James Hannaham - Delicious Foods

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.

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.

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.