Delicious Foods

by James Hannaham

  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.

  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.

  10.

  Drunken Bum Knows

  Darlene 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.