Delicious Foods (4 page)

Out in the street, she always thinking ’bout Somebody Might Kill Me. She got so obsessed with dying that she ain’t take no kinda precautions ’gainst it. To Darlene, copping ain’t never meant risking her life—’cause not copping felt like dying anyhow, and she ain’t lost that game yet. And if she did lose—well, hell, she wouldn’t know. Her idea of heaven was that the two of us could kick it together 27-9, like we would say—that’s twenty-seven hours a day, nine days a week—without nobody judging our relationship. Without none of the issues you get from having a body. Y’all think a body be who you is, but it ain’t nothing but a motherfucking sack of meat.

Darlene start inching away, thinking ’bout making a run for it—to where, she ain’t had no idea—and the father shout at her to stay put, but she ain’t heard him right.

Another thought that we had sewed together in her mind right then like a thrift-store quilt spilled out her mouth without her realizing. Who does a watermelon…laugh at…when you kill it?

Dad, I can’t do this. I can’t do this!

Then get my motherfucking money back.

What? You’re kidding. Dad?

A ambulance screamed by, honking a high note, then a low note, and that took they attention. They waited like criminals for the sound to die down, for normal cars to whiz over the asphalt again, so they could get calm enough to ignore the background noise, and Darlene took a couple tiny steps away from them two before some regular noises crept back in. The kid moved his eyes to his father head, then to Darlene face, and swiveled again.

First he asked politely. He go, Ma’am?, and opened the car door.

The word
ma’am
itself made her back up faster, like a curse reminding her who she shoulda been, so she turnt and start to book behind the dusty front entrance to the BBQ, thinking the Jackson twins was hers now and she ain’t had to do nothing to the kid. A plastic cowboy on a red bucking bronco be dangling off the roof. Broken furniture sitting behind that greasy windowpane, and a For Lease sign be hanging by one corner inside the damn window.

The father shoved the son ’gainst the door and went, Sammatawitchu, nigger! Git that money back!

Ow, my elbow!

Darlene ran, but it was a fence back there and she couldn’t jump that shit. The fence too high and she too high and a razor wire be swizzling round the top of the fence. She heard the car door slam and feet slap the asphalt behind her and the next thing she know, the sonofabitch had her wrists behind her back. He got some kinda sharp, athletic thing zapping through his fingers like a depth charge. Youth buzzing in his veins, all gruff and rowdy and shit. She bucked around and thrust her legs back, tryna find his nuts with her heel, but she kept kicking her bag on accident. She ain’t had his kind of strength.

Some vagrant brother be lying by the dumpster without no shoes on, showing off his rough-ass swollen feet. One of em had a open sore that’s all meaty, attracting flies. Darlene yelling murder and rape, but the bum just lift his head and ain’t react no further. The young man hand had came down over her mouth and it tasted soapy—cleaner than some of Darlene recent meals. So she licking the webs between his fingers to get him to let go her face, but he just clamped onto her jaw more tighter.

The bum lift his head and put it down again. A bottle of Old Crow be his pillow and his pacifier. The kid let go her mouth and figured out how to cram his hand into the bag and rifle through without letting her go. Once he had got the money, the bag fell off her arm and he pushed her forward. She twisted her ankle and fell on her face ’gainst the curb by the dumpster and she could feel her nose and lip and face had swole up already. A police car slowed down fifty yards away on the main road. One cop checked the scene from the passenger side, but they ain’t stop, probably because the father said everything cool. Darlene spat out two teeth and felt a third so loose it come out when she touched it with her tongue. She rolled that puppy round in her mouth.

I guess that made Darlene go more nuts. She not vain, but she had to keep her looks to get business. I made sure she knew at least
that.
She picked up them teeth, stuck em in her skirt pocket, and tore after the kid—leapt on his back right as his hand touched the door handle and tried to throttle the motherfucker, using his shirt collar to get control. Man, she wanted that forty dollars something bad. But some powerful surprise demon leapt up out the kid too, and he threw her off and slammed her in the cheek. Darlene head snapped back, then she stumbled and doubled over. Dull, heavy pain spread out from her nose into her skull. She couldn’t turn her neck without no more pain and she tasted iron and salt, touched her lip and held out her hand to see some cherry-red fingertips, and all her love lines and heart lines and fate lines be wet with blood. The car wheels was skipping around in the gravel, then the car turnt onto the road and got smaller in the distance till you couldn’t see it no more. The dust be mixing with the gritty metal taste in her mouth and she spat the blood and the grit on the dirt. Her gums was throbbing real bad.

Forty dollars…Shit, Darlene, I said. We coulda been done for at least one motherfucking day. Much as I loved Darlene, I couldn’t hide my disappointment. I could get sorta angry sometimes. I ain’t proud of it. But she had that thing where she crumbled under pressure. So I threw a fit. I lost it, I was hollering and cussing and accusing her of being unfaithful to me. Then I guess I made it clear that I wouldn’t let her go home until she could get some money so we could go braindancing together 27-9.

She looked at me with her cheeks deflated. Who’s going to pick up my sorry behind now, she asked, with my face broken, three missing teeth, and no shoes? I can’t do this anymore. This is horrible. I give up.

Goddamn it! I shouted. Maybe Crew Cut’s right! Maybe you
is
lazy, you fucking—! I made myself hoarse yelling inside her head. I called her a bazillion nasty insults I can’t even repeat here. I went, You don’t really want to be with me! You don’t love me! I cried—she made me weep.

Scotty! she screamed. Please, stop! Just tell me how can I get the money now. Scotty! I
do
love you, and I will do anything for you.

I pointed her face at the road. Get out there! I said. Ain’t nothing shameful ’bout trying to survive, bitch. Don’t you know the street always got a answer?

And of course I was right.

E
ddie got used to being home alone after nine o’clock, when his mother went to parties, or so she said.
Every night a party?
he thought at first. Sometimes she’d go meet a friend and return in twenty minutes. During the day in the schoolyard, he fought other fifth-graders who called his mother names, not convinced that they had any evidence, but at night the names reverberated in his head.
Your mother is your mother,
he would tell himself,
and you have to forgive, no matter what people say, no matter if she did any of what they say she did.

In the mornings he’d sometimes find her facedown on the couch in last night’s outfit, one leg drooping above the carpet, a crust of spit caking the throw pillow under her snoring mouth. She would have left the television on, and he’d hear people talking for a long time about some guy named Dow Jones who had fallen down a lot. His mother’s dress would have crept up to expose the crease where her thigh met her butt. No one else lived in the apartment, and to discover his mother’s rump displayed so crudely moments after he had woken up with an erection always produced a confused sensation in his head. To silence the feeling, he’d find a sheet, draw it over her body, and kiss her cheek gently, attempting not to rouse her. It occurred to him that he was doing her job, but he didn’t notice the cloud of resentment forming in his love for her, his hostility growing darker. I’m the son, he whispered to himself. The son can’t take care of the mother.

Other nights she didn’t come home at all, and instead her keys jangled in the lock at dawn, startling him into alertness. The front door would bang open against the drywall, followed by the twin thuds of her handbag on the carpet and her body on the squeaky couch. He would close his bedroom door so as not to disturb her. Quiet morning sounds from the outside would smooth everything over. Cheeping birds, car engines, a rooster someone kept, perhaps illegally, in a backyard, somewhere in the complex of dusty two-level brick buildings from the early 1970s. Through his mother’s arrival he’d attempt sleep—though after struggling into slumber he’d always doze more comfortably for another hour or two before getting up for school, knowing Darlene had again escaped the nameless dangers of the night world.

One Tuesday morning in June, on one of the last days of fifth grade, as he lay between unconscious dreams and waking fantasies, he pictured a time years earlier, when they had lived in Ovis with his father, before coming to Houston. (
We’re moving to be nearer to Aunt Bethella,
his mother had said, but even at nine years old, he suspected she had ulterior motives.) Before the move, they’d had a blond-brick ranch house with a backyard—a real yard—a limitless rectangle of parched crabgrass that grew larger and greener in his imagination the further time ran away with it. In the evenings, crowds of grackles would settle in a live oak in the corner by the chain-link fence. Their black iridescent feathers had a natural elegance, and the birds peered at him with mocking intelligence, like well-dressed rich folks encountering a vagrant on a red carpet. They didn’t want
some
of his food, it seemed, they meant to cheat him out of
all
of it. Their raspy noises sounded more like broken radios than birdcalls, and to make their cries they widened their beaks and puffed their feathers with so much force that it looked like they might explode. The way they strutted and sneered, Eddie decided that these birds had inside them the souls of angry black people from the olden days, ghosts come back to settle some ageless vendetta.

His father, Nat Hardison, who could now qualify as such an outraged spirit, had lived in that house with them, but Eddie, who turned six the month after his father died, couldn’t summon many clear memories of him—a bedtime story about a whale, the green marbled tackle box they took on a fishing trip, the scent of Old Spice aftershave. His mother kept a photo of Dad in his air force uniform on a shelf by her bed, facing away so that she wouldn’t see it while lying down. The sun had turned the picture mauve, but from that pinkish dreamworld, his dad glowed back, displaying his L-square jaw and high cheekbones, showing his teeth as he smiled.

Eddie remembered chasing the grackles in the old backyard, maybe because their menacing weirdness barged in on his need for order. In his fantasy, Eddie knew that if he could only clear all the birds from the backyard, his father would return—not the stiff, fading image, but the real, lanky man whose crossed leg he would ride like a horse into that unhad future. He found a horseshoe embedded in the grass and tossed it at the fence. As the iron clattered against the chain link, black wings fluttered everywhere around him; piercing cries rang out across the neighborhood. The sense of his father’s presence came on so powerfully that it woke him.

Daddy? he said.

Then came the realization that he was alone in Houston, a thought that ripened into terror.

Ma?

He did not find her on the sofa, or anywhere else. He searched for evidence that she’d come in and left, but he didn’t see the bag, the shoes, not even the clothes she would sometimes hang on doorknobs or abandon near the bed, clothes he would later fold and put away, arrange neatly in the hamper, or leave on the bed for her as the photo of his father watched, he hoped, approvingly.

When the school day was about to start and his mother hadn’t appeared, Eddie left early and ran to Mrs. Vernon’s bakery to tell her that his mother had vanished. Mrs. Vernon, solid in as many ways as one could think of, owned her home and ran the shop practically by herself. The bakery sold staples like loaves and rolls but also red velvet layer cakes, cookies, and coconut towers for weddings. The smells lured kids, made her place their first stop at the strip mall, even before the video-game arcade. Mrs. Vernon could always tell who had big problems in their lives. The neighbors called it a gift, but everybody had issues; Mrs. Vernon just happened to ask the right questions and didn’t mind getting involved. To a certain extent.

Once she understood Eddie’s troubles, Mrs. Vernon immediately called the police. He watched the hands on the big clock above the glass display cases inch closer to the start of school while Mrs. Vernon remained on hold, the receiver wedged between her cheek and shoulder, pulling the looped cord taut. Eddie admired Mrs. Vernon’s levelheaded attitude as she sold beignets and translucent coffee even while attending to his predicament. He entertained the fantasy that she would adopt him if Ma never got back. But this thought came too close to wishing his mother dead and he felt guilty for it. Instead of coveting Mrs. Vernon’s motherly ways, he occupied himself by pretending he had his choice of the different cookies in the display—green pistachio leaves, pink and brown checkerboards, squares buried in chocolate. He breathed in their almondy aroma.

I’d like to report a missing person, Mrs. Vernon said. Name Darlene Hardison. She started to spell his mother’s name and stopped short. Oh, you do, do you? Mm-hmm. Another pause. It don’t matter about what she do, sir. It’s that she got a young son waiting on her, and he right here. Her voice brightened. Really, now? Would you mind checking your records?

Keeping the phone wedged against her ear, Mrs. Vernon gave someone change, paid full attention to customers for several minutes. A few times she made eye contact with Eddie and raised her eyebrows to say they still had her on hold. Then she said, dejectedly, into the phone, So she’s not down there, huh? She cupped her hand over the mouthpiece and addressed Eddie. When the last time you saw her?

Last night, he said, around nine thirty.

Half past nine last night, Mrs. Vernon repeated to the cop on the phone, and froze her face into a pout during a long pause. Friday morning sound like a long time, Officer. Don’t you think—no, I suppose you don’t. At the end of the call, she sighed and said, Thank you for your help, and Eddie could tell she meant
Thanks for nothing.
He forced his tears back up into his head. Mrs. Vernon gave him a slice of cake in a Tupperware box to save for lunch but it only made him feel better enough to relax his face. The best possible cake couldn’t help.

Even one day to wait for your missing mother is forever. Eddie told a bad friend at school about his mother and the kid said, Every second you don’t do nothing, somebody could be killing her and you’re not preventing the killing of her! During recess a kid called Doody but really named Heath tried to cheat at finger football and Eddie stomped on his foot so hard Doody wept and said that Eddie had broken it even though he could walk fine after five minutes. No teacher witnessed this; no authority heard about it later.

Eddie looked for his mother on the humid, sweaty journey home. When he got back to the apartment, he kept thinking she would call if she could get to a phone. As he searched the rooms, he found that she had left a favorite blouse with gold threads sewn into the piping. His feverish inventory of everything she had not taken proved that she had not meant to disappear, to leave behind the possessions she cherished or anything else she loved. Who had kidnapped her?

Hours passed; the house remained silent. The street seemed quieter than usual, as if everybody knew that Darlene Hardison had gone missing and, worse, that they had hidden themselves to avoid caring. To drown the silence of the phone, Eddie turned up the television. Mrs. Vernon dropped by to see if his mother had shown up, and Eddie said she hadn’t. In Mrs. Vernon’s voice he waited to hear something tell him that he could spend the night with her, but that never came, only a complaint about her own full house and a promise to check in on him tomorrow.

Now, if this go on much longer, I’ma have to call protective services, Mrs. Vernon warned the next day when he visited just before the bakery closed because she hadn’t checked in the whole day.

No, Eddie whined. I can take care of myself. Plus my aunt Bethella lives across town if I need her. I’ve stayed with her before, he told Mrs. Vernon, though he thought at the same time that it would be impossible to contact Bethella. He knew that his mother and his aunt hated each other, and he felt that his aunt hated him because of his mother. No, he could never ask her help again. But maybe he could go it alone. I’m almost twelve, he said.

And you think you grown. Hmm.

I am the man of the house, he said, shoving his hands into his pockets, trying to sound logical and wear a serious, old expression.

I suppose you right about that, sir, Mrs. Vernon said soberly, forcing him, as rapidly as someone dropped into cold water feels a chill, to remember what made that a bad thing. He scuttled out of the store before she could see the shame take over his face or hear him cry.

At 9:30 that night, shortly after the time Darlene would normally leave, he turned off the lights and appliances, slipped out the front door, and locked it behind him. He walked downstairs into the parking lot of the complex, concerned that someone would see him and figure out what had happened or judge Darlene a bad mother for letting him stay out late. Car headlights suddenly shone on him, so dazzling he couldn’t see the vehicle behind them. The beams seemed to expose his aloneness and helplessness, sensations he couldn’t release even after scampering to the sidewalk and making his way to the strip.

He had been driven down parts of the long commercial avenue many times, sometimes when the school bus took a wrong turn or a detour, but rarely at night. Seeing it in this new way filled him with dread. A few sections, mainly the strip malls nearer the highway, supported restaurants and movie theaters. There were no sidewalks. In Texas, having a vehicle meant having a life—if you walked on the shoulder, everybody could see that you’d failed in some way. That you couldn’t afford a vehicle, that your car had broken down and you couldn’t pay for a cab, that you had no friends to call. Maybe you were too weird to hitchhike. Out by the curb, shaggy people with walking sticks and shopping carts guided mangy animals to nowhere. Teens who’d blackened their eye sockets and pierced the bridges of their noses shuffled toward Houston’s underworld. A decaying but popular bowling alley sat across from a lot that contained Mexican and Chinese chain restaurants, and farther down you could find one of those tremendous, shiny supermarkets that stayed open all night just because it could, its clientele growing sparser and freakier as the evening progressed. Whole sections of the road closed after business hours—a cluster of stores that sold antiques, ceramic tiles, and Christian books and supplies lay dormant in shadows, and farther on, beyond a bright gas station, stretched another chunk of avenue where several strip malls had failed and their gigantic unlit parking lots seemed to undulate like wide, deep rivers do at night.

At the corner, near the edge of an empty department-store parking lot, a woman waited at a bus shelter. She leaned against the light box, silhouetted, peering into whichever cars stopped at the traffic signal. This didn’t seem strange to Eddie until it occurred to him that the buses must have stopped running. Initially he judged the woman unfortunate, then ignorant and badly dressed, but as he figured out what she was doing, he saw her ingenuity. She had an excuse, if a lame one, to lurk in this territory. Suddenly he thought of his mother—first he had to rule out the possibility that the woman was her, then reconcile himself to the idea that his mother was no different, which he could not do. But he felt this woman might know his mother, or her whereabouts.