Delicious Foods (17 page)

Jackie hands went in and out that cone of yellow light, but Darlene couldn’t see nothing but the faint shadow of her back. Darlene ain’t said nothing and Jackie ain’t notice she there. Jackie had placed a total of five them little mice in a neat row on her end table. She raised a plastic cup above one them mice and drizzled a stream of liquid over it and the shit puffed up.

Then Darlene face squinched up ’cause she figured this li’l ritual had some kinda connection to Jackie personal hygiene. Them little mice was tampons. Then it crossed her mind that Jackie be using her menstrual blood to work roots on somebody. From there, them imaginary chickens swooped in, all plucked up and weird-looking enough to be the truth: Jackie had collected them tampon mice from the trash so she could do some fucked-up gris-gris on the group. That made Darlene so sick she broke out in a cold sweat and tiptoed backward the way she had came, her breath getting short now, her heart jumping up like a fat red toad. She put her head down on her bed and pretended to sleep.

With the bulb giving off hardly no light, Jackie come out her room, dangling one the tampons by its tail. Darlene saw her stopping at the lower right corner of each the beds. To stop motherfuckers from stealing they shoes, most people stuck the legs of they beds into the heels of they shoes at night, and if you be peeping down the row of beds it be like the beds gonna run away with the dreamers on board. A couple beds up from hers, Darlene heard some drops of watered-down blood going
pit-pat
on people shoes. Maybe Kippy ain’t even die tryna leave, but Jackie had just dripped them bloodstains on his boots. She turnt the start of a disgusted laugh into a sleepy cough, thinking ’bout telling Sirius that Delicious had Jackie doing obeah, dripping her monthly on they shoes to stop em from running away. Man, would he bust a gut. But then again, maybe the obeah had did the job on most these motherfuckers.

The next morning, Darlene felt the need to quit Delicious pretty bad. The boring hard work and dirty conditions had broke her will, and now she had to wash that bitch’s voodoo blood off her shoes in the morning, behind her back? She kept muttering, No way, that isn’t right. Sometime her work detail wasn’t physically difficult, and they’d make her dump bushels of pink slop into the old wooden hog feeder or spray pesticides on the plants, and she’d have time to come up with plans to get out without nothing bad happening. But whenever she thought about doing courageous shit, her nerves turnt to Jell-O and she would come to my ass crying and begging me to make her feel better. She always saying she knew she should wanna leave more, enough to do some brave shit, but I be talking her out of it.

Plan A was that she just tell How she quitting and walk away—but to where? Would he let her go? No. And how far she gon have to walk, anyways? And how ’bout all that money she owed? It had fell to $908.55 at that point ’cause they been digging up sweet potatoes and she had got good at that. Then plan B became maybe she could find a lawyer somewheres—but who? And how? And to say what? And how you gonna pay a expensive motherfucking lawyer? Besides, Joe Lawyer just gonna go, You signed a contract. Plan C was to put a slit into one them melons she be packing and stick a note into the cut, but she knew they would find that shit during inspections and chuck the melon, or, worse, they’d fish out the note, trace the damaged fruit back to her, dock her pay, and do her like they done TT, who broken nose need a splint it wouldn’t never get. He having trouble breathing, his voice sounding all wheezy, but you couldn’t laugh.

Later that morning, she packing melons and had a vision where the fruit done split itself in half and growed a giant slice that turnt into a red mouth. First the mouth smiled at her but then when it start talking it tattled on her, got some pink juice spilling over its green and white lips, seeds popping off its red tongue like li’l fleas. Then a entire field of melons busted out laughing, along with the paranoia chickens and the real chickens of Delicious till the ridicule done got thick as mud. To be honest, I had been hanging out with some damn strange substances during that particular time. I ain’t even sure who they was. Darlene suspected that PCP or LSD had become real chummy with me. But maybe Delicious finally did have her losing her mind. Plan D meant keep working and pay off her debt and then asking to leave someday. Maybe.

A couple days after they clocked TT, while she waiting on the daily money, Darlene out on a detail and strolling down a row of cornstalks by herself, not too far from the depot and within the reach of the crew. The only sound come from the rustling of the cornstalk leaves, and she thought it’s that growing sound again, like some kinda creaky rustling, or that breathing. But then she saw a building she ain’t notice before, sorta in the distance, and she decide to test out how long the leash on her just to see.

She get out to this path that’s by a broke-down shack. Three grackles landing behind her one after the other, and a fourth one in the front, like a li’l militia ’bout to arrest her ass. Them birds would sometime come after her on days when she had to carry sacks of grain that was heavier than children out to the livestock feeders. They’d squint at her with they judgy-ass faces, probably expecting her to slip and scatter a easy meal for they ass, but on this particular day she ain’t had nothing on her that she knew they wanted, and since she knew they ain’t want nothing, it made her flip out a little.

She stared down the row of cornstalks at the place where it look like they nearly touched and spilled out into the sky. That rickety old barn be on her left. She could hear Nat whistling underneath just ’bout anything she notice at the time, surrounded by radio static. She recognize the song “Love Won’t Let Me Wait.” Nat had wanted to make that they wedding song. He loved that jam and thought it had a romantic mood but wasn’t much interested in the lyrics. Darlene thought it sounded too sexual and she objected and finally he agreed to “Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me.” But Nat kept on joking with her ’bout that first song; he couldn’t see the sexual part even though people be moaning in the middle of the song. He said it had a honeymoon feeling to it.

She stop and hunt in the sky, almost like she expect the Lord to throw him down to her at last, but today the sky staring back like a just painted ceiling. But when she drug her eyes over the ground, she saw the main grackle plant hisself in front of her, maybe tryna keep her from going no farther. Was he in cahoots with How? He made his chest all round, sticking his feathers out and opening up that spiky beak wide as a change purse. It seem to Darlene like the song and the static pouring out his wobbly throat. The whistling done become the original singer voice, like the bird had a radio stuck down his li’l windpipe.

Darlene did
not
know what the hell going on; she couldn’t make no kinda sense outta this, so she skipped right past the effort and braindanced with me instead, closing her eyes and swaying to the saxophones as they caressing her and wrapping theyself around that singer sexy confession. She stopped feeling all self-conscious. The idea that Delicious had fucked with me left her mind. She even forgot to wait for her pay. All the sensations of her wedding night done came right the fuck back—the beautiful droop of the train on her gown, the stiff lace going round her head, the smiling faces of they few loyal friends and relatives, how they all had to keep Eddie out the pictures so she ain’t looked like a Jezebel, the short pile of shiny gifts sitting by the entrance to the church, Nat’s warm hand pushing against her knuckles as they cutting that spongy deep chocolate cake.

When the song got done, the bird start talking. He only got a couple words out before Darlene heard Nat’s voice. She screamed with joy and the bird snapped his beak shut. She froze, put her palm to her face, then put herself onto the dirt in front the grackle and crawled toward him with her arms outstretched, begging to hold him. The bird hop-flew backward and away, without no fear. His friends was moving around Darlene; she thought they’s chuckling at her while they making they bizarre noises, but she ain’t give a shit. She put her eyes on the leader, tryna see her husband in his place.

Nat, it’s you! Praise the Lord. What did you say?

All sharp and tight, the bird turnt its head sideways and tried out a bunch of poses where he could peep at Darlene. He wagging his beak left, then right.

He sighed. Darlene, sweetheart, I can’t stand to see you like this.

But if it brought you back to me—

You know this isn’t what I want for you. Or for Eddie. You’re worth so much more.

At those words, Darlene started weeping. She tried to ignore her emotionality and talk through the sobbing, but that shit ain’t work. Nat, she said, I’d rather be with you. Why’d they take you away? Why? How could God let that happen? Please forgive me for the migraine and the shoes and the everything.

Darlene, I said. Darlene! Stop talking to that bird. That bird ain’t your husband. It’s just a damn bird. When
I’m
the voice of reason, you know shit is fucked.

She reached out again, faster, and grazed part the grackle shiny feathers with her fingertip before he like, hippity hop out the way.

It’s not the same, the bird said. You’ll crush me, Darlene.

If I die maybe I could be a bird too.

Honey, don’t talk like that. You’re not going to die. You need to live. That’s what I came to say. You need to leave here and go raise my son.

A long silence passed between the two of em. She couldn’t stop staring at the bird’s li’l yellow eye; he ain’t hardly blink. She wanted to see tenderness in that bird, but she really couldn’t. In that body she couldn’t know Nat no more, not with that blank-ass eyeball. She wanna kiss him, but when the bird done turnt his beak toward her, she imagining what it gon feel like to kiss a grackle, have that beak poking her cheek or piercing her lip, comparing that to the memory of her husband lips on hers—warm, soft tongues and breath going back and forth, body linking up to body. She covered her face without no consideration to how she smearing herself with dirt bombs and grit. Some different strange music done started floating through in the air, not the radio song no more, but some kinda fucked-up jazz off a smashed piano, then that suddenly stopped.

How could you come back and act so cold? she said.

The bird goes, This is the best I can manage. I’m sorry.

Nat! Darlene grabbed for the bird and he moved backward again. He raised his wings all tentative and whatnot, like he testing the air.

I would if I could, the grackle said, this time with a bit of grief. Believe me.

Then the bird be poking under his greenish-black wing to groom hisself, and in a split second Darlene finally snapped out her insanity, and now she seen that the grackle just be a normal animal that couldn’t talk and ain’t had nobody dead husband spirit inside. She felt stupid and ashamed that she had thought that and had to admit she not in her right mind. She seen herself at the bottom of a well, and people yelling down to her. She peeking into that li’l circle of light up top, stretching her hand out and tryna touch em.

S
ince the moment Jackie had helped them into the Death Van and distributed the first of many hits to the other passengers, Eddie fantasized that he really was crossing into the underworld to rescue his mother. Once the minibus turned onto the desolate roads and rattled over potholes toward nowhere, and his fellow travelers disappeared into a state between deep thought and sleep—though they had started the journey with a lively card game and an argument about boxing before lighting up—Eddie’s fantasy rose toward possibility. Maybe this lazy mood was death? Even after they’d stuck the box in the ground and told him his father was in it, no one had ever told him that things changed about your body after you died, except for his impression that you wore a robe and sprouted wings in heaven or grew horns and a tail in hell. On some level he knew not to share these thoughts because people would laugh. He and Tuck had not yet received robes or grown tails. It probably took a long time, he knew; he had learned while following his mother around that anything you needed from a white person at a desk always took extra time and required you to sign a lot of papers.

Eddie tried to grill Jackie to figure out where he would find Darlene when they arrived, but she, along with most of the other passengers on the ride, was minimally responsive, especially after she smoked. If anyone on the Death Van said something coherent, they’d make the type of outlandish statements he’d become accustomed to hearing from his mother. Strangely, the familiarity of their drugged-out behavior gave him confidence that his mother had, in fact, joined their ranks. He would just need to sit tight.

Tuck nearly coughed his guts out during the journey; he’d been growing sicker and weaker as the trip wore on, and to Eddie this gradual worsening seemed consistent with the process of dying, or having already died. When he asked Tuck, the man seemed to think that all he needed was an Olde English 800. Once they reached their destination, Eddie’s companion had lost the ability to rise from his seat without help. After Jackie spent several minutes attempting to get him to his feet by tugging on his limp arms, a few of the more able-bodied and right-minded men summoned from the chicken house lifted him out of the minibus and laid him on the ground next to the front wheel, and a debate erupted about whether he, and also Eddie, would be permitted to sleep with the rest of the workers or if this would constitute a health hazard. Eddie swiveled his head in search of Darlene but he didn’t see anyone like her nearby.

The workers did not care where Eddie and Tuck went; the debate took place mainly because of the presence of two paler men Eddie later learned were Sextus Fusilier and How, who used the moment to turn over in their minds, briefly, whether they should quarantine these two or let the illness run its course among the workers. In How’s opinion, not much work or profit would be lost, because he knew he could manage the team, but Sextus remained cautious, invoking all the clichés of thrift with which his family must have indoctrinated him over the years. Eddie didn’t understand the gist of this conversation. Instead he imagined that the two men were really God and the Devil (though he went back and forth about who was who) and that they had deadlocked over a decision about his and Tuck’s eternal fate.

During the conversation, Sextus brought up the topic of a barn out by the depot that seemed to him ideal as a temporary infirmary. After they had settled the issue and checked the other new people in, he drove off, and How and Jackie loaded Tuck and Eddie back into the van. Eddie opened his mouth to inquire about Darlene’s presence on the farm, but How told him to shut up before he finished asking if he could ask a question.

Silently they drove out to the barn, which turned out to be weather-beaten and unstable, a rotten, listing structure etched in silver by the moonlight. With a few sharp blows from a small ax, How broke the padlock off its hinges. Then, almost as an afterthought, he tossed a blanket into the musty space with the two of them. Waving their hands at Eddie and Tuck as if to fan their bodies into place, Jackie and How made it clear that they did not want to catch whatever Tuck had come down with.

The fear and speed with which the crew had ostracized them made Eddie increasingly uneasy. He hadn’t shown any symptoms, he hadn’t coughed even once, but they assumed that he and Tuck, whom they kept referring to as his father, despite his frequent and loud corrections, had both picked up whatever contagious illness was soon liable to take Tuck to a picnic with the ancestors. Their certainty rubbed off on him. When they wouldn’t even give him a Kleenex, he could only assume that they knew what illness the two of them had contracted and expected him and Tuck to waste away rapidly.

We’ll be back later, Jackie said. She and How swung the door shut behind themselves and Eddie heard the noise of their shoes crunching through the dead leaves on the path gradually diminish, then the minibus’s ignition and departure. When Jackie said
later,
Eddie couldn’t tell if she meant half an hour or six months.

The support beams on each corner leaned far enough over that the walls became rhombuses. The barn had gone so completely to seed that blades of moonlight sliced through the decaying slats of wood that had once been the back wall. As his eyes adjusted, Eddie stomped less carefully. Tuck had collapsed near the door, and his endless coughing annoyed Eddie but also reassured him that his fellow traveler had not died or been attacked by something unseen.

At least I’m indoors tonight, Tuck managed between hacking fits. A moonbeam cut across his face. Sort of indoors, he added.

When Eddie reached the far left corner of the barn, he found—among rust-eaten pitchforks and trowels, useless stirrups and yokes, and a bucket of stagnant water—the remnants of an upright piano. The enamel on most of its ivory teeth had snapped off, and a few of the black keys had come off as well, leaving only raw wood flush against the keyboard. The front panel had fallen off, but someone had placed it diagonally on the top, although at some point the lid had broken and it hung precariously off the back by one hinge.

The environment made him restless—he thought he heard bats; the spiderwebs that touched his face and arms made him think of movies about zombies, almost made him wonder if he had entered the world of those monsters as a monster himself. With a theatrical flourish, Eddie reached out to the piano with both arms extended, his fingers splayed in a Frankenstein stance, and, in the manner of someone who does not know a language attempting to speak it, attacked the keys from one end to the other. The muted thumps on the hammerless notes, dissonant chimes, and bizarre twangs that he made the piano emit sounded to him like devil music. When Eddie discovered the sustain pedal and let his every punishment of the instrument ring out, Tuck whimpered for him to stop, claiming that his ears would bleed and promising to play and sing a hundred songs on it when he got well, but the noise drowned him out, and the barn, and probably the outside world for a few hundred yards, became the eerie domain of some ghoulish musical apparition.

When Eddie decided that he had come to the finale, he bashed the keys forcefully four times and allowed the dirty sonic cloud he’d produced to dissipate until it disappeared beneath the sounds of crickets and strange frogs outside.

For four days that October the crew marooned Eddie and Tuck by themselves, providing only the most rudimentary food, usually care packages consisting of a bruised orange, a salty, disintegrating baloney sandwich, a half-pint of warm milk or watery OJ from concentrate, and one packet of generic mayo. Someone from the crew would drop several packages at a time in green Styrofoam containers outside the barn on the path, which was really just two deep, muddy parallel tire tracks with long grass between them. Without entering, the person might call out to check on Tuck, who could barely drag himself down the small hill where he and Eddie relieved themselves.

Because food came only once a day, Eddie divided the lunches evenly and saved half of his for dinner. He would do the same for Tuck, whose worsening illness had begun to make Eddie unsure of his own health. He begged for alcohol; Eddie whined until they brought it, charging against Tuck’s debt.

During the day, Eddie explored the woods and fields around the barn, thinking that he might see his mother somewhere. Periodically he made sure that he could still breathe by inhaling as much of the humid atmosphere as he could and running as far as he dared without losing sight of the barn and then back again, his vitality confirmed by his panting and sweating.

The food bringers talked but the talk did not say anything, it was only nervous chatter, like the night people in Houston. Eddie could tell that they might not remember how to have conversations, so when he tried asking about Darlene, he half expected to get garbled responses. Words without meanings jumped out of the sides of the food bringers’ mouths; their eyes were always bloodshot and jumpy.

I’m missing school, Eddie said to one of them. I’ve got to go back. Is Darlene Hardison here somewhere? She’s my mother. I need to find her.

You
need? I need. I need me a rug, this food bringer said. He swallowed his words and barely opened his mouth when he spoke. I got me some
bad
rug-need, that’s what I’m about! Fat motherfucker giving me attitude. Fattitude, that’s what it is. Ha! One thing you gotta say about me, I’m funny. When I leave here I’ma go to LA and be a comedy star in the movies like Eddie Murphy. You watch.

Have you seen Darlene Hardison?

Once or twice a food bringer did not seem out of it but never answered his questions except by grunting equivocally, and they all regarded him with unsettling, blank cow-eyes. Eddie suspected that someone had ordered them not to say anything except to ask about his health.

You okay? a food bringer said, almost as an afterthought, while leaving.

I think so.

Fever? Chill? Ache?

No.

The guy pointed at Tuck lying in the corner. He ain’t dead yet? He spoke with what sounded to Eddie like impatience.

No. Better than he was yesterday.

Hmm. Might not be medical. That’s what How an’ them saying. On account a you ain’t got it.

Not medical? Then what?

Some kinda obeah juju from somewheres.

What’s obeah juju?

The guy’s response terrified Eddie. He stared at Eddie and his eyes glazed over in a dramatic way that the boy could not decipher. The guy didn’t respond to the question, maybe because something more exciting had just happened inside his skull, but he also looked surprised that Eddie didn’t know that term. Or perhaps bugging out his eyes was his way of demonstrating obeah juju. It did not feel at all like a normal interaction between human beings. With the same weird grimace on his face, the man turned and waddled off through the brush.

On the afternoon of the fourth day in the barn, Tuck recovered, almost miraculously. He sat up, stood, stretched, and walked shakily across the dirt to the rectangle of light in the corner where the door had fallen off one of its hinges. It was as if Jesus had laid his palm on the man’s sweaty forehead and pronounced him well. Tuck qualified his sudden burst of energy in every way he could think of, as if he knew better than to get excited about something that could turn out to be nothing.

I could be about to get worse, he warned. And it ain’t like I’m about to run the one-hundred-yard dash. But the fever musta broke or something. Damn if it ain’t a complete mystery how shit function inside my own self. Chin to chest, he looked down at his dirt-caked T-shirt. Now I need some more of that drinkahol, boy, ’cause I’m getting the goddamn shakes again.

Was it obeah juju?

Tuck froze and then snapped his head toward Eddie. He responded with a condescending outrage Eddie always half expected from older black adults. Damn right somebody put a curse on me, he said. From the minute I got borned. He cut his eyes and spat his words. Doctor grabbed me out my mama pussy, held me by my feet, whacked my black ass extra-hard, and said, It’s a nigger! That’s the curse that’s on me. Around here niggers say some funky words, put some chicken feathers in a wine bottle, and motherfuckers just laugh it off, but when white folks say some curses on your ass, you are up to your neck in fines and bills and fees and lawyers for the rest of your life. Then you’re in jail, which is a motherfucking labyrinth of shit on a whole different level. And white folks do that shit to other white folks too. Shit, they’d do it to the birds if they could.

What you think happen to me? he went on. Tuck described his struggle to make it as a musician: the years of touring; sleeping on the same filthy comforter every night in the back of a rickety van; playing all night and having to split fifty dollars among the six band members, and not evenly, because Mad Dog, his bandleader, demanded a bigger cut; the club managers who sometimes refused to pay; the lack of a steady woman; the steady presence of the wrong women; the ominous, deepening evidence that the audience for Mad Dog Walker’s music was literally dying and the leader’s tendency to blame his band for the waning popularity of the blues and harangue them, and sometimes even the thin crowds at shows, during his interminable drug binges; how the stress of all these things made Tuck drink until he didn’t have the strength to do anything but drink, and how even that strength disappeared, how his playing, the activity that had given Tuck the greatest pleasure and kept him going spiritually, though never financially, gradually seemed to take the shape of a noose and began to tighten around his neck.