"I Know What a Bullet Can Do"

I know what a bullet can do. Oh, everybody thinks they know, everyone’s seen crime photographs of wounds open like vaginas, movies with geysers of arterial blood splattering walls, computer-generated images of bullets piercing flesh on CSI. But there are other quietly brutal ways a bullet can do damage. Bullets also have the power to heal. You don’t have to believe me. But I have a feeling you will.

My husband wore a bullet on a long silver chain around his neck. Amid his pale blonde chest hair and skin red from the sun and Miller Genuine Draft, that bright silver necklace perpetually hung around his neck. Patrick. When Patrick held me down, his bullet would grind into the bone at the base of my throat. I still have a dark place there. I say it’s a birthmark, but it’s really just a bruise too stubborn to heal. “Am I your sweet meat?” he used to ask me while he fucked me. “Say it. Say, Patrick, you’re my sweet meat.”

Here’s what I learned from marriage: I am not brave and I am not strong. But I am patient and resolute and I can outlast anyone. It’s a trait to be envied.

A man came in the store last night. He didn’t even put up the façade of shopping. He just marched determinedly up to the counter, shoved his hand in his pocket and said, “This bullet? It’s for you.” I gave him all the money from my drawer, stuffed it in the paper sack like he demanded; he slapped the counter and left. “He slapped down his bullet like he was paying me for a service rendered,” I told the police officer.

This bullet was brass, not silver. It was smaller than Patrick’s and without the luster and the life. It was oily looking like some people’s pocket change or voices can be. When the bell on the door quieted after the man’s hasty exit, I picked the bullet up and squeezed it into the palm of my hand until the pain of that tender flesh made my peripheral vision fade away.

The robbery was all over the morning news. The Channel 6 News was thrilled with the story. They showed a picture of my store while the newscaster announced that the man who held it up hadn’t used a gun. In fact, he didn’t even say gun. The unctuous newscaster made a big point of this; she almost broke into a smile when she told how he’d disappeared before the police could find him. “A successful crime” she stated, making him sound heroic.

I resented the way the interview with me was portrayed. I resented becoming a sound bite, a punch line, a guilty pleasure. I resented the real story not getting airtime. Why was no one interested in how I survived sixteen years of marriage?

“How did you feel when you realized what happened?”

“Frightened. Angry. In shock. Honestly, I was just glad he left without hurting me. Mostly I just felt grateful.”

“Er, you felt grateful?” Like I had said the wrong answer. Like grateful isn’t enough to satisfy a television audience. Like grateful wouldn’t appease the masses of drama-hungry wolves watching. Like any one them wouldn’t have felt the same damned way.

“I think you underestimate gratitude,” I replied. “It’s a much more intense feeling than you think. In fact, I’d put gratitude up there with the big ones. It’s strong like love. Or fear. Or grief.”

I know this to be true. Or maybe how it works is this: gratitude makes you able to appreciate the big feelings you wouldn’t be able to otherwise when you are too busy surviving to feel.

“Where’s the bullet now?”

“Well, the police took it. I’ve asked to have it back when they’re through with it as evidence.”

“Why? What’ll you do with it?”

Put it on a chain to wear around my neck, I’m thinking. “Oh, I don’t know. Put it in my jewelry box, I suppose, where I can look at it from time to time.” So I can remember.

I think to myself, I know what will happen. One day my robber will die. Maybe some gung-ho Korean store clerk will shoot him when he reaches into his pocket. Maybe he’ll overdose in some condemned crack house with a needle his arm and no food in his belly. Or maybe he’ll drop dead of a brain aneurysm while sodomizing his weeping wife, his dead weight pressing down on her, his bullet necklace poking her in her back, cold and hard. “Only thirty-six years old too,” people will say. “Such a shame, such a waste.”

“Yes,” I will say. “It is a shame.” After all, I can afford to be tender. I survived.