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.
23.
Gators
The 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.