Oh, really? I didn’t know that! How said, back to emotion number one. Wait, let me ask myself: Do I give a fuck about that? No, I believe that I don’t give a fuck about that. He turned his neck to address Sextus. Can you believe this? Without waiting for an answer, he turned back around. Sextus regarded How with mild discomfort, his face twisted slightly, like he had a stomachache. I don’t care if it’s the president of the United States, you do what I say. What do you have to say for yourself?
Eddie didn’t have nothing to say, but he didn’t say anything because he didn’t want to give How the pleasure of letting loose another hurricane of abuse.
How’s eyes darted around the space again, and he moseyed past Eddie, giving Darlene a cursory examination to prove his point. He sucked his teeth and picked up a length of sheathed cable and a long chain not unlike the one used to keep the barn doors locked. He took it up in one hand and pushed Eddie, struggling and stumbling, into one corner of the room with the other hand, shouting, See? See?, like he’d proved a point about Eddie that he and Sextus had discussed before arriving.
He took all that stuff and bound Eddie to the hole in one of the doors. First he wound the cable around the kid’s wrists tightly enough that after a few minutes it cut off his circulation. Eddie felt his hands swell and tingle—first they felt like gloves, later like someone else’s hands. He wrapped the chain tightly but randomly around the cord, and from somewhere on him he pulled out a rusty pair of tight handcuffs that he passed through themselves and cinched around Eddie’s wrists until he could no longer get the cuffs to make their characteristic clicking sound as they tightened. Then he looped everything and the chain through the hole in the door and left Eddie to dangle by his wrists, his butt not quite touching the floor. He picked up one of the boards designated for the shelves, although it was relatively light and unwieldy, and used it to jab Eddie in the chin, the tender skin behind his ear, and finally to thwack him on the back of the head hard enough to raise a bump.
Sextus watched, twitching now and again, then Sextus and How left Eddie dangling there.
21.
The Plan
I heard it secondhand that Jarvis Arrow gone back to Sirius B, who only lived a couple towns over from him, and played that tape of Darlene talking ’bout how good they had it at the farm and how everything hunky-dory, and when Sirius heard it his eyes might as well popped out they sockets and his scalp jumped off his skull. ’Cause it been a whole bunch of years, five or six something, since he heard Darlene voice, and that gave him a big surprise, on account a he assume that anybody he know from back then had figured they own way to get the hell outta Dodge. And here come this lady he’d had feelings for, who had worked in this place that whole time, who had helped him get away hisself, and him knowing she couldn’t tell the truth to no microphone, like she a brainwashed zombie.
Meanwhile, he remembering that she had asked him to memorize the phone number and to find her kid and after all the time it had took to get off the farm—he had forgot the number and his promise too. I think he felt damn guilty about that, like he ain’t cared enough for her to risk nothing. It’s just as likely, though, that them Delicious people with they guns and whatnot scared the stuffing outta that boy. I bet fear had kept him from coming back to save folks as much as some dumbass guilty feelings.
For most of them years Sirius tried to put Delicious behind him and move on in that fashion that black folks often got to. He stopped hanging out with me, start going to them stupid meetings where they always talking ’bout higher powers and one days at a time, ’bout as ridiculous as that book Darlene read. Sirius cut me dead and I resented that shit, but we had a lotta mutual friends, and I be hearing ’bout all the li’l developments in his life. Underneath I liked him, and I woulda kicked it with him again any time he needed a little pick-me-up. I know, I say that about everybody. I’m so damn easy. My ass always tryna love some motherfuckers more than they love me, or more than they love they own self. I’m a mess.
Anyhow, I heard that Sirius had moved back to Houston and start making music again, some tired-ass rap jams with all kinda anti-drugs, anti-gang-violence messages in it, which I found hard to keep from taking personally, or seriously, but whatever, but I still loved that sonofabitch, just like I do all my friends.