Cool Breeze paid no attention to him, until he heard the plywood disengage from the saw. He turned his head out of curiosity just as the mulatto balled his fist and tried to jam a piece of coat-hanger wire, sharpened to a point like an ice pick and driven vertically through the wood handle off a lawn-mower starter rope, through the center of Cool Breeze's ear and into his brain.
The wire point laid open Cool Breeze's cheek from the jawbone to the corner of his mouth.
He locked his attacker's forearm in both bis hands, spun with him in circles, then walked the two of them toward the saw that hummed with an oily light.
"Don't make me do it, nigger," he said.
But his attacker would not give up his weapon, and Cool Breeze drove first the coat hanger, then the balled fist and the wood plug gripped inside the palm into the saw blade, so that bone and metal and fingernails and wood splinters all showered into his face at once.
He hid inside the barrel of a cement mixer, where by all odds he should have died. He felt the truck slow at the gate, heard the guards talking outside while they walked the length of the truck with mirrors they held under the frame.
"We got one out on the ground. You ain't got him in your barrel, have you?" a guard said.
"We sure as hell can find out," the truck driver said.
Gears and cogs clanged into place, then the truck vibrated and shook and giant steel blades began turning inside the barrel's blackness, lifting curtains of wet cement into the air like cake dough.