the hard packed dirt below the passenger door. He yells into the windshield so Skeetah can hear him. “He wants us to get the house ready for the hurricane.”