Delicious Foods: A Novel

by James Hannaham

  For four days that October the crew marooned Eddie and Tuck by themselves, providing only the most rudimentary food, usually care packages consisting of a bruised orange, a salty, disintegrating baloney sandwich, a half-pint of warm milk or watery OJ from concentrate, and one packet of generic mayo. Someone from the crew would drop several packages at a time in green Styrofoam containers outside the barn on the path, which was really just two deep, muddy parallel tire tracks with long grass between them. Without entering, the person might call out to check on Tuck, who could barely drag himself down the small hill where he and Eddie relieved themselves.

  Because food came only once a day, Eddie divided the lunches evenly and saved half of his for dinner. He would do the same for Tuck, whose worsening illness had begun to make Eddie unsure of his own health. He begged for alcohol; Eddie whined until they brought it, charging against Tuck’s debt.

  During the day, Eddie explored the woods and fields around the barn, thinking that he might see his mother somewhere. Periodically he made sure that he could still breathe by inhaling as much of the humid atmosphere as he could and running as far as he dared without losing sight of the barn and then back again, his vitality confirmed by his panting and sweating.

  The food bringers talked but the talk did not say anything, it was only nervous chatter, like the night people in Houston. Eddie could tell that they might not remember how to have conversations, so when he tried asking about Darlene, he half expected to get garbled responses. Words without meanings jumped out of the sides of the food bringers’ mouths; their eyes were always bloodshot and jumpy.

  I’m missing school, Eddie said to one of them. I’ve got to go back. Is Darlene Hardison here somewhere? She’s my mother. I need to find her.

  You need? I need. I need me a rug, this food bringer said. He swallowed his words and barely opened his mouth when he spoke. I got me some bad rug-need, that’s what I’m about! Fat motherfucker giving me attitude. Fattitude, that’s what it is. Ha! One thing you gotta say about me, I’m funny. When I leave here I’ma go to LA and be a comedy star in the movies like Eddie Murphy. You watch.

  Have you seen Darlene Hardison?

  Once or twice a food bringer did not seem out of it but never answered his questions except by grunting equivocally, and they all regarded him with unsettling, blank cow-eyes. Eddie suspected that someone had ordered them not to say anything except to ask about his health.

  You okay? a food bringer said, almost as an afterthought, while leaving.

  I think so.

  Fever? Chill? Ache?

  No.

  The guy pointed at Tuck lying in the corner. He ain’t dead yet? He spoke with what sounded to Eddie like impatience.

  No. Better than he was yesterday.

  Hmm. Might not be medical. That’s what How an’ them saying. On account a you ain’t got it.

  Not medical? Then what?

  Some kinda obeah juju from somewheres.

  What’s obeah juju?

  The guy’s response terrified Eddie. He stared at Eddie and his eyes glazed over in a dramatic way that the boy could not decipher. The guy didn’t respond to the question, maybe because something more exciting had just happened inside his skull, but he also looked surprised that Eddie didn’t know that term. Or perhaps bugging out his eyes was his way of demonstrating obeah juju. It did not feel at all like a normal interaction between human beings. With the same weird grimace on his face, the man turned and waddled off through the brush.

  On the afternoon of the fourth day in the barn, Tuck recovered, almost miraculously. He sat up, stood, stretched, and walked shakily across the dirt to the rectangle of light in the corner where the door had fallen off one of its hinges. It was as if Jesus had laid his palm on the man’s sweaty forehead and pronounced him well. Tuck qualified his sudden burst of energy in every way he could think of, as if he knew better than to get excited about something that could turn out to be nothing.

  I could be about to get worse, he warned. And it ain’t like I’m about to run the one-hundred-yard dash. But the fever musta broke or something. Damn if it ain’t a complete mystery how shit function inside my own self. Chin to chest, he looked down at his dirt-caked T-shirt. Now I need some more of that drinkahol, boy, ’cause I’m getting the goddamn shakes again.

  Was it obeah juju?

  Tuck froze and then snapped his head toward Eddie. He responded with a condescending outrage Eddie always half expected from older black adults. Damn right somebody put a curse on me, he said. From the minute I got borned. He cut his eyes and spat his words. Doctor grabbed me out my mama pussy, held me by my feet, whacked my black ass extra-hard, and said, It’s a nigger! That’s the curse that’s on me. Around here niggers say some funky words, put some chicken feathers in a wine bottle, and motherfuckers just laugh it off, but when white folks say some curses on your ass, you are up to your neck in fines and bills and fees and lawyers for the rest of your life. Then you’re in jail, which is a motherfucking labyrinth of shit on a whole different level. And white folks do that shit to other white folks too. Shit, they’d do it to the birds if they could.

  What you think happen to me? he went on. Tuck described his struggle to make it as a musician: the years of touring; sleeping on the same filthy comforter every night in the back of a rickety van; playing all night and having to split fifty dollars among the six band members, and not evenly, because Mad Dog, his bandleader, demanded a bigger cut; the club managers who sometimes refused to pay; the lack of a steady woman; the steady presence of the wrong women; the ominous, deepening evidence that the audience for Mad Dog Walker’s music was literally dying and the leader’s tendency to blame his band for the waning popularity of the blues and harangue them, and sometimes even the thin crowds at shows, during his interminable drug binges; how the stress of all these things made Tuck drink until he didn’t have the strength to do anything but drink, and how even that strength disappeared, how his playing, the activity that had given Tuck the greatest pleasure and kept him going spiritually, though never financially, gradually seemed to take the shape of a noose and began to tighten around his neck.

  He had followed his ambition to the outskirts of its possibility and had not found riches there, which didn’t bother him, since he was used to poverty, but he’d expected a certain sense of fulfillment, a measure of respect from his community—What a joke that was, he said, to think that niggers fighting for the same scrap of meat like a pack of yard dogs is a community—something unnameable but gratifying, and he’d found that all he had in the end, once Mad Dog and the boys parted ways, was his own stupid life, emptied of significance.

  Just as he had begun to imagine how to redirect that life toward something new, maybe to think about getting a GED, a spiteful variety of fate—others might call it God—put his body in Oklahoma City, in the path of a particular Honda Accord driven by a thirty-four-year-old mother with an alarmingly high blood-alcohol level, especially for a Thursday afternoon. Tuck sustained four broken ribs, multiple lacerations, a busted kneecap, and a severe concussion. While he remained in intensive care for two weeks, the woman was unharmed. He blamed the concussion for cognitive problems that made it impossible for him to return to any sort of work, and without health insurance he faced charges so astronomical that once he’d healed sufficiently and the overdue notices began to crowd out the junk mail in the doorway of his motel-style condo rental, the pressure became so great that it forced him out.

  I gone out one day and just kept going and going and didn’t go back. What I had? I ain’t had no girlfriend, my children don’t—I ain’t got no real children anyhow, my brother dead, my parents long gone, and—

  They both started and became still, alert, listening, because they’d heard a rustling outside, close enough that it sounded as if it had originated in their heads. The food delivery had already come through that afternoon; by now Eddie had the usual itchy acid sensation in his esophagus from the baloney. Neither of them could quickly co
me up with an explanation for the footsteps they heard making their way around the barn and casting a shadow through the open places in the planks. Quietly they rose and moved to the wall. A figure dappled with circles of sun and green shadow, made dark by the angle of the light, came around the side of the barn. It moved with animal grace for a moment, then its motions became twitchy. Eddie pushed his eye close to a break in the wall.

  Somebody chasing a bird, Tuck whispered. Don’t blame em—them baloney sandwiches ain’t enough for nobody. He chuckled to himself.

  The person muttered and stopped in a patch of sunlight. Though cautious of getting splinters in his cheek, Eddie pushed his eye closer to the wall and examined the figure in disbelief and confusion. A desperate and eerie feeling came over him that his fantasy of having crossed over into the land of the dead had leapt out of his control and become horribly real. He saw an apparition—a skinny woman, a witch with missing teeth and disheveled hair full of leaves and short pieces of straw, dressed in a tattered shirt and baggy, muddy jeans with a rope for a belt.

  The woman dragged herself through the underbrush on her knees with her arms out, trying to catch an oily-looking grackle that kept backing up. Her eyes remained locked on the bird, which at last fluttered out of reach and into a young tree. The woman’s irises rolled up too far under her lids and she fell forward. She looked like something dead.

  Eddie sprinted out of the barn and around the corner, adrenaline throbbing behind his eyes and sapping his breath. Then he paused at a safe distance and peered at the woman and called out to her. She turned to him, but her reaction was not sudden or full of surprise. She angled her head in his direction as if she had heard a faint noise much farther away in the distance. Her mouth opened slackly, caught remembering.

  Mama, he breathed, a question, almost a hope that this sad apparition had only temporarily assumed a shape similar to his mother’s. Then the haunt’s eyes flared and took on an intensity unlike before, and recognition blazed between them. Eddie didn’t want to admit that his mother had turned into this thing, this barely familiar shadow, because he would have to move toward it and embrace it, but the relief that he’d found her, alive, finally conquered his disgust. His eyes overflowed, his heart broke into a blur of ecstasy; he ran toward her.

  At that moment Darlene turned back to the bird and passionately groped toward it, and when again it moved to a higher branch, she burst into a panic. She rose and her wailing became violent, her grasping ferocious; she tore at leaves and flicked branches so that they snapped back against her arms and face and left welts that soon bled.

  Eddie clung to her waist and bellowed, Ma, while she screeched and howled in the direction of the grackle, which leapt into even higher branches, then took flight above the treetops and into the smudgy sky, its black wings flapping quickly, then slowly, then fading into nothing.

  Darlene collapsed against a tree and stroked Eddie’s head as he burrowed it into her lap. They remained attached in this way, Eddie pressing himself into Darlene as if he could squeeze her back into her old self.

  Tuck sauntered out of the barn and stopped cold when he turned the corner and saw Eddie and Darlene. That your mama, huh, Tuck stated. Drunken bum was right! He tried and failed to remember the song he’d made up, humming to himself in quiet confusion.

  Eddie and Darlene paid him no attention. Their rocking and crying reached a low, intense drone as natural sounds returned—the shuddering of crickets, the white noise of leaves in trees, the songs of birds, including the broken-radio cacophony of the grackles. Darlene, with her head back and her eyes rolled up, watched the sky for them but saw nothing. Eddie clung to her rough, foul-smelling jeans and wept, both because he had found his mother and because he’d found her like this, in a state that kept her from really being his mother.

  Several strong breezes swept across the area at uneven intervals. No one spoke for a time. Tuck turned away and went back into the barn, and Eddie and Darlene prolonged the moment, soundlessly clutching at each other. What had come before was too unbearable to talk about and what would come afterward they did not know. Better to let the world melt into nothing for a while.

  At last Eddie flipped over and scratched his hand through the dirt. Soon enough, Darlene said, Eddie, and Eddie said, Mom, and they repeated this rudimentary dialogue, having been so far away from the fact of each other that it took the dialogue to bring them each back into existence. The words of their names volleyed from one to the other, first as a question, then a statement, an incantation, and, finally, a revelation.

  13.

  Meet Scotty

  Them shoes was the next casualty after the fire at Mount Hope Grocery. Yellow-ass pumps, too narrow just at the front of where the toe start up. Not the kinda footwear you need to got on when you standing all day. And if she ain’t chose the outfit she did, she wouldna needed to wear them yellow shoes; she coulda put on the black flats. She wouldna jammed her feet in the yellows and got that headache, he wouldna had to go for no Tylenol at no store, and them boys wouldna run into him at that time. The store mighta still got torched but at least Nat coulda survived. You could start another store, but you couldn’t start no other him.

  So the first moment Darlene had alone with them shoes, back in her room the day after the cops drank all the coffee and then showed her that driftwood, she gripped the heel and the toe of the first one and tried to rip it apart, but the thickness wouldn’t tear. The more it ain’t rip, the harder she pulling—that damn leather ain’t so much as stretch. Them durable-ass shoes got Darlene so mad she bit down on the side of one and be chomping on it like a dog attacking a squeeze toy. Her teeth sliding and her jaw cramping, but my girl ain’t hardly made mark the first on them leather uppers.

  She knew she done something ridiculous—you couldn’t hold no shoes responsible for nothing, shoes ain’t got no intentions. But shoes also can’t talk back, they helpless, and what’s helpless always gon take the biggest part of the rage. After she bit the one shoe, Darlene threw both of em at the wall, stomped on em, kicked em. She stopped to think for a second ’bout how to destroy em better, then she found a scissors in the next room, and with those bad boys she hacked and snipped and dug into every last one of the stitches that’s holding the parts of the shoes together, poking the point in, twisting real hard. Then she pulled the leather off the sole and cut it into funky-shaped bits that landed all over, on the windowsill and under the end tables and shit, and she gone to the garage and got a hammer from a toolbox. She beat them heels with that hammer till the li’l layers of wood done come unstuck and be falling around her, spinning under the work shelves and into spare tires where wasn’t nobody ever gonna see em again. If pumps could talk, them poor ladies woulda been yelling, Darlene, have mercy! What we do? For God’s sake, tell us what the hell we did!

  The blouse went next, and that gone into the grill out in the backyard, lighter fluid all over everything, up in a orange flame, like a miniature of the tragedy, like payback, though Darlene ain’t understand or care that she just making them shoes and that blouse the next motherfucking thing down on the chain of pain. The fire made a loud-ass wind sound and the beauty of them jittering blue and yellow flames pulled her closer almost against her will.

  Her son ran out there wondering what going on, and she hollered, Stay back, Eddie! He stood there watching slack-mouthed while them evil-smelling synthetics done burnt a black hairdo of smoke up over them live oaks back there, driving all the grackles away. Goddamn shoes!

  Ma? Eddie asked, tryna make his voice like a hand that gonna stroke her shoulder blade and make it all okay, like he had a chance in hell of doing that.

  She ain’t never took her eyes off that grill. She twisting her fingers together and twirling her wedding ring around like she putting a spell on somebody. Darlene glared at that fire, tryna give it the same intensity it’s giving her, then she squeezed a whole bunch more fluid onto it. Holy Mother of God, that shit made a gigantic flare that lit up ever
ything in the yard and flashed back from every window in the house and from the neighbor windows too.

  Darlene shouting, Goddamn yellow goddamn blouse!

  She made a vow never to match colors no more. She boycotted Tylenol and all other pain relievers. Way down below her everyday thoughts, she said to herself that she ain’t deserve no pain relief no more. Pain relief? Relief from pain? Oh no, she deserved more pain, the kinda pain she had inflicted on the man she loved, the man who was her life, the kinda punishing hell heat that had surrounded his body and burnt him up into a tree stump that got married. She deserved more pain than you could put in a human body. She deserved the kinda pain that filled up the sky and turnt into the weather. Like that big red storm on Jupiter. A storm the size of Jupiter itself. Her mind screamed real loud, like she need to get the attention of a motherfucker on another planet, or somebody who might or might not be in heaven, and them screams ain’t never stopped.

  After all that waiting, with everybody except her wondering if he had got away and still alive somewhere, they told her they had found something and showed her that piece of driftwood with her matching wedding ring on it.

  Then people start coming by the house with all the hope they once had ’bout the husband being alive drained out they faces, and they all saying the same damn word—Sorry. So sorry. I’m sorry. So so sorry. Sorry sorry sorry.

  You’re not sorry, she said to them in her head. You didn’t do it. Me, I’m sorry. I had the migraine. I wore the shoes. If you’re so sorry, do something about it, she thought, and couldn’t keep herself from thinking. But you can’t do anything about it. What can sorry do? Sorry doesn’t pull anybody’s husband out of the grave alive.