Then Darlene ran across Sparkplug chuffing up the road outside their house—alive, half awake. She tried to hide her disappointment in his continued existence, and the rising terror making her limbs shudder.
Oh! he said. You ain’t hear? Suddenly his crow’s-feet wrinkled up with apparent shame and he shut down completely. His fat legs shifted as if he meant to break into a run. If it’s any help, he said, I myself spent last night downtown on vagrancy and I ain’t see them bring nobody in, definitely not Nat, ’cause when a fine fellow like him come in a jail cell, everybody notice. Darlene thanked Sparkplug and hurried closer to the store, wringing her knuckles, feeling her pulse race across her cheeks, into her eyes.
A group of older women in flowery muumuus and silky wigs crossed the road to greet her, two of them with flowers behind their ears. The two biggest ladies blocked her path in a way that seemed obvious and deliberate. Darlene recognized the women as her neighbors, but she didn’t have a close relationship with any of them, not Harriet, not Alice, not Jeanette. From her vantage point she could not make out the store through a tall copse of sugar maples and pines that obscured the view.
Why, Miss Darlene! How are you today? Alice said, gripping Darlene’s wrist with both hands, her voice high and fake. Alice’s thick forearms looked like big tubes of cookie dough.
Ignoring Darlene’s many questions about whether they’d seen Nat, the ladies clucked about nothing of consequence—the muggy weather, who’s cooking what, who wasn’t at church and why, last year’s cane harvest, an upcoming wedding. They did so with enough energy to confuse Darlene for several minutes, especially when they paused to solicit her opinion of the various trifles, but then she came to understand that they had information to conceal. When she subtly endeavored to step around them, they moved along with her, surrounding her in their human corral.
How is Eddie? asked Jeanette, taking hold of Darlene’s forearm, walking both her hands down Darlene’s arm and stitching their fingers together. She put her face close to Darlene’s face and forced her to lock eyes.
Darlene, for her part, resisted Jeanette’s stare, letting her eyes blur into the distance through the trees, in the direction of Mount Hope. She answered the ladies’ questions without listening very carefully, keeping her responses terse and attempting to graciously extricate herself from Jeanette’s firm touch.
Isn’t this cool afternoon just delightful, what with how hot it’s been? Harriet said. She breathed in to the crest of her lung capacity while caressing her face with her hand. The others agreed and added boring comments to her cheerful, inconsequential statements until the cloud of boringly ominous comments seemed to attack the group like thirsty mosquitoes.
The wind changed then and the heavy smell of burned wood rushed up Darlene’s nose; for the first time she saw a thin tube of grayish smoke rising above the vicinity of the store’s footprint. The horror must have shown on her face, because the ladies moved their feet apart like they would momentarily need to hold her or push her backward. Jeanette lurched forward and gave Darlene a loving, paralyzing bear hug. Tears distorted her voice as she begged Darlene, Please don’t go no further.
Darlene wrenched herself free of the ladies, who lumbered after her but could not prevent her from running to Mount Hope on her own. She clutched herself and cried out when she arrived at its charred maw, raising her eyes to see the sky through what she had known as the roof, the support beams askew, blackened, cracked, and shiny from the inferno, the front door chopped apart by firefighters and dangling from its bottom hinge, melted plastics, and even the freezer severely burned, all telling her with one voice that the police had spoken the truth, that her husband had perished among these things.
Later that day in the morgue, which smelled of lemon cleaner and formaldehyde, the same cops she’d hoped had lied when they spoke about it in her house asked her to look at something else burned, something they had found in the debris, and for a moment Darlene thought that they had taken a pig from a nearby barbecue pit and decided to play a prank. At first the sight of this thing did not affect her any more than watching a tray of ribs show up on a picnic table, until the doctors and policemen referred to it as him.
Him resembled one of the support beams from the store, a log turned to charcoal, and had she run her finger along its contours, she thought it would’ve dropped bits of black powder onto the steel table and the floor and darkened the swirl of her fingerprint. She knew why they had asked her to come, but it confused her to see this bizarre piece of driftwood that they might have pulled away from a riverside bonfire. She almost laughed, as any normal person might have, but those other people wouldn’t have noticed that the gold ring around one of the fingers matched the ring on her own finger. The sculpture had an open mouth, and Darlene thought of her husband screaming and choking on smoke as the fire changed places with his breath. The blood drained from her arms and legs, and she spun around and covered her mouth as she walked carefully out of the room to the nearest waiting area and collapsed over the back of a chair.
It had really happened, somebody had burned her husband to death, ripped him out of her life forever and left her alone. And now she might be equally likely to get stabbed to death and set on fire by the same people, who had decided that it didn’t matter when someone killed and mangled bodies like his. She wished that she had died instead. No, she wished that she had come with Nat to the store and changed the outcome, or that she hadn’t had a migraine that night at all, or that she hadn’t let him go to the store even though she’d said she’d be fine, that she had taken a sedative instead. Then she wondered if somebody on the police force had been involved, or known something, that maybe somebody on the police force had doused Nat with the actual gasoline, maybe another had lit the match, a few more had stabbed him, and perhaps they had followed her into the sitting area at that very moment. Maybe that man, or that one; which of these creeps had the cruelest face? Or the nicest one. Which sonofabitch could cover up the best? She felt certain that they would try to chop her up and roast her body like a rack of ribs too—or her son’s.
Darlene’s parents wouldn’t show up for the services—they probably wouldn’t show up for their own funerals. Her father, P. T. Randolph, had allowed various illnesses to go untreated—hypertension, cataracts, and rheumatoid arthritis, to name three. He claimed to do so in the name of religion, but everybody said that being saved meant less to him than saving money. He’d splurged on a wheelchair a few years back, but now he shared it with her mother, Desirée, who had thromboses in both legs and diabetes running rampant. According to Darlene’s brother, Gunther, whom they called GT, they barely left the sofa, let alone Lafayette. They didn’t have a car or a home phone anymore, and if they wouldn’t get a phone, they’d never pay for a bus. Besides which, he said, Mama panics if she even thinks about getting on a bus.
Surprisingly, LaVerne and Puma, who had cut Nat off for years, drove up from New Orleans for the service, but Puma kept grilling anybody who would listen: How do they know it’s him? They don’t really know! That ain’t my boy. Bethella avoided Puma, and later complained to Darlene about his disrespectfulness. As a rifle party fired off a three-volley military salute, Darlene could feel Puma’s eyes on her. His tortured expression seemed to set off each gunshot, all of them aimed at her heart. Then Nat’s parents turned on Darlene as if they suspected her of the murder, as if they knew about the Tylenol and the tight shoes. She overheard LaVerne say, He should’ve been buried in the Hardison plot. Darlene could see she would need to steer clear of them.
Family notwithstanding, people with earnest intentions did try to help Darlene as best they could over the next couple of years. Retail clerks, neighbors, social workers, a detective from San Francisco. She would remember that help from time to time, and the feeling would raise her mood slightly for a short period. The detectives eventually ruled out a large number of people and settled on a group of young hoodlums, possibly hired by an older set of hoodlums. They feared
that they did not have enough evidence to guarantee a conviction, but they arrested them anyway, even though the district attorney could not get the trial moved to a more favorable location.
Without telling Darlene, Nat had taken out a modest life-insurance policy in addition to the store’s fire insurance. When she learned of this by mail she wept; she thought of each check she wrote afterward as a postcard he’d sent from beyond the grave. Darlene avoided spending much time in Ovis, buying buttermilk or ham hocks from other shops in nearby towns. She’d lost, along with the store, the heart to stack cans of baked beans on the shelves by herself or decorate the register with pictures of family members she could no longer face because of what she had done, and so she did not attempt to rebuild or reopen the store. Instead she hid under the fear that these insane freaks who felt they did not have to follow the law meant to return and finish the job. Sometimes she hoped that they would.
Bethella volunteered to take Eddie off her hands for a week immediately following the services, during the terrifying lull after Nat’s death when it began to seem that no one cared anymore except her, and during that time, the citified Negroes and Jewish lawyers of New York with their biblical names—Aaron and Abraham and Leah—came to Ovis and stayed for weeks in nearby motels and private homes, offering their services for free. Darlene refused to throw a party, but Eddie spent his sixth birthday playing in the backyard with several of the lawyers’ children. The lawyers interviewed her with earnest intensity, though she could not tell them much; took to the streets, though she would not; and shook their fists at the press, telling them everything they knew about justice and how it ought to work. But fist-shaking did not produce sufficient evidence for the justice system to feed on. Despite their tenacity, after more than a year with no results, they had to apologize and depart for good. Although the police found a tire print that matched the pickup of a certain kid and his friends, whom they rounded up, all other evidence had been incinerated, and they couldn’t produce a single witness. At the end of those many months the lawyers shook their heads and scribbled down emergency numbers on the backs of their business cards. The police promised to keep working on the case; they all seemed sincere. Then the lawyers went home to their city of origin, probably thinking about different legal cases that they could actually set right.
After they left, Darlene decided that she should independently collect whatever information she could to prove who murdered Nat, but the people who had done it had covered their tracks, chucked their murder weapons in places nobody had found, probably burned their bloody clothing. Nobody white in the town admitted to seeing anything untoward. Nobody white would take the word of anybody black. It seemed sometimes as if an imaginary store had burned down and an imaginary black man had lost his imaginary life inside it.
Some of the white people who had no shoes, holes in their clothes, and moth-eaten hats squinted at Darlene differently afterward, like they had indigestion from the story and couldn’t spit up. Did they know things they couldn’t tell her, or did they despise her? How could a store burn down at night and nobody see anything, Darlene would think, and complain to anybody who would listen, as well as many who would not, and interrogate anybody she thought might have seen something that person did not want to have seen. In bad dreams, she watched the orange flames chewing Mount Hope to death, lighting the neighborhood and the faces of people she’d served every day, who peered into the glow while her husband shouted for help and melted behind the windows.
But after a year and a half, Darlene’s desire for revenge subsided enough for a daily routine to take shape, one that avoided anything to do with Nat and focused instead on everything related to raising a son and struggling to pay the phone bill and the rent and the car insurance, things Nat had done without her help and that the store’s income had covered, barely. The loss of even one of those sources of support—the store, her income, her husband—could’ve crushed Darlene. But losing all three, combined with her guilt about her part in the tragedy, eventually drained away her spirit and the last of her fight. At that point she merely wanted to sit still, to look beyond reality and ignore the world; she wanted to switch places with the boring chores of life so that she would matter again, and all the obligations would grow small and distant and useless.
As her insurance money began to run low, an eccentric white man who claimed he’d once met Nat gave Darlene a job she called a Hail Mary pass, the kind of job you take knowing that it won’t cover your expenses, hoping that you’ll get an additional job the next day (or a better one the next month), admitting that you simply need to get out of the house. She became a clerk and cashier at a chain drugstore called Hartman’s Pharmacy, the type of lackluster store where red-and-green crepe-paper Santas and reindeer faded in the chaotic, dusty window display until February, the month when she started.
She had worked there for only a couple of weeks when they came in. Two of the five suspects they hadn’t had enough evidence to convict. Both of them lanky and tattooed, with grayish skin, pimples, and dead killer eyes. With a long line full of talkative people, Darlene didn’t see the men until they arrived at her register. She turned to the last customer in front of the two guys, and when the customer left and she saw these two so close, with nothing in between, close enough to squeeze her neck shut, she stumbled back as if somebody had pushed her.
They dropped a case of Schlitz cans on the counter with a smug bang. Darlene pushed around behind Carla, at the other register, and went into the back. The two hadn’t recognized Darlene, and when she disappeared they became confused at first, then angry when she didn’t come back after a few minutes. In court, they had shaved and worn ties, but since then, they had let their hair grow long. One of them had on a filthy T-shirt that said ALABAMA in metallic letters. Dirt highlighted the wrinkles on their knuckles and outlined their fingernails. One of them had a wispy mustache. Then the names exploded in her mind—Claude and Buddy Vance, whose father, Lee Bob, was considered the ringleader.
Where the hell she run to? Buddy asked.
Claude laughed. She got workaphobia?
Buddy, the older, taller one, in the Alabama T-shirt, rapped on the counter a couple of times with the flat of his hand. Excuse me!
Carla, in the middle of her own transaction, asked them to wait a second and told them, Ain’t nothing gone wrong. She stepped toward the back room, but just as she reached the door, it swung open so that she had to jerk back. Darlene poked her head out.
Darlene, what’s the matter? You got customers.
It’s them, she said. They’ve got their nerve coming in here.
Them? What them? What them is they?
Them! Darlene insisted, as if pushing that word would reveal its hidden meaning.
Shoppers piled up at her checkout line and began grumbling. Darlene did not attempt to answer Carla in full; instead she swung the door the rest of the way and stomped back to her cash register in order to keep the weakness she could feel flooding into her arms and legs from causing her to fall. She willed herself to bravery, thinking of what Nat would’ve wanted.
Composing herself, she focused on the case of Schlitz, but she couldn’t find the price tag.
It’s nine ninety-nine, Claude said. Like the display says right over there. He was quieter, more intense than Buddy, the type who would probably whisper to you as he strangled you to death.
Buddy pointed. The display featured twelve-packs of Schlitz cans, two for $9.99. They only had one. One would not get them the discount; it would be $12.99. She tried to explain the problem, haltingly, without meeting his eyes, but then words became unsayable, her mind a little tornado.
Buddy’s feet kept shifting, like a wrestler’s, and at last Darlene glanced up at his forehead turning red. Now she could see his short temper, the rage that Nat did not survive. She stared at his veiny hands on the twelve-pack, the hairy fingers that might have held the tire iron (she imagined a tire iron, though they never figured out what blunt instrument) t
hat smashed into her husband’s temple and left him limp, dead on the floor of his own store, because she’d had a headache and she needed Tylenol. That’s why she would never use Tylenol anymore, why she walked in any other aisle in the drugstore rather than walk by the Tylenol, why she wouldn’t touch the Tylenol whenever anybody bought some. Why she wouldn’t say the word Tylenol. Why she wouldn’t think the word Tylenol. From the book she knew that thinking certain words might bring back her bad luck.
Let me tell you what I think of your twelve-ninety-nine shit beer! Buddy said, and tore open the cardboard box and ripped out a can. He shook it vigorously and popped the tab in Darlene’s direction so that the foam spewed both high and low. Claude smiled up at his brother and prepared to run.
People in the two lines stepped back—some horrified, some admiring of Buddy. A chunky man in a baseball cap reached out to bend Buddy’s arm so that he would stop, but Buddy grabbed a second can and opened that one too.
Carla shouted, Hey, I’m calling the cops, and Darlene screamed Stop and No again and again, and then she slipped on something, or fainted, and fell on the rubber honeycomb pad behind the checkout counter.
Buddy reached over the counter to keep dousing Darlene with beer after she fell. The man in the baseball cap grabbed his arm to restrain him. Claude ran to the door and paused there, begging Buddy to run, and as he started off, Buddy grabbed a third can of beer and squirted that everywhere too. Again the man in the baseball cap attempted to thwart Buddy, but Buddy’s beer-slicked arm slipped from the man’s grip. Then Buddy aimed the beer-can fountain at the man, who became enraged and chased the two of them out of the store, the three of them growling curses at one another.
Delicious Foods: A Novel Page 12