James Hannaham - Delicious Foods

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.

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 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.