25.
Summerton
Revisited
Eddie finally heard from his mother a couple of weeks after he’d broken out. Mysterious calls had started coming to his aunt’s house with disturbing frequency. Bethella would pick up the phone and hear silence or breathing, then someone would hang up. When she stopped answering the phone, it sometimes rang for a half an hour. At first Eddie worried that the Delicious people had figured out where he had gone, maybe by torturing his mother, but then one evening, he watched his aunt lose her composure and scream into the phone.
Please identify yourself! she told the receiver. Who in the Living Christ is calling? What do you want? I am going to call the police if you don’t stop this harassment!
Her agitated tone put Eddie in mind of the relationship between the two sisters, and the next time the phone rang for a long time and Bethella was not at home, he knocked the receiver off the hook, arranged it on the floor with his mouth, and put his ear beside it in order to talk.
After an ecstatic, tearful greeting, Darlene explained, in a long, rambling monologue, that she had figured he would go to Bethella, so she’d phoned her sister’s old pastor, who provided her, a little reluctantly, with the new contact information. She apologized for the weird calls, but at the same time, she said, she’d enjoyed hearing her sister’s voice again. She mentioned something about taking care of Sextus in the hospital, and by that time, he figured that she had not kicked either of her old habits. He changed the subject to tell her about Fremont, and they eulogized him for a moment.
Almost immediately after this silence in the conversation, Eddie described a plan by which he would return to Delicious, though it disturbed him now that in his haste to flee, he could only partially remember where he’d started out in Louisiana—somewhere near Ruston, he recalled, the first place he’d stopped.
Hardly pausing for a breath throughout, Eddie launched into his own monologue, outlining for Darlene exactly when he planned to come back for her, where to meet him, and at what time. He would drive back with Jarvis’s car, and Bethella would follow. Both cars would stop for five minutes a few miles away from the depot, where a particular dogwood tree hunched beside the road. They would load as many workers as would fit into the cars and take them to the nearest city—Shreveport, he believed—into which the influence of the Fusiliers did not bleed. He’d return the Subaru to Jarvis, in Houston, and let everybody else out at a police station along the way in order to give their testimony against Delicious, for what it was worth, though he doubted that the police would respond in any significant way. He couldn’t live with himself, however, he told his mother, if he did not at least try to expose the place for what it was and get it shut down.
No need, Darlene told him when he’d finished. No need, she said, in an almost artificially soothing voice that made Eddie wonder for a split second if she had switched her addiction of choice to an antidepressant. I’ll be living at Summerton from now on, she said. I’m looking after Sextus and Elmunda—at least I will be when he gets out of the hospital. Sextus was paralyzed during your escape, and you know Elmunda has always had serious problems. That’s why I’m saying you can come home if you want. She gave him her telephone number at the hospital as well as at Summerton.
The changes she described seemed unreal to Eddie; he lowered his chin when she used the word home to describe Delicious. Home? he said. That place isn’t anybody’s home. They’re brainwashing you, Ma.
His mother explained that she’d called not only to make sure he was all right, but also to ask him back. She had taken charge of all the business affairs at the farm, and things had become a lot better. Many improvements had come to pass already, even in the couple of weeks since Eddie had found his way up to Bethella. Things were changing, she kept saying. Already they had reconnected the pay phones, which hadn’t been broken after all, and most of the workers would get to leave pretty soon if they wanted to, in a few months at the very latest. Sextus and Elmunda can’t run this place anymore, she said. They are sick people.
Doesn’t that mean you can leave on your own? Eddie wanted to know. And come here?
No, no, I have to stay, she said, in a tone that sounded as if she meant to reassure him of something she refused to give life to in words. She laughed. And I don’t think Bethella will have me anyway, she said. Hammer and a few others are going tonight, they found enough money for a bus ticket somewhere. Michelle we don’t know what happened to, but she did what she wanted, and I hope she made it. You really should come back, honey.
Ma, what happened to my hands?
The line went silent. Eddie, I know you know what happened, Darlene finally managed.
I meant where are they. ’Cause I never saw them again.
I don’t think you want an answer to that. You’re just trying to hurt your mother, Darlene said. And maybe your mother deserves it. The silence returned for several moments, then she said, TT. We stopped to smoke somewhere and I think TT put the bag down, and by the time anybody realized—we had to move fast, sweetheart. Is that good enough? Mama fucked up again. But now she’s trying to make things right. It’s much different here, everything’s different now.
Eddie nearly walked away from the phone at that point, disgusted by the thought of the fate of his appendages, but the image of Sextus and his fake bashful laugh came to mind, as well as the corruption his expressions concealed so badly. Eddie could not believe that things had changed so drastically so soon, and he vowed never to return to Delicious regardless. Had the Fusiliers put his mother up to making this call in order to get him to go back, to entrap him and prevent him from exposing them? It made sense that they might try, given his mother’s habit for crack, for Sextus, or for some twisted combination of the two.
Eddie promised himself that he’d get the Subaru back to Jarvis, who would write something in the newspaper that would tell the world what Delicious had done to him and to Sirius and the others, and they would pull his mother out of there even if it was against her will and figure out what had made her go from talking about Delicious as a nightmare to considering it a dream palace in so short a time. Had she ever truly wanted to leave in the first place? Maybe, it dawned on him, she had been pretending to want to leave solely to placate him.
Saying nothing further, Eddie dropped Bethella’s phone onto its cradle with his mouth. But afterward, amid a rising sense of dread, a suspicion that much more had gone wrong than his mother was at liberty to describe, a worry lingered that someone, possibly Sextus or Elmunda, or more likely How or Jackie, might’ve been standing right next to Darlene with some sharp weapon up to her neck. Perhaps Sextus had such a horrifically strong need to get Eddie back to Delicious and to maintain secrecy that they would kill his mother if he didn’t return. A wave of nausea crested in his stomach and chest, and he felt a violent disorientation, as if he were an hourglass right at the moment when somebody flipped it over.
Eddie called Darlene nearly every day after that in an attempt to convince her to leave the farm. Her refusal to allow him to rescue her became deeply frustrating. Had he stayed closer to Louisiana, he might have effected a forced rescue, despite how badly the first had gone. Eventually Darlene refused to speak about leaving Delicious unless he considered coming back. When he rebuffed her, needling her instead, she hung up on him, then stopped answering the phone entirely. Her actions aggrieved Eddie, and with reassurance from Bethella that Darlene was irredeemable, he eventually gave up.
Around that time, a few months after Eddie had left the farm, Jarvis finally tracked him down.
How did you find me? Eddie asked.
Jarvis explained that the St. Cloud DMV had contacted him about a parking ticket, which had provided the first hint. From the ticket I figured you’d run off to St. Cloud. I looked up repairmen and asked around. That’s what reporters do.
I reckon you want your car back.
This is true, Jarvis said, and then he volunteered to come get the car provided
Eddie would talk to him about what had gone on at Delicious. He could get the paper to pay for part of the trip and the rest he could deduct from his taxes.
I can’t, Eddie said. I don’t want anything to happen to my mom. She’s still there.
Still there? That’s great! I mean, not great, but what a story.
They spoke further, and ultimately Jarvis told Eddie that he should keep the car for a while. Most of the people I need to talk to are down here in the vicinity of Louisiana, he said. I can use my girlfriend’s car. I’ll pay the ticket.
Late the following spring, when Eddie had been in Minnesota for a little more than a year, ten months after the phone call, Jarvis finally arrived to retrieve his vehicle. Over the course of an hour or two, Jarvis brought Eddie up to date about the exposé. He read to Eddie a section of an early draft of the five-part series that would run in the Chronicle.
Few people ever showed up at Delicious nowadays, he said. Sometimes, one of the Fusiliers’ former business partners might appear at the front gate, which the family kept locked in order to prevent surprise visits. Any visitors who did make it in would most likely have heard pathetic stories about the rapid downhill trajectory of the finances at Delicious after the accident, about the magnitude of the family’s losses, about the strange atmosphere that seemed to have grown up along with the kudzu now gamboling across more than a third of the company’s vast acreage, and so they would have prepared themselves to pity this family for their financial ruin. For the perceptive ones, however, that feeling would likely give way to the inkling that in addition to the sad fate of this husband and wife and their once-prosperous farm, a peculiar and maybe sinister tone of negligence and corruption had not only overtaken the watermelon patches and tomato fields now growing more weeds than crops but also tiptoed up the steps behind every visitor, armed with the ability to disappear at the precise moment before it could be observed. Your head turned sharply and your eyes saw nothing, but the sense of a malevolent presence would linger for an instant, like a streak of glass cleaner evaporating from a mirror.
Eddie suffered the journalist and his elaborate metaphors and maintained a polite demeanor, but of course what he wanted most was to hear that his mother had come to her senses and would soon get free of that awful place.
She says she’s running the farm now, he told Jarvis.
Really? Jarvis said. If that’s the case, it isn’t official. Or legal. But she does behave strangely during business meetings.
Is she going to leave there already? Eddie asked pointedly.
Eventually she’ll have to, Jarvis said. But listen, I’m getting to it—I think she’s doing something weirder, based on my interviews with some people who tried to do business with the company. Jarvis went on to tell Eddie that some of the powerful cigar-smoking men who arrived in the parlor would slosh their neat bourbon as they suggested that Sextus ought to sell off some of the farm to develop some sort of real estate interest—one guy wanted a hive of condos inspired by the design of the French Quarter, another had a proposal for an amusement park. Because of his condition, Sextus always received them downstairs, and they all noticed, after much longer than they thought possible, a backlit figure Sextus told them was named Darlene sitting in the adjoining room, at work on something they usually couldn’t discern with any success, given the dim light, though they all reported hearing the clanking of metal parts against one another or the thump of a thick stick, of a long metal pole scraping the inside of a metal tube, or of a foot slamming against a rug in the background.
Oh, that’s Darlene—cleaning my guns, Sextus explained. She’s cleaning my guns.
From behind the visitors, Darlene occasionally coughed or laughed or cleared her throat, and at some moments these visitors thought they detected her making editorial comments on their proceedings in the parlor, although they immediately judged it impossible for anybody to have heard the conversation in the parlor very clearly from that vantage point. One guy said he thought he’d seen her over there pretending to level the barrel of the firearm directly at Sextus’s head, and that at the same time he heard a tiny laugh reverberating against the ceiling.
All of the deals proposed in the parlor, as the guests would know, if any of them had spoken to one another, met with the same ambiguous fate. Sextus sometimes agreed to some aspect of his potential investors’ offers, and the old men would draw up a tentative contract with the eager developer’s legal team, but regardless of whether these fellows paid a down payment or a percentage of some kind to ensure the Fusiliers’ bond, a period of immutable inertia and inactivity followed.
After word got out and a couple of investors sued, with partial success, to get their money back, the number of hopeful developers trickled down to only a couple of rubes from Ohio or, once, from Billings, Montana, all of them apparently having mentally cleared away the brush that strangled the acreage and imagined themselves at the center of a cattle farm where a mass of lowing livestock reached the edge of their vision in all directions, every cow aspiring in its heart of hearts to become a gross of Big Macs and feed whole families of egg-shaped travelers along American interstates.
I got some stuff from people who recently got out of there as well, Jarvis said.
One day toward the end of the previous summer, not long after Sextus arrived home from the hospital, Darlene enlisted a couple of workers to take him out toward the nearest field in his chair. First he marveled at the heat, then complained about it until they arrived at the barn, where Darlene instructed the guys to clean off and drive out the red tractor: his friend, the workhorse with a patina of rust along the tire rims that always fanned out slightly more every time they met. Sextus’s pupils dilated and his face took on the expression of a good child at dessert time. Darlene made sure he had on an official Delicious baseball cap to keep the late-afternoon sun out of his eyes. Once the cap stopped his squinting, the heat didn’t bother him anymore and he asked the helpers to move him closer, even though he knew they didn’t have a choice. They positioned him atop the tractor seat as if he could still cut through untold acres of the farm in the way that had once kept his workers perpetually on guard.
It took three people to keep him there, one on the left and one right, holding his floppy hands up to the sides of the steering wheel and miming for him, in the style of certain types of puppetry, the action of driving, and a third behind him, using his belly for Sextus to rest his useless back against, like the trunk of a tree supporting a spindly vine.
In order to save on gasoline, they didn’t even turn on the engine. Even so, Sextus said he wanted to stay out there all day. Ain’t this the life, he said. This is living.
They helped him drink a can of beer. Hours went by. Toward sunset, he peered into the far distance as the horizon turned crimson and cool breaths of wind raised and lowered the collar of his shirt. Then he told the guys I’m cold in a tone of voice that seemed to mean both I need to go inside now and I have been dead for a long time. In the balmy southern breeze, the phrase seemed to mean everything except what it said. The guys lifted Sextus out of the tractor and into his chair, raised the chair into the van, and wobbled the short distance down the potholed road back home.
26.
Chronicle
That fall it mostly be cloudy, like the weather had got stuck on the mist setting. Damned if that ain’t make it feel like the farm ain’t had no connection to nothing out in the world, but that’s how folks liked it up at Summerton. Almost two years done gone by since the breakout, and it seem like wasn’t nothing gonna change no more, like the mist itself just confirming that shit.
Then this one morning, the voice of anchorpeople Jim Pommeroy and Gigi Risi start ringing out in the hallway as usual, only Elmunda took to shrieking over the noise of the TV set and the bitch would not stop. We was like, What the hell and it’s only 6:30 in the goddamn morning? Darlene with Sextus on the downstairs porch, and she had finally got him to sit up in his damn chair by shoving a little block o
f wood under the back of his wheelchair wheel, and now it sound like Elmunda done fell and broke her tailbone.
But when Darlene gone upstairs into her bedroom to see what the hell gone wrong, Elmunda pointing at the TV and shrieking her motherfucking head off, going, I heard my name! They spoke Sextus’s name and they spoke mine! Of all the nerve! What did it say about us?
Darlene stood in the doorjamb catching her breath. It wasn’t nothing unusual for Elmunda to be going berserk—everybody say her problems was mental and not physical—so Darlene ain’t paid it no never-mind at first. Trying not to sound all snobby or whatever, she goes, They probably said something that sounded to you like your name and his, Ms. Elmunda. She had that tone down for dealing with the lady of the house. Apparently Elmunda ain’t like hearing that explanation, and she clammed up and frowned at Darlene, then she turnt away, thinking ’bout God knows what. She come back with a less insane attitude, but it ain’t take more than another few seconds for her to get all argumentative again.
Darlene still standing there, ready to smack down any of Elmunda’s dumbass paranoid fantasies, if not the lady herself, but after a bunch of commercials for pharmaceuticals and remote retirement communities, and then a heart-tugging story ’bout a hippo and a wallaby that’s in love at the Monroe zoo, the news recap done proved Elmunda right, and she mad as a damn wet hen again and start talking all surprised, like she ain’t never realized that people they talked about on TV could also live outside the TV. Darlene thought, She didn’t even seem to hear what they said on the news. She’s just reacting to the sound of her name and her husband’s.
Darlene herself known something like this gon happen sooner or later, but then her life had schooled her to believe that things she knew was gonna happen wasn’t gonna happen. So she shocked that it happened right then, but deep down it ain’t surprised her. It turnt out the TV news had picked up on a story out the Houston Chronicle, a five-part investigation piece based on the testimony of a man who call hisself Titus Wayne Tyler who had worked for Delicious Foods, a company that Jim Pommeroy said Tyler had made some startling accusations against.
Delicious Foods: A Novel Page 30