you can get your hands on a copy of that photograph, then use your computer’s photo editing software to enlarge that corner section of the picture. Concentrate on the lower left-hand side of the gazebo, enlarge that a little, and you will see what looks like a small fuzzy animal trying to burrow its way through the gazebo’s latticework and hide underneath.
That is the top of my head.
A few seconds after that photograph was taken, I scrambled to my feet and ran back down to the car as fast as I’ve ever run in my life. When I got there, the National Guardsman who’d been arguing with my aunt was surrounded by half a dozen angry and panicked students. Two of them grabbed the guardsman while another attempted to yank his rifle from his grip. The gun was jerked up, down, and to the side. One. Two. Three.
On two Amy whipped her head around and saw me standing by the car. She started to shout something at me and then three arrived and something exploded. I couldn’t see what because I was magically on my back staring up at the clouds and wondering why I couldn’t feel my left side.
Here’s a piece of information you might want to file away under Things You Never Want to Find Out for Yourself: If fired in close enough proximity to a target-even an accidental one like an annoyingly curious nine-year- old boy who should have stayed in the stupid car-rubber bullets can cause almost as much damage as the real thing.
The bullet passed cleanly through my left shoulder, missing bone but making a permanent impression on what tissue it met along the way.
I remember everyone crowding around me. I remember the way Amy grabbed me and kissed me and got my blood all over her nice blouse. I remember the strength of the guardsman’s arms as he pushed everyone aside and lifted me up like he was some kind of superhero and ran toward the truck. Then I decided I was tired and closed my eyes.
I was treated at the local hospital, then transferred by ambulance to Cedar Hill Memorial the next morning. I remember none of this because I was unconscious for nearly twenty hours after it happened.
What I do remember is waking up in my hospital room to find Amy there with my mom, a nurse, and a couple of reporters. Amy was so glad to see me awake she broke down crying and tried to hug me, but the nurse said that wasn’t a good idea, so my aunt simply kissed my cheek and held my hand while my mom glared at her, and then at me. She didn’t have to speak; I knew what was going through her mind: Do you have any idea how angry your father is about all of this? Do you know how embarrassing this has been to us?
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to her.
“Oh, hon,” said Amy, “oh god, what have you got to be sorry about? I should have left the minute I knew what was happening! This is all my fault. I’m so sorry.”
I turned my head and looked at her. Why was she crying about me?
I was something of a minor celebrity on the floor for a few days after that. I was the Kid Who’d Gotten Shot at Kent State. That’s how nurses and orderlies broke the ice with me: “Hey, aren’t you that kid who got shot at Kent State? Wow.”
I knew I’d been hit in the shoulder, but what confused me was why I had this monster bandage running from the center of my chest down to my package. (My father was a WWII veteran, and in his house you never said “pee-pee” or “penis” or “dick”; no, when referring to that area, you called it your “package.”)
It turned out that when I’d dropped, I’d slammed down on a large rock at the side of the road and ruptured my spleen. My parents had raised holy hell about having surgery performed in Kent and had insisted it be done at Cedar Hill. I was stabilized and moved, even though postponing the surgery could have killed me. To this day I try to convince myself it had nothing to do with the rates at CHM being nearly twenty-five percent cheaper; haven’t made it there yet, but stay tuned.
Soon enough I became less of a conversation piece and just another patient and that was fine with me. Most days in the hospital I was kept comfortable, had plenty of help when I needed to get out of bed, regained my appetite, and had a few visitors; mostly Amy (who not only bought Steppenwolf 7 for me, but evidently every album in every record store between here and Michigan) and a couple of my teachers from school. Mom came to visit only once after that first day, and then didn’t say much or stay long. My father never visited or called. I guessed he was still mad at me.
On those days when Aunt Amy didn’t come by, I could always count on Beth, who always seemed to appear just when I needed her, always decked out in her torn blue bathrobe with the words Grand Hotel, London stitched out in fading letters across the chest. She boasted that her mother had gotten it for her while in England on a theatrical tour, and the hotel management was more than happy to give such a renowned stage actress as Beth’s mother a tiny souvenir. (Even then I suspected that Beth might not be telling me the whole truth; I’d heard a couple of nurses talking about how she lived with her aunt, who was the only relative that could be found. If her mother was such a famous stage actress, then how hard could it be to find her? After all, she’d sent her that bathrobe from London, hadn’t she? Then I figured that maybe Beth was embarrassed because her mom and dad didn’t want her, so she made up things. I guessed that was okay. Sometimes the truth was boring, or made other people feel sorry for you and not know what to say, so they didn’t say anything and left you alone. I got the feeling Beth had been left alone a lot.)
Beth had been admitted for an emergency appendectomy when her appendix burst and was in the room two doors down from mine. She’d come by my room in the early days of my stay when I was still the Big Curiosity, but unlike the rest of the patients on our floor, she kept coming back.
Beth was sixteen years old, I was still nine (Ten in July I’d tell people any chance I got, as if knowing that would make me any less ridiculous in their eyes.); she wore love beads around her neck and told me she had a pair of hip-hugger bell-bottom jeans that she only wore in warm weather because she liked to wear her sandals with them-thank God the appendectomy scar was low enough that she could still wear halters and tube-tops.
My wardrobe consisted mostly of mismatched plaid and paisley.
Beth seemed to be popular at her school (she had a lot more visitors than I did, all of them girls who were her age; and she always brought them over to meet me, and they always said I was cute but I don’t think they really meant it). I was a big Zero at my school, what with the plaid, the paisley, and my thick, dark-framed glasses, not to mention my interest in books (Vonnegut), monster movies (Godzilla ruled, still does), and music that wasn’t on American Top Forty.
Why someone Beth’s age seemed to like being around a kid like me, I don’t know. Maybe she cast me in the role of Little Brother She Never Had or something; all I know is that anytime I got sick, or fell down (I fell down a lot the first week or so after my surgery), or even felt lonely, Beth was there before any nurse or doctor, always helping me up, or brushing my hair back with her hand, or giving me a big but not too-tight hug. I liked that. My mom and dad weren’t big huggers. They loved me, I knew that (or told myself so, anyway), but ours was not a house big on physical displays of affection. So a Beth bear hug (the only kind she knew how to give) was always welcomed, even when it made me feel like a little baby.
Then one day Beth overhead something between a nurse and one of the orderlies, something about the lab where all the animals were kept. Eavesdropping on adult conversations was something that Beth seemed to do automatically, and when she told me what she’d heard, something about the word “animals” piqued my interest.
“They keep animals here? I thought this was a hospital just for people.”
“I guess there’s like a whole floor of them over in one of the other buildings,” Beth said. “They try out new drugs and operations on them, to help humans.”
“How do you get there?”
“I heard the nurses saying that you have to go outside, across the street. But guess what?” She smiled at me, one of those delicious “I’ve-Got-A-Secret” smiles that become less enchanting the older you get, then lowered her voice to a whisper: “There are tunnels! Can you believe it? Like those secret underground places in all the James Bond movies. Pretty groovy, huh?”
Having been cooped up in this room and bed for most of the last ten days, I was all for it. “How do we get there?”
“I’m not sure, but I’m working on it. Stay cool.”
Beth worked on it, all right. One of the orderlies on our ward was the older brother of a girl Beth knew from school, and was easily talked into taking us there. (I remember that he and Beth had gone into one of the little rooms down the hall to talk about it and were in there an awfully long time.)
