Where are y’all off to on this fine evening? Sextus asked, almost cordially.
But when he and How saw the four of them for the first time in the peculiar light created by the Subaru’s lights bouncing off the minibus and the silvery moon, they both stepped back and their eyebrows rose. TT, Tuck, and Darlene had bloodstains all over their clothes; they must have looked like a terrifying mob.
What the Sam Hill? Did y’all slaughter a bunch of my chickens?
Where are these nice gentlemen taking you? How said, before anybody could respond.
A few very uneasy moments passed while How and Sextus appeared to wait for some kind of answer from the crew, but all of them, excepting Jarvis, knew better than to give either of these men a response, truthful or sarcastic. Their silence inflated, and Eddie could imagine their eyes shifting from side to side, and the way they’d catch and throw back one another’s sidelong glances, either gathering up the courage to make a break for it like Michelle or letting the will drain out of them so that they could give up without losing face or catching a beating.
When no one spoke, Jarvis kept starting to answer but changing his mind before a complete thought could fall out of his mouth, after which he would sigh, or say, Well, or Um.
Then Darlene, almost like a nervous flinch, leapt at Sextus and embraced the shotgun, kicking his shins and telling him to let it go. How pulled out a Glock and raised its muzzle, but Sextus, even as he lunged back and forth, attempting to wrestle the shotgun out of Darlene’s arms, ordered him not to shoot her. Instead, How trained his gun on the others, though still trying to protect Sextus from Darlene, but in a matter of moments, the three others divided his attention enough to tackle him. TT in particular seemed to savor the thrashing they gave How. A shot reverberated through the air. Then another.
Darlene had begun to howl a series of outlandish, frequently nonsensical accusations at Sextus—You killed my son! You tried to destroy me with your voodoo! You made Jackie control me with her * blood, you fucker! You tried to break me apart with your hair! You tried to keep me quiet by fucking me! Your breath put me in prison! You tried to get inside my brain and piss your name on the inside of my skull, you fucking zombie-master motherfucker! I love you! But I hate everything you’ve ever done including love me, you sonofabitch. You stole my handbag and you broke my glass crystal watermelon! Give me my rocks. Kiss me. Why won’t you kiss me with your mind! Fuck me with your gun! she begged him. I’m going to fuck you with your gun!
While the things Darlene shouted sounded like the random curses and incomprehensible bullshit a crack addict might spew during a breakdown, they were so bizarre, more bizarre than anything Eddie had ever heard come out of her mouth, even during her worst experiences with drugs, that he soon understood what he thought she meant for him to do. She was saying the first things that came to mind in order to stall them, so that he could make a break for it.
At the height of the brawl, Eddie looped a leg over the backseat and lay flat, then shimmied out on his elbows and knees and, using the open door to mask his movements, swung himself into the driver’s seat.
They hoped I would do this, he thought. They want me to. He wasn’t abandoning them. He planted himself in the driver’s seat of a car for the first time, as opposed to the tractor Sextus had taught him to drive. Crouching behind the wheel, he stepped on the brake and used his forearms to shift the car into drive. He saw Jackie see him; she sat up and immediately started banging on the inside of the minibus window with the flat of her hand to get everybody’s attention. Eddie hugged the steering wheel, turned it with his chin, and stomped down on the gas as hard as he could. The Subaru lurched forward and the passenger-side door closed from the momentum. The driver-side door banged closed against the back end of the minibus as it cleared.
Hey! Jarvis shouted.
Ten miles and thirty minutes later, convinced that nobody had followed him, Eddie managed to push the headlight switch forward with his mouth and turn on the brights. In front of the car, a brazen light the color of young corn exposed the night landscape, slicing through the future like a child’s eyes opening on the first morning of life.
24.
Scotty Is
Surprised
Once Darlene saw How and Sextus actually physically standing in the goddamn road, keeping her from quitting Delicious after she had let them motherfuckers chop off her son hands to get out, she admitted to herself that she been had. She felt like she falling into a sinkhole right above a landfill, down into years of liquid garbage, the putrid trash of all them misreported work hours, of spraining her ankles and breathing insecticide without no health care, of choking down undercooked and overcooked food without no nutritional value, let alone flavor, of them jacked-up prices down at the depot. For a split second Darlene left me and floated above the whole scheme like suddenly she could see what it had did to her and to everybody else it touched, and like anybody who had a second of clear thinking in the middle of a cyclone of bullshit, she lost her motherfucking mind.
The whole time she been directing her anger and despair at herself, taking the blame for that short rope of events she done lynched herself on—them tight shoes, that headache, the asking for the Tylenol that led to the murder and the fire and addiction and the abandonment and finally Delicious. She remembered all what the book had told her, and realized the book had played her ass the same way.
Goddamn this drug, she thought.