Then How voice, low in the back of the group, say that work need to start up again, like work could get back to work by itself, but she managed to ignore him till she got TT in a stable place. Since he okay with staying on the ground on account a his shock and dizziness, she gone back to hunting down them not-there lemons. After a while, the sun went down and a chill came up into the air like water filling a glass. TT got up and start tryna work again, but he real hurt. At the end of the day, Darlene seen that his tub ain’t had but four brownish lemons in it, and that meant he gonna be asking everybody else to share they food and they drugs.
Later, right before lights-out, she convince TT to explain what had went down, and even then he would only whisper. It wasn’t no conversation, he said. I asked How a question and next thing I knew he took a fat-ass log and opened my head up like a damn watermelon.
What did you ask?
I asked if anybody knew where Sirius gone and what happened to him, just casual-like, and that was the answer. You was tight with Sirius, Darlene. Don’t know why I didn’t ask you first. What happen to that nigger? Did he get loose?
I haven’t the foggiest, TT, she said, shaking her head. I wish I did know. I hope.
You do too know. You can’t play me.
Why is it important to you?
It ain’t! That’s why I thought it wasn’t no big deal to ask! I just wanna know. Did he get out?
I couldn’t tell you.
That means you know. You prolly going with him next.
You go ahead and believe whatever you want. Get some rest.
But she kept hanging out with TT—and I joined them, of course. She tryna drown the troubles out her mind, her not looking at him, him not looking at her. I tried to get em to a higher plane, but it ain’t gone much of nowhere; I was weak right then, mostly fucking talcum powder that they had sold on markup down at the depot. Jackie made the usual announcements to wrap up the day and send everybody to bed, and soon, what with all the activity, Darlene and TT become shadows to each other, like they be trees and shrubs spaced out on a hill in the damn twilight.
Once it got dark enough, though, TT start blabbing in a whisper with Darlene about the exact number of his debt as he calculated it on his own versus what they said he owed, and how in general couldn’t nobody make no sense of the hiring policy at Delicious. Jackie and How had picked up a alcoholic bum with a swollen leg with gangrene on it, he said, and the guy’s son, and the man had caught the terrible flu that going around and he up in the bed, and the boy wouldn’t never leave his daddy. TT had only heard secondhand, though. Them two supposed to have got put in a barn that’s further off, in a broke-down infirmary, to keep from spreading the disease. TT ain’t had no idea what they want with people in such bad shape.
They like a motherfuckin’ Hoover now, he joked. Sucking up old niggers and babies off the street. What a child and a invalid gonna do on a farm and winter season almost here?
They’re crazy, Darlene whispered.
What happened to Sirius? Did they kill him?
I don’t know, TT.
She said that shit to get him off her back, but saying the words made her think for the first time that she actually didn’t know. She start thinking maybe Sirius had got captured and killed without nobody on the crew finding out ’cause wouldn’t nobody say nothing. The idea cut real close to what had happened with Nat and bored a hole in all them optimistic thoughts she had stacked up in her head and now a ton of evil-ass doubts was pouring through that hole. After all the joking she and Sirius done ’bout Delicious, it had never crossed her mind for real that they might actually kill folks to protect theyself. She thought that ain’t nothing much matter to Delicious beyond the take for a given day, week, or month and whether you had shaped a twig into a shank and hid it in your sock so they could dock your pay.
Sometime when I be hanging out with folks and they start getting all into conspiracies and plots, I like to encourage em to get creative and keep thinking on it and believing in theyself. Everybody say you gotta believe in yourself. Your parents says it, and the TV say it, and all the damn movies. Of course Darlene li’l book say it too. So before I got done hanging with her that night, her paranoia done hatched five hundred little chicks and they had all took to peeping around in her head, more chickens than it be in the next room. She couldn’t sleep behind that, what with her mind tryna raise up all the possible chickens and figure out the truth without letting the powers above know what she knew, or even what she suspected. When you working hard, she thinking, you don’t really be getting paid, and you can’t go nowheres, everybody know the name for that. Everybody on the farm always comparing what they done to the olden days, but they just exaggerating ’cause they angry—didn’t nobody get paid back then. Ain’t that the definition of slavery? You don’t get paid? And if you had signed a fucking contract and agreed to the debt they kept piling on—well, everybody be quietly arguing on the definition of that shit all the time.