It took three people to keep him there, one on the left and one right, holding his floppy hands up to the sides of the steering wheel and miming for him, in the style of certain types of puppetry, the action of driving, and a third behind him, using his belly for Sextus to rest his useless back against, like the trunk of a tree supporting a spindly vine.
In order to save on gasoline, they didn’t even turn on the engine. Even so, Sextus said he wanted to stay out there all day. Ain’t this the life, he said. This is living.
They helped him drink a can of beer. Hours went by. Toward sunset, he peered into the far distance as the horizon turned crimson and cool breaths of wind raised and lowered the collar of his shirt. Then he told the guys I’m cold in a tone of voice that seemed to mean both I need to go inside now and I have been dead for a long time. In the balmy southern breeze, the phrase seemed to mean everything except what it said. The guys lifted Sextus out of the tractor and into his chair, raised the chair into the van, and wobbled the short distance down the potholed road back home.
26.
Chronicle
That fall it mostly be cloudy, like the weather had got stuck on the mist setting. Damned if that ain’t make it feel like the farm ain’t had no connection to nothing out in the world, but that’s how folks liked it up at Summerton. Almost two years done gone by since the breakout, and it seem like wasn’t nothing gonna change no more, like the mist itself just confirming that shit.
Then this one morning, the voice of anchorpeople Jim Pommeroy and Gigi Risi start ringing out in the hallway as usual, only Elmunda took to shrieking over the noise of the TV set and the bitch would not stop. We was like, What the hell and it’s only 6:30 in the goddamn morning? Darlene with Sextus on the downstairs porch, and she had finally got him to sit up in his damn chair by shoving a little block of wood under the back of his wheelchair wheel, and now it sound like Elmunda done fell and broke her tailbone.
But when Darlene gone upstairs into her bedroom to see what the hell gone wrong, Elmunda pointing at the TV and shrieking her motherfucking head off, going, I heard my name! They spoke Sextus’s name and they spoke mine! Of all the nerve! What did it say about us?
Darlene stood in the doorjamb catching her breath. It wasn’t nothing unusual for Elmunda to be going berserk—everybody say her problems was mental and not physical—so Darlene ain’t paid it no never-mind at first. Trying not to sound all snobby or whatever, she goes, They probably said something that sounded to you like your name and his, Ms. Elmunda. She had that tone down for dealing with the lady of the house. Apparently Elmunda ain’t like hearing that explanation, and she clammed up and frowned at Darlene, then she turnt away, thinking ’bout God knows what. She come back with a less insane attitude, but it ain’t take more than another few seconds for her to get all argumentative again.
Darlene still standing there, ready to smack down any of Elmunda’s dumbass paranoid fantasies, if not the lady herself, but after a bunch of commercials for pharmaceuticals and remote retirement communities, and then a heart-tugging story ’bout a hippo and a wallaby that’s in love at the Monroe zoo, the news recap done proved Elmunda right, and she mad as a damn wet hen again and start talking all surprised, like she ain’t never realized that people they talked about on TV could also live outside the TV. Darlene thought, She didn’t even seem to hear what they said on the news. She’s just reacting to the sound of her name and her husband’s.
Darlene herself known something like this gon happen sooner or later, but then her life had schooled her to believe that things she knew was gonna happen wasn’t gonna happen. So she shocked that it happened right then, but deep down it ain’t surprised her. It turnt out the TV news had picked up on a story out the Houston Chronicle, a five-part investigation piece based on the testimony of a man who call hisself Titus Wayne Tyler who had worked for Delicious Foods, a company that Jim Pommeroy said Tyler had made some startling accusations against.
Then the camera had went to Jarvis Arrow, and Darlene thinking, I remember that man’s face from somewhere. Sometime she be having memory problems. The dude pushed his thick black eyeglass frames up on the bridge of his nose and he shaking his damn head while he talking ’bout Delicious, or at least his version of what gone down there. Then they showed TT face, and the face start talking ’bout the chicken house, and he rolling up his T-shirt to show folks how long the scars be up his damn side and cross his back, welts that be looking like ginormous worms glued to his skin. Health care? He laughed. We didn’t get no kind of no health care. I laid up on my back with paper towels stuffed in my guts, biting a piece of a Styrofoam cooler to keep the pain down. Still can’t walk right, can’t breathe right out my nose.
Darlene did remember that, though. She thinking how that TT had had a good sense of humor the whole time he sick, how he laughing at folks who fussed over him, and how he done told everybody he ain’t want no kinda special treatment and to treat his ass normal. But now he talking like this the worst shit that ever happened, and it sound like a outrage to Darlene, ’cause he saying it in front of the world. It felt like he telling family secrets to folks who not gonna give two shits. Darlene shouted at Jim Pommeroy to shut his goddamn mouth.