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.”
Eleven
Sissy Loads
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.
About an hour after that, Renee, wearing only what she was when she came into the world, showed up at my office door, a faded old accordion file tucked under her arm. “What’s this, Ken?”
“What?” Still tired, I barely glanced at her. I kept peering through the curtains in my office, watching for Jim’s truck. The St. Pauli Girl walked over to me, pressing her body against my back, wrapping one arm around me. I heard the file land on my desk.
“Are you bored with me?”
“What are you talking about?” I sounded annoyed, but regretted it. I spun around and tried to hug her, but she pushed away from me and moved back by the door.
“Does Jim fuck like me?”
“What?”
“Look at me,” she said, rubbing her right hand over her breasts, letting it brush over the trim triangle of dark blond hair between her thighs. “Are you more interested in Jim than me? More interested in that book? Aren’t I enough to keep your attention?”
“Don’t be silly. Come here.”
She didn’t hesitate. I kissed her softly on the mouth and then turned her around so that her bare, muscular back rested against my chest and abdomen. I threw my right arm around her breasts, pulling her so close that not even the Holy Ghost could have slipped between us. Brushing her lush blond hair away with the point of my chin, I ran my mouth over the light down on the nape of her neck, kissed her ears. I let the fingertips of my left hand trace the curve of her hip. I slid my fingers slowly across her flat belly and down into her soft, trimmed thatch of hair. Her breaths grew short and rapid and she was already wet as I ran my fingers gently along her folds. I nudged the tip of my finger into the split at the tip of her labia. Not wanting to rush her, I made lazy, gentle passes, increasing the speed and pressure just a little with each stroke. Finally, she grabbed my wrist and pressed my fingers hard against her. Her back arched, body shuddered. She sighed and relaxed, falling fully against me.
We stood there like that for a few minutes, the tension flowing out of her body. She felt small and vulnerable in my arms. It was dawning on me that I did in fact know far more about Jim than I did about the St. Pauli Girl. I really had cut myself off from women. I’d sleep with them, but I didn’t want to know them or anything about them.
“I’m sorry about before,” I said, kissing her on top of her head. “I didn’t sleep much last night.”
“Why not?”
“Meg’s supposed to be calling soon about the book deal and the tension’s starting to get to me.”
“Oh, the publishing stuff.”
“Yeah, that.” I kissed her again, let her go, and retrieved the file from the desk. “You were asking about this.”
“I found it in bed instead of you,” she said, wrapping herself up in an old quilt thrown over the back of my desk chair.
I brushed a loose strand of hair out of her eyes, tucking it behind her ear, and kissed her on the mouth.
“What about the file?” she asked, sitting down in my desk chair.
I reached into the file. “You’ve seen me writing lately.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m writing about what’s in here,” I said, handing her a tattered spiral notebook.
“What is it?”
“It’s the diary of a murderer.”
She got a sick look on her face. “A murderer?”
I told her about being sent to do a piece on the Troubles and detailed how I’d met the man who’d hunted me down in Deptford, how he�
�d given me that damned notebook.
“But why you?” she asked.
“He never said anything except he heard I was looking for a different kind of story. I don’t know. Maybe he could spot a fellow lost soul.”
“Didn’t you ask?”
I laughed. “He wasn’t the kind of man to ask.”
“What makes his story so different?”
“Because he was like the slave ship captain who comes to see the tragedy of what he has done. But unlike the slave ship captain who writes ‘Amazing Grace’ because he believes there is a God to redeem him, McGuinn knows there is no God. McGuinn is so much more a tragic figure because he knows there is no redemption or forgiveness. What is done is done.”
But the book wasn’t done and when Jim called to say he’d be a half hour late, I went back to it.
There he was, the jumpy bollix, ten paces over his left shoulder and about as inconspicuous as a cunt in a cock shop. He was looking everywhere but at McGuinn. Short of stature, he was a mean-faced fooker with opaque eyes. No more than thirty with the bloated muscles and acne of a juicer, he was a real trouble boy, that one. The type of lad that was always spoiling for violence. Maybe, McGuinn thought, he would oblige the lad, as he possessed a knack for violence his own self.
But he had to make a choice quickly. He supposed he could vanish into the crowd like so much smoke and keep going. It wasn’t as if this town held any particular fascination for him. To the contrary, he could recreate his lonely little hell in any of a thousand shite holes along the road. One factory or abattoir was much like another, one bloody and mindless job same as the next. Yet he found he was in no hurry to scurry. He’d been on the run his entire feckin’ life and he was spent. This corner of nowhere was as fine as any other in which to make a stand. Besides, he was curious.
This set up smelled neither of the Prods nor the Brits. Although it had the feel of amateur night at Ralph and Jim’s Bar and Grill, McGuinn couldn’t risk dismissing the possibility that there were forces at play here beyond his experience. Unlikely, for sure, but possible.
Gun Church Page 8
