James Hannaham - Delicious Foods

An argument broke out in the backseat over whether they had gone farther into the farm. During the argument, Michelle let it slip that she suspected Jarvis of working for the Fusiliers and that he might be taking them on a loop inside the farm instead of helping them get away. In a flock of half-finished sentences, she tried to explain that she knew the Fusiliers wanted to test the loyalty of everybody in the camp at any cost. She wouldn’t put anything past them. If I didn’t know better, she said, I might start thinking that y’all two — she pointed at Sirius and Jarvis, sacrificing her precarious balance — has conspired with the growers and any minute now could shoot everybody in the car and drive it into the river.

Jarvis shrugged off the accusation at first, but then grew quiet and sober, explaining almost lovingly his astonishment at the level of paranoia that everybody took for granted. He supposed that given what he called the Whole Coyote Scenario — cutting off someone’s hands to free him from a trap — of which he didn’t approve, he shouldn’t have wondered that everybody had a lot of trauma. He compared the crew to soldiers coming back from an unjust war and told a story about his father’s service in Vietnam. He begged everyone to trust that Sirius knew a shortcut or two and that he had no interest in doing anything but helping, and Sirius backed him up, explaining exactly the route they meant to take in order to avoid being conspicuous or making too much noise. Jarvis found it disturbing, he said, that the workers didn’t have a clear impression of the size or layout of the farm, and he wondered aloud how Delicious had kept them in the dark for so many years. But to Eddie, the degree to which the workers depended on alcohol and crack cocaine should have spoken for itself, and to see such innocence in a grown man puzzled him. Why didn’t he immediately recognize that drugs had vaporized half these people’s brains?

Michelle swore that she believed Sirius and Jarvis, but a minute later Eddie heard her take off her seat belt. In the silence that followed, the purr of the Subaru rose above other noises and smoothed over some of the edgy feeling. Michelle said that it might help if Jarvis turned the headlights off and used the moonlight instead; Jarvis, apparently eager to accommodate her, tried that for a minute, then admitted that it scared him and switched them back on. Michelle settled into her seat and invoked her close relationship with Jesus as a kind of warning to Jarvis and Sirius, as if Jesus were an older brother about to pull up in his Ford Mustang and punch anybody who mistreated his sister. After a few moments she grabbed her armrest and held it tightly.

The shortcut ended and Jarvis edged the car up onto a more navigable stretch of road, strewn with smaller, looser rocks. As they came near to what Sirius assured them was the edge of the property, a world they had not seen for years, a headlight, the first they’d encountered that night, barreled toward them from a distance. At first Eddie thought it was a motorcycle, but as the car got closer, he saw that one light had gone out. Only a series of turns and slight hills sat between their vehicle and the approaching one.

Michelle straightened her back at the sight of the headlight and shouted, Pull over and cut your lights! Cut your lights! Pull over!

Oh, come on, Michelle, Sirius said.

What’s — why? Jarvis blurted.

It’s the minibus! The minibus done lost a headlight and they too cheap to fix it. You motherfuckers.

Minibus? Jarvis asked.

Oh my God, she said. By then, the distance had halved, and a moment later the minibus stopped in the middle of the road, perpendicular to traffic, its blue flank blocking the way forward like a dead cypress in a swamp. As Jarvis hit the gas, prepared to make a spectacular swerve around the minibus, Michelle pushed Sirius’s seat forward, mashing him against the dashboard, and managed to swing the passenger door open and leap halfway out. TT tried to lunge over and pull her back in by the leg, but she kicked him off. The door rushed back and hit her shoulder, and then jetted out again. Jarvis stomped on the brake with his whole weight and the car halted at a diagonal twenty yards from the minibus. Sextus and How had already piled out and prepared themselves for a confrontation.

The moment the car stopped, Michelle vaulted the rest of the way out of the car and, after running forward a few yards like somebody ready to fight, took a right turn into the rushes, churning forward with great difficulty, as though attempting to sprint through thigh-high water. Sextus and How shouted her name, begging her to come back, saying that they did not want to hurt her. But when she did not respond, Sextus removed the shotgun from under his arm and fired a warning shot into the air. Behind the steering wheel, Jarvis shrieked and a spasm visibly rippled through his body; Sirius steadied the journalist by gently placing his palm atop his sternum. Jarvis gasped. Little gems of perspiration decorated his forehead and the bridge of his nose. Darlene curled down behind him to avoid stray shots and told Eddie to do the same, so he scrunched onto his side in the hatch against the back of the backseat, using it as a barrier, behind which no one could see or shoot him, but from which he could peek out. Meanwhile, TT squeezed close next to Darlene.

It seemed that How and Sextus — and Jackie, whose dark shadow Eddie could just make out behind a reflection in one of the minibus windows illuminated by the headlights — at first thought to follow and capture Michelle as she pushed through the vegetation, but the prospect of losing the rest of the crew for her sake maybe changed their minds and they let her run. He couldn’t see whether or not Hammer lay in wait inside the minibus.

Sextus petted his shotgun lovingly and chuckled. It’s all gators out in that swamp, honey! Hope you know that! He said it again, yelling loud enough that she could hear, perhaps meaning for it to discourage everyone in the Subaru as well.

They all jolted in their seats when Michelle hollered something back from far away that sounded to Eddie through the open windows of the car like, Y’all the fucking gators! You!

Eddie rediscovered the quilt in the hatch and slowly edged it over his head with his forearms, leaving a small area open so that he could see past the seat back, through the ribbons of seat belt, and out to where Sextus and How stood expectantly. The two men adjusted themselves in ways that demonstrated their bravado, tugging their belt loops up, spreading their legs like cowboys. Sextus continued to stroke the shotgun, his index finger curling around the trigger. How touched the brim of his hat. With a phony courtesy that angered Eddie, he asked the people in the car to get out. Jarvis kept his attention focused on Sextus and How as he stepped out of the car with his hands up at his sides, treating them like the police officers they pretended to be.

Eddie stirred under the quilt, but without turning around, Darlene whispered, Stay, almost like she was talking to herself. The car’s idling, she said. If we don’t get out then maybe you still can.

Eddie thought he could still faintly hear Michelle’s hands and feet pushing through the brush. Darlene, Tuck, and TT emerged from the backseat on the same side, and eventually Sirius came around the passenger-side door. Eddie listened to everybody’s feet scuffling nearer to the minibus. Jackie turned on the lights inside the van. The two doors of the Subaru stood open like the wing casings of a flying palmetto bug.

Where are y’all off to on this fine evening? Sextus asked, almost cordially.

But when he and How saw the four of them for the first time in the peculiar light created by the Subaru’s lights bouncing off the minibus and the silvery moon, they both stepped back and their eyebrows rose. TT, Tuck, and Darlene had bloodstains all over their clothes; they must have looked like a terrifying mob.