Unless work gone late—which it done a lot—Delicious supposed to paid the crew every day in the afternoon, round 5:00 roll call or a li’l later. People looked forward to that shit like they ’bout to start a weekend, but most everybody worked the same amount every day except Sunday so it ain’t matter much. The company ain’t paid on the books. Instead they tallied up your productivity they own self without no paycheck company or nothing. Some folks got paid by the tub, some by the hour or by the egg if they was in the coop with the laying hens. The sad motherfuckers who scooped up birdshit for fertilizer got paid by the bucket. Ain’t nobody wanted that job, and asides it made you a outcast of the crew. Sirius B always seem to look for the worst jobs to do, acting like he Jesus. He went after that one like he thinking everybody else want it, and ain’t nobody tell him no different.
They lined your ass up outside the sleeping area and told you how much you had worked and what pay you got and then hand you the pay right into your palm. Most folks ain’t get more than ten dollars a day, so for real they hardly giving out nothing except more debt. But some days, some folks could make thirty and forty, and everybody be striving for that, like the company running some kinda numbers game. Meanwhile, Delicious took out for everything—the meals, the boots, the tubs and sacks they loaned you for the picking, the alcohol, and me especially. They be giving you drinks and drugs like it’s your birthday party and then laying it all on your credit.
They left How in charge, and that sonofabitch did his whole job quick as a auctioneer and made your pay sheet sound like a science, so if you ain’t get what you expect, you would have to walk off slow, probably confused, shoving your li’l three or four dollars down in your pocket so couldn’t nobody see how much or steal nothing from you. Some folks tried damn hard at this shit—like Hannibal kept a piece of paper under his hat and had wrote down damn near every debt he got and every vegetable he done picked, but when he went to How, he got argued down into the same amounts of nothing as everybody else.
Sometimes it ain’t make no sense that How’s version of your salary would come so much lower than the one you calculated in your head as you working all day. Darlene got the idea from Hannibal to count on a piece of paper so she could give evidence to How if he told her she ain’t worked the amount she said. But whenever she called How on it, he would tell her that she made it up, or that he done docked her pay on account of a sarcastic comment she had made ’bout the company.
That guy How could remember every bad thing you done or said without letting you know he noticed, and then he’d remind you right when you needed a hit, or cash, or a boost. Even if you only said what you said to let off steam. You couldn’t bad-mouth the company or complain ’bout none of the busted tubs without no handles, the broken equipment that had took off somebody finger once and usually opened up a thigh every couple weeks, or point out that there wasn’t no masks or no clean place to wash your hands even with so much pesticides clouding up the joint. You especially couldn’t bitch about nothing on company time. He had people spying on each other, too, and he would dock you and reward motherfuckers for information he got secondhand about your ass. Sometimes How would even dock you for questioning his calculation of your debt. That shit fucked motherfuckers up.
But if you complained, How would go, You think a big diversified grower that has contracts with Birds Eye and Chiquita and Del Monte needs to skim five bucks off the paycheck of a little piddling serf like you? And you would shut your trap, ’cause on balance you needed the money more than that tiny moment of self-respect. Except that them tiny moments would start glomming together like little oil droplets in a contaminated stream.
So Darlene might make a few more bucks a day if she could chuck a couple extra melons, handle all them eggs, or shovel some chicken shit with Sirius. Every Tuesday and Friday, almost soon as How gave the crew the vapors they called pay, him and Hammer would drive everybody out to the depot, six or seven miles down the road to a place they said called Richland, but everybody call it the depot. Motherfuckers had most likely spent everything and borrowed forward on the rest, so what you got that day ain’t even count as pay, or it look like negative pay.
Richland ain’t look much like a town. Hardly nothing grew there—stunted bushes and dry grass out to the edge of your eyeballs, a gas station, a depot, a broken-down brick building, a tin-roof shack with a painted sign that said GENERAL STORE in red. The place too tiny to get on a map. Some the crew thought Delicious had actually made up the town. Other people told them people they was paranoid on account of me, but Sirius B said, It’s not no paranoia when it’s happening up in your face.
At night, between craving and using, the group got into one the many debates that always be going through the chicken house like a virus. This one had to do with whether the farm be in Louisiana at all, or if they maybe driven everybody far as Florida in that van. Darlene and Sirius was usually arguing on the same side about where they at, on account a she growed up near Lafayette. One time, a few weeks after she got there, the whole crew had kept arguing ’bout where they at until after lights-out. Darlene stayed quiet a long time, simmering like a li’l pot on a blue flame, then her voice busted out in the dark, saying that great-tailed grackles always hanging around there, which you don’t get nowheres but in Texas, Louisiana, and Mexico, and which she seen all the time growing up near Lafayette, but ain’t nobody seen not one flamingo, which everybody know they got all over the place in Florida but not Louisiana, so how you could explain that? The whole no-chicken area gone totally silent while people be thinking on that one, then TT goes, That don’t prove nothing, ’cause birds don’t gotta stop at no borders. They don’t know the difference for when it’s one state and when it’s another.
Darlene shouts, Oh, shut up! and fold her arms, then she announce that she had to go to sleep behind that one, ’cause the whole thing done got too boring. She close her eyes, but she ain’t had one eye closed for more than a few seconds yet when she feel something touching her elbow. At first she take in a deep breath ’cause she think a giant roach or a poison spider done crawled up onto her bed ’bout to bite her, or that TT gonna strangle her ass ’cause she proved him wrong, but the same instant she figure out that it somebody hand, she realize it ain’t touching her with a palm—somebody dragging they knuckles all the way up and down her arm in a slow, calm, stroking way.
Seem like them knuckles be touching each one of them superfine hairs on her arm, making em stand up and sit down at they command. The touch make her remember ’bout meeting with Nat at the diner. Darlene know who belong to the hand on account a which side the bed it come from and how long it is, but to make sure, she reach her right hand over and hook her finger inside the curled-up hand as it passing down her left forearm, knowing it belong to Sirius just from the feel of them rough-ass calluses right under the fingers and the veins popping out right past his wrists. She keep moving her finger over the palm and once her hand be totally inside his, she feel his pulse there at the bottom of the hand, thumping against her fingertip.
That go on for a while, the hand-fucking, but it start to seem kinda stupid if it ain’t gon lead to actual sex sex. The problem with fucking in the barracks wasn’t that nobody gon see—in fact, couldn’t nobody see they own hand in front of they own face up in the chicken house at night. The problem be keeping everything quiet, ’cause them beds be creaky as all get-out, and you could say something really whispery to somebody in that concrete-ass room and motherfuckers on the other side the room not just gonna hear what you said, they gonna answer your ass.
Sirius had to get up real slow, and Darlene listening for every last creak his bed make as it start letting him rise up off it, she imagining that man body coming for her slower than a check from the government, she ain’t letting the touching hand go neither, like if she let it go he gon fall sideways into the darkness away from her. Finally the moment come where the bed ain’t make no more noise and she could feel Sirius breath and lips near her face and she raise her head up a tiny bit and use her lips to find his. It hurts a little ’cause of the burns and sores near her mouth, but she put that out her mind on account of the hotness of them lips.
He whisper real soft, almost so that she can’t hear it, that they could go in the bathroom and get it on, ’cause don’t nobody know the difference at night between one black-ass fool and two in the bathroom, since you couldn’t hear what going on in there well as you could out in the main room. Darlene ain’t thinking too hard ’bout nothing, and she definitely wanting to continue what they started, maybe not to the point that she think he thinking, but at least in the bathroom they ain’t had to be so cautious. She rise on up out the bed in the same delicate way as he just done, and they tongues be poking all inside each other mouth and whatnot, and they breathing so heavy they know they got to get out that main room.
She grab ahold his belt loop and he feel his way through the dark to the bathroom, and even though it stink, at least they could squeeze in the stall without no door and get a small amount of privacy for a microsecond. He sitting on the toilet and she sitting on him, and she can’t see nothing in there neither so it’s like she fucking nothing, or the night sky, like he a star and she the blackness that be holding him up.
Pretty soon he get done and after a longer time she do too, and she fall over onto his shoulders like she gon fall asleep there.
I seen a whole bunch of those birds too, he whispered. The grackles? I knew we was in Louisiana.
Then somebody banged on the stall wall and the hot mood went right down the drain.
Where they at wasn’t the only thing folks be talking ’bout by a long shot. People talked a lot about they next job and how they gonna get it. When I get outta Delicious, I’ma go into construction, I’ma start my own landscaping business, I’ma drive a ice cream truck—didn’t none of it had no basis in reality. They be arguing ’bout sports even more, after watching parts of the games on Jackie’s portable TV that had a blue-ass nine-inch screen. Everybody talking ’bout Carl Lewis and Flo Jo all summer long.
After the five-hundred-dollar ride and the hundred-dollar first night, folks had to rent they beds and pay utilities on the water and electric, so the total came to twenty dollars a night. Sirius be like, I’m making ten a day and paying twenty a night? That shit don’t make sense. Everybody told him to just work harder, ’cause sometime you could get over that hump. It wasn’t no A/C, and it be so hot all the time that folks starts taking a shower in they clothes tryna keep cool while the clothes drying. Couldn’t hardly nobody sleep in that heat. They only collected the living expenses once a week, so if you ain’t want no more debt you had to be smart enough to squirrel away them greenbacks somewheres wouldn’t nobody find em. You even had to make sure didn’t nobody stole your stuff while you showering, so a lot of folks got Ziploc baggies and jammed they little moneys and whatever else in em—gold fillings, photos of they kids—so they could take they not-that-valuables with em into the shower, keep a eye on that munty, like TT called it.
But it never was much in them baggies, ’cause down in Richland, Gaspard Fusilier marked up everything so much that it gobbled your whole dollar amount. They charged $4.99 for a minibottle of Popov, $12.00 for a six-pack of Tecate in a can. Darlene and em would think, Bullshit—sometimes they even said Bullshit, but never too loud—they knew they ain’t had no choice but to pay the outrageous price, usually on credit. And since everybody addicted to drugs or alcohol or both, or denied it until they copped, folks would buy bottles and rocks and gear from a outside dude who marked his stuff way up, too, ’cause they all knew that the operation worked out in the hinterlands of God knows where, way out in Louisiflorida, and you couldn’t do no goddamn comparison shopping.
If Darlene got her groceries (that’s what they called their purchases) early, she would wait by the bus for everybody else, smoking boulders in the space between the minibus and the trees. She called that having afternoon tea. They got the workers to go faster and be more productive by keeping me away from em between lunch and dinner. That made em insane, but management promised em all kinda rewards in the form of extra rocks. People freaked out in them fields—twitching and yammering and shit—but you’d be surprised how fast a crackhead could pick a strawberry vine when it’s a lighter and a loaded pipe on the other side.
Out in the field one day, a potbellied brother name of Moseley who nobody knew how long he been with Delicious told everybody ’bout how a dude with a beef against a guy he claimed had stole his muffuletta sandwich out there had made a shank by melting the wrong end of one them sporks they sometimes gave out with the lunches and sporked his enemy in the kidney enough to put him in the hospital and never come back. Didn’t nobody know what happened after, Moseley said, if he died or what have you. Somebody said it might be worth trying that to get outta Delicious and somebody else said they gon tell How.
There’s a rock out by some trees that had that Spanish moss hanging on it, ’bout thirty yards away from the depot, but still you could see it from where Hammer usually parked. Darlene like to sit on that rock, squishing a lousy bread-and-cheese sandwich between her fingers before pigging out on it and drowning it with a Popov or two or three on good days, and when she sat there, she could hear a little brook trickling, fondling the other rocks before it go into this concrete tube that’s under the road real close by. She watching a group of crows edge over and pick apart a dead opossum in the road. Somebody once told her that crows could remember your face forever, so if you do mean shit to a crow and come back twenty years later tryna act all nice, it’ll squawk at you and go, Look, it’s that same sonofabitch! Let’s peck his brain out, y’all.
Once, after ’bout two and a half months of working for Delicious, Sirius B came to sit with Darlene. Something wasn’t right about him, even more than the drugs, but it musta been kinda mental, ’cause aside from a faraway glaze in his eyes that look almost like a rapture, his problem wasn’t nothing you could put your finger on unless you counted the shit he talking ’bout. Sirius ain’t did no small talk; he would find the most painful thing on your mind or the most cosmic idea and act like chitchat could just start there, at the most intense part. When you start talking with Sirius B it’s like he tryna stab you with a conversation.
He sitting down near Darlene on the rock and smoking, and when he done sucked up his first hit, he held his lungs tight and start wheezing and talking at the same time he passed her the pipe, and then she sparked it to get the rest, burning the end first and then moving up the pipe to my sparkling chunks of stone inside.
He said, You missing your boy, Darlene? You call him yet?
She shook her head, put me down, and start flattening that damn sandwich again. She went, It isn’t easy using the phones, as you know. Darlene thought Eddie wouldn’t want to see her that way anyhow, that nobody oughta see her that way—hair undone, lips burned, ripped seams all over them thirdhand T-shirts she wore; sweaty, dirty, itchy, and scabby, doing the monkey the minute I got too far away to beam her up. She say to herself, Eddie’s smart like Nat, he’ll find somebody to give him what he needs. She figured her sister gonna step in.
So Sirius asked her, Did you get in touch with anybody?
I left a message for Eddie that I’m okay and don’t worry, she lied, but I couldn’t say where to look for me because where are we? She threw her eyes around at the shrubs and trees, and farther out to the gray mist way the fuck out by the horizon. That sonofabitch How keeps saying he’s going to tell me the name of the place and the address of where we are but I don’t think he knows himself!
Delicious phone ain’t work for nobody, they both knew that shit. But Sirius too much of a gentleman to call her out.
That ain’t right, you shouldn’t let them keep you away from your son.
She thought he’s talking down to her, and got upset. I’m not letting anybody keep me away from anything, she said. She gnawed the crust off the sandwich and start chomping on the mashed bread and yellow cheese inside. Her throat dry and she ain’t had nothing to wash the sandwich down with ’cause she had the Popovs first that day and the heat of late August already done dehydrated her ass. She staring at the brook, thinking maybe she could get water from there, but judging by the smell and them crushed cans and cigarette boxes sloshing around in the water and the weird-ass way that the foam foaming up in the water didn’t never disappear off them rocks, she figure that shit’s polluted.
Sometimes I get a feeling about all this, Sirius said.
All what?
The day after the hand sex that led to the bathroom sex, Sirius had said to Darlene that it wasn’t no thang, and said it again the couple of times it happened since, and that phrase kept repeating in her mind—Ain’t no thang. It got her confused and frustrated that her stuff ain’t floored Sirius or, if it had, that he pretending it hadn’t.
You know, he said, the dorm got rats and palmetto bugs, we be picking heavy-ass melons or shoveling chicken shit all day in this crazy-hot weather, pay’s the lowest of the low, can’t call nobody, won’t nobody let you off the premises or visit home, assuming you still got one…Don’t it feel like a punishment from the Lord? Like it’s God saying, Fuck you, you crackhead nigger, you can’t do no better than this?
Darlene twist up one side her mouth. First of all, she said I’m not a crackhead or a nigger, thank you very much. I went to school. A crackhead is an individual who has lost all sense of the outside world, they’re like a zombie, closed off to the whole of existence, like they would smack, rape, and kill their sister for a hit and it wouldn’t matter in what order. That is not me. And God nothing. You made the choice to shovel chicken shit, Sirius.
Pardon me, ma’am. Sirius start looking at the bus and then off in the other direction.
And Lord, this is an improvement for me! At least now I’m doing good work—hard work, but honest work. Darlene flexed one her arms, which had got thinner and more muscular from tossing around so much produce, and also from doing drugs, but you couldn’t really tell which one had slimmed her down more. Work I’m proud of, she said. Can tell people about. And I don’t have to run all over the world dealing with shady people when I’m trying to get high. It’s one-stop shopping around here. Right?
Word.
Sirius nodded, even though the shit they ain’t said be as thick as crack smoke hanging in the air, a reckless doubt clinging to every little drop of humidity, but Darlene ain’t know if that feeling had to do with the attraction they was ignoring or with something else, something they couldn’t quite see, or with some shit they both knew but couldn’t share ’cause that would change all they fears from cloudy-ass suspicions to real demons, like demons on horseback, galloping down the road in they path, couldn’t stop em. Quietly they watching all the other workers walk out the store and congregate by the bus, and the pressure to go back over there getting more pressurized.
Maybe behind that doubt, and the sense that the intimate moment gonna end soon, Sirius suddenly start talking ’bout his past. He told her he always had a interest in science, specially the sky and the stars, that he wanted to go to school to become a astronomer or a meteorologist, but his brothers couldn’t tell him how you got them jobs, and his mama said you need a telescope and you need to be smart, and he thought that meant (a) they couldn’t afford no telescope, and (b) she ain’t think he smart. His father told him you couldn’t make no money looking at no stars nohow, so he should get a job that paid real money, a job that people need all the time, like building houses or stitching up dead bodies.
His third-grade teacher couldn’t tell him none the steps to be a astronomer neither, except she said you had to be real good at math. He had just failed a math test ’cause he ain’t knowed it was coming and hadn’t studied. Later, he went to a bad high school and he dropped out and started a hip-hop group, but they wasn’t signing nobody from noplace but New York or LA, and meanwhile he stuck in Fort Worth, couldn’t get his crew to move—they was like, Too far! Too goddamn expensive!
But I keep reading the science pages in the paper, he said. Hell, that’s all I read. I don’t follow politics, but science is real interesting to me. A smile spread over his face. He goes, Darlene, did you know there’s a star in the sky that’s a diamond? It’s called BPM 37093. I memorized that, ’cause the minute you can go there, I’m getting on a spaceship. It’s a star that collapsed. A star caves in when it dies. That’s what happened to BPM 37093. And all the carbon in it got crushed up into a diamond. A diamond that’s a billion trillion trillion carats. Can you believe that? A diamond that’s bigger than the sun? Now when I get there, I’m not gonna be greedy or nothing. I’ma cut off a couple of pieces that’s maybe only the size of my hand and bring those back. I’ll be a mega-bazillionaire, and I won’t have no worries no more.
You’re the biggest bullshitter, Darlene told him, flirting with her voice. There’s no such number as a billion trillion trillion.
Swear to God! Actually that shit is actually true. Then, like he tryna prove that he had told the truth all the time, he admitted to her that he called hisself Sirius B partially ’cause his real name was Melvin—Please don’t tell none of these niggers, he said—and the other part ’cause it’s also the name of the closest star to the solar system. He spelt it for her, explaining that everybody who heard the name mistook it for the word serious, but all his inspiration done come out the sky. His pupils get wide and he start telling her ’bout the Dogon people of Mali in Africa, said they got ancient rituals that had came from astronomical information that white folks only just discovered, like the fact of the star he named hisself after. You need a telescope to see Sirius B, he said. Now, how the Dogon people known about it so long ago? He also said that the Dogons was amphibious.
Darlene thinking she gotta draw the line at a motherfucker who believe in amphibious Negroes from ancient times who knew shit about outer space, right?
Then Sirius stood up and scrambled down into the brook, knocking rocks over and splashing. He goes, Don’t say you saw me, Darlene. I think I could trust you. Then the sonofabitch ducked into the culvert.
Sirius? What are you doing, Sirius? she called out.
It’s a experiment, he called back. His voice be echoing from inside the tube, like the earth itself talking.
What about the contract? Didn’t you sign the contract? You owe them money.
I’ll come back, he said. Splashing sounds coming through the pipe for a little while. I just want to see what happens.
What happens is you get your ass kicked. Hammer or How will find you and kick your ass. Or you die in that hole there. Or they find you and kill you. She sat back and showed him her feet. These used to be Kippy’s boots!
Don’t say you saw me. Please, just don’t say you saw me. Or say I went a different way.
Darlene wanted to stand up and go with him, but out the corner of her eye she seen How getting the group together to go back to the chicken house, and even though How had his wide lumpy back turned, just looking at that muscular neck made her afraid he gon turn around and raise his eyebrow at any moment once he realize she tryna slip off. He’d run over and pull his gun out to keep her from flying the coop, and that would give Sirius up too. If one of em had a chance, maybe she shouldn’t push their luck.
Sirius! I need you to do something?
The cylinder said, What.
When you get far enough, call this number and tell them where you are, and when they find you, tell them how to get to me. She recited the number for Mrs. Vernon’s bakery several times. Remember it, she begged. Please. Remember it? And call.
Sirius promised.
On breaks, and in moments when she panicked or got frustrated, Darlene be daydreaming ’bout busting out the contract and running too. During her afternoon, if she raise her head or get a two-minute rest from pitching Sugar Babies to TT or Hannibal, she could squint out cross that infinity cornfield with all them bushes or groves of maples or live oaks here and there that went along the many li’l streams that be zigzagging through the property, so many that couldn’t nobody memorize em, and she pretend she could leave and go back to the calm life she ain’t never had.
One afternoon, they had driven out to the lemon grove Delicious kept in one corner of the joint. The Fusiliers, who running the place, had wanted to specialize in citrus at one time—at least that’s what How said—but this li’l bunch of acres, maybe six or seven, was the only part left of that experiment, which they said used to spread out something like two hundred or three hundred acres but had also failed. But now it had only some twisty lemon and lime trees, and the crew found out it ain’t had too much fruit. After climbing through a whole bunch of rows, the twenty of em had only picked enough fruit to cover the bottom of one tub, and even them lemons was covered with all kinda brown spots and holes.
Even How seen how bad it was, and for once he could only blame the bad soil and them scrubby trees, not the laziness of his pickers. Hannibal went, They know it ain’t the time to pick no lemons, they just giving us busywork or some shit. What the fuck.
How ain’t want to, but he gave em a five-minute break and said that after that they gonna be spraying pesticides on the leaves of them trees and aerating the damn soil. Darlene got permission to travel a few yards up the road to squat and pee. On one side the lemon grove there’s another one them giant cornfields, corn they told her mostly gonna feed some livestock, nothing that gonna show up on nobody dining-room table. She found a aisle between two sections that looked private enough to do her business and prepared herself.
By that time of year, the corn be stretching higher than her forehead, ’bout to get harvested, them little yellow tassels be dancing in the wind. Her family raised corn on the small plot she had grew up on—it couldn’t have been far from here, she figured. It had that familiar scent of home to it, sometime she could smell eucalyptus slipping into her nose. Sirius had said that if you stayed still and listened real careful, you could hear the sound of corn growing, a noise that Darlene couldn’t hardly imagine. She figured everything sound like it: the corn leaves rustling, the wind its own self, a creaking-floorboard type sound she could sometimes hear. But she wasn’t prepared to feel what she felt then: the two fields of corn rising on either side start to breathe, like they got gigantic lungs underneath, like they sighing, she thought, or maybe sleeping.
She finish and stood up and thought ’bout running. Anywhere. Just picking a random direction and trying her luck. She tryna figure out which way she gonna have to go to find people who ain’t had nothing to do with Delicious, who would keep her and protect her if need be. The bus had came from a direction she thought was north, and that was the sun in the west. But she ain’t had no way of knowing which way gonna lead somewhere safe the fastest. Folks knew Sirius had runned off, but management ain’t said nothing ’bout it to nobody, like it be a family secret from 1859.
Maybe as a way of talking ’bout Sirius, Hammer and How and the crew started tryna top each other at describing the dangers you run into if you escaped into the woods, even if you found your way to the bayou. Alligators, crocodiles, black bears, quicksand, swamps full of mosquitoes everybody said was the size of birds, wild gun-toting rednecks who went by the old ways, hungry wolf-dogs, voodoo priests who need human flesh for they ritual sacrifices, humongous tree frogs and poison insects, poison ivy, poison oak, hogweed. TT once insisted, all serious, that the Devil out there, the actual one. He kept saying, The Devil—that his sister had seen the Devil, and the Evil One done torn the ligaments in her heel so she couldn’t run, but she crawled back to her car and got away. TT said he seen the torn ligaments and everything. People mostly ain’t took him seriously, but he still told the story good enough to shut everybody up and bring out they sympathies.
Hannibal, over there hugging his fedora, said, I ain’t messing with the Devil.
The earth keep breathing, slower now. Darlene gone over to the exhaling cornfield and put a foot by the edge, then another, then decide to press her way through the tall plants to God knew where: the idea of Away be pulling her farther into the field. But after a minute or two, she realize that they could hear her moving around out there, and that they had put tiny surveillance cameras out in the cornfield, some stuck inside the leaves of the plants, partially to watch the crows and the deer, but also for other reasons. The corn got impossible to push through, and when she done shaking her hands off—they already cut up by them rough, sticky-ass cornstalks—she had to turn around.
Back in the bus, she peering round the geography more careful than ever, hoping she gonna see some shit that give away her whereabouts, that point her in a actual direction, told her what to do. She ain’t never seen, nowhere in the places they drove through, a house or a shack that wasn’t part of the Fusilier property or the buildings owned by Delicious. Smirking, How would point em out to the workers all the time, and Darlene sometime thought he smirked ’cause it meant they couldn’t even be thinking ’bout leaving.
Brushy trees was fanning out cross the ground, sometime gone all the way out to the horizon, sometime they falling off right where the close edge had a sharp drop, maybe down to a river. Fog and mist making it so you couldn’t tell where the field end and the sky start. In elementary school, her science teacher had taught the kids that long ago, when the continents was one continent, the middle of the U.S.A. had sat at the bottom of the ocean, and sometime Darlene find herself imagining that it still there, with the whole of the wind turning into a deep, drowning liquid, with catfish and octopuses skimming all around hills made of sand and seaweed, and prehistoric fish feeding on the naked limbs of dead trees that be pushing up out the dirt.
With the land so flat, the sky took up most the view, and the bigness of the blue made Darlene feel she had shrank whenever she stared up into them gigantic puffing, curling patterns that was smearing and flicking through the sky, looking like a spooky painting, like a prelude to the ridiculous universe up there, where it wasn’t no air, and everything a quazillion miles from everything else and stars be diamonds. At the end of every day, while the horizon going black and she watching the stars and planets blink above the smoke from the planes, she thinking ’bout Eddie, and ’bout Sirius, and ’bout the billions of years since the water had drained off, and the billions that’s gonna come, and ’bout how small her world had become. Without putting no words on them thoughts, she got pretty sure that she ain’t matter, and she did break out running, but she ran back toward all the things in life she knew for sure—especially me.