I will sew you up, but you will need a good long rest.
This isn't a small thing. It isn't a huge thing, but you ought to spend at least a couple of weeks off your feet.'
'You cut it out tonight. I'll sleep here and be gone in the morning. You give me a good pain shot and that will be that.'
'You are a hard case,' said the doctor.
'My wife says the same.'
'Your wife and I bet anyone that ever met you. All right, you sit back. I'm going to wash you up, then shave you. Then I'll go scrub, and we'll give you a painkiller and we'll do what's gotta be done.'
Bob watched with a numb leg and an odd feeling of dislocation.
The doctor had put an inflatable tourniquet around the upper leg to cut down on blood loss. Then he'd wrapped his leg in a sterile Ace bandage, and now he cut through it, a horizontal incision with a scalpel an inch deep and three inches long into the lower inside of his right thigh. Bob felt nothing. The blood jetted out in a spurt, as if an artery had been snipped, but it hadn't, and as the initial jet was soaked up by the bandage, the new blood crept back to seep out of the ugly gash.
He'd seen so much blood, but the blood he remembered was Donny's blood. Because the bullet had shattered his heart and lungs, it had gotten into his throat fast and he'd gagged it out. There was so much, it overcame his pipes and found new tunnels out of which to surge: it came from his nose and mouth, as if he'd been punched in the face. Donny's face was ruined, taken from them all by the black-red delta as it fanned from the center of his face down to his chin.
The doctor tweaked and squeezed the incision, opening it as one would a coin purse, then he took a long probe and inserted it into the wound and began to press and feel.
'Is it there?'
'I don't have it--yeah, yeah, there it is, I ticked against it. It seems to be encapsulated in some scar-type tissue. I'd guess that's standard for an old bullet.'
He removed the probe, now sticky with blood, gleaming in the bright light of the operating theater, and set it down. Picking up a new scalpel, he cut more deeply, more blood flowed.
'I'm going to have to irrigate,' he said through his mask.
'I can't see much, all that damn blood.'
'They will do that on you, won't they?' said Bob.
Lopez merely grunted, squirted a blast of water into the wound, so that it bubbled.
It was so strange: Swagger could feel the water as pressure, not unpleasant, even a little ticklish, he could feel the probe, could almost feel as the pincers tugged at the bullet. The sensations were precise, the doctor tugging at the thing, which was evidently quite disfigured and jammed into some tissue and wouldn't just pop out as a new bullet would. Bob felt all these details of the operation.
He saw the opening in his leg, saw the blood, saw the doctor's gloved fingers begin to glow with blood, and the blood begin to spot his surgeon's gown and smock.
But he felt nothing, it could have been happening to someone else. It was unrelated to him.
At last, with a tiny tug, Lopez pulled the bloody pincers out of the wound and held the trophy up for Bob to see: the bullet was crusted in gristle, white and fatty, and the doctor cut it free with his scalpel. It had mangled when it had met his bone, its me plat collapsing into its body, so that it was deformed into a little flattened splat, like a mushroom, oddly askew atop the column of what remained. But it hadn't broken into pieces, it was all there, an ugly little twist of gilding metal sheathing lead, and its original aerodynamic sleekness, its missile ness was still evident in the twisted version. He could see striations running down it, where the rifle's grooves had gripped it as it spun through the barrel so long ago on its journey toward him.
'Can you weigh it?'
'Yeah, right, I'll weigh it and then I'll wax it, and then I'll gift-wrap it while you quietly bleed to death. Just hold your horses, Bob.'
He dropped the bullet into a little porcelain tray, where it tinkled like a penny thrown into a blind man's cup, then went back to Bob.
'Please weigh it,' said Bob.
'You ought to be committed,' the doctor said. He irrigated the wound again, poured in disinfectant and inserted a little sterile plastic tube, for drainage. Then he quickly and expertly sewed it up with coarse surgical thread. After finishing, he restitched with a finer thread.
Then he bandaged the wound, wrapped an inflatable splint around it and blew hard until the splint held the leg stiff, nearly immobile. Then he loosened the Velcro on the tourniquet and tossed it aside.
'Pain?'
'Nothing,' said Bob.
'You're lying. I felt you begin to tense five minutes ago.'
'Okay, it hurts a bit, yeah.'
Actually, it now hurt like hell. But he didn't want another shot or anything that would drug him, flatten him, keep him woozy. He had other stuff to do.
'Okay,' said the doctor.
'Tomorrow I'll rebandage it and remove the tube. But it'll relieve the pressure tonight.
