Delicious Foods

by James Hannaham

  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 pres
ent 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.

  You gonna make my ass late for the presidential cotillion, the man said. ’Cause that’s where I’m planning to take the forties you bringing me.

  Eddie walked away backward with the bike, watching carefully to make sure the man couldn’t escape, and he hid behind a sedan at one point to be certain the guy could not get away. Then he leapt on the bike and pedaled frantically until he reached the liquor-store parking lot.

  After a few tries, he found a Houstonite by the local convenience store who seemed outwardly immoral. He told his story and offered up an inadequate five-dollar subsidy. The young guy bought him a pair of warhead-shaped bottles of piss-colored liquid in two paper bags inside a third plastic bag with handles, which Eddie slipped over one handlebar and rushed back to the lot to deliver.

  He found the man kneeling by the trailer, in position for prayer but cursing, snarling, biting like an animal at the crazy knot. He claimed to know voodoo, boasted he was a high priest, threatened to lay a curse on Eddie to rival the one laid on Ham.

  By Papa Legba, nigger, you’ll be a nigger forever, the man spat, and your whole kin gon be niggers. Black dark evil muddy-ass niggers, too dumb to know they own name and so black you can’t see em in the daytime. Lips so thick they gotta eat through a straw, nose so flat they can’t breathe, hair so bushy housecats’ll get lost in it.

  Eddie set down the bags with the bottles in them and stood next to the man, attacking the bizarre tangle of twine, digging into its tight knots with his fingernails, tugging and severing it when nothing else would work. Once the man found himself free of the handcuffs, he fell on one of the paper bags and tore down the side to reveal the forty, which he did not waste time admiring but twisted open and guzzled three-quarters of before he settled down enough to acknowledge Eddie’s presence again.

  With his eyes on the second, he slowed his sipping of the first and regarded his captor with a certain resentment, a resentment Eddie suddenly understood that he might never reverse, even if he managed to sweet-talk information out of the guy.

  Yo’ mama got in the Death Van, the bum said, punching the word Death, almost laughing.

  Death Van? Fuck you, you lying s—

  They come around with this here van, okay, and I seen a mess of folks get in thisyer van, but don’t none of em come back. Now they asked me to go, and I heard them saying they take folks off to do some wonderful job somewheres, but I said to myself, What kinda job it is you don’t come back from? He nodded as if Eddie had already offered the correct answer. Death, that’s the only job a nigger don’t never come home from. They prolly out there making some nigger-flesh dog food. Maybe I’m paranoid, or it’s a exaggeration, but something’s going on.

  Eddie had heard or read the story about the man who goes to hell to get his wife back and eventually does bring her home, and even though he couldn’t remember where he’d heard it—school probably—or the details of the story, he believed that you could go to hell and bring people back safely.

  Where do they come get people?

  Just up the road a piece. Northwood Manor, near the Clayton’s supermarket.

  Take me there.

  The beggar refused, and as soon as he refused, Eddie snatched the undrunk bottle of yellow liquor away from him and moved backward, holding it above his head as if he might dash it against the concrete. This aroused a fit of shouting and cursing and then coughing from the older man, who looked wildly at the bottle as if it were his child. He rose to a standing position and lumbered toward the bottle with an arm outstretched as Eddie played a vicious game of keep-away around his intoxicated body. When they seemed to become aware of the game’s endlessness, the fact that Eddie would never give him the bottle and he could never capture it, the ridiculousness of the standoff became apparent, and neither of them could hold his laughter. Even though Eddie hated him and figured the feeling was mutual, the man then agreed to take Eddie to the last location where he’d seen the Death Van.

  I reckon it ain’t that far, the bum said. It took a while, but Eddie managed to thumb a ride for them from a pickup, throwing the bike into the bed of the truck.

  They called him Tuckahoe Joe, the bum explained to Eddie and the driver, or just Tuckahoe, or Tuck, because he had grown up in a place called Tuckahoe and because his real name was a girl’s name that a lot of men in his family had cursed each other with, so he went by the nickname instead.

  I started using it when I played out, he said. Music, that is. I used to play blues music. You know what that is?

  Eddie nodded, though he felt the stab at his intelligence.

  Now I just live the fucking blues, Tuck muttered. Played bass guitar for a very popular fella called Willie “Mad Dog” Walker. For years. You heard a him? He’s T-Bone Walker Jr.’s second grandnephew. Or that’s what he used to say, anyway. “Only Got Myself to Blame”—you know that song? That’s him, anyway, his one big hit.

  Tuckahoe sang a little but Eddie didn’t recognize the tune. Old folks’ music, he thought. Dead folks’ music. Tuckahoe told them that the band had toured the East Coast and then come to Houston by public transportation alone. They would take the bus or the train from one city to the next and then walk or hitchhike when there wasn’t enough of a connection. As if to verify his tale, he listed every city he had passed through on the way and how to hook up from one system to the next.

  When you get to Houston, though, he said, you can go to Dallas or Austin or San Antonio, but between them and El Paso it’s all desert, so the band had to stop. Originally we stopped in Austin. Austin’s like a pitcher plant. Well, it was for me. You know what that is? A pitcher plant? It’s a plant that eat flies, like a Venus flytrap, but it catches them by having a sweet sweet pool of sugariness inside, down at the bottom, and slippery walls, so that when the fly land on the damn thing, he slip on down in there and drown in happiness. Come to think of it, New Orleans even more like that, but it’ll kill you faster. Anyhow, he said, tipping the first bottle vertically above his head to get the last taste of nectar, I’m still drowning in happiness.

  The driver made a horrified face as Tuck drank, but said nothing.

  Tuck looked at the label before placing the bottle between his feet and uncapping the second.

  The driver took a deep breath.

  The closer they got to their destination, the more Tuck’s monologue sagged and melted. He also had a hard time remembering exactly where he’d seen the
Death Van. Facts contradicted one another; Tuckahoe was in Virginia at first, then in New York, names ballooned with improbability—We opened for the Rolling Stones in Memphis the night MLK got shot, he said—until finally the narrative exploded and the plastic masks fell off his accomplishments. Eddie tried to believe his stories out of sympathy, as he could sense the extremity of Tuck’s abandonment, but at the same time Tuck had become gradually more repulsive to Eddie during the ride and had widened the gap between himself and Eddie, not to mention the driver, in what was perhaps a self-fulfilling prophecy of loneliness. Eddie worried that he’d arrived at another dead end, with another disoriented person whose addiction made his mind too foggy to recall anything.

  But only a few minutes later, Tuck got a flash of insight and suddenly demanded that their ride let them out a few yards away from the parking lot of a Party Fool, closed but still brightly lit. With the chain store’s harlequin mascot looming above on the roof, governing their every move with his scepter, they disembarked. The driver helped Eddie lift the bike out of the truck. Tuck removed the second, half-empty forty from its paper bag, chugging as he advised Eddie about how the drivers of the Death Van operated.

  They’re picking on the people that’s the most out of it, he said. That’s what it seem to me. I don’t know how you going to get them interested as just a little boy. They only after the worst of the hookers, the junkies, and the alkies, y’see, people rocked out they mind. Hey, maybe they selling Negro skeletons to Baylor for research. After that Tuskegee shit, anything could happen.

  They waited for an hour and fifteen minutes, until a navy blue minibus slowed to a stop twenty yards ahead of them with the smoothness of a panther, then everything went silent for a moment, until the next car passed a couple of minutes later.

  For the first time in some time, Tuck became silent, contemplative, almost reverent. He took a sip of malt liquor and leveled his rheumy eyes at Eddie. You lucky tonight, kid, he eventually murmured. He coughed and spat. Or, not lucky.