Gun Church (10 page)

“What happened?”

“Funny thing about shooting, Kip. Before you took your first shot, you didn’t know how the Python would recoil. Once you knew, you anticipated. So even before you got the second shot off, you were pulling your arms back. The only thing you were in danger of hitting with that second round there was a red-tailed hawk in the wrong place at the wrong time. Don’t fret. You’ll get better.”

I hoped so, but for now I was perfectly happy to play with all the Colonel’s toys. I fired a Luger, a .38 Police Special, a .45 Browning, a .40 Glock, a Walther PPK, and a .25 Beretta. It didn’t matter what I shot. I got that same rush every time. The Colonel’s duffel bag was like a magician’s hat. Each time Jim reached in, he seemed to pull out a different automatic or revolver. Whatever I fired and regardless of how badly I missed what I was aiming for, Jim assured me that I would get better.

“Amateur hour’s over, Jim. Now let me see some real shooting,” I said, reaching into the bag and handing him the Browning.

He positively beamed, as I knew he would, at the chance to show off for me. Jim surveyed the landscape, picking out a target.

“See that dried pine cone wedged in there between the branch and the trunk,” he said, pointing the muzzle of the .45 at a tree about fifty feet away.

“I do, the one—”

Before I got the rest of the words out of my mouth, the round obliterated the pine cone. Shot after shot, no matter the weapon in his hand, Jim hit whatever he set his sights on. Then switching hands, he did much the same thing. He even took a few blind shots and hit most of his targets.

“I can make you better at this,” he said, “but I don’t think you’ll ever get as good as me.”

“This is fun, but why would I want to get as good as you?”

“Well, you don’t really have to get as good as me, I guess; but you do have to get better, much better.”

“Why?”

His expression went through several changes in the course of only a few seconds. At first, he seemed confused, then annoyed, and then he smiled as if finally understanding my question.

“The only reason we came up here was to get you better, so you can come back to the chapel.”

“The white blockhouse?”

“Yeah, the chapel. You do want to go back there, don’t you?”

He knew I did. A pusher always knows a junkie when he sees one.

“Absolutely.”

“Well, Kip, you want to go back to the chapel again … ” His voice dropped to a whisper as he picked up the little Beretta and snapped back its slide. “You have to shoot.”

Then, to underline the point, he swung the freshly loaded Beretta around and put several bullets—
pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop
—one on top of the next, into a nearby tree. That I was sitting against the tree and the shots might’ve parted my hair down the middle had they been a few inches lower was apparently beside the point.

“What the fuck!” I jumped to my feet, rushing on adrenalin. I poked my finger into the hole in the tree.

“
Reach out your hand and put it into my side
,” said Jim. “
Stop
—

“—
doubting and believe
,” I completed the sentence.

He looked pleased. “You remember?”

“From the other night and from the Bible,” I said. “That’s Jesus to Doubting Thomas. It’s been a long time since I recalled scripture.”

“Around here, Kip, it’s all about the Good Book. It’s the only hope people got.”

“I imagine the spear in Jesus’s side went in a lot deeper than these bullets,” I said, only the tip of my finger disappearing into the tree.

He shrugged his shoulders. “What do you expect? It’s a .25. No stopping power.”

“That wasn’t very funny, Jim, shooting above my head that way.”

“It wasn’t meant to be funny. I wanted to give you a taste of what it feels like to stand in the chapel. It’s not fooling around.”

“I figured that out the other night. I get it. You’re not fucking around.”

“So you want back in?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

Fuck yeah
! “I guess.”

“Then you have to shoot.”

“Shoot?”

“Shoot.”

I was still a bit dazed. As the effects of the adrenalin faded, I became conscious of the ringing in my ears and a profound weakness in my legs. I sat back down before gravity made the decision for me. I heard what the kid was saying, but couldn’t make sense of it. He must’ve seen the puzzlement in my eyes.

“Shoot,” he repeated, voice steady and calm, letting the clip slide out of the Beretta, racking the slide to make sure the little automatic was empty, tossing it into the duffel bag. “You have to face someone else down. That’s the rule. No exceptions, not even for you.”

“Renee?”

“Renee too. You know those little red crosses on our shirts?”

“I noticed them, yes,” I answered. “I was going to ask you about them.”

“Those crosses mark how many times we’ve shot and where we’ve been hit. If you look closely next time, you’ll see that the holes in the shirt have been sewn together.”

“But you let me in without—”

“You earned the right by what happened in class, but if you want back in—”

“—I have to shoot. I get it, Jim.”

“You understand, but you don’t get it. You won’t get it until you raise a gun up at someone raising a gun up at you. Until then, regardless of how good you get out here, it won’t matter.”

“Kind of like hitting golf balls into a net,” I heard myself say. “It’s not the real thing.”

He was beaming again. “Just like that, but different. There’s more than just the shooting. The shooting is a means to an end, not an end in itself.”

Guns, golf, and metaphysics: I figured we’d get back around to it eventually.

“But what about hunting?”

Jim’s face went blank. He stood up, walked to the bag, fished out the Police Special, and loaded it with a single round. Without a word to me about his intentions, Jim scanned the woods. He raised up and fired. A few seconds later, a squirrel tumbled out of a nearby tree.

“My daddy was a cruel man, Kip, but he hated hunting. After we went out shooting a few times, I killed a squirrel like I did just now. The Colonel beat me senseless right out here in these woods. The Colonel liked to say that a sport’s only a sport when both sides know they’re playing. I never forgot that. For something to matter, both sides have to know.” He looked back up into the trees. “Come on. It’s getting late.”

My body wasn’t as achy as it had been when we began. I had to confess that for the first time since coming to Brixton, I had a routine that required a level of engagement beyond sleepwalking. Having a routine of any kind made me feel less like a fraud. No mean feat, that, but Jim had bigger plans for his hero and his hero had had his fill of disappointing people. So for the last few weeks I was up at 5:00
A.M.
, writing. Jim would come by at 7:00
A.M.
and we’d go running. We hadn’t yet made it past a mile, but you wouldn’t have been able to tell by the burning soreness in my legs. My lungs … forget my lungs. That first week I would begin gasping for breath when I heard the crunch of Jim’s tires on the gravel driveway. Yet, there was something incredibly pleasing about the pain, about feeling anything beyond the drip, drip, dripping dull ache of regret for a life flushed down the shitter.

After classes, Jim would pick me up and we’d drive back to the spot above the falls to shoot. For now we worked with the little Beretta because he said it was the most easily tamed. Eventually, Jim felt confident enough in my shooting—or just crazy enough—to stand a few feet to the left or right of the target I was aiming at. I think I probably flinched more than he did. The flinching scared him more than the bullets.

What Jim couldn’t know was how hard I was rushing. I was flinching because I could not slow my heart. With the haze and sharp tang of the gun smoke filling the air, it was all I could do not to swoon. I was in four places at once: here, the lake house, my classroom, and the chapel. With each shot I took I was everywhere. It was like one continuous gestalt dream: I was the bloodied curtains, the broken glass, the ashes, the guns, and the bullets. I was my father, Frank, Jim, the fat kid. I was me, watching.

Each squeeze of the trigger was a burst of adrenalin, every shot had a life of its own. Although I could not control my pulse rate, the world seemed to slow down. The more I fired, the slower it got. I swore I could watch the ejected shells spinning, tumbling in space as if gravity were more a suggestion than a law of nature.

When I’d grabbed Frank Vuchovich’s gun, I had opened a portal to a different universe, one I thought I’d never get back to; but here I was at the event horizon, almost at the point of falling into the black hole. And I wanted into the darkness. I wanted to reclaim some dignity and I knew in my gut this was the way to do it. It had already fired me up so much that I had produced more work in a few weeks than I had produced in fifteen years, and better work than I had managed in twenty.

“Kip, relax. You keep clenching up like that, you’ll hit me. Those bullets are sissy loads, so don’t worry too much. There’s less powder in the cartridge, so there’s less of an explosion and less power at impact. If you hit me with one of them, you probably won’t kill me, but it’ll require more treatment than rubbing some dirt on it.”

I guess I relaxed a little after that because he didn’t say another word about it. When we took a break, he rolled up the left leg of his jeans. There was a pink splotch of scar tissue like a wad of chewed bubble gum a few inches up his shin from the top of his boot. His face was aglow with pride.

“If you
had
hit me, Kip, it wouldn’t be the first time. What you and me were just doing, you shooting and me standing over near the target, that’s how this started out,” he said. “There’s just something about standing across from someone holding a gun in your direction, even if it’s not pointed right at you. It’s … I don’t know how to put it in words. It’s like you’re scared, but alive, really alive for the first time. And once you feel that, there’s no going back. Do you know what I mean?”

Did I
. Anyone who’s experienced the first fifteen minutes of a good cocaine high knows that feeling. Problem is you spend the rest of the night doing more and more blow getting less and less high. You try to get back to that first rush, but you can’t. You can’t no matter how hard you try and believe me, I tried.

“This,” he said, rubbing the scar like a lucky rabbit’s foot, “was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“How do you figure?”

“Opened up my eyes.”

“To what?”

“To everything.”

“Everything?”

He laughed. “What I’m saying is that I was reborn.”

“Jim, no offense, but getting shot in the shin isn’t exactly a near-death experience.”

“Near enough,” he said, his face cold and serious. “Look, I know I’m just some dumb hick from a little mining town, but it doesn’t mean I don’t think about big things. Before I got shot, I was dead inside. Everybody’s dead inside in a place like this. It’s a world of the dead. You think we all don’t know that community college is a dead end? But what else is there for us growing up around here? We’re just wasting time until we get a job mining coal or logging or we enlist. There’s no great challenges waiting for us. None of us is growing stem cells in the cellar in our spare time. Our world is built on nothingness. There are no dreams anymore.

“Listen, Kip, people in these parts, they have that ignorant faith in God. In spite of everything they see around them in this fucked-up place where there’s nothing waiting for them at the end of the rainbow, they believe. Well, for me, for those of us who shoot, it’s a lot easier to believe in guns than God. Guns don’t make empty promises, and they answer our prayers. Out here, in this dead world, we’re nothing. Look at the bunch of us: a guy who works in a copy center, a cook, an ugly girl. Who are we? Where are we going? Nowhere. But when we’re inside the walls of the chapel, we matter and it’s the rest of the world that’s insignificant. Every gesture has meaning for us. We’re only really alive with guns in our hands. Like you wrote in
Flashing Pandora
, there’s no meaning of good without bad, no light without the dark. For us, there’s no life without the threat of dying.”

“A man should think about big things,” I said.

He had no doubt spent hours preparing this little speech and had waited for just the right moment to lay it on me. Although I found his philosophy half-baked, I couldn’t help but be flattered that he so much wanted my approval. I actually enjoyed our time together. Other than the card game I used to have with Jerry Nadir, my weeks hanging with Jim were the most sustained contact I’d shared with another man since my career fell apart. It’s not like my writer friends dumped me. It was me who distanced myself from them. I could not bear their successes in the face of my failures; so, like a wounded animal, I crawled off to let my career die far away from the pack.

Jim was an eager listener and when he wasn’t trying too hard to impress me, he seemed a pretty interesting kid. He was genuinely fascinated by my stories of New York and of my week-long coke-fueled benders. He loved hearing about the famous people I’d met.
Yes, Jim, Truman Capote did sound like that and I don’t know if he was nicer when he wasn’t drunk because he was always drunk
. The kid especially enjoyed the stories of the famous women I’d fucked. I explained to him that although I didn’t have the scars to show for it, I’d faced death down a few times myself.

“My scar tissue’s on the inside,” I said, sounding like bad movie dialogue.

While I wasn’t quite ready to get all teary-eyed over not having fathered a son of my own—Amy couldn’t have kids and given my self-absorption and my own role model, I was ill-suited to fatherhood—it did stir some unexpected feelings in me.

After shooting, Jim would drop me off at school. After class, I’d head back home for another few hours of writing. Then the St. Pauli Girl would come by. She’d cook for me, I’d help her with her school papers, then write a little more myself, and we’d end the night in my bed. Last night, we didn’t even fuck. I was worn out. We seemed to need a night of simply falling into sleep, our bodies twined together for warmth and comfort and nothing more. I woke up early and slipped into my office.