Eddie and Tuck locked eyes, and Eddie remembered how easy it had been to tie him up the day they met, but now what they expected of him would amount to an unforgivable betrayal. Tuck had ended up here because of him, and had helped him to find his mother. Eddie ought to have been helping Tuck get out of Delicious. Now they’d given him no choice but to wound his benefactor, and it wouldn’t have surprised him to hear that they wanted him to kill Tuck. Eddie had no intention of doing anything.
When he didn’t move to take the shovel, Hammer grabbed him by the arm and yanked up one of the bandages, tearing away hair and skin. Eddie twisted his body, but Hammer held him tight. Jackie poised the cylinder of salt upright with its spout open above the freshly scabbing cuts that snaked down Eddie’s forearm. Tuck attempted to edge away, but Hammer alternated carefully between holding Eddie and watching to make sure that Tuck didn’t try to escape. Before Eddie could wrench free of Hammer, Jackie shook a few grains into the red valleys of exposed flesh and Eddie felt a biting pain and stumbled forward. Hammer chucked the shovel into his unstable path; it connected with his ankle and he fell on his shoulder into the loose, dry dirt, soiling his wounds and sprinkling clods of earth over the bandage.
Let’s get this show on the road, Hammer demanded. He grabbed hold of the rope between Tuck’s wrists.
Eddie slowly rose to his knees, brushing and blowing dirt off his arms and clothes and out of his bandage. He brought up a knee and took the shovel in hand, then stood, shakily, and gripped it with both hands, adopting the stance of a baseball player about to bunt, letting the blade swing back and forth between his shins.
Jackie and Hammer leveled the same impatient expression at him, their eyelids halfway down, their jaws tightly set.
Eddie struck Tuck lightly on the thigh at first, and muttered an apology he hoped Jackie and Hammer would not overhear.
Jackie only said, Harder, and Hammer pushed Tuck forward toward Eddie.
Tuck stumbled, but stood his ground. Eddie’s blows grew sharper and more impersonal. Tuck took up Eddie’s message where he’d left off, and every time the scoop of the shovel made contact with his shoulder blades or the backs of his thighs or, eventually, his head and neck, and he fell to his knees and then to the ground, he forgave Eddie out loud. It’s okay, he said, it’s okay. But soon Tuck ran out of forgiveness and begged for mercy, until at last he could no longer speak and his legs gave out. His face kissed earth wet with his own blood and he wriggled as if he could crawl underneath it to safety, while Eddie unleashed an aimless rage directed as much toward himself and his circumstances as toward Tuck’s helpless body.
Eddie saw him a few days later, back out in the field—maybe they were harvesting rhubarb—holding himself up with a rake and a broken shovel handle (perhaps the one that had dealt the blows, Eddie thought with a shudder) tied to his leg to keep it set, and one arm in a sling. He imagined bruises in the shape of every state covering Tuck’s body.
Eddie approached him with his eyes nearly closed, wringing the hem of his T-shirt between his fingers. You okay? he said.
No, Tuck blurted out. No no no no fucking no. Do I look okay, nigger?
I’m still sorry.
You nearly killed me. I almost wish you had.
What? Why?
I know what they did that for, and I don’t want to see it.
18.
How
When Eddie became the official handyman, Michelle recruited him as a double agent. She wanted him to take advantage of the trust their superiors had in him, so she convinced him to use part of his time to comb through the Fusiliers’ computer files and Sextus’s office, trying to find information about the place that might help people who wanted to terminate their contracts and leave the premises. The first order of business, Michelle said, was to figure out the layout of the farm. Eddie spent part of his time rifling through whatever he could, but not so much as a faded receipt stuck in an old book gave anything away; even stationery didn’t help. He didn’t find anything that said Delicious Foods. He did discover a cache of letterhead for a company called Fantasy Groves LLC, though, which listed post office boxes in a variety of midsize cities—Shreveport, Birmingham, Tampa—no place even halfway as country as the farm. Someone on what they referred to as the no-lime detail, which lay just south of the no-lemon one, claimed that he’d seen Louisiana signs on a nearby road that outside people seemed to travel on; like a lot of things among the crew, it became an endless subject of debate. Eddie saw yellowing piles of a local Louisiana paper in the house, the Picayune. He related this news to Michelle, but the workers got into an argument about whether the presence of the paper proved the region. White folks in California be reading the New York Times, somebody insisted. I seened em doing it.
Eddie found little use in trying to convince the crew of something so basic, so he concentrated on finding details about the business, records of moneys paid or documents related to payroll. Most of what he found pertained to large payments made by big corporations that purchased food grown on the various farms operated by Fantasy Groves LLC. Just reading the names of all the food companies and supermarkets who bought from the farms on hundreds of invoices made his mouth water. Never did he uncover any records that had anything to do with the workers—no payroll stubs, no legal documents, not even a list of names. That made Michelle suspect that Delicious was a subcontractor to Fantasy Groves, a name she had never heard. Delicious was an anonymous shell company. With little hope of a paper trail, Michelle gave Eddie a directive to find out as much as he could from Sextus.
Why don’t you ask my mom? he wondered aloud.