He whisper real soft, almost so that she can’t hear it, that they could go in the bathroom and get it on, ’cause don’t nobody know the difference at night between one black-ass fool and two in the bathroom, since you couldn’t hear what going on in there well as you could out in the main room. Darlene ain’t thinking too hard ’bout nothing, and she definitely wanting to continue what they started, maybe not to the point that she think he thinking, but at least in the bathroom they ain’t had to be so cautious. She rise on up out the bed in the same delicate way as he just done, and they tongues be poking all inside each other mouth and whatnot, and they breathing so heavy they know they got to get out that main room.
She grab ahold his belt loop and he feel his way through the dark to the bathroom, and even though it stink, at least they could squeeze in the stall without no door and get a small amount of privacy for a microsecond. He sitting on the toilet and she sitting on him, and she can’t see nothing in there neither so it’s like she fucking nothing, or the night sky, like he a star and she the blackness that be holding him up.
Pretty soon he get done and after a longer time she do too, and she fall over onto his shoulders like she gon fall asleep there.
I seen a whole bunch of those birds too, he whispered. The grackles? I knew we was in Louisiana.
Then somebody banged on the stall wall and the hot mood went right down the drain.
Where they at wasn’t the only thing folks be talking ’bout by a long shot. People talked a lot about they next job and how they gonna get it. When I get outta Delicious, I’ma go into construction, I’ma start my own landscaping business, I’ma drive a ice cream truck—didn’t none of it had no basis in reality. They be arguing ’bout sports even more, after watching parts of the games on Jackie’s portable TV that had a blue-ass nine-inch screen. Everybody talking ’bout Carl Lewis and Flo Jo all summer long.
After the five-hundred-dollar ride and the hundred-dollar first night, folks had to rent they beds and pay utilities on the water and electric, so the total came to twenty dollars a night. Sirius be like, I’m making ten a day and paying twenty a night? That shit don’t make sense. Everybody told him to just work harder, ’cause sometime you could get over that hump. It wasn’t no A/C, and it be so hot all the time that folks starts taking a shower in they clothes tryna keep cool while the clothes drying. Couldn’t hardly nobody sleep in that heat. They only collected the living expenses once a week, so if you ain’t want no more debt you had to be smart enough to squirrel away them greenbacks somewheres wouldn’t nobody find em. You even had to make sure didn’t nobody stole your stuff while you showering, so a lot of folks got Ziploc baggies and jammed they little moneys and whatever else in em—gold fillings, photos of they kids—so they could take they not-that-valuables with em into the shower, keep a eye on that munty, like TT called it.
But it never was much in them baggies, ’cause down in Richland, Gaspard Fusilier marked up everything so much that it gobbled your whole dollar amount. They charged $4.99 for a minibottle of Popov, $12.00 for a six-pack of Tecate in a can. Darlene and em would think, Bullshit—sometimes they even said Bullshit, but never too loud—they knew they ain’t had no choice but to pay the outrageous price, usually on credit. And since everybody addicted to drugs or alcohol or both, or denied it until they copped, folks would buy bottles and rocks and gear from a outside dude who marked his stuff way up, too, ’cause they all knew that the operation worked out in the hinterlands of God knows where, way out in Louisiflorida, and you couldn’t do no goddamn comparison shopping.
If Darlene got her groceries (that’s what they called their purchases) early, she would wait by the bus for everybody else, smoking boulders in the space between the minibus and the trees. She called that having afternoon tea. They got the workers to go faster and be more productive by keeping me away from em between lunch and dinner. That made em insane, but management promised em all kinda rewards in the form of extra rocks. People freaked out in them fields—twitching and yammering and shit—but you’d be surprised how fast a crackhead could pick a strawberry vine when it’s a lighter and a loaded pipe on the other side.
Out in the field one day, a potbellied brother name of Moseley who nobody knew how long he been with Delicious told everybody ’bout how a dude with a beef against a guy he claimed had stole his muffuletta sandwich out there had made a shank by melting the wrong end of one them sporks they sometimes gave out with the lunches and sporked his enemy in the kidney enough to put him in the hospital and never come back. Didn’t nobody know what happened after, Moseley said, if he died or what have you. Somebody said it might be worth trying that to get outta Delicious and somebody else said they gon tell How.
There’s a rock out by some trees that had that Spanish moss hanging on it, ’bout thirty yards away from the depot, but still you could see it from where Hammer usually parked. Darlene like to sit on that rock, squishing a lousy bread-and-cheese sandwich between her fingers before pigging out on it and drowning it with a Popov or two or three on good days, and when she sat there, she could hear a little brook trickling, fondling the other rocks before it go into this concrete tube that’s under the road real close by. She watching a group of crows edge over and pick apart a dead opossum in the road. Somebody once told her that crows could remember your face forever, so if you do mean shit to a crow and come back twenty years later tryna act all nice, it’ll squawk at you and go, Look, it’s that same sonofabitch! Let’s peck his brain out, y’all.