Then, with one last intake of breath, Martha pulled it out. “Got it!” I craned my head around and saw her grinning. “There! Got the little fucker.”
Her fingers in their thin gloves were covered in my blood. Her face was exultant. I smiled, weakly, and struggled up in the bed. She dropped the bullet into my outstretched palm, and it was small and ugly, smeared with blood and tissue, its black copper head flattened by force. When Martha laid it in my hand it was warm, like a grub or the end of a tongue. I put it on the night table, under the shade of the lamp, and lay back down so she could sew me up.
Somehow this hurt less—the stitching. Maybe I was already feeling better from the bullet being gone. Maybe I was getting used to it, another person’s hands inside my body. Maybe being put back together just hurt less than coming apart.
“You’re like a different person,” I told Martha as she finished up, pulled the black thread through me one last time. “Doing this.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just mean—steady.”
“What do you mean, steady?”
My answer was interrupted by a gunshot, outside, somewhere close. Loud and unmistakable. I yanked the bedside light out of the wall, rolled over onto Martha in the darkness and covered her on the ground, lay there panting on top of her, my shoulder throbbing and burning. There was a second shot, then a third.
“What do you think—”
“Stay here,” I said and crawled to the door. I crept, hunched over, down the hallway to the front office, my gun tucked into the waistband of my pants, blood oozing from my wound. I went down that narrow hotel hallway in the middle of the night with the sure dark feeling that something new and terrible had happened. Something bad was happening.
“Well, hey there, boy,” said the cracker at the desk. “You coming to join the party?”
Another gunshot outside, then loud cheering: shouts, applause. A celebration. They weren’t shooting in anger, they were shooting in the air. I glanced at the man’s TV screen, where CNN had put up a still photograph of Donatella Batlisch, a file photo, a head shot, frozen.
“Was she—” I don’t know why I asked. I already knew. “Did she get confirmed?”
“No, and she won’t be. She got taken care of is what she got.” He mimed the shape of a gun, mimed the squeezing of the trigger. “One shot. Back of the neck. Some boy did his mama proud tonight, that’s for damn sure.”
I didn’t have to tell it to Martha. When I got back to the room the lights were still off, but the TV was on, and she was sitting on the edge of the bed, her face bathed in the glow of the bad news.
I closed the door behind me, and she stood up quietly and turned it off.
I stood at the window with my right hand reached across to my left shoulder, my hand tight on the wound. I wasn’t feeling sorrow, not exactly. Not surprise, certainly. I was feeling again like I wasn’t made for all this. That’s what I was thinking. Born into the wrong life, somehow. Wrong body. Blood seeped from my shoulder, drying in the thin cotton fabric of my undershirt. The celebration was growing outside, a crowd of happy Tennesseans clustered in the moonlight around the tailgate of a dull white pickup truck, handing out bottles of beer.
Beyond them, traffic had eased up on I-65, and cars were rushing south toward the Fence.
Martha’s face was set, grim and hard. “Have you ever been down there?” she said.
“Never,” I said. “Never in all my life.”
2.
We cleared the Border House with no problem.
There were six wide lanes of traffic, six guard stations, six mechanical arms rising and falling to let vehicles in one at a time. There was a lane for WHITE (ALABAMA CITIZEN) and a lane for WHITE (OTHER UNITED STATES CITIZEN), and a lane for COLORED IN CAR (ALABAMA PERMIT) and the lane we took: COLORED IN CAR (OTHER UNITED STATES PERMIT).