Salvage the Bones: A Novel

His mewl is loud, makes itself heard among the crickets; and he is the loudest Mardi Gras dancing Indian, wearing a white headdress, shouting and dancing through the pitted streets of the sunken city. He spent that month in the shed, banging at one of Daddy’s junk lawn mowers until one day he started it screaming to life, and then he went down to the Catholic church and convinced them to pay him to cut the grass and pull weeds at the graveyard. Where Junior’s or Randall’s sleep faces are babyish, fat and smooth, Daddy’s sleeping face is Skeetah’s: puckered, the skin pulling: the face frozen in fight. Junior was on Randall’s back, his eyes finally uncovered and open.