Free The Tank Man's Son by Mark Bouman

pouring out the dregs from a thermos. The sight of my own blood poured out in the sand made my stomach clench, and I gritted my teeth against the bile I could taste in the back of my throat. Dad reached back into the car, set my shoe on the floor, and unrolled my sock. Then he disappeared. I could see Jerry, who had been standing just behind Dad outside the car. He was still calmly cradling his right arm, and the blood that had leaked out over his fingers was drying and darkening. Dad returned with an old towel and told Jerry to get in the front. Then Dad leaned over me again and, as if he were tying my shoelace, knotted the towel around my ankle. The door slammed, Dad hopped into the front seat, and then the engine roared to life and we were bouncing down the driveway.
    I expected Dad’s furious lecture to begin at any moment, but the fifteen-minute drive passed in complete silence. My ankle felt like an ocean was raging inside it, with waves of pain crashing loudly enough that I could feel them in my ears. I watched upside-down trees whip past the window   — flick flick flick   —and I tried to see how many I could count between blinks.
    Dad screeched to a stop in front of Doc Kramer’s clinic. He yanked open the car door and lifted me out, carrying me down the outside stairs to the basement entrance. Jerry opened it and stood back, and Dad marched in. Doc Kramer didn’t have a receptionist, but from Dad’s arms I could see four other patients waiting in the room. There was an old woman with gray hair and large glasses, and beside her were two middle-aged women, frozen in midconversation. An elderly man nearly fumbled the magazine he’d been reading. I saw them at a crazy angle, my head resting in the crook of Dad’s arm. I wondered why they had all come. Arthritis? A sore throat? I wondered if any of them had ever been shot.
    Then I was inside the examination room. Doc Kramer looked as tall and tired as he always did. The sight of two young boys with bleeding wounds didn’t faze him   —or at least not when they were the Bouman boys.
    “Put him on that table,” he said to my father. Then he stepped out of the room for a minute, and from where I lay on the table I could hear him apologizing to his other patients. Jerry sat nearby on another table. When Doc Kramer came back, he ignored Jerry and me, walking to stand nose to nose with my father. “What happened?” he asked, peering over his wire-rim glasses.
    “Well, the boys were tending targets . . .” His speech was hesitant, sheepish. I’d never heard him speak that way. Doc didn’t blink, and Dad was forced to continue. “And they . . . got a little too close.” Dad closed his mouth and floated to the edge of the room, where he stood alone with his arms crossed.
    Doc Kramer didn’t say anything at the close of Dad’s explanation   —just shook his head as if Dad had invented a whole new type of stupid. “Get me a sewing kit, please,” Doc Kramer said quietly to his nurse, and the two of them moved over to my brother. The nurse laid out the kit on a tray, and Doc went to work on Jerry’s arm. When he lifted the flapped skin to see what had caused the damage, he found several pieces of metal, silver atop the pink of Jerry’s bicep muscle.
    “Well, look at that,” he said, and with a large pair of tweezers heremoved the shards, dropping them one by one onto a metal tray. Plunk. Plunk. Plunk. Jerry barely blinked.
    “And I told the boys to stay behind the berm, but . . .” Dad’s voice trailed off as quickly as it had started.
    Doc Kramer pulled the largest piece from Jerry’s arm. It was twisted, and red blood coated it. He looked at my brother. “I want to make sure I get all the pieces,” he said, and Jerry nodded. As Doc probed the wound, Jerry observed stoically, as if he were watching Mom clean a spot of dirt from his sleeve.
    “I’m done with you,” Doc Kramer said as he finished stitching. “Now let’s take a look at