Delicious Foods: A Novel

by James Hannaham

  Eddie approached him with his eyes nearly closed, wringing the hem of his T-shirt between his fingers. You okay? he said.

  No, Tuck blurted out. No no no no fucking no. Do I look okay, nigger?

  I’m still sorry.

  You nearly killed me. I almost wish you had.

  What? Why?

  I know what they did that for, and I don’t want to see it.

  18.

  How

  When Eddie became the official handyman, Michelle recruited him as a double agent. She wanted him to take advantage of the trust their superiors had in him, so she convinced him to use part of his time to comb through the Fusiliers’ computer files and Sextus’s office, trying to find information about the place that might help people who wanted to terminate their contracts and leave the premises. The first order of business, Michelle said, was to figure out the layout of the farm. Eddie spent part of his time rifling through whatever he could, but not so much as a faded receipt stuck in an old book gave anything away; even stationery didn’t help. He didn’t find anything that said Delicious Foods. He did discover a cache of letterhead for a company called Fantasy Groves LLC, though, which listed post office boxes in a variety of midsize cities—Shreveport, Birmingham, Tampa—no place even halfway as country as the farm. Someone on what they referred to as the no-lime detail, which lay just south of the no-lemon one, claimed that he’d seen Louisiana signs on a nearby road that outside people seemed to travel on; like a lot of things among the crew, it became an endless subject of debate. Eddie saw yellowing piles of a local Louisiana paper in the house, the Picayune. He related this news to Michelle, but the workers got into an argument about whether the presence of the paper proved the region. White folks in California be reading the New York Times, somebody insisted. I seened em doing it.

  Eddie found little use in trying to convince the crew of something so basic, so he concentrated on finding details about the business, records of moneys paid or documents related to payroll. Most of what he found pertained to large payments made by big corporations that purchased food grown on the various farms operated by Fantasy Groves LLC. Just reading the names of all the food companies and supermarkets who bought from the farms on hundreds of invoices made his mouth water. Never did he uncover any records that had anything to do with the workers—no payroll stubs, no legal documents, not even a list of names. That made Michelle suspect that Delicious was a subcontractor to Fantasy Groves, a name she had never heard. Delicious was an anonymous shell company. With little hope of a paper trail, Michelle gave Eddie a directive to find out as much as he could from Sextus.

  Why don’t you ask my mom? he wondered aloud.

  Your mom don’t always get the facts right. And frankly, I ain’t sure about her loyalties.

  On one occasion when Sextus and Darlene returned from all the sex prayers they said upstairs during Eddie’s visits, he picked up a few of the papers he had come across on the computer desk and tried feebly to draw Sextus into a conversation about business. Just get him talking, Michelle had said. Eddie had not quite finished replacing the toner cartridge and getting the printer back online. Eddie twirled in the room’s knockoff of an ergonomic office chair as Sextus and his mother waited for him—too quietly, it seemed. Sextus lit a cigar and sat down in an antique chair near the window by the fan.

  Eddie tried to keep his tone casual. Is the farm getting bigger? he asked. He’d seen a letter that suggested the Fusiliers had bought a large parcel of land.

  Oh, them papers is old. And you shouldn’t be reading em nohow. You wanna know something, son, you just ask.

  The mild, nonchalant response emboldened Eddie. Okay. He waited for a while and then asked, Where do you keep all the records of the people at the farm and what you paid them and what they owe? How much does my mother owe? What about me?

  Darlene had chosen a folding chair near to Eddie. She touched him on the shoulder and said his name sternly.

  Sextus, watching something outside, maybe right downstairs, gradually smiled and said, You don’t ask about that. He smiled his unhappy smile. Cigar smoking had become something of a post-visit ritual for Sextus, but Eddie could tell that watching him smoke made his mother want to use; she leaned in and kept her eyes fixed in the cigar’s direction. She always beat a path to the pipe as soon as they went back to the chicken house. Sextus tried to blow smoke out the window, but it got caught in the draft from the fan and sped toward the two of them instead. Eddie tried not to cough by making his cough sound like throat clearing.

  A long interval passed as the day’s soporific heat penetrated Eddie’s limbs and skull, intent on turning him into a rag doll, almost as much as it did on days when he went out with some crew to dig or weed or harvest.

  Why don’t I ask about that? Eddie asked.

  Though he didn’t raise his voice, a sudden rage sounded in Sextus’s tone. You don’t ask because you don’t fucking ask! Darlene, tell your whelp to shut his piehole.

  The shift in Sextus’s mood startled and humiliated Eddie.

  Eddie—Darlene said again, not daring to repeat the phrase. The silence returned; Sextus focused out the window again, this time on something distant—maybe a plane.

  Just as suddenly as his anger had rushed in, Sextus relaxed his back into the chair and adopted the caring voice of a mentor. He turned to Eddie. You might as well know now, son. At some point I think you might could become part of the management at Delicious. I seen it from the first. You’re young and smart, you usually don’t ask no dumb questions, you’re a whiz with the equipment and such, et cetera. You got a type of authority inside you that you need to keep folks like the ones working here in line. I seen how you deal with that one who always singing, the bluesman. You’re good. What’s more, you don’t got no issue with the pipe, and that’s more than I could say for Jackie.

  She’s getting worse every day, Darlene said absentmindedly. That’s true.

  How’s a good worker, but he’s batshit psycho crazy. I reckon he’ll move along somewheres else. Frankly, I wish he would.

  Sextus turned to face the two of them and stubbed his cigar into a nearby ashtray. Now it ain’t gonna happen tomorrow. But you keep doing good, by and by something gonna come available for you in one them upper areas. Just don’t do nothing stupid, see? He squinted as he spoke, and Eddie figured he was referring to his earlier questions.

  I won’t, sir, Eddie said. The thought of Delicious becoming the rest of his life made his stomach burn. But he smiled.

  Immediately on his return to the chicken house, Eddie sat down on the bottom bunk of the bed where his mother slept and unlaced one of his tattered shoes. In a matter of minutes, Michelle made her way over to him and sat on the opposite side of the bed, a little farther down, probably so that she could examine his face carefully and make sure he wasn’t lying, he thought.

  So. Did you find anything out?

  No, not really, Eddie muttered. I asked a couple of your questions and he told me to shut my piehole. Eddie didn’t think he should mention Sextus’s offer of advancement, but he thought of it during the whole conversation. Michelle grilled him about which questions he’d asked, the exact words Sextus had used in reply, the inflection of his replies, and his general state of mind. Eddie didn’t have much to tell. It did seem important that Sextus made decisions about who did what at Delicious, because the company didn’t exist on paper. But he couldn’t explain how he knew that.

  She asked for maps again, and anything that might reveal the structure of the business. If he did have any new information, he wondered if he now had an incentive to keep it to himself. Maybe the way to get out of Delicious was to move up in the ranks under false pretenses, save himself and his mother, then come back for the others. He doubted that Michelle would see any benefit in that approach.

  What kind of cigar did he smoke? she asked. Could you tell where it came from?

  Eddie apologized for not having noticed and promised Michelle that he would try hard
er to remember all the small details next time.

  The smallest details, she insisted, could be the most important to remember.

  As he dealt with his awkward feelings about letting Michelle and the others down as a spy (he was sure they suspected him of keeping information from them, though he hadn’t uncovered any), the Fusiliers increased his responsibilities. Gradually, How stopped sending Eddie out to weed and pick and add fertilizer and pesticides to the various crops, and had him spend more time indoors, tinkering with computers, appliances, and engines. Sextus told me I had to, How said.

  Occasionally Sextus would call on Eddie to watch over or play with the wee boy, Jed, who had recently turned four, and that kept Eddie away from the squalor of the chicken house. The doctors had advised Elmunda against having him in her condition, to which she replied, The Lord won’t let me have him in another condition. Then her health worsened. She had had a series of seizures during childbirth, then a stroke. She and Sextus began to enlist Eddie as a babysitter every so often, in addition to having him make things. He put a wooden box with hinges together to hold Jed’s many toys.

  The managers, Eddie noticed, started to treat him like a mascot, as if a cogent and intelligent boy his color interested them the way a singing dog might, or a horse that could solve simple equations. As a joke at first, Sextus let Eddie sit on the tractor, but when he saw how seriously Eddie took the wheel and pretended to shift the gears, he volunteered to teach the boy to drive it for real. It pleased Eddie to receive that kind of fatherly attention from anywhere, though at the same time it made him sad and angrily conscious of his own father’s absence, but he accepted anyway, since the opportunity to learn a new skill rarely came along.

  Occasionally Sextus allowed him to shower in one of the downstairs bathrooms—Darlene had been doing so upstairs for a while. The bathrooms at Summerton had hot water and fresh-smelling soap; after the first time he had to stop using the soap because when he returned everybody smelled it on him and asked biting, jealous questions, exaggerated his chance to do what he wanted with his future, and openly doubted his loyalty to the workers. They had been less forthright with Darlene, given the implications of her special treatment. The Fusiliers, for their part, seemed to draw the line at letting Eddie dine with them, perhaps because they knew he would have demanded that Darlene join them, and Elmunda would not have put up with that.

  Gradually everybody figured out—or Darlene told them—that the Fusiliers had decided to groom Eddie to become a supervisor, and though he found it flattering that the bosses treated him specially and gave him work that fit his particular talents, the question of whether that meant they would someday agree to send him on his way and allow his mother to leave with him—the only reason he considered accepting such a heinous position—remained unresolved. When Sextus decided to clean out the old barn and turn it into a workshop for Eddie, furnished primarily with woodworking tools Sextus had bought for himself but never learned to use, the management’s intentions became public knowledge—not to mention a source of embarrassment for Eddie. But the discomfort was mixed with an unspoken relief and gratitude for his special treatment. At night, though, locked in the chicken house under the watch of the hoarse dog, and later a younger, nastier dog, he feared that his fellow workers would retaliate against him by stabbing or smothering him, which was one reason he’d agreed to spy for Michelle.

  It was harder to negotiate the same kind of treaty with How, Hammer, and Jackie, but particularly How. He never let his guard down. Once, on a tomato-picking detail, Eddie wound up nearer to the school bus than usual by some series of mishaps, which meant nearer to How. The foreman usually wore black heavy-metal-band T-shirts, usually a red pentagram with the word Slayer inside it. He’d cut the sleeves off, making it easier for someone to catch a glimpse of his fleshy flanks through the large armholes. Along with a shock of black hair, thickening arms, and a complicated beard he’d recently grown, How had an especially demonic look around that time, and an attitude to match. TT said that How had deliberately stepped in one of TT’s tomato buckets because of a grudge and blamed him for all the damaged produce, Michelle said she’d kicked his thigh to avoid his advances, and that other women had not been so lucky. Everybody saw How take special trips down the line to shout at Hannibal when he thought the man wasn’t working fast enough. He’s just an older guy, people would say, leave him be.

  Standing above Eddie at the back of the truck, How glared toward Eddie, and since the detail had only begun, he had time to wait and comment, so Eddie braced himself for the usual racial remarks and accusations of laziness. The one thing you could say about How was that he hated all groups equally, even his own Mexican people. Three minutes into picking, he barked at Eddie.

  You fill that tub yet, Eddie?

  Eddie knew better than to respond; he concentrated instead on selecting tomatoes at the proper level of unripeness for transport—only greens or breakers this time, turning or pink stayed on the vine—and cleanly twisting them away from their vines without damaging them. No one could’ve filled the tub by that point.

  No? You can’t fill a tub in three minutes? He climbed out of the school bus, chuffed down the row, and stood behind Eddie, who was still trying to ignore the foreman. I’ma show you. Move it. With his bulk he shoved Eddie aside and moved the green tub to his feet. He raised his wrist to look at his watch. It’s six forty-three now. So by six forty-six I bet I’ll be done, or—or I’ll take twenty dollars off your mother’s debt. He cracked his knuckles, lowered his center of gravity, then positioned the tub in such a way that he could nudge it with his foot as he moved down the line. Move it, he barked again, and Eddie stepped back.

  Okay, go, How shouted to himself. I haven’t done this shit in a long fucking time, he said, already having plucked and tubbed three tomatoes, but this shit was my childhood. Just like you! His fingers moved with surprising speed and grace, like someone who could’ve played the vibraphone exceptionally well, and he placed each one against the last inside the tub gently, like an egg. I grew up in southern Florida, he said, where my mother brought me and my sisters, and they didn’t give a shit about child labor or nothing, so all three of us would race each other to fill the tubs, picking tomatoes—we were so stupid we considered that shit a game. I got real good at it. You know how some kids get good at video games? This shit was my video game.

  Then when I turned twelve they deported our ass so I joined a gang in Juarez. The main guy took me under his wing when I was fourteen. But that shit was too hard, man. So I came back to the U.S. by myself this time, but I had to take care of the guy who brought me back so that I wouldn’t be in all that debt. Then I was a coyote myself for a while, but this farm life, I like it better. Not so much moving around. Not as many people trying to kill you.

  He continued his absentminded autobiography until he’d filled the bucket with green tomatoes and the two of them had edged a short distance down the row of plants. He looked at his watch. Shit, six forty-seven. I guess I don’t have the stuff I used to. And your mama don’t get the twenty bucks off! He stood up and handed the bucket to Eddie, waited a moment, then snatched it out of the kid’s hands.

  What are you fucking kidding me, like I’m going to credit you for this one? Dream on, motherfucker. Call that a training session.

  That evening, How undercounted what Eddie showed him; he did it to everybody, but with Eddie he’d blatantly lie about the count.

  I picked five more bins than that, Eddie said.

  Are you calling me a liar?

  No, I’m calling you no good at math.

  Oh, fuck you, How spat. I’m not good at math? All of your earnings goes to your crackhead mother, so why don’t you pick up what you think I owe you at the depot, okay? Your tomatoes had scratches all over them because your fingernails got too long from working up at the house every other day. And I still haven’t figured out where the jack from the truck went. I think you probably know. Don’t you break Sextus’s compute
r every other day so that you can keep fixing it instead of coming down here? I mean, I don’t blame you. If I could fix a computer, I wouldn’t leave that place neither.

  For Eddie, interacting with How had become as unpleasant as when his coworkers had enlisted him to kill a snake or chase a rat or, once, a polecat in the living quarters during the early-morning hours. A visit with How came to mean only bad news, grueling work, or a combination of the two unique to Eddie’s days at Delicious.

  19.

  The Wrong Limes

  Darlene been had known that the only time that management ain’t seem to need to know exactly where you was and how to grab you back at a second notice was when they took you down the depot on Friday and Tuesday and let you wander round a li’l bit. Michelle said the reason they be letting people wander off that time was that the depot be dead center of the farm, and the chance you could get off the property alive by your lonesome got so small that they’s overconfident. Hadn’t nobody never seen no map so didn’t nobody know, but she said she had figured it out from stuff that How and Hammer said. If you gone missing at the depot, likely you gonna wind up back where you started or die from one the five zillion dangers between you and freedom. Michelle tried to piece together a map in her head based on where they had took her on different details and on things people be saying ’bout where things was, but she couldn’t never be sure. Michelle always asking Eddie to find a map on Sextus computer but he only got a map of America—Naked, he said, without no states or no names, just all green and brown from mountains and plains and rivers.

  Darlene ain’t never told nobody, Michelle included, that Sirius B had probably escaped from that area and that he coulda made it out somehow. She ain’t never knew how much to trust nobody, and I suppose I convinced her that the others gonna inform on her if she said too much. I liked it there; I wanted to stay. For me the place like one them barbecues you can’t leave ’cause you gotta spend three hours saying good-bye to every last motherfucker there. Ooh, cousin Tyrone just walked in! Darlene always talking all kinda shit ’bout how she wanna leave, especially to Eddie, who really did wanna get out, but she ain’t never put no effective actions onto her words. That shit start to work Eddie nerves.