Gil stares down, trying to figure out what just happened. His near vision isn’t so good, and he doesn’t have his glasses on, so he tries to pull his head away from his own upper chest to see what is there. A stick appears to be protruding from him. He follows the stick to the end and sees feathers.
“Shit,” he says. Is this an arrow in my chest?
Just then, the bushes in front of him explode and his neighbor, Ron, spills out. His face is flushed and he is panting hard. He has a bow in his hand.
Yes, Gil thinks, this IS an arrow in my chest. That’s weird.
He feels a little lightheaded.
“Ohmygod,” Ron says, as if it is all one word.
Gil is sitting in his lawn chair, where he had placed himself with a paperback and a glass of iced tea just a few minutes ago, enjoying a little solitude while Marjorie is out of town for a class reunion. What do I do now?
Ron drops to his knees in front of him.
“Don’t move,” Ron says, answering Gil’s silent question. Ron drops the bow and places his hands over his own chest, as if checking to see if he has arrow in him, too.
“Are you okay?” Ron asks, but quickly follows it up with, “Of course you’re not okay, so stupid. I am so, so sorry.”
Gil thinks a moment and takes stock. He is breathing, the lightheadedness has already passed, and he really doesn’t feels much except a little pressure where the arrow is stuck in.
“Actually,” he says, “I kind of feel okay.”
“Alright, that’s good, but maybe you’re in shock,” Ron says, releasing the pressure he has been placing on his own chest, “so I’m going to call an ambulance.”
Gil doesn’t think he needs one. He says this to Ron, who looks incredulous, but pauses before pressing the send button on his cell phone.
“Maybe we should just pull it out,” Gil says.
Ron shakes his head, hard.
“No, no,” he says. “Not a good idea. You are never supposed to pull it out. I’m pretty sure I learned that when Matt was in Boy Scouts. Or maybe it was from that crocodile hunter guy, I’m not sure, but I am sure we shouldn’t pull it out.”
“Okay,” Gil says, weirdly calmer than Ron is, “you can drive me.”
Ron has to recline the seat in his Mazda nearly all of the way for Gil to get in without the shaft of the arrow hitting the dashboard, but the five mile trip to the ER is otherwise uneventful. Ron pulls up in the ambulance bay.
“Why don’t you just park the car?” Gil asks. “I can walk.”
Ron ignores him, puts the car in park.
“Wait here,” he says, and darts out of the car, heading for the ambulance bay doors. He shuffles back and forth in front of them, searching for a door handle, or button, or something that will trigger them to open, but they stubbornly stay shut.
“Fuck!” Ron declares, not caring if he is heard.
Someone inside finally notices his wild gesturing and comes to open the door. Soon Gil is loaded out of the car into a wheelchair, against his insistence that he can walk, and wheeled through the doors, Ron trailing behind.
All eyes are instantly on him. Gil isn’t sure how many people are in the space - ten? twenty? Every single one of them is looking at him. This is it, he chuckles to himself, My fifteen minutes of fame. He smiles.
“Go get the doc,” the guy pushing the wheelchair says to no one in particular. No one moves until a slim, dark-haired young woman standing behind a counter nudges a guy a few feet away and says, “She’s in fifteen. Go.” The woman glances down at a computer screen, then says to Gil’s driver, “Put him in thirty-nine, it’s the only resuss room open.”
Gil doesn’t know what “resuss” means, but hopefully arrow removing is involved. A trail of people falls in behind him as he is wheeled around a corner, a procession forming from all sides. This is kind of fun, Gil thinks.
He gets settled into a bed. It’s the kind that the back lifts up on, so he is more sitting than lying on it. The guy who drove his wheelchair pulls up a seat next to the bed and starts rubbing and patting on Gil’s arm, explaining that he is going to start an IV. A doctor comes in, and Gil tells the story while Ron sits remorsefully on a chair in the corner, nodding his head in agreement, even when Gil fibs a little and tells them that Ron was shooting the arrows for “target practice” rather than goose slaughter.
The doctor listens to his heart and lungs, peers closely at where the arrow meets his chest, but doesn’t touch it. A robot on wheels is brought in, its arm carefully positioned above Gil so as to avoid bumping into the arrow. A freezing cold board is placed behind him and the robot makes a “whhhhhr-clink” noise that signals the x-ray has been taken, but the doctor says the x-ray isn’t good enough, so she orders a cat scan.
Probably eight or nine people are in the room, now, floating in and out, but only two or three actually look like they have something to do. A couple of them have their phones in their hands, and he thinks of his grand-niece, Jess, and how she seems to have grown some kind of sucker appendage on her hand that keeps the damn thing permanently attached. He bets she could open her palm and shake her hand with all her might and that phone wouldn’t move.
“What’s your name?” he asks a young man to his right, wearing the same gray scrubs as the one who jabbed the needle in his arm (which, by the way, hurt more than that arrow, thank you very much).
The young man seems startled, but smiles a sheepish smile and answers, “Dillon.”
“You can take my picture if you’d like, Dillon,” Gil says.
Dillon glances quickly around the room, looking for feedback.
“Seriously,” Gil says, “I don’t mind. Put it on your social media stuff if you want.”
“I don’t think we’re supposed to do that,” the guy who stuck the needle in his arm says.
“Even if I tell you it’s okay? Everyone in here heard me say it. Go ahead and take a picture. Besides, I really want to see it.”
“Oh,” Dillon says, “I think it’s fine for me to take a picture if it’s to show you…”
Dillon raises his phone and quickly snaps a photo, and so do three or four other people in the room.
They should have anticipated the wrath that would come down on them from the administrative suite the next day with the subsequent sequestering of phones and forced photo deletions. But at least no one posted it on social media, in spite of Gil’s okay. And Gil enjoyed looking at the photos of himself from various angles, imagining himself the hapless victim of a random Cherokee attack on his small and humble village.
The doctor comes back in, shooing away his throng of admirers, but they don’t go far and gravitate back toward the door as soon as the doctor starts talking, her attention on Gil.
“So,” she starts, “as amazing as this is, it appears that this arrow has missed all of the important stuff. It missed your lung, and it missed the big blood vessels and it missed your nerves. All of those things are bundled up, right by where this arrow sits, but it didn’t hit any of them.”
“Okay,” Gil says, “so what are we going to do?”
“We, I mean I, am going to pull it out.”
Ron sits up straight, wanting to mention the Boy Scouts and the crocodile hunter, but thinks better of it, and decides to trust the doctor, who, having pulled on a pair of royal blue gloves, reaches out for the arrow.
“So we’re doing this now?” asks Gil.
She nods, placing a dry gauze at the base of the arrow with one hand and her other hand on the shaft.
He nods, too, and she pulls. It doesn’t take much effort, it just comes out. He, Ron and the collective of observers at the door to his room all hold their breath, and Gil is pretty sure that the doctor is holding her breath, too. But nothing happens. There is only a tiny trickle of blood and a barely visible gap in his skin where the projectile once stood tall. There is a respectful moment of silence, which Gil breaks.
“Can I keep that?” he asks, and she places the arrow in his hand.
“Tomorrow,” he says, turning to Ron, punching the hand with the arrow toward him, “I’m going to show you how to kill a goose.”
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