Carla shouted, Hey, I’m calling the cops, and Darlene screamed Stop and No again and again, and then she slipped on something, or fainted, and fell on the rubber honeycomb pad behind the checkout counter.
Buddy reached over the counter to keep dousing Darlene with beer after she fell. The man in the baseball cap grabbed his arm to restrain him. Claude ran to the door and paused there, begging Buddy to run, and as he started off, Buddy grabbed a third can of beer and squirted that everywhere too. Again the man in the baseball cap attempted to thwart Buddy, but Buddy’s beer-slicked arm slipped from the man’s grip. Then Buddy aimed the beer-can fountain at the man, who became enraged and chased the two of them out of the store, the three of them growling curses at one another.
Darlene, doubled over on the floor, kept screaming long after the men had run off. In the confusion, some customers dashed out of the store to watch the chase; others gave up on making purchases, and somebody stole herself a handful of 100 Grand candy bars. Carla knelt down beside Darlene on the rubber honeycomb, trying to wipe her face and clothes dry with the tail of her company shirt and console her at the same time. Darlene had pulled in her arms to defend herself and kept them stiff in front her chest.
Lord have mercy, Carla said. I seen it on the news! Was that them boys that—I mean, they probably done it, but can’t nobody say. And you! I didn’t even put it together. Oh my stars.
Darlene’s terror faded a little bit and she cried normally.
Carla sat back on her knees. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off, honey. Come in tomorrow, or even take a couple of days, make a fresh start. I’ll let Spar know what happened. She put her hands on her hips, then let them drop to her sides, and said, Lord, I hate this town.
9.
An Improvement
Unless work gone late—which it done a lot—Delicious supposed to paid the crew every day in the afternoon, round 5:00 roll call or a li’l later. People looked forward to that shit like they ’bout to start a weekend, but most everybody worked the same amount every day except Sunday so it ain’t matter much. The company ain’t paid on the books. Instead they tallied up your productivity they own self without no paycheck company or nothing. Some folks got paid by the tub, some by the hour or by the egg if they was in the coop with the laying hens. The sad motherfuckers who scooped up birdshit for fertilizer got paid by the bucket. Ain’t nobody wanted that job, and asides it made you a outcast of the crew. Sirius B always seem to look for the worst jobs to do, acting like he Jesus. He went after that one like he thinking everybody else want it, and ain’t nobody tell him no different.
They lined your ass up outside the sleeping area and told you how much you had worked and what pay you got and then hand you the pay right into your palm. Most folks ain’t get more than ten dollars a day, so for real they hardly giving out nothing except more debt. But some days, some folks could make thirty and forty, and everybody be striving for that, like the company running some kinda numbers game. Meanwhile, Delicious took out for everything—the meals, the boots, the tubs and sacks they loaned you for the picking, the alcohol, and me especially. They be giving you drinks and drugs like it’s your birthday party and then laying it all on your credit.
They left How in charge, and that sonofabitch did his whole job quick as a auctioneer and made your pay sheet sound like a science, so if you ain’t get what you expect, you would have to walk off slow, probably confused, shoving your li’l three or four dollars down in your pocket so couldn’t nobody see how much or steal nothing from you. Some folks tried damn hard at this shit—like Hannibal kept a piece of paper under his hat and had wrote down damn near every debt he got and every vegetable he done picked, but when he went to How, he got argued down into the same amounts of nothing as everybody else.
Sometimes it ain’t make no sense that How’s version of your salary would come so much lower than the one you calculated in your head as you working all day. Darlene got the idea from Hannibal to count on a piece of paper so she could give evidence to How if he told her she ain’t worked the amount she said. But whenever she called How on it, he would tell her that she made it up, or that he done docked her pay on account of a sarcastic comment she had made ’bout the company.
That guy How could remember every bad thing you done or said without letting you know he noticed, and then he’d remind you right when you needed a hit, or cash, or a boost. Even if you only said what you said to let off steam. You couldn’t bad-mouth the company or complain ’bout none of the busted tubs without no handles, the broken equipment that had took off somebody finger once and usually opened up a thigh every couple weeks, or point out that there wasn’t no masks or no clean place to wash your hands even with so much pesticides clouding up the joint. You especially couldn’t bitch about nothing on company time. He had people spying on each other, too, and he would dock you and reward motherfuckers for information he got secondhand about your ass. Sometimes How would even dock you for questioning his calculation of your debt. That shit fucked motherfuckers up.