Fiction Friday

PART III

THE DOOR

 

  Bon didn’t stand staring long. After a brief moment, his heart now racing, he pounded up to the second floor where he had his workroom: drafting table, and computer. He whipped open a tall cabinet – an old cherry- wood wardrobe he had retro-fitted with drawers and shelves- and pulled out his camera with it’s little remote that he put in his right pocket, as well as  a four-foot (the longest he could find)  cardboard collapsible periscope that he had recently purchased at a toy store.
          Going into his bedroom, stuffing the camera temporarily under his arm, he grabbed his passport – he now kept it out on his nightstand (really just a couple of plastic milkcrates with a beat-up oriental rug draped over them) – and shoved it into his left front pocket. He thundered back down the stairs.
          The light was still there, very indistinct and muffled.
          Now he could hear voices, and an irregular, sharp popping or cracking sound. The popping sounded like small-arms fire, but he realized he’d only ever heard gun sounds in movies or on TV, so he didn’t really know how they sounded in real life. This was real life, right? Bon thought it was.
          Crap. He’d forgotten his tripod.  Putting the camera and the periscope on a chair, he ran back up to his workroom – the tripod, folded up, leaned in the corner by the wardrobe - grabbed it and ran back down.
          The light was still there.
          He put the camera on the tripod, turned it on and aimed it at the door, putting it into movie mode. He started recording. Bon had hung a rope from a beam, with a loop at the end for a hand-hold, near the door. This he now took with his right hand – with his left he picked up the periscope and tucked it under the arm holding the safety rope. He opened the door.
          Three Arabic-looking men in cheap western dress, wearing Muslim keffiyehs, the flaming ruins of a village behind them, black smoke (the air that came in smelled of burning rubber, Bon thought) pouring up into a dead gray sky, stood screaming at him in what sounded like a machine-gun blast of Arabic. Two of the men aimed actual machine guns at Bon; the third man’s machine gun hung around his neck on a Nikon camera strap. He grabbed Bon’s periscope, yelled, shook it in Bon’s face still yelling. Bon heard the crackle of small-arms fire in the distance; even in his pants-wetting fear he thought that, indeed, the movie sound-effects guys –folly artists, isn’t that what they were called? - had got the sound of distant gun fire spot on.
          Bon kicked the door shut with his foot. In the half second it took to close, the two holding their guns pulled the triggers; their guns chattered. Holes appeared in the door and splintered wood flew into the basement. Letting go of the rope, Bon jumped to the floor, to the side of the door, landing on his stomach. His face stung, hitting gravel and concrete. The door slammed, he supposed, hitting the Nikon strap guy in the face, because, just as it closed, Bon heard what must have been “Ow! Fuck! That hurts!” he supposed, in Arabic.
          For several moments, Bon lay completely still, thanking his lucky stars he hadn’t been shot. He felt fluid trickling on his right thigh, and realized he had wet himself; he had heard that people often did that – and often more- in life and death situations.
          His head was turned away from the door; finally after a good minute of confirmed silence, he opened his eyes, lifted his head and turned it. Fragments of door wood lay scattered about in front of him. The light under the door was gone. He locked up and saw that the red record button still flashed on his camera. “Good!” thought Bon. He rolled over onto his back. He sat up, damn near passed out, steadied himself with his hands.
          “Whoa!” said Bon. He stood, grabbed the rope to keep himself from falling. Little stars shot around in the air before him. “Shit!” he said.
          In faint dizziness, he dropped his head, saw a pool of blood where his thigh had been, saw it trickle into a small, nearby puddle (most of the basement was now dry), saw the blood swirl into a paisley pattern…”Quite pretty,” he thought, realizing he was getting delirious. He looked down at his thigh, saw blood pulsing in rhythm with his heart out of a rip on the inside of his thigh, just inches below his wedding tackle. Where had he heard hat, “wedding tackle”? A Mike Meyers movie? He wasn’t sure. His knees buckled, but he caught himself, yanking on the rope.
          Suddenly he jerked his head up, shook it; the stars cleared away. With energy now, and a suddenly clearer head, he undid his belt while prying off his shoes, dropped his pants and shimmied out of them. The bullet had grazed him, tearing a rip maybe four inches long and one quarter inch deep. He knew if it had hit his carotid artery, blood would be spraying, not pulsing. Maybe it had nicked the artery? “Shit!” He didn’t know anatomy that well, but he knew he didn’t want to go to the hospital; they had to report all gunshot wounds to the police, and after his recent “visit” to France…“Shit!” he said again.
          He pressed his right hand to his thigh, then looked around. There seemed to be a lot of blood, but it was probably less than six or seven ounces; significant, but not life threatening, not if he could stay awake. He realized he felt faint from shock as much as, if not probably more than from blood loss.
          Bon had a bottle of Percocet a dentist had given him six months previously when he had an impacted wisdom tooth extracted. Far from hurting, once the offending tooth had come out, he felt remarkably better. Though the dentist assured him it would hurt once the Novacaine wore off, it never had. Once the shock from his bullet wound had worn off, however, his thigh hurt like hell. Like nothing he could remember, and he had had his fair share of stiches as a kid; the most extensive of which had been a result of a most painful wound, gotten while sliding down the tin roof of an old barn, a corner of tin had been turned up… Bon had, previous to that injury, believed human butt-cheeks to be low in nerve endings. He now knew this to be false.
          Bon was very grateful for the Percocet. He had staunched the bleeding – he was glad he always kept a good supply of Bounty paper towels around; washed it and sutured it with some butterfly band-aids he still had from having stepped on a nail while cleaning out the basement when he had first moved into the house..
          He had already had two Percocet. His thigh looked pretty good, and he’d wrapped it in gauze, also left over from the nail incident. Having just chased three more Percocet with two shots of brandy,  he lay down on his bed. He felt pretty great. Those opiates…They sure erased the pain, they erased everything; no fear, no fear of dying, of overdose even…well, almost everything…as great as he felt, as he began to peacefully doze, he thought he’d rather be having coffee with pretty Gina …

To Be Continued