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.