She climbed down from the bed frame and she and TT told Michelle and Eddie ’bout the dog. They could hardly hear that dog, so each of them gone up on the cot and took a peek. The dog kept wheezing, and the sound struck em so funny and sad that they thinking ’bout going on ahead and jumping down anyways. That dog so old! TT said. What he gonna do, gum us to death?
Michelle said, Fuck it. Life and death, y’all. She climb up on the cot by her damn self and shimmy up through the window to the outside, and right after her leg disappear through the window they heard her ass fall and start howling ’bout that she twist her ankle and here come the dog. Darlene get up to the window to look, and she seen Michelle tryna dodge the dog, ’cause he keep coming for her, same time as she climbing up over the fence, but that fence be ’bout nine feet high and got a double row of razor wire at the top, so she can’t go nowheres. At one point, she get halfway up the fence, but the dog chomp down her ankle and she had to kick his ass away while she still tryna climb.
Darlene’s like, Just come back through the window, Michelle! But she ain’t listen. She so hardheaded that she still hanging on the fence just out the dog reach when the minibus come back, and I ain’t never seen nobody laugh and bust on nobody so hard as them three when they found Michelle out there, hanging on the fence and kicking her leg out at that dog face. They demerited the shit outta her and sealed up the window with new cement blocks the next day.
In the end, the rest of em decided to wait. To get to know the dog. Darlene wondered how they coulda put a dog out there for such a long time without nobody knowing ’bout it—maybe the wheezing bark kept him secret—but a month later, when TT start making a new getaway plan, Michelle goes, The dog must have just got there. Probably that night, knowing our luck, and TT chimed in, They found the most quietest dog going. But vicious. I think they trained his ass to want human blood.
Maybe ’cause the whole thing had happened in almost total darkness, or maybe ’cause didn’t nobody on the crew want to blow they cover, Darlene and TT and Eddie got away with not getting away that night. Michelle ain’t give them up or nothing. Nobody knew Delicious policy on leaving without terminating your contract ’cause they ain’t never said nothing after people tryna bust out. Seem they wouldn’t never admit that any motherfucker with half a brain would want to get away from that place. When you heard them sonofabitches talking ’bout Delicious, it was the place they told you about when they picked you up, the three-star hotel that got a Olympic swimming pool and a tennis court with gourmet meals, crazy as that shit sound. How act like the grind at Delicious be like he in charge of catering at the motherfucking White House.
So if somebody disappeared and ain’t never tried to come back, which to them nobody in they right mind would, meaning that Sirius B was out his mind, which was not hard to imagine, you never found out for sure if they made it. They showed you Kippy’s boots. And if you tried to leave the premises and failed, them Delicious people ain’t want nobody to know you even tried, so they ain’t punished nobody but Michelle specifically for that, ’cause the whole crew done seen her fail. They came down extra-hard on Michelle behind that, but you couldn’t tell if that meant nothing, ’cause they came down extra-hard all the damn time, so what the hell could extra extra-hard even mean?
Even if a worker done tried to bail in a obvious kind of way, like booking down the road during the town run, How and them ain’t never accuse nobody of attempting to escape. Hannibal tried that and they just grabbed his ass and threw him in the van, and there was this blood smear on the back window for a long time from what they did to him after, plus a scar on his neck and a big bloodstain on his hat that he couldn’t never totally wash out. But they ain’t said nothing about no rules. They knew that wondering what rule you had broke gon make you worry more, make the whole joint a totally scary question mark. They wanted to keep your sorry ass running in place, weeding fields, picking fruit that ain’t there, and, most of all, partying with me.
16.
Summerton
On rainy days, work didn’t always slow down, but it sometimes changed focus; the routine might include fewer outdoor activities related to harvesting, more indoor tasks, and maintenance. For the most part, the equipment at Delicious either did not work very well, or did not work at all. Most of the cultipackers had numerous missing teeth, and some of the crossbars holding them together had snapped from rust damage, come apart at the bolts and no one had ever repaired them, or the machines had received some nearly laughable stopgap patch. As for the other farm equipment, someone had wrapped the broken axle of a wheelbarrow back together with a large quantity of twine, while someone else had reattached the ends of several rakes with duct tape.
To till the land, the farm still used a large number of moldboard plows, possibly from the 1960s, whose coulters had chipped, hung loose from their beams, disappeared, or, in some cases, become so corroded that their height regulators had fused to their beams. It appeared that management had appointed Hammer chief of maintenance, but only his proprietary exclamations of sorrow and guilt over the atmosphere of disrepair gave that role away, since nobody ever saw him do anything to actually take care of the machines.
One day during the rainy spring six months after he’d arrived, Eddie happened to be on detail with Hammer and a few other workers in the garage with the mostly intact roof, as opposed to the makeshift coverings that had become permanent fixtures.