Late the following spring, when Eddie had been in Minnesota for a little more than a year, ten months after the phone call, Jarvis finally arrived to retrieve his vehicle. Over the course of an hour or two, Jarvis brought Eddie up to date about the exposé. He read to Eddie a section of an early draft of the five-part series that would run in the Chronicle.
Few people ever showed up at Delicious nowadays, he said. Sometimes, one of the Fusiliers’ former business partners might appear at the front gate, which the family kept locked in order to prevent surprise visits. Any visitors who did make it in would most likely have heard pathetic stories about the rapid downhill trajectory of the finances at Delicious after the accident, about the magnitude of the family’s losses, about the strange atmosphere that seemed to have grown up along with the kudzu now gamboling across more than a third of the company’s vast acreage, and so they would have prepared themselves to pity this family for their financial ruin. For the perceptive ones, however, that feeling would likely give way to the inkling that in addition to the sad fate of this husband and wife and their once-prosperous farm, a peculiar and maybe sinister tone of negligence and corruption had not only overtaken the watermelon patches and tomato fields now growing more weeds than crops but also tiptoed up the steps behind every visitor, armed with the ability to disappear at the precise moment before it could be observed. Your head turned sharply and your eyes saw nothing, but the sense of a malevolent presence would linger for an instant, like a streak of glass cleaner evaporating from a mirror.
Eddie suffered the journalist and his elaborate metaphors and maintained a polite demeanor, but of course what he wanted most was to hear that his mother had come to her senses and would soon get free of that awful place.
She says she’s running the farm now, he told Jarvis.
Really? Jarvis said. If that’s the case, it isn’t official. Or legal. But she does behave strangely during business meetings.
Is she going to leave there already? Eddie asked pointedly.
Eventually she’ll have to, Jarvis said. But listen, I’m getting to it—I think she’s doing something weirder, based on my interviews with some people who tried to do business with the company. Jarvis went on to tell Eddie that some of the powerful cigar-smoking men who arrived in the parlor would slosh their neat bourbon as they suggested that Sextus ought to sell off some of the farm to develop some sort of real estate interest—one guy wanted a hive of condos inspired by the design of the French Quarter, another had a proposal for an amusement park. Because of his condition, Sextus always received them downstairs, and they all noticed, after much longer than they thought possible, a backlit figure Sextus told them was named Darlene sitting in the adjoining room, at work on something they usually couldn’t discern with any success, given the dim light, though they all reported hearing the clanking of metal parts against one another or the thump of a thick stick, of a long metal pole scraping the inside of a metal tube, or of a foot slamming against a rug in the background.
Oh, that’s Darlene—cleaning my guns, Sextus explained. She’s cleaning my guns.
From behind the visitors, Darlene occasionally coughed or laughed or cleared her throat, and at some moments these visitors thought they detected her making editorial comments on their proceedings in the parlor, although they immediately judged it impossible for anybody to have heard the conversation in the parlor very clearly from that vantage point. One guy said he thought he’d seen her over there pretending to level the barrel of the firearm directly at Sextus’s head, and that at the same time he heard a tiny laugh reverberating against the ceiling.
All of the deals proposed in the parlor, as the guests would know, if any of them had spoken to one another, met with the same ambiguous fate. Sextus sometimes agreed to some aspect of his potential investors’ offers, and the old men would draw up a tentative contract with the eager developer’s legal team, but regardless of whether these fellows paid a down payment or a percentage of some kind to ensure the Fusiliers’ bond, a period of immutable inertia and inactivity followed.
After word got out and a couple of investors sued, with partial success, to get their money back, the number of hopeful developers trickled down to only a couple of rubes from Ohio or, once, from Billings, Montana, all of them apparently having mentally cleared away the brush that strangled the acreage and imagined themselves at the center of a cattle farm where a mass of lowing livestock reached the edge of their vision in all directions, every cow aspiring in its heart of hearts to become a gross of Big Macs and feed whole families of egg-shaped travelers along American interstates.
I got some stuff from people who recently got out of there as well, Jarvis said.
One day toward the end of the previous summer, not long after Sextus arrived home from the hospital, Darlene enlisted a couple of workers to take him out toward the nearest field in his chair. First he marveled at the heat, then complained about it until they arrived at the barn, where Darlene instructed the guys to clean off and drive out the red tractor: his friend, the workhorse with a patina of rust along the tire rims that always fanned out slightly more every time they met. Sextus’s pupils dilated and his face took on the expression of a good child at dessert time. Darlene made sure he had on an official Delicious baseball cap to keep the late-afternoon sun out of his eyes. Once the cap stopped his squinting, the heat didn’t bother him anymore and he asked the helpers to move him closer, even though he knew they didn’t have a choice. They positioned him atop the tractor seat as if he could still cut through untold acres of the farm in the way that had once kept his workers perpetually on guard.