James Hannaham - Delicious Foods

I rushed into the few doubting and unbelieving parts left in Darlene’s mind and I shouted, Babygirl, surrender to yes! Say yes to good feelings! Say yes to pleasure! Fuck pain. All that damn pain? Leave it behind you. Ain’t that what the book say to do?

Good thing I ain’t run into no resistance up in her mind, ’cause I wanted to go to that farm just as bad…Now, I get that when somebody walk up to your house and offer you heaven on earth, the delivery truck don’t usually be idling at the curb. That goes extra-specially in Texas. But we couldn’t think on that. Darlene already had way too much shit not to be thinking ’bout.

Once the minibus got moving, Jackie passed the recruits a clipboard and a pen, like when you getting a job job, and she goes, This the contract.

Somebody already done folded that sucker over to the last page and put a bright yellow tag in the place where you supposed to sign. A beefy brother with giant teeth and idiot eyes name of TT squinted at the page and scribbled on the signature line. Sirius B, who a intense, silent type sitting cross the aisle, took the contract out from under the clip, fold it to the first page, and held it like he wanna read that shit in the streetlamp light that they whizzing through.

Jackie leant into his personal space and said, Don’t sweat it, bruh, you just sign.

Before she seen what anybody else done, Darlene slipped that pen out that clip and joyfully wrote Darlene Hardison right on the line. A screen rolled down over her world that showed a sparkling future of joy, just like the book told her she gonna get by asking and believing that she gonna receive.

Picture Darlene not thinking. Imagine her ass floating above that bus, having a long-term hopegasm, rivers of happy sliding from her mouth to her crotch and back, warm and smooth, curling around her body like a combination of pure maple syrup and sex. Picture me fucking her deep, slick, and slow, a body made of smoke, telling her I love her more than her mother ever did. Picture Darlene starring in a Hollywood movie called The Lady with the Damn Good Job.

After she had got to know some her future coworkers and everybody shared stories and drugs, the bus hushed up a minute and Darlene put her head back, relaxed her pelvis, and got all philosophical. She goes, Drugs are good, and she threw a smile as easy as you’d throw a 45 onto a turntable back in the day. The minibus had a smooth, bouncy suspension. Jackie turnt back to listen, stretching them shiny lips across her face. Darlene had thought shit like that even on sober days, now it fell out her mouth like a little stump speech.

Drugs’s good! She said it with extra o ’s. But not just! she said. Everything in this country that they tell you is bad? It’s good! She counted on her fingers. Sex is good, fast food is good, niggers are good, dancing’s good, and you know alcohol’s fantastic. That’s why they — they rape it into your head that it’s all bad, because if everybody realized how good, nobody would do anything else! Wouldn’t waste time going to a stupid school where nobody will hire you once you graduate, or working for some big company that steals your life. She sat back again and sighed. I have spoken, she said. Now pass the peace pipe!

You know the minibus be rocking with laughter and agreements on that one.

A while later they turnt off Interstate Something and start down a state or a county route, one without no streetlamps nowhere, maybe without no number. The driver clicked on the brights. Out the left side the minibus played hit radio, all staticky — the right-side speakers ain’t worked. The station played “Need You Tonight,” and “Sign Your Name,” and “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car”—I told Darlene that I knew the DJ and he playing them songs just for us. Then that song “Never Gonna Give You Up” came on and I went, That’s ’bout you and me, honey.

Out on the highway you could sometime make out some misty farms with little shrubs next to em, and out yonder on the road, the lights of cars was shrinking and falling into the past. In spite of her state of mind, everything Darlene ain’t thinking ’bout stayed with her, the way that a sound too high for your ear to hear still out there and dogs or whatever could hear it, or radioactivity your eye couldn’t see could still spread out everyplace in front of you and fuck your shit up. I couldn’t completely keep her mind off her thoughts, even though she kept begging me to — she wanted me to wipe out the experiences that be rising up like the undead, chewing on her will to live. But I do things different. I like to get people hyped up, to loosen they fear, give em some extra courage, put a little english on they stride.

So while Darlene smoked with the men in the back of the van, she could still hear something whispering, He’s gone, he’s gone, nothing matters, never did. We will all be dead soon. Then the world will end, so why go on? Go to him. Be with him. I swear that part did not come from me. ’Cause when folks really wanna die, that’s a substance more powerful than Scotty — imagine a drug that you do it once and you guaranteed dead. Right, that’s called poison. Na-aah, no, thank you, not my job. All I ever said was Smoke it up.

Quiet come down in the back of the van, and the men seen that without no streetlights, you could see the stars outside flickering like rocks in a pipe. That brother who name Sirius B pointed out one them animals from the horoscope, talking ’bout how it predict what you gonna be like.

That doesn’t mean anything, Darlene told him. There’s nothing out there.

Sirius B goes, Then what do you think the stars hanging on to?

Just — just whatever it is. Darlene swirled her hands in front of her face. Just Out There . Like, deep space — God. The horoscope is just some fools putting fake satanic ideas onto nothing. The ancient people looked up through the clouds and said, That’s a goat! she shouted, bugging her eyes out like TT to show the stupidity. And folks have harped on it for so long that now everybody looks up there and says, Look at the goat! She folded her arms, but she wasn’t done talking. But it’s stupid because we gave the names to the stars. There aren’t any lines connecting anything up in the sky to make a goat. It’s the same with everything else. People named everything, so we think the name is the truth. But nothing means anything if we made the rules up ourselves. God made the rules, we just made up some fake names.

Darlene ain’t thought ’bout Nat’s face, or the blood. She sure ain’t thinking ’bout what come later, and whether it had to do with the obeah that Hazel had worked on her. On the way out there, she ain’t even thought about how Interstate Whatever didn’t never curve, how it kept you in a state of suspense. This minibus trip had only one turn, it felt like, a left turn that had happened some time before, she couldn’t remember how long ago. Then the road got real rough. It be bounding everybody forward into the headrests and sideways against the windows.

For miles it’s only reeds growing at the side of the road, then trees come back, then you see a farmhouse with a collapsing barn beside it, then a rusty tractor, then a big-ass wheel. Then the pink part of the sky start going all blue, and Darlene could see faraway shit without knowing how far she traveled, like if she seen a pagoda, she’d a said, I guess we made it to China. Without questioning none of it.

What she seen farther away was tiny trees by the horizon, lame little hills, a burnt-out car. Puffy mist rising out the ground. Wasn’t no towns, not no buildings nowhere, only tall green grass and telephone poles and wires and, later, cornfields, rows of some green plant that was probably collard greens or cabbage, then more motherfucking corn. Darlene ain’t notice, but they hadn’t passed no houses of no kind in more than a hour. Jackie shifted in her seat and the pleather start making rubbery noises up against her thighs.