From the Corner of His Eye

The same faces: hard-eyed, suspicious.
        If Vanadium appeared among these men, Junior would not only puke out the contents of his stomach, but also would disgorge his internal organs, every last one of them, and spew up his bones, too, until he emptied out everything within his skin.
        "I thought there was a burglar," Junior groaned, but he knew better than to spit out his entire story at once, for then he would appear to be reciting a script.
        Soon paramedics followed the police, who spread out through the apartment, and Junior relinquished his grip on the dishtowel.
        In a minute or two, one of the cops returned, crouching close as the medics worked. "There's no intruder."
        "I thought there was."
        "No sign of forced entry."
        Junior pressed the word through a grimace of pain: "Accident."
        The cop had picked up the.22 pistol, using a pencil through the trigger guard, to prevent the destruction of fingerprints.
        "Mine," Junior said, nodding at the gun.
        Raised eyebrows punctuated the question: "You shot yourself.
        Junior strove to appear properly mortified. "Thought I heard something. Searched the apartment."
        "You shot yourself in the foot?"
        "Yeah," Junior said, and refrained from adding you moron.
        "How'd it happen?"
        "Nervous," he said, and howled when one of the paramedics proved to be a sadist masquerading as an angel of mercy.
        Two more uniformed officers had entered the kitchen, fresh from their search of the apartment. They were amused.
        Junior wanted to shoot all of them, but he said, "Take it. Keep it. Get it the hell out of here."
        "Your gun?" asked the crouching officer.
        "I never want to see it again. I hate guns. Jesus, this hurts."
        Then by ambulance to the hospital, whisked into surgery, and for a while, blessed unconsciousness.
        Paramedics preserved his raggedly severed toe in an one-quart plastic Rubbermaid container from his own pantry. Junior would never again use it to store leftover soup.
        Although first-rate, the surgical team wasn't able to reattach the badly torn extremity. Tissue damage was too extensive to permit delicate bone, nerve, and blood-vessel repair.
        The stump was capped at the end of the internal cuneiform, depriving Junior of everything from the metatarsal to the tip of the toe. He was delighted with this result, because successful reattachment would have been a calamity.
        By Friday morning, September 10, little more than forty-eight hours after the shooting, he felt good and was in fine spirits.
        He happily signed a police form, relinquishing ownership of the pistol that he'd purchased in late June. The city operated a program to melt confiscated and donated weapons and to remake them into plowshares or xylophones, or into the metal fittings of hookah pipes.
        By Thursday, September 23, due to Junior's accident and surgery, the draft board-which had reinstated his I -A status after he'd lost the exemption that had come with his former job as a rehabilitation therapist-agreed to schedule a new physical examination in December.
        Considering the protection that it would afford him in a world full of warmongers, Junior considered the loss of the toe, while tragic, to be a necessary disfigurement. To his doctors and nurses, he made jokes about dismemberment, and in general he put on a brave face, for which he knew he was much admired.
        Anyway, traumatic as it had been, the shooting was not the worst thing that happened to him that year.
        Recuperating, he had plenty of time to practice meditation. He became so proficient at focusing on the imaginary bowling pin that he could make himself oblivious of all else. A stridently ringing phone wouldn't penetrate his trance. Even Bob Chicane, Junior's instructor, who knew all the tricks, could not make his voice heard when Junior was at one with the pin.
        There was plenty of time, as well, for the Bartholomew search.
        Back in January, when he received the disappointing report from Nolly Wulfstan, Junior was not convinced that the private detective had exercised due diligence in his investigation. He suspected that Wulfstan's ugliness was matched by his laziness.
        Using a false name, claiming that he was an adoptee, Junior made inquiries with several child-placement organizations, as well as