Delicious Foods (13 page)

Darlene’s parents wouldn’t show up for the services—they probably wouldn’t show up for their own funerals. Her father, P. T. Randolph, had allowed various illnesses to go untreated—hypertension, cataracts, and rheumatoid arthritis, to name three. He claimed to do so in the name of religion, but everybody said that being saved meant less to him than saving money. He’d splurged on a wheelchair a few years back, but now he shared it with her mother, Desirée, who had thromboses in both legs and diabetes running rampant. According to Darlene’s brother, Gunther, whom they called GT, they barely left the sofa, let alone Lafayette. They didn’t have a car or a home phone anymore, and if they wouldn’t get a phone, they’d never pay for a bus. Besides which, he said, Mama panics if she even thinks about getting on a bus.

Surprisingly, LaVerne and Puma, who had cut Nat off for years, drove up from New Orleans for the service, but Puma kept grilling anybody who would listen: How do they know it’s him? They don’t really know! That ain’t my boy. Bethella avoided Puma, and later complained to Darlene about his disrespectfulness. As a rifle party fired off a three-volley military salute, Darlene could feel Puma’s eyes on her. His tortured expression seemed to set off each gunshot, all of them aimed at her heart. Then Nat’s parents turned on Darlene as if they suspected her of the murder, as if they knew about the Tylenol and the tight shoes. She overheard LaVerne say, He should’ve been buried in the Hardison plot. Darlene could see she would need to steer clear of them.

Family notwithstanding, people with earnest intentions did try to help Darlene as best they could over the next couple of years. Retail clerks, neighbors, social workers, a detective from San Francisco. She would remember that help from time to time, and the feeling would raise her mood slightly for a short period. The detectives eventually ruled out a large number of people and settled on a group of young hoodlums, possibly hired by an older set of hoodlums. They feared that they did not have enough evidence to guarantee a conviction, but they arrested them anyway, even though the district attorney could not get the trial moved to a more favorable location.

Without telling Darlene, Nat had taken out a modest life-insurance policy in addition to the store’s fire insurance. When she learned of this by mail she wept; she thought of each check she wrote afterward as a postcard he’d sent from beyond the grave. Darlene avoided spending much time in Ovis, buying buttermilk or ham hocks from other shops in nearby towns. She’d lost, along with the store, the heart to stack cans of baked beans on the shelves by herself or decorate the register with pictures of family members she could no longer face because of what she had done, and so she did not attempt to rebuild or reopen the store. Instead she hid under the fear that these insane freaks who felt they did not have to follow the law meant to return and finish the job. Sometimes she hoped that they would.

Bethella volunteered to take Eddie off her hands for a week immediately following the services, during the terrifying lull after Nat’s death when it began to seem that no one cared anymore except her, and during that time, the citified Negroes and Jewish lawyers of New York with their biblical names—Aaron and Abraham and Leah—came to Ovis and stayed for weeks in nearby motels and private homes, offering their services for free. Darlene refused to throw a party, but Eddie spent his sixth birthday playing in the backyard with several of the lawyers’ children. The lawyers interviewed her with earnest intensity, though she could not tell them much; took to the streets, though she would not; and shook their fists at the press, telling them everything they knew about justice and how it ought to work. But fist-shaking did not produce sufficient evidence for the justice system to feed on. Despite their tenacity, after more than a year with no results, they had to apologize and depart for good. Although the police found a tire print that matched the pickup of a certain kid and his friends, whom they rounded up, all other evidence had been incinerated, and they couldn’t produce a single witness. At the end of those many months the lawyers shook their heads and scribbled down emergency numbers on the backs of their business cards. The police promised to keep working on the case; they all seemed sincere. Then the lawyers went home to their city of origin, probably thinking about different legal cases that they could actually set right.

After they left, Darlene decided that she should independently collect whatever information she could to prove who murdered Nat, but the people who had done it had covered their tracks, chucked their murder weapons in places nobody had found, probably burned their bloody clothing. Nobody white in the town admitted to seeing anything untoward. Nobody white would take the word of anybody black. It seemed sometimes as if an imaginary store had burned down and an imaginary black man had lost his imaginary life inside it.

Some of the white people who had no shoes, holes in their clothes, and moth-eaten hats squinted at Darlene differently afterward, like they had indigestion from the story and couldn’t spit up. Did they know things they couldn’t tell her, or did they despise her? How could a store burn down at night and nobody see anything, Darlene would think, and complain to anybody who would listen, as well as many who would not, and interrogate anybody she thought might have seen something that person did not want to have seen. In bad dreams, she watched the orange flames chewing Mount Hope to death, lighting the neighborhood and the faces of people she’d served every day, who peered into the glow while her husband shouted for help and melted behind the windows.

But after a year and a half, Darlene’s desire for revenge subsided enough for a daily routine to take shape, one that avoided anything to do with Nat and focused instead on everything related to raising a son and struggling to pay the phone bill and the rent and the car insurance, things Nat had done without her help and that the store’s income had covered, barely. The loss of even one of those sources of support—the store, her income, her husband—could’ve crushed Darlene. But losing all three, combined with her guilt about her part in the tragedy, eventually drained away her spirit and the last of her fight. At that point she merely wanted to sit still, to look beyond reality and ignore the world; she wanted to switch places with the boring chores of life so that she would matter again, and all the obligations would grow small and distant and useless.

As her insurance money began to run low, an eccentric white man who claimed he’d once met Nat gave Darlene a job she called a Hail Mary pass, the kind of job you take knowing that it won’t cover your expenses, hoping that you’ll get an additional job the next day (or a better one the next month), admitting that you simply need to get out of the house. She became a clerk and cashier at a chain drugstore called Hartman’s Pharmacy, the type of lackluster store where red-and-green crepe-paper Santas and reindeer faded in the chaotic, dusty window display until February, the month when she started.

She had worked there for only a couple of weeks when they came in. Two of the five suspects they hadn’t had enough evidence to convict. Both of them lanky and tattooed, with grayish skin, pimples, and dead killer eyes. With a long line full of talkative people, Darlene didn’t see the men until they arrived at her register. She turned to the last customer in front of the two guys, and when the customer left and she saw these two so close, with nothing in between, close enough to squeeze her neck shut, she stumbled back as if somebody had pushed her.

They dropped a case of Schlitz cans on the counter with a smug bang. Darlene pushed around behind Carla, at the other register, and went into the back. The two hadn’t recognized Darlene, and when she disappeared they became confused at first, then angry when she didn’t come back after a few minutes. In court, they had shaved and worn ties, but since then, they had let their hair grow long. One of them had on a filthy T-shirt that said
ALABAMA
in metallic letters. Dirt highlighted the wrinkles on their knuckles and outlined their fingernails. One of them had a wispy mustache. Then the names exploded in her mind—Claude and Buddy Vance, whose father, Lee Bob, was considered the ringleader.

Where the hell she run to? Buddy asked.

Claude laughed. She got workaphobia?

Buddy, the older, taller one, in the Alabama T-shirt, rapped on the counter a couple of times with the flat of his hand. Excuse me!

Carla, in the middle of her own transaction, asked them to wait a second and told them, Ain’t nothing gone wrong. She stepped toward the back room, but just as she reached the door, it swung open so that she had to jerk back. Darlene poked her head out.

Darlene, what’s the matter? You got customers.

It’s them, she said. They’ve got their nerve coming in here.

Them? What them? What them is they?

Them! Darlene insisted, as if pushing that word would reveal its hidden meaning.

Shoppers piled up at her checkout line and began grumbling. Darlene did not attempt to answer Carla in full; instead she swung the door the rest of the way and stomped back to her cash register in order to keep the weakness she could feel flooding into her arms and legs from causing her to fall. She willed herself to bravery, thinking of what Nat would’ve wanted.

Composing herself, she focused on the case of Schlitz, but she couldn’t find the price tag.

It’s nine ninety-nine, Claude said. Like the display says right over there. He was quieter, more intense than Buddy, the type who would probably whisper to you as he strangled you to death.

Buddy pointed. The display featured twelve-packs of Schlitz cans,
two
for $9.99. They only had one. One would not get them the discount; it would be $12.99. She tried to explain the problem, haltingly, without meeting his eyes, but then words became unsayable, her mind a little tornado.

Buddy’s feet kept shifting, like a wrestler’s, and at last Darlene glanced up at his forehead turning red. Now she could see his short temper, the rage that Nat did not survive. She stared at his veiny hands on the twelve-pack, the hairy fingers that might have held the tire iron (she imagined a tire iron, though they never figured out what blunt instrument) that smashed into her husband’s temple and left him limp, dead on the floor of his own store, because she’d had a headache and she needed Tylenol. That’s why she would never use Tylenol anymore, why she walked in any other aisle in the drugstore rather than walk by the Tylenol, why she wouldn’t touch the Tylenol whenever anybody bought some. Why she wouldn’t say the word
Tylenol.
Why she wouldn’t think the word
Tylenol.
From the book she knew that thinking certain words might bring back her bad luck.

Let me tell you what I think of your twelve-ninety-nine shit beer! Buddy said, and tore open the cardboard box and ripped out a can. He shook it vigorously and popped the tab in Darlene’s direction so that the foam spewed both high and low. Claude smiled up at his brother and prepared to run.

People in the two lines stepped back—some horrified, some admiring of Buddy. A chunky man in a baseball cap reached out to bend Buddy’s arm so that he would stop, but Buddy grabbed a second can and opened that one too.

Carla shouted, Hey, I’m calling the cops, and Darlene screamed
Stop
and
No
again and again, and then she slipped on something, or fainted, and fell on the rubber honeycomb pad behind the checkout counter.

Buddy reached over the counter to keep dousing Darlene with beer after she fell. The man in the baseball cap grabbed his arm to restrain him. Claude ran to the door and paused there, begging Buddy to run, and as he started off, Buddy grabbed a third can of beer and squirted that everywhere too. Again the man in the baseball cap attempted to thwart Buddy, but Buddy’s beer-slicked arm slipped from the man’s grip. Then Buddy aimed the beer-can fountain at the man, who became enraged and chased the two of them out of the store, the three of them growling curses at one another.

Darlene, doubled over on the floor, kept screaming long after the men had run off. In the confusion, some customers dashed out of the store to watch the chase; others gave up on making purchases, and somebody stole herself a handful of 100 Grand candy bars. Carla knelt down beside Darlene on the rubber honeycomb, trying to wipe her face and clothes dry with the tail of her company shirt and console her at the same time. Darlene had pulled in her arms to defend herself and kept them stiff in front her chest.

Lord have mercy, Carla said. I seen it on the news! Was that them boys that—I mean, they probably done it, but can’t nobody say. And you! I didn’t even put it together. Oh my stars.

Darlene’s terror faded a little bit and she cried normally.

Carla sat back on her knees. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off, honey. Come in tomorrow, or even take a couple of days, make a fresh start. I’ll let Spar know what happened. She put her hands on her hips, then let them drop to her sides, and said, Lord, I hate this town.

U
nless work gone late—which it done a lot—Delicious supposed to paid the crew every day in the afternoon, round 5:00 roll call or a li’l later. People looked forward to that shit like they ’bout to start a weekend, but most everybody worked the same amount every day except Sunday so it ain’t matter much. The company ain’t paid on the books. Instead they tallied up your productivity they own self without no paycheck company or nothing. Some folks got paid by the tub, some by the hour or by the egg if they was in the coop with the laying hens. The sad motherfuckers who scooped up birdshit for fertilizer got paid by the bucket. Ain’t nobody wanted that job, and asides it made you a outcast of the crew. Sirius B always seem to look for the worst jobs to do, acting like he Jesus. He went after that one like he thinking everybody else want it, and ain’t nobody tell him no different.

They lined your ass up outside the sleeping area and told you how much you had worked and what pay you got and then hand you the pay right into your palm. Most folks ain’t get more than ten dollars a day, so for real they hardly giving out nothing except more debt. But some days, some folks could make thirty and forty, and everybody be striving for that, like the company running some kinda numbers game. Meanwhile, Delicious took out for
everything
—the meals, the boots, the tubs and sacks they loaned you for the picking, the alcohol, and me especially. They be giving you drinks and drugs like it’s your birthday party and then laying it all on your credit.

They left How in charge, and that sonofabitch did his whole job quick as a auctioneer and made your pay sheet sound like a science, so if you ain’t get what you expect, you would have to walk off slow, probably confused, shoving your li’l three or four dollars down in your pocket so couldn’t nobody see how much or steal nothing from you. Some folks tried damn hard at this shit—like Hannibal kept a piece of paper under his hat and had wrote down damn near every debt he got and every vegetable he done picked, but when he went to How, he got argued down into the same amounts of nothing as everybody else.

Sometimes it ain’t make no sense that How’s version of your salary would come so much lower than the one you calculated in your head as you working all day. Darlene got the idea from Hannibal to count on a piece of paper so she could give evidence to How if he told her she ain’t worked the amount she said. But whenever she called How on it, he would tell her that she made it up, or that he done docked her pay on account of a sarcastic comment she had made ’bout the company.

That guy How could remember every bad thing you done or said without letting you know he noticed, and then he’d remind you right when you needed a hit, or cash, or a boost. Even if you only said what you said to let off steam. You couldn’t bad-mouth the company or complain ’bout none of the busted tubs without no handles, the broken equipment that had took off somebody finger once and usually opened up a thigh every couple weeks, or point out that there wasn’t no masks or no clean place to wash your hands even with so much pesticides clouding up the joint. You especially couldn’t bitch about nothing on company time. He had people spying on each other, too, and he would dock you and reward motherfuckers for information he got secondhand about your ass. Sometimes How would even dock you for questioning his calculation of your debt. That shit fucked motherfuckers up.

But if you complained, How would go, You think a big diversified grower that has contracts with Birds Eye and Chiquita and Del Monte needs to skim five bucks off the paycheck of a little piddling serf like you? And you would shut your trap, ’cause on balance you needed the money more than that tiny moment of self-respect. Except that them tiny moments would start glomming together like little oil droplets in a contaminated stream.

So Darlene might make a few more bucks a day if she could chuck a couple extra melons, handle all them eggs, or shovel some chicken shit with Sirius. Every Tuesday and Friday, almost soon as How gave the crew the vapors they called pay, him and Hammer would drive everybody out to the depot, six or seven miles down the road to a place they said called Richland, but everybody call it the depot. Motherfuckers had most likely spent everything and borrowed forward on the rest, so what you got that day ain’t even count as pay, or it look like negative pay.

Richland ain’t look much like a town. Hardly nothing grew there—stunted bushes and dry grass out to the edge of your eyeballs, a gas station, a depot, a broken-down brick building, a tin-roof shack with a painted sign that said
GENERAL STORE
in red. The place too tiny to get on a map. Some the crew thought Delicious had actually made up the town. Other people told them people they was paranoid on account of me, but Sirius B said, It’s not no paranoia when it’s happening up in your face.

At night, between craving and using, the group got into one the many debates that always be going through the chicken house like a virus. This one had to do with whether the farm be in Louisiana at all, or if they maybe driven everybody far as Florida in that van. Darlene and Sirius was usually arguing on the same side about where they at, on account a she growed up near Lafayette. One time, a few weeks after she got there, the whole crew had kept arguing ’bout where they at until after lights-out. Darlene stayed quiet a long time, simmering like a li’l pot on a blue flame, then her voice busted out in the dark, saying that great-tailed grackles always hanging around there, which you don’t get nowheres but in Texas, Louisiana, and Mexico, and which she seen all the time growing up near Lafayette, but ain’t nobody seen not one flamingo, which everybody know they got all over the place in Florida but
not
Louisiana, so how you could explain that? The whole no-chicken area gone totally silent while people be thinking on that one, then TT goes, That don’t prove nothing, ’cause birds don’t gotta stop at no borders. They don’t know the difference for when it’s one state and when it’s another.

Darlene shouts, Oh, shut up! and fold her arms, then she announce that she had to go to sleep behind that one, ’cause the whole thing done got too boring. She close her eyes, but she ain’t had one eye closed for more than a few seconds yet when she feel something touching her elbow. At first she take in a deep breath ’cause she think a giant roach or a poison spider done crawled up onto her bed ’bout to bite her, or that TT gonna strangle her ass ’cause she proved him wrong, but the same instant she figure out that it somebody hand, she realize it ain’t touching her with a palm—somebody dragging they knuckles all the way up and down her arm in a slow, calm, stroking way.

Seem like them knuckles be touching each one of them superfine hairs on her arm, making em stand up and sit down at they command. The touch make her remember ’bout meeting with Nat at the diner. Darlene know who belong to the hand on account a which side the bed it come from and how long it is, but to make sure, she reach her right hand over and hook her finger inside the curled-up hand as it passing down her left forearm, knowing it belong to Sirius just from the feel of them rough-ass calluses right under the fingers and the veins popping out right past his wrists. She keep moving her finger over the palm and once her hand be totally inside his, she feel his pulse there at the bottom of the hand, thumping against her fingertip.

That go on for a while, the hand-fucking, but it start to seem kinda stupid if it ain’t gon lead to actual
sex
sex. The problem with fucking in the barracks wasn’t that nobody gon see—in fact, couldn’t nobody see they own hand in front of they own face up in the chicken house at night. The problem be keeping everything quiet, ’cause them beds be creaky as all get-out, and you could say something really whispery to somebody in that concrete-ass room and motherfuckers on the other side the room not just gonna hear what you said, they gonna
answer
your ass.

Sirius had to get up real slow, and Darlene listening for every last creak his bed make as it start letting him rise up off it, she imagining that man body coming for her slower than a check from the government, she ain’t letting the touching hand go neither, like if she let it go he gon fall sideways into the darkness away from her. Finally the moment come where the bed ain’t make no more noise and she could feel Sirius breath and lips near her face and she raise her head up a tiny bit and use her lips to find his. It hurts a little ’cause of the burns and sores near her mouth, but she put that out her mind on account of the hotness of them lips.

He whisper real soft, almost so that she can’t hear it, that they could go in the bathroom and get it on, ’cause don’t nobody know the difference at night between one black-ass fool and two in the bathroom, since you couldn’t hear what going on in there well as you could out in the main room. Darlene ain’t thinking too hard ’bout nothing, and she definitely wanting to continue what they started, maybe not to the point that she think he thinking, but at least in the bathroom they ain’t had to be so cautious. She rise on up out the bed in the same delicate way as he just done, and they tongues be poking all inside each other mouth and whatnot, and they breathing so heavy they know they got to get out that main room.

She grab ahold his belt loop and he feel his way through the dark to the bathroom, and even though it stink, at least they could squeeze in the stall without no door and get a small amount of privacy for a microsecond. He sitting on the toilet and she sitting on him, and she can’t see nothing in there neither so it’s like she fucking nothing, or the night sky, like he a star and she the blackness that be holding him up.

Pretty soon he get done and after a longer time she do too, and she fall over onto his shoulders like she gon fall asleep there.

I seen a whole bunch of those birds too, he whispered. The grackles? I knew we was in Louisiana.

Then somebody banged on the stall wall and the hot mood went right down the drain.

Where they at wasn’t the only thing folks be talking ’bout by a long shot. People talked a lot about they next job and how they gonna get it. When I get outta Delicious, I’ma go into construction, I’ma start my own landscaping business, I’ma drive a ice cream truck—didn’t none of it had no basis in reality. They be arguing ’bout sports even more, after watching parts of the games on Jackie’s portable TV that had a blue-ass nine-inch screen. Everybody talking ’bout Carl Lewis and Flo Jo all summer long.

After the five-hundred-dollar ride and the hundred-dollar first night, folks had to rent they beds and pay utilities on the water and electric, so the total came to twenty dollars a night. Sirius be like, I’m making ten a day and paying twenty a night? That shit don’t make sense. Everybody told him to just work harder, ’cause sometime you could get over that hump. It wasn’t no A/C, and it be so hot all the time that folks starts taking a shower in they clothes tryna keep cool while the clothes drying. Couldn’t hardly nobody sleep in that heat. They only collected the living expenses once a week, so if you ain’t want no more debt you had to be smart enough to squirrel away them greenbacks somewheres wouldn’t nobody find em. You even had to make sure didn’t nobody stole your stuff while you showering, so a lot of folks got Ziploc baggies and jammed they little moneys and whatever else in em—gold fillings, photos of they kids—so they could take they not-that-valuables with em into the shower, keep a eye on that munty, like TT called it.

But it never was much in them baggies, ’cause down in Richland, Gaspard Fusilier marked up everything so much that it gobbled your whole dollar amount. They charged $4.99 for a minibottle of Popov, $12.00 for a six-pack of Tecate in a can. Darlene and em would think,
Bullshit
—sometimes they even said Bullshit, but never too loud—they knew they ain’t had no choice but to pay the outrageous price, usually on credit. And since everybody addicted to drugs or alcohol or both, or denied it until they copped, folks would buy bottles and rocks and gear from a outside dude who marked his stuff way up, too, ’cause they all knew that the operation worked out in the hinterlands of God knows where, way out in Louisiflorida, and you couldn’t do no goddamn comparison shopping.

If Darlene got her groceries (that’s what they called their purchases) early, she would wait by the bus for everybody else, smoking boulders in the space between the minibus and the trees. She called that having afternoon tea. They got the workers to go faster and be more productive by keeping me away from em between lunch and dinner. That made em insane, but management promised em all kinda rewards in the form of extra rocks. People freaked out in them fields—twitching and yammering and shit—but you’d be surprised how fast a crackhead could pick a strawberry vine when it’s a lighter and a loaded pipe on the other side.

Out in the field one day, a potbellied brother name of Moseley who nobody knew how long he been with Delicious told everybody ’bout how a dude with a beef against a guy he claimed had stole his muffuletta sandwich out there had made a shank by melting the wrong end of one them sporks they sometimes gave out with the lunches and sporked his enemy in the kidney enough to put him in the hospital and never come back. Didn’t nobody know what happened after, Moseley said, if he died or what have you. Somebody said it might be worth trying that to get outta Delicious and somebody else said they gon tell How.