The Darling by Russell Banks Page B

to confuse a bullet wound with any other kind of injury—it was usually the face of the victim that gave it away, scared, in pain, but mainly surprised. Zack had that look.
    I helped him to his feet and led him into the kitchen, where he let go of all restraint and like a child terrified by a nightmare—suddenly awake and safe in his own bed—began to sob. Carol and I carefully removed his torn, blood-soaked jean jacket and shirt, and I saw that the bullet had gone cleanly through his shoulder and seemed to have missed bone and arteries.
    “It’s not as bad as it looks, but you’ve lost some blood. You’re going to have to get to the hospital,” I told him.
    “No! I can’t! You fix it!” he cried, as if I were his mommy.
    “Why can’t you go to the hospital?” Carol asked him.
    “Jesus, you tell her,” he said to me.
    Bettina had come into the kitchen and stood by the door in her pajamas, looking scared and confused. “Carol, take care of Bettina,” I said. “I’ll take care of him.” Carol obeyed and scooted Bettina towards her bedroom. “Zack’s okay, honey!” I called to the child. “He just had an accident, that’s all!”
    I knew enough anatomy and emergency first aid to clean the wound quickly and staunch the bleeding, and when Zack had recovered himself sufficiently to ask for whiskey—a line he probably took from a Western movie—I knew he’d not lost as much blood as I’d feared.
    “You going to tell me what happened?” I asked and poured him a teacup of Jim Beam.
    Carol had returned to the kitchen, and Zack jerked his head in her direction. “I’ll have to tell you later, man.”
    “Carol, please, we need some privacy,” I said.
    “This is weird,” she said. She walked back into the living room, flipped on the TV, dropped herself onto the sofa, and sulked.
    “Oh, man, she drives me crazy sometimes. Now, Jesus, you . Fucking public enemy number one.”
    Carol flipped off the TV, got up, and stuck her head into the kitchen. “I’m goin’ to bed, Don. You comin’?”
    I was at the sink scrubbing the bloodstains out of Zack’s jean jacket and denim shirt, and shot her a dirty look. Then felt sorry for it. All she wanted from me was a little straightforward affection mixed with respect—no reason to treat her like a dumb dog. The bedroom door closed behind her, and Zack was already talking.
    He’d blown it, he explained, blown it big time, and we were going to have to leave the apartment, get out of New Bedford, out of the country, probably. We not only, as always, had the FBI sniffing after us, but now we were also being hunted down by these black guerillas from New York City, Zack’s very heavy dudes who, he had suddenly discovered, were not Maoist revolutionaries after all, but gangsters, bank robbers, drug dealers. “The real thing, man!”
    He’d tried to draw a line, he said, on dealing drugs, specifically heroin, and in Newark, on the way to make a buy, they’d had an argument, a misunderstanding, actually, based not on money, he assured me, but principles. Although they had thought it was about money, which is why the misunderstanding had gotten out of hand, so to speak, and they’d suddenly turned on him. He was lucky to have gotten out of there and back here alive, he said. And now these guys were more dangerous to us than the FBI was, because he knew stuff about them that no one else did, and they knew our names and where we lived, the city of New Bedford, at least, but not the actual street address, he assured me. So we had a little time, maybe a day or two, before they came knocking on the door.
    “What the hell do you mean us and we? What the hell did you tell them about me? ”
    “Nothing, man, just your name in passing, you know, on account of the Weather thing. I mean, you think you’re only a peon in the Movement, but you’re well known, man, a poster girl. You were sort of like my bona fides, you know what I’m sayin’?”
    “Who are these people