Big Henry squats next to me. Randall is pointing down the street, pointing something out to Junior, where the library was that he visited with his school once, maybe.
“I heard what you said. When you was talking to your daddy.”
I will have to tell Skeetah as clearly as I can, and he will have to close his eyes and for one second not think of China and listen as I tell him the story of Katrina and what she did to the coast.
“Who the daddy?” Big Henry asks. There is no blazing fire to his eyes, no cold burning ice like Manny’s. Only warmth, like the sun on the best fall days when the few leaves that will turn are starting and the air is clear and cloudless.
“It don’t have a daddy,” I say. I palm a piece of glass, marbled blue and white, blunt at the edges, grab another that is red and a pink brick stone. I slip all three into my pockets. Like Skeetah told me the story of the last thing that Mama said to us, I will tell him this. This was a liquor bottle, I will say. And this, this was a window. This, a building.
“You wrong,” Big Henry says. He looks away when he says it, out to the gray Gulf. There is a car out there in the shallows of the water. The top gleams red. “This baby got a daddy, Esch.” He reaches out his big soft hand, soft as the bottom of his feet probably, and helps me stand. “This baby got plenty daddies.”
I smile with a tightening of my cheek. My eyes feel wet. I swallow salt.
“Don’t forget you always got me,” Big Henry says.
I hold the stones so tight in my fist in my pocket that they hurt. I wish I could tell Big Henry this: I wish you were there when the water came, you with your big hands, your legs like tree trunks sunk in the earth. I lead the way over the ruined ground to Randall and Junior, who watch us approaching.
I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.
Skeetah’s made a clearing in what used to be the yard but is now a tangle of tree branches and wood and car and wire and garbage. Our house looks like it has been painted in mud, slathered dark. It looks tilted wrong by the water. The night wind feels cool only because it is less hot than the day. Ms. Bernadine gave us a big cup of water each for a bath; a shower was wetting the rag in the water, soaping it, stripping in Big Henry’s warm tiled blue bathroom that smelled faintly like rotten eggs, soaping my whole body, and then rinsing off with the water from the cup. It was heaven. She unwrapped and washed Daddy’s hand, leaned in close, said, It’s a little red. Daddy had replied, already slurring, We’ll deal with it. Dinner was sardines and Vienna sausages, canned corn, dry ramen we ate like crackers, grape and red soda; even after I sucked the last of the sugary hot bite of the soda down, licked the last fish oil from the sardines from my fingernails, I was still hungry. We drove up to the house and had to park the car almost on top of the trees that had been dragged out of the street and left at the side of the road near the ditch.
Skeetah must have found an axe, or maybe he used his bare hands to break the wood; he sits in the middle of the downed trees, his fire big, higher than the fire we barbecued on, so big that the flames leap past the top of his head, burnish him black and gleaming like the glass I found earlier. He sits on an overturned bucket in the circle of mud and dirt that he has made, his elbows on his knees, his eyes intent on the fire. He wears a pair of jean shorts and tennis shoes, and next to him is a rubber tire, a chain that is the same, dark cloudy gray of the hurricane clouds on top of that. China’s things. He has found China’s things.
“We brought you some food,” I say. He looks up, unsurprised, like he has been expecting us. The whites of his eyes are very white, and he seems more still than I have ever seen him before, as still as if there is some hard stone inside of him, at his center: a concrete foundation left still.
“Thank you,” he says. “Your shoes.” Skeetah motions to another, smaller pile I had not noticed. A muddy pile of shoes that looks exactly like the kind of pile the puppy China made. “I found them.”
We sift through the pile. Skeetah peels open the top of one of the Vienna sausage cans, unties the bag of saltines, makes a small sandwich, and begins eating. He chews very slowly. Crumbs gather at the corner of his lips, and he licks them away.
“You should come down with us,” Randall says, jamming his foot into his shoe. Junior slides down Randall’s side, a small black shadow. I throw him his shoes. Randall sits in the dirt, and Junior settles in his lap. Randall lets his chin sit on Junior’s bald, sweating egghead.
“We got plenty of room,” Big Henry says. He inhales his cigarello, and the tip lights red. “You could sleep in my room.”
“We’re worried about you.” I say it because they won’t.
Skeetah smiles around the food, shakes his head. He picks up the cream soda we brought him, his favorite, opens it, and takes a sip.
“I’m not going nowhere,” he says. He eats another cracker sandwich. The meat smells rich in the dark; the crackers smell like nothing. All of it smells like it is burning because of the smoky fire, which is unbearably hot. I sit next to Skeetah but scoot backward to feel leaves still green and fat on the fallen trees tickle my back. “She’s somewhere out there, and she’s coming back.”
“You didn’t see St. Catherine,” Randall says. “Look like somebody dropped a bomb. Like war.”
“Bois ain’t St. Catherine.” Skeetah frowns for a moment, a dark line like a slash between his eyes, his lips and nose like a puzzle with the pieces fit together wrong, and then his face is smooth and polished again. “She can swim.”
“You can come back up here during the day,” Big Henry suggests.
“No.”
“If she come back, Skeet, ain’t like she going to leave again,” I say.
“Ain’t no if.” Skeetah rubs his head from his neck to the crown like his skin is a T-shirt he could pull off and over his skull. Like he could pull who he is off and become something else. Like he could shed his human shape, in the dark, be hatched a great gleaming pit, black to China’s white, and run off into what is left of the woods, follow the line of the creek, and find China sniffing at the bole of an oak tree filled with quivering squirrels, or sniffing at the earth, at the rabbits between the waters. “Not if. When.”
When he looks back up at me, he is still again: sand seared to rock.
“She’s going to come back to me,” he says. “Watch.”
We will sit with him here, in the strange, insect-silent dark. We will sit until we are sleepy, and then we will remain until our legs hurt, until Junior falls asleep in Randall’s arms, his weak neck lolling off Randall’s elbow. Randall will watch Junior and Big Henry will watch me and I will watch Skeetah, and Skeetah will watch none of us. He will watch the dark, the ruined houses, the muddy appliances, the tops of the trees that surround us whose leaves are dying for lack of roots. He will feed the fire so it will blaze bright as a lighthouse. He will listen for the beat of her tail, the padding of her feet in mud. He will look into the future and see her emerge into the circle of his fire, beaten dirty by the hurricane so she doesn’t gleam anymore, so she is the color of his teeth, of the white of his eyes, of the bone bounded by his blood, dull but alive, alive, alive, and when he sees her, his face will break and run water, and it will wear away, like water does, the heart of stone left by her leaving.