Honey, don’t talk like that. You’re not going to die. You need to live. That’s what I came to say. You need to leave here and go raise my son.
A long silence passed between the two of em. She couldn’t stop staring at the bird’s li’l yellow eye; he ain’t hardly blink. She wanted to see tenderness in that bird, but she really couldn’t. In that body she couldn’t know Nat no more, not with that blank-ass eyeball. She wanna kiss him, but when the bird done turnt his beak toward her, she imagining what it gon feel like to kiss a grackle, have that beak poking her cheek or piercing her lip, comparing that to the memory of her husband lips on hers—warm, soft tongues and breath going back and forth, body linking up to body. She covered her face without no consideration to how she smearing herself with dirt bombs and grit. Some different strange music done started floating through in the air, not the radio song no more, but some kinda fucked-up jazz off a smashed piano, then that suddenly stopped.
How could you come back and act so cold? she said.
The bird goes, This is the best I can manage. I’m sorry.
Nat! Darlene grabbed for the bird and he moved backward again. He raised his wings all tentative and whatnot, like he testing the air.
I would if I could, the grackle said, this time with a bit of grief. Believe me.
Then the bird be poking under his greenish-black wing to groom hisself, and in a split second Darlene finally snapped out her insanity, and now she seen that the grackle just be a normal animal that couldn’t talk and ain’t had nobody dead husband spirit inside. She felt stupid and ashamed that she had thought that and had to admit she not in her right mind. She seen herself at the bottom of a well, and people yelling down to her. She peeking into that li’l circle of light up top, stretching her hand out and tryna touch em.
12.
Obeah Juju
Since the moment Jackie had helped them into the Death Van and distributed the first of many hits to the other passengers, Eddie fantasized that he really was crossing into the underworld to rescue his mother. Once the minibus turned onto the desolate roads and rattled over potholes toward nowhere, and his fellow travelers disappeared into a state between deep thought and sleep—though they had started the journey with a lively card game and an argument about boxing before lighting up—Eddie’s fantasy rose toward possibility. Maybe this lazy mood was death? Even after they’d stuck the box in the ground and told him his father was in it, no one had ever told him that things changed about your body after you died, except for his impression that you wore a robe and sprouted wings in heaven or grew horns and a tail in hell. On some level he knew not to share these thoughts because people would laugh. He and Tuck had not yet received robes or grown tails. It probably took a long time, he knew; he had learned while following his mother around that anything you needed from a white person at a desk always took extra time and required you to sign a lot of papers.
Eddie tried to grill Jackie to figure out where he would find Darlene when they arrived, but she, along with most of the other passengers on the ride, was minimally responsive, especially after she smoked. If anyone on the Death Van said something coherent, they’d make the type of outlandish statements he’d become accustomed to hearing from his mother. Strangely, the familiarity of their drugged-out behavior gave him confidence that his mother had, in fact, joined their ranks. He would just need to sit tight.
Tuck nearly coughed his guts out during the journey; he’d been growing sicker and weaker as the trip wore on, and to Eddie this gradual worsening seemed consistent with the process of dying, or having already died. When he asked Tuck, the man seemed to think that all he needed was an Olde English 800. Once they reached their destination, Eddie’s companion had lost the ability to rise from his seat without help. After Jackie spent several minutes attempting to get him to his feet by tugging on his limp arms, a few of the more able-bodied and right-minded men summoned from the chicken house lifted him out of the minibus and laid him on the ground next to the front wheel, and a debate erupted about whether he, and also Eddie, would be permitted to sleep with the rest of the workers or if this would constitute a health hazard. Eddie swiveled his head in search of Darlene but he didn’t see anyone like her nearby.
The workers did not care where Eddie and Tuck went; the debate took place mainly because of the presence of two paler men Eddie later learned were Sextus Fusilier and How, who used the moment to turn over in their minds, briefly, whether they should quarantine these two or let the illness run its course among the workers. In How’s opinion, not much work or profit would be lost, because he knew he could manage the team, but Sextus remained cautious, invoking all the clichés of thrift with which his family must have indoctrinated him over the years. Eddie didn’t understand the gist of this conversation. Instead he imagined that the two men were really God and the Devil (though he went back and forth about who was who) and that they had deadlocked over a decision about his and Tuck’s eternal fate.