“She need room to breathe.” Skeetah’s hands slide over her fur, and he leans in to listen to her belly. “She gotta relax.”
“Ain’t nothing about her relaxed.” Randall is standing at the side of the open doorway, holding the sheet that Skeetah has nailed up for a door. For the past week, Skeetah has been sleeping in the shed, waiting for the birth. Every night, I waited until he cut the light off, until I knew he was asleep, and I walked out of the back door to the shed, stood where I am standing now, to check on him. Every time, I found him asleep, his chest to her back. He curled around China like a fingernail around flesh.
“I want to see.” Junior is hugging Randall’s legs, leaning in to see but without the courage to stick in more than his nose. China usually ignores the rest of us, and Junior usually ignores her. But he is seven, and he is curious. When the boy from Germaine bought his male pit bull to the Pit to mate with China three months ago, Junior squatted on an oil drum above the makeshift kennel, an old disconnected truck bed dug in the earth with chicken wire stretched over it, and watched. When the dogs got stuck, he circled his face with his arms, but still refused to move when I yelled at him to go in the house. He sucked on his arm and played with the dangling skin of his ear, like he does when he watches tele vision, or before he falls to sleep. I asked him once why he does it, and all he would say is that it sounds like water.
Skeetah ignores Junior because he is focused on China like a man focuses on a woman when he feels that she is his, which China is. Randall doesn’t say anything but stretches his hand across the door to block Junior from entering.
“No, Junior.” I put out my leg to complete the gate barring Junior from the dog, from the yellow string of mucus pooling to a puddle on the floor under China’s rear.
“Let him see,” Daddy says. “He old enough to know about that.” His is a voice in the darkness, orbiting the shed. He has a hammer in one hand, a clutch of nails in another. China hates him. I relax, but Randall doesn’t move and neither does Junior. Daddy spins away from us like a comet into the darkness. There is the sound of hammer hitting metal.
“He makes her tense,” Skeetah says.
“Maybe you need to help her push,” I say. Sometime I think that is what killed Mama. I can see her, chin to chest, straining to push Junior out, and Junior snagging on her insides, grabbing hold of what he caught on to try to stay inside her, but instead he pulled it out with him when he was born.
“She don’t need no help pushing.”
And China doesn’t. Her sides ripple. She snarls, her mouth a black line. Her eyes are red; the mucus runs pink. Everything about China tenses and there are a million marbles under her skin, and then she seems to be turning herself inside out. At her opening, I see a purplish red bulb. China is blooming.
*
If one of Daddy’s drinking buddies had asked what he’s doing to night, he would’ve told them he’s fixing up for the hurricane. It’s summer, and when it’s summer, there’s always a hurricane coming or leaving here. Each pushes its way through the flat Gulf to the twenty-six-mile manmade Mississippi beach, where they knock against the old summer mansions with their slave galleys turned guest houses before running over the bayou, through the pines, to lose wind, drip rain, and die in the north. Most don’t even hit us head-on anymore; most turn right to Florida or take a left for Texas, brush past and glance off us like a shirtsleeve. We ain’t had one come straight for us in years, time enough to forget how many jugs of water we need to fill, how many cans of sardines and potted meat we should stock, how many tubs of water we need. But on the radio that Daddy keeps playing in his parked truck, I heard them talking about it earlier today. How the forecasters said the tenth tropical depression had just dissipated in the Gulf but another one seems to be forming around Puerto Rico.
So today Daddy woke me up by hitting the wall outside me and Junior’s room.
“Wake up! We got work to do.”
Junior rolled over in his bed and curled into the wall. I sat up long enough to make Daddy think I was going to get up, and then I lay back down and drifted off. When I woke up two hours later, Daddy’s radio was running in his truck. Junior’s bed was empty, his blanket on the floor.
“Junior, get the rest of them shine jugs.”
“Daddy, ain’t none under the house.”
Outside the window, Daddy jabbed at the belly of the house with his can of beer. Junior tugged his shorts. Daddy gestured again, and Junior squatted and slithered under the house. The underside of the house didn’t scare him like it had always scared me when I was little. Junior disappeared between the cinder blocks holding up the house for afternoons, and would only come out when Skeetah threatened to send China under there after him. I asked Junior one time what he did under there, and all he would say is that he played. I imagined him digging sleeping holes like a dog would, laying on his back in the sandy red dirt and listening to our feet slide and push across floorboards.
Junior had a good arm, and bottles and cans rolled out from under the house like pool balls. They stopped when they hit the rusted-over cow bath Daddy had salvaged from the junkyard where he scraps metal. He’d brought it home for Junior’s birthday last year and told him to use it as a swimming pool.
“Shoot,” Randall said. He was sitting on a chair under his homemade basketball goal, a rim he’d stolen from the county park and screwed into the trunk of a dead pine tree.
“Ain’t nothing hit us in years. They don’t come this way no more. When I was little, they was always hitting us.” It was Manny. I stood at the edge of the bedroom window, not wanting him to see me. Manny threw a basketball from hand to hand. Seeing him broke the cocoon of my rib cage, and my heart unfurled to fly.
“You act like you ancient—you only two years older than me. Like I don’t remember how they used to be,” Randall said as he caught the rebound and passed it back to Manny.
“If anything hit us this summer, it’s going to blow down a few branches. News don’t know what they talking about.” Manny had black curly hair, black eyes, and white teeth, and his skin was the color of fresh-cut wood at the heart of a pine tree. “Everytime somebody in Bois Sauvage get arrested, they always get the story wrong.”
“That’s journalists. Weatherman’s a scientist,” Randall said.
“He ain’t shit.” From where I was, Manny looked like he was blushing, but I knew his face had broken out, tinged him red, and that the rest of it was the scar on his face.
“Oh, one’s coming all right.” Daddy wiped his hand along the side of his truck.
Manny rolled his eyes and jerked his thumb at Daddy. He shot. Randall caught the ball and held it.