Now Jackie talked a long stream, you couldn’t dip in your damn toe. Girl had heart-shaped lips with brick-color lip gloss slathered on em, and the edges was shining. Sexy red plums. Her tongue always going somewheres when she talked. Sometimes she licked the corner of her mouth to keep it from getting dried out from all that talking.
Jackie. Jackie? Jackie, Darlene said every so often, trying to butt in, to let her know how much on board with it she already was.
Jackie eyes still ain’t said nothing—they could only say The deal, the great deal, the wonderfulness of the deal. She acting jittery—and I knew why. I recognized her as a old friend. Finally I had to introduce the two of em. Jackie stopped the hard sell for a hot minute.
May I call my son? Darlene asked.
Sometime Eddie say that Darlene didn’t never care about him, especially when it come to the particular moment we talking ’bout now, but she ain’t never stopped tryna make sure she could get in touch. Eddie probably thought his mom loved his dad more than him, and that mighta been true, but she thought ’bout Eddie all the time. Love’s a mother to start with, so when sonofabitches start fighting over who love who more, and tryna say that this action you done today gotta line up with that verbal statement from yesterday ’bout how much you loved somebody, and they pull out they love-o-meters and start measuring shit out to infinity, I get pissed. Me, I think people could love me, or somebody like me, and still show they obligations to the other people in they life as number 2 and 3 and 4 and so on down the line and it ain’t no thang.
When Darlene asked about calling her son, Jackie got activated again. Course you could call your son, she said. We’ll let you use the phone when we get there. Free of charge!
Jackie be showing off the open door of the minibus with her hand like she on The Price Is Right, and Darlene thinking she could hear the sucking of pipes and the popping of rocks in there. The darkness and the tinted windows had kept her from seeing much, and in them days, she always hearing rocks in the background of everything anyhow.
I said to Darlene, I know these folks. I approve. Honey, get the fuck in before the people out in them bushes behind the Party Fool who be listening to everything we say find out ’bout this terrific opportunity and try to come with us. Darlene said yes and jumped over to the minibus without no reservations whatsoever. And when she done that, she noticed a plush carpet on the minibus floor, a carpet laid out in front of us on the road to prosperity.
Darlene hesitated on account a she ain’t know if she could get up into the van. Her eyes rolled into her head and she swooned, almost ’bout to fall. She gripped the footrest to get a balance and flopped onto the floor of the van, next to the center seat. Her hand went swoosh over the beige shag and she remembered being a child and petting a sheep her father had named Luther.
At the wheel, with just the front-seat overhead light on, a red-eyed brother be sucking the last from a juice box, making a racket. When he got done, he pushed the box through the slit in the window out to the road, and a breeze blew it into the center lane and a passing semi done crushed that shit flat.
Jackie laughed, and the driver looked around and gave a broad smile without opening his mouth. Four others sitting in the rest of them seats, all of em hunched-over shadows made by the headlights coming from the opposite side the road. Red Eye turnt the ignition, the door closed, and they was on they way.
Darlene found herself a seat and look at Jackie. I grew up on a farm, Darlene said.
Did you now? That’s sure gonna come in handy.
What time is it? I need to call my son, okay?
Okeydokey.
How far is it from Houston?
Just up the road here, an hour or so.
That close? Okay! Darlene seen a bunch of dark shapes, three in the very backseat and one in the seat in front of that, passing round a little red light. The one in front took it in his palm, and she bugged out when she saw that pipe. The man put it up to his face, and the light be getting brighter as he sucked it in and the pipe start fizzing that fizz that gave Darlene a orgasm of hope. She love the sound of my voice.
You feel like lighting up, go on ahead now. This ain’t company time! Jackie said, and giggled.
Darlene nearly had a conniption. You don’t mind? she asked.
Jackie talked all calm and businessy. This company really takes care of their workers! We don’t judge.
Seriously? she asked Jackie. Seemed to Darlene someone should nominate them for Best Employer the World Has Ever Known.
Seriously, Jackie said.
Word, said one the brothers in the back.
What’s the hitch? Darlene asked.
The hitch is that there ain’t no hitch.
Jackpot! One the brothers passed the pipe up front and Darlene sucked it like it’s a pacifier. She thinking how we could spend time together, but she also gonna have real, honest-to-God work at a place where they understand our relationship and ain’t try to stop it or make her stay away from me. Too good.
This is an incredible opportunity, Darlene gushed. She felt like Miss America taking her first walk with that motherfucking tiara on, carrying them roses in her arms and waving and crying.
I rushed into the few doubting and unbelieving parts left in Darlene’s mind and I shouted, Babygirl, surrender to yes! Say yes to good feelings! Say yes to pleasure! Fuck pain. All that damn pain? Leave it behind you. Ain’t that what the book say to do?
Good thing I ain’t run into no resistance up in her mind, ’cause I wanted to go to that farm just as bad…Now, I get that when somebody walk up to your house and offer you heaven on earth, the delivery truck don’t usually be idling at the curb. That goes extra-specially in Texas. But we couldn’t think on that. Darlene already had way too much shit not to be thinking ’bout.
Once the minibus got moving, Jackie passed the recruits a clipboard and a pen, like when you getting a job job, and she goes, This the contract.
Somebody already done folded that sucker over to the last page and put a bright yellow tag in the place where you supposed to sign. A beefy brother with giant teeth and idiot eyes name of TT squinted at the page and scribbled on the signature line. Sirius B, who a intense, silent type sitting cross the aisle, took the contract out from under the clip, fold it to the first page, and held it like he wanna read that shit in the streetlamp light that they whizzing through.
Jackie leant into his personal space and said, Don’t sweat it, bruh, you just sign.
Before she seen what anybody else done, Darlene slipped that pen out that clip and joyfully wrote Darlene Hardison right on the line. A screen rolled down over her world that showed a sparkling future of joy, just like the book told her she gonna get by asking and believing that she gonna receive.
Picture Darlene not thinking. Imagine her ass floating above that bus, having a long-term hopegasm, rivers of happy sliding from her mouth to her crotch and back, warm and smooth, curling around her body like a combination of pure maple syrup and sex. Picture me fucking her deep, slick, and slow, a body made of smoke, telling her I love her more than her mother ever did. Picture Darlene starring in a Hollywood movie called The Lady with the Damn Good Job.
After she had got to know some her future coworkers and everybody shared stories and drugs, the bus hushed up a minute and Darlene put her head back, relaxed her pelvis, and got all philosophical. She goes, Drugs are good, and she threw a smile as easy as you’d throw a 45 onto a turntable back in the day. The minibus had a smooth, bouncy suspension. Jackie turnt back to listen, stretching them shiny lips across her face. Darlene had thought shit like that even on sober days, now it fell out her mouth like a little stump speech.
Drugs’s good! She said it with extra o’s. But not just! she said. Everything in this country that they tell you is bad? It’s good! She counted on her fingers. Sex is good, fast food is good, niggers are good, dancing’s good, and you know alcohol’s fantastic. That’s why they—they rape it into your head that it’s all bad, becau
se if everybody realized how good, nobody would do anything else! Wouldn’t waste time going to a stupid school where nobody will hire you once you graduate, or working for some big company that steals your life. She sat back again and sighed. I have spoken, she said. Now pass the peace pipe!
You know the minibus be rocking with laughter and agreements on that one.
A while later they turnt off Interstate Something and start down a state or a county route, one without no streetlamps nowhere, maybe without no number. The driver clicked on the brights. Out the left side the minibus played hit radio, all staticky—the right-side speakers ain’t worked. The station played “Need You Tonight,” and “Sign Your Name,” and “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car”—I told Darlene that I knew the DJ and he playing them songs just for us. Then that song “Never Gonna Give You Up” came on and I went, That’s ’bout you and me, honey.
Out on the highway you could sometime make out some misty farms with little shrubs next to em, and out yonder on the road, the lights of cars was shrinking and falling into the past. In spite of her state of mind, everything Darlene ain’t thinking ’bout stayed with her, the way that a sound too high for your ear to hear still out there and dogs or whatever could hear it, or radioactivity your eye couldn’t see could still spread out everyplace in front of you and fuck your shit up. I couldn’t completely keep her mind off her thoughts, even though she kept begging me to—she wanted me to wipe out the experiences that be rising up like the undead, chewing on her will to live. But I do things different. I like to get people hyped up, to loosen they fear, give em some extra courage, put a little english on they stride.
So while Darlene smoked with the men in the back of the van, she could still hear something whispering, He’s gone, he’s gone, nothing matters, never did. We will all be dead soon. Then the world will end, so why go on? Go to him. Be with him. I swear that part did not come from me. ’Cause when folks really wanna die, that’s a substance more powerful than Scotty—imagine a drug that you do it once and you guaranteed dead. Right, that’s called poison. Na-aah, no, thank you, not my job. All I ever said was Smoke it up.
Quiet come down in the back of the van, and the men seen that without no streetlights, you could see the stars outside flickering like rocks in a pipe. That brother who name Sirius B pointed out one them animals from the horoscope, talking ’bout how it predict what you gonna be like.
That doesn’t mean anything, Darlene told him. There’s nothing out there.
Sirius B goes, Then what do you think the stars hanging on to?
Just—just whatever it is. Darlene swirled her hands in front of her face. Just Out There. Like, deep space—God. The horoscope is just some fools putting fake satanic ideas onto nothing. The ancient people looked up through the clouds and said, That’s a goat! she shouted, bugging her eyes out like TT to show the stupidity. And folks have harped on it for so long that now everybody looks up there and says, Look at the goat! She folded her arms, but she wasn’t done talking. But it’s stupid because we gave the names to the stars. There aren’t any lines connecting anything up in the sky to make a goat. It’s the same with everything else. People named everything, so we think the name is the truth. But nothing means anything if we made the rules up ourselves. God made the rules, we just made up some fake names.
Darlene ain’t thought ’bout Nat’s face, or the blood. She sure ain’t thinking ’bout what come later, and whether it had to do with the obeah that Hazel had worked on her. On the way out there, she ain’t even thought about how Interstate Whatever didn’t never curve, how it kept you in a state of suspense. This minibus trip had only one turn, it felt like, a left turn that had happened some time before, she couldn’t remember how long ago. Then the road got real rough. It be bounding everybody forward into the headrests and sideways against the windows.
For miles it’s only reeds growing at the side of the road, then trees come back, then you see a farmhouse with a collapsing barn beside it, then a rusty tractor, then a big-ass wheel. Then the pink part of the sky start going all blue, and Darlene could see faraway shit without knowing how far she traveled, like if she seen a pagoda, she’d a said, I guess we made it to China. Without questioning none of it.
What she seen farther away was tiny trees by the horizon, lame little hills, a burnt-out car. Puffy mist rising out the ground. Wasn’t no towns, not no buildings nowhere, only tall green grass and telephone poles and wires and, later, cornfields, rows of some green plant that was probably collard greens or cabbage, then more motherfucking corn. Darlene ain’t notice, but they hadn’t passed no houses of no kind in more than a hour. Jackie shifted in her seat and the pleather start making rubbery noises up against her thighs.
Jackie goes, Almost there.
Darlene looked out the window and the whole goddamn view was corn. It had took all night driving to get where they going, but didn’t nobody in the minibus ask how many hours had tiptoed past. Too much enjoyment be happening up in that vehicle to keep track of the time or the place. We wanted to rip ourselves outta times and places anyhow. Someday I wanna switch places with y’all just for a while, so before you die you could feel what it like not to have no body. Sweet Jesus, it take a whole lot of worriation out your head. First ’bout doctor bills, and then ’bout racism and sexism, and most positively, it immediately put a end to all that When Am I Gonna Die bullshit. I told Darlene that the whole problem of humanity is that if you got a body, you gotta have a time and a place. But when y’all got a time and a place, y’all really don’t got shit—time don’t do nothing but disappear. People and places and seasons and events be changing faster than you could recognize em, let alone remember em or appreciate em. How y’all supposed to live on fast-forward all the motherfucking time? Don’t ask me. Scotty don’t got no idea. Better y’all than me.
5.
Show Us the Planets
Edward Randolph Hardison always wanted to get things done quickly. Even his birth came a month too early, right after Labor Day weekend, another event in a week of fleeting expectation in the news—the Viking 2 spacecraft sent the first color photographs from Mars, the Rat Pack reunited for a moment, Mao Tse-tung died. After his parents’ overwhelming experience of the miscarriage the year before, they nearly went to pieces as they waited by the incubator, watching Eddie breathe through a ventilator until his lungs finally developed. Nat and Darlene had wanted to get settled before getting married, but the urgency of Eddie’s medical problems, followed by the tentative elation they felt when they finally got to take home a healthy child, in mid-October, inspired them to hold a small marriage ceremony the following March, not far from the hospital in Shreveport. To avoid the appearance of immorality—finding out they’d been living in sin would shock their new neighbors—Darlene handed Eddie to her sister during the wedding photos. If necessary, she and Nat would sometimes lie about which event had come first, the birth or the wedding.
Once Eddie’s condition stabilized, they rushed back to Ovis to attend to their business. The Mount Hope Grocery was in the wrongest part of a town made of wrong parts, a wooden building with thick greenish beams holding up its awning. It had been a gas station once, but over time Eddie’s father had the pumps ripped out, moved the main building, and added another structure until he’d built a classic general store with an inviting verandah where neighbors would soon gather to play cards and voice grievances. A stream ran behind the store, and back there, while the adults talked business, Eddie often tried to capture tiny fish between his palms and once chased after a talkative tabby cat with green eyes.
Before the store opened, on the nights when people gathered at the blond-brick ranch house they rented in town, Eddie’s parents would send him to bed early, but he would silently pass through his open bedroom door and watch what he could from down the hall, where he’d see men like his father, with straight carriages and resonant voices, and women, attractive like his mother but slouchier, with arch, skeptical expressions, crowded into thei
r living room smoking, watching television, and drinking bourbon. On some occasions Eddie created excuses to get up in order to sneak glances at the fascinating box with its bluish-gray, flickering images. But these adults never watched anything exciting, only white men standing opposite each other at podiums arguing in words he did not understand, or crowds of people in big rooms where balloons fell in the colors of the USA.
More often the men alone would gather to watch a game—the Saints, or college basketball. But the rules and the breaks in action disturbed Eddie’s concentration, and he couldn’t keep his childish attention on anything for very long. When his mother discovered him in the process of sipping from a spent whiskey glass polluted by a cigarette butt, she increased her efforts to keep him in his room during his father’s summits, and during her own more sedate meetings with the ladies.
Once the general store opened, all the activity shifted to the verandah and the side yard there. They would congregate at long forest-green picnic tables outside the Mount Hope Grocery, and Eddie’s parents would speak with their neighbors as they went about their day—people in overalls, women pushing white children in carriages. Nat and Darlene encouraged all of them to write their names down on clipboards. During those times Eddie wandered up and down the main street, or into the thrift shop, where he found toys, or he begged his mother for change to run to the ice cream parlor that drew everybody in with the sweet smell of baking cones.
Eddie’s parents always gave him the sense that they were doing important, possibly risky work. They drew emergency plans for him on the blank pages at the back of his coloring books. They forbade him to trust strangers. Phone calls sometimes came at odd hours, and he would hear his mother panicking, his father rising in the night to secure the doors and windows. Not only did his father keep a shotgun locked behind the counter at the store, he taught his wife how to use it.
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