China is licking the puppies. I’ve never seen her so gentle. I don’t know what I thought she would do once she had them: sit on them and smother them maybe. Bite them. Turn their skulls to bits of bone and blood. But she doesn’t do any of that. Instead she stands over them, her on one side and Skeetah on the other like a pair of proud parents, and she licks.
“She ain’t done yet,” Daddy says from the bed of his truck. “The afterbirth.” He disappears again off into the darkness with the sound of the bottles I cleaned rolling after him through the dirt.
It is as if China has heard Daddy. She backs into a corner, wedges herself between a stack of cinder blocks and what I think is most of a car motor. She makes no noise, just bares her teeth.
Grimaces. Skeetah makes no move toward her. She does not want to share this; he will not make her. Her muzzle glistens pink and yellow with what she has licked from her puppies. There is a wet sound behind her, and she turns quickly, still leaking a thin line of mucus, to eat what has fallen. I squat and peer through Skeet’s legs. It looks dark purple, almost black, in the corner, and with a shake of her head, the glistening mess is gone. It had looked like the inside of the last pig that Daddy had, that he slaughtered and emptied into a tub before making us clean the intestines for chitterlings: it stank so bad Randall threw up.
“I heard they always eat the afterbirth,” Randall says. China walks past Skeetah, licks his pinkie. It is a kiss, a peck. She stands over the dirty towel that holds her puppies.
“Look,” I say.
There is something moving where she dropped, where she ate. Skeetah crawls over on his hands and knees, and picks it up.
“A runt,” he says. He carries it into the light.
It is brindle. Stripes of black and brown ride its ribs like a zebra’s. It is half the size of its brothers and sisters. Skeetah closes his fist, and it vanishes. “It’s alive,” he says. There is delight on his face. He is happy to have another puppy; if it lives, he can get maybe $200 for it, even if it is a runt. He opens his hand, and the puppy appears like the heart of a bloom. It is as still as a flower’s stigma. Skeetah’s mouth falls straight, his eyebrows flatten. He lays it down. “Probably going to die anyway.”
China does not lay down like a new mother. She does not suckle. She licks the big red puppy and then forgets him. She is looking past Skeetah to us. She bristles at us standing at the door. Skeetah grabs her neck collar, tries to calm her, but she is rigid. Junior pulls his way up Randall’s back. I think about hugging Skeetah before I go, but China is glowering, so I just smile at him. I don’t know if he sees me in the dark. He has done a good job. Only one puppy is dead, even though it is China’s first time birthing. China scratches at the earth floor of the shed as if she would dig a hole and bury the puppies from sight. In the ruins of the refuse-laden yard, Daddy is hitting something metal. We leave. Skeetah refastens the curtain behind us, pulling it tight against the still clear night. The shed falls dark.
I tell Junior to take a bath once we enter the house, but he ignores me, and it is not until Randall turns on the water and carries him to the bathtub that he washes off. Randall stands in the doorway watching Junior because he is convinced that when Junior closes the door to wash, he only sits on the edge of the bathtub and kicks his feet in the water. Junior hates bathing. I am the last to take a shower, and the water, even though I have only the cold spigot on, is lukewarm. August is always the month of the deepest heat, the heat that reaches so far in the earth it boils the water in the wells. When I go to bed, Junior is already asleep. The box fan in the window hums. I lie on my back and feel dizzy, light-headed, nauseous. I only ate once today. I see Manny above me, his face licking mine, the heat of his sweat, our waists meeting. How he sees me with his body. How he loves me like Jason. Junior snorts a baby snore, and I drift off with Manny’s breathing in my brain.