Delicious Foods (15 page)

She finish and stood up and thought ’bout running. Anywhere. Just picking a random direction and trying her luck. She tryna figure out which way she gonna have to go to find people who ain’t had nothing to do with Delicious, who would keep her and protect her if need be. The bus had came from a direction she thought was north, and that was the sun in the west. But she ain’t had no way of knowing which way gonna lead somewhere safe the fastest. Folks knew Sirius had runned off, but management ain’t said nothing ’bout it to nobody, like it be a family secret from 1859.

Maybe as a way of talking ’bout Sirius, Hammer and How and the crew started tryna top each other at describing the dangers you run into if you escaped into the woods, even if you found your way to the bayou. Alligators, crocodiles, black bears, quicksand, swamps full of mosquitoes everybody said was the size of birds, wild gun-toting rednecks who went by the old ways, hungry wolf-dogs, voodoo priests who need human flesh for they ritual sacrifices, humongous tree frogs and poison insects, poison ivy, poison oak, hogweed. TT once insisted, all serious, that the Devil out there, the actual one. He kept saying,
The Devil
—that his sister had seen
the Devil,
and the Evil One done torn the ligaments in her heel so she couldn’t run, but she crawled back to her car and got away. TT said he seen the torn ligaments and everything. People mostly ain’t took him seriously, but he still told the story good enough to shut everybody up and bring out they sympathies.

Hannibal, over there hugging his fedora, said, I ain’t messing with
the Devil.

The earth keep breathing, slower now. Darlene gone over to the exhaling cornfield and put a foot by the edge, then another, then decide to press her way through the tall plants to God knew where: the idea of Away be pulling her farther into the field. But after a minute or two, she realize that they could hear her moving around out there, and that they had put tiny surveillance cameras out in the cornfield, some stuck inside the leaves of the plants, partially to watch the crows and the deer, but also for other reasons. The corn got impossible to push through, and when she done shaking her hands off—they already cut up by them rough, sticky-ass cornstalks—she had to turn around.

Back in the bus, she peering round the geography more careful than ever, hoping she gonna see some shit that give away her whereabouts, that point her in a actual direction, told her what to do. She ain’t never seen, nowhere in the places they drove through, a house or a shack that wasn’t part of the Fusilier property or the buildings owned by Delicious. Smirking, How would point em out to the workers all the time, and Darlene sometime thought he smirked ’cause it meant they couldn’t even be thinking ’bout leaving.

Brushy trees was fanning out cross the ground, sometime gone all the way out to the horizon, sometime they falling off right where the close edge had a sharp drop, maybe down to a river. Fog and mist making it so you couldn’t tell where the field end and the sky start. In elementary school, her science teacher had taught the kids that long ago, when the continents was one continent, the middle of the U.S.A. had sat at the bottom of the ocean, and sometime Darlene find herself imagining that it still there, with the whole of the wind turning into a deep, drowning liquid, with catfish and octopuses skimming all around hills made of sand and seaweed, and prehistoric fish feeding on the naked limbs of dead trees that be pushing up out the dirt.

With the land so flat, the sky took up most the view, and the bigness of the blue made Darlene feel she had shrank whenever she stared up into them gigantic puffing, curling patterns that was smearing and flicking through the sky, looking like a spooky painting, like a prelude to the ridiculous universe up there, where it wasn’t no air, and everything a quazillion miles from everything else and stars be diamonds. At the end of every day, while the horizon going black and she watching the stars and planets blink above the smoke from the planes, she thinking ’bout Eddie, and ’bout Sirius, and ’bout the billions of years since the water had drained off, and the billions that’s gonna come, and ’bout how small her world had become. Without putting no words on them thoughts, she got pretty sure that she ain’t matter, and she did break out running, but she ran back toward all the things in life she knew for sure—especially me.

D
arlene had been gone a few months, and Eddie had failed to find her walking anywhere along Houston’s semi-abandoned commercial strips. But the night people who populated the 24-hour diners and after-hours clubs treated him well, offering to help even if they couldn’t, and he stopped judging them. A guy at a gas station gave him a discount on a pack of bubble gum and a free king-size candy bar. Everybody had a different suggestion for what could have happened, and though no one proposed that his mother might’ve died, none of the potential scenarios sounded promising. She could have run off with a john, some said, or someone could have abducted her. Perhaps someone robbed her and she’d ended up in the hospital again, Eddie thought, like last February, when he’d lived with Aunt Bethella. But he didn’t find her at the hospital, and what’s more, Aunt Bethella had moved. She’d told him then that she and her husband might leave Houston soon, that they would let him know and call with the address, but Darlene’s phone got cut off, so maybe Aunt B. would send a letter soon.

Remembering Mrs. Vernon’s chat with the police, Eddie assumed that they had not arrested Darlene for soliciting and thrown her in jail. She could be on an extra-long binge, a hotel clerk theorized. A few of the people he met squinted and tried to remember if they’d met her, licking her name with their tongues. Eddie’s rapport with Houston’s underworld didn’t snuff out his despair, but when he returned to the badly lit rooms in their apartment complex, it reassured him to know that word on the street had started to pass from sidewalk to fried-chicken joint to strip club to pawnshop. But the routine of getting undressed for bed and brushing his teeth and saying his prayers did not change. He held to it desperately. After turning out the light and listening to the low hum of televisions and conversations in other apartments gradually settle down to the nervous tension of silence, he watched the movements of shadows on the ceiling and did not sleep until his uneasiness mingled with exhaustion and boredom and took his senses hostage. Then he rolled his borrowed bicycle down the steps and all over Houston. The Fifth Ward, where he and his mother lived, sat in the middle of Houston, so he often didn’t have to travel that far, and Houston didn’t have much in the way of hills, which made biking relatively easy. Cars and trucks caused more trouble for him than distance or topography.

He could not keep from searching during the day, but the best leads came at night. Once school ended, he’d spend the afternoon reading car magazines in libraries and bookstores, or visiting school friends, fixing their bicycles and hooking up their Nintendo systems, then playing Donkey Kong Jr. and Super Mario Bros. until their dinnertimes, when he would usually slink away unless he could figure out how to stay and eat something other than cereal or sandwiches without having to explain anything about his situation at home. At night, he would mount his bike to continue the quest, sometimes pretending to be a Batman-like character.

The seedier areas of Houston became his haunts. Down in Garden Villas, Eddie met a lady who called herself Giggles, and though she didn’t seem to know much, he enjoyed running into her every few nights. Like a lot of people, she mistook him for a runaway at first. Many others had made that mistake, and it angered him, but sometimes they gave him food, so he tried to keep his cool. But this time he lost his composure and shouted, No, I’m the opposite of a runaway! I’m a stayahere!

Giggles told him that she’d seen a woman out walking in Montrose who resembled his mother, but when he went there the next night, a pothead by the name of Myron couldn’t confirm her report. Myron did think that Darlene might be going under a different name out in Southwest or up in Hidden Valley.

In Hidden Valley several nights later, Eddie spotted a group of women on the other side of 45, but by the time he found the closest underpass and arrived in the place where he’d seen them, they’d disappeared into various town cars with darkened windows. At a tattoo parlor, a guy called Bucky ushered him out of the place immediately but stopped outside to listen to Eddie’s description of his mother. Bucky claimed to know six different women who sounded exactly like Darlene, and wanted to know what an eleven-year-old kid was doing in that part of town so late. Frowning sweetly, he paid for Eddie to take a cab home and tossed the bike into the backseat.

That routine had lasted a month and a half. By late August, Eddie’s sources started to yield other sources. Giggles told him to find a woman of the night nicknamed Juicy near where Giggles worked, up on Telephone Road, then Juicy told him to go way further north, to Jensen Drive. Jensen Drive was on the way home, so Eddie saved it for another night. When he got there, to a strip mall that contained an arts-and-crafts emporium, a post office, a dusty liquor store, and a pet-store franchise, Eddie met a chain-smoking Asian transsexual who called herself Kim Ono. She suggested he go back to Southwest, walk down Gulfton Street, and find a hooker named Fatback.

Fatback knows everything that happens before it happens, she said, and quite a bit that don’t.

How will I find her? Eddie asked. What does she look like?

Kim Ono rolled her eyes and said, Kid, her name’s Fatback for a reason, okay? Arching one penciled-in eyebrow at him higher than seemed humanly possible, she ashed her cigarette into a mailbox. Federal crime, she said, grinning.

When he found Fatback, a self-assured, meticulously put-together lady who had more of a landscape than a body sitting on top of her legs, like chocolate soft-serve, she claimed with utter certainty that she’d seen Darlene before, but only a few times, and not for a couple of months. Despite this ambiguous news, it seemed to Eddie that the Southwest area might prove fruitful. He visited the surrounding neighborhoods for the next three nights, but nothing happened. He started to ask himself,
Why can’t I find another family that won’t disappear?

Fatback kept an eye out for him, or so she said, and after another two months, in October, he visited the same area again, having no better ideas, his hopes nearly extinguished.

But then he ran into Giggles in his neighborhood, and she could always spare the time for him because she didn’t get a lot of business. All the johns found her inappropriate laughter off-putting. Just picture it, she said, every time a guy takes down his pants, I laugh. It’s a nervous habit, I can’t control it. She chuckled as if to demonstrate. I laugh like that all the time, but most guys don’t like it none when it look like you laughing at they business. If I turn away to do it, it’s worse. Mens really insecure. Present company excluded, I’m sure.

She passed her long-nailed hand over his head, and he wondered if she would have sex with him for free, but he couldn’t form the right question to pursue the idea and he dropped it.

Except my regular guys, she went on. They like it a little
too
much. But every time a new guy stops I need to give him a damn disclaimer. Whoops, I cursed in front of a child. And I shouldn’t be telling you this. You’re, like, a baby! You remind me of my li’l cousin!

They spent a long time chatting in front of a chain-link fence that surrounded the parking lot of a nautical store out by I-45, standing under a banner that read 
50%
OFF ALL BOATS.
The sign, strung up on the side of a parked semitrailer without a truck tractor, flapped in the wind stirred by speeding vehicles. It wasn’t completely impossible that a driver going by might think that she sold boats. Intermittently, Giggles would make a desultory attempt to attract someone passing by. He liked that she couldn’t get anyone to stop because the thought of other men with her made him jealous. Eddie wanted her to babysit him, or be his girlfriend, or do something that combined the two but didn’t have a name.

Only when she spotted a car she recognized, a shiny Trans Am yellow as an egg yolk, did she perk up, and she hopped over to the side of the road, shouting, Hey, Danny! What up, Dan-Dan? Yo!

Eddie clenched his jaw and kicked the pavement as he watched them negotiate; he figured she’d forgotten him and he began to turn away, thinking of the next place he might go, but Giggles called out and wiggled her fingers at him just before closing the door and speeding away with Dan-Dan, and he forgave everything. He yawned—he had stayed out until nearly two a.m. again. The company of his night friends had started to seem safer than the empty apartment.

Eddie walked seven times in a circle around the poles holding up the front end of the semitrailer, precisely, heel to toe, sometimes underneath the truck—halfway hoping to produce some magical effect that would bring Giggles back. He began saying things to hear what they sounded like in that metallic, echoing space, nonsense about how he wanted Giggles to come back so he might fuck her, that he felt left out because he was the only one she
wouldn’t
do it with even if he had the money, and then idly he sang out his mother’s name. He threatened to become a pimp if Darlene didn’t come back, thinking that would surely get her attention, even if she’d become a ghost. After he strained his vocal cords, he started whistling instead, and then finally quieted down.

A disembodied voice exploded the silence, startling Eddie. An older man’s raspy baritone seemed to hover somewhere near the truck, maybe underneath, perhaps inside. Phlegmy coughing sessions interrupted his speech—you couldn’t call them fits; fits didn’t last that long.

Eddie traveled around the truck again, thinking that he might discover someone under it who had a weapon and might steal from him one of the last two valuables he still owned—his five-dollar bill or his life. Instead, as he investigated, he eventually made out the shape of a bum lying against a dumpster a few yards beyond the semi. As he approached, Eddie saw that the man had planted himself in a nest of empty, capless bottles of Four Roses and Thunderbird and crushed red-and-white-striped boxes from fast-food joints whose thin, oily sheets of wax paper escaped from him and skittered across the abandoned lot, their journey interrupted occasionally by long grass that punctured the snaky black cracks in the asphalt.

When the man spoke, the underside of the semi and the boats on the other side of the fence caused his voice to bounce and carry, giving it an almost supernatural authority. Lookin’ for Mama, the man announced almost tauntingly, like the title of a film he was about to screen.

Eddie stopped and scowled in the direction of the voice. This man had overheard information he had shared in private. As if he hadn’t offended Eddie enough, the homeless dude then improvised an almost incoherent, mocking blues song around the statement.
I know where yo’ mama at. Drunken Bum know where yo’ mama at.
Eddie stood stewing, full of stranger-hate.
Whatcha gonna do for Drunken Bum before Drunken Bum tell you where yo’ mama gone?
Despite the taunt, Eddie noticed that although the man had so much trouble speaking, he was actually a very good singer. A few times he repeated a line that might have come from another song:
I ain’t got no mama now.
Then he stopped singing.

Yeah? Where you think she at? Eddie spat.

You go buy me some drinkahol, son, before I tell you nothing.

The fuck I will.

What say?

You don’t know
shit,
Eddie snarled, emphasizing the curse word, excited to vent and test profanity out on an adult. You just trying to get some more wino wine.

I know what happen to yo’ mama,
the man mutter-sang. Then, in a rambling, improvised song, he described Darlene, with enough identifying details—the handbag she carried, the type of shoes she wore, her hairstyle, the correct position of the most prominent mole on her face—that Eddie arched his back, readying himself to attack the man if, as he feared, the bum decided to lay insults on top of a description he now recognized as his mother.
She real cute,
he sang lasciviously.
But she lost her teeth. Ain’t got no teeth! But she’s cute enough to hold. Yes, she a beaut! But only when her mouth be closed.
He collapsed in laughter.

Eddie became a child again and rushed over to the bum. What? What happened? Where is she? She lost her teeth? How?

This here jaw don’t flap until it get loose, got it? Liquor store down that road. He gestured vaguely in a direction where there did not seem to be a street.

I’m twelve years old, Eddie protested.

I don’t give a fuck if you’s a embryo, nigger! Git! Wanna know where your mama at, don’tcha? By now Eddie had gotten near enough to smell a cloud of sour whiskey around him, body odor as pungent as a plate of raw onions.

Finding an adult to get liquor for him did not present so big a problem; he had heard many kids from school say they did so on a regular basis. The larger difficulty lay on the other side of that one—how could he find this wino again should he come across the liquor store and figure out how to buy the malt liquor the man demanded? What if he paid for the stuff and returned to find the guy gone? How to make sure this character, who came off so much like an evil spirit already, wouldn’t disappear?

How come you remember so much about my mom if you drunk all the time? Eddie asked.

Ain’t no fun remembering the shit that done happened to
me
, nigger, the bum slurred. Eddie felt the guy waiting for him to laugh, but he couldn’t.

They went back and forth this way for a while. Eddie tried to get the guy to come with him, but the bum would not rise. The boy considered taking his chances—after all, there’s nothing more pathetic than an alcoholic who can’t motivate himself enough to get his own booze. But uncovering a viable lead after so many dangerous weeks of searching made Eddie nervous enough to hyperventilate. The notion that this fellow might be the only obstacle between him and his mother gave him practically superhuman willpower and tenacity.

No matter how much the man insisted he wouldn’t go anywhere, Eddie couldn’t believe him. Not surprisingly, the man had nothing worth using as collateral.

Eventually, in the near distance, Eddie spotted a length of twine that had once held a large box closed and, with the bum’s grudging consent, tied his wrists first together and then to the landing gear of the trailer with a knot so haphazard that it would have no choice but to remain secure.