When Manny appears, there is no sun to reach out its hand, to stroke him like a dog, to make him blaze and shine. He does not burn, but still there is something about him that glows, like a fire that is dying and the heat lives in the ashes, plain. I see him first because I am sitting on the steps. Junior’s and Randall’s backs are to him as they place the eggs in the pot. When Manny sees me looking at him, he catches on the secret mid-walk, like it’s a untied shoestring, and his eyes go wide, whiter in his face. But he keeps walking, becoming larger and more real in the gloom and wind and shaking green of the day until his footsteps are louder than the insects, which quiet one by one as if he is the coming storm. Where do they go? I think, and he is looking at Randall’s back, not my eyes, and I hate him, and I wonder if I will ever stop loving him.
“Cuz,” he says.
Randall almost drops the twenty-fourth egg he holds.
“Shit,” Randall says and turns.
“Sorry.” Manny’s shoulders. I loved his shoulders and his neck most of all. I want to open my mouth on his neck just once. He is the lightest thing in the clearing. I want to have him blazing over me again, just once. But he looks at Randall, and he half grins. It is only then that I can see the scar on his face, the skin pulling wrong. He has not come here for me. “We talk?”
Randall bends, places the last egg in the pot, puts the pot in my arms, and talks to Manny but looks at me. “Yeah,” he says. “Can you start these?” They walk outside together, stop at the foot of the back steps.
I stand with the pot. The eggs wobble against one another, sound like rocks at the bottom of a dry creek, rolling from a foot.
“Junior, go play,” Randall calls through the door. Junior shoots away, freed from his chores. He is all bald head and blurred arms and legs. I run water into the pot in the sink until it covers the eggs.
“Skeetah ain’t here?”
“Think he somewhere off in the woods running China.”
“She’s a beast.”
“Yeah.”
I sprinkle salt into the water, but there is more rice than salt in the shaker.
“Coach called you about the game?”
“Said they was paying for Bodean to go to camp.”
“I didn’t know.”
I light the stove with a match and set it to boil. I stand a few feet away from the door in the dark of the kitchen so they can’t see me, and I squint through the screen.
“I’m sorry,” Manny says.
“Well.” Randall sighs.
“I don’t know what happened.”
“My best friend got into a fight with my brother is what happened.”
“I had other shit on my mind. Wasn’t nothing against Skeet.”
“He don’t think that. He think you made him poison his dog.”
“I wouldn’t do no bullshit like that. You know me.”
Randall has nothing in his hands. Manny fans his face like he’s waving away gnats.
“He also think you dogging my sister.”
“Randall, come on, man.”
“What you want?”
“We like family.”
Manny shoves his hands into his pockets and bends in like he’s curling for a blow, as if he’s ashamed to say what he’s said.
“Rico your family. I ain’t blood.”
“Like blood.”
“That’s the problem.” Randall shakes his head like a horse trying to fling off reins. “I’m the only one.”
“That ain’t true.”
“Yeah it is.”
“I done watched Junior grow up with all of y’all. That’s real.”
“What about Esch and Skeet?”
“Them, too.”
“No,” Randall says. “It’s not the same.” Bubbles of air, tiny as those that rise up out of the mouths of fish in water, rise from the bottom of the pot, gather in the middle. Vapor mists from the center. “I got shit to do. I’ll see you later.”
Randall walks into the kitchen and I look up from the pot like I haven’t been standing on my tiptoes in the faint blue light of the burner’s fire, like I haven’t been listening.
“It’s going to take forever to boil. Leave it,” Randall says. He doesn’t look at me when he says it, tall and straight. He stalks past, closes the door to his room. I hear it shut, and I am out the screen door, running, still on my tiptoes, feet barely touching the ground. There he is, there, receding under the trees, a setting sun. I jump the ditch to the road.
“Wait!” I call. My voice is higher than I have ever heard it.
Manny stops, turning, and his face is a magnolia flower tossing in the wind, his eyes the bright yellow heart. Now I see it, now I don’t.
“What?” he says when I catch up to him. “Randall wanted something?”
Manny’s eyes slide past me to the ditch, to the road, up to the sky the color of a scoured pan.
“No,” I say. “Me.”
“I gotta go.” He turns, shows me the back of his head, his hair, his shoulders. Now I see it, now I don’t.
“I’m pregnant.”
He stops in profile. His nose is like a knife.
“And?”
His hair grows so fast it’s already starting to curl. Sweat beads at his hairline.
“It’s yours.”
“What?”
“Yours.”
Manny shakes his head. The knife cuts. The sweat rolls down his scar, is flung out onto the rotten asphalt.
“I ain’t got nothing here,” he says. Manny blinks at me when he says it. Looks at me head-on, for the second time ever. “Nothing.”
Nothing. For some reason I see Skeetah when I blink, Skeetah kneeling next to China, always kneeling, always stroking and loving and knowing her. Skeetah’s face when he stood across from Rico, when he told China, Make them know.
I am on him like China.
I fought Skeetah and Randall for play when we were younger. Once I punched Skeet in the stomach when we were wrestling and my arms felt like noodles, like he had no muscle to hit and I had no muscle to hit him with. I kicked Randall in the chest when he was picking with me and knocked the wind out of him. Once I fought a girl in the middle school locker room for laughing at my budding breasts; she sneered that I needed to tell my mama that I needed a training bra. My mama was four years dead then. That girl plucked my shirt where a bra strap would be and pushed me, and I turned back on her and swung blind, trying to smash her face in, kicking at her legs, elbowing her, beating with my whole body. She was twice my size, but I surprised her before she was able to push me off. I fell over the bench and the lockers cut a gash in my arm, but I left that girl with a knot rising purple on her head and a lip pink and tender as a pickled pig’s lips in a jar. She always says hello to me when she sees me in the hallway, three years after the fact. I am fast.
I am slapping him, over and over, my hands a flurry, a black blur. His face is hot and stinging as boiling water.
“Hey! Hey!” Manny yells. He blocks what he can with his elbows and forearms, but still I snake through. I slap so hard my hands hurt.
“I love you!”
“Esch!” The skin on his throat is red, his scar white.
“I loved you!”
I hit his Adam’s apple with the V where my thumb and pointer finger cross. He chokes.
“I loved you!” This is Medea wielding the knife. This is Medea cutting. I rake my fingernails across his face, leave pink scratches that turn red, fill with blood.
“Stupid bitch! What is wrong with you?”
“You!”
Manny grabs me under my armpits, picks me up off the ground, and throws. I fly backward. My toes land first, skimming the road, then my heels thud, but I am moving too fast to stop and I hit the ground with my butt. I try to catch myself with my stinging hands and then they sting more. I’ve scraped the skin off.
“How you come to me saying something’s mines when you fuck everybody who come to the Pit?”