'You never even charged him.'
'I charged him plenty. I just never collected. Every few months, Billy sends me ten or fifteen dollars. It should be paid up by the next century.'
'Well, I am a good horse, too. And I have this here problem and that's why I come to you. If I go to VA, it could take months for the paperwork to clear. If I go to a private MD, I got a passel of questions I have to answer and a big operating room to tie up and weeks to recover, whether I need it or not. I need this thing now. Tonight.'
'Tonight!'
'I need you to go in on local, dig it out, and sew me up.'
'Bob, we are talking about serious, invasive work. It would take any normal man a month to recover, under intensive medical care. You won't be whole again for a long time.'
'Doc, I been hit before. You know that. I still come back fast. It's a matter of time. I can't tell you why, but I'm under the gun on time. I have to find something out so I can go to the FBI. I need a piece of evidence. I need your help.'
'Oh, Lord.'
'I know you did a tour over there. It's a thing guys like us have in common. We ought to help each other when we can.'
'No one else will, that's for sure,' said Dr. Lopez.
'You was a combat medic and you probably saw more gunshot wounds and worked on more than any ten MDs.
You know what you're doing.'
'I saw enough of it over there.'
'It's a nasty thing to fire a bullet into a man,' said Bob.
'I was never the same, and now that I am getting old, I feel my back firing up because of the damage it did to my structure. And the VA don't recognize pain. They just tell you to live with it, and cut your disability ten percent every year. So on I go, and on all of us go with junk in us or limbs missing or whatever.'
'That war was a very bad idea. Nothing good ever came out of it.'
'I copy you there. I wouldn't be here if I didn't have no other choice. I need that bullet.'
'You are a fool if you think what I can offer you is as safe as modern hospital medicine.'
'You dig the bullet out and put in the stitches. If you don't do it, I'll have to do it myself and that won't be pretty.'
'I believe you would. Bob. Well, they say you are one tough son of a bitch. You better be, because you're going to need every bit of tough to get through the next few days.'
Bob lay on his back, looking at the large mirror above him. The ugliness of the entrance wound was visible, he hated to look at it. The bullet had hit him almost dead on at a slight downward angle, plowed through skin and the tissue of his sheathing gluteus medius muscle, then shattered the plate like flange of the hip bone, deflecting off to plunge down the inside of his leg, ripping out muscle as it went. The bullet hole was unfilled: it was that alone and nothing else-- a channel, a void, an emptiness in his hip that plunged inward, surrounded by an ugly pucker of ruined flesh.
'No false hip?' said Dr. Lopez, feeling at it, examining it carefully.
'No, sir,' said Bob.
'They patched it up with bone grafts from my other shin and screws. On cold days, them screws can light up, let me tell you.'
'Did it break a leg, too?'
'No, sir, it just tore up tissue traveling down the leg.'
The doctor probed Bob's inner thigh, where a long dead patch described the careening bullet's terrible passage through flesh. Bob looked up, away, feeling the acute humiliation of it. The doctor's operating theater was immaculately clean, though out of scale to human bodies, as its most usual patients were horses with leg or eye problems.
Except for the two of them, it was deserted.
'Well, you're lucky,' Dr. Lopez said.
'I was afraid it still might be hung up in the mechanics of the hip. If that had happened, you were out of luck. I couldn't take it out without permanently crippling you.'
'I am lucky,' said Bob.
'Yeah,' the doctor said, 'I can feel it here, nested in the thigh, down close to the knee. I know what happened.
They had to screw your hip together with transplants, the deep, muscular wound of the bullet didn't matter to them.
They didn't even bother to look for it. They just sewed it up. They were trying to keep you alive and ambulatory, not make sure you could get through airport metal detectors.'
'You can get it?'
'Bob, this is going to hurt like hell. I have to cut through an inch of muscle, get down close to the femur. I can feel it in there. You will bleed like a dog on the roadway.
