“You the only one I been with!” I rush him again.
“You better go to Big Henry with that bullshit!” Manny twists and shoves me away from him again, but I take the neck of his T-shirt with me when I go.
“I know!” I say. “I know it’s yours!”
“No it ain’t.”
“I’ma tell Randall.”
“You think they don’t know you a slut?” He spits this and it is red; I have drawn blood.
Manny shakes his head and snorts, skipping backward away from me, and then he is running down the narrowing road, being swallowed by the rustling brush, and I am shaking like the leaves, like the green around me, bent in the first fingering rush of the coming winds.
“You are!” I yell.
Tomorrow, I think, everything will be washed clean. What I carry in my stomach is relentless; like each unbearable day, it will dawn. I watch Manny getting smaller and smaller, and my ribs break like dry summer wood, and burn and burn and burn.
“The baby will tell,” I scream. “It’ll tell!” But the wind grabs my voice up and snatches it out and over the pines, and drops it there to die.
Randall finds me sitting in the ditch. My legs are over the side, and the blackberry vines are scratching them and there are ants crawling on my toes, but I don’t care. Tears run down my face like water and I cover my face with my shirt but it is too hot and I can’t make it go away. I can never make it stop never nothing. When Jason betrayed Medea to exile so he could marry another woman, she killed his bride, the bride’s father, and last her own children, and then flew away into the wind on dragons. She shrieked; Jason heard.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” I tell him this through the cotton.
“We going to the white people’s house.”
“Who?”
“You and me.”
“For what?”
“We need supplies.” Randall says, and the day quiets for a moment, and I can hear the breath going in and out of him. “Did he say something to you?”
“No.” I wipe my face, let the shirt slide away and down. My eyes feel swollen and warm as ripe grapes. “He ain’t say nothing.”
“I need your help, Esch.” I have never seen one part of Randall soften when he’s awake, not the long line of his arms, his legs like steel posts, his face, always changing and making and saving and shooting things. But now, just for a breath, his face goes soft, and he looks like the baby pictures Mama took of him, pictures of a Randall I’d never seen before. “Please, Esch.”
I bend over and scrub my face dry with my shirt, but the tears still come.
“I can’t,” I sob.
“Please,” Randall whispers.
“Why?” I breathe.
“I need you.”
I scrub, wipe like I could wipe the love of Manny, the hate of Manny, Manny, away. And then I get up because it is the only thing I can do. I step out of the ditch and brush the ants off because it is the only thing I can do. I follow Randall around the house because it is the only thing I can do; if this is strength, if this is weakness, this is what I do. I hiccup, but tears still run down my face. After Mama died, Daddy said, What are you crying for? Stop crying. Crying ain’t going to change anything. We never stopped crying. We just did it quieter. We hid it. I learned how to cry so that almost no tears leaked out of my eyes, so that I swallowed the hot salty water of them and felt them running down my throat. This was the only thing that we could do. I swallow and squint through the tears, and I run.
The start of my run through the woods with Randall is easier; where me and Skeet sprinted, hand in hand, Randall and I jog. I don’t breathe hard at the beginning, and I force myself to ask questions, to speak through the other pain.
“Where’s Junior?”
“Running around somewhere in here.”
“Skeet?”
“Him, too.”
There are no chattering squirrels, no haunted rabbits, no wading turtles in the woods. I don’t know where they have gone, but there are none here. When I look up into the sky, the gray of it shaking as I run, I see birds in great flocks that would darken the sun if we could see it through the thickening clouds. They are all flying away, all flying north. The flocks break and dip and soar, and they are Randall’s hand on a basketball, Skeet’s on a leash, my legs in a chase. I watch them until they vanish past the trees, and then there is only us, the woods, the leaves rattling underfoot. Vines catch my arms, my head; we tear through until we break out into the clearing before the fence, the field, the barn, the house, and I drop to my knees, and Randall leans back as if he would fall, both of us breathing hard, looking wet and newly born.
There are no cows, no egrets. Randall leaps over the fence without using his hands, jumps high as a deer, but I crawl through on my stomach, my belly feeling like a bowl sloshing with water. I swallow most of it now, and my face is wet with mostly sweat. We pick our way across the field, kicking at cow droppings and mushrooms. The grass seems denser, thicker. There is no blue truck, no white man and woman, no chasing dog. The windows of the house and the barn have been boarded over with thick pieces of plywood, but when I put my ear to the board over the window that Skeetah broke while Randall holds me up, one arm around the soft push of my abdomen and his other arm like a set under my butt, I can hear the cows, big and stupid, shuffling in the barn, letting out little lowing complaints, knocking the walls as if they are looking for escape. I wipe my eyes.
“The house,” Randall says.
Randall lets me down slow. The wood is rough under my hands. When I look at the boards in front of me, I see one dark splash like paint, one maroon tear from where Skeetah fell out of the window; it’s his blood. I wonder if the old limping man smiled when he saw it, felt some kind of joy at the fact that the boy was hurt, or if the limping white man just shook his head as he boarded it over, the anger making the hammer fly bad, bend the nails crooked so that they curve like commas.
The boards of the house are more even, more secure. They are not a patch-up of boards of different sizes like our house; there is no glass left peeking through cracks, only plywood closed smooth and tight as eyelids.
“Here.” Randall tries to slide his finger between the board and the wall, but only his fingernail fits. “You try,” he says, but my fingers will not go in either. I don’t even think Junior’s could. “We should’ve brought a crowbar.”
I shake my head.
“Fuck!” Randall yells. He punches the plywood and it dints, dimples in the middle, and there is the sound of breaking wood and breaking glass. When he pulls his fist back, he’s split the skin, smashed it, and he leaves blood on the board. He holds his hand. His face looks like how I imagine the glass behind the board looks; hard and lined, each piece sliding away from the other where they split, black in the cracks. His eyes look wet. “Shit.” The blood pools in the valleys between his knuckles, rolls to waterfall between his fingers. He looks at me. “I couldn’t do it even if I did have a crowbar.”
“You ain’t Skeet,” I say. The taste of my tears is like raw oysters.
“We have to, Esch.”
“It’s too thick.”
“We have to try.”
Randall knees his chest like he is putting on pants and then he kicks his heel hard into the center of the plywood where he dented it. The glass behind it shatters. He kicks again and the wood splits; it sounds like a shot. Randall stops, and we both look around, scared, but there is no old man swinging a gun like an axe, no pink-dressed woman, just the cows lowing in the barn in the dark, the wind rustling past the trees, the air so wet and hot it could be rain.
“One more time,” Randall says, and then he kicks again, all of his muscle straining against the hot day, the sealed gingerbread house, and the board cracks in two but will not fall because of the nails, and Randall is crouching on the ground, clutching his bad knee.