Delicious Foods

by James Hannaham

  Remember Sirius B? Darlene suddenly asked.

  Not very well, Eddie said. But you were involved with him, weren’t you?

  I still daydream about him sometimes, she said.

  It seemed like a girlish confession, a chamber of her personality that his mother rarely opened.

  He was a very interesting guy, Eddie offered. From what I hear, he’s doing well in the music business.

  I did a lot of daydreaming back at Delicious, Darlene said. You had to. Especially in the fields on those details. She didn’t turn away from the TV.

  Eddie allowed her to define what she’d done as daydreaming, choosing not to argue. Daydreaming, he thought. If only.

  Like everybody, she said, she figured out a way to keep her attention focused just enough to accomplish whatever task she’d been assigned, so that her mind could travel in any direction it pleased even if they would not allow her body to follow. She told Eddie that she often found herself disappearing to a strange episode she had shared with Sirius one diamond-clear evening. The sun had tipped over the horizon and turned the land in the west into a velvet silhouette, while off to the east, the sky had become a navy blue felt blanket shot through with pinholes, all of them mysterious—was each one a distant home? A streetlamp? A high, oblivious airplane? Some celestial event?

  We knew without having to be told, Darlene said, that we would have to work overtime, into the night. The managers never turned on the work lights until the very last possible moment. How’s main purpose in life was to make sure Delicious never went over budget.

  Eddie laughed in agreement and said he remembered that.

  His mother sought out his hand and looked down when she found his prosthesis instead. An unspoken shame for having momentarily forgotten the past seemed to radiate from her; she skipped over the apparatus, and her fingers made gentle contact with the skin of Eddie’s forearm.

  It’s okay, he said. Forgiveness never ends, he thought to himself. Either it’s a bottomless cup or it’s nothing. Black—no milk, no sugar. Come up next month, Ma. I’ll take care of the airfare. Immediately he chided himself for having made this offer before clearing it with Ruth.

  Really? she said.

  Maybe I’ll make dinner for you and Ruth and Nat, maybe Bethella will come by.

  Let’s not go too fast! she exclaimed at Bethella’s name.

  Darlene locked eyes with her son. Eddie tried not to smile or cry. The longer they held this look, the more it expanded, seeming to contain everything—the events of their past as well as the consequent emotions: pain, joy, betrayal, estrangement, love, hate. Then the moment blew like an overloaded fuse.

  She spent a moment trying to remember the subject of their conversation, then said, Sirius! So me and Sirius, we turned into a couple of black blobs out there that night, squatting to pick strawberries, turning invisible.

  The moon hadn’t come up yet. In that sable darkness they found an advantage. Sirius knelt in the dirt behind her to rest, an act that, had How seen it, would’ve earned him a severe reprimand. He had stopped picking anything in favor of shaking the vines in order to make a noise that sounded like work. Darlene stopped too and raised her hand to wipe her brow and take a whiff of the strawberry residue that coated her fingertips, the only pleasure the job had to offer, and a dubious one at that, given the stickiness that accompanied it. In the midst of his rustling, Sirius quietly begged her to join him, and she inched her way in his direction, still squatting, duck-style. By this time, the dusk glowed a striking pink stroke against the black of the distance, and stars revealed themselves like champagne bubbles along the inside of a vast fluted glass. When she arrived at his side, placing her hand on his sweaty back through the cutout sleeve of his shirt, he pointed out various constellations, the centaurs and scorpions in the sky that she had never quite believed in.

  He explained to her again the concept of light-years: light traveled six trillion miles in one of our years. Somehow that sounded slow to her. She found it disturbing and difficult to fathom when he repeated that the starlight they saw that night had really happened hundreds of years in the past and only reached their eyes that day. It offended her that the past could intrude so literally on the present yet never return. It made her think of everything in her own past that had brought her to Delicious and that she wanted to reverse, and how the light from the stars had come from long before the time she had been with her son, even from before the time when Nat had been alive. Only then could she faintly accept the romance of it; of human beings, all by themselves on a wet rock in an outpost of a universe whose size they couldn’t comprehend, staring into the heavens to make primitive pictures in the air based on lights that might not even exist anymore. And one of these days all of it would disappear, at least the way Sirius described it: space would collapse, the planet would get torn apart by a comet, the sun would fry the solar system with a supernova, some catastrophe would obliterate human history and civilization. We’ll be lucky, he said, if our bones become somebody else’s fossils.

  Darlene absorbed all of this information from him but could find no hope in it whatsoever. Why, she asked, if all these small things we do, all this work that gets dumped on us day after day, if all our love and our attachments mean absolutely nothing and everything will eventually get incinerated, why do we bother to do anything? Is there any reason to keep on living? Is that why it’s better to smoke our lives away, why oblivion and death seem to call to us continually, like they’re summoning us home? How do we do it? How do we go on?

  Before Sirius could respond, How turned on the lights, a pair of those bright white spotlights mounted on stands in clusters of six, and unleashed the type of dazzling illumination you might normally find on a Little League field in a suburban town. The two of them must have felt electrocuted. They froze for an instant, then their limbs unclenched, and as if falling out of the cosmos, they reset themselves to the task of foraging in the low plants and vines and dirt to find unbruised, pristine specimens and gently place each berry into one of the small boxes they carried for that purpose.

  So I never got to hear his answer to the question, Darlene said. I found my way, but I wanted to know what he thought.

  I reckon I heard the answer, Eddie said, and he began to relate how during Sextus’s trial, he and Sirius had gone with Michelle and a couple of people on the prosecution team—a lawyer and a young clerk—to a diner a few blocks down the road, the kind that looks like an Airstream trailer, wrapped in aluminum that’s been polished and faceted into diamond shapes, flooded inside with that pleasantly unpleasant odor of many years of hot bacon grease. Somewhere in the course of a freewheeling conversation, loosened by the sense that the team no longer had a chance of losing the case and by the solid beams of sun chopping through the space, the clerk turned to Sirius and questioned him about his escape the way someone young and brash would.

  The slim kid had on a short-sleeved shirt with a light blue grid pattern, exactly like graph paper. The energy in his body looked like life when he turned his whole torso to ask Sirius, How the hell did you get through all that?

  Sirius laughed for a second, and so did Michelle, then a sober expression crept over his mouth and into his eyes. But his answer had already taken too long for the clerk.

  I mean, what kept you going? Like, I got snowed in without electricity for a couple of days in a friend’s cabin in Colorado, all by myself, and I spent half the time on my knees praying to the Lord until the rescue came through. Wrapped in five blankets, of course.

  I went through that phase, Sirius said, nodding. The Lord didn’t do shit.

  Everybody paused awkwardly at his casual dismissal of the kid’s religious faith and stared at Sirius waiting for further elaboration. Michelle stirred sugar into her coffee, her spoon jingling against the mug.

  The Lord turned out to be just another story, Sirius continued. After that one, he said, I told myself the story of my family’s devastation should I pass, but that was a joke to
o—their devastation would have lasted about as long as a commercial break.

  He changed that into a desire to live for some dream of a future family of his own, he said, or for his music to outlast him, for some legacy that might help him live beyond his life, but those were all stories too. It turned out that all stories betray you when you’re down to chasing crickets to get your next meal. A story might help you get through your life, he said, but it doesn’t literally keep you alive—if anything, most often people who have power turn their story into a brick wall keeping out somebody else’s truth so that they can continue the life they believe themselves to be leading, trying somehow to preserve the idea that they’re good people in their small lives, despite their involvement, however indirect, with bigger evils. He said he often thought about the people who were going to eat the strawberries and lemons and watermelons he picked for Delicious, about what those folks would look like, how they might peel the fruit, how the fruit would taste, maybe about the fruit salad they would make, or the pie.

  But I’m sure they never thought about me, Sirius said. No, not from behind that brick wall.

  After a while out there in the wilderness, Sirius said, the myths and faiths and social everythings stopped meaning anything to him. The survival instinct took over from the day-to-day fairy tales he’d needed when all of them worked for Delicious, and something essential in his brain turned him back into an animal. And there he was, catching fish with his bare hands, navigating by smell, bathing in the rain. Sirius quit asking how he could go on, Eddie told his mother. He had to survive. He had to live. He was free.

  Acknowledgments

  For their help, love, and support, the author would like to kiss Brendan Moroney, Ben George, Doug Stewart, Clarinda Mac Low, Kara Walker, Jennifer Egan, Helen Eisenbach, Colleen Werthmann, Timothy Murphy, Alvin Greenberg, John Bowe, Marcelle Clements, Andrew May, Michael Agresta, Brian Parks, Gregory Cash Durham, David Hamilton Thomson, Daniel Clymer, Jen Sudul-Edwards, Joshua Furst, Christopher and Kathleen Moroney, Rosa Saavedra, Laura Germino and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Greg Schell, Marla Akin and John McAlpin, Patrick Adams, Carina Guiterman, Fundacíon Valparaíso, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, Ledig House, and his scuzzy former office, ISC 310, at the Pratt Institute.

  Also by James Hannaham

  God Says No

  About the Author

  James Hannaham is the author of the novel God Says No, which was honored by the American Library Association. He holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin and lives in Brooklyn, where he teaches creative writing at Pratt Institute.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Little Muddy

  1. Braindancing

  2. Blackbirds

  3. Conjure

  4. We Named the Goat

  5. Show Us the Planets

  6. Your Own Cord

  7. Who Is Delicious?

  8. Driftwood

  9. An Improvement

  10. Drunken Bum Knows

  11. Eclipse

  12. Obeah Juju

  13. Meet Scotty

  14. Lost Years

  15. Inertia

  16. Summerton

  17. Your Punishment

  18. How

  19. The Wrong Limes

  20. Doing Nothing

  21. The Plan

  22. We Could Get You Free

  23. Gators

  24. Scotty Is Surprised

  25. Summerton Revisited

  26. Chronicle

  27. Trials

  28. Almost Home

  29. Daydreaming

  Acknowledgments

  Also by James Hannaham

  About the Author

  Newsletters

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2015 by James Hannaham

  Cover design by Keith Hayes

  Cover illustrations by Kara Walker

  Cover © 2015 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First ebook edition: March 2015

  Excerpt from “Love Won’t Let Me Wait,” words and music by Vinnie Barrett and Bobby Eli © 1974 (renewed) Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. and Zella Music. All rights administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music.

  Excerpt from “In the Bush,” words and music by Patrick Adams and Sandra Cooper copyright © 1978 Universal Music Corp., P.A.P. Music, a division of Patrick Adams Productions, Inc., and Keep On Music. All rights for P.A.P. Music, a division of Patrick Adams Productions, Inc., controlled and administered by Universal Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

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  ISBN 978-0-316-28492-9

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