Anarchist to Abolitionist: A Bad Quaker's Journey
This Time It Wasn't My Fault.
Back in the double-wide on the farm, something was happening that I knew nothing about. Alvin was not serving his customers fairly. I don't remember the details and that may be because I never fully learned them, or maybe they didn't matter to me at the time. Either way, Alvin had upset several gentlemen who couldn't express their frustrations in English.
In the trailer that night, Alvin was in his bedroom, closest to the driveway, sleeping hard. We had two guests, a guy and a girl, sleeping in the living room, and I was in the back bedroom farthest from the driveway, asleep.
Sometime late in the night, a station wagon with five or six angry men pulled into our driveway and began shouting in Spanish. I woke up and went to the door to see what was going on. As I walked into the living room, I flipped on the lights, walked over to the door, and bent over slightly to look out the peep-hole. In doing so, I created a situation where light suddenly came through the peep-hole, grabbing the men's attention. Then, the peep-hole went dark, indicating someone was just inside the door.
From my view through the peep-hole, I saw a guy raise a rifle and shoot. The bullet hit the door about 8 inches below the peep-hole, striking me in the center of the sternum. Pain overwhelmed me and my legs went limp. I hit the floor in a pile, unable to catch my breath. The girl in the living room screamed and the angry guys outside opened fire on the trailer. The next day, we counted the holes in the trailer. Including the one in the door, there were thirty nine in total. I remember being amazed they didn't hit a single window.
Laying on the floor, I was desperate for air. I pushed my upper body up with my hands and exhaled as hard as I could. That got me breathing again. The old phrase, "knocked his wind out," is not usually what happens. I know this because of the many times that I fell out of trees, off of horses, or off of houses, and had the wind knock out of me as a kid. What actually happens most of the time is that you have plenty of air in your lungs, it's just that the shock of the impact throws off the part of your brain that tells your diaphragm what to do, and it responds by locking. You need to get the air out of your lungs to start breathing again.
The shooting stopped, and I was just lying there on the floor, holding up my upper body with my arms. I kept expecting to die, but it just didn't happen. Then I noticed how little blood was on the floor, really only a few drops, including one more that fell as I pondered the meaning of this. I came to a seated position and touched the wound. There was the bullet sticking out of my chest.
Later, I figured out what must have happened. From the size of the bullet, we estimated the rifle was a .22 caliber, and likely firing the "short" version of the bullet, which is a weak subsonic round. The thin aluminum on the outside of the door, along with the cardboard filling and thin paneling on the inside of the door, took enough of the energy away from the round that it only hit me with enough power to break my sternum. Of course, a broken sternum is excruciatingly painful and takes time to heal, but a little to one side or the other, and there's a good chance it could have penetrated a lung, which would have been real bad. A lung injury wound mean a hospital and gunshot wound, plus a hospital means cops.
Now the fun part began. No one there had the grit to pull a bullet out of a guy’s chest, so I had to stand in front of the mirror and grab it with pliers and pull it out myself. The door had splattered wooden splinters and a few little shards of aluminum into my chest in a pattern about four inches across. I had to stand there and pluck each one out with tweezers, swab the whole thing with iodine, and bandage it all up, working backwards in the mirror.
I took some kind of pain pills the girl had, I think it may have been codeine, and washed it down with a water glass full of whiskey, then went back to bed. The girl and the guy left, which I would expect given the events. I woke up the next day about noon, took a shower and re-bandaged myself. I noticed Alvin was still asleep and had left his door open, so I decided to walk down to the shop to see if news of the shooting had made it to any of the farm hands.
By this time, it was about 1pm Saturday. As I walked into the shop, the guys told me I needed to go see the boss in the office. They said he was pretty mad about something. I assumed he had heard about the shooting and had come in to work to fire us. So, I walked over there. Sure enough, he was mad, but not for the reason I had guessed. He told me he had informed Alvin that he wanted us both to work that morning, and to be at the shop by 7 a.m. at the latest. He told me how he came to the trailer about 8am and banged on the door and yelled. He even blew the horn of his truck and couldn't wake us. Evidently, he was so angry he didn't notice the hole in the door or the ones all over the trailer.
He finished the scolding me by telling me I was fired, and so was Alvin. I could have saved my job, if I would have just told him that Alvin never mentioned anything to me about working, or I would have been down to the shop on time. But I didn't. I was getting sick of everything that was going on in my life at the time. The only thing I wanted to do was run away with Cindy and start a new life somewhere else.
First post & table of contents
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