Collections - 3. Chapter 3 -- The Bullet Story

The Bullet Story

New Year's morning, just after 3:30, there was a sharp, loud "THWACK!" which woke Tom and me, and we knew in a moment it was neither an earthquake nor St. Nick. But the kids next door had been having a party, and there had been occasional screaming and the sounds of single, sporadic, fireworks, and, at a previous party when Lizzie's single dad, Jim, had been away, a kitchen window had been smashed. So I said to Tom, "Relax. It's looks like they've just broken another window, though ours this time. We'll get it fixed in the morning."

But Tom wanted to turn on the light, so I did, and it turned out the broken window wasn't on the party side of our house. It was just above the center of our headboard, and the possibly misthrown beer bottle that caused it had also pierced the valance of the horizontal blinds.

"Someone's been shooting at the house," I thought, and there have been vandal kids before, trashing streets of mailboxes from moving trucks using 2 x 4s. But I didn't want to panic Tom, so I said nothing. Still, he got up and, on the floor across from the window, found the bullet. So he called the police.

A half-hour later, two young officers arrived, one Hispanic and the other Asian. The rounder, Hispanic one talked, while the Asian, who looked a bit like Stan Laurel, was mostly silent. But he noticed the scratch on the mirrored closet doors opposite the broken window, and he indicated that's where the bullet had probably stopped before ricocheting to the floor.

"It's a .45," the Hispanic officer, Lamas, said. "I know because I carry ammunition just like it, and when I was on tanks, in the military, we were warned not to shoot these things wildly because they can travel two or three miles."

"It wasn't just a shot from the street then?" I asked, knowing that almost everyone on our block seemed armed.

"No, we had reports of shots being fired around Saticoy and Winnetka, and this might've been one of them. When you shoot in the air, and the bullets go off at even a slight angle, they take a long time to come down."

I thought the intersection of Saticoy and Winnetka was more than two or three miles. It's three miles straight north just to Saticoy, and Winnetka's three miles east from there. But I'm not Sherlock Holmes or Pythagoras, so again I said nothing, and after some easy paperwork, Officers Lamas and Mivagishima left, offering us a "Happy New Year."

Tom, of course, wanted to vacuum and to wash the sheets. There were shards of glass on his pillow, four feet below the three-inch hole, and he worried about other shards penetrating the water bed mattress. But I knew how slow and methodical he can be in cleaning mode, and I needed to tutor coherently this morning. At his suggestion, I went to my old bed in the guest room, asking him to wake me when he was going back to sleep.

Instead, I woke in the guest room around ten, noticing the still-unmade water bed as I passed in the hall. Tom was on the living room couch, watching the Rose Bowl parade. It seems he needed me to hold back the water bed mattress, so he could vacuum, so he'd simply slept on the couch.

I guess it's a good thing the dog wasn't around because she would have barked at the kids' party, barked at the fireworks, barked at the "THWACK!" and then barked at the officers. Though she would have been quiet and friendly after they entered the house.

"You guys are lucky you weren't up to stop the bullet," Officer Lamas had said. But after doing some research online this morning, I realized that once the bullet had gone through the window and the valance, it was pretty well spent. It wouldn't have done any more damage to either Tom or me than it had to the slightly scratched mirror. A pedestrian who'd been hit by a bullet straying a mile-or-so from a police rifle range was unhurt and claimed it felt a bit like "being hit by a bat," I'm assuming the baseball kind.

This morning, I showed the kids from the party the hole in our window. Some of them had heard the noise and had seen the police car, but others hadn't, and nine or ten of them tumbled out of the house to gawk, as if just awake.

"This is the kind of thing that happens in your neighborhood, Shawn, not ours," tall, blonde Lizzie told a boy who could have been Officer Lamas' twin.

Shawn just grinned, which might be the best reaction.

So that's our first adventure of the new year, and I'm hoping the rest of the year continues to be as surprising and as lucky.