Authors: James Hannaham
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.
T
hat 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 of 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.
Then the camera had went to Jarvis Arrow, and Darlene thinking,
I remember that man’s face from somewhere.
Sometime she be having memory problems. The dude pushed his thick black eyeglass frames up on the bridge of his nose and he shaking his damn head while he talking ’bout Delicious, or at least
his
version of what gone down there. Then they showed TT face, and the face start talking ’bout the chicken house, and he rolling up his T-shirt to show folks how long the scars be up his damn side and cross his back, welts that be looking like ginormous worms glued to his skin. Health care? He laughed. We didn’t get no kind of no health care. I laid up on my back with paper towels stuffed in my guts, biting a piece of a Styrofoam cooler to keep the pain down. Still can’t walk right, can’t breathe right out my nose.
Darlene did remember that, though. She thinking how that TT had had a good sense of humor the whole time he sick, how he laughing at folks who fussed over him, and how he done told everybody he ain’t want no kinda special treatment and to treat his ass normal. But now he talking like this the worst shit that ever happened, and it sound like a outrage to Darlene, ’cause he saying it in front of the world. It felt like he telling family secrets to folks who not gonna give two shits. Darlene shouted at Jim Pommeroy to shut his goddamn mouth.
From downstairs on the verandah Sextus snapped at her and Elmunda to shut the hell up. The men in white coats gonna take both you heifers away, he yapped. He silent for a second, then he goes, On second thought, don’t stop. That’d be the happiest day of my life.
Then TT start talking ’bout a woman who brung her son to the farm and he start working there before he even working age. That made the shame in Darlene’s chest that been swirling around catch fire like a spark in a almost empty gas tank and she jammed down the mute button on the set, watching TT ugly lips curling around all them damn lies she could tell was lies without even hearing em. But inside, she known for a while that one these freaks gonna bring the operation to a end. She just wanna keep doing it her way, the way she already been doing it, taking it apart from the inside, and she got took aback that TT and Jarvis telling they side of it without saying shit to her beforehand. Now she thinking a whole bunch of official motherfuckers gonna drive up to the house and demand that she let em in and that she serve em; they gonna ask to sit down and want cups of coffee and tea and water and they’d be smoking up the house, but not the good stuff, and they gonna write down all the answers to all the hard questions, them questions that ain’t nobody inside the place wanna hear, let alone be talking ’bout with a camera up in they face.
Darlene finger start inching over to the red power button on the upper left of the remote, and just when she ’bout to put it in place to press down, she seen Eddie face and shoulders show up on the screen. It’s only a picture, but the sight of him make her dizzy, and she cringing backward and lower herself into a seat in the recliner right next to Elmunda sickbed. By now the lady’s anger more like it’s a ember instead of a open flame. Elmunda had locked her arms cross her chest and had twisted her damn mouth over to one side, but she so annoyed that she couldn’t say nothing no more.
Darlene moved her ass up to the front of the chair, then cut her eyes and unmuted the sound so she could hear TT talking again. She had to admit that what he saying ’bout the barracks and the depot and all that shit ain’t had no big-ass mistakes or untruths or whatever, but she couldn’t stand to listen to him tell his experience nohow, stuff so close to her own life, and making em sound all harsh and disgusting; she bet that Jarvis fool had told him what to say and how to put the place down so that sympathies gonna pour in and everybody gonna agree with his point of view on Delicious. If he ain’t stop, that stab wound he making into her past gonna keep slicing and getting all deep until it ripped open all the motherfucking memories she had went through during her time on the farm. They all coming back and stinging her like she done whacked a hornet nest: the good job she thought gonna erase all that shit she want me to help her forget, how she done lost her teeth, all the streetwalking with me, the stabbing, them boys with they beer cans, them yellow shoes, that goddamn piece of driftwood. Plus the way that she had put the last scrap of her faith in Delicious—all gentle, like she putting a baby chick that had fell out a nest back up in it—and once again the world had kicked her ass with a thunderstorm of bullshit and cruelty that knocked down the whole damn tree. If it had happened to some dumbass who be far away or not real, she thinking it almost be hilarious.
She couldn’t hear nothing of the broadcast over her own thinking no more. When the news over, she got out her chair and left Elmunda almost steaming out her ears and tryna decide the next program to watch, skipping over channels and rejecting all of em with a grunt or a screech of hate. Darlene gone down that hallway with her arms all slack, looking at some shit couldn’t nobody see right ahead of her, and when she get back to her room and shut the door, she goes boom right down on the bed and done took a glass pipe off her night table. She put me into it and lit up, and I smiled at her with no face and fizzed and popped like usual, filling up the insides of the pipe with some thick-ass smoke. I opened a door inside the smoke and she done came on in and run down a unreal hallway past a whole bunch of rooms in the mansion I built for her until she found one with a fireplace going in front of a warm couch with a soft fabric that made her pussy shiver when she runned her hands over it. I put a blanket down the end. She watching the smoke float through the room for a while, then she put the blanket around her shoulders and be tugging it tighter, all the way over her head.
Wouldn’t you know that right after we had got all comfortable together and Darlene lying in my arms of smoke, some damn phone that she ain’t seened on a stand next to the couch start ringing. Suddenly we back in the real mansion. She peek out from under the blanket and I told her not to answer no phone ’cause it ain’t a phone I had put there but she done it anyway and heard voices inside the phone, asking all kinda tough questions and demanding to speak to anybody who living in the house. She telling them voices to go the fuck away but they kept after her ass until she put the phone down. Sextus and Elmunda son, Jed, come into the room, six years old, and he talking the same as the voice, he asking what’s wrong with his folks in his li’l child-ass voice. Darlene could hang up a phone, but she couldn’t hang up no kid, and she tossed a empty plastic bottle at him.
He dodge the bottle and come over to her. What happened, Miss Darlene? Why’s Mama shouting?
Don’t be ridiculous.
That’s not a answer. Did something happen? They were on the television.
This child was a little bitch-ass detective.
Darlene thinking ’bout telling the truth, but I said, Hell no, you not telling this child the truth! She told him, Nothing is going to happen to you or your parents, Jedidiah. She said that shit instead of
Your parents fucked a whole lot of niggers over and they might could go to jail for a whole long time, so get ready.
You got to protect a child, I said, and the best way I know to protect a child is to lie your motherfucking head off. She tried to tell me some shit ’bout Eddie when he round the same age, and how she feel bad for lying to him about his father, but I was like, Please. She pulled the blanket back over her head.
While she still under the blanket, she saying, Don’t worry, Jed. Jed kept worrying and asking questions but eventually he took her advice when she went, Okay, you can worry, but go worry somewhere else.
She blown out a sigh when the li’l boy finally disappeared. Even so, Jed had set her to thinking ’bout Eddie more and she decide for herself that it wasn’t no way she gon let Eddie talk to Jarvis or TT ’bout nothing that had went down. What they done had exposed her ass and made them weird voices come out the phone and out the boy, and she called Eddie up, ’bout to chew his ass out. For the first seven or eight times the number wasn’t the number and some angry fool started getting mean with her, like, Go away, bitch, go away, but she kept calling until the real number gone through.
She got Eddie on the phone and screamed like a train brake at him even though she ain’t want to. I thought it would get through to him and make him stop investigating with that guy on account a Darlene had everything under control and she could take care of the farm and them people who running the farm without nobody else getting involved or telling the world all what had happened there with the folks who running the company.
Eddie tryna tell her to stay calm and that she ain’t sound stable, like that she had hung out with me too much. He said some hurtful-ass shit to her, like that she too tight with me, and he asked point-blank if she had stopped hanging out with me, and even with me there, she said yes, ’cause I often told her that whenever any motherfucker accuse you of shit you ain’t want em to be right about, you can’t just admit that they accusation be true, you gotta fight the fuck back.
I am not an addict or a crackhead, Darlene said. I can’t smoke as much because of the way I have to operate the place, so now I smoke mainly at night if I smoke at all. Sometimes I don’t smoke for a full two days. And why is this any of your business?
Eddie laughed behind that one. I can’t say I blame his stupid ass.
Then Darlene told him that he think he too good to come back to Delicious and to her so what did Scotty have to do with anything? She told him she gonna figure out a way to get back at him if he cooperate with the investigation. He insulted her again, apologized, then he start pleading with her to quit me until Darlene could hear his wimpy ass start to break down and cry on the phone. Seriously. Darlene done pulled the blanket up off her head and sat up and leaned forward. We thinking we had the advantage at last.
Both of em start screaming into the phone, and then Eddie hung up on her, so Darlene called back a few times and the angry man she called before on accident said some stupid shit ’bout a restraining order. Once Darlene got the number right, Eddie bitched me out and told his mother that she had stayed at Delicious on account of drugs and Sextus, and said some other shit ’bout what he thought she thought ’bout Sextus body, specifically his skin and the whiteness of it. There’s a lot in here that Darlene don’t remember, including a whole bunch of beefs that she howled and that Eddie screamed back at her, and then more voices on the phone, whatever.
Couple days later, Elmunda seen a picture of Darlene on the TV and she called Darlene in the room and they heard Jim Pommeroy talking ’bout what Darlene had said, her own words going onto the screen and a scratchy recording of Darlene voice over the phone going, Nobody did anything wrong, and How dare you, and The truth will eventually come out, like it always does.
I said to Darlene, Your own motherfucking son done recorded your ass behind your back. That’s fucked up. She froze; her jaw clamped. She couldn’t even comprehend that shit.