Delicious Foods: A Novel

by James Hannaham

  6.

  Your Own Cord

  The cops in the pink and orange donut shop said the police couldn’t go find Eddie’s mother right then because you had to wait.

  Everybody who got somebody missing gotta wait, they told Eddie. Not just you, son.

  He sat with three policemen at a table with four plastic seats, the officers looming above his thin brown limbs. Eddie swiveled in his seat, fascinated by how it swung and caught, focusing on the chair to avoid the eyes of the cops. Everything outside now had the same glossy dark about it as the inside of somebody’s eye.

  You can’t always tell right away, one cop leaned over his massive coffee to say, if a person has run off for personal reasons or if something of a different nature has happened that necessitates officers of the law getting involved.

  Eddie unconsciously made a face that showed he didn’t understand this principle—when somebody disappeared, didn’t you just go find her? Wasn’t it that simple?

  This fellow’s convex belly kept his cop shirt taut. His mustache went down to his chin on either side, and he had a soft, genuine expression, none of which matched his starchy uniform.

  Sometimes folks can’t cope, he kept explaining, and they run away from their lives on purpose because they think that their problems will go away if they take their bodies off the scene. A bad person didn’t do anything to them, he said, scrunching the space between his brows, they just hit the highway. And in the first few days, unless we find somebody who says they saw a bad guy taking the person away, there’s always a hopeful chance that the person will come back on their own recognizance, because they realize that they love everybody they left behind and that all they really needed was a little breather.

  What’s recognizance? Eddie asked.

  Um, by themselves. It means you do it by yourself. Of your own accord.

  Nope, another of the cops said. That’s reconnaissance. Nobody paid attention to him.

  I went to look for her myself, Eddie said. Because everybody here says don’t trust the police.

  The cops glanced at one another and then at Eddie.

  I don’t know why anybody would say a mean thing like that, the handlebar-mustache cop said. Don’t you trust us, son?

  Can I trust somebody else? Eddie asked. Is there a different police where she won’t have to use her own cord?

  The officer’s chest jounced under his taut shirt as he laughed.

  Already this waiting period had made Eddie skeptical enough that he decided not to get the police involved even when the time came. He would do it himself. The police, he realized, wouldn’t have the same incentive. His suspicion that they didn’t think his mother was worth finding came not from anything they said but from their general attitude of mildly amused boredom, even from the officer who sounded as if he wanted to help but couldn’t break the rules. He probably didn’t want to seem different from his partners.

  That policeman scrawled Eddie’s address and Mrs. Vernon’s number on the back of a parking ticket. Eddie got up to leave, and at that point he gave the men a more detailed verbal picture of Darlene, the one he’d worked on some in his head, and they promised to stay alert and contact him as soon as the waiting period ended. A fourth cop came back from the bathroom and sat in Eddie’s chair.

  Brave kid, Eddie heard one of them say as he crossed the tile floor and shoved the door open with his shoulder. He launched himself into the pink lights flooding the far reaches of the parking lot.

  He determined that he would try to enter his mother’s mind, searching places she might have gone, armed with a photograph he’d uncovered in a brown album half filled with fading snapshots. The picture he had found showed both his parents grinning in front of a Christmas tree choked with tinsel, locked in the past by denim vests and blowout afros, but he thought he should let the night people see only his mother. To preserve the memory of his father, too upsetting and confusing for him to comprehend at this point, he covered the image of Nat with a piece of newspaper, careful to fold it over the back like a sleeve and tape it there so as not to damage the front.

  The police, as promised, left a message on Mrs. Vernon’s answering machine a couple of days after he’d spoken to them, assuring him that an investigation was under way, but he did not return their phone call. He had already given his own investigation priority, because, he had decided, in a just world only he should be allowed to find her, by chance or by God, but since he did not see a point in refusing their help outright, he didn’t respond.

  On day three he lingered at the end of class, having nodded off a few times and nearly fallen asleep. He had not eaten well—only free breakfasts and lunches in school, from which he would bring home portions for later, hidden in his book bag and under his shirt. His placement in the second row from the back had saved him from drawing the teacher’s suspicions—though so many discipline problems exploded around him daily that Mr. Arceneaux wouldn’t have noticed anyway. The realization that nobody cared was both liberating and frightening—he could fail that class and other classes, drop out of school, and graduate to hanging out and drinking Dixie beer while sitting on milk crates and playing dominoes in front of boarded-up houses without anyone even raising an eyebrow. He could disappear or die and it would take weeks or years for anybody to realize what had happened.

  As he swiveled his eyes through the room, drowsy and dizzy, he understood for the first time that his classmates didn’t count for any more than he did. It didn’t matter if they never acknowledged the shadow of worthlessness above them, poised to crush them like Godzilla’s foot. There wasn’t much they could do to resist that. Few things could save him, as he saw it. School might save him, at least that’s what everybody said, but school went down like medicine. Sports could, or becoming a singer or a rapper, but he wasn’t musical. But with school he thought the odds might improve. He had a sudden sharp mental picture of his dead father crossing the concrete playground and crunching through the grass and leaves outside to peer into the classroom and monitor his progress, his grayish face troubled and stern. Eddie didn’t pretend it had actually happened, but the what-if got to him. He sat up and forced himself to pay attention, stealing a nervous glance out the window every so often but seeing only birds.

  Eddie feared that Darlene might be dead, but in the abstract that didn’t seem as bad to him as the idea that she had abandoned him on her own cord. He thought that he would prefer to find her dead than find her alive and have to endure a face-to-face rejection, possibly amplified by the addition of Some Man. Some Man he thought of as a brutish, stocky guy weighted down with gold-plated necklaces, cursed with an overhanging brow, a throaty growl, and a habit of challenging people to punch him in the gut. A foolishly proud James Brown–type with tattooed forearms and a Jheri curl who drove a white Cadillac edged with rust. In Eddie’s mind, this aggressive dude differed little from Mr. T; maybe that had something to do with the increased TV watching that came with having the house to himself. Perhaps Some Man would be his mother’s pimp, though he didn’t know that she had one, let alone if she had actually sold her body. He hadn’t seen her take any money or do anything. Still, Eddie dreaded the appearance of a flashy dresser with an iron fist who would confirm his mother’s status and imprison him with vicious, irrational rules. Any potential attachment of Darlene’s terrified him; anybody coming between them could only widen their rapidly expanding separation.

  But that fear didn’t prevent him from venturing into the underworld every night after her disappearance and creating a fantasy life for himself as a detective. In fact, the fantasy was nearly real. Eddie divided up an old map of Houston, already so overused that the paper rectangles had nearly separated from one another. He circled each neighborhood and, starting with his own house in the Fifth Ward, knelt on the map in the living room scrawling through the city’s landmarks, making pie shapes inside the concentric ring roads. Every few nights he’d visit the seediest corners of the pie shapes, each time making new con
nections, like a paper chain that might lead him to her.

  When he had done with the likeliest areas of the pie shapes, he moved outside the ring road, until his nightly journey began to require more bus fare than he could manage on what he borrowed from friends and teachers without explaining his situation, and he’d had to walk home long distances after the buses stopped running. School gradually ended, and for most kids, responsibility dissolved into heat and haze, but Eddie worried that he might have to figure out how to pay the rent and the bills if his mother did not return soon.

  Whenever Eddie saw their landlord, Nacho Vasquez, a tan guy about Eddie’s height who wore denim shirts and a bolo tie with a silver and turquoise brooch, Nacho always steered the conversation toward Darlene—How’s your mom? he’d ask. Is she at home? It took until August for him to tell Eddie to remind her that she was two months behind on rent. Eddie explained that she had gone on a business trip—a long one. When asked what kind of business, Eddie said that the trip was a job, she had found work somewhere else for a little while. He told Nacho that she knew about the rent and would pay him when she got back. Eddie was about to get on a bicycle he’d borrowed from a school friend and go searching for her again.

  She left you here? Nacho asked.

  Mrs. Vernon looks after me, Eddie said. Every day.

  Did she go by herself?

  Yeah. She doesn’t have a boyfriend or anything.

  She doesn’t? Oh. What kind of guys does your mom like?

  I don’t know. She doesn’t like tall guys. Anymore.

  Nacho turned mauve. Really? Has she ever dated, you know, someone like me? I’m half French and half Mexican.

  Maybe. Yeah. I’ll ask!

  When does she get back?

  In a couple of weeks.

  Tell her to get that rent to me, okay? But maybe I’ll cut her a break if—you know? Never mind. All right? But soon!

  Okay, Eddie said, and he could almost see time accruing, as if he had turned a crank and made the sun go backward and rise in the west. Nacho’s patience would eventually run out. But Eddie hoped Darlene would get back long before then.

  7.

  Who Is

  Delicious?

  The minibus done slowed down to a bumpity-bump. The headlights lit up a wall, and the bricks of the wall turned out as part of a farmhouse made of cinder blocks. The red-eyed driver, a brother they called Hammer, put the thing in park, let the engine idle, and went, We’re here. Hammer wasn’t his name, they called him that on account a he look like MC Hammer—he a skinny brother with his hair shaved in stripes on one side and got them same big glasses. He stretched his arms by grabbing the top of the steering wheel and said, Home sweet home, y’all, then a second later he said GET OUT in a real loud voice, like the Amityville Horror demon, to a dude name Hannibal and to TT, who twitching and talking shit and hadn’t got up yet.

  Didn’t nobody in that minibus care about nothing. TT and Hannibal—a spacey man who always wearing this raggedy-ass fedora—almost got into a fistfight over if Michael Jordan was the best ever. They agreed that he played the best, but Hannibal said just playing the best ain’t make nobody the best ever, because what about sportsmanship?

  So nobody seen them headlights shining on the new digs as we passing, let alone the whole farm. I coulda told em ’bout some shacks I seen next to some white propane tanks, and then some wide-ass fields with orange trees sometimes, and swampy saw grass far as the headlights could throw they beams. Looked peaceful, like a place where wouldn’t nobody get up in our business, and you know I hate when people be judging my friends for hanging out with me. Whenever I could take a vacation with em I jump at the chance.

  A chicken waddled into the road in front of us. Hammer almost hit it—he had to stomp on the brake with both feet and that made the bus jerk forward like Sherman Hemsley, so much that Darlene seen the bead cushion under Hammer’s ass when he leapt up. The whole crew got jostled and took to complaining. Hannibal dropped his pipe, and it ain’t break but it did roll up under the seats, and he had to get down on his knees and crawl around to find it while it’s rolling back and forth. When he bent down, everybody could see his butt crack and that caused some serious hilarity for everybody except a lively woman name Michelle who wearing pigtails even though she thirty-something—you know that girl hopped over Hannibal ass and looked out the window with a scared face on, gripping the seat back.

  Did you hit it? she asked. You didn’t hit it, did you? That’s bad luck to hit a chicken!

  Especially for the chicken, Hammer said.

  Down in the road, the chicken waggled them red things on its head at the new employees in the bus like it saying, Course I made it, you dumbasses. The fuck you looking at?

  In all the drama of stopping, Darlene and I sat in the back looking at the scene, studying it like it’s some philosophicated hypothenesthesism and with a li’l giggle we thought to ourself, Why did the chicken cross the road? Kind of as a joke, but Darlene also said that shit out loud. Why did the chicken cross the road? Ain’t nobody act like they heard, so we start asking the question seriously—my girl wanted a answer. Why did the chicken cross the road?

  Right then the chicken booked into them tall grasses off to the side of the minibus. Hammer pointed at it and said to Darlene, Look like you missed your chance for a exclusive interview. Then he jump off the driver seat and gone to unlock the door that let us all out.

  Michelle told Hammer, You funny. Glad you ain’t hit it.

  Jackie frowned and squinted, tryna see where the chicken had went, like maybe she gonna have to go chase it down. How did she get out? Jackie muttered under her breath. But then her expression changed into one that ain’t care no more.

  We was in front of this long one-story building made of concrete that had a line of muddy windows along the top of the wall. Jackie, Michelle, TT, and Darlene slid down out they seats into a pothole filled with water and had to shake out they shoes; Hammer poked and punched Hannibal and Sirius B till they stood up and got out, all sloppy and nervous. Now that Darlene out the shitty-ass A/C in the van, the humidity put her in a chokehold. She searching for a clue to where we had gone to—was we still in Texas, or had we went far as Louisiana or Mississippi or even the Florida Panhandle? Couldn’t nobody tell, and if I was the only motherfucker paying attention, they sure had a mucho problema. How long do it take to get how far? Was that a Texas tree? Was that? The hell time it was? Was that sugarcane?

  Darlene look at the building kinda suspicious, and then, right with everybody else, the good smells in her memory gone away and got replaced with a strong shit smell. Like a shit smell so bad that it reached its whole hand up inside your nose, pinched the bottom of your brain, and twisted your tear ducts like a lemon peel going into a motherfucking cocktail. The newbies all gagging and making disgusted faces and talking with vomit voices. Somebody seen feathers on the ground and pointed and said they saw feathers on the ground.

  This is a chicken coop, Darlene said, like she just discovered America. Why did we stop here?

  No, no, this ain’t no chicken coop! TT said. How it’s a chicken coop when we just seen a chicken running around outside?

  Basehead, she muttered.

  Bitch, I heard that, TT started, but Sirius B took a step to stand between em.

  Darlene screwed up her face at TT and then turnt around, sighing to herself, ’cause TT always be saying the negative of whatever you said. She knew to ignore his ass.

  I feel bad for you, TT, Sirius B said.

  In the minibus, Sirius telling everybody how well known he is for music in Dallas–Fort Worth—mostly Fort Worth—and that hadn’t impressed nobody, but outside Darlene could check out his tallness and saw that he had these long sexy arms on a wiry muscular body, with a ballplayer butt. Big big big Sasquatch feet. She took a step closer so she could feel the body heat between they arms and the little hairs that be brushing together there.

  You in the opposite reality of everybody else,
Sirius told TT. You don’t gotta be Einstein to smell that this a damn chicken coop. He laughed at how ridiculous TT be.

  Darlene smirked, and she wanna put her hand up Sirius shirt between his shoulder blades so she could know firsthand ’bout how smooth his skin. So she did. And instead of jerking around violent or nothing, Sirius turnt and shown her his face like a gift he gonna let her unwrap later, but she gotta wait. But between the feel of them silky back muscles and the open face he done showed her, his eyes touching her eyes, shit got all gooey, and that put the holy terror in her. She pulled her hand out and put it behind her on her own back, like she tryna undo what she had just did. Sirius looked forward again.

  Jackie asked Hammer to leave the headlights on so everybody could see better in the early light and follow her to a heavy sliding gray door a few yards up. She kept hunting around, maybe to see where the chicken had went, then unlocked the door, pulled it open with some help from Sirius, and stood next to it so everybody could get in, even though she ain’t put no lights on. The chicken-shit odor got ten times stronger, and when Darlene moved inside the building, into the nasty musty chicken air, and stood in this hallway with a bunch of straw scattered on the floor, she could hear these ting ting ching sounds coming from the left. She looked to the left and seen that one noise had came from all the chicken feet plucking at the bottom of they cages, and the other noise was the birds going what what what brock all over the place, or at least the ones of the birds that be insomniacs.