Ma? he asked, as loud as he dared, a noise that could’ve come from a goat.
The dark, cool hallway, clogged with artifacts, offered no response, nor any clues about where they had gone. Eddie looked both ways, then into the room directly opposite, where, through one of the windowpanes, he spied a section of the front lawn. He rushed back into the den and peered out the opposite window in the hope that he would spot at least one of them outside. He went to the window as if it were a brilliant idea, wrested it open, and leaned out as far as he could.
Mama! he shouted, this time more demanding, less goatlike.
He listened for her response, expecting anything, even a muffled scream from behind a secret door. It was no use. They were dead. Eddie returned to the hallway and ran shouting up and down its creaky floorboards, suspecting that if people heard him misbehaving, he’d get their attention. He called for his mother, drawing out the word Mama into long strings that shook inside his throat as he dashed around the hallway. When he lost his breath, he collapsed against the banister on the staircase and flopped onto the second stair. He wondered how long he might have to wait for them to return, or if they had gone away specifically to avoid him.
Exhausted and scared, he put one ear against the stair. In the ear that pointed upward, to the next floor, he heard his mother’s laugh.
This being his first time at Summerton, he didn’t gather the nerve to ascend the stairs and listen more closely, but on many subsequent occasions, Eddie would remove his shoes and, taking advantage of the carpeted steps, slowly make his way upstairs to follow the sound of his mother’s voice—it angered him a little that she seemed to use a higher, fake-sounding register around Sextus—down the hallway to a closed door. He knew better than to speak to his mother about this aspect of their visits to Summerton, but he drew conclusions on his own from hearing their labored breathing and Sextus’s feral grunts through the door, their low voices and whispers, their frequent invocations of the Lord. At first he tried to convince himself that they were merely praying together. But soon he had to admit that their prayers sounded very sexual.
Over time, Sextus’s technical problems became simpler and simpler—he never seemed to plug anything in—and Eddie would grow restless while waiting for Sextus and Darlene. He would sometimes tiptoe up to the door and listen for a while, trying to discern the meaning and emotion of their murmuring. Eddie would decide that he had to know the truth for sure even if it embarrassed all of them and he got in trouble. He’d plant himself directly in front of the doorknob, dramatically raise his hand high above his head, and resolve once and for all to yank the door open and satisfy all his doubts. There he’d remain, rigid as a slash pine, and hold the position until he became so frightened that one of them would open the door from the other side that he’d have to slide back down the hall and downstairs noiselessly in his socks.
17.
Your Punishment
As much as he hated the toil and confinement of the next several years, Eddie accepted most of what happened at Delicious as a condition of being with his mother. He complained about the moldy mattresses, the wet sandwiches, about having to avoid certain people on account of lice, but he almost never saw past those details to what might have been wrong with the place on a larger scale. The first time he suggested that they leave the farm and go back to Ovis, his mother doubled over as if he’d slugged her in the stomach, and on other occasions, if he mentioned Houston instead, she might fall to her knees on a rake, or cover her face with mud-crusted hands.
Nevertheless, it pleased Eddie to get paid for the farmwork he did, plus the computer repair or other fix-it jobs. Sextus would even sometimes send him off with part of a day-old loaf of Elmunda’s homemade bread, which he devoured quickly with Darlene before they got back to the chicken house so that nobody would know and they wouldn’t have to share. When he turned fourteen, he signed the contract, and even though he handed over most of his very minuscule wages to his mother—he was among the few who did not rack up massive amounts of debt, very deliberately—he took pride in his accomplishments and considered his endurance its own type of salary. He reckoned that if you went around comparing your suffering to the suffering of Jesus, you could get through the worst of the worst like nothing happened.
For some reason, How usually sent Eddie and Tuck out on the same detail each day. The work changed every few days, but having a consistent work partner made the intense labor go more quickly, even when they had to pull weeds out from between seemingly infinite rows of sweet potatoes under a patchwork of steel-gray clouds during tornado warnings, getting soaked by thundershowers and sloshing through mud past their ankles, or, later in the year, harvest the same crop by hand, tugging the stalks and poking into the dirt for the fat tubers in 95-degree weather, with no water breaks until noon and the end of the day. Every afternoon, Tuck would fill the entire countryside with his baritone, and sometimes, once he got the gist, Eddie and some of the others joined in a chorus of “Kentucky Woman,” “No-Good Lowdown Blues,” or “Lonesome Train.” Sometimes if Tuck was in good spirits—or exceptionally bad spirits—Eddie could convince him to sing “Only Got Myself to Blame,” and on extra-special days he might get him to demonstrate to a new recruit how to sing Mad Dog Walker’s follow-up, a carbon copy that never charted, “Nobody’s Fault but Mine.”
Eddie got sunburned all over his arms and the back of his neck from being out there all day. When he complained to How that they ought to give workers sunblock, How cackled and said, Sunburn? You niggers all so black you wouldn’t get sunburn if a solar flare went up your asses. Buy some sunblock down at the store.
Six ounces of generic sunblock cost $12.99. Eddie tried to save up for it, but Darlene needed his money too often, and he gave her priority over a sunburn that really didn’t hurt that much—it stung only when you touched it, or if it touched anything else. He vowed to wear a shirt no matter how hot it got, once wearing shirts stopped irritating his skin.
Every so often, something unnameable surged in him. One June evening it had gotten to eight o’clock and they were out harvesting Charleston Crosses, a type of watermelon so big that How said he’d seen mothers in Mexico dry them out to use as cribs. Eddie was hungry, he said, and How had promised that work would stop at eight p.m., but Eddie knew that it had gone later than that and they hadn’t stopped and nobody else had complained. Nobody but How could own a watch out there, officially. Still, a couple of people hid clocks on their persons, and they had the sun to guess with until that went down.
When it got to about 8:45, Eddie’s body stopped working and he took a natural sort of rest, sitting back on his hams and panting, wiping the sweat and dirt from his forehead and shoulders with his rough palms. Sometimes, like that night, How rigged up a few spotlights on the school bus and shone them across the field so that work could continue indefinitely. When How saw that Eddie had taken a pause, he shouted for him to get off his ass. Although his voice blared through the megaphone, because of the position of the bright white lights, the glare hid everything. Eddie squinted but couldn’t see into the bus. When Tuck and TT begged How to go easy on him, pointing out that they had already been working most of the day and that Eddie was just a kid, How told them to go fuck themselves. He reminded the crew that they hadn’t met the day’s quota by a long shot because they were lazy fucks, like faggots or women.
We’ll stay out here until four in the morning if we have to, he bellowed.
Tiny splats of water dotted Eddie’s nose and shoulders. He always welcomed a thundershower after a hot day. It cooled the earth and all the workers, and made an excuse for work to slow down. Its arrival reminded everybody that when it came to their workplace, only God would show mercy. And even the merciful rain cascaded down their foreheads and over their eyebrows and blinded them. It created mud that got into their shoes and squished grittily between their toes and made it that much harder to get any work done, especially at night. The watermelons grew slippery, and if t
hey didn’t have work gloves, which most didn’t, they’d drop the melons and bruise them, or break them open accidentally. The broken and bruised ones exposed their tantalizing sweet insides and Eddie and the others would salivate, but they knew these broken pieces would be set aside as slop for the livestock. Delicious didn’t want to give workers the incentive to damage fruit.
For another two and a half hours, the rain shot down like the blast from a fire hose, and the crew struggled to judge the ripeness of the crop in the artificial light and to heave the fat orbs into the open side of the school bus. The atmosphere resembled something out of a disaster movie, with everyone scrambling past one another, careful not to collide, desperate to arrive at a quota that had never been specified in the hope that at some point they would reach a magic number that would conclude the ordeal. Eddie had seen and experienced this phenomenon nearly every day; he’d deliberately push time out of his mind so that he could soothe the agony of longing for the end of the shift.
You people should be better workers, How told the crew once work finally ended, not long before midnight. You’re already out of it. All y’all really need to do is move your arms and legs. It ain’t that hard. He lifted his hands perpendicular to his body and let his wrists dangle, then he bugged his eyes out and took a few clumsy steps forward. It’s like Night of the Living Dead out there, he said. With watermelons.
By the time Eddie returned to the chicken house, he felt as if the rain had swelled a river inside his head. The thought of what had happened that day sent him into a rage that gushed over the ramparts. He glared at the brownish mattress he shared with his mother, who had gotten in earlier from her detail and had sprawled out as if to hug the bed in his absence. He complained to her that they had to leave right then, but she didn’t respond.
As he waited in line for the shower, slapping away mosquitoes and looking in all directions at once for palmetto bugs, he decided to kill as many of everything as he could. The first giant bug he saw he lunged out of the line for and leapt on with both feet, an action that produced an unappetizing sound that caused some people to cringe. He kept watch as other bugs appeared at irregular intervals, eventually abandoning his place in line to go on the hunt. In the trash he found a piece of cardboard, rolled it into a stiff wand, and rushed around the entire space, bludgeoning wings and legs and innards on the walls and empty beds and concrete floors.
You just the little exterminator tonight, Tuck commented drily. Kill em all, don’t miss none. There’s one. Go get em. That’s a real public service you’re doing. By the time you done we’ll think we’re living at the Waldorf.
Despite his teasing, Tuck found his own cardboard weapon and helped Eddie out in a lighthearted kind of way. Eddie, by contrast, had a serious vendetta going. When he smashed an insect, he didn’t stop hitting its dead body until it resembled a smear with dismantled legs and antennae.
Die, stupid bug! Die! he shouted. Then he’d examine each dead carcass and stomp on it if it didn’t seem quite dead before sprinting across the room to pulverize the next one.
Over time, the aggravation of that day grew worse, became perpetual, and spread. The bosses gave him increasingly demanding and more physical work on top of the mechanical issues and trumped-up computer problems Sextus called on him for, and he found himself at work nearly all day and all week. Anything became grounds for him to lose his head. He stomped on the moldy cheese-and-pickle sandwiches and chucked the rotten fruit at the walls; he ripped open a mattress with his bare hands; he threw a chicken across a yard; he broke his toe on a concrete wall and had to make a splint for himself with Scotch tape and a maple twig and hobbled around complaining until the toe healed. He arm-wrestled so intensely that he broke the arm of a young woman who then walked around for months with two almost straight tree branches duct-taped around the injured limb. Eddie ripped an already broken toilet out of the wall. He threw a coworker off a moving harvester during an argument. The fighting got him in trouble a lot, but he could talk his way out of almost any punishment because he had Sextus’s ear.
Aside from his age, the other thing that set Eddie apart from everybody else was that he hadn’t become addicted. His mother saw one of the workers hand him a loaded pipe and a lighter one evening and she snatched them out of his hands and threw the lighter across the room and started shouting at him, Can’t you see what this goddamn shit does? and Didn’t I raise you better than that?
To which Eddie thought, No.
Then his mother ambled across the room to find the drugs, picked up the lighter, and took a hit herself, and he watched her hunch over with her back to him, flicking and sucking on the pipe and trying to hide her activity from everybody who had just witnessed her go off on him.
When he moved closer, watching her like a scout stares at a campfire, she grumbled, Do as I say, not as I do.
Eddie left her side and went to sit on sagging milk crates among the rest of the crew. Darlene’s behavior proved her point, he saw. She was like a drowned person hollering up out of the river at a potential suicide not to jump. The next time somebody offered him a glass pipe, he accepted it only to throw it on the ground and stomp on it like one of the bugs, though that started a brutal fight that left him with gaping wounds on his forearms that for days attracted horseflies to the edges of his toilet-paper-and-duct-tape bandages.
Usually, How was the one to punish Eddie for an infraction such as this brawl—whack him in the ass with the business end of a rake, across the back with a leather strap, or on the temple with the butt of his gun. But for some reason Jackie assumed the responsibility to decide how to make him pay for this offense. That same day, someone had ratted on Tuck for stealing a package of Jujubes from the store, and Hammer found the brightly colored candies in Tuck’s pants pocket before the bus left the depot to return to the chicken house. Since he hadn’t opened the package, Hammer returned it to the store (a five-dollar value!) and warned Tuck that the penalty would come later, giving him no idea when, or what form it would take.
The next day, Jackie brought Tuck and the bandaged Eddie together into a field of young corn, with Hammer there as enforcer. Jackie carried a cylinder of Morton salt in the crook of one arm, held against her breast like a stillborn child; Hammer carried a rusty shovel. They had tied Tuck’s wrists together, and Hammer nudged him forward into a clearing with the point of the shovel.
In her usual dry manner, Jackie said to Eddie, Your punishment is to punish him. She leveled a merciless, distant glance at each of them in turn.
Hammer moved the shovel into Eddie’s space, expecting him to take it, but instead the younger man stared down at it as if it might bite him if he touched it. A small aircraft buzzed overhead; Tuck and Eddie looked up, eager for a sign from the outside world.
You got ears? Hammer asked.
Yeah, I got ears, Eddie snapped.
Watch it, Hammer said, shaking the shovel up and down in front of him. Well?
Eddie and Tuck locked eyes, and Eddie remembered how easy it had been to tie him up the day they met, but now what they expected of him would amount to an unforgivable betrayal. Tuck had ended up here because of him, and had helped him to find his mother. Eddie ought to have been helping Tuck get out of Delicious. Now they’d given him no choice but to wound his benefactor, and it wouldn’t have surprised him to hear that they wanted him to kill Tuck. Eddie had no intention of doing anything.
When he didn’t move to take the shovel, Hammer grabbed him by the arm and yanked up one of the bandages, tearing away hair and skin. Eddie twisted his body, but Hammer held him tight. Jackie poised the cylinder of salt upright with its spout open above the freshly scabbing cuts that snaked down Eddie’s forearm. Tuck attempted to edge away, but Hammer alternated carefully between holding Eddie and watching to make sure that Tuck didn’t try to escape. Before Eddie could wrench free of Hammer, Jackie shook a few grains into the red valleys of exposed flesh and Eddie felt a biting pain and stumbled forward. Hammer chucked the shovel int
o his unstable path; it connected with his ankle and he fell on his shoulder into the loose, dry dirt, soiling his wounds and sprinkling clods of earth over the bandage.
Let’s get this show on the road, Hammer demanded. He grabbed hold of the rope between Tuck’s wrists.
Eddie slowly rose to his knees, brushing and blowing dirt off his arms and clothes and out of his bandage. He brought up a knee and took the shovel in hand, then stood, shakily, and gripped it with both hands, adopting the stance of a baseball player about to bunt, letting the blade swing back and forth between his shins.
Jackie and Hammer leveled the same impatient expression at him, their eyelids halfway down, their jaws tightly set.
Eddie struck Tuck lightly on the thigh at first, and muttered an apology he hoped Jackie and Hammer would not overhear.
Jackie only said, Harder, and Hammer pushed Tuck forward toward Eddie.
Tuck stumbled, but stood his ground. Eddie’s blows grew sharper and more impersonal. Tuck took up Eddie’s message where he’d left off, and every time the scoop of the shovel made contact with his shoulder blades or the backs of his thighs or, eventually, his head and neck, and he fell to his knees and then to the ground, he forgave Eddie out loud. It’s okay, he said, it’s okay. But soon Tuck ran out of forgiveness and begged for mercy, until at last he could no longer speak and his legs gave out. His face kissed earth wet with his own blood and he wriggled as if he could crawl underneath it to safety, while Eddie unleashed an aimless rage directed as much toward himself and his circumstances as toward Tuck’s helpless body.
Eddie saw him a few days later, back out in the field—maybe they were harvesting rhubarb—holding himself up with a rake and a broken shovel handle (perhaps the one that had dealt the blows, Eddie thought with a shudder) tied to his leg to keep it set, and one arm in a sling. He imagined bruises in the shape of every state covering Tuck’s body.
Delicious Foods Page 23