Authors: James Hannaham
Urgent muttering sprang up around him, voices of group members confirming the mutilation of the saw, trying to decide on an appropriate, expedient action. Eddie allowed himself a few moments to get comfortable moving his fingers again; some blood and sensation had come back into his capillaries, he stopped imagining that his hands would soon turn black and that severing them would make no difference anyway. In the darkness behind the sweatshirt blindfold, he opened and closed his eyes and could see no light. A deep shadow appeared dotted with ghostlike greenish lights and vague shapes that he guessed must correspond to objects he had recently viewed; or perhaps they formed a map of the stars in some unknown corner of the galaxy.
The voices around him did not utter complete sentences; instead they communicated with barely audible whispers and soft, nudging grunts, some of which seemed to mean agreement, and others disagreement. They spoke among themselves, someone manipulating the saw, possibly knocking metal tools against it. Eddie had ordered a replacement blade, he recalled, but UPS would take several more weeks to deliver it.
After a time, Eddie permitted his mind to wander. He pictured the days ahead with great fear, making a list of activities he assumed he would no longer be able to do. He remembered rotating a tiny screwdriver between his thumb and index finger to tighten the hinges on Elmunda’s eyeglasses, reassembling the circuit board on the Fusiliers’ computer, picking up grains of rice that he’d accidentally spilled on their kitchen floor, removing a staple jammed in the business end of a stapler. The many times he’d opened soda cans and held pens and cutlery and turned the pages of a newspaper whizzed through in his head like images in a flip-book; he grew more despondent at the thought of the myriad items whose surfaces he would never get to caress, starting with the female body, then his own body, angora cats, corn silk, the pointed hairs of one of the Fusiliers’ Persian rugs, a sack of seeds, cool running water. It didn’t comfort him much to imagine that he would still feel these things with other parts of his body; idly touching the bristles of a shaving brush like the one that had belonged to his father did not seem possible or desirable without fingers. Then he thought about the pleasures of the fingers themselves, about instruments he would never learn to play, about snapping and clapping and flipping the bird, about making silhouettes of animals on bright walls, about carrying and drumming and cooking, and about the sign language he would never learn—and as these losses mounted, he changed his mind. There had to be a way to leave Delicious without having to go through with this. Sirius himself had done it.
But as he turned with his shrouded head to tell the debating folks behind him to back off, the circular saw started up again. When he shouted, he could tell his protest sounded to them like anxiety; they merely patted his back and reassured him. Perhaps the sweatshirt muffled him more than he had previously thought—could they not hear what he was saying?
In another moment the broken blade stung Eddie’s skin just above the knot of his left wrist, and a burning sensation spread out from there, but in a second the spinning cutter came into contact with bone and made another high-pitched grinding noise before the hardness where the radius and the ulna came together gave way and shattered. The cut felt ragged to Eddie, who believed that a neat slice would improve the chances that his hands could be reattached, and he clenched his teeth against the horrific ongoing burn. The mechanical noises drowned out his shouting; at this point he knew that whatever came out of his mouth sounded to them like a response to the pain and shock, not a statement that he had changed his mind and that they should stop cutting.
The clumsy jabbing of the saw gave him the sinking feeling that the dirty job had fallen to TT, whom Eddie had watched perform all of the tasks How and Jackie assigned to him with a complete lack of artistry or subtlety, consistently bruising fruit and breaking open melons. After a few short moments more of burn and tear he felt his left hand hanging heavy from the skin and tendons that remained; he had grown faint from the blood loss and fainter still from the
thought
of blood loss. Someone jumped in to arrest his widening injury with a tourniquet made from a towel which quickly became warm and wet.
In the midst of the fracas, an unfamiliar voice entered the room, attempting to shout over the noise and direct people in some fashion. For a second the voice approached the same pitch as the saw and demanded an explanation for the current activity, but after a couple of moments it returned to its original volume and the focus around Eddie seemed to change. The voice, he now understood, must belong to Jarvis Arrow, the man who’d come with Sirius, and with a shudder of relief, Eddie assured himself that even if nothing else had gone well exactly, the timing of the escape would work out perfectly. He heard his mother’s voice as well, and what he believed to be her feet scrambling around the workshop.
The awkward stabbing of the saw continued and finally released his left arm; Eddie let it fall toward his flank, but before it could get there, a pair of gentle hands lifted it into a folded towel. His mother whispered encouragements to him, describing the way she was stopping the blood by tearing up a towel and attaching it to the end of his wrist with lengths of sheathed cable and rubber they’d saved from before.
You’re almost free, he heard her say. Almost free. Darlene ran out of the workspace again, pledging to return when the job was done.
But he would not be free until the bearer of the saw could scoot over to the opposite side—and repeat the excruciating performance. The pain of losing the right hand combined with what he already felt in the left; the trauma drained his head of blood and he began to hyperventilate. The bungling and the pain continued with the right hand, as before. The person with the saw turned it off and Eddie felt someone tugging at his forearm as if to loosen a stubborn connection, but the saw went on again, poking around and grinding into his fractured bones. Eddie passed out and then regained consciousness, then passed out again as he heard his mother, who had returned to the workspace, repeating, without joy or sorrow, We have to go. Right this minute. We got you free, so stand up.
T
he pain in Eddie’s forearms had gotten so bad that he could only wobble forward, knock-kneed. A couple of strong people held him by his armpits and guided him through the blackness; low bushes scratched his elbows. After a minute or two he counted everyone present by the voices—his mother, TT, Tuck, Sirius, Michelle, and Jarvis. The car, they said, was parked about a mile away to keep the Delicious people from seeing and guessing what was about to happen. They had to make the journey as silently as possible. TT and Darlene paused for a couple of minutes because he had some rocks and they both needed some smoky courage. Nobody had bothered to untie the sweatshirt from around Eddie’s head, but that oversight increased his awareness of sounds. He noticed all sorts of night noises—planes rumbled through the sky, bullfrogs croaked, grackles called and responded to each other, and something that might’ve been a deer crunched through crops and leaves. Not only did these sensations help keep his mind off the tension jetting up and down his arms into the space his hands used to occupy, but he couldn’t find the right moment to ask someone to remove the blindfold, so he let it remain.
From time to time, Sirius leaned in to his ear and asked for a progress report. He said that he felt okay except for his hands, which was a joke, but nobody laughed. Sirius apologized, promising to get him to a doctor, and asked if he would rather have kept working at the farm his whole life than lose his hands.
I’d rather have lost all four limbs and my head than stay at Delicious, he told Sirius, but he didn’t mean it. He wanted to make up for the joke and sensed that everybody’s faith in the mission rested on the belief that cutting off his hands had been the best, most logical solution to the problem rather than something that would have occurred only to people who were out of their fucking minds. Most of them, after all, were literally on crack.
Led by Sirius, with Tuck guiding the blindfolded Eddie, they hiked a faint trail that Sirius claimed to remember from the days following his escape. At first, TT and Michelle held Darlene up, but she insisted on supporting herself even though she had a lot of trouble doing so. Once they had traveled some distance—Eddie couldn’t guess how far—it occurred to him that he didn’t know what they’d done with his hands. Naturally he couldn’t have seen where they’d put them, and during the process his attention had stayed on the pain. He spent a few hundred more yards wondering about his hands. A couple of times, he craned his head back, as if looking for them, though that gesture made no sense, given the blindfold.
Tuck appeared to guess what his movements meant. Uh-oh, he whispered. I don’t know. I think your moms has em. Somebody put em in a plastic bag and soon’s we get rolling and get far enough away, we’re gon stop and get some ice and you’ll be okay.
Eddie nodded, but at that moment he could imagine that Tuck and the rest looked like old-time executioners taking him to the gallows out amid Spanish moss in the olden days. He worried that they would forget about his hands, that the appendages would stay behind and take root in the soil among the cabbage plants.
They got to the Subaru after what felt like hours. Sirius untied the arms of the sweatshirt from behind Eddie’s ears and the fabric flopped down, landing partially on his shoulders. Before him a nearly full moon hung above the horizon like a flashlight interrogating the world. A road that Eddie couldn’t remember ever seeing during his time on the farm stretched out in front of them. The moonlight turned the road ashy blue, a sight so unusual that Eddie almost thought he’d invented it himself.
Halfheartedly Sirius said, I figured you wouldn’t want to see for a while, as he took the sweatshirt off Eddie’s shoulders and folded it in half. He folded the arms as well and wrapped them in the bottom half of the shirt.
But this is beautiful, Eddie said, not thinking so much about the scene but the fact that everyone would be leaving the farm. He would’ve smiled if he hadn’t been in so much pain.
I meant your—Sirius said.
Eddie raised his arms up to see for the first time what he’d lost. He remembered a time when he’d worn one of his late father’s shirts, and his arms hadn’t come all the way down. He’d skipped around the house, delighted with himself, until his mother discovered him and shook him almost hard enough to rip the shirt off his back.
In the car, Eddie lay sideways in the hatchback on a filthy quilt, keeping his arms raised. TT, Michelle, Darlene, and Tuck smashed into the backseat—Darlene on Tuck’s lap—while Jarvis drove and Sirius rode shotgun. Jarvis gunned the motor, repeatedly expressing his shock that he’d gotten himself involved in this rescue, though the confusion in his voice couldn’t mask his enjoyment of the crazy adventure or his implied belief that once they got through the whole thing, the mission would improve an already great story.
Jarvis had to drive pretty slowly to navigate the bumpy road. Eddie squirmed around in the hatch and gave up on trying to rest, let alone sleep. The four in the back jostled one another in humorously uncomfortable ways: TT’s face smashed against a headrest, Michelle kept accusing and warning Tuck about the placement of his hands.
An argument broke out in the backseat over whether they had gone farther into the farm. During the argument, Michelle let it slip that she suspected Jarvis of working for the Fusiliers and that he might be taking them on a loop inside the farm instead of helping them get away. In a flock of half-finished sentences, she tried to explain that she knew the Fusiliers wanted to test the loyalty of everybody in the camp at any cost. She wouldn’t put anything past them. If I didn’t know better, she said, I might start thinking that y’all two—she pointed at Sirius and Jarvis, sacrificing her precarious balance—has conspired with the growers and any minute now could shoot everybody in the car and drive it into the river.
Jarvis shrugged off the accusation at first, but then grew quiet and sober, explaining almost lovingly his astonishment at the level of paranoia that everybody took for granted. He supposed that given what he called the Whole Coyote Scenario—cutting off someone’s hands to free him from a trap—of which he didn’t approve, he shouldn’t have wondered that everybody had a lot of trauma. He compared the crew to soldiers coming back from an unjust war and told a story about his father’s service in Vietnam. He begged everyone to trust that Sirius knew a shortcut or two and that he had no interest in doing anything
but
helping, and Sirius backed him up, explaining exactly the route they meant to take in order to avoid being conspicuous or making too much noise. Jarvis found it disturbing, he said, that the workers didn’t have a clear impression of the size or layout of the farm, and he wondered aloud how Delicious had kept them in the dark for so many years. But to Eddie, the degree to which the workers depended on alcohol and crack cocaine should have spoken for itself, and to see such innocence in a grown man puzzled him. Why didn’t he immediately recognize that drugs had vaporized half these people’s brains?
Michelle swore that she believed Sirius and Jarvis, but a minute later Eddie heard her take off her seat belt. In the silence that followed, the purr of the Subaru rose above other noises and smoothed over some of the edgy feeling. Michelle said that it might help if Jarvis turned the headlights off and used the moonlight instead; Jarvis, apparently eager to accommodate her, tried that for a minute, then admitted that it scared him and switched them back on. Michelle settled into her seat and invoked her close relationship with Jesus as a kind of warning to Jarvis and Sirius, as if Jesus were an older brother about to pull up in his Ford Mustang and punch anybody who mistreated his sister. After a few moments she grabbed her armrest and held it tightly.
The shortcut ended and Jarvis edged the car up onto a more navigable stretch of road, strewn with smaller, looser rocks. As they came near to what Sirius assured them was the edge of the property, a world they had not seen for years, a headlight, the first they’d encountered that night, barreled toward them from a distance. At first Eddie thought it was a motorcycle, but as the car got closer, he saw that one light had gone out. Only a series of turns and slight hills sat between their vehicle and the approaching one.
Michelle straightened her back at the sight of the headlight and shouted, Pull over and cut your lights! Cut your lights! Pull over!
Oh, come on, Michelle, Sirius said.
What’s—why? Jarvis blurted.
It’s the minibus! The minibus done lost a headlight and they too cheap to fix it. You motherfuckers.
Minibus? Jarvis asked.
Oh my God, she said. By then, the distance had halved, and a moment later the minibus stopped in the middle of the road, perpendicular to traffic, its blue flank blocking the way forward like a dead cypress in a swamp. As Jarvis hit the gas, prepared to make a spectacular swerve around the minibus, Michelle pushed Sirius’s seat forward, mashing him against the dashboard, and managed to swing the passenger door open and leap halfway out. TT tried to lunge over and pull her back in by the leg, but she kicked him off. The door rushed back and hit her shoulder, and then jetted out again. Jarvis stomped on the brake with his whole weight and the car halted at a diagonal twenty yards from the minibus. Sextus and How had already piled out and prepared themselves for a confrontation.
The moment the car stopped, Michelle vaulted the rest of the way out of the car and, after running forward a few yards like somebody ready to fight, took a right turn into the rushes, churning forward with great difficulty, as though attempting to sprint through thigh-high water. Sextus and How shouted her name, begging her to come back, saying that they did not want to hurt her. But when she did not respond, Sextus removed the shotgun from under his arm and fired a warning shot into the air. Behind the steering wheel, Jarvis shrieked and a spasm visibly rippled through his body; Sirius steadied the journalist by gently placing his palm atop his sternum. Jarvis gasped. Little gems of perspiration decorated his forehead and the bridge of his nose. Darlene curled down behind him to avoid stray shots and told Eddie to do the same, so he scrunched onto his side in the hatch against the back of the backseat, using it as a barrier, behind which no one could see or shoot him, but from which he could peek out. Meanwhile, TT squeezed close next to Darlene.
It seemed that How and Sextus—and Jackie, whose dark shadow Eddie could just make out behind a reflection in one of the minibus windows illuminated by the headlights—at first thought to follow and capture Michelle as she pushed through the vegetation, but the prospect of losing the rest of the crew for her sake maybe changed their minds and they let her run. He couldn’t see whether or not Hammer lay in wait inside the minibus.
Sextus petted his shotgun lovingly and chuckled. It’s all gators out in that swamp, honey! Hope you know that! He said it again, yelling loud enough that she could hear, perhaps meaning for it to discourage everyone in the Subaru as well.
They all jolted in their seats when Michelle hollered something back from far away that sounded to Eddie through the open windows of the car like, Y’all the fucking gators! You!
Eddie rediscovered the quilt in the hatch and slowly edged it over his head with his forearms, leaving a small area open so that he could see past the seat back, through the ribbons of seat belt, and out to where Sextus and How stood expectantly. The two men adjusted themselves in ways that demonstrated their bravado, tugging their belt loops up, spreading their legs like cowboys. Sextus continued to stroke the shotgun, his index finger curling around the trigger. How touched the brim of his hat. With a phony courtesy that angered Eddie, he asked the people in the car to get out. Jarvis kept his attention focused on Sextus and How as he stepped out of the car with his hands up at his sides, treating them like the police officers they pretended to be.
Eddie stirred under the quilt, but without turning around, Darlene whispered, Stay, almost like she was talking to herself. The car’s idling, she said. If we don’t get out then maybe you still can.
Eddie thought he could still faintly hear Michelle’s hands and feet pushing through the brush. Darlene, Tuck, and TT emerged from the backseat on the same side, and eventually Sirius came around the passenger-side door. Eddie listened to everybody’s feet scuffling nearer to the minibus. Jackie turned on the lights inside the van. The two doors of the Subaru stood open like the wing casings of a flying palmetto bug.
Where are y’all off to on this fine evening? Sextus asked, almost cordially.
But when he and How saw the four of them for the first time in the peculiar light created by the Subaru’s lights bouncing off the minibus and the silvery moon, they both stepped back and their eyebrows rose. TT, Tuck, and Darlene had bloodstains all over their clothes; they must have looked like a terrifying mob.
What the Sam Hill? Did y’all slaughter a bunch of my chickens?
Where are these nice gentlemen taking you? How said, before anybody could respond.
A few very uneasy moments passed while How and Sextus appeared to wait for some kind of answer from the crew, but all of them, excepting Jarvis, knew better than to give either of these men a response, truthful or sarcastic. Their silence inflated, and Eddie could imagine their eyes shifting from side to side, and the way they’d catch and throw back one another’s sidelong glances, either gathering up the courage to make a break for it like Michelle or letting the will drain out of them so that they could give up without losing face or catching a beating.
When no one spoke, Jarvis kept starting to answer but changing his mind before a complete thought could fall out of his mouth, after which he would sigh, or say, Well, or Um.
Then Darlene, almost like a nervous flinch, leapt at Sextus and embraced the shotgun, kicking his shins and telling him to let it go. How pulled out a Glock and raised its muzzle, but Sextus, even as he lunged back and forth, attempting to wrestle the shotgun out of Darlene’s arms, ordered him not to shoot her. Instead, How trained his gun on the others, though still trying to protect Sextus from Darlene, but in a matter of moments, the three others divided his attention enough to tackle him. TT in particular seemed to savor the thrashing they gave How. A shot reverberated through the air. Then another.