As he dealt with his awkward feelings about letting Michelle and the others down as a spy (he was sure they suspected him of keeping information from them, though he hadn’t uncovered any), the Fusiliers increased his responsibilities. Gradually, How stopped sending Eddie out to weed and pick and add fertilizer and pesticides to the various crops, and had him spend more time indoors, tinkering with computers, appliances, and engines. Sextus told me I had to, How said.
Occasionally Sextus would call on Eddie to watch over or play with the wee boy, Jed, who had recently turned four, and that kept Eddie away from the squalor of the chicken house. The doctors had advised Elmunda against having him in her condition, to which she replied, The Lord won’t let me have him in another condition. Then her health worsened. She had had a series of seizures during childbirth, then a stroke. She and Sextus began to enlist Eddie as a babysitter every so often, in addition to having him make things. He put a wooden box with hinges together to hold Jed’s many toys.
The managers, Eddie noticed, started to treat him like a mascot, as if a cogent and intelligent boy his color interested them the way a singing dog might, or a horse that could solve simple equations. As a joke at first, Sextus let Eddie sit on the tractor, but when he saw how seriously Eddie took the wheel and pretended to shift the gears, he volunteered to teach the boy to drive it for real. It pleased Eddie to receive that kind of fatherly attention from anywhere, though at the same time it made him sad and angrily conscious of his own father’s absence, but he accepted anyway, since the opportunity to learn a new skill rarely came along.
Occasionally Sextus allowed him to shower in one of the downstairs bathrooms—Darlene had been doing so upstairs for a while. The bathrooms at Summerton had hot water and fresh-smelling soap; after the first time he had to stop using the soap because when he returned everybody smelled it on him and asked biting, jealous questions, exaggerated his chance to do what he wanted with his future, and openly doubted his loyalty to the workers. They had been less forthright with Darlene, given the implications of her special treatment. The Fusiliers, for their part, seemed to draw the line at letting Eddie dine with them, perhaps because they knew he would have demanded that Darlene join them, and Elmunda would not have put up with that.
Gradually everybody figured out—or Darlene told them—that the Fusiliers had decided to groom Eddie to become a supervisor, and though he found it flattering that the bosses treated him specially and gave him work that fit his particular talents, the question of whether that meant they would someday agree to send him on his way and allow his mother to leave with him—the only reason he considered accepting such a heinous position—remained unresolved. When Sextus decided to clean out the old barn and turn it into a workshop for Eddie, furnished primarily with woodworking tools Sextus had bought for himself but never learned to use, the management’s intentions became public knowledge—not to mention a source of embarrassment for Eddie. But the discomfort was mixed with an unspoken relief and gratitude for his special treatment. At night, though, locked in the chicken house under the watch of the hoarse dog, and later a younger, nastier dog, he feared that his fellow workers would retaliate against him by stabbing or smothering him, which was one reason he’d agreed to spy for Michelle.
It was harder to negotiate the same kind of treaty with How, Hammer, and Jackie, but particularly How. He never let his guard down. Once, on a tomato-picking detail, Eddie wound up nearer to the school bus than usual by some series of mishaps, which meant nearer to How. The foreman usually wore black heavy-metal-band T-shirts, usually a red pentagram with the word Slayer inside it. He’d cut the sleeves off, making it easier for someone to catch a glimpse of his fleshy flanks through the large armholes. Along with a shock of black hair, thickening arms, and a complicated beard he’d recently grown, How had an especially demonic look around that time, and an attitude to match. TT said that How had deliberately stepped in one of TT’s tomato buckets because of a grudge and blamed him for all the damaged produce, Michelle said she’d kicked his thigh to avoid his advances, and that other women had not been so lucky. Everybody saw How take special trips down the line to shout at Hannibal when he thought the man wasn’t working fast enough. He’s just an older guy, people would say, leave him be.
Standing above Eddie at the back of the truck, How glared toward Eddie, and since the detail had only begun, he had time to wait and comment, so Eddie braced himself for the usual racial remarks and accusations of laziness. The one thing you could say about How was that he hated all groups equally, even his own Mexican people. Three minutes into picking, he barked at Eddie.
You fill that tub yet, Eddie?
Eddie knew better than to respond; he concentrated instead on selecting tomatoes at the proper level of unripeness for transport—only greens or breakers this time, turning or pink stayed on the vine—and cleanly twisting them away from their vines without damaging them. No one could’ve filled the tub by that point.