I guess I finally made it, Sirius said, his voice catching with self-consciousness and what sounded like despair.
You didn’t have to wait so long, Darlene said, like somebody about to kiss somebody. At this point Sirius knelt down to whisper to her, and Eddie could no longer hear their conversation.
Still, from his vantage point tied to the door, Eddie could almost feel the tenderness radiating from Sirius. Sirius had eyes nearly the size of strawberries, and almost as red, and when he looked at you, it felt like he pitied you, and maybe loved you like a relative. Anybody might have wanted to save Eddie, considering where he’d wound up, but Sirius was obviously ill-equipped for the job; a man of deep thoughts, spiritual sayings, and compassion—Eddie had heard from the crew that in his music, Sirius preached nonviolence, mercy, tolerance, and cosmic deliverance, like the second coming of Dr. King or somebody. Eddie thought he might like to know that sort of brother in his day-to-day life, to go to for advice and such. Darlene had frequently told him his father had some of those qualities—she went for that type. But when you’ve got to do some urgent work of the sort they were about to do right then, Eddie thought he’d rather have a no-nonsense fellow in his corner, somebody who wouldn’t overthink it.
But somehow in the confusion that dominated the scene, TT placed a pair of bolt cutters in Sirius’s palms and gestured for him to make an attempt at freeing Eddie’s hands. Sirius rose from his conversation with Darlene and moved toward Eddie, delicately testing the tool. After a few moments of paralysis, he worked the cutters into a bunch of different areas but couldn’t do more than snip little wounds into the sides of the chain and expose some of the sheathing on the cable. Then he tried using the bolt cutters to free Eddie from the hole in the door, but there was a long rusty metal guard running the length of it, which prevented him from making even a tiny slice.
Take the damn door off the hinges, Darlene wheezed.
But Michelle thought that would only saddle him with a gigantic piece of equipment and keep him grounded even more than if they hadn’t done a thing.
In a silent, creeping way, it became obvious to Eddie, though nobody breathed the words, that the easiest way to get him free—something that the others had probably started thinking about a long time before he understood it—would be for him to leave his hands behind.
Tuck kept saying, Now we could get you free, we could get you free. But for the first few times he said it, Eddie thought Tuck meant to encourage himself; it didn’t dawn on Eddie that perhaps Tuck wanted it to seem like Eddie had come up with the idea first. And when he realized what Tuck meant, and why he wouldn’t be more specific, Eddie’s head filled with a rage hotter than the blue flame at the end of a blowtorch.
He didn’t say anything for a long time as the others milled around, discussing options. Instead he tried to explain the complexity of the situation to himself in his head, and then by looking back and forth in a certain way between Tuck and Sirius B. Never at Darlene. Tuck and Sirius semicircled his dangling body anxiously, not so much keeping their distance as seeming to fear the next step; apparently neither of them could muster the energy required to move forward. A sympathetic tingle passed through Eddie’s nerves and veins, and he felt sharply that he shouldn’t take his fury out on them, as they were victims too, nearly to the same degree.
With the time we have, I don’t see an alternative, Sirius fretted.
Doctors can put em back nowadays, Tuck said. He had found the circular saw. He held it, unplugged, in his right hand, almost casually, as if he planned to use the blade to scratch an itch on his forearm. We’ll save em, he said, and then repeated the phrase.
Eddie’s anger rose even higher. More than anything else, he wanted, ridiculously, to show Tuck that he wasn’t holding the saw properly. Idiot, he thought. Sirius busied himself by gathering up a few of the longer pieces of the sheathed cable; Eddie tried to catch his mother’s eye, but she appeared to be having an intense discussion with Scotty—she wouldn’t look at Eddie or come close to him in a way that somebody might later connect with what was about to happen.
We’ll put em on ice, my man, Tuck said. Eddie listened to his voice for any undercurrent of payback. The songs of Willie “Mad Dog” Walker played loudly in his head.
Tuck plugged the saw into a plastic adapter that screwed into a light socket. He tested the distance between the end of its slack and Eddie’s position at the door, then tugged on the cord attached to the lightbulb and moved the whole operation when he found that it wasn’t quite close enough to do the job accurately.
I can’t do it, he said.
Do you mean you can’t reach, or you can’t do it? Eddie asked.
Can’t do it. Just can’t. Can’t even look at the doing of it. It’s too…He took a long frowning pause.
After all that, you’re going to go soft?
Go soft? I am soft, bruh, he said. When it come to something like this.
Sirius decided that the group should quickly make some rules about the procedure. He suggested that Eddie close his eyes so that he wouldn’t know who had done the job. But that didn’t pan out when Michelle said it would be obvious once he opened them again, and everybody else would know and give it away, so he’d find out immediately no matter what.
You should all come in close, Eddie said. Then it won’t be so obvious.
Nobody liked that idea.