During the conversation, Sextus brought up the topic of a barn out by the depot that seemed to him ideal as a temporary infirmary. After they had settled the issue and checked the other new people in, he drove off, and How and Jackie loaded Tuck and Eddie back into the van. Eddie opened his mouth to inquire about Darlene’s presence on the farm, but How told him to shut up before he finished asking if he could ask a question.
Silently they drove out to the barn, which turned out to be weather-beaten and unstable, a rotten, listing structure etched in silver by the moonlight. With a few sharp blows from a small ax, How broke the padlock off its hinges. Then, almost as an afterthought, he tossed a blanket into the musty space with the two of them. Waving their hands at Eddie and Tuck as if to fan their bodies into place, Jackie and How made it clear that they did not want to catch whatever Tuck had come down with.
The fear and speed with which the crew had ostracized them made Eddie increasingly uneasy. He hadn’t shown any symptoms, he hadn’t coughed even once, but they assumed that he and Tuck, whom they kept referring to as his father, despite his frequent and loud corrections, had both picked up whatever contagious illness was soon liable to take Tuck to a picnic with the ancestors. Their certainty rubbed off on him. When they wouldn’t even give him a Kleenex, he could only assume that they knew what illness the two of them had contracted and expected him and Tuck to waste away rapidly.
We’ll be back later, Jackie said. She and How swung the door shut behind themselves and Eddie heard the noise of their shoes crunching through the dead leaves on the path gradually diminish, then the minibus’s ignition and departure. When Jackie said later, Eddie couldn’t tell if she meant half an hour or six months.
The support beams on each corner leaned far enough over that the walls became rhombuses. The barn had gone so completely to seed that blades of moonlight sliced through the decaying slats of wood that had once been the back wall. As his eyes adjusted, Eddie stomped less carefully. Tuck had collapsed near the door, and his endless coughing annoyed Eddie but also reassured him that his fellow traveler had not died or been attacked by something unseen.
At least I’m indoors tonight, Tuck managed between hacking fits. A moonbeam cut across his face. Sort of indoors, he added.
When Eddie reached the far left corner of the barn, he found—among rust-eaten pitchforks and trowels, useless stirrups and yokes, and a bucket of stagnant water—the remnants of an upright piano. The enamel on most of its ivory teeth had snapped off, and a few of the black keys had come off as well, leaving only raw wood flush against the keyboard. The front panel had fallen off, but someone had placed it diagonally on the top, although at some point the lid had broken and it hung precariously off the back by one hinge.
The environment made him restless—he thought he heard bats; the spiderwebs that touched his face and arms made him think of movies about zombies, almost made him wonder if he had entered the world of those monsters as a monster himself. With a theatrical flourish, Eddie reached out to the piano with both arms extended, his fingers splayed in a Frankenstein stance, and, in the manner of someone who does not know a language attempting to speak it, attacked the keys from one end to the other. The muted thumps on the hammerless notes, dissonant chimes, and bizarre twangs that he made the piano emit sounded to him like devil music. When Eddie discovered the sustain pedal and let his every punishment of the instrument ring out, Tuck whimpered for him to stop, claiming that his ears would bleed and promising to play and sing a hundred songs on it when he got well, but the noise drowned him out, and the barn, and probably the outside world for a few hundred yards, became the eerie domain of some ghoulish musical apparition.
When Eddie decided that he had come to the finale, he bashed the keys forcefully four times and allowed the dirty sonic cloud he’d produced to dissipate until it disappeared beneath the sounds of crickets and strange frogs outside.
For four days that October the crew marooned Eddie and Tuck by themselves, providing only the most rudimentary food, usually care packages consisting of a bruised orange, a salty, disintegrating baloney sandwich, a half-pint of warm milk or watery OJ from concentrate, and one packet of generic mayo. Someone from the crew would drop several packages at a time in green Styrofoam containers outside the barn on the path, which was really just two deep, muddy parallel tire tracks with long grass between them. Without entering, the person might call out to check on Tuck, who could barely drag himself down the small hill where he and Eddie relieved themselves.
Because food came only once a day, Eddie divided the lunches evenly and saved half of his for dinner. He would do the same for Tuck, whose worsening illness had begun to make Eddie unsure of his own health. He begged for alcohol; Eddie whined until they brought it, charging against Tuck’s debt.
During the day, Eddie explored the woods and fields around the barn, thinking that he might see his mother somewhere. Periodically he made sure that he could still breathe by inhaling as much of the humid atmosphere as he could and running as far as he dared without losing sight of the barn and then back again, his vitality confirmed by his panting and sweating.
The food bringers talked but the talk did not say anything, it was only nervous chatter, like the night people in Houston. Eddie could tell that they might not remember how to have conversations, so when he tried asking about Darlene, he half expected to get garbled responses. Words without meanings jumped out of the sides of the food bringers’ mouths; their eyes were always bloodshot and jumpy.
I’m missing school, Eddie said to one of them. I’ve got to go back. Is Darlene Hardison here somewhere? She’s my mother. I need to find her.