They turned from a smaller road onto a larger. Over the trees the sun was full up and an unwatchable white. The dash’s clock said six-twenty, though Eric seemed to remember that’s what it had said when, in the dark, he’d first climbed into the truck. Maybe it was broke. Beyond a wooden rail lay a good-sized cornfield. Hundreds of tasseled ears moved together. Beside it stretched another, a foot shorter. On the far side, dark green and purple produce grew knee high. Dynamite turned the truck in by what looked like a two-story barn — or a barracks. Half the ground-floor wall was widely spaced slats. Spots of light in it suggested the back wall was the same, letting through sunlight from the field behind.
They pulled up, and Shit was out the door and down by an old fashioned hand-worked pump, painted orange and standing high as his shoulder. As Eric followed Shit from the truck, he saw the pump sat on a six-inch concrete base. Three pickups — only one less than three years old — and two cars were parked near.
“We gotta get the bags outta them cans.” Shit nodded toward a row of ten oil drums along the barn/barrack’s side wall, with — in most — black bags bulging from the top and dangling red ties down the sides from under metal lids that, in two cases, had slipped off, one flat on the ground, one to lean against the dented drum.
In a knitted cap and sleeveless thermal vest, a strong-looking black fellow ambled around the building corner:
“Hey, there, guys. I thought you’d be here half an hour ago.”
“We got a new man with us today,” Dynamite said, as though that explained it. “This here’s Eric. He’s gonna be helpin’ me and Shit — ” who had already gone to the first drum, tossed the cover against the building wall, and hauled up one, two, three sacks, then, with his other hand, reached in and hauled out two more.
Eric went over and did the same to the second drum — the thing must have held six. As they went back and forth to toss them into the truck bed — the last clattered, full of glass and cans — another black fellow came around, lugging a brown shopping bag in each hand. He was heavier and darker than the other. “Hey — Dynamite! I put some good stuff together for you. Some green peppers — and I know you like that corn. There’s some eggplants, some onions, some potatoes…”
“I like the corn.” Dynamite grinned. “But it’s a little rough on the teeth — when you don’t got so many.”
“You don’t have to eat it on the cob,” the fellow said. “Boil it up, cut that stuff off, give it a few scrapes with the back of your knife to get the good shit out, then fry it up in some bacon grease with some cut-up onions and peppers — put some of them summer squash in there, salt and pepper, and you got your dinner. Do it with some real bacon — and it’s a good dinner, too.”
Dynamite said, “You gonna come over and cook it for us?”
“You guys don’t want no fresh herbs, do you?”
Eric asked, suddenly: “You got dill? And maybe some basil?”
“Dill and basil, comin’ up! I thought Ronny and his goddam cookin’ class was the only ones interested in stuff like that.” He wandered off.
In a minute, he was back with the herbs, one leafy, one stringy and feathery, both roots wrapped in squares of newsprint. “Here you go.”
“Thanks.” Eric took them and tossed them in through the truck’s window.
“You know how to cook?”
Eric said, “A little.”
“Wow…!” Shit said, full of wonder.
The man laughed, a high, black laugh that Eric associated with his Texas relatives. “Why don’t you bring that cute nigger you done whelped over here more often — and, hell, this one, too — ” he nodded toward Eric, as he turned back for the next can — “so we can feed sumpin’ real good to both these boys.”
Dynamite said, “I told you a long time ago, Horm.” He started toward the cans now. “When Shit’s gets twenty-one, he can come over any time he wants. And fuck anyone of your black asses he has a mind to.” He flung off a lid, and grabbed up one, three, four bags in one hand and four in the other — as did Shit. Both Shit and Dynamite’s all but nailess hands, during actual work, seemed big as steam shovels. Everyone was always saying how large Eric’s own hands were, but he could just about hold two in each.
Had his inexperience really delayed them half an hour?
When he came back for the next can, he made himself carry three and three — and by the time, even in the gloves, he got to the truck bed (one sack nearly dropped) — the skin between thumb and forefinger on his left hand was a burning agony. The thumb on his right throbbed. But he went back for six more.
The fellow who had set down the shopping bags hooked his thumbs under the sides of his jeans, and pushed them down from the upper half of his copper buttocks and the crevice between. He turned away and backed up, displaying his bare bottom. “You mean you gonna let that pig fucker make you wait dat long to run yo’ sweet dick up my easy-meat canyon — ?”
Suddenly Shit dropped his sacks, snatched one of his gloves free, and swung his hand to smack Horm’s butt. But Horm hooted and leaped aside, then doubled over laughing, thumbing his jeans back up. In a moment, Shit had the sacks again, carrying them to the truck.
First Dynamite, then Eric started laughing.
They climbed back into the cab. Shit and Eric’s knees rattled the paper bags the fellow had sat on the truck-cab floor. In tan letters, a-slant the bags’ brown side, it read: DUMP FARMS PRODUCE.
Eric picked the newspaper-wrapped herbs off the seat.
“Hell.” Shit grinned at Eric, as they drove back. “I been fuckin’ Horm’s asshole in the Opera — and fuckin’ around with the gay guys out here at the Produce — which is all of ’em — since I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen. He — ” from the nod, he meant Dynamite — “knows that.”
“Sure I know it,” Dynamite said. “But you still gotta keep up appearances.” Then he frowned. “I never snuck you into the Opera when you was no twelve-years-old.”
“I know.” Shit frowned. “But that didn’t stop me from sneakin’.”
“Oh…” Dynamite looked puzzled.
Shit chuckled. “They used to treat me pretty nice.” (Out the window they passed a sign in red and gold letters on gray planks: DUMP FARMS PRODUCE, like the bags. On the side of the sign was a large picture of the orange water pump. Driving in, Eric had not seen it. Perhaps he’d been looking out the other window.) “That’s ’cause they knew he was sittin’ down in the front row, beatin’ his meat. But they used to get back in some corner with me, and let me go to town on ’em. When I was a little guy, I loved to fuck more than just about anything. And all them fuckin’ farm niggers knew it, too.”
“Like you still don’t,” Dynamite said dryly.
“Sometimes if it was a few of ’em together, they’d wait in line for me to finish with one and go on to the next.” Sunlit shadows rushed over their laps, their arms, and — down in the bags — the green husks, the yellow and black tassels, the peppers shiny green between their knees, with the dill and basil in their newsprint wrapping on top of the one between them.
Eric looked back up. “They give you food for takin’ away their garbage?”
“Naw,” Dynamite said. “Everybody gets vegetables and stuff from the Produce. That’s Kyle’s, too. He’s my friend — me and Jay’s — what started the Dump, where we live. They bring it down to the market at Dump Corners. But we get ours in the mornin’, ’cause we’re out here.”
As, again, the truck neared the beach, half the sky was a silver too bright to gaze at. The sand was white-gold and stuck with umbrellas. Half with trunks to their knees, beachgoers wandered about, some with towels over their shoulders, some carrying beach chairs or baskets. Hours after, beyond wire-woven pickets, the sea’s edge swarmed with swimmers. You had to squint. By ten to noon, the July Wednesday was over eighty-five.