Once, after ’bout two and a half months of working for Delicious, Sirius B came to sit with Darlene. Something wasn’t right about him, even more than the drugs, but it musta been kinda mental, ’cause aside from a faraway glaze in his eyes that look almost like a rapture, his problem wasn’t nothing you could put your finger on unless you counted the shit he talking ’bout. Sirius ain’t did no small talk; he would find the most painful thing on your mind or the most cosmic idea and act like chitchat could just start there, at the most intense part. When you start talking with Sirius B it’s like he tryna stab you with a conversation.
He sitting down near Darlene on the rock and smoking, and when he done sucked up his first hit, he held his lungs tight and start wheezing and talking at the same time he passed her the pipe, and then she sparked it to get the rest, burning the end first and then moving up the pipe to my sparkling chunks of stone inside.
He said, You missing your boy, Darlene? You call him yet?
She shook her head, put me down, and start flattening that damn sandwich again. She went, It isn’t easy using the phones, as you know. Darlene thought Eddie wouldn’t want to see her that way anyhow, that nobody oughta see her that way—hair undone, lips burned, ripped seams all over them thirdhand T-shirts she wore; sweaty, dirty, itchy, and scabby, doing the monkey the minute I got too far away to beam her up. She say to herself, Eddie’s smart like Nat, he’ll find somebody to give him what he needs. She figured her sister gonna step in.
So Sirius asked her, Did you get in touch with anybody?
I left a message for Eddie that I’m okay and don’t worry, she lied, but I couldn’t say where to look for me because where are we? She threw her eyes around at the shrubs and trees, and farther out to the gray mist way the fuck out by the horizon. That sonofabitch How keeps saying he’s going to tell me the name of the place and the address of where we are but I don’t think he knows himself!
Delicious phone ain’t work for nobody, they both knew that shit. But Sirius too much of a gentleman to call her out.
That ain’t right, you shouldn’t let them keep you away from your son.
She thought he’s talking down to her, and got upset. I’m not letting anybody keep me away from anything, she said. She gnawed the crust off the sandwich and start chomping on the mashed bread and yellow cheese inside. Her throat dry and she ain’t had nothing to wash the sandwich down with ’cause she had the Popovs first that day and the heat of late August already done dehydrated her ass. She staring at the brook, thinking maybe she could get water from there, but judging by the smell and them crushed cans and cigarette boxes sloshing around in the water and the weird-ass way that the foam foaming up in the water didn’t never disappear off them rocks, she figure that shit’s polluted.
Sometimes I get a feeling about all this, Sirius said.
All what?
The day after the hand sex that led to the bathroom sex, Sirius had said to Darlene that it wasn’t no thang, and said it again the couple of times it happened since, and that phrase kept repeating in her mind—Ain’t no thang. It got her confused and frustrated that her stuff ain’t floored Sirius or, if it had, that he pretending it hadn’t.
You know, he said, the dorm got rats and palmetto bugs, we be picking heavy-ass melons or shoveling chicken shit all day in this crazy-hot weather, pay’s the lowest of the low, can’t call nobody, won’t nobody let you off the premises or visit home, assuming you still got one…Don’t it feel like a punishment from the Lord? Like it’s God saying, Fuck you, you crackhead nigger, you can’t do no better than this?
Darlene twist up one side her mouth. First of all, she said I’m not a crackhead or a nigger, thank you very much. I went to school. A crackhead is an individual who has lost all sense of the outside world, they’re like a zombie, closed off to the whole of existence, like they would smack, rape, and kill their sister for a hit and it wouldn’t matter in what order. That is not me. And God nothing. You made the choice to shovel chicken shit, Sirius.
Pardon me, ma’am. Sirius start looking at the bus and then off in the other direction.
And Lord, this is an improvement for me! At least now I’m doing good work—hard work, but honest work. Darlene flexed one her arms, which had got thinner and more muscular from tossing around so much produce, and also from doing drugs, but you couldn’t really tell which one had slimmed her down more. Work I’m proud of, she said. Can tell people about. And I don’t have to run all over the world dealing with shady people when I’m trying to get high. It’s one-stop shopping around here. Right?
Word.
Sirius nodded, even though the shit they ain’t said be as thick as crack smoke hanging in the air, a reckless doubt clinging to every little drop of humidity, but Darlene ain’t know if that feeling had to do with the attraction they was ignoring or with something else, something they couldn’t quite see, or with some shit they both knew but couldn’t share ’cause that would change all they fears from cloudy-ass suspicions to real demons, like demons on horseback, galloping down the road in they path, couldn’t stop em. Quietly they watching all the other workers walk out the store and congregate by the bus, and the pressure to go back over there getting more pressurized.