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.