No? You can’t fill a tub in three minutes? He climbed out of the school bus, chuffed down the row, and stood behind Eddie, who was still trying to ignore the foreman. I’ma show you. Move it. With his bulk he shoved Eddie aside and moved the green tub to his feet. He raised his wrist to look at his watch. It’s six forty-three now. So by six forty-six I bet I’ll be done, or—or I’ll take twenty dollars off your mother’s debt. He cracked his knuckles, lowered his center of gravity, then positioned the tub in such a way that he could nudge it with his foot as he moved down the line. Move it, he barked again, and Eddie stepped back.
Okay, go, How shouted to himself. I haven’t done this shit in a long fucking time, he said, already having plucked and tubbed three tomatoes, but this shit was my childhood. Just like you! His fingers moved with surprising speed and grace, like someone who could’ve played the vibraphone exceptionally well, and he placed each one against the last inside the tub gently, like an egg. I grew up in southern Florida, he said, where my mother brought me and my sisters, and they didn’t give a shit about child labor or nothing, so all three of us would race each other to fill the tubs, picking tomatoes—we were so stupid we considered that shit a game. I got real good at it. You know how some kids get good at video games? This shit was my video game.
Then when I turned twelve they deported our ass so I joined a gang in Juarez. The main guy took me under his wing when I was fourteen. But that shit was too hard, man. So I came back to the U.S. by myself this time, but I had to take care of the guy who brought me back so that I wouldn’t be in all that debt. Then I was a coyote myself for a while, but this farm life, I like it better. Not so much moving around. Not as many people trying to kill you.
He continued his absentminded autobiography until he’d filled the bucket with green tomatoes and the two of them had edged a short distance down the row of plants. He looked at his watch. Shit, six forty-seven. I guess I don’t have the stuff I used to. And your mama don’t get the twenty bucks off! He stood up and handed the bucket to Eddie, waited a moment, then snatched it out of the kid’s hands.
What are you fucking kidding me, like I’m going to credit you for this one? Dream on, motherfucker. Call that a training session.
That evening, How undercounted what Eddie showed him; he did it to everybody, but with Eddie he’d blatantly lie about the count.
I picked five more bins than that, Eddie said.
Are you calling me a liar?
No, I’m calling you no good at math.
Oh, fuck you, How spat. I’m not good at math? All of your earnings goes to your crackhead mother, so why don’t you pick up what you think I owe you at the depot, okay? Your tomatoes had scratches all over them because your fingernails got too long from working up at the house every other day. And I still haven’t figured out where the jack from the truck went. I think you probably know. Don’t you break Sextus’s computer every other day so that you can keep fixing it instead of coming down here? I mean, I don’t blame you. If I could fix a computer, I wouldn’t leave that place neither.
For Eddie, interacting with How had become as unpleasant as when his coworkers had enlisted him to kill a snake or chase a rat or, once, a polecat in the living quarters during the early-morning hours. A visit with How came to mean only bad news, grueling work, or a combination of the two unique to Eddie’s days at Delicious.
19.
The Wrong Limes
Darlene been had known that the only time that management ain’t seem to need to know exactly where you was and how to grab you back at a second notice was when they took you down the depot on Friday and Tuesday and let you wander round a li’l bit. Michelle said the reason they be letting people wander off that time was that the depot be dead center of the farm, and the chance you could get off the property alive by your lonesome got so small that they’s overconfident. Hadn’t nobody never seen no map so didn’t nobody know, but she said she had figured it out from stuff that How and Hammer said. If you gone missing at the depot, likely you gonna wind up back where you started or die from one the five zillion dangers between you and freedom. Michelle tried to piece together a map in her head based on where they had took her on different details and on things people be saying ’bout where things was, but she couldn’t never be sure. Michelle always asking Eddie to find a map on Sextus computer but he only got a map of America—Naked, he said, without no states or no names, just all green and brown from mountains and plains and rivers.
Darlene ain’t never told nobody, Michelle included, that Sirius B had probably escaped from that area and that he coulda made it out somehow. She ain’t never knew how much to trust nobody, and I suppose I convinced her that the others gonna inform on her if she said too much. I liked it there; I wanted to stay. For me the place like one them barbecues you can’t leave ’cause you gotta spend three hours saying good-bye to every last motherfucker there. Ooh, cousin Tyrone just walked in! Darlene always talking all kinda shit ’bout how she wanna leave, especially to Eddie, who really did wanna get out, but she ain’t never put no effective actions onto her words. That shit start to work Eddie nerves.