Gun Church

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  I was feeling so good about myself, about the chapel, about getting back to work, about the St. Pauli Girl. But when Jim came by for our morning run it was like he was determined to test my resolve, like he wanted to make sure I knew my place.

  “We’re not shooting today,” he said almost before he got out of his truck.

  “Are you kidding me? After last night, I am totally juiced to-”

  “We’re taking the day off. It’s the rule.”

  “Your rule?”

  “The rules aren’t mine, Kip. Like I told you before when we were at the chapel and I was walking you through things, stuff will get explained to you as you earn the right. Last night you earned a ticket inside the chapel, but not the keys to the kingdom. The chapel isn’t a game to us or a diversion. It’s our thing. I know how excited you are to shoot again and to know everything, but it’s not how it works. Like any discipline, there’s stuff you’ve got to do first before you understand it. You either have to trust me or turn away. It’s your choice.”

  He knew I wasn’t going to turn away. I felt like the kite on the end of his string. He was a smart kid who knew a lot about me. Give the junkie a taste and then hold the prize just out of reach. Watch him jump, beg, and crawl. I knew how that worked, but I didn’t like it. Still, I knew there was a single word I could say that would chaff his ass. So I said it:

  “But-”

  “Your choice.” He didn’t like being challenged, especially by me, and his expression showed it.

  I hid my smile from him, but he had another surprise for me.

  “There’s something else. Next time we shoot, you have to pick a new gun.”

  “I was just getting good with the Beretta.”

  “Good isn’t the point,” he said. “The chapel isn’t about simply being competent. It’s not a gun range. The chapel is about the essential nature of the gun and how we can use it to elevate us.”

  Christ, I thought, here we were again, back to that metaphysical bullshit. I wasn’t happy about it or about switching guns, but I didn’t want to push back too hard. We didn’t talk much during the run. I knew I was being an ungrateful prick, that without Jim and the St. Pauli Girl and the chapel, I’d still be staring at those seven first lines, but I was disappointed. Oddly, that’s when Jim chose to ask me a favor.

  “Kip, um, I’m kind of embarrassed to ask … Oh, forget it.”

  Whatever anger I had for Jim seemed to vanish. It was easy for me to forget that in spite of his big talk, Jim was such a kid. He was so tongue-tied, so pathetic trying to ask me whatever it was he wanted to ask me that I felt sorry for him.

  “Just ask, Jim.”

  “Can I borrow your Porsche this weekend? There’s this girl I used to date who went away to school upstate and I’m going up to see her tonight-”

  “Sure, Jim, anytime. Better an old red Porsche than an old F-150.”

  He blew out a big breath of relief. “I’ll take good care of her. Fill up the tank and everything.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I trust you, Jim.”

  I went inside and retrieved my car keys. When I handed them to Jim, he got that Gee-can-I-blow-you look on his face. Instead, he just thanked me and swore I wouldn’t regret lending him my car.

  I guess my generosity was good karma because things went wonderfully with Renee that evening. She’d spent the day getting things ready for a special meal to celebrate me losing my gun cherry-her phrase, not mine. Three things I already knew about her: she could cook, she could fuck, and she could shoot. What else could a man ask for in a woman? It had also dawned on me recently that she was a lot smarter than I’d given her credit for. Well, maybe smarter isn’t the right word. She was smart. That much was clear early on, but more than that, the St. Pauli Girl was wise. She was the one who talked politics, and world affairs in a reasoned, nuanced manner. I really enjoyed listening to her. I’d stopped thinking about the world around the time it stopped thinking about me, but later that night Renee wasn’t interested in the state of the world.

  “What was Amy like?”

  “Where’s this coming from?”

  “You can’t blame me for being curious,” she said. “Do you think about her?”

  “Funny, I used to think about her all the time. Less so since … since September. At the end there, our marriage was just a massive compound fracture. That’s when things were really bad for me.”

  “Bad with her?”

  “Bad with everything. I was getting kicked to the curb by my publisher. Not that I didn’t deserve to lose my contract. At least when Amy cut me loose, she told me to my face.”

  “What did your publisher do?”

  “The liquidations manager sent me a letter offering me my novels at a heavily discounted rate before they sold off the remaining stock to clear space in the warehouse. Nice, huh? Not a word from my publisher or my editor. Not a ‘thank you’ or a ‘fuck you.’ Not even ‘goodbye.’ It was like getting a Dear John letter from your fiancee’s third cousin.”

  Renee looked hurt on my behalf. “How could they do that to you?”

  “I did it to me. Then I called my agent and she told me what I already knew. She’s tough, Meg, and didn’t sugar coat it. No velvet glove on her iron fist. I’d made her life pretty miserable with my bullshit. That’s what I do to women, I make them miserable. Maybe you should run.”

  She ignored that last part. The St. Pauli Girl no longer seemed much in the mood for talk after that. Both of us were tired and after dinner, we went to bed. Neither one of us slept very long and for all the right reasons. In fact, we spent the entire weekend sleeping very little and in our own very little world.

  Eighteen

  The Fine Print

  When Jim showed up for our first run following my very tiring weekend, I was really happy to see him. I could feel the big smile on my face. Downstairs, I put my hand out to him.

  “I’m glad we’re friends, Jim.”

  “Me too, Kip.”

  “Sorry I was cranky the other day.”

  “Everybody gets a little weirded out after their first time in the chapel. It’s no big thing.”

  “We’re okay, then?” I asked.

  “We’re always okay. And thanks for the car. She was totally impressed.” His smile said what he no longer had to. Mission accomplished. He’d gotten laid.

  Later that day, after class, it was back up into the woods as usual. As happy as I was for him, I still wasn’t pleased about having to get accustomed to a new sidearm. No matter. I needed Jim as a friend, as the man who would keep me on the inside. Until I stood across from Jim in the chapel, raised my weapon and fired, I’d told myself it was all about writing again, about McGuinn. That was no longer true. It may never have been true. If I never wrote another word, I would’ve been hooked. I was hooked. I wanted that rush again so badly I could taste it. So when Jim said pick another gun, I picked another gun.

  It was definitely the.38. The feel was very different from the Beretta. The Beretta was small and sleek-a woman’s gun, Jim teased. It popped more than banged when you fired it. The.38 was no cannon, but it was a beast by comparison. Still, it fit comfortably in my hand and after only a few rounds I started to get a feel for it.

  Things were going great and the tiny dose of bad blood between Jim and me seemed forgotten-forgotten until I asked if I could shoot the Beretta one last time for old times’ sake.

  “I told you, you’re never going to see that gun again, so don’t ask about it!” It wasn’t a suggestion. It was the first time Jim’s tone was unmistakably belligerent.

  “Christ, kid,” I said, using kid to tweak his nose, “you and your rules! Why not open up your own chapter of the NRA and leave it at that?”

  For the hurt expression on his face, you’d have thought I’d just gut-shot him. His lips moved, but only wounded animal noises came out. Then realizing how stunned he must have looked to me, he turned away in embarrassment. Only after getting hold of himself did he face me. H
is expression was no longer stunned or wounded. I’d seen him angry once, when Vuchovich was holding us hostage. He was angrier now.

  “Don’t ever say that again, Kip. We’re nothing like those gun queers.”

  “Gun queers?”

  “It’s the old-fashioned meaning of queer. It means like obsessed. We’re not like that. We don’t care about muzzle velocities and specs and shit like that. We’re not queer for the guns themselves, not like the Colonel.”

  “Okay, but why hate the NRA? I mean, I’d think you would hate gun control advocates worse.”

  “Gun control is a misnomer. They don’t want to control guns. They just don’t want you to have ’em. I understand that and, let’s be real, it is kind of hard to argue that we wouldn’t all be safer if no one had handguns. The NRA types, man, they’re the worst. They’re the real gun control advocates because they want to control what you do with your guns: how to hold them, how to carry them, when to clean them, when to use them, and on and on. They’re fascists. They couldn’t give two shits about the Constitution. For them, everything except the Second Amendment is the fine print. They’re just a bunch of gun queers.”

  I held my palms upward in surrender. “Sorry.”

  “All right,” he said, but he was still red-faced. “Just don’t ever say that. We’ve come a long way together, too long a way to screw it all up now. We’re both in the deep end of the pool, Kip, and there’s no going back now.”

  I kept quiet. The kid needed to have his say if we were going to move on. Besides, I was trying to figure out if there was something I was missing. This was the second time in only a few days Jim had talked to me this way. After I went after Stan Petrovic and Jim tackled me, he had said a very similar kind of thing. You’regoingtofuckeverythingup. Youcan’tdothatnow. Youcan’tfuckitallupnow.

  “No, Kip, I’m the one who should be sorry, not you. I shouldn’t have gone off on you like that. Don’t be mad at me, please,” he said, his frightened inner child that he hid so well coming to the fore. “I just want you to like and understand me. I think sometimes I want that a little too much and I get worried is all.”

  “Jim, you’re the best friend I’ve got in this world. Forget it. Let’s just shoot.”

  And shoot we did, way longer than was normally the case. It was a race to see whether the sun would set before we ran out of ammo. I could tell Jim was getting bored, so I regaled him with some of my endless supply of stories. What I don’t think Jim realized was just how hooked I really was. He didn’t have to beg for my approval. By now, it was almost beside the point.

  Nineteen

  Monkey Suit

  Ironic thing is, it took me standing there in the chapel a second time to realize it wasn’t Amy’s respect I wanted, but my own. Regardless of the forces that got me there, I was there, the.38 in my raised hand. Standing across from me was the security guard from the abandoned base, a Glock in his raised hand. Although I wasn’t nearly as proficient with the.38 as I was with the Beretta, I wasn’t going to complain or balk at another chance for the big rush.

  “Even with all the practice, you’re so nervous that first time that if you didn’t just raise up and shoot, you’d probably kill someone in the crowd,” Jim had said. “Ain’t that different than being a real virgin, you just aim and shoot.” We both had a laugh at that.

  The second time was different. Gone was the profound nervousness, the panic that came with not knowing. The nauseating smells that had nearly caused me to swoon were expected, almost comforting, and the protective gear, though still cumbersome, didn’t irk me quite so much. The sweat that poured out of me was from excitement, not fear. I moved out of the locker room to the chapel under my own steam. There was no change in my perceptions. My hearing was fine. I wasn’t particularly conscious of my breathing or of the beating of my heart. What I felt was alive. I was fully in the moment maybe for the first time in my life. The ritual of the ash seemed to have the paradoxical effect of both heightening my sensations and calming me even further.

  Through the door and padding, I stood shoulder to shoulder with my opponent, the security guard from the base. Our helmets were strapped on. We took eight measured strides to the center spot on the chapel floor. We did not bow or shout, “Blessed are they who have not seen, and yet believe.” Jim had told me, “Only virgins do that.”

  I felt my opponent’s back to mine. I counted out the four strides, stopped, then took the one last step and about-faced. I zeroed in on my opponent’s chest. This time I didn’t need to imagine a red fist pumping inside a rib cage. I simply focused on the center of his vest. Jim placed the.38 in my hand, placed a Glock in the hand of my opponent, and stepped off to the side. He asked the both of us if we were ready. When we nodded that we were, Jim told us to raise our weapons and said, “Begin.”

  “Each visit to the chapel is a different test,” Jim had explained. “The second time is as much a test of wills as a matter of marksmanship. It’s sort of like a game of chicken. How long can you stand there staring down the barrel of another weapon before one of you gives into the tension? Big balls won’t do you any good if you miss and take one in the chest. It’s a balancing act.”

  I had to constantly weigh the loss of accuracy, the gun getting heavier in my hand the longer I waited, versus the macho factor.

  As we stood there, rain pelting the corrugated metal roof of the hangar, there was a palpable sense of anticipation in the dank air. Maybe the same energy was there the first time too and I had been so consumed by the experience I hadn’t noticed. The longer I held back, the bigger the rush. I could feel the thousand little crosscuts in the textured grip of the.38. Then I saw or thought I saw a tensing in my opponent’s stance, but I could not react quickly enough. A flash. Bang! Then I fired.

  A second later, I was still standing, still breathing freely. Nothing hurt. The freight train missed me. Across the way, the security guard was down, writhing on the floor. I was staring at him, admiring my handiwork, buzzing inside my own skin like a total freak. I’d hit him, but I couldn’t lose control. I walked over to him, gave him my hand, and pulled him to his feet. We removed our helmets and stood across from each other. He looked utterly dejected. His hand was on my shoulder, my index finger in the hole in his shirt above his heart. Only I spoke, “Stop doubting and believe.” When the receiving line was formed, only I passed along from person to person, repeating the phrase.

  Someone clapped me on the back. Jim. “Great shot, Kip. Maybe you can get as good as me. You okay?”

  I didn’t answer right away. I couldn’t. Just nodded my head yes.

  “Come on.” His arm urged me forward. “Let’s get a beer.”

  I unhitched all my gear. As it fell to the floor at my feet my energy level dipped, but it was nothing like the crash I experienced the last time. Renee kissed me on the cheek and we slowly walked over to the beer coolers. I was already fantasizing about my next time in the chapel, about how I wanted to try this without the monkey suit and helmet. Addiction isn’t only about the here and now but about the buzz of anticipation. It may well be a physical phenomenon, but it’s equally romantic. In a wonderfully perverse way, addiction is like falling in love.

  This time, Jim didn’t come back to the locker room with me. It was only me and the security guard washing up, mostly in silence. What would we have had to talk about, anyway? I was lost in thought, feeling good about where I was at in my life. I wasn’t sure I had ever felt this way before, even at the height of my fame and talent. How completely fucking weird was that? Life was good. I was writing again. Things between Jim and me had pretty much returned to normal. My times with Renee were really pretty amazing. I wasn’t nearly bored with her and more surprisingly, she didn’t seem the least bit tired of me.

  When we went back into the chapel, the next two shooters were the big guy from the BCCC maintenance crew and Jim. They were dressed only in vests covered in white T-shirts. The front of Jim’s shirt was covered in red crosses and black smears
. The big guy’s shirt bore about ten or so crosses. The St. Pauli Girl stood next to me, holding my hand. There was a very different kind of tension in the air and in the crowd than earlier. The pinging of the rain on the roof was foreboding, each drop the tolling of a bell. I could feel the change in atmosphere in Renee’s grip as she could in mine. This was gladiatorial and it came with the very real possibility of blood or death.

  Something else was different, too. Although both men acted out the same rituals the security guard and I had just performed, there was a marked change in how they were done. The both of them moved with such amazing grace and precision that it seemed like a pas de deux. Although they were different sizes and different ages, the length and timing of their strides was nearly identical.

  The snaggle-toothed girl handed each man his weapon-the maintenance guy the.38 I’d shot earlier and Jim the Browning-and stood back. She asked if they were ready. They nodded that they were and then, just as Jim had done before, she said, “Begin.”

  I figured the maintenance guy had to be pretty good to have done this kind of shooting ten times and for Jim to risk his life facing him. Still, the BCCC maintenance man was clearly the more nervous of the two. Jim stood there, steady as a rock, weapon raised, seeming not to breathe. Sweat was visible on the big man’s brow and he wasn’t nearly as solid as Jim. His breaths were louder and raspy, probably a result of all those cigarettes he always smelled of. He fired. Jim fired. They both went down, but it was obvious something was wrong. There was blood.

  “Oh fuck! Oh fuck!” the big man screamed in pain, clamping his right hand over his left bicep, blood seeping through the tight spaces between his fingers. “Oh, Jesus, it burns.”