Then he noticed he was alone in the room.
He couldn’t remember the exact moment when he’d become so absorbed in figuring out the computer problem that Sextus and Darlene could have slipped out of the room unnoticed. Had they disappeared at the same time? He turned away from the desk and listened for signs but could hear only the fan humming, the papers rustling, and, through the open window, the breeze shimmying in the trees. Birds and crickets chirped. Every so often a chorus of cicadas chittered loudly and then quieted down. A rooster crowed and in the distance a car sped across the countryside. He wished he knew the exact location of the car and of the road. Maybe they had left together? The car sounded too far away.
Eddie stood up, flexed his knees, and walked to the doorjamb. Almost afraid to put his feet outside the room, remembering Sextus’s warning, he leaned against the molding and stuck his head into the hallway. Since he’d arrived at Delicious and found Darlene, he’d developed a fear of losing her, even losing sight of her, and his mind immediately shifted to a fear that the worst had happened—Papa Legba had lured them out of the room behind Eddie’s back and taken them to the other side. He used his shirt to dab sweat off his neck.
Ma? he asked, as loud as he dared, a noise that could’ve come from a goat.
The dark, cool hallway, clogged with artifacts, offered no response, nor any clues about where they had gone. Eddie looked both ways, then into the room directly opposite, where, through one of the windowpanes, he spied a section of the front lawn. He rushed back into the den and peered out the opposite window in the hope that he would spot at least one of them outside. He went to the window as if it were a brilliant idea, wrested it open, and leaned out as far as he could.
Mama! he shouted, this time more demanding, less goatlike.
He listened for her response, expecting anything, even a muffled scream from behind a secret door. It was no use. They were dead. Eddie returned to the hallway and ran shouting up and down its creaky floorboards, suspecting that if people heard him misbehaving, he’d get their attention. He called for his mother, drawing out the word Mama into long strings that shook inside his throat as he dashed around the hallway. When he lost his breath, he collapsed against the banister on the staircase and flopped onto the second stair. He wondered how long he might have to wait for them to return, or if they had gone away specifically to avoid him.
Exhausted and scared, he put one ear against the stair. In the ear that pointed upward, to the next floor, he heard his mother’s laugh.
This being his first time at Summerton, he didn’t gather the nerve to ascend the stairs and listen more closely, but on many subsequent occasions, Eddie would remove his shoes and, taking advantage of the carpeted steps, slowly make his way upstairs to follow the sound of his mother’s voice—it angered him a little that she seemed to use a higher, fake-sounding register around Sextus—down the hallway to a closed door. He knew better than to speak to his mother about this aspect of their visits to Summerton, but he drew conclusions on his own from hearing their labored breathing and Sextus’s feral grunts through the door, their low voices and whispers, their frequent invocations of the Lord. At first he tried to convince himself that they were merely praying together. But soon he had to admit that their prayers sounded very sexual.
Over time, Sextus’s technical problems became simpler and simpler—he never seemed to plug anything in—and Eddie would grow restless while waiting for Sextus and Darlene. He would sometimes tiptoe up to the door and listen for a while, trying to discern the meaning and emotion of their murmuring. Eddie would decide that he had to know the truth for sure even if it embarrassed all of them and he got in trouble. He’d plant himself directly in front of the doorknob, dramatically raise his hand high above his head, and resolve once and for all to yank the door open and satisfy all his doubts. There he’d remain, rigid as a slash pine, and hold the position until he became so frightened that one of them would open the door from the other side that he’d have to slide back down the hall and downstairs noiselessly in his socks.
17.
Your Punishment
As much as he hated the toil and confinement of the next several years, Eddie accepted most of what happened at Delicious as a condition of being with his mother. He complained about the moldy mattresses, the wet sandwiches, about having to avoid certain people on account of lice, but he almost never saw past those details to what might have been wrong with the place on a larger scale. The first time he suggested that they leave the farm and go back to Ovis, his mother doubled over as if he’d slugged her in the stomach, and on other occasions, if he mentioned Houston instead, she might fall to her knees on a rake, or cover her face with mud-crusted hands.