Delicious Foods (18 page)

He had followed his ambition to the outskirts of its possibility and had not found riches there, which didn’t bother him, since he was used to poverty, but he’d expected a certain sense of fulfillment, a measure of respect from his community—What a joke that was, he said, to think that niggers fighting for the same scrap of meat like a pack of yard dogs is a community—something unnameable but gratifying, and he’d found that all he had in the end, once Mad Dog and the boys parted ways, was his own stupid life, emptied of significance.

Just as he had begun to imagine how to redirect that life toward something new, maybe to think about getting a GED, a spiteful variety of fate—others might call it God—put his body in Oklahoma City, in the path of a particular Honda Accord driven by a thirty-four-year-old mother with an alarmingly high blood-alcohol level, especially for a Thursday afternoon. Tuck sustained four broken ribs, multiple lacerations, a busted kneecap, and a severe concussion. While he remained in intensive care for two weeks, the woman was unharmed. He blamed the concussion for cognitive problems that made it impossible for him to return to any sort of work, and without health insurance he faced charges so astronomical that once he’d healed sufficiently and the overdue notices began to crowd out the junk mail in the doorway of his motel-style condo rental, the pressure became so great that it forced him out.

I gone out one day and just kept going and going and didn’t go back. What I had? I ain’t had no girlfriend, my children don’t—I ain’t got no real children anyhow, my brother dead, my parents long gone, and—

They both started and became still, alert, listening, because they’d heard a rustling outside, close enough that it sounded as if it had originated in their heads. The food delivery had already come through that afternoon; by now Eddie had the usual itchy acid sensation in his esophagus from the baloney. Neither of them could quickly come up with an explanation for the footsteps they heard making their way around the barn and casting a shadow through the open places in the planks. Quietly they rose and moved to the wall. A figure dappled with circles of sun and green shadow, made dark by the angle of the light, came around the side of the barn. It moved with animal grace for a moment, then its motions became twitchy. Eddie pushed his eye close to a break in the wall.

Somebody chasing a bird, Tuck whispered. Don’t blame em—them baloney sandwiches ain’t enough for nobody. He chuckled to himself.

The person muttered and stopped in a patch of sunlight. Though cautious of getting splinters in his cheek, Eddie pushed his eye closer to the wall and examined the figure in disbelief and confusion. A desperate and eerie feeling came over him that his fantasy of having crossed over into the land of the dead had leapt out of his control and become horribly real. He saw an apparition—a skinny woman, a witch with missing teeth and disheveled hair full of leaves and short pieces of straw, dressed in a tattered shirt and baggy, muddy jeans with a rope for a belt.

The woman dragged herself through the underbrush on her knees with her arms out, trying to catch an oily-looking grackle that kept backing up. Her eyes remained locked on the bird, which at last fluttered out of reach and into a young tree. The woman’s irises rolled up too far under her lids and she fell forward. She looked like something dead.

Eddie sprinted out of the barn and around the corner, adrenaline throbbing behind his eyes and sapping his breath. Then he paused at a safe distance and peered at the woman and called out to her. She turned to him, but her reaction was not sudden or full of surprise. She angled her head in his direction as if she had heard a faint noise much farther away in the distance. Her mouth opened slackly, caught remembering.

Mama, he breathed, a question, almost a hope that this sad apparition had only temporarily assumed a shape similar to his mother’s. Then the haunt’s eyes flared and took on an intensity unlike before, and recognition blazed between them. Eddie didn’t want to admit that his mother had turned into this thing, this barely familiar shadow, because he would have to move toward it and embrace it, but the relief that he’d found her, alive, finally conquered his disgust. His eyes overflowed, his heart broke into a blur of ecstasy; he ran toward her.

At that moment Darlene turned back to the bird and passionately groped toward it, and when again it moved to a higher branch, she burst into a panic. She rose and her wailing became violent, her grasping ferocious; she tore at leaves and flicked branches so that they snapped back against her arms and face and left welts that soon bled.

Eddie clung to her waist and bellowed, Ma, while she screeched and howled in the direction of the grackle, which leapt into even higher branches, then took flight above the treetops and into the smudgy sky, its black wings flapping quickly, then slowly, then fading into nothing.

Darlene collapsed against a tree and stroked Eddie’s head as he burrowed it into her lap. They remained attached in this way, Eddie pressing himself into Darlene as if he could squeeze her back into her old self.

Tuck sauntered out of the barn and stopped cold when he turned the corner and saw Eddie and Darlene. That your mama, huh, Tuck stated. Drunken bum was right! He tried and failed to remember the song he’d made up, humming to himself in quiet confusion.

Eddie and Darlene paid him no attention. Their rocking and crying reached a low, intense drone as natural sounds returned—the shuddering of crickets, the white noise of leaves in trees, the songs of birds, including the broken-radio cacophony of the grackles. Darlene, with her head back and her eyes rolled up, watched the sky for them but saw nothing. Eddie clung to her rough, foul-smelling jeans and wept, both because he had found his mother and because he’d found her like this, in a state that kept her from really being his mother.

Several strong breezes swept across the area at uneven intervals. No one spoke for a time. Tuck turned away and went back into the barn, and Eddie and Darlene prolonged the moment, soundlessly clutching at each other. What had come before was too unbearable to talk about and what would come afterward they did not know. Better to let the world melt into nothing for a while.

At last Eddie flipped over and scratched his hand through the dirt. Soon enough, Darlene said, Eddie, and Eddie said, Mom, and they repeated this rudimentary dialogue, having been so far away from the fact of each other that it took the dialogue to bring them each back into existence. The words of their names volleyed from one to the other, first as a question, then a statement, an incantation, and, finally, a revelation.

T
hem shoes was the next casualty after the fire at Mount Hope Grocery. Yellow-ass pumps, too narrow just at the front of where the toe start up. Not the kinda footwear you need to got on when you standing all day. And if she ain’t chose the outfit she did, she wouldna needed to wear them yellow shoes; she coulda put on the black flats. She wouldna jammed her feet in the yellows and got that headache, he wouldna had to go for no Tylenol at no store, and them boys wouldna run into him at that time. The store mighta still got torched but at least Nat coulda survived. You could start another store, but you couldn’t start no other him.

So the first moment Darlene had alone with them shoes, back in her room the day after the cops drank all the coffee and then showed her that driftwood, she gripped the heel and the toe of the first one and tried to rip it apart, but the thickness wouldn’t tear. The more it ain’t rip, the harder she pulling—that damn leather ain’t so much as stretch. Them durable-ass shoes got Darlene so mad she bit down on the side of one and be chomping on it like a dog attacking a squeeze toy. Her teeth sliding and her jaw cramping, but my girl ain’t hardly made mark the first on them leather uppers.

She knew she done something ridiculous—you couldn’t hold no shoes responsible for nothing, shoes ain’t got no intentions. But shoes also can’t talk back, they helpless, and what’s helpless always gon take the biggest part of the rage. After she bit the one shoe, Darlene threw both of em at the wall, stomped on em, kicked em. She stopped to think for a second ’bout how to destroy em better, then she found a scissors in the next room, and with those bad boys she hacked and snipped and dug into every last one of the stitches that’s holding the parts of the shoes together, poking the point in, twisting real hard. Then she pulled the leather off the sole and cut it into funky-shaped bits that landed all over, on the windowsill and under the end tables and shit, and she gone to the garage and got a hammer from a toolbox. She beat them heels with that hammer till the li’l layers of wood done come unstuck and be falling around her, spinning under the work shelves and into spare tires where wasn’t nobody ever gonna see em again. If pumps could talk, them poor ladies woulda been yelling,
Darlene, have mercy! What we do? For God’s sake, tell us what the hell we did!

The blouse went next, and that gone into the grill out in the backyard, lighter fluid all over everything, up in a orange flame, like a miniature of the tragedy, like payback, though Darlene ain’t understand or care that she just making them shoes and that blouse the next motherfucking thing down on the chain of pain. The fire made a loud-ass wind sound and the beauty of them jittering blue and yellow flames pulled her closer almost against her will.

Her son ran out there wondering what going on, and she hollered, Stay back, Eddie! He stood there watching slack-mouthed while them evil-smelling synthetics done burnt a black hairdo of smoke up over them live oaks back there, driving all the grackles away. Goddamn shoes!

Ma? Eddie asked, tryna make his voice like a hand that gonna stroke her shoulder blade and make it all okay, like he had a chance in hell of doing that.

She ain’t never took her eyes off that grill. She twisting her fingers together and twirling her wedding ring around like she putting a spell on somebody. Darlene glared at that fire, tryna give it the same intensity it’s giving her, then she squeezed a whole bunch more fluid onto it. Holy Mother of God, that shit made a gigantic flare that lit up everything in the yard and flashed back from every window in the house and from the neighbor windows too.

Darlene shouting, Goddamn yellow goddamn blouse!

She made a vow never to match colors no more. She boycotted Tylenol and all other pain relievers. Way down below her everyday thoughts, she said to herself that she ain’t deserve no pain relief no more. Pain
relief?
Relief from pain? Oh no, she deserved
more
pain, the kinda pain she had inflicted on the man she loved, the man who was her life, the kinda punishing hell heat that had surrounded his body and burnt him up into a tree stump that got married. She deserved more pain than you could put in a human body. She deserved the kinda pain that filled up the sky and turnt into the weather. Like that big red storm on Jupiter. A storm the size of Jupiter itself. Her mind screamed real loud, like she need to get the attention of a motherfucker on another planet, or somebody who might or might not be in heaven, and them screams ain’t never stopped.

After all that waiting, with everybody except her wondering if he had got away and still alive somewhere, they told her they had found something and showed her that piece of driftwood with her matching wedding ring on it.

Then people start coming by the house with all the hope they once had ’bout the husband being alive drained out they faces, and they all saying the same damn word—Sorry. So sorry. I’m sorry. So so sorry. Sorry sorry sorry.

You’re not sorry,
she said to them in her head.
You didn’t do it. Me,
I’m
sorry. I had the migraine. I wore the shoes. If you’re so sorry, do something about it,
she thought, and couldn’t keep herself from thinking.
But you can’t do anything about it. What can sorry do? Sorry doesn’t pull anybody’s husband out of the grave alive.

Most the time she spent resenting relatives and friends, but she couldn’t let nobody know that. She wasn’t no horrible person, she just couldn’t help feeling everything, including the wrong emotions. When she had to deal with anybody, she made sure not to show no emotion of no kind. They wouldn’t like to know that her house felt invaded, that when she peeled all them carrots and cucumbers and whatnot to put out for LaVerne and Puma and Bethella and Fremont and the rest, she thinking ’bout stripping their skin, thinking ’bout chasing everybody out and stabbing her wrists with the peeler.

No, that wasn’t the right thing to feel, or even think, let alone say—forget about doing it. So nothing. No genuine reactions. Acting all zombified made things easier and harder at the same time. Thank you for coming, Bethella. Oh, I’m hanging in there. Yes, it’s terrible. Eddie doesn’t understand and I don’t know what to say to him. I mean, which parts do I explain, and how much? Yes, justice.
Justice won’t bring him back any quicker than sorry,
she thought. In Louisiana, a Negro could find a igloo faster than justice.

At church, with Eddie gripping her gloved hand, all them flower crosses looking blurry behind her veil, Darlene thinking ’bout the morgue, and ’bout that damn piece of driftwood inside that coffin. Eddie looked up and asked how they know his daddy in there, and she laughed a little ’cause she ain’t know neither and couldn’t bring herself to say nothing. If Eddie had seen that charcoal thing with its sickening face in that casket he wouldn’t believe it had nothing to do with his daddy neither. Didn’t no words come to her, she gone back to staring at the picture on the program, and fortunately Leticia Bonds from the beauty shop start singing “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” right then. She had the type of voice that made you think she gonna be a star someday.

Later, when they putting Nat in the ground, Darlene squeeze Eddie’s hand a little tighter and he turnt his eyes down to the casket, and she ain’t feel that Eddie had a grip on her hand no more, but that she had tumbled into a grave herself and be grasping at his forearm, tryna keep herself from getting inside that box next to that black log. She wanted to hold that damn log and stroke it like it still Nat, or like something of him had stayed inside it, even if it crumbled in her arms. As if she could still pull her face right up close to his after he had fell asleep, the way she used to did every night, and kiss him and breathe in his breath.

With Nat gone, she wasn’t no person no more. She hadn’t lost a part of herself, she lost the whole motherfucking thing. Bad labels came into her mind ’bout herself, and all of em stuck, ’cause she had stole Nat from somebody else, and ’cause of the standing around at the store in them yellow shoes, and ’cause of the migraine, and ’cause of who she was.

Even when her neighbors pressured the police and they found out ’bout a group of white men that ain’t had no alibis, Miss Darlene couldn’t be thinking ’bout what
they
done. They was just white boys doing what come natural in the place they from—down south, white boys be hunting Negroes like lions be hunting gazelles out in the goddamn Serengeti. Hell, the damn cops still did it theyself. Darlene focused on the part that she played in the process, how if she hadna stood around in them shoes and gotten that migraine, etc., if Nat hadna insisted on putting his clothes on and going down there, he wouldna been there for them boys to broke his legs and head and toss his ass on the floor like dog meat while they splashing kerosene everyplace like the Devil’s cologne and then lighting they ever-loving matches and gone to sit in they cars. Sitting there like they television done broke and that’s the substitute for
Disney’s Motherfucking Magic Kingdom.

But even in that hot-ass courtroom, Darlene couldn’t conjure up no hatred for nobody but herself while them boys’ steady stream of
Yes sir
s and
No sir
s ringing out against the walls, and the brutality be showing under they cool smiles and they polite chitchat with one another, even the women, even the judges. In the heat, them boys dabbing they foreheads with handkerchiefs and adjusting they ties, but you could tell they vicious bloodthirsty motherfuckers inside. They ain’t stir at all when they lawyer used the word
coloreds
and a couple of black folk up in the balconies grunted a complaint. One of em, a older man, be cleaning his damn fingernails while the lawyer describing the whole of everything Nat had gone through to turn his ass to charcoal. Them good ol’ boys treat they own trial like they was toddlers that had got accused of stepping on a ant by accident.

If any of it woulda made a difference, Darlene mighta paid more attention. It ain’t surprise her or move her none when the judge threw the case out ’cause the damn prosecution ain’t had enough evidence to convict, ’cause why would they bother to
find
enough evidence?

She ain’t feel nothing when the fathers and they boys filed out with they crew-cut heads sticking out them stiff white dress shirts, hugging they wives and mothers like they done saved something precious that the evil Darlene had tried to take from em. Darlene said to herself,
Let them go back to their guns and their private clubs. Nothing will bring Nat back, and killing or jailing somebody else’s husband or son would only burn everybody’s wounds deeper.

She let other folks talk to the reporters—people who felt more outraged than she did ’cause they ain’t done nothing to cause the events. They ain’t know and they never would know how it felt.

Eddie ain’t need a mother who had did that to a father, a bitch who murdered husbands with her headaches. She let Bethella take him to Houston sometime, for the days right after they killed Nat, and later when she start tryna find work. Oftentimes, she couldn’t bring herself to go get him, so she didn’t, and he stayed with Bethella longer. Eddie needed Bethella’s strictness and her discipline, Darlene said—she thought it gonna influence him positively. Whenever Darlene took care of Eddie after what happened, she let him jump on the furniture, bought him ice cream and cake, drove him wherever he wanted to go, let him stay home from school—once she even stole a wind-up toy boat for the bath ’cause at the time she couldn’t pay, but she felt bad and stereotypical behind that immoral action too, even though she done it for a good reason. She wasn’t ’bout to deny that Eddie deserved every last thing he wanted; it hurt him when he couldn’t get things, and she couldn’t watch him suffer for one blessed minute. It woulda hurt more to explain the why-nots.
He
the innocent one.

Nat been gone ’bout a year and a half before Darlene finally got herself a job, a job aside from the unpaid work she tried to avoid, which was dealing—or not dealing—with the charred remnants of Mount Hope Grocery. She heard ’bout the gig through this white boy named Spar said he met Nat once. The insurance money for Nat and for the store be running out, and even though it had helped a whole lot, using it still reminded Darlene’s ass of all she done blamed herself for. Her new job was at a different store, a nationwide chain with fluorescent lights and linoleum instead of wood beams and peat-moss smells, so it ain’t set off no unpleasant memories for her. But unpleasant memories you know to avoid; its the goddamn pleasant ones be causing all the pain on account a they sneak up on your ass.

On one them evening shifts, with Harriet from down the road looking after Eddie, Darlene start thinking ’bout going back to all the places she and Nat once shared, and when she get home late that night, she start going through a whole bunch of Nat’s coats, his bomber jacket that still be smelling like his Old Spice, and his pictures of the Centenary Gents, and the songs he used to whistle start clogging up her mind. Darlene knowed she gotta drown out them memories and get the fuck outta Louisiana. That’s right when she started thinking ’bout moving to Houston. Bethella could guard her son. Eddie like being with Bethella probably more than being with her, Darlene told herself. Eddie ain’t need to soak up all the weird, negative messages she be giving off all the time. Plus, she hoping that she could find better work in Houston.