The Bullet Hole

Sallie Reynolds

Valentin Lacoste

Word Count 1482

Dark, I remember dark. Someone knocking. And a softer sound, breathing. Maybe crying. I was thirteen, not allowed to answer the door at night.

Our house was miles out of town. Mother had died; my father, who was a country doctor, kept saying he was going to sell the place and get a smaller one in town where he wouldn’t have to worry about me at night. But he never did.

Now the sound was flap-flapping, like wings.

A window in the stair landing looked down on the stoop. A shadow.

“Please! Help me.”

I put on a robe and went down. The door was locked but never bolted until my father got back from a night call.

“When I opened the door, the porch light suddenly flooded the doorway, and the man-shadow seemed to jump at me. He was swaying, holding his side. Blood oozed around his fingers. I caught his arm led him into Daddy’s clinic and got him into a chair.

“The doctor’s not here,” I said.

He groaned. His shirt was a pitiful rag, pants tied with rope and ripped down one side as if he’d been dragged. His face looked carved, a statue—cheekbones and nose so sharp. He was older than me. A little.

“Am I gonna die?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered.

His head dropped.. “Can’t walk no more..”

Blood was running between his fingers. I got my father’s scissors and began cutting the rags off his chest. He pushed my hand away. “I’m trying to help you!” I said.

For the first time, he looked right at me. His eyes were pale green. “You know doctorin’?”

“Some . . .”

There was a hole right below his ribs. Smaller than a dime, red around the edges. Knives make a kind of slit, so this was a bullet hole. Blood ran in a black ribbon down his dark skin. The tattered pants and shirt were stiff with it. He smelt like hamburger, when you open the packet from the butcher.

I leaned over so I could see his back. It was smooth. The bullet was still in there.

I got out alcohol, peroxide, iodine, gauze. Took forceps from the sterilizer, pressed a pad, easy as I could, around the hole. I’d seen my father do this: First get the area clean.

He squeezed his eyes shut. I poured alcohol on my hands and peroxide on the pad, dabbed it around the hole. Some bubbled in. His mouth and eyes flew open. “Shit!”

He stared at me with those emeralds.

“I’m going to put more, I’m sorry—” He nodded, shut his eyes again. This time I poured the peroxide directly in the hole. His entire body flinched, but he didn’t make a sound.

I cleaned his chest and side with the alcohol, rubbed the dried blood off the top of his stomach, down to the rope belt. His skin was smooth, the color of cherry-wood.

When the blood stopped, I could see shirt fibers in the hole. I picked them out with the forceps. His skin flicked and twitched.

“This next is iodine. To kill germs. It’s going to really hurt. Now!” I grabbed a plug of gauze in the forceps and thrust it into the hole.

He grunted, kicked out his feet, but didn’t curse. More blood came out of the hole. I hoped I was doing this right. Oh god, don’t let me throw up.

The hole was bigger but it was clean. And only a little blood oozed out.

I rubbed iodine on his chest, a large red island of red. Then taped a thick bandage over the hole, which looked like a bear made it. But it stopped the blood.

His throat made a clunking sound when he swallowed two aspirins.

“There’s a couch in the back room. You can rest till my father comes and takes the bullet out.”

His pupils were large, now, jet-black in green froth, whites shining. His face was slick with sweat, almost like a fire inside, drying to ash at the edges. He tried to stand up. “I’ll be goin’.”

“You have to wait for my father! Really! You’ll make it bleed again. You could die.” I handed him our dinner bell. “Ring this if you need me.”

He said, “I got to go. I thank you.” And pushed the bell back at me. It fell with a clank on the floor.

“Why did I do all that, then? You’re just making it worse.”

After a second, he nodded. And limped behind me into Daddy’s study, lowered himself on the couch. His eyes were deep in dark hollows.

At the desk, I took out the pistol Daddy kept there, put it in my pocket. He saw me. The other drawers were locked, but the medicine cabinet in the clinic room never was.

He said, “Where your mama at?”

I didn’t say anything.

“You by yourself—at night?”

“I’m fine by myself!”

“You let me in too quick,” he said, “I coulda been a killer.”

“Are you?”

He started to laugh, but sobbed and pressed his side. The light carved his cheeks into hooks.

I went into the kitchen, poured a glass of milk, took it back to the study. His Adam’s apple bobbed again as he drank.

“There’s more milk.”

“I probly just throw it up,” he said. “I didn’t mean nothing bad about you, Miss. Just, you got the most angel hair I ever seen—like light.”

My hair was an ugly frizz! My face showed everything. And turned red.

Back in the kitchen, I wrote a note to my father, taped it to the outside of the door. I got an enamel bedpan and toilet paper, and took them in the study, along with an old clean shirt of my father’s from the hall closet.

“There’s nothing worth anything here.” I made my voice calm and hard. “My father’s doctor tools, but everybody would know where you got them.”

His face turned to stone.

I went up to my room and locked the door.

When I woke, it was light. Daddy was alone in his clinic, smudges under his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept at all.

“You did a pretty good job here,” he said. He held out a metal dish. A little gray lump clanked. “Target .22. Nicked a vein. He’d have bled a lot worse, if you hadn’t helped him. One thing, though—you didn’t call the sheriff. We have to report gunshot wounds. And walking in here after midnight with a bullet in him? He’s got some questions to answer.”

“But he didn’t do anything!”

“You don’t know that.”

I did know. And I knew the sheriff, with his big belly, small hard eyes, mean mouth. I also knew my father would say those are nothing but feelings.

After school, the sheriff questioned me. Tried to scare me, asking over and over, what happened? I kept saying, nothing, nothing happened. I told him carefully what I did. He went on and on. He said the “boy” lied to him, told him he’d shot himself, but you can’t shoot yourself at that angle.

“He was the victim,” I said. “Somebody shot him.”

The Sheriff snorted. “Well, he’ll get to think all about who did what, up there in the pen.”

“The penitentiary?” It was a big concrete building the next town over, wrapped in barbed wire, and men with machine guns. We heard terrible things went on there.

“He thanked me for helping him,” I said.

“Well aint that nice.”

“Do I have to – bear witness?” If so, I was going to say he was polite, that someone had hurt him. That he didn’t do anything. “What’s his name?”

“Don’t you worry about him,” the sheriff said. “Just leave him to us, sweetheart!”

“I’m not your sweetheart!” I said. “You should’ve taken him to the hospital!”

“Well, well. You know, I could haul your daddy in. Child endangerment. Doc tells me you’re thirteen, smart as sap. You tell him from me he needs a lady out here with you at night.”

Later I read in the newspaper that Junius Johnson, aged 16, was sent to the penitentiary for being in possession of a gun. I wrote to him, told him I knew he hadn’t done wrong, and I knew he hadn’t been thinking of stealing. I was sorry for saying so.

My father tore up the letter.

Years later, no one admitted knowing a Junius Johnson. No one could tell me if he’d gotten out of prison, or if he was alive. Or if he ever existed.

I prayed for him, though I didn’t believe in god.

I prayed about what happened to him. And what wouldn’t have if I’d let him run off into the night.

Even if he was hurt, even if he was dead and his bones in the ground, he’d have been free.

Sallie is 85, lives back of beyond in Northern California with her painter-writer-mechanic husband, a grand dog, and two hawks (she’s a licensed falconer.) She had to live this long in order to become a decent human being. Her stories are here and there, her two novels are on Amazon.