Jim lay still where he fell as he had the first time. Nearly everyone rushed to the blood. Renee and I ran to Jim. We pulled him to his feet, but he bent back over in pain. When he stood straight again, I saw the hole in his T-shirt. He’d been hit in his belly and it clearly hurt, Kevlar or not.
“How is he?” Jim asked, thrusting his chin at the maintenance man.
“You hit him in the arm. What happened?”
“Later.”
Jim rushed over to his bleeding opponent, who had a white towel wrapped around the wound. The blood hadn’t yet leaked through.
“He’ll be all right,” said the guy from the copy center. “The shot just sort of cut through his tricep. Good thing it didn’t get lodged in there. It’ll hurt, but we’ll get him patched up.”
Jim went over to him. That weird silence fell over the chapel and everyone stood back to form the line. Jim stuck his index finger onto the bloody towel. The big man stuck his bloody finger to Jim’s belly and they recited. Then they moved along the receiving line. Unlike in the world outside the chapel, wounded or not, you were expected to finish what you started. A few weeks back, Jim told me that short of death, there were no excuses. Now I knew it wasn’t just hyperbole.
Jim gave the wounded man the customary hug, but didn’t apologize. The maintenance guy didn’t utter an angry word, but there was obvious puzzlement in his eyes and hesitation in his demeanor. As he was led back into the locker room, his eyes met mine and he held his gaze until he was helped through the mattresses and out of the chapel. There was something in his stare that I couldn’t understand and by the time he disappeared from sight, I stopped trying to comprehend.
Jim said it fell on the two of us to clean up, so I sent Renee on ahead as we waited for the place to clear out. I looked forward to having a chance to talk to Jim about what had happened, but I wanted Jim to be the one to bring it up. He had a slightly different agenda.
“So, how was it the second time around? Different, right?” he asked, tying up the last of the plastic garbage bags. “Not like your old life.”
“Let me tell you something: guns and books, they’re not as different as you think. The first book is all about excitement and anticipation. You just write the damn thing because you don’t really know what you’re doing. But the second book … Watch out! Especially if the first book got people’s attention. When the second book is published-that is if you can manage to write a second book-they lie in the weeds for you wielding their long knives or worse.”
“Worse?”
“Much worse,” I said. “They can ignore you.”
“That’s a bad thing?”
“The worst thing there is, to be ignored,” I said. “Better to be despised. So what happened with-”
He shook his head. “I was off tonight. My head was someplace else and I waited too long to fire. By the time I squeezed, he’d already hit me.”
“Shit!”
“He’ll live.”
“But what if he hadn’t?”
“You know those rules you were complaining about? Well, we got them for that too. Are you scared about shooting now?”
“Pretty much the opposite, Jim.”
He smiled proudly. “Good thing. Come on, let’s go.”
Outside the hangar, the rain had given way to an achingly clear sky and a chilly northeast wind. I loaded the garbage bags into the box of Jim’s pickup while he went to shut down the generator and stow it. Without the rumble of the generator all I could hear was that eerie creaking of the buildings in the wind.
Twenty
Outlines
I was worn out and when Jim dropped me off, I dragged my ass upstairs and into the shower. Renee was nude on the bed, dead asleep. As I let the water run over me, I realized my grasp on the inner workings of the chapel wasn’t as firm as I thought it was. But I’d survived this long without understanding most of the mysteries of the universe and one more, give or take, wasn’t going to ruin my day. I would either figure it out for myself or Jim would reveal the knowledge to me one day when we were out in the woods shooting. He enjoyed that, doling out information in tiny doses. I think it helped him feel in control, which, I suppose, he was.
The St. Pauli Girl came into the bathroom just as I finished shaving and kissed me on the cheek.
“There’s three phone messages for you,” she said.
I laughed. “I wonder who died?”
She punched my arm. “Don’t even joke like that.”
“When you’re my age, kiddo, it’s not a joke.”
Feeling re-energized by the shower and Renee’s lack of clothing, I was prepared to ignore the messages, but I was too curious. I hadn’t received three messages in a single day since Janice Nadir had taken her act on the road. She used to call me all the time and tell me how much she wanted to suck my cock or how she liked it when I fucked her hard from behind. I didn’t miss those messages. Suddenly, irrationally, my focus shifted away from Janice and I found I was thinking of Amy. Had something happened to her? Is that what those messages were about? If they were, what would I do? How would I feel? Where would that leave me? Even I was a little bit embarrassed by my thinking of Amy only in terms of myself.
I splashed my face with aftershave, rolled on deodorant, and slipped into my old terry bathrobe-a long-ago gift from Amy. I kissed Renee on the mouth, desperately-a kiss like a prayer-and told her I’d be back up in a few minutes. Now she looked worried too. My mind raced with a hundred scenarios, one worse than the next, as I took the stairs two at a time. I listened to the three messages-all from Meg. The brittle tone of her voice and the cryptic “You need to call me back” did little to allay my fears.
“What the fuck, Donovan? Is Amy all right?”
“Amy?”
“My ex-wife,” I whispered into the mouthpiece. “You remember her?”
“Don’t be a schmuck, Kip. As far as I know, Amy’s miserable being married to that dickhead Peter Moreland, but otherwise fine.”
“Then what’s with the messages? Something’s wrong. Are you-”
“I’m fine too.”
“Then what’s the matter?”
“You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?” I asked, not very patiently.
“Haskell Brown is dead.”
“What? What happened, did the gerbil get loose and gnaw through his colon?”
“Not only are you a prick, Weiler, but you’re a homophobic one,” she said.
“I love you and you’re gay.”
“We’re not talking about me.”
“Okay, Meg, what happened?”
“He was robbed and murdered early Sunday morning in Chelsea. They beat him and shot him. The cops think it was more than just a robbery because of the brutality of the beating.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A hate crime, you idiot. Gay bashing isn’t as popular as it used to be, but it’s still the sport of kings for some.”
“Fuck. I mean I had no love for the guy, but … ”
We stayed on the phone sharing a minute of uncomfortable silence. Neither one of us, I think, wanted to say aloud what we were both thinking. Then Meg, as she always did, gave it voice.
“If that new book of yours isn’t just some bullshit excuse to blow your life up again, Kip, tighten up the pages you’ve got so far. With them, I want an outline and a story synopsis as well.”
“You know I don’t do outlines.”
“You do now! You want this book published, Weiler, you follow the rules, my rules. Understand? Remember that in this business mothers eat their young and then use the bones for toothpicks. And it’s worse now than it used to be. Remember also, you’re not who you used to be.”
“I’m not sure I ever really was.”
“Don’t get philosophical on me, Kip. It doesn’t suit you. I want something on my desk a week from today, ten days, latest. I’m going to let stuff settle down some before I approach Dudek through Mary Caputo.”
; “Okay.”
“One more thing. I’m going to send signals to Dudek that you’ll take the rights deal if he even thinks about a new book for you. That’s as far as I’m willing to push him and if his answer is ultimately no, it’s no and we take the rights deal. This is our last chance with Travers Legacy and yours with me. Get it?”
“We’re through if I fuck this up.”
“Exactly. I love you, Kip Weiler. God knows why, but I always have. You shoot this down or screw it up and that’s it between us.”
“One week,” I said.
“Ten days, latest.”
When I got upstairs, the St. Pauli Girl was sitting up in bed, her arms folded around her knees and bare breasts. “Is everything okay?” she asked, the concern on her face still visible even in the semidarkness.
I answered by gently unfolding her arms, softly pushing her legs apart, and pressing my mouth onto her. But when I woke up hours later, the St. Pauli Girl’s flavor still filling up my senses, I was again thinking of Amy. Even now, ten years removed from her, I didn’t fully comprehend the attraction. Given how many women I’d had without hardly trying, I didn’t understand the power Amy had that let her turn me inside out, but she could and with nothing more than a sideways glance or the pursing of her lips. After we were married, I used to tell myself that my straying into strange beds-and I mean “strange” in all of its Oxford American permutations-was simply a function of my petulance about Amy’s sway over me. I loved her fiercely, yet I resented her for it. Go figure.
Amy had been forced to deal with the worst of the Kipster, especially his talent’s long, slow death rattle and the thousand little aftershocks that followed in its wake. Still, the dissolution of our marriage wasn’t all on me. Amy was neither a martyr nor saint. She had her hairline cracks and peculiar vanities. The woman was more complicated than a Chinese box and twice as hard to open. Even her demeanor came with a wind chill. She considered writers more craftsmen than artists, and was more than a little irked by just how easily money and fame had come my way. “At best, writers are McArtists,” she was fond of saying. Oh, we were quite a pair: two wounded, complicated people who resented the shit out of each other. Now there’s a formula for success, huh?
As I stood to clean up, it occurred to me that a new book might mean more to me than I could have imagined. I went to my office afterwards to follow Meg’s orders. I typed “Outline.” Yet in spite of the news of Haskell Brown’s death and the blood in the chapel that night, nothing came to me. For the first time since starting the book I felt pressure. And there I was staring at the nearly blank screen, the cursor mocking me at the end of the “e” in outline. E as in empty.
Twenty-One
Cutthroat
I wasn’t empty for long.
A blanket of autumn snow in a hardscrabble place like Brixton County had that falsely purifying picture-postcard effect. You could fool yourself that the snow somehow stopped the miners and loggers from getting shitfaced after their shifts and going home to beat the crap out of their wives. If you listened carefully enough, you could almost hear John Denver singing some cracker-barrel hymn to the simplicity of rural life. Simplicity, my ass. Life was no less complicated here than anywhere else. If anything, life in Brixton had a more desperate edge than almost any place else I’d unpacked my bags. It was the land of coal and pine, not milk and honey. Like Jim once said to me, the only options for kids who grew up here were the mines, the pines, or the military recruitment signs. So, no, as pretty as it all looked as Jim drove Renee and me up into the hills that Friday at dusk, I wasn’t buying into the notion of Brixton’s snow-white baptism.
We started out the way Jim usually drove when we were going to shoot, but somewhere along the route he took a turn away from the river and we were in unfamiliar territory. We weren’t headed to the chapel either. Not even Renee seemed to know where we were going. The confusion in her eyes was manifest. Funny, I thought, how I barely noticed the beauty of her eyes anymore. I used to see her features as a collection of distinct physical assets-the suede blue eyes, her impossible cheekbones, that perfect ass-as aspects of herself, as the St. Pauli Girl, but not as a woman. It dawned on me that these days I thought of her less and less as the St. Pauli Girl.
Finally, Jim pulled off the pavement onto a pitted dirt road that bounced us all around like a mechanical bull in a honky-tonk bar. We drove through a gap in a slatted wooden fence that had seen better days. The sky was already turning darker when I noticed some familiar vehicles parked along the side of the road. Jim hadn’t said what we were up to and I still couldn’t be sure, but the sight of those other pickups relaxed me. It had quite the opposite effect on Renee, the confusion in her eyes morphing into worry. Jim didn’t pull over until we emerged into a clearing about the size of two football fields placed side by side.
“Used to be a berry farm,” he said. “Guy went bankrupt after they shut the base down.”
When we piled out of the Jim’s old F-150, people emptied out of their trucks too. This was a long way from the chapel, but it was the same ragtag cast of characters. The deputy sheriff was there. Stan Petrovic too, in all his pock-marked glory. In fact, the only one missing was the security guard from Hardentine. Guess he actually had to watch the abandoned base.
Jim asked, “Did you set up the logs like you were told?”
The fat kid said, “Everything is ready.” He retreated to his 4x4, started it up, and turned it so that it faced the clearing. In the truck’s high beams, I could make out several piles of logs. Some were stacked no more than one or two high, while others were piled maybe three or four feet high. They were set at odd angles to each other and there didn’t seem to be a pattern to how they were arranged.
Jim was pleased. “Good, let’s collect the equipment here, and then go and park our trucks at even intervals around the patch. Don’t forget to leave them running and to turn your brights on.”
I think that’s when I started rushing. My head was spinning so that I barely noticed Renee go back to Jim’s truck with him. I was vaguely aware of the displeasure in her voice as she spoke to him, but I was already too far gone to care. Things were starting to make sense, a twisted kind of Brixton sense. We were going to shoot, but it wasn’t going to be done like the carefully choreographed Kabuki of the chapel. No, this was going to be very different indeed.
“We have four full suits,” Jim said when he returned from his truck and dropped the Colonel’s duffel bag to the ground. “If we do this fast, most of us can shoot tonight.”
There was much rejoicing in Mudville, except from the maintenance man. Jim reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a handful of folded pieces of paper, which he dumped into his Carhartt baseball cap and shook around.
“Line up. I’m going to give you all numbers and then we’ll pick from the hat.” With that he pointed to himself, “One.” Renee: “Two.” Me: “Three,” … and so on until he got to Stan Petrovic, “Seventeen.”
Jim thrust the hat out in front of the maintenance guy from BCCC. If this honor was some attempt at reconciliation for Jim having wounded the man, it wasn’t working. The guy glared at Jim as he stepped forward, rubbing the coat over his bicep where he’d been hit by the bullet. Jim seemed oblivious and told him to pick four numbers. He did without enthusiasm and handed the four slips of paper to Renee, who didn’t seem at all pleased to be calling the numbers. The undercurrent was a far cry from the chapel.
“Eight. Three. Nine. Seventeen.”
The fat kid, the deputy sheriff, Stan, and I stepped forward or maybe everyone else stepped back. I was now rushing so hard I couldn’t tell.
“Here’s the deal,” Jim said, dabbing his finger into the now familiar coffee can and touching it to each of our foreheads. “Get your suits on. I’ll load your weapons with four rounds each. This is Cutthroat: every man for himself. You take a hit anywhere, you’re dead. You’ve got to stay within the confines of the clearing and the only things you can use for cover are th
e log barriers, the snow, and anything else that you can find out there. You can’t hide behind the trucks and you can’t sit behind any one barrier too long. When my truck horn blows, you have to move. You don’t move: you’re dead. You have fifteen minutes to kill everyone else out there with you. Got it? Good. Then get dressed. When you’re suited up, pick up your weapon, walk out there, and select a barrier. When all four of you are out there, I’ll blow the horn to begin.”
Ten minutes later I was flat on my belly, taking cover behind one of the low log barriers. I had the.38 in my hand, my heart thumping. In spite of the cold, I was sweating through my underwear. This was going to be a test of so much more than marksmanship and machismo. The wind was up, and depending upon your position, snow might be blowing into your eyes through the slits in the face mask of your helmet. You’d have to think your way through this and I figured my brain was about the only advantage I had.
The deputy sheriff was far more likely to have been trained for situations like this even if the most dangerous thing he ever did was to chase pleated skirts. Stan may have been a surly motherfucker and a belligerent drunk, but you don’t play special teams in the NFL for as long as he had without a giant set of balls and an incredible instinct for survival. And the fat kid had been good enough to have faced down Jim in the chapel.
Jim stood on his truck horn for the game to begin. Instead of running out from behind the barrier, I rolled to my left, made a bipod of my elbows and steadied the.38. I took the chance that one of my opponents would stand and run across my path. I figured right. The fat kid burst out from behind the tallest barrier. I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and squeezed the trigger. He went down in a heap, grabbing his left thigh and screaming in pain. As usual, I spent too long patting myself on the back. Dirt and snow kicked up a few inches in front of my face, through the eye slits, and blinded me. Shit! My eyes filled with tears and I couldn’t stop blinking, but I had to move and move fast.
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