Code 61 - Donald Harstad [174]
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THE
HEARTLAND
EXPERIMENT
By
Donald Harstad
ONE
NOW
Slugs came ripping through the old boards of the barn, showering us with dust and debris. I got even lower than I had been before, pressing my face against the old, dusty limestone foundation. I could see George hunkering down against the thick support beam he'd found, and I heard Hester, who was off to my right in the gloom, say “Shit.” At first, I thought it was just a comment, but then she kept talking.
“Shit, oh shit, shit, shit … ”
I turned, and saw that she'd rolled away from her vantage point near the rotted boards, and was half sitting with her back against the foundation wall.
“What? You okay?”
“My face,” she said. She held the right side of her face with one hand, while she struggled to re-holster her sidearm with the other, and I saw blood oozing between her fingers. “Shit, shit … ”
George and I both got over to her as fast as we could crawl. “Let me see … ”
She reluctantly moved her hand from the right side of her face, and I saw some blood and torn flesh. Not too much. It was hard to see in the shadows. I unsnapped my windbreaker, and daubed her face as gently as I could with the fleecy lining. It was all I had.
“Ahhh!” and she pushed my hand away.
“Sorry, sorry, just a sec, just let me look … ” I said.
“Don't press … ”
“Yeah. Yeah,” I said, as I fumbled in my shirt pocket for my reading glasses, and then looked more closely. Sticking out of her right cheek was a half-inch stub of an old, rusty square nail, flattened but about half as big around as a pencil, embedded back toward the corner of her jaw. “I see it … it's a nail. Part of one. There's a chunk of nail stuck in your cheek,” I said.
“Don't touch it!”
“No, no … ”
“I can feel it,” she said, after a second, “with my tongue.” As she spoke, a rivulet of blood dripped over her lower lip, and onto her sleeve. “It's gonna hurt,” she said, and shivered, violently. “It's inside my mouth. Oh, shit.”
“It doesn't seem to be bleeding very much,” I told her. “But spit, don't swallow it … ”
“I just had a first-aid class,” came Sally's voice from over behind the rusty milking stanchions. “Somebody get over here, and let me come take a look.”
George reached out and patted Hester on the arm. “It'll be all right,” he said. “Okay,” he told Sally. “Be right there. I'll get my stuff.”
Hester nodded, but said nothing as George crawled away.
“It's not a bullet,” I said. She was shivering pretty hard, and I wanted to reassure her. “It's just a piece of old nail, must have been hit by a slug. It's not life-threatening, okay? It's not a bullet. There's no damage other than a little hole.” It had occurred to me that she might be worried about disfigurement. And it really wasn't a very big hole.
She nodded. “It'll hurt,” she said, with a quaver in her voice. “Hit my teeth. Numb now … but it'll hurt … oh boy.” She didn't look at any of us, just stared at the floor, concentrating and breathing slowly and deeply.
If she was right about her teeth, it really was going to hurt like hell.
Sally came scuttling over on all fours. “Hi, Hester. Let me see what I can do here, okay? You're gonna be all right … ”
“Sure,” said Hester. Her words were less distinct. Swelling inside her mouth?
Sally briefly examined the wound. “We need some sort of compress,” she said. “Just to protect it, if we can. Some water to irrigate it, maybe? Later, later, we better let the doc remove it, okay?”
As soon as I heard “irrigate,” I reached into my pocket and pulled out one of my bottles of water and handed it to Sally. As far as I knew, all our first-aid equipment was kept in our cars, and they were effectively out of reach. I thought for a second. “My tee shirt? It's clean today … ”
“It'll have to do,” said Sally. She, too, reached out and patted Hester on the shoulder. “You're gonna have the world's biggest compress,” she said.
Hester made a muffled noise, and I think she wanted to sound like she was laughing.