Delicious Foods (9 page)

Six months after all the northerners left, Darlene finally found a job at a convenience store, and Eddie assumed that her new job would open up a new life: Her mood would brighten, she would stop biting her nails, she would finally make it to Parents’ Day. But none of that happened. Somehow, things got worse.

When he found the pipe that summer, he did not know what it was at first, but it made a cool toy spaceship, since it looked a little like the starship
Enterprise
, round at one end and skinny at the other, and he flew it through the apartment between his fingers. He flew it across the universe of the living room repeatedly, trying to reach warp speed. The first time Darlene saw him playing with the pipe, she plucked it out of his hand without explanation, only curses—curses he’d rarely heard her speak before, and that change felt more ominous to him than the pipe.

One afternoon he came home to find her, hair disheveled, one pink roller in, nearly passed out across the card table they used for meals. He pulled out the chair beside her to discover one of his father’s shoe trees lying sideways on the seat cushion, and the combination of these sights made him aware of everything he had pretended not to understand about his mother. In the past, he had walked in on her intensely caressing or staring at photographs of his father or objects he had owned, but this time he felt as if he had interrupted some deeply shameful activity between his mother and the shoe tree, perhaps the aftermath of a voodoo spell meant to transplant his father’s soul into the shoe tree and resurrect him. The absurdity of the situation gave Eddie the courage to ask a question so outlandish, insulting, and terrifying that every other time his tongue had tried to form it, the query had evaporated.

Did somebody kill my dad? he asked.

Yes, she said from under a canopy of her hair, like he’d asked if the sun rose in the east. Then, more ferociously, raising her head, she added, They killed him hard, so he would stay dead.

Who did?

They
don’t know, Darlene said.

It didn’t cross Eddie’s mind until several days later that she could have meant more than one group of people by the word
they.
By then, the subject had disappeared. He kept trying to figure out what she’d meant, but during the rest of the year, all through second grade, he couldn’t find a gentle path to bring her back to talking about his father’s death and discover what she’d had in mind. First of all, whom she’d meant by
they.
The police? The people in town? She’d said it like she meant the detectives who had failed to get enough evidence to convict the suspects, but she’d also said it scornfully, as if she didn’t believe that the detectives didn’t know. Or did his mother mean that
she
knew, but nobody would listen? His eight-year-old brain tried to unscramble the mystery, until a final possibility emerged like a poisonous toad from a bog, shaking mud off, and this option proved ugly enough to weigh as much as the truth. That
they
knew, but pretended not to know. That one of
them
might have helped or covered up the evidence.

That summer, right before he died of pancreatic cancer, Sparkplug told him how they killed somebody they wanted to stay dead. Darlene and Eddie had traveled to the closest hospital, in Delhi, Louisiana, to pay their last respects.

You bind his hands behind his back with twine, Sparkplug confided while Darlene used the bathroom. You break his legs. You bash him in the mouth with a tire iron so that he swallows the majority of his teeth and the fragments scatter. You stab him eighteen times. You set his body on fire in his own store. You shoot him with his own gun. I’m telling you this because you ought to know, he wheezed. And bless her heart, your mama ain’t gonna say.

Eddie was too stunned to believe what this guy, a known oddball he hardly remembered, told him—it would take another five years to sink in.

Sparkplug passed away, and that November Darlene and Eddie moved to Texas, into a small apartment in the Fifth Ward. Eddie had screamed and wept that they would have to leave his father there, and everything associated with him, including the Mount Hope Grocery, but his mother explained, holding in her own tears, that they could come back anytime, and they’d also leave behind many painful memories. The store’s just an empty lot now, she said.

When they moved into the new place, she called to him from the vacant living room before her friend arrived with the rental truck full of their possessions. This will be better, she said, her voice reverberating through the space. We’ll be closer to family, I’ll be further away from temptation.

It was not better.

Temptation came with them. A few months after he and Darlene moved to Houston, creditors started calling. His mother, often some combination of drugged, absent, and sleeping, could not usually answer, and Eddie learned to recognize the calls whenever he heard several seconds of dead air after picking up. Or a machine would say,
Please hold.
The calls started coming several times a day; he’d hear their robot voices on the answering machine when he came back from school, or they would call in the evening. If he picked up, he would try to sound younger. Sometimes a utility would get shut off. He took to boiling water on the electric stove to wash himself. He would open the oven for warmth during that string of chilly nights in January and February that passed for winter in Texas, do his homework by the range light.

Talking to his mother stopped working. She no longer paid attention to the world or to time. She acted like someone wrapped in a gauze of happiness, but a fake happiness that to Eddie suggested that she didn’t care about him. A year later, Aunt Bethella came over for Thanksgiving dinner, but she turned around and left. Eddie didn’t think she would have liked the dry, donated turkey or the generic cranberry sauce anyway. They couldn’t eat the sweet potato pie she’d brought, and he was angrier at his aunt for hurling the pie down on the stoop in her fury at Darlene than for leaving.

He decided not to go to school some days, choosing instead to wander around the perimeter, seeing his friends at video arcades on their lunch breaks. He borrowed what he considered a lot of money; other times he slipped coins and bills out of his mother’s purse in order to support his diet of one-dollar tacos and Bubble Yum. On days when he did go to school, he’d do stupid things like perform a mocking impression of his science teacher to her face or pick a fight with a dirty kid who had dark circles under his eyes. Each time Eddie landed in detention he thought that they would bring his mother into school. Darlene did show up a few times, only to deny her drug use to the administrators, who
acted
like they believed her more than they seemed to actually believe her, but eventually his mother stopped showing up altogether. The school nurse told Eddie that she had addicts in her family too, and to remember that no matter how much he misbehaved, he would never divert his mother’s attention away from the drugs. Don’t take it personally, she said. It’s a disease. Sometimes she would give him five or ten dollars. It made a difference.

One October night, Darlene put on one of her late husband’s hats, a fedora that seemed new, and sat at the table across from Eddie, maybe pretending to be a businessman. He had taken to shutting her out, because making eye contact would provoke a confrontation or make an upsetting episode worse. But when he didn’t acknowledge her this time, she dropped her head to the table, despite the clutter there, and peeped at him from under the hat brim, making owl noises. She tried other animals. Cats, goats. Then she saluted him, raised her voice, insisted they were somewhere else—on a boat, it seemed.

We’ve got to get at the emergencies, sir, she demanded. The other people need to see if it isn’t correctly so that a reaction can’t do it! Show us the planets.

Ma? he asked, hoping that speaking to her directly would shatter the pane of craziness she’d pulled up between them. He posed the question again—Ma?—wrapping his fingers around her forearm as if he meant to tug her into reality.

Show us the planets! she repeated, and slammed her hand on the table, slightly lifting the cards, pennies, and dominoes, nearly knocking over a tiny vase designed for a single flower.

Eddie peeled her hot hand off the table, threaded his smaller fingers between her rough ones, the nail polish now candy-apple red and flaking off, and led her to the balding patch of soil just outside, the size of a carpet, where a few sprigs of clover hugged the sides. Distant dogs barked and trucks rumbled down the highway, wailing like giants in pain.

She followed him, stumbling, and when he’d adjusted to the beauty of the cooler evening air and the spectacular array of pink and blue clouds in the immense sky, he pointed to a bright dot near the moon and said, There.

Calm settled on her shoulders, randomly. The sight of Venus might have had nothing to do with the shift in her mood. It seemed that as far as she was concerned, Venus could have been a flashlight, a motorcycle careening down a one-lane highway, a match losing its fire. Even so, they sat spellbound. She kicked off a sandal and absentmindedly drew circles in the dust with her toe, not looking down. In that moment of peace, he put his face between his knees so she wouldn’t see, and rubbed it there silently, his cheek against his leg, letting numb tears fall from his eyes.

T
he cops in the pink and orange donut shop said the police couldn’t go find Eddie’s mother right then because you had to wait.

Everybody who got somebody missing gotta wait, they told Eddie. Not just you, son.

He sat with three policemen at a table with four plastic seats, the officers looming above his thin brown limbs. Eddie swiveled in his seat, fascinated by how it swung and caught, focusing on the chair to avoid the eyes of the cops. Everything outside now had the same glossy dark about it as the inside of somebody’s eye.

You can’t always tell right away, one cop leaned over his massive coffee to say, if a person has run off for personal reasons or if something of a different nature has happened that necessitates officers of the law getting involved.

Eddie unconsciously made a face that showed he didn’t understand this principle—when somebody disappeared, didn’t you just go find her? Wasn’t it that simple?

This fellow’s convex belly kept his cop shirt taut. His mustache went down to his chin on either side, and he had a soft, genuine expression, none of which matched his starchy uniform.

Sometimes folks can’t cope, he kept explaining, and they run away from their lives on purpose because they think that their problems will go away if they take their bodies off the scene. A bad person didn’t do anything to them, he said, scrunching the space between his brows, they just hit the highway. And in the first few days, unless we find somebody who says they saw a bad guy taking the person away, there’s always a hopeful chance that the person will come back on their own recognizance, because they realize that they love everybody they left behind and that all they really needed was a little breather.

What’s
recognizance
? Eddie asked.

Um, by themselves. It means you do it by yourself. Of your own accord.

Nope, another of the cops said. That’s
reconnaissance.
Nobody paid attention to him.

I went to look for her myself, Eddie said. Because everybody here says don’t trust the police.

The cops glanced at one another and then at Eddie.

I don’t know why anybody would say a mean thing like that, the handlebar-mustache cop said. Don’t you trust us, son?

Can I trust somebody else? Eddie asked. Is there a different police where she won’t have to use her own cord?

The officer’s chest jounced under his taut shirt as he laughed.

Already this waiting period had made Eddie skeptical enough that he decided not to get the police involved even when the time came. He would do it himself. The police, he realized, wouldn’t have the same incentive. His suspicion that they didn’t think his mother was worth finding came not from anything they said but from their general attitude of mildly amused boredom, even from the officer who sounded as if he wanted to help but couldn’t break the rules. He probably didn’t want to seem different from his partners.

That policeman scrawled Eddie’s address and Mrs. Vernon’s number on the back of a parking ticket. Eddie got up to leave, and at that point he gave the men a more detailed verbal picture of Darlene, the one he’d worked on some in his head, and they promised to stay alert and contact him as soon as the waiting period ended. A fourth cop came back from the bathroom and sat in Eddie’s chair.

Brave kid, Eddie heard one of them say as he crossed the tile floor and shoved the door open with his shoulder. He launched himself into the pink lights flooding the far reaches of the parking lot.

He determined that he would try to enter his mother’s mind, searching places she might have gone, armed with a photograph he’d uncovered in a brown album half filled with fading snapshots. The picture he had found showed both his parents grinning in front of a Christmas tree choked with tinsel, locked in the past by denim vests and blowout afros, but he thought he should let the night people see only his mother. To preserve the memory of his father, too upsetting and confusing for him to comprehend at this point, he covered the image of Nat with a piece of newspaper, careful to fold it over the back like a sleeve and tape it there so as not to damage the front.

The police, as promised, left a message on Mrs. Vernon’s answering machine a couple of days after he’d spoken to them, assuring him that an investigation was under way, but he did not return their phone call. He had already given his own investigation priority, because, he had decided, in a just world only he should be allowed to find her, by chance or by God, but since he did not see a point in refusing their help outright, he didn’t respond.

On day three he lingered at the end of class, having nodded off a few times and nearly fallen asleep. He had not eaten well—only free breakfasts and lunches in school, from which he would bring home portions for later, hidden in his book bag and under his shirt. His placement in the second row from the back had saved him from drawing the teacher’s suspicions—though so many discipline problems exploded around him daily that Mr. Arceneaux wouldn’t have noticed anyway. The realization that nobody cared was both liberating and frightening—he could fail that class and other classes, drop out of school, and graduate to hanging out and drinking Dixie beer while sitting on milk crates and playing dominoes in front of boarded-up houses without anyone even raising an eyebrow. He could disappear or die and it would take weeks or years for anybody to realize what had happened.

As he swiveled his eyes through the room, drowsy and dizzy, he understood for the first time that his classmates didn’t count for any more than he did. It didn’t matter if they never acknowledged the shadow of worthlessness above them, poised to crush them like Godzilla’s foot. There wasn’t much they could do to resist that. Few things could save him, as he saw it. School might save him, at least that’s what everybody said, but school went down like medicine. Sports could, or becoming a singer or a rapper, but he wasn’t musical. But with school he thought the odds might improve. He had a sudden sharp mental picture of his dead father crossing the concrete playground and crunching through the grass and leaves outside to peer into the classroom and monitor his progress, his grayish face troubled and stern. Eddie didn’t pretend it had actually happened, but the what-if got to him. He sat up and forced himself to pay attention, stealing a nervous glance out the window every so often but seeing only birds.

Eddie feared that Darlene might be dead, but in the abstract that didn’t seem as bad to him as the idea that she had abandoned him on her own cord. He thought that he would prefer to find her dead than find her alive and have to endure a face-to-face rejection, possibly amplified by the addition of Some Man. Some Man he thought of as a brutish, stocky guy weighted down with gold-plated necklaces, cursed with an overhanging brow, a throaty growl, and a habit of challenging people to punch him in the gut. A foolishly proud James Brown–type with tattooed forearms and a Jheri curl who drove a white Cadillac edged with rust. In Eddie’s mind, this aggressive dude differed little from Mr. T; maybe that had something to do with the increased TV watching that came with having the house to himself. Perhaps Some Man would be his mother’s pimp, though he didn’t know that she had one, let alone if she had actually sold her body. He hadn’t seen her take any money or do anything. Still, Eddie dreaded the appearance of a flashy dresser with an iron fist who would confirm his mother’s status and imprison him with vicious, irrational rules. Any potential attachment of Darlene’s terrified him; anybody coming between them could only widen their rapidly expanding separation.

But that fear didn’t prevent him from venturing into the underworld every night after her disappearance and creating a fantasy life for himself as a detective. In fact, the fantasy was nearly real. Eddie divided up an old map of Houston, already so overused that the paper rectangles had nearly separated from one another. He circled each neighborhood and, starting with his own house in the Fifth Ward, knelt on the map in the living room scrawling through the city’s landmarks, making pie shapes inside the concentric ring roads. Every few nights he’d visit the seediest corners of the pie shapes, each time making new connections, like a paper chain that might lead him to her.

When he had done with the likeliest areas of the pie shapes, he moved outside the ring road, until his nightly journey began to require more bus fare than he could manage on what he borrowed from friends and teachers without explaining his situation, and he’d had to walk home long distances after the buses stopped running. School gradually ended, and for most kids, responsibility dissolved into heat and haze, but Eddie worried that he might have to figure out how to pay the rent and the bills if his mother did not return soon.

Whenever Eddie saw their landlord, Nacho Vasquez, a tan guy about Eddie’s height who wore denim shirts and a bolo tie with a silver and turquoise brooch, Nacho always steered the conversation toward Darlene—How’s your mom? he’d ask. Is she at home? It took until August for him to tell Eddie to remind her that she was two months behind on rent. Eddie explained that she had gone on a business trip—a long one. When asked what kind of business, Eddie said that the trip was a job, she had found work somewhere else for a little while. He told Nacho that she knew about the rent and would pay him when she got back. Eddie was about to get on a bicycle he’d borrowed from a school friend and go searching for her again.

She left you here? Nacho asked.

Mrs. Vernon looks after me, Eddie said. Every day.

Did she go by herself?

Yeah. She doesn’t have a boyfriend or anything.

She doesn’t? Oh. What kind of guys does your mom like?

I don’t know. She doesn’t like tall guys. Anymore.

Nacho turned mauve. Really? Has she ever dated, you know, someone like me? I’m half French and half Mexican.

Maybe. Yeah. I’ll ask!

When does she get back?

In a couple of weeks.

Tell her to get that rent to me, okay? But maybe I’ll cut her a break if—you know? Never mind. All right? But soon!

Okay, Eddie said, and he could almost see time accruing, as if he had turned a crank and made the sun go backward and rise in the west. Nacho’s patience would eventually run out. But Eddie hoped Darlene would get back long before then.