By the time Eddie returned to the chicken house, he felt as if the rain had swelled a river inside his head. The thought of what had happened that day sent him into a rage that gushed over the ramparts. He glared at the brownish mattress he shared with his mother, who had gotten in earlier from her detail and had sprawled out as if to hug the bed in his absence. He complained to her that they had to leave right then, but she didn’t respond.
As he waited in line for the shower, slapping away mosquitoes and looking in all directions at once for palmetto bugs, he decided to kill as many of everything as he could. The first giant bug he saw he lunged out of the line for and leapt on with both feet, an action that produced an unappetizing sound that caused some people to cringe. He kept watch as other bugs appeared at irregular intervals, eventually abandoning his place in line to go on the hunt. In the trash he found a piece of cardboard, rolled it into a stiff wand, and rushed around the entire space, bludgeoning wings and legs and innards on the walls and empty beds and concrete floors.
You just the little exterminator tonight, Tuck commented drily. Kill em all, don’t miss none. There’s one. Go get em. That’s a real public service you’re doing. By the time you done we’ll think we’re living at the Waldorf.
Despite his teasing, Tuck found his own cardboard weapon and helped Eddie out in a lighthearted kind of way. Eddie, by contrast, had a serious vendetta going. When he smashed an insect, he didn’t stop hitting its dead body until it resembled a smear with dismantled legs and antennae.
Die, stupid bug! Die! he shouted. Then he’d examine each dead carcass and stomp on it if it didn’t seem quite dead before sprinting across the room to pulverize the next one.
Over time, the aggravation of that day grew worse, became perpetual, and spread. The bosses gave him increasingly demanding and more physical work on top of the mechanical issues and trumped-up computer problems Sextus called on him for, and he found himself at work nearly all day and all week. Anything became grounds for him to lose his head. He stomped on the moldy cheese-and-pickle sandwiches and chucked the rotten fruit at the walls; he ripped open a mattress with his bare hands; he threw a chicken across a yard; he broke his toe on a concrete wall and had to make a splint for himself with Scotch tape and a maple twig and hobbled around complaining until the toe healed. He arm-wrestled so intensely that he broke the arm of a young woman who then walked around for months with two almost straight tree branches duct-taped around the injured limb. Eddie ripped an already broken toilet out of the wall. He threw a coworker off a moving harvester during an argument. The fighting got him in trouble a lot, but he could talk his way out of almost any punishment because he had Sextus’s ear.
Aside from his age, the other thing that set Eddie apart from everybody else was that he hadn’t become addicted. His mother saw one of the workers hand him a loaded pipe and a lighter one evening and she snatched them out of his hands and threw the lighter across the room and started shouting at him, Can’t you see what this goddamn shit does? and Didn’t I raise you better than that?
To which Eddie thought, No.
Then his mother ambled across the room to find the drugs, picked up the lighter, and took a hit herself, and he watched her hunch over with her back to him, flicking and sucking on the pipe and trying to hide her activity from everybody who had just witnessed her go off on him.
When he moved closer, watching her like a scout stares at a campfire, she grumbled, Do as I say, not as I do.
Eddie left her side and went to sit on sagging milk crates among the rest of the crew. Darlene’s behavior proved her point, he saw. She was like a drowned person hollering up out of the river at a potential suicide not to jump. The next time somebody offered him a glass pipe, he accepted it only to throw it on the ground and stomp on it like one of the bugs, though that started a brutal fight that left him with gaping wounds on his forearms that for days attracted horseflies to the edges of his toilet-paper-and-duct-tape bandages.
Usually, How was the one to punish Eddie for an infraction such as this brawl—whack him in the ass with the business end of a rake, across the back with a leather strap, or on the temple with the butt of his gun. But for some reason Jackie assumed the responsibility to decide how to make him pay for this offense. That same day, someone had ratted on Tuck for stealing a package of Jujubes from the store, and Hammer found the brightly colored candies in Tuck’s pants pocket before the bus left the depot to return to the chicken house. Since he hadn’t opened the package, Hammer returned it to the store (a five-dollar value!) and warned Tuck that the penalty would come later, giving him no idea when, or what form it would take.
The next day, Jackie brought Tuck and the bandaged Eddie together into a field of young corn, with Hammer there as enforcer. Jackie carried a cylinder of Morton salt in the crook of one arm, held against her breast like a stillborn child; Hammer carried a rusty shovel. They had tied Tuck’s wrists together, and Hammer nudged him forward into a clearing with the point of the shovel.
In her usual dry manner, Jackie said to Eddie, Your punishment is to punish him. She leveled a merciless, distant glance at each of them in turn.
Hammer moved the shovel into Eddie’s space, expecting him to take it, but instead the younger man stared down at it as if it might bite him if he touched it. A small aircraft buzzed overhead; Tuck and Eddie looked up, eager for a sign from the outside world.
You got ears? Hammer asked.
Yeah, I got ears, Eddie snapped.
Watch it, Hammer said, shaking the shovel up and down in front of him. Well?