Okay, let’s figure something out! Darlene shouted, mostly to save her ass from feeling insulted by Michelle but also surprised how easily Michelle had made her mad what with accusing her ass of being a bad mother and a traitor. She couldn’t find that spark in her heart to be thinking ’bout no plan just yet, though. She all worried ’bout how she gonna do that and stay with me.
Hammer and How came halfway up the steps of the bus just in time to hear what Darlene shouted.
Figure out? What you got to figure out, Darlene? How asked her, like a cop. You know where your next high’s coming from, don’t you?
Michelle stood and swayed back up the aisle, still smoking, then she twisted her neck in How direction. We’re talking woman things, she said with a nasty edge, tryna cut him out the conversation. You know what a woman is? You ever been with one?
That’s a ten-dollar demerit right there. Better watch that mouth of yours, bitch.
Better than watching that face of yours.
That’s ten more.
Now she owes $1,769.35, Darlene marveled to herself.
How climb the rest the stairs, snapped to attention, and done drawn his gun. He point the barrel at Michelle, panting like he a unruly German shepherd, and goes, Fucking shut the fuck up. I’m docking you for insubordination. And put that cigarette out.
Michelle giggled and covered her face. Then she flicked the cigarette out the window.
A few nights later, Jackie, How, and Hammer locked the chicken house after lights-out and gone drinking somewheres, or maybe to get new people. Hands had got short even for winter. It still be a lotta work—they be harvesting cabbages, curing sweet potatoes, planting onions and chives, and tilling the bejeezus out the soil in January. But Sirius gone, and also a lady named Yolanda, and a dude who went by Billy Bongo flew the coop. A Nicaraguan dude they called Flaco had got real sick off the pesticides and then vanished. This brother nicknamed Too Tall had probably died, maybe of heatstroke. When they found him in the morning, Hammer said, He still breathing, and said he gonna take this man to the hospital—even though there probably wasn’t no hospital within a hundred miles—so he and TT and Hannibal stuck Too Tall in the passenger side of a pickup truck even though Too Tall not staying upright, and Hammer drove away. TT said that as they moving him, when Too Tall head and arm fell out the open window against the side mirror, didn’t no breath cloud show up on the mirror. Folks said that that ain’t prove nothing, but still and all, didn’t nobody never see Too Tall no more. And didn’t nobody bring up the name of Too Tall neither. Never.
The workers ain’t know how far Jackie, How, and Hammer going when they went to pick folks up this time, but you bet everybody up in that chicken house heard the minibus noise and listened for it to fade out, putting they head sideways, raising they eyebrows up. Folks was relieved not to have to see no supervisors no more, and a few of em moving together to talk and smoke. Every so often Darlene would hear a li’l outbreak of laughter or a shout when one the rats done skittered through the bathroom—maybe somebody seen Charlie, this one nasty rat that got bald patches in his side from where he scratched hisself till he bled. Everybody said that seeing Charlie meant at least a week of bad luck.
In the cover of the laid-back atmosphere, Michelle and TT snuck over to the mattress where Darlene and Eddie already gone to sleep. Michelle shook them awake. They decided that once everybody else went to sleep, TT gon lift everybody up to the window and out. They pretend to have a conversation, which turnt to a real conversation even though Darlene couldn’t think ’bout nothing except were they gonna go through with the plan and would they fail and die or fail and get the shit kicked out of em. Success ain’t even occur to her ass.
When the group finally got quiet, and all they could hear was the clucking and rustling feathers from the hundreds next door, Michelle and TT stood up and made they move. Darlene adrenaline went schwoop. The dark be too dark; they looking like shadows of shadows up next to that wall. Didn’t none of em had matches right then, or God forbid a candle—they ain’t even sell no candles at the depot.
Michelle be like, How y’all could be smoking so much and nobody got a light?
Darlene grabbed Eddie hand and still had to grope her way around—you ain’t want to touch them walls, what with the black mold and them palmetto bugs and whatnot.
Them palmetto bugs seemed to know shit, too. When somebody ain’t slept in a mattress for a day, a bunch of em would go to that mattress and hang out. They was the giant flying type, too. Then they got bold—sometime they run cross your toes or your face in the night or climb up your pant leg and you jump up and shout and do a crazy dance to shake em out and try to find em in the dark to kill them, but you couldn’t. Tuck said, I bet it’s like entertainment for em, even they know you can’t do nothing. I told Darlene that I knew for certain that them shady-ass bugs was informing on the workers, telling the management who had bad-mouthed the company in the off-hours. Some of em was robot bugs designed to listen in. Darlene warned everybody ’bout that, but they wouldn’t take her seriously. Their loss.
Eventually Eddie helped Darlene get to the wall with the high window. But then, when they got over there, they had to move one the bunk beds against the concrete real quiet-like on account a the other workers who ain’t gone might give em away outta jealousy, or want to join up with em, and that would get too dangerous.