Delicious Foods (29 page)

Darlene had begun to howl a series of outlandish, frequently nonsensical accusations at Sextus—You killed my son! You tried to destroy me with your voodoo! You made Jackie control me with her pussy blood, you fucker! You tried to break me apart with your hair! You tried to keep me quiet by fucking me! Your breath put me in prison! You tried to get inside my brain and piss your name on the inside of my skull, you fucking zombie-master motherfucker! I love you! But I hate everything you’ve ever done including love me, you sonofabitch. You stole my handbag and you broke my glass crystal watermelon! Give me my rocks. Kiss me. Why won’t you kiss me with your mind! Fuck me with your gun! she begged him. I’m going to fuck you with your gun!

While the things Darlene shouted sounded like the random curses and incomprehensible bullshit a crack addict might spew during a breakdown, they were so bizarre, more bizarre than anything Eddie had ever heard come out of her mouth, even during her worst experiences with drugs, that he soon understood what he thought she meant for him to do. She was saying the first things that came to mind in order to stall them, so that he could make a break for it.

At the height of the brawl, Eddie looped a leg over the backseat and lay flat, then shimmied out on his elbows and knees and, using the open door to mask his movements, swung himself into the driver’s seat.

They hoped I would do this,
he thought.
They want me to.
He wasn’t abandoning them. He planted himself in the driver’s seat of a car for the first time, as opposed to the tractor Sextus had taught him to drive. Crouching behind the wheel, he stepped on the brake and used his forearms to shift the car into drive. He saw Jackie see him; she sat up and immediately started banging on the inside of the minibus window with the flat of her hand to get everybody’s attention. Eddie hugged the steering wheel, turned it with his chin, and stomped down on the gas as hard as he could. The Subaru lurched forward and the passenger-side door closed from the momentum. The driver-side door banged closed against the back end of the minibus as it cleared.

Hey! Jarvis shouted.

Ten miles and thirty minutes later, convinced that nobody had followed him, Eddie managed to push the headlight switch forward with his mouth and turn on the brights. In front of the car, a brazen light the color of young corn exposed the night landscape, slicing through the future like a child’s eyes opening on the first morning of life.

O
nce Darlene saw How and Sextus actually physically standing in the goddamn road, keeping her from quitting Delicious after she had let them motherfuckers chop off her son hands to get out, she admitted to herself that she been had. She felt like she falling into a sinkhole right above a landfill, down into years of liquid garbage, the putrid trash of all them misreported work hours, of spraining her ankles and breathing insecticide without no health care, of choking down undercooked and overcooked food without no nutritional value, let alone flavor, of them jacked-up prices down at the depot. For a split second Darlene left me and floated above the whole scheme like suddenly she could see what it had did to her and to everybody else it touched, and like anybody who had a second of clear thinking in the middle of a cyclone of bullshit, she lost her motherfucking mind.

The whole time she been directing her anger and despair at herself, taking the blame for that short rope of events she done lynched herself on—them tight shoes, that headache, the asking for the Tylenol that led to the murder and the fire and addiction and the abandonment and finally Delicious. She remembered all what the book had told her, and realized the book had played her ass the same way.

Goddamn this drug,
she thought.

That’s right. Scotty got the blame again.

A lotta pent-up emotions and explanations for shit that had happened bubbled up into Darlene throat right then, hot and evil as a Tabasco gargle, and she gone to town on Sextus tryna get that shotgun out his hands. She had every intention of shooting his ass dead right there, and probably killing How and Jackie too, and then maybe herself. It’s true we was hanging out right before this all happened, but some of the shit that came out her mouth when she had that outburst took even
me
aback. I ain’t tell her to say none of that. Half of what she said just
sounded
crazy, but she more or less telling the truth. Then Eddie done the smart thing and hightailed it outta that hellhole, mom or no mom. We all ultimately on our own anyhow—ain’t that sad?

It’s strange when you used to encouraging your friends to do all kinda mayhem and then all of a sudden you gotta switch gears. This time I remember shouting at Darlene, I said, Honey, you need to check yourself! Give that man back his shotgun and let’s get in the minibus and let this all blow over so we could get back to the way it used to was, with all the smoking! But D wouldn’t have it.

Even while she tryna rip that gun outta Sextus fingers, biting his hands or licking em or kissing him, maybe thinking she gonna fool him into the idea that if he give up the weapon, she gon give up the punani. Who know what she thinking? You could be damn sure somebody gone nuts if
I
think they unstable.

What did happen is that the shotgun gone off and blasted away one and a half of Sextus fingers. At that same moment, How turnt his attention away from Jarvis and Sirius and TT and fired a shot at Darlene head, but How had shitty aim and the bullet gone into one of Sextus lungs and later they found out it done shattered his spine. TT and Sirius and Jarvis jumped How at that point and Jackie took off in the van, leaving everybody in the dark, just struggling shapes outlined by the moonbeams.

Jackie thinking she could head back to the chicken house and pretend she ain’t seened nothing. It ain’t matter to her that she left her boss out there for dead with a crazy lady tryna turn his skull into a jack-o’-lantern. Me and Jackie, we tight, I know how she think. Self-preservation come real natural to her, and in this situation a motherfucker couldn’t invent a better policy than self-preservation. I heard her say to herself that if Sextus and How died, she could just move on to a new farm, and if they made it she could tell em she flipped out and went to get help. She know how to bend reality into whatever tool could benefit her.

Since Sextus ain’t had no use of his spine no more, he let go the shotgun like he done turnt into Raggedy Andy and fell into the dirt. All of a sudden Darlene holding a firearm right above the face of one the men she could hold directly responsible for a helluva lotta the shit that done fucked up the last six years of her life that she just had thought about. Nat had taught her how to use a shotgun back in the Ovis days, and she rusty, but she sure as hell remembered how to brace that bad boy ’gainst her shoulder for the kickback and the rest. Sirius and TT and Tuck had beat How down by that point; Jarvis done pulled off his shirt and had tore it into strips to tie the sonofabitch’s hands behind his back so they could all take his ass to justice. That plan seemed shaky to Darlene even at that moment. How you gon take a motherfucker to justice without no car?

I can’t feel nothing. Sextus groaned up at Darlene. He having a lotta trouble breathing and foam be pushing out one corner of his mouth.

Me neither, she said back. Her index finger wrapped itself around the trigger, and it felt good the way that shit cut into the underside of her knuckle. She touched the end of the gun barrel upside Sextus cheek, to his forehead, and then the end of his nose, like she deciding on the best place for the shot that gonna blow his whole head off. It gonna look like somebody thrown a jar of strawberry jam out their car onto the road. Strawberries her and the crew probably picked last year.

Meanwhile Sirius, TT, Jarvis, and Tuck is tryna control How, who a big-ass dude and determined to get away. They got his arms tied behind his back, but he keep running off a li’l farther down the damn road two or three time. Finally the three of em done knocked him facedown and sat on him.

Darlene raised the shotgun so Sextus could see, finna blast that sucker in the eyeball. She thought he laying there on account a he surrendered, that he gonna just let her shoot him.

She go, Look. The gun’s kissing you. Kissy-kiss. At this point she just pouring on the crazy.

Your stance is all wrong, Darlene, he grumbled. And you’ve still got the safety on, honey. You ain’t trying to kill me.

She snapped out her insanity for a second and frowned at Sextus and went, Always have to be in control, even when you’re about to die. She undone the safety and kicked him in the side.

I’m just telling you. I’m trying to do you a favor.

I know what your favors are like. She kicked his leg into a awkward position, knee bent up and leg twisted backward, and it stayed that way.

Just go ahead, he said. I can’t feel nothing from my neck down, Darlene. I want you to do it, I don’t want to be stuck like Elmunda where somebody gotta take care of me all the time, dress me and wipe my ass like a newborn. Do it!

Darlene lowered the shotgun. If he tryna put some reverse psychology on her ass, it worked. She ain’t want to do what Sextus said no more in no kinda way, shape, or form. No, she said. I know what I want. Something in Sextus face got double handsome to her when he begging for shit. Them eyebrows be curling like a corn chip, and that li’l space between em getting all wrinkly. That dude
been
knowed how to get folks doing what he want on some sheer animal-magnetism shit.

From the distance, somebody—probably Jarvis—start shouting at Darlene not to kill Sextus, like he just noticed she had put the gun in the man’s face.

Tell me what you want, honey, Sextus said. I’ll make sure you get anything you want.

Both of us rolled our eyes at that shit. Darlene took a long pause and squinted at Sextus blue-white head writhing on the pavement just a foot or so from a giant pothole where his brains would spill if she pulled the trigger. Right then, TT start kicking How in the head something fierce, maybe tryna knock him out, and he be pushing Jarvis and Sirius and Tuck out the way every time they grab him and pull him off. His face got the expression of a man who want everybody to know that he believe in what he doing.

A chilly breeze blowing up the back of Darlene shirt, and for a instant she could see what that landscape musta look like ten million years ago, underwater, when some continents was touching each other and the hills be rolling around on the seafloor and every last fish be a bizarre monster that couldn’t see nothing. Couldn’t no sunlight hardly penetrate down there. Everything around em made Darlene feel like she drownding under a mile of water.

She come back into the moment, a li’l bit further away from me, looking down at Sextus sweet miserable expression and thinking ’bout them eyebrows. She thinking,
They’re thick like Sirius’s and shaped like the hole in a violin.
Some powerful shit in her be craving more time to enjoy the feeling of loving him and hating him and controlling his ass while he a invalid. She traced them eyebrows with the end of the shotgun and goes, Know what I want? I want a real job.

E
ddie finally heard from his mother a couple of weeks after he’d broken out. Mysterious calls had started coming to his aunt’s house with disturbing frequency. Bethella would pick up the phone and hear silence or breathing, then someone would hang up. When she stopped answering the phone, it sometimes rang for a half an hour. At first Eddie worried that the Delicious people had figured out where he had gone, maybe by torturing his mother, but then one evening, he watched his aunt lose her composure and scream into the phone.

Please identify yourself! she told the receiver. Who in the Living Christ is calling? What do you want? I am going to call the police if you don’t stop this harassment!

Her agitated tone put Eddie in mind of the relationship between the two sisters, and the next time the phone rang for a long time and Bethella was not at home, he knocked the receiver off the hook, arranged it on the floor with his mouth, and put his ear beside it in order to talk.

After an ecstatic, tearful greeting, Darlene explained, in a long, rambling monologue, that she had figured he would go to Bethella, so she’d phoned her sister’s old pastor, who provided her, a little reluctantly, with the new contact information. She apologized for the weird calls, but at the same time, she said, she’d enjoyed hearing her sister’s voice again. She mentioned something about taking care of Sextus in the hospital, and by that time, he figured that she had not kicked either of her old habits. He changed the subject to tell her about Fremont, and they eulogized him for a moment.

Almost immediately after this silence in the conversation, Eddie described a plan by which he would return to Delicious, though it disturbed him now that in his haste to flee, he could only partially remember where he’d started out in Louisiana—somewhere near Ruston, he recalled, the first place he’d stopped.

Hardly pausing for a breath throughout, Eddie launched into his own monologue, outlining for Darlene exactly when he planned to come back for her, where to meet him, and at what time. He would drive back with Jarvis’s car, and Bethella would follow. Both cars would stop for five minutes a few miles away from the depot, where a particular dogwood tree hunched beside the road. They would load as many workers as would fit into the cars and take them to the nearest city—Shreveport, he believed—into which the influence of the Fusiliers did not bleed. He’d return the Subaru to Jarvis, in Houston, and let everybody else out at a police station along the way in order to give their testimony against Delicious, for what it was worth, though he doubted that the police would respond in any significant way. He couldn’t live with himself, however, he told his mother, if he did not at least try to expose the place for what it was and get it shut down.

No need, Darlene told him when he’d finished. No need, she said, in an almost artificially soothing voice that made Eddie wonder for a split second if she had switched her addiction of choice to an antidepressant. I’ll be living at Summerton from now on, she said. I’m looking after Sextus and Elmunda—at least I will be when he gets out of the hospital. Sextus was paralyzed during your escape, and you know Elmunda has always had serious problems. That’s why I’m saying you can come home if you want. She gave him her telephone number at the hospital as well as at Summerton.

The changes she described seemed unreal to Eddie; he lowered his chin when she used the word
home
to describe Delicious. Home? he said. That place isn’t anybody’s home. They’re brainwashing you, Ma.

His mother explained that she’d called not only to make sure he was all right, but also to ask him back. She had taken charge of all the business affairs at the farm, and things had become a lot better. Many improvements had come to pass already, even in the couple of weeks since Eddie had found his way up to Bethella. Things were changing, she kept saying. Already they had reconnected the pay phones, which hadn’t been broken after all, and most of the workers would get to leave pretty soon if they wanted to, in a few months at the very latest. Sextus and Elmunda can’t run this place anymore, she said. They are sick people.

Doesn’t that mean you can leave on your own? Eddie wanted to know. And come here?

No, no, I have to stay, she said, in a tone that sounded as if she meant to reassure him of something she refused to give life to in words. She laughed. And I don’t think Bethella will have me anyway, she said. Hammer and a few others are going tonight, they found enough money for a bus ticket somewhere. Michelle we don’t know what happened to, but she did what she wanted, and I hope she made it. You really should come back, honey.

Ma, what happened to my hands?

The line went silent. Eddie, I know you know what happened, Darlene finally managed.

I meant where are they. ’Cause I never saw them again.

I don’t think you want an answer to that. You’re just trying to hurt your mother, Darlene said. And maybe your mother deserves it. The silence returned for several moments, then she said, TT. We stopped to smoke somewhere and I think TT put the bag down, and by the time anybody realized—we had to move fast, sweetheart. Is that good enough? Mama fucked up again. But now she’s trying to make things right. It’s much different here, everything’s different now.

Eddie nearly walked away from the phone at that point, disgusted by the thought of the fate of his appendages, but the image of Sextus and his fake bashful laugh came to mind, as well as the corruption his expressions concealed so badly. Eddie could not believe that things had changed so drastically so soon, and he vowed never to return to Delicious regardless. Had the Fusiliers put his mother up to making this call in order to get him to go back, to entrap him and prevent him from exposing them? It made sense that they might try, given his mother’s habit for crack, for Sextus, or for some twisted combination of the two.

Eddie promised himself that he’d get the Subaru back to Jarvis, who would write something in the newspaper that would tell the world what Delicious had done to him and to Sirius and the others, and they would pull his mother out of there even if it was against her will and figure out what had made her go from talking about Delicious as a nightmare to considering it a dream palace in so short a time. Had she ever truly wanted to leave in the first place? Maybe, it dawned on him, she had been pretending to want to leave solely to placate him.

Saying nothing further, Eddie dropped Bethella’s phone onto its cradle with his mouth. But afterward, amid a rising sense of dread, a suspicion that much more had gone wrong than his mother was at liberty to describe, a worry lingered that someone, possibly Sextus or Elmunda, or more likely How or Jackie, might’ve been standing right next to Darlene with some sharp weapon up to her neck. Perhaps Sextus had such a horrifically strong need to get Eddie back to Delicious and to maintain secrecy that they would kill his mother if he didn’t return. A wave of nausea crested in his stomach and chest, and he felt a violent disorientation, as if he were an hourglass right at the moment when somebody flipped it over.

Eddie called Darlene nearly every day after that in an attempt to convince her to leave the farm. Her refusal to allow him to rescue her became deeply frustrating. Had he stayed closer to Louisiana, he might have effected a forced rescue, despite how badly the first had gone. Eventually Darlene refused to speak about leaving Delicious unless he considered coming back. When he rebuffed her, needling her instead, she hung up on him, then stopped answering the phone entirely. Her actions aggrieved Eddie, and with reassurance from Bethella that Darlene was irredeemable, he eventually gave up.

Around that time, a few months after Eddie had left the farm, Jarvis finally tracked him down.

How did you find me? Eddie asked.

Jarvis explained that the St. Cloud DMV had contacted him about a parking ticket, which had provided the first hint. From the ticket I figured you’d run off to St. Cloud. I looked up repairmen and asked around. That’s what reporters do.

I reckon you want your car back.

This is true, Jarvis said, and then he volunteered to come get the car provided Eddie would talk to him about what had gone on at Delicious. He could get the paper to pay for part of the trip and the rest he could deduct from his taxes.

I can’t, Eddie said. I don’t want anything to happen to my mom. She’s still there.

Still there? That’s great! I mean, not great, but what a story.

They spoke further, and ultimately Jarvis told Eddie that he should keep the car for a while. Most of the people I need to talk to are down here in the vicinity of Louisiana, he said. I can use my girlfriend’s car. I’ll pay the ticket.

Late the following spring, when Eddie had been in Minnesota for a little more than a year, ten months after the phone call, Jarvis finally arrived to retrieve his vehicle. Over the course of an hour or two, Jarvis brought Eddie up to date about the exposé. He read to Eddie a section of an early draft of the five-part series that would run in the
Chronicle.

Few people ever showed up at Delicious nowadays, he said. Sometimes, one of the Fusiliers’ former business partners might appear at the front gate, which the family kept locked in order to prevent surprise visits. Any visitors who did make it in would most likely have heard pathetic stories about the rapid downhill trajectory of the finances at Delicious after the accident, about the magnitude of the family’s losses, about the strange atmosphere that seemed to have grown up along with the kudzu now gamboling across more than a third of the company’s vast acreage, and so they would have prepared themselves to pity this family for their financial ruin. For the perceptive ones, however, that feeling would likely give way to the inkling that in addition to the sad fate of this husband and wife and their once-prosperous farm, a peculiar and maybe sinister tone of negligence and corruption had not only overtaken the watermelon patches and tomato fields now growing more weeds than crops but also tiptoed up the steps behind every visitor, armed with the ability to disappear at the precise moment before it could be observed. Your head turned sharply and your eyes saw nothing, but the sense of a malevolent presence would linger for an instant, like a streak of glass cleaner evaporating from a mirror.

Eddie suffered the journalist and his elaborate metaphors and maintained a polite demeanor, but of course what he wanted most was to hear that his mother had come to her senses and would soon get free of that awful place.

She says she’s running the farm now, he told Jarvis.

Really? Jarvis said. If that’s the case, it isn’t official. Or legal. But she does behave strangely during business meetings.

Is she going to leave there already? Eddie asked pointedly.

Eventually she’ll have to, Jarvis said. But listen, I’m getting to it—I think she’s doing something weirder, based on my interviews with some people who tried to do business with the company. Jarvis went on to tell Eddie that some of the powerful cigar-smoking men who arrived in the parlor would slosh their neat bourbon as they suggested that Sextus ought to sell off some of the farm to develop some sort of real estate interest—one guy wanted a hive of condos inspired by the design of the French Quarter, another had a proposal for an amusement park. Because of his condition, Sextus always received them downstairs, and they all noticed, after much longer than they thought possible, a backlit figure Sextus told them was named Darlene sitting in the adjoining room, at work on something they usually couldn’t discern with any success, given the dim light, though they all reported hearing the clanking of metal parts against one another or the thump of a thick stick, of a long metal pole scraping the inside of a metal tube, or of a foot slamming against a rug in the background.

Oh, that’s Darlene—cleaning my guns, Sextus explained. She’s cleaning my guns.

From behind the visitors, Darlene occasionally coughed or laughed or cleared her throat, and at some moments these visitors thought they detected her making editorial comments on their proceedings in the parlor, although they immediately judged it impossible for anybody to have heard the conversation in the parlor very clearly from that vantage point. One guy said he thought he’d seen her over there pretending to level the barrel of the firearm directly at Sextus’s head, and that at the same time he heard a tiny laugh reverberating against the ceiling.

All of the deals proposed in the parlor, as the guests would know, if any of them had spoken to one another, met with the same ambiguous fate. Sextus sometimes agreed to some aspect of his potential investors’ offers, and the old men would draw up a tentative contract with the eager developer’s legal team, but regardless of whether these fellows paid a down payment or a percentage of some kind to ensure the Fusiliers’ bond, a period of immutable inertia and inactivity followed.

After word got out and a couple of investors sued, with partial success, to get their money back, the number of hopeful developers trickled down to only a couple of rubes from Ohio or, once, from Billings, Montana, all of them apparently having mentally cleared away the brush that strangled the acreage and imagined themselves at the center of a cattle farm where a mass of lowing livestock reached the edge of their vision in all directions, every cow aspiring in its heart of hearts to become a gross of Big Macs and feed whole families of egg-shaped travelers along American interstates.