You need? I need. I need me a rug, this food bringer said. He swallowed his words and barely opened his mouth when he spoke. I got me some bad rug-need, that’s what I’m about! Fat motherfucker giving me attitude. Fattitude, that’s what it is. Ha! One thing you gotta say about me, I’m funny. When I leave here I’ma go to LA and be a comedy star in the movies like Eddie Murphy. You watch.
Have you seen Darlene Hardison?
Once or twice a food bringer did not seem out of it but never answered his questions except by grunting equivocally, and they all regarded him with unsettling, blank cow-eyes. Eddie suspected that someone had ordered them not to say anything except to ask about his health.
You okay? a food bringer said, almost as an afterthought, while leaving.
I think so.
Fever? Chill? Ache?
No.
The guy pointed at Tuck lying in the corner. He ain’t dead yet? He spoke with what sounded to Eddie like impatience.
No. Better than he was yesterday.
Hmm. Might not be medical. That’s what How an’ them saying. On account a you ain’t got it.
Not medical? Then what?
Some kinda obeah juju from somewheres.
What’s obeah juju?
The guy’s response terrified Eddie. He stared at Eddie and his eyes glazed over in a dramatic way that the boy could not decipher. The guy didn’t respond to the question, maybe because something more exciting had just happened inside his skull, but he also looked surprised that Eddie didn’t know that term. Or perhaps bugging out his eyes was his way of demonstrating obeah juju. It did not feel at all like a normal interaction between human beings. With the same weird grimace on his face, the man turned and waddled off through the brush.
On the afternoon of the fourth day in the barn, Tuck recovered, almost miraculously. He sat up, stood, stretched, and walked shakily across the dirt to the rectangle of light in the corner where the door had fallen off one of its hinges. It was as if Jesus had laid his palm on the man’s sweaty forehead and pronounced him well. Tuck qualified his sudden burst of energy in every way he could think of, as if he knew better than to get excited about something that could turn out to be nothing.
I could be about to get worse, he warned. And it ain’t like I’m about to run the one-hundred-yard dash. But the fever musta broke or something. Damn if it ain’t a complete mystery how shit function inside my own self. Chin to chest, he looked down at his dirt-caked T-shirt. Now I need some more of that drinkahol, boy, ’cause I’m getting the goddamn shakes again.
Was it obeah juju?
Tuck froze and then snapped his head toward Eddie. He responded with a condescending outrage Eddie always half expected from older black adults. Damn right somebody put a curse on me, he said. From the minute I got borned. He cut his eyes and spat his words. Doctor grabbed me out my mama *, held me by my feet, whacked my black ass extra-hard, and said, It’s a nigger! That’s the curse that’s on me. Around here niggers say some funky words, put some chicken feathers in a wine bottle, and motherfuckers just laugh it off, but when white folks say some curses on your ass, you are up to your neck in fines and bills and fees and lawyers for the rest of your life. Then you’re in jail, which is a motherfucking labyrinth of shit on a whole different level. And white folks do that shit to other white folks too. Shit, they’d do it to the birds if they could.
What you think happen to me? he went on. Tuck described his struggle to make it as a musician: the years of touring; sleeping on the same filthy comforter every night in the back of a rickety van; playing all night and having to split fifty dollars among the six band members, and not evenly, because Mad Dog, his bandleader, demanded a bigger cut; the club managers who sometimes refused to pay; the lack of a steady woman; the steady presence of the wrong women; the ominous, deepening evidence that the audience for Mad Dog Walker’s music was literally dying and the leader’s tendency to blame his band for the waning popularity of the blues and harangue them, and sometimes even the thin crowds at shows, during his interminable drug binges; how the stress of all these things made Tuck drink until he didn’t have the strength to do anything but drink, and how even that strength disappeared, how his playing, the activity that had given Tuck the greatest pleasure and kept him going spiritually, though never financially, gradually seemed to take the shape of a noose and began to tighten around his neck.
He had followed his ambition to the outskirts of its possibility and had not found riches there, which didn’t bother him, since he was used to poverty, but he’d expected a certain sense of fulfillment, a measure of respect from his community—What a joke that was, he said, to think that niggers fighting for the same scrap of meat like a pack of yard dogs is a community—something unnameable but gratifying, and he’d found that all he had in the end, once Mad Dog and the boys parted ways, was his own stupid life, emptied of significance.
Just as he had begun to imagine how to redirect that life toward something new, maybe to think about getting a GED, a spiteful variety of fate—others might call it God—put his body in Oklahoma City, in the path of a particular Honda Accord driven by a thirty-four-year-old mother with an alarmingly high blood-alcohol level, especially for a Thursday afternoon. Tuck sustained four broken ribs, multiple lacerations, a busted kneecap, and a severe concussion. While he remained in intensive care for two weeks, the woman was unharmed. He blamed the concussion for cognitive problems that made it impossible for him to return to any sort of work, and without health insurance he faced charges so astronomical that once he’d healed sufficiently and the overdue notices began to crowd out the junk mail in the doorway of his motel-style condo rental, the pressure became so great that it forced him out.