Delicious Foods (14 page)

There’s a rock out by some trees that had that Spanish moss hanging on it, ’bout thirty yards away from the depot, but still you could see it from where Hammer usually parked. Darlene like to sit on that rock, squishing a lousy bread-and-cheese sandwich between her fingers before pigging out on it and drowning it with a Popov or two or three on good days, and when she sat there, she could hear a little brook trickling, fondling the other rocks before it go into this concrete tube that’s under the road real close by. She watching a group of crows edge over and pick apart a dead opossum in the road. Somebody once told her that crows could remember your face forever, so if you do mean shit to a crow and come back twenty years later tryna act all nice, it’ll squawk at you and go, Look, it’s that same sonofabitch! Let’s peck his brain out, y’all.

Once, after ’bout two and a half months of working for Delicious, Sirius B came to sit with Darlene. Something wasn’t right about him, even more than the drugs, but it musta been kinda mental, ’cause aside from a faraway glaze in his eyes that look almost like a rapture, his problem wasn’t nothing you could put your finger on unless you counted the shit he talking ’bout. Sirius ain’t did no small talk; he would find the most painful thing on your mind or the most cosmic idea and act like chitchat could just start there, at the most intense part. When you start talking with Sirius B it’s like he tryna stab you with a conversation.

He sitting down near Darlene on the rock and smoking, and when he done sucked up his first hit, he held his lungs tight and start wheezing and talking at the same time he passed her the pipe, and then she sparked it to get the rest, burning the end first and then moving up the pipe to my sparkling chunks of stone inside.

He said, You missing your boy, Darlene? You call him yet?

She shook her head, put me down, and start flattening that damn sandwich again. She went, It isn’t easy using the phones, as you know. Darlene thought Eddie wouldn’t want to see her that way anyhow, that nobody oughta see her that way—hair undone, lips burned, ripped seams all over them thirdhand T-shirts she wore; sweaty, dirty, itchy, and scabby, doing the monkey the minute I got too far away to beam her up. She say to herself,
Eddie’s smart like Nat, he’ll find somebody to give him what he needs.
She figured her sister gonna step in.

So Sirius asked her, Did you get in touch with anybody?

I left a message for Eddie that I’m okay and don’t worry, she lied, but I couldn’t say where to look for me because where are we? She threw her eyes around at the shrubs and trees, and farther out to the gray mist way the fuck out by the horizon. That sonofabitch How keeps saying he’s going to tell me the name of the place and the address of where we are but I don’t think he knows himself!

Delicious phone ain’t work for nobody, they both knew that shit. But Sirius too much of a gentleman to call her out.

That ain’t right, you shouldn’t let them keep you away from your son.

She thought he’s talking down to her, and got upset. I’m not letting anybody keep me away from anything, she said. She gnawed the crust off the sandwich and start chomping on the mashed bread and yellow cheese inside. Her throat dry and she ain’t had nothing to wash the sandwich down with ’cause she had the Popovs first that day and the heat of late August already done dehydrated her ass. She staring at the brook, thinking maybe she could get water from there, but judging by the smell and them crushed cans and cigarette boxes sloshing around in the water and the weird-ass way that the foam foaming up in the water didn’t never disappear off them rocks, she figure that shit’s polluted.

Sometimes I get a feeling about all this, Sirius said.

All what?

The day after the hand sex that led to the bathroom sex, Sirius had said to Darlene that it wasn’t no thang, and said it again the couple of times it happened since, and that phrase kept repeating in her mind—
Ain’t no thang.
It got her confused and frustrated that her stuff ain’t floored Sirius or, if it had, that he pretending it hadn’t.

You know, he said, the dorm got rats and palmetto bugs, we be picking heavy-ass melons or shoveling chicken shit all day in this crazy-hot weather, pay’s the lowest of the low, can’t call nobody, won’t nobody let you off the premises or visit home, assuming you still got one…Don’t it feel like a punishment from the Lord? Like it’s God saying, Fuck you, you crackhead nigger, you can’t do no better than this?

Darlene twist up one side her mouth. First of all, she said I’m not a crackhead
or
a nigger, thank you very much. I went to school. A crackhead is an individual who has lost all sense of the outside world, they’re like a zombie, closed off to the whole of existence, like they would smack, rape, and kill their sister for a hit and it wouldn’t matter in what order. That is not me. And God nothing. You made the choice to shovel chicken shit, Sirius.

Pardon me, ma’am. Sirius start looking at the bus and then off in the other direction.

And Lord, this is an improvement for me! At least now I’m doing good work—
hard
work, but honest work. Darlene flexed one her arms, which had got thinner and more muscular from tossing around so much produce, and also from doing drugs, but you couldn’t really tell which one had slimmed her down more. Work I’m proud of, she said. Can tell people about. And I don’t have to run all over the world dealing with shady people when I’m trying to get high. It’s one-stop shopping around here. Right?

Word.

Sirius nodded, even though the shit they
ain’t
said be as thick as crack smoke hanging in the air, a reckless doubt clinging to every little drop of humidity, but Darlene ain’t know if that feeling had to do with the attraction they was ignoring or with something else, something they couldn’t quite see, or with some shit they both knew but couldn’t share ’cause that would change all they fears from cloudy-ass suspicions to real demons, like demons on
horseback,
galloping down the road in they path, couldn’t stop em. Quietly they watching all the other workers walk out the store and congregate by the bus, and the pressure to go back over there getting more pressurized.

Maybe behind that doubt, and the sense that the intimate moment gonna end soon, Sirius suddenly start talking ’bout his past. He told her he always had a interest in science, specially the sky and the stars, that he wanted to go to school to become a astronomer or a meteorologist, but his brothers couldn’t tell him how you got them jobs, and his mama said you need a telescope and you need to be smart, and he thought that meant (a) they couldn’t afford no telescope, and (b) she ain’t think he smart. His father told him you couldn’t make no money looking at no stars nohow, so he should get a job that paid real money, a job that people need all the time, like building houses or stitching up dead bodies.

His third-grade teacher couldn’t tell him none the steps to be a astronomer neither, except she said you had to be real good at math. He had just failed a math test ’cause he ain’t knowed it was coming and hadn’t studied. Later, he went to a bad high school and he dropped out and started a hip-hop group, but they wasn’t signing nobody from noplace but New York or LA, and meanwhile he stuck in Fort Worth, couldn’t get his crew to move—they was like, Too far! Too goddamn expensive!

But I keep reading the science pages in the paper, he said. Hell, that’s all I read. I don’t follow politics, but science is real interesting to me. A smile spread over his face. He goes, Darlene, did you know there’s a star in the sky that’s a diamond? It’s called BPM 37093. I memorized that, ’cause the minute you can go there, I’m getting on a spaceship. It’s a star that collapsed. A star caves in when it dies. That’s what happened to BPM 37093. And all the carbon in it got crushed up into a diamond. A diamond that’s a
billion trillion trillion
carats. Can you believe that? A
diamond
that’s bigger than the sun? Now when I get there, I’m not gonna be greedy or nothing. I’ma cut off a couple of pieces that’s maybe only the size of my hand and bring those back. I’ll be a mega-bazillionaire, and I won’t have no worries no more.

You’re the biggest bullshitter, Darlene told him, flirting with her voice. There’s no such number as a billion trillion trillion.

Swear to God! Actually that shit is
actually
true. Then, like he tryna prove that he had told the truth all the time, he admitted to her that he called hisself Sirius B partially ’cause his real name was Melvin—Please don’t tell none of these niggers, he said—and the other part ’cause it’s also the name of the closest star to the solar system. He spelt it for her, explaining that everybody who heard the name mistook it for the word
serious,
but all his inspiration done come out the sky. His pupils get wide and he start telling her ’bout the Dogon people of Mali in Africa, said they got ancient rituals that had came from astronomical information that white folks only just discovered, like the fact of the star he named hisself after. You need a telescope to see Sirius B, he said. Now, how the Dogon people known about it so long ago? He also said that the Dogons was amphibious.

Darlene thinking she gotta draw the line at a motherfucker who believe in amphibious Negroes from ancient times who knew shit about outer space, right?

Then Sirius stood up and scrambled down into the brook, knocking rocks over and splashing. He goes, Don’t say you saw me, Darlene. I think I could trust you. Then the sonofabitch ducked into the culvert.

Sirius? What are you doing, Sirius? she called out.

It’s a experiment, he called back. His voice be echoing from inside the tube, like the earth itself talking.

What about the contract? Didn’t you sign the contract? You owe them money.

I’ll come back, he said. Splashing sounds coming through the pipe for a little while. I just want to see what happens.

What happens is you get your ass kicked. Hammer or How will find you and kick your ass. Or you die in that hole there. Or they find you and kill you. She sat back and showed him her feet. These used to be Kippy’s boots!

Don’t say you saw me. Please, just don’t say you saw me. Or say I went a different way.

Darlene wanted to stand up and go with him, but out the corner of her eye she seen How getting the group together to go back to the chicken house, and even though How had his wide lumpy back turned, just looking at that muscular neck made her afraid he gon turn around and raise his eyebrow at any moment once he realize she tryna slip off. He’d run over and pull his gun out to keep her from flying the coop, and that would give Sirius up too. If one of em had a chance, maybe she shouldn’t push their luck.

Sirius! I need you to do something?

The cylinder said, What.

When you get far enough, call this number and tell them where you are, and when they find you, tell them how to get to me. She recited the number for Mrs. Vernon’s bakery several times. Remember it, she begged. Please. Remember it? And call.

Sirius promised.

On breaks, and in moments when she panicked or got frustrated, Darlene be daydreaming ’bout busting out the contract and running too. During her afternoon, if she raise her head or get a two-minute rest from pitching Sugar Babies to TT or Hannibal, she could squint out cross that infinity cornfield with all them bushes or groves of maples or live oaks here and there that went along the many li’l streams that be zigzagging through the property, so many that couldn’t nobody memorize em, and she pretend she could leave and go back to the calm life she ain’t never had.

One afternoon, they had driven out to the lemon grove Delicious kept in one corner of the joint. The Fusiliers, who running the place, had wanted to specialize in citrus at one time—at least that’s what How said—but this li’l bunch of acres, maybe six or seven, was the only part left of that experiment, which they said used to spread out something like two hundred or three hundred acres but had also failed. But now it had only some twisty lemon and lime trees, and the crew found out it ain’t had too much fruit. After climbing through a whole bunch of rows, the twenty of em had only picked enough fruit to cover the bottom of one tub, and even them lemons was covered with all kinda brown spots and holes.

Even How seen how bad it was, and for once he could only blame the bad soil and them scrubby trees, not the laziness of his pickers. Hannibal went, They know it ain’t the time to pick no lemons, they just giving us busywork or some shit. What the fuck.

How ain’t want to, but he gave em a five-minute break and said that after that they gonna be spraying pesticides on the leaves of them trees and aerating the damn soil. Darlene got permission to travel a few yards up the road to squat and pee. On one side the lemon grove there’s another one them giant cornfields, corn they told her mostly gonna feed some livestock, nothing that gonna show up on nobody dining-room table. She found a aisle between two sections that looked private enough to do her business and prepared herself.

By that time of year, the corn be stretching higher than her forehead, ’bout to get harvested, them little yellow tassels be dancing in the wind. Her family raised corn on the small plot she had grew up on—it couldn’t have been far from here, she figured. It had that familiar scent of home to it, sometime she could smell eucalyptus slipping into her nose. Sirius had said that if you stayed still and listened real careful, you could hear the sound of corn growing, a noise that Darlene couldn’t hardly imagine. She figured everything sound like it: the corn leaves rustling, the wind its own self, a creaking-floorboard type sound she could sometimes hear. But she wasn’t prepared to feel what she felt then: the two fields of corn rising on either side start to breathe, like they got gigantic lungs underneath, like they sighing, she thought, or maybe sleeping.