Stronger (26 page)

His backup, Sergeant John MacLellan, felt something sizzle past his ear as soon as he turned onto Laurel. He was still trying to figure out what was happening when a second bullet hit the headrest an inch from his other ear. He threw open the door to give himself room and ducked behind it for cover.

The two patrol cars, going in opposite directions, had wound up side by side. The officers were pinned down, only a few feet apart, with only their pistols. Tamerlan was closing, and the brothers were firing so many rounds into the cruisers that they couldn’t even lift their heads to assess the situation. So Sergeant MacLellan reached in, put his cruiser in drive, and let it roll down the street toward Tamerlan. Both brothers turned to fire at it. Then Tamerlan ran for cover, and his brother threw a pipe bomb, blowing out the car windows. By the time the cruiser bumped lightly into a car parked in a driveway five houses down, Officer Reynolds and Sergeant MacLellan had taken cover behind a tree.

I have never visited the bomb site on Boylston Street, where my legs were turned to applesauce. I’ve planned to three times, but I’ve always found an excuse to back out. One day I’ll go there, before next year’s marathon, for sure, just not quite yet.

But I visited the site of the shootout. I’ve seen that tree. It’s six inches around at most and pocked with bullet holes. The officers must have crapped their pants when they returned the next day and saw how small it was.

“I thought it was a sequoia,” Sergeant MacLellan said. “I thought it was big as a house.”

Four guns were blazing when Sergeant Jeff Pugliese arrived on the scene. He had been leaving the police station in his family minivan when he heard the call. He saw the Tsarnaevs hidden behind their cars, with the two officers pinned down, so he raced around the back of the nearest house to get behind them. He had to climb two fences in the process. Sergeant Pugliese is a thirty-three-year veteran, so he’s no youngster, “but I vaulted those fences,” he said.

The Tsarnaevs were firing rounds at a ferocious clip. They threw two more pipe bombs. The first blew out car windows and shook Sergeant MacLellan so hard that his eyeballs bounced around in their sockets. The second was a dud. As Tamerlan covered him, Dzhokhar ran out and placed a pressure-cooker bomb, like the one that destroyed my legs, in the middle of the street. That was when the people in the surrounding houses stopped taking pictures, because everybody scattered when they saw that fat bomb. Officer Reynolds managed to get behind the nearest house, but Sergeant MacLellan, still trying to recover from the concussion of the pipe bomb, was trapped in the kill zone behind the tree.

Something happened. Probably the top slid off the pressure cooker before detonation, but nobody is sure. The bomb exploded, but instead of blasting out, the shrapnel blew straight up. As it rained down, Sergeant Pugliese took up position twenty feet from the brothers and started skip-firing bullets—he was actually bouncing them off the ground so they would go under their car.

Tamerlan was hit in the leg. He went down. For a moment, it was quiet. Then, without warning, Tamerlan charged from behind the car straight at Sergeant Pugliese, firing as he came. It was like that scene in
Pulp Fiction
, when the kid charges Vincent and Jules in the apartment. Tamerlan was ten feet away; he put bullet holes in the wall right where Sergeant Pugliese was crouching, but the sergeant wasn’t hit.

“Freeze,” Sergeant MacLellan yelled, charging at Tamerlan with his gun drawn. He was out of bullets, but Tamerlan didn’t know that, so Sergeant MacLellan jerked his arm like he was firing. Tamerlan turned, then realized he too was out of bullets, right before Sergeant Pugliese hit him full force from behind and knocked him to the ground. Both officers jumped on top of him. Tamerlan had been shot multiple times by Sergeant Pugliese, but real police bullets don’t have the stopping power of movie bullets. Tamerlan was badly wounded, but he fought like an animal.

Meanwhile, two other police cruisers had arrived, blocking the intersection of Dexter and Laurel. By then, Dzhokhar had jumped in the stolen car. The other end of Laurel was open, but instead of escaping, he flipped a U-turn and floored it back toward the two officers struggling with Tamerlan. His intention, apparently, was to run them down, but at the last minute the officers rolled out of the way, and he slammed into his brother instead. The car dragged the body half a block, before plowing into a police cruiser and escaping into Watertown.

And still, when they came with the cuffs, Tamerlan struggled. Despite his fatal wounds, it took three officers to hold him. It was only after he was finally cuffed that they realized Dicky Donohue, a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority officer who had just arrived on the scene, was down.

“You’ll find a hundred guys that say they were there,” one of the cops on the patio said. “But we know the truth. There were only eight. And except for Dicky and his partner, they were all Watertown.”

“Three Watertown cops took the older bastard down,” someone else piped in. “But it took twenty-five hundred to arrest his little brother.” As it turned out, Dzhokhar was only ten blocks away, hiding in a boat.

I remember shaking Sergeant MacLellan’s hand that day. He was one of the officers I had met at the Bruins game, and we had been texting for weeks, but I had no idea until that golf outing what he had done. Can you imagine a more unlikely handshake? The guy who was standing closest to a bomb, and the guy who hid behind a sapling in a gun fight.

Sergeant Pugliese was also there, looking nothing like a guy who could vault a fence. Only when the adrenaline was pumping, I guess.

Dicky Donohue was there with his wife and two young children. He had been in critical condition for a long time, and he was still walking with a cane. He didn’t remember anything about that night, but he knew who had saved him.

“These guys are heroes,” he said.

“We were doing our jobs,” John MacLellan said.

“It’s amazing more people weren’t hurt,” the chief said. Everyone nodded in agreement. Hundreds of bullets had been fired, bombs had been thrown, and only Tamerlan had died.

We were all quiet for a second, thinking about that. Despite what the movies suggest, shootouts like that never happen. “We had almost seventy-two years of experience on that street,” the chief said, “and nobody had fired their gun in the line of duty. Not even once.”

“It’s over now,” someone said, raising a beer. “To Jeff.”

“To Sean Collier.”

“To Dicky.”

“To the Watertown PD,” I said. “Thank you.”

37.

T
hat same weekend, I went to my nephew Cole’s birthday party in Aunt Jenn’s backyard. It was the middle of August, and it was hot. The Dog Days, they call them in the baseball season, a hundred degrees, one hundred twenty games down, and forty-two to go. The Yankees had collapsed, and the Sox were battling for the best record in the league. Koji Uehara was killing it in the bullpen, and Big Papi was ripping, but I couldn’t get excited about a possible World Series. Playoffs, sure, but no team goes from worst to first in a year, not even a team like this one built on grit, togetherness, and bat-shit crazy. They ground out small victories, day after day. They grew beards in some sick show of solidarity. And I don’t mean nice, trimmed beards. I mean face muffins.

I don’t like the Sox, a friend from New York texted me. But those Amish guys are pretty good.

Hard to believe that only a year ago, I’d introduced Erin to my family after Cole’s party. Now she was practically a member of the family, and no one could imagine a celebration without Carlos and Kevin. I watched them chatting with each other, two of the many people who had come through for me. I watched Cole, Big D, and Sully jumping in the bounce house. It seemed impossible: not just jumping, which was of course impossible for me, but being on the sidelines like that, doing my own thing and having fun, without anybody watching.

A few days before the party, Cole had set up a lemonade stand for me. “I’m going to give Uncle Jeff all the money,” he told Aunt Jenn. Aunt Jenn lived on a main road between the highway and downtown North Chelmsford. It was two lanes, but there was a lot of traffic. Cole put up the banner that had been across the highway on the day I left Spaulding:

Welcome Home, Jeff. Bauman Strong.

I was sick of that banner, but Cole was so happy to be helping his uncle, just like everyone else. He raised $120 selling lemonade. A few of the neighbors gave him $20 and told him to keep the change.

He gave me the money at the party: $60. He had decided, since he did all the work, and it was his ninth birthday and all, that splitting the money was fair.

“Thank you, Forehead,” I said.

I could tell how much stronger I was because it was so easy to wrestle him, even from my wheelchair. Cole is so hyperactive, he can get past most defenses. But now when I held him at arm’s length, he couldn’t get close.

“Go get yourself a Snickers, Forehead,” Uncle Bob joked. “We’re talking here.” Did I mention that Cole has a peanut allergy? Uncle Bob was shameless.

Cole wandered off, although not for a Snickers. Uncle Bob and I stuck to our hot dogs and beer. Around my family, it was mostly like the old days. They were used to me, and they treated me like they always had. But even at Cole’s party, there were people who hadn’t met me before. Who cried when they saw me and wanted to shake my hand.

I thought about the Watertown party. One of the detectives had come up to me later in the evening. “I texted my wife you were here,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes. “She wanted me to tell you she loves you. That she thinks about you every day.”

Are you kidding me? Look over there, that’s Sergeant John MacLellan. That guy refused to move from behind a tree so he could get a better shot at the bombers. He charged a guy with a gun without knowing the guy was out of bullets. After the shootout, they found bits of shrapnel in his bulletproof vest.

John MacLellan is a hero. John MacLellan deserves to be on a postage stamp.

Me? I can’t even climb a set of stairs.

I looked at Aunt Jenn’s aboveground pool, with its five steps. I had been working for four months, killing myself with leg lifts and walking practice. I had been working on stairs for two solid weeks, and still those steps were insurmountable. I couldn’t have gone into the pool unless I’d been willing to use my arms to crawl, and I wasn’t in the mood to sit on the ground and haul myself up like a gimp.

Besides, I’d gone to Mrs. Corcoran’s sister’s house the week before. It was the first time we’d seen each other since Spaulding. Mrs. Corcoran was adjusting to her new legs. Sydney had gone to her senior prom, where she was voted Prom Queen. It was a beautiful day. Erin and I were in her sister’s pool, having a great time, laughing and wrestling, when suddenly I went under. Somehow, I got pushed toward the bottom. I couldn’t get up. My arms were pinned, and I had no way to kick to the surface.

In a second, I went from happy to helpless. From hope to just… pathetic.

Even worse, the dunk screwed up my hearing. My ears had been improving all summer, but the water pressure screwed up something inside. A week later, in Aunt Jenn’s backyard, the party sounded like a wall of sound.

I took a sip of my beer.

I eyed the stairs to the aboveground pool.

I thought about the back kick, the first step in climbing stairs. Michelle had introduced a new piece of equipment: a piece of paper. She slid it under the foot I was trying to kick back. It was supposed to eliminate friction. I focused on putting my weight on the paper, then kicking it backward. If I could make the paper fly, Michelle said, I would have the correct motion.

How hard was it to make a piece of typing paper fly?

Two weeks, and the paper never flew.

38.

J
ules from United Prosthetics met me at Spaulding. She had checked my legs many times before, so I knew her well. “How was your wedding?” I asked.

“Oh, you know,” she said. “Perfect.”

She went to help another patient. By the time she came back, I was in the middle of my session with Michelle. I had walked back and forth using the parallel bars four times, turning around at the end each time.

“I’m tired,” I told Jules. “More tired than I used to be.”

“It’s the loose fit,” she said. “Even a little slippage makes it harder to do the same work. You’re probably using four or five times more effort than before. Do you have any pain?”

“Lots.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere,” I said. “It moves around.”

“Have you tried an extra sock?”

Michelle had already suggested the extra sock. “It pinches my hip.”

“We can cut it down,” Jules said. She explained again that my leg was changing shape. Some areas were bigger than when the socket was created. Others were smaller. Because of the trauma, and the long process of healing, my thighs would probably keep changing shape for the next year. “We can cut the sock to fill in the smaller parts. We can also stuff pieces down in the bottom of the socket, to fill in the gaps at the end of your leg. That’s where you’re really losing energy.”

Erin handed Jules a couple extra socks, and she cut them into shape. I was pissed. These were $100,000 legs, and the best way to correct the fit was to cut some socks and jam cloth into the end of them?