But if you complained, How would go, You think a big diversified grower that has contracts with Birds Eye and Chiquita and Del Monte needs to skim five bucks off the paycheck of a little piddling serf like you? And you would shut your trap, ’cause on balance you needed the money more than that tiny moment of self-respect. Except that them tiny moments would start glomming together like little oil droplets in a contaminated stream.
So Darlene might make a few more bucks a day if she could chuck a couple extra melons, handle all them eggs, or shovel some chicken shit with Sirius. Every Tuesday and Friday, almost soon as How gave the crew the vapors they called pay, him and Hammer would drive everybody out to the depot, six or seven miles down the road to a place they said called Richland, but everybody call it the depot. Motherfuckers had most likely spent everything and borrowed forward on the rest, so what you got that day ain’t even count as pay, or it look like negative pay.
Richland ain’t look much like a town. Hardly nothing grew there—stunted bushes and dry grass out to the edge of your eyeballs, a gas station, a depot, a broken-down brick building, a tin-roof shack with a painted sign that said GENERAL STORE in red. The place too tiny to get on a map. Some the crew thought Delicious had actually made up the town. Other people told them people they was paranoid on account of me, but Sirius B said, It’s not no paranoia when it’s happening up in your face.
At night, between craving and using, the group got into one the many debates that always be going through the chicken house like a virus. This one had to do with whether the farm be in Louisiana at all, or if they maybe driven everybody far as Florida in that van. Darlene and Sirius was usually arguing on the same side about where they at, on account a she growed up near Lafayette. One time, a few weeks after she got there, the whole crew had kept arguing ’bout where they at until after lights-out. Darlene stayed quiet a long time, simmering like a li’l pot on a blue flame, then her voice busted out in the dark, saying that great-tailed grackles always hanging around there, which you don’t get nowheres but in Texas, Louisiana, and Mexico, and which she seen all the time growing up near Lafayette, but ain’t nobody seen not one flamingo, which everybody know they got all over the place in Florida but not Louisiana, so how you could explain that? The whole no-chicken area gone totally silent while people be thinking on that one, then TT goes, That don’t prove nothing, ’cause birds don’t gotta stop at no borders. They don’t know the difference for when it’s one state and when it’s another.
Darlene shouts, Oh, shut up! and fold her arms, then she announce that she had to go to sleep behind that one, ’cause the whole thing done got too boring. She close her eyes, but she ain’t had one eye closed for more than a few seconds yet when she feel something touching her elbow. At first she take in a deep breath ’cause she think a giant roach or a poison spider done crawled up onto her bed ’bout to bite her, or that TT gonna strangle her ass ’cause she proved him wrong, but the same instant she figure out that it somebody hand, she realize it ain’t touching her with a palm—somebody dragging they knuckles all the way up and down her arm in a slow, calm, stroking way.
Seem like them knuckles be touching each one of them superfine hairs on her arm, making em stand up and sit down at they command. The touch make her remember ’bout meeting with Nat at the diner. Darlene know who belong to the hand on account a which side the bed it come from and how long it is, but to make sure, she reach her right hand over and hook her finger inside the curled-up hand as it passing down her left forearm, knowing it belong to Sirius just from the feel of them rough-ass calluses right under the fingers and the veins popping out right past his wrists. She keep moving her finger over the palm and once her hand be totally inside his, she feel his pulse there at the bottom of the hand, thumping against her fingertip.
That go on for a while, the hand-fucking, but it start to seem kinda stupid if it ain’t gon lead to actual sex sex. The problem with fucking in the barracks wasn’t that nobody gon see—in fact, couldn’t nobody see they own hand in front of they own face up in the chicken house at night. The problem be keeping everything quiet, ’cause them beds be creaky as all get-out, and you could say something really whispery to somebody in that concrete-ass room and motherfuckers on the other side the room not just gonna hear what you said, they gonna answer your ass.
Sirius had to get up real slow, and Darlene listening for every last creak his bed make as it start letting him rise up off it, she imagining that man body coming for her slower than a check from the government, she ain’t letting the touching hand go neither, like if she let it go he gon fall sideways into the darkness away from her. Finally the moment come where the bed ain’t make no more noise and she could feel Sirius breath and lips near her face and she raise her head up a tiny bit and use her lips to find his. It hurts a little ’cause of the burns and sores near her mouth, but she put that out her mind on account of the hotness of them lips.