From the distance, somebody—probably Jarvis—start shouting at Darlene not to kill Sextus, like he just noticed she had put the gun in the man’s face.
Tell me what you want, honey, Sextus said. I’ll make sure you get anything you want.
Both of us rolled our eyes at that shit. Darlene took a long pause and squinted at Sextus blue-white head writhing on the pavement just a foot or so from a giant pothole where his brains would spill if she pulled the trigger. Right then, TT start kicking How in the head something fierce, maybe tryna knock him out, and he be pushing Jarvis and Sirius and Tuck out the way every time they grab him and pull him off. His face got the expression of a man who want everybody to know that he believe in what he doing.
A chilly breeze blowing up the back of Darlene shirt, and for a instant she could see what that landscape musta look like ten million years ago, underwater, when some continents was touching each other and the hills be rolling around on the seafloor and every last fish be a bizarre monster that couldn’t see nothing. Couldn’t no sunlight hardly penetrate down there. Everything around em made Darlene feel like she drownding under a mile of water.
She come back into the moment, a li’l bit further away from me, looking down at Sextus sweet miserable expression and thinking ’bout them eyebrows. She thinking, They’re thick like Sirius’s and shaped like the hole in a violin. Some powerful shit in her be craving more time to enjoy the feeling of loving him and hating him and controlling his ass while he a invalid. She traced them eyebrows with the end of the shotgun and goes, Know what I want? I want a real job.
25.
Summerton
Revisited
Eddie finally heard from his mother a couple of weeks after he’d broken out. Mysterious calls had started coming to his aunt’s house with disturbing frequency. Bethella would pick up the phone and hear silence or breathing, then someone would hang up. When she stopped answering the phone, it sometimes rang for a half an hour. At first Eddie worried that the Delicious people had figured out where he had gone, maybe by torturing his mother, but then one evening, he watched his aunt lose her composure and scream into the phone.
Please identify yourself! she told the receiver. Who in the Living Christ is calling? What do you want? I am going to call the police if you don’t stop this harassment!
Her agitated tone put Eddie in mind of the relationship between the two sisters, and the next time the phone rang for a long time and Bethella was not at home, he knocked the receiver off the hook, arranged it on the floor with his mouth, and put his ear beside it in order to talk.
After an ecstatic, tearful greeting, Darlene explained, in a long, rambling monologue, that she had figured he would go to Bethella, so she’d phoned her sister’s old pastor, who provided her, a little reluctantly, with the new contact information. She apologized for the weird calls, but at the same time, she said, she’d enjoyed hearing her sister’s voice again. She mentioned something about taking care of Sextus in the hospital, and by that time, he figured that she had not kicked either of her old habits. He changed the subject to tell her about Fremont, and they eulogized him for a moment.
Almost immediately after this silence in the conversation, Eddie described a plan by which he would return to Delicious, though it disturbed him now that in his haste to flee, he could only partially remember where he’d started out in Louisiana—somewhere near Ruston, he recalled, the first place he’d stopped.
Hardly pausing for a breath throughout, Eddie launched into his own monologue, outlining for Darlene exactly when he planned to come back for her, where to meet him, and at what time. He would drive back with Jarvis’s car, and Bethella would follow. Both cars would stop for five minutes a few miles away from the depot, where a particular dogwood tree hunched beside the road. They would load as many workers as would fit into the cars and take them to the nearest city—Shreveport, he believed—into which the influence of the Fusiliers did not bleed. He’d return the Subaru to Jarvis, in Houston, and let everybody else out at a police station along the way in order to give their testimony against Delicious, for what it was worth, though he doubted that the police would respond in any significant way. He couldn’t live with himself, however, he told his mother, if he did not at least try to expose the place for what it was and get it shut down.
No need, Darlene told him when he’d finished. No need, she said, in an almost artificially soothing voice that made Eddie wonder for a split second if she had switched her addiction of choice to an antidepressant. I’ll be living at Summerton from now on, she said. I’m looking after Sextus and Elmunda—at least I will be when he gets out of the hospital. Sextus was paralyzed during your escape, and you know Elmunda has always had serious problems. That’s why I’m saying you can come home if you want. She gave him her telephone number at the hospital as well as at Summerton.
The changes she described seemed unreal to Eddie; he lowered his chin when she used the word home to describe Delicious. Home? he said. That place isn’t anybody’s home. They’re brainwashing you, Ma.
His mother explained that she’d called not only to make sure he was all right, but also to ask him back. She had taken charge of all the business affairs at the farm, and things had become a lot better. Many improvements had come to pass already, even in the couple of weeks since Eddie had found his way up to Bethella. Things were changing, she kept saying. Already they had reconnected the pay phones, which hadn’t been broken after all, and most of the workers would get to leave pretty soon if they wanted to, in a few months at the very latest. Sextus and Elmunda can’t run this place anymore, she said. They are sick people.