Once How’s footsteps faded, Eddie, still kneeling by his mother, tried to find ways to make her comfortable. He folded scraps of canvas and put them behind her head on the floor, made a splint for her broken arm by wrapping a long piece of twine around a wooden paint stirrer. He found a small jar of petroleum jelly to use as a salve in the many places she needed it, some of which she insisted on balming herself. While he took care of her wounds, she blurted out a disjointed story about Jarvis Arrow, trying to tell Eddie that Sirius had made it out and would come back to get them and make a run for it.
Darlene’s injuries, her restless state of mind, and Scotty, of course, had impaired her ability to articulate what happened, so her son paid only partial attention. Scotty never left her side even when—no, especially when—so much trouble tumbled down on her at once. She sounded amazed, like somebody having a religious conversion, and that made her story even harder to clarify. She kept saying, He’s coming, He’s coming, and Sirius will get us out of here, but this sounded to Eddie like Seriously get us out of here. Eddie didn’t remember Sirius, having only heard about him from Darlene and the rest of the crew. To Eddie, Sirius B sounded like a hazy legend that the heavy smokers conjured up to give themselves hope, a figure barely more real than Papa Ghede.
Even if Sirius had seemed real to him, Eddie remained skeptical of all the cosmic mumbo-jumbo everybody said that Sirius used to talk all the time—space clouds shaped like crabs and horse heads, a diamond bigger than the sun—it sounded to him like the kind of make-believe shit crackheads talked 90 percent of the time. When he heard Darlene’s half-conscious claims, through fat bleeding burned lips, that Sirius was alive and coming to get them, it seemed like a combination of a mixed-up prayer and a Negro spiritual about Jesus where a chariot comes down from heaven to rescue folks. And he didn’t consider her babbling nearly as urgent as her injuries. She rambled like a psychotic, and though Eddie had an excess of patience for her insanity, he’d heard plenty of her ravings in the past and had learned not to pay her any mind. He focused on keeping her calm so that her body could start to heal.
A few minutes after her breathing slowed, she laid her head back—a sign of relative stability—and he got up to test out whether he could leave. He pushed the two panels of the barn doors forward and discovered, without surprise, that How had padlocked them together and drawn a heavy chain through a hole in each side. He must have done it carefully and quietly, because Eddie didn’t remember hearing any chains jangling or even doors swinging shut, but then again, he hadn’t concentrated on anything except his mother for a while.
An hour or so went by. Once Darlene stopped trying to talk as much and seemed moderately comfortable, she fell into a shallow sleep. Eddie knew she wouldn’t sleep long and that when she woke up she would need to cop pretty bad. He thought he could get drugs for her on his next trip to the depot, but he didn’t know when that might happen.
Once her breathing became even and her biceps stopped twitching, he returned the plane and the gouge to their rightful place with the woodworking tools and examined the shelves he was planning to put in. He would continue building them so that he could at least finish some of the tasks assigned him that day. It was as if the rest of the day had been a kind of grimy window, and his labor the rag he wiped everything else away with so that he could see clearly. From time to time he peered over at Darlene to make sure nothing had gotten worse, but primarily he remained fixated on assembling the boards.
When he heard voices coming up the path, he figured that How had come back with somebody and would soon unchain the door. He stopped working on the shelves, put away his tools, and moved to the center of the room, positioning himself between his mother and the slowly opening barn doors.
The chains clanked and swung loose from their position, going slack in the holes that someone had bashed into the door in order to make the chain lock. One of the chains gained momentum and hurtled to the ground like a fleeing snake. When Eddie looked up from watching that happen, he met How’s eyes, and he could see Sextus standing just behind and to the left of him, hands on his hips, a bit of wind flipping up a strand of the waxy silver hairs on his head. He scowled like a mechanic watching a car crash and wondering how much he might get for the scrap.
Something didn’t seem right—How looked good. His brown irises glowed, color flooded into his tan dimples. Was this emotion number three? It looked like he’d sent a better-looking younger brother in his place, not the sweaty dude who led late-night watermelon details and forced workers to pick nonexistent citrus. The brushy sides of his haircut glistened like an otter’s pelt; his spiteful smile got so broad he looked like somebody discovering that his mission in life was to help others.
The three stood there like the last pieces left in a chess game. Scowling, How breathed through his mouth in a way that made him sound like somebody who snored loudly, his windpipe flapping deep inside him. His switch flipped to his second emotion.
You didn’t do nothing, did you? I asked you to do things and you didn’t do nothing. She’s still lying there in that same position that you left her in. Didn’t I say what to do?
You did. Eddie didn’t think he would get anywhere by pointing out to How that Darlene was his mother and that people didn’t torture their mothers. In the world of Delicious Foods, though, obedience came first; everyone had to submit to a preposterous system of laws that had nothing to do with justice, logic, or even maximizing company profits—it seemed as if the managers made up rules just so they could enforce them and their employees would have to follow them, a pure sadism free of any incentive aside from its own continuation.
Eddie’s defense fell out of his mouth anyway. That’s my mother.