James Hannaham - Delicious Foods

Since Sextus ain’t had no use of his spine no more, he let go the shotgun like he done turnt into Raggedy Andy and fell into the dirt. All of a sudden Darlene holding a firearm right above the face of one the men she could hold directly responsible for a helluva lotta the shit that done fucked up the last six years of her life that she just had thought about. Nat had taught her how to use a shotgun back in the Ovis days, and she rusty, but she sure as hell remembered how to brace that bad boy ’gainst her shoulder for the kickback and the rest. Sirius and TT and Tuck had beat How down by that point; Jarvis done pulled off his shirt and had tore it into strips to tie the sonofabitch’s hands behind his back so they could all take his ass to justice. That plan seemed shaky to Darlene even at that moment. How you gon take a motherfucker to justice without no car?

I can’t feel nothing. Sextus groaned up at Darlene. He having a lotta trouble breathing and foam be pushing out one corner of his mouth.

Me neither, she said back. Her index finger wrapped itself around the trigger, and it felt good the way that shit cut into the underside of her knuckle. She touched the end of the gun barrel upside Sextus cheek, to his forehead, and then the end of his nose, like she deciding on the best place for the shot that gonna blow his whole head off. It gonna look like somebody thrown a jar of strawberry jam out their car onto the road. Strawberries her and the crew probably picked last year.

Meanwhile Sirius, TT, Jarvis, and Tuck is tryna control How, who a big-ass dude and determined to get away. They got his arms tied behind his back, but he keep running off a li’l farther down the damn road two or three time. Finally the three of em done knocked him facedown and sat on him.

Darlene raised the shotgun so Sextus could see, finna blast that sucker in the eyeball. She thought he laying there on account a he surrendered, that he gonna just let her shoot him.

She go, Look. The gun’s kissing you. Kissy-kiss. At this point she just pouring on the crazy.

Your stance is all wrong, Darlene, he grumbled. And you’ve still got the safety on, honey. You ain’t trying to kill me.

She snapped out her insanity for a second and frowned at Sextus and went, Always have to be in control, even when you’re about to die. She undone the safety and kicked him in the side.

I’m just telling you. I’m trying to do you a favor.

I know what your favors are like. She kicked his leg into a awkward position, knee bent up and leg twisted backward, and it stayed that way.

Just go ahead, he said. I can’t feel nothing from my neck down, Darlene. I want you to do it, I don’t want to be stuck like Elmunda where somebody gotta take care of me all the time, dress me and wipe my ass like a newborn. Do it!

Darlene lowered the shotgun. If he tryna put some reverse psychology on her ass, it worked. She ain’t want to do what Sextus said no more in no kinda way, shape, or form. No, she said. I know what I want. Something in Sextus face got double handsome to her when he begging for shit. Them eyebrows be curling like a corn chip, and that li’l space between em getting all wrinkly. That dude been knowed how to get folks doing what he want on some sheer animal-magnetism shit.

From the distance, somebody — probably Jarvis — start shouting at Darlene not to kill Sextus, like he just noticed she had put the gun in the man’s face.

Tell me what you want, honey, Sextus said. I’ll make sure you get anything you want.

Both of us rolled our eyes at that shit. Darlene took a long pause and squinted at Sextus blue-white head writhing on the pavement just a foot or so from a giant pothole where his brains would spill if she pulled the trigger. Right then, TT start kicking How in the head something fierce, maybe tryna knock him out, and he be pushing Jarvis and Sirius and Tuck out the way every time they grab him and pull him off. His face got the expression of a man who want everybody to know that he believe in what he doing.

A chilly breeze blowing up the back of Darlene shirt, and for a instant she could see what that landscape musta look like ten million years ago, underwater, when some continents was touching each other and the hills be rolling around on the seafloor and every last fish be a bizarre monster that couldn’t see nothing. Couldn’t no sunlight hardly penetrate down there. Everything around em made Darlene feel like she drownding under a mile of water.

She come back into the moment, a li’l bit further away from me, looking down at Sextus sweet miserable expression and thinking ’bout them eyebrows. She thinking, They’re thick like Sirius’s and shaped like the hole in a violin. Some powerful shit in her be craving more time to enjoy the feeling of loving him and hating him and controlling his ass while he a invalid. She traced them eyebrows with the end of the shotgun and goes, Know what I want? I want a real job.

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.