Junior was on Randall’s back, his eyes finally uncovered and open. He looked drunk.
“What about Skeet?” I asked.
“He’ll find us,” Randall said. “Daddy?” He raised an arm to Daddy, flicked his head toward the road.
“Yeah.” Daddy cleared his throat.
“We can fix it,” Randall said.
Daddy looked down at the ground, shrugged. He glanced at me and shame flittered across his face like a spider, sideways, fast, and then he looked past the house to the road and started walking slowly, uneven, limping. There was a gash in the back of his leg, bleeding through his pants.
We picked our way around the fallen, ripped trees, to the road. We were barefoot, and the asphalt was warm. We hadn’t had time to find our shoes before the hand of the flood pushed into the living room. The storm had plucked the trees like grass and scattered them. We knew where the road was by the feel of the stones wearing through the blacktop under our feet; the trees I had known, the oaks in the bend, the stand of pines on the long stretch, the magnolia at the four-way, were all broken, all crumbled. The sound of water running in the ditches like rapids escorted us down the road, into the heart of Bois Sauvage.
The first house we saw was Javon’s, the shingles of his roof scraped off, the top bald; the house was dark and looked empty until we saw someone who must have been Javon, light as Manny, standing in front of the pile of wood that must have been the carport, lighting a lighter: a flicker of warmth in the cold air left by the storm. At the next nearest house, when the neighborhood started to cluster more closely together, we saw what others had suffered: every house had faced the hurricane, and every house had lost. Franco and his mother and father stood out in the yard looking at each other and the smashed landscape around them, dazed. Half of their roof was gone. Christophe and Joshua’s porch was missing, and part of their roof. A tree had smashed into Mudda Ma’am and Tilda’s house. And just as the houses clustered, there were people in the street, barefoot, half naked, walking around felled trees, crumpled trampolines, talking with each other, shaking their heads, repeating one word over and over again: alive alive alive alive. Big Henry and Marquise were standing in front of Big Henry’s house, which was missing a piece of its roof, like all the others, and was encircled by six of the trees that had stood in the yard but that now fenced the house in like a green gate.
“It’s a miracle,” Big Henry said. “All the trees fell away from the house.”
“We was just about to walk up there and see about y’all,” Marquise said.
Big Henry nodded, swung the machete he had in his hand, the blade dark and sharp.
“In case we had to cut through to get to y’all,” Marquise explained.
“Where’s Skeet?” Big Henry asked.
“Looking,” Randall said, hoisting Junior farther up on his back.
“For what?” Marquise asked.
“The water took China,” I said.
“Water?” Big Henry asked, his voice high at the end, almost cracking.
“From the creek that feeds the pit.” Randall said. “The house flooded through. We had to swim to the old house, wait out the storm in the attic.”
I wanted to say: We almost drowned. We had to bust out of the attic. We lost the puppies and China.
“We need a place to stay,” I said.
“It’s just me and my mama,” Big Henry said. “Plenty of room. Come on.” He flicked the machete blade, threw it to Marquise, who caught the handle and almost dropped it.
“You all right, Mr. Claude?” Big Henry asked Daddy.
Every line of Daddy’s face, his shoulders, his neck, his collarbone, the ends of his arms, seemed to be caught in a net dragging the ground.
“Yeah,” Daddy said. “I just need to sit for a while. My hand.” He stopped short. Big Henry nodded, placed one of those big careful hands on Daddy’s back, and escorted us through the milling crowd, the crumbled trees, the power lines tangled like abandoned fishing line, to his home. He looked at me over his shoulder, and the glance was so soft, so tentative and tender, I wanted to finish my story. I wanted to say, I’m pregnant. But I didn’t.
Amongst the older women in hair curlers and oversized T-shirts and slippers, the girls in sweatpants and tank tops, the boys riding their bikes, the men gathered in clusters pointing at each other and at the sky, I saw Manny. He was sitting in the back of a white and silver pickup truck parked half in, half out of the road, surrounded by the tops of ripped trees. He was staring across the crowd at us, and from that far away, he was all muscled shoulders and golden skin and black, black eyes. There were wide smears of mud all across his legs, his chest. He raised one forearm in a short, stiff wave. Randall hunched over next to me, eyeing Daddy’s and Big Henry’s backs.
“Is it him?” he whispered.
I nodded, looked down at the ground.
“I knew you had a crush on him, but-” Randall cleared his throat. “I didn’t think he’d do anything about it.”
“I wanted to,” I said.
“I’m going to beat the shit out of him,” Randall said, the words whistling out of him.
A girl separated herself from the crowd, sat down next to Manny on the truck, laid her head on his shoulder. Shaliyah. Manny sat there stiffly beside her, still looking at me, at Randall, waiting for a wave, a nod, anything. I slid my fingers into the crook of Randall’s elbow, and Junior’s leg rubbed the back of my hand. His skin, and Randall’s skin, was warm; I walked so that Randall was my shield, my warm cover, my brother.
“No, Randall,” I said. “You don’t need to. I already did.”
Randall snorted, but he didn’t let Junior go, and he squeezed his forearm to his waist, folding my arm into his, pulling me with him. We walked to Big Henry’s front door together.
Big Henry’s mother, Ms. Bernadine, is half Big Henry’s size, with wide hips and thin shoulders, and now I know where he gets his careful hands. She settled Daddy on the sofa in the dark, hot house, unwrapped and cleaned and rewrapped his hand in the light from the open door and the open windows. Her hands were small and quick as hummingbirds, and just as light. She made potted meat sandwiches, and when one of her brothers brought over a small generator, she hooked the refrigerator up to it from an extension cord along with a small fan, and this she put in the window in the living room, and pointed it at Daddy’s face, which was gray and twisted.
Marquise had run up to the house to find Skeetah and took his dog along: Lala gleamed like melted butter, untouched by the havoc of the hurricane. He said when he got to the house, Skeetah heard his dog barking and came out of the woods. Skeetah was wearing wet, muddy shorts he’d salvaged from the wreckage, but he was still barefoot. When Marquise tried to get him to come down to Big Henry’s house, he’d asked for Marquise’s lighter, said he’d camp out at the house because he was waiting for China to come back. Marquise had argued with him, but Skeetah ignored him, so Marquise left. When Marquise told us the story, he chewed the inside of his cheek, looked ashamed that he hadn’t been able to drag Skeetah down into Bois. “He’s stubborn,” Randall said. “You can’t make him do nothing he don’t want to do.”
That night, when people with working trucks and chains were clearing the streets of trees and burning wet, smoking bonfires, we slept on thin pallets on Big Henry’s living room floor, and his mother whispered to Big Henry in the kitchen: “Ain’t they one more?”
“Yeah,” he said. “He’s looking for his dog.”
“As long as they need,” she said. “At least they alive.”
“Yeah,” Big Henry said, and I knew he was looking at us, Junior under my armpit, sweating and twitching in his sleep, Daddy still as a stone on the sofa, Randall laying facedown, his head buried in his folded arms, almost diagonal in the small living room. One or two sodden bugs whirred outside, and I wondered where Skeetah was, saw him sitting before a fire, his head cocked to the night, which had turned hot after the cold air left by the storm passed. Waiting.