The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [17]
WITH RESPECT TO ACCIDENTAL BLOODSHED, it is my modest boast that I became the neighborhood’s most memorable contributor one tranquil September afternoon in my tenth year while playing football in Leo Collingwood’s backyard. As always, the game involved about a hundred and fifty kids, so normally when you were tackled you fell into a soft, marshmallowy mass of bodies. If you were really lucky you landed on Mary O’Leary and got to rest on her for a moment while waiting for the others to get off. She smelled of vanilla—vanilla and fresh grass—and was soft and clean and painfully pretty. It was a lovely moment. But on this occasion I fell outside the pack and hit my head on a stone retaining wall. I remember feeling a sharp pain at the top of my head toward the back.
When I stood up, I saw that everyone was staring at me with a single rapt expression and inclined to give me some space. Lonny Brankovich looked over and instantly melted in a faint. In a candid tone his brother said: “You’re gonna die.” Naturally I couldn’t see what absorbed them, but I gather from later descriptions that it looked as if I had a lawn sprinkler plugged into the top of my head, spraying blood in all directions in a rather festive manner. I reached up and found a mass of wetness. To the touch, it felt more like the kind of outflow you get when a truck crashes into a fire hydrant or oil is struck in Oklahoma. This felt like a job for Red Adair.
“I think I’d better go get this seen to,” I said soberly, and with a fifty-foot stride left the yard. I bounded home in three steps and stepped into the kitchen, fountaining lavishly, where I found my father standing by the window with a cup of coffee dreamily admiring Mrs. Bukowski, the young housewife from next door. Mrs. Bukowski had the first bikini in Iowa and wore it while hanging out her wash.
My father looked at my spouting head, allowed himself a moment’s mindless adjustment, then leaped instantly and adroitly into panic and disorder, moving in as many as six directions at once, and calling in a strained voice to my mother to come at once and bring lots and lots of towels—“old ones!”—because Billy was bleeding to death in the kitchen.
Everything after that went by in a blur. I remember being seated with my head pressed to the kitchen table by my father as he endeavored to stanch the flow of blood and at the same time get through on the phone to Dr. Alzheimer, the family physician, for guidance. Meanwhile, my mother, ever imperturbable, searched methodically for old rags and pieces of cloth that could be safely sacrificed (or were red already) and dealt with the parade of children who were turning up at the back door with bone chips and bits of gray tissue that they had carefully lifted from the rock and thought might be part of my brain.
I couldn’t see much, of course, with my head pressed to the table, but I did catch reflected glimpses in the toaster and my father seemed to be into my cranial cavity up to his elbows. At the same time he was speaking to Dr. Alzheimer in words that failed to soothe. “Jesus Christ, Doc,” he was saying. “You wouldn’t believe the amount of blood. We’re swimming in it.”
On the other end I could hear Dr. Alzheimer’s dementedly laid-back voice. “Well, I could come over, I suppose,” he was saying. “It’s just that I’m watching an awfully good golf tournament. Ben Hogan is having a most marvelous round. Isn’t it wonderful to see him doing well at his time of life? Now then, have you managed to stop the bleeding?”
“Well, I’m sure trying.”
“Good, good. That’s excellent—that’s excellent. Because he’s probably lost quite a lot of blood already. Tell me, is the little fellow still breathing?”
“I think so,” my father replied.
I nodded helpfully.
“Yes, he’s still breathing, Doc.”
“That’s good, that’s very