It’s only more depending how much work you do, Jackie said. You not willing to work hard, are you? She raised her eyebrows and turnt to count the men as they went together.
Darlene frowned, she shifting her weight, and this grumpy feeling kicked her ass. She cocked her head and walked over to join the menfolk, saying, Of course I’m willing to work hard! At first she stood behind the backs of the tallest dudes, then she got up on tippy-toe to hear Jackie instructions. When the big echoey space swallowed Jackie voice, Darlene decide not to ask her to repeat herself. When she done wore out the patience of the shortest, furthest-back man by begging him to tell her what Jackie said, she decided to mimic the guys as they stiffened they bodies and pulled they holey T-shirts and muddy work pants into place. Those that been there and got theyself the regulation canvas gloves (fifteen dollars at the depot) be tugging em over they rough fingers. Most the men made they way to the door, Darlene marching in with em, getting set for tough labor, hopefully justified by high money. She ain’t had no appropriate shoes, so Jackie found a pair somebody had left behind.
She goes, These boots belonged to Kippy.
It sound like Kippy somebody important. Darlene put the boots on, and she notice that the laces be all stiff with some dark, rusty-colored dust, and it be on the shoes too.
Kippy ran away. Tried to. But he didn’t make it.
Darlene wiggled her toes inside the toe of one boot, and they fit her tight as a rabbit inside a grain silo. Them shoes was too huge, and now she thinking that that rusty dust be Kippy blood.
They caught him. So…Jackie shook her body like she tryna say, Don’t try this at home, kids.
Shortly, ten of em riding in a souped-up school bus. Most the seats had got ripped out, so everybody had to stand up, and the windows of the bus, the kind schoolchildren woulda jacked down and thrown paper planes outta, they been removed, and both sides opened into the air. The front windshield had broke in a spiderweb shape, by somebody the foreman called a crackhead. The guys who worked there longest knew to sit down and hold on to the few seats there was, ’cause when the bus started up and shook in them potholes, you might lose your balance and fall out the open side. A bunch of big-ass light green plastic tubs took up part of the inside the school bus.
Darlene sat near Sirius, but he acting all uncomfortable, what with all the man-talk that done broke out as soon as the guys separated from the women. He leant away from her and he ain’t look back. A guy would sometimes make a rude comment and glance over to check what she doing, but Darlene only half listening to they coarse jokes and swagger. She had came down fast since them dirty hits this morning, and the drumbeat done started up in her head again. I heard her thinking, I need you, Scotty. I want to be with you. I told her that I loved her too and that I always gonna need her forever. I’ll always be with you, I said. I started singing her wedding song: You’re the best thing that ever happened to me…Just look up. She turnt her chin to the sky and saw some chunky little clouds with straight edges at the bottoms, rocking a smooth butter color on account a the early-morning light. To us the scene above look like a giant blue table in the middle of a ballroom, scattered with some crack rocks. We felt like she could reach up and pull them ginormous rocks down like they lemons off a tree.
Darlene raised her hands to where the window woulda been, but the bus went in a pothole and wobbled big and she flinched and grabbed the side and the seat in front of her to keep from falling out. One her legs gone over. Sirius gaping at her for a second and hold out his hand, but by then she ain’t need to grab it. Her temples throbbing with blood, and drips of sweat sliding down her armpits to her waist; they tickled and made her itch. One the guys had a voice like Nat, and soon she could hear her dead husband whistling “You Are My Starship” along with them drumbeats, and her eyes teared up like she crying but she ain’t know why the tears ’cause she only felt numb, like she suddenly a metal spigot that somebody had opened.
Another dude who ain’t introduced hisself interrupted her sad little trance to say, You better have some strong arms. He raised his arms and flexed em to show her what strong arms looked like.
She stared at his deformed nose, tryna make him feel as small as he had made her feel.
He went, You know it’s watermelons, don’tcha?
What’s watermelons?
What we picking.
Oh yeah, right, right. Mm-hmm. Watermelons. It’s more money though.
Nah, not that much more than anything else.
Darlene thought ’bout what it gonna look like to carry a fruit the size of a big-ass dog across her forearms. I know, she said. Between the ginormous job and that sticky heat, already hot enough that the sweatier men had took off they shirt and was using it as towels, she might drop dead by afternoon. I wanted to give her more strength, but I could feel my power fading, till I was only a li’l tingle bouncing up and down her nerve endings, like a pair of shoes stuck on a telephone wire.
It ain’t the real biggies, the guy said, not no Carolina Crosses—whoo. Thank God it’s still early. Reckon they’ll be like thisyer. He cupped his hands around the air to show something the size of a basketball. Maybe li’l bigger. They call it a Sugar Baby.
Darlene remembered her melon-fucking Cajun john. If he could make it out here, I said to her, he’d be in heaven, and she could make a lot of money and spend it on a lot of drugs. Plenty of shame out here for that sonofabitch to like. I lived for the upward curl of Darlene’s wet lips, I wanted to see em around a pipe again, letting me in and down her throat so I could gently caress them li’l sponges inside her lungs and give her back her beautiful self-confidence.
Look like you gonna enjoy it, the guy said.
No, she said, I’m thinking about something else. I’m sorry.
I laugh like that too sometime, he said, tryna see some shit beyond the flat fields. I was friends with that guy too—we spent a lot of time together laughing about shit neither of us could remember now.
Darlene did not enjoy harvesting no watermelons. Not even them Sugar Babies that only weighed ten pounds. But she had to do it for at least another month, because she had chose the job and they wouldn’t let her switch, plus she had something to prove. The foreman, that mustache guy, who also the driver, chose the spots with the most ripe melons. He said you could tell the ripeness by how yellow the grass underneath, and he giving all kinda li’l notes ’bout when a melon ain’t ripe and warned the group not to be touching none of the ones he ain’t cut off the vine, ’cause if you ripped the stem you could ruin the ripening process and that would be bad for what he be calling consumer demand.
Then he’d go up and down the rows with a li’l hook blade shaped like a comma, cutting the vines and freeing them green globes. His second in command had a butter knife and did the same thing, but he had a helluva lot more trouble. After the cut, they’d turn the melon out so the pickers could see if they’d cut it off the vine or not. Next the bus would drive slowly down a row, and half the group would form a human chain on either side. They’d pick up them Sugar Babies and toss the ripe ones down the chain till somebody threw em to one the catchers riding inside, a brother on each side the school bus. The catchers had to drop em in the bins without bruising none of em. There was miles and miles of this shit to do.
The foreman—Darlene eventually heard him answer to the name How, probably short for Howard—maybe ’cause he seened her almost run off that first morning, ain’t wanna put her on none the easier jobs. He ain’t let her hide inside that shady bus and arrange them melons into no neat pile—his buddies, the dudes he joked with about pussy, got them jobs. He put her in the middle of the human chain, where she had to catch the Sugar Babies with her gut. Once or twice they knocked the wind outta her. She breathed deep, pretended she ain’t hurt, and hurled the next melon to the next catcher, who handed it up to the guy on the bus.
This supervisor How seem to enjoy putting Darlene down, always reminding her that she had wanted to come out and harvest w
atermelons with the men. He’d pretend that she on a baseball team and do a play-by-play of her throws or her catches and snicker when she fucked up. But she ain’t never broke none, she kept saying to herself. She never dropped a single one. Her forearms bruised up, she jammed her finger, broken nails scraped melon skins sometimes, but she ain’t never dropped a single one.
The season went on, and the melons changed type till they turnt into some humongous, child-size, lead-heavy boulders. Darlene always thinking that they weigh what Eddie used to weigh when he smaller, and that made her ask could she call home, but then it’d get too complicated or pricey and she’d hang with me instead. She got near the pay phone, but she ain’t never had no money. She dialed a number and it said some crazy shit she ain’t never heard a pay phone say. It’d go, Please deposit five dollars for the next five minutes. And she be like, That’s twenty quarters!
Once when she picking melons she stopped and wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her wrist and stood there all sporty-like, waiting for the next one, and How giving her a hard time ’bout it.
He go, Bet you wanna cut one of them Charleston Grays open and sit down on that rock over there, eh?
It wasn’t the first time he talked trash about picking watermelons that sounded like he tryna get the black folks’ goat. How called himself one hundred percent Mexican and talked a lot of shit on how Texas and California really belonged to Mexico and the gringos stole everything, and he teased the black crew members ’bout the Civil War and said that they belonged to him. He told the few Mexicans on the crew that he be a Aztec and they his POWs.
At first, in that roasting heat and that motherfucking unbreathable humidity, Darlene did dream ’bout stopping work and tearing open a Sangria melon with her bare hands, biting the red part off real slow and letting the juice drip down her cheeks and onto her neck and chest, sticking her face in and wetting it just to get cool. But on account a How’s comments she ain’t want him to know, ’cause it seem racist against herself to want so bad to stop work and eat a watermelon. This man How wouldn’t never cut that shit out, though.
You know you want that, right? How told her. He mocked her with a exaggerated grin. All you people want is some watermelon.
Fuck it, How, she spat. It’s one hundred degrees out here and we’re slinging around these twenty-pound fruits all dainty like they already belong to some white lady in the Garden District? If I want to stop and eat one myself, who cares if people call me a nigger just for wanting what anybody in their right mind would want? If eating and resting and surviving makes you a nigger, then sign me up!
The guy behind her on the chain goes, I hear that, and grunted and lobbed a Carolina Cross her way. Word.
It socked her in the gut and made her stumble backward a couple steps and then drop to one knee, but she held fast, like letting go even one a them suckers would splatter the last of her willpower all over the dirt. As she got up the strength to heave that damn monster up to the guy in the school bus, she feeling a intense need to hang with me again, so she could smoke and smoke and smoke until I filled up her empty insides with smoke, and we could do a spiral dance together up into that heavenly ballroom full of drugs way above the planet Earth.
8.
Driftwood
Darlene clutched at the bedclothes in her sleep that morning, mashing them into the shape of a blanket and winding up in the middle of the bed, sweating. The clock said 6:05 a.m. when she awoke, and Nat hadn’t come home. At 6:06, nothing; 6:10, 6:14, 6:59, still no husband, and she felt certain she knew what that meant. Her mind told her, An alive Nat would have called. Darlene’s internal organs seemed to shift positions; her lungs fell to her hips, her heart pulsed through her stomach. For the first time she allowed herself to think, He’s not alive. He offered to go to the store and get the Tylenol and now he’s not alive. If I hadn’t had a headache he would have stayed home safe. If I hadn’t worn those tight shoes that I know give me migraines I wouldn’t have asked for the Tylenol and he would’ve come back last night. If I hadn’t already taken a sedative, thinking it could substitute for Tylenol, I wouldn’t have fallen asleep.
They had gotten used to occasional threats and crank calls from their political opponents over the years, but after Nat spoke out in the local media against David Duke, the former Klansman who became a member of the House of Representatives, the Mount Hope Grocery got on the radar of a host of malicious detractors. In the past few weeks, Nat and Darlene had found a multitude of college-ruled-paper scraps shoved into their mailbox or underneath their door, covered in epithets. They both heard unpleasant words shouted from cars and endured a disturbing incident with the local police when two uniformed officers entered the store. The first fired his pistol into the ceiling apropos of nothing while the second bought a package of beef jerky from the terrified part-time clerk on duty. Sometimes the phone would ring, and on the other line somebody would breathe or bark a threat: We gonna string you up, nigger. Make your ass a human piñata.
Once Darlene picked up the phone, and after several moments of silence, she heard a radio crackling in the background. Finally, a raspy voice asked, Connie? That you? Hello, is Connie there?
Darlene let out an audible breath and told the caller, You’ve got the wrong number, ma’am, in a bright, relieved tone.
I’m glad you’re happy about it, the voice said before the receiver banged down.
Most of the customers who weighed in felt that the police had not addressed the threats to Mount Hope particularly seriously, but you couldn’t call the police on the police. Sparkplug had a routine in which he would imagine making the call himself: Hello, police of the police? We got some officers that’s breaking the law—all over my back. Send us a cop fast, but send another cop to watch the first cop.
From the moment Darlene woke up, Nat’s absence burned pinholes in the fabric of her life. She very much considered Nat’s life and her own the same life—it had never occurred to her that marriage could represent anything less. If she ever thought about death, she prayed that the two of them would die in a car crash together at age eighty-three, or drift off into senility as their many grandchildren stood beside their king-size bed, massaging the balls of their thumbs and feeding them black cherry–flavored gelatin. She hadn’t thought very carefully about how big a risk it is to love anybody, or how much the choices made by the one you love can increase that risk.
Darlene ordered herself to rise; she tossed the sheets back, letting them crinkle across the mattress. On a normal morning, Nat would’ve calmly entered the room by now, set her coffee on a coaster on the nightstand, made the bed as she showered, whistling as he glided from room to room. She tiptoed into the hallway, thinking that she would discover him there; he would make an excuse about getting a slow start, she would blush at her foolish worry, and they would kiss. He did not appear, and yet the sound of his whistling entered her mind along with a knife of sheer dread that sharpened itself on her rib cage. For a while Nat had favored that Tavares song “It Only Takes a Minute,” but sometimes he’d whistle a gospel tune, or something a little more somber that sounded like “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” Sometimes he would whistle through his teeth, other times he wet his lips and puckered them. The notes of the songs would repeat in her memory, like breezes drifting around the corners when she didn’t expect them, sometimes warm and loving, other times merely annoying.
By that time Nat would normally have filled the house with the smoky aroma of country bacon. Eddie would probably have gotten up with him to set the table and pour juice into their jam-jar glasses before Nat walked him to what they called day care—really just the home of a caring local matron. But when she peeked into Eddie’s room, she saw him still asleep. Darlene shivered at this realization and attempted to warm herself as she walked down the hallway to the phone. When she called Mount Hope, the other end rang interminably. She dialed the number of every person on her list of people to call in the entire town of Ovis and several
of the nearby towns, but she couldn’t get an answer anywhere; perhaps nobody got up that early. The fear of bad news kept her from journeying down to the store herself. She would wait at home, at least for a while longer. Eddie woke up, distressed to be late, asking for his father. Darlene told him that he’d stubbed his toe and driven himself to the hospital.
How could he drive with a stubbed toe? Eddie demanded to know.
He stubbed the left one and stepped on the gas with the right, she said.
Eddie quieted down, and her own lie calmed her enough to dismiss her fear as irrational. Maybe some version of her lie had actually happened. Sometimes, she knew, if she dwelled on it too closely, she could fear every moment she spent apart from Nat—not knowing what danger he might face in those murky parts of his life she did not share.
That afternoon, when she’d decided to figure everything out once and for all, the police paid a visit just after Eddie came home for lunch from playing down the street.
The police spoke of something they called it.
At first, she became unhinged and threw herself outside, toward the clothesline, but once the police left the house, she calmed down, remembering not to trust what the police said, certainly not more than her own experience. She steeled herself to walk up to Mount Hope and investigate. The police may not have had the facts exactly right—white folks in Ovis had a habit of confusing one black man for another. Perhaps Sparkplug had burned himself to death accidentally a few doors down and Nat had merely fallen asleep in one of the chairs out back, the way he had done once after too many beers at an evening party, and he’d had to open the shop as soon as he awakened. Then he couldn’t answer the phone because a long stream of customers had kept him busy.
Outside, a small group of short trees gave off a sweet thick maple-syrup odor. Anybody she met along the way she subjected to a grilling—Did you see him? He wouldn’t ever stay out all night. If only she hadn’t asked him to go out. If only she hadn’t had a migraine last night. I’m sure he’s okay, they told her back. Didn’t hear nothing. Didn’t hear nothing—but they didn’t make eye contact when they said it.
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