“Can you tell me where I’m at?” he says. His voice is loud, as if he is shouting at an old person who is hard of hearing. “I’m on the phone with 911, and they need to know where I’m at.”
“Tell them you in between Bois Sauvage and St. Catherine’s, on the bayou. Tell them the closest road is Pelage, and you right before the Dedeaux Bridge.”
The man nods, opens his mouth to speak.
“I’m…” He closes it. “Can you? I’m…” He reaches into the passenger-side window, holds the phone in a red grip in front of Skeetah’s face. Skeetah doesn’t shrink away, doesn’t move. Instead, he stares through the man’s hand. Big Henry, in his way, takes the phone with just two of his fingers. It is polka-dotted with blood.
“Yeah, it’s been an accident. Two people, and they car flipped over in a tree.” Big Henry repeats the location. “This the man’s phone, but the woman, she just laying there.” He pauses. “Okay. All right. I will.” He looks down in his lap, mumbles, “Thank you.” On the ground, the woman still looks as if she is asleep: head on her bicep, hands open as if she has just let something go, laying on her side.
“What’d they say?” I ask.
“They want us to stay here with them until they come. They going to be a few minutes.”
“I need to get home,” Skeetah says.
Big Henry stares at Skeetah as he pulls to the side of the road to park in the overgrown grass. I am almost afraid he will hit the man, who stands wilted in the ditch again, his toes no longer touching the woman. The man stares off as if he cannot see Big Henry’s car sliding past him, inches away.
“The puppies. She don’t know how to take care of them yet.”
Big Henry turns off the car. I hold myself. The pregnancy test crinkles. Big Henry removes the keys, looks at the man’s phone that he has dropped in his lap. He opens the door, pulls himself out of the seat, closes the door, and begins walking toward the man.
“She’s hungry. And nursing,” Skeetah says.
In every one of the Greeks’ mythology tales, there is this: a man chasing a woman, or a woman chasing a man. There is never a meeting in the middle. There is only a body in a ditch, and one person walking toward or away from it. Big Henry is kneeling next to the woman. The man has sunk to a squat so that only his head is visible, which he is holding in his hands. I think I hear him moaning. Big Henry hovers over the woman like a grounded buzzard at the side of the road, awkward and cross-footed. I wonder what the woman with the hair the color of a golden condom wrapper is to the man.
“I don’t trust her.” Skeetah waits to say this until Big Henry is too far away to hear, so low I think he’s forgotten I’m sitting in the backseat.
“You think they family or friends?” I shift to ease the scratch of the test, but I don’t move too much because I don’t want it to fall out of the band of my shorts. Skeetah doesn’t answer. I push the front seat.
“Huh?”
“Family or friends?” I look back toward them to see that the man is wandering toward us. Big Henry hollers at him, but it sounds like he is mumbling.
“Lovers,” he says.
“What you mean?”
“You know what I mean,” Skeetah says.
I’d always assumed he missed more than half of what went on at the Pit; seemed like all I ever saw around him, once he brought home a pit he told me he stole out of somebody’s yard when he was twelve, were dogs. Striped dogs, bald, whitish-pink dogs, fat dogs, dogs so skinny their bones looked like a school of fish darting around under their skin. His voice was a bark, his step the wagging thump of a meaty tail. We lost each other, a little. And now I wonder what Skeetah’s seen, what he’s been paying attention to when his dogs are sleeping, when he’s between dogs, because every dog before China died before they got a year old. Each time, Skeetah waited a week, then got another one. Before China, he never bothered to buy dog food, and he fed them table scraps mixed with Daddy’s chicken feed. What does he know about lovers? He’s the odd one, the one that always smells like sweaty fur when all the boys are together, the one the girls probably think stinks. But even I know that there’s one, always one, who likes the boy like Skeetah. There’s always one for everybody. But I don’t think he believes that. A hand slaps the door wetly, and the man is there, his fingers trailing red like fishing line. He is squinting at Skeetah, and Skeetah is leaning away from the door.
“Hey, man.” I hear the crank; Skeetah is rolling up the window.
“I think I’ve seen you before.”
Skeetah stops mid-roll.
“Don’t you cut grass?”
“Can you please get away from the car?” I squeak.
“At the graveyard?”
Skeetah rolls up the window so that it seals. Instantly it is five degrees hotter.
“This asshole,” Skeetah mutters. “Why doesn’t he go check on his girlfriend?” He wants to open the door, I know. “How he just going to leave her there like he don’t see her, walk over her like a pile of dirty clothes on the floor?” He wants to hit the man, the bleeding man, with the door. He wants to cuss the man out.
“He’s already bleeding.”
“He don’t know me. He don’t even live in Bois Sauvage.”
“Maybe he live in one of them big houses back out on the bayou. Maybe he go to one of them churches upcountry and saw you on his way.”
Skeetah rolls on his shoulder so the knob digs into his back; the glass pillows his head. “Big Henry need to come get him.” He says it, and Big Henry is shuffling across the grass toward us; he moves gracefully when he runs. All the awkwardness that hobbles him when he is standing or sitting or walking, afraid to crush things, is gone.
“Sir, the ambulance is on the way.” Big Henry grabs the man by the elbow with the fingers of one hand. “Come with me.”
The man rubs his head, smears blood across it like a bandana. His eyes twitch from side to side like he’s reading a book we can’t see.
“Sir.”
“He don’t deserve it,” Skeetah grunts, and slouches further down. “China’s waiting on me.”
The man walks leaning forward, his head swinging from left to right. He peers from the road to the woods, tangled with switchgrass and swamp myrtle. He doesn’t swing his hands when he walks. He stops near the woman and stands, but he won’t look at her. Instead, he pulls out his phone, dials, and talks. Big Henry stands on the other side of the woman. He waits. When the ambulance arrives twenty minutes later, the man is still talking. The woman is still sleeping. Skeetah’s eyes are closed; every few minutes, his nostrils flare.
Skeetah tosses the bag of dog food over his shoulder like Randall tosses Junior and trots to the shed before Big Henry puts the car in park. Big Henry rolls his shoulders, puts his arm on the back of the seat Skeetah has run from.
“Thank you for the ride,” I say.
Big Henry turns, bends his arm, looks at me when he says it. I almost can’t hear it over China’s excited barking coming from the shed. She throws them like knives. Rip, rip, rip, rip.
“You welcome.”
My mouth jumps, and I know it’s not a smile, but I slide out of the car and away from Big Henry anyway. He’s still looking. I got my hands in the pockets of my shorts, and I pinch the test so it won’t slide out when I walk.
“You should wash your hands!” I yell over my shoulder on the way to the house. He could have blood on them, that man’s blood, breeding things on his hands. The inside of the man’s body come out to make Big Henry sick. When I push the door, Big Henry’s already at the outside spigot, scrubbing like he wants to peel his skin off.
In the bathroom, the old pink tile that Mama helped Daddy lay feels wet, but I can’t see any water on it. The tub is dry. I pull out the test, run the water while I tear the plastic. I’ve seen movies, know you pee on the stick, which I do. I lay it on the edge of the bathtub, and I climb in, careful not to kick it over on the floor. The tub is some kind of metal, and it is warm. The plastic mat on the bottom of the tub is soft. I watch the stick like Big Henry watched the man. My feet are black against the white, and they leave dirty streaks when I rub them against the tub; it’s like I’m rubbing the color off. I sit on my hands; I avoid looking at my stomach, flat in the tub, the way the man refused to look at the woman lying at his feet, sleeping in the long grass.