Gun Church

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  I rolled back behind the barrier, which was probably against one rule or another. I couldn’t afford to care. This was about survival and about winning. Fuck the rules, I thought. As my eyes worked hard to flush out the dirt, I realized that at least some good had come of what had happened: The fat kid was out of the game, leaving me only two adversaries to worry about, and one of those adversaries had wasted a bullet. I had three bullets to make two kills and so did one of my opponents. The other still had four, but I had to use my head for something other than math.

  Figuring it was human nature for people to stay safely hidden behind one of the barriers until Jim blew the horn to move, I decided my best chance at survival was to go now, before the horn. Problem was, I had only a vague notion of where one of the others might be. Since the shot that kicked the dirt into my eyes had come from in front of me, I guessed that one of the shooters was behind the barrier about sixty feet ahead of where I was. I had no sense of where the other shooter might be. If I chose wrong, I’d probably be running straight into a waiting bullet. Having decided to go, I took a few deep breaths, but the equation changed before I could move.

  Strange, I almost felt as if I wasn’t thinking as me anymore, but as McGuinn. Early on I had made the decision not to confine McGuinn to a place like the chapel and now here I was struggling in a setting not unlike the one I was creating for McGuinn. Sometimes art imitates life and sometimes it’s the other way around. Out here, it was both. Writers often inject themselves into their characters. Now, I was trying to inject my character into me.

  Just as I stuck my head out from behind the logs, I caught sight of the deputy coming out from behind the barrier straight ahead of me. So he was the one who almost got me. He was making a mad dash for a low stack of logs thirty yards to his left. I guess he’d also thought the element of surprise was the smart play. Only it wasn’t.

  He didn’t get five feet before Stan rose up from a prone position to the left of another barrier and blasted the deputy square in the back. He pitched forward from the force of the bullet and his own momentum. He lay there still for a few seconds, but didn’t writhe in pain or scream anything except, “Goddammit!” The bullet must have caught him in a heavily protected spot and the only thing wounded was his pride.

  Now there were two: Stan and me.

  Stan stayed upright, making the same mistake I had, taking a lap of honor before he’d won anything. He was pretty far away from me and my eyes weren’t yet totally clear of grit, but I doubted I would get a cleaner shot at a stationary target later on. Taking the shot right then is what McGuinn would have done. He’d written that you had to take your shot when the opportunity presented itself because second chances are never guaranteed. I fired. Splinters flew off the edge of the log barrier just at Stan’s back. He turned his head my way. I couldn’t see his face beneath his helmet, but it was easy to imagine his sneer. I ducked back behind the logs.

  The rush was gone and in its place was fear. It didn’t matter that the suit afforded me full protection or that I had two rounds left. I was being hunted and I was hunting. This was worlds apart from the controlled situation of the chapel. I’d been scared before, but not scared like this, not even when Frank Vuchovich stuck the Colt in my face.

  The horn blew and I moved, combat crawling as fast as I could to a tall stand of logs to my right. I stopped long enough to rise up to try and catch a glimpse of Stan. I thought I heard something, but I’d lost him. I crawled again. Something crashed down loudly to my left. I sat up on my knees and aimed the.38. That’s when the baseball bat hit me in the back of the head and I went to sleep, face mask down in the snow.

  My head burned with pain and when the trauma room doctor shined his pen light in my eyes I thought my skull might literally explode.

  “You’ve got a textbook concussion there, Mr. Weiler,” said the doctor. “We’ll get you something for the pain, do a scan to make sure it’s nothing more serious, and we’ll keep you here overnight.”

  I was in no shape to argue with the man. I didn’t even know how I’d gotten there and wasn’t a hundred percent sure of how I got concussed. The last thing I remembered was being on my belly in the snow behind a log and thinking about how scared I was.

  “I’ll let your wife come in while I arrange for your scan and get a nurse to bring you something for the pain.”

  Wife? Amy was here? Jesus, I really was confused.

  Renee came into the examining room. She was red-eyed and shaking.

  “The doctor says you’re going to be okay in a few days, but you have to stay here tonight,” she said, her voice brittle.

  “What happened?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Some of it, but not how I got hurt,” I said.

  “Stan threw a big rock that landed over your left shoulder. When you got to your knees, he came up behind you and … and … ”

  “And what?”

  “He shot you in the back of the helmet from about twenty feet. The round got between some of the padding and the helmet took almost all the impact. If it was one of those old metal helmets … I told the doctor you fell off a ladder.”

  “Did anyone do anything about it? Did Jim?”

  “We can’t. It’s against the rules. You get into this and you take the risk. Anything else would ruin the whole idea of it,” she said, her heart not in it.

  I knew. Jim had told me a hundred times. Didn’t mean I had to like it.

  “I’m going to kill fucking Stan. I’m telling you, Renee, I’m going to kill him.”

  “Who are you going to kill, Mr. Weiler?” It was a nurse, a small cup in one hand and a larger cup in the other.

  “My landlord,” I lied. “If he had repaired the porch like he was supposed to, I wouldn’t have been up on that ladder.”

  “Here,” she said, “take these. They should help with the pain. And please try not to get agitated.”

  When the nurse left the room, I repeated, “I’m going to kill that cocksucker.” And I swear I almost meant it.

  Twenty-Two

  Fox Hunt

  This time we met at 4:00 A.M. not at the chapel and not at the old berry farm, but at a long-abandoned logging camp about five miles east of where Jim and I shot in the woods.

  Here, the surrounding hills were not so steep nor as prevalent, and whole swathes of forest had been logged into submission in the years before anyone had heard of Earth Day. At this point in its travels, the Crooked River ran a straighter, wider course and whispered in comparison to its roaring by the falls.

  Renee had been sullen and silent as she drove my car up into the hills. She hadn’t said so, but I knew she’d wanted me to stay home. I was feeling much better, though I wasn’t quite over my concussion symptoms. We both sensed it wouldn’t take much to send me backsliding. You have no idea just how awful concussion headaches are until you experience them. Considering my once prodigious consumption of cocaine and alcohol, I’d had some formidable headaches, but the ones I suffered through in the wake of Stan’s shot to the back of my head were titanic. Legion were the joys of concussion because the headaches weren’t the worst of it.

  In the days following Cutthroat, I became depressed and disconnected, lost inside my own head. My internal voice was drowned out by a cloying and constant ringing in my ears and there were moments I found myself thinking life wasn’t worth living like this, that it wouldn’t take much more of it to send me following in my father’s footsteps. A bullet through my brain, I thought, couldn’t have been much worse than what I was suffering through. I suppose if the predawn festivities were just one more trip into the chapel for ashes and bullets, I would have stayed home, but the rush of something new pushed me to go. Even so, my head was a little cottony. I felt a beat too slow, a step behind.

  Getting gingerly out the passenger door, it struck me that my red Porsche seemed completely out of place there among the pickups in a clearing above the river. It gave me pause, reminding me that in spite of al
l that had transpired since late September, I was just as out of place among these people as my car was among their trucks. It gave me pause, but didn’t stop me. I’d crossed a line the first time I walked into the chapel and there would be no stepping back now.

  The fog shrouding the treetops and crawling a few feet off the ground felt like it was pouring right out of my head. Whether it was the early hour or that the ride along the bumpy dirt road had worn me out, I couldn’t say. What was obvious to me was that I was falling back down the well I’d only just crawled out of. I couldn’t quite focus on the words Renee spoke to me as we trudged up a low hill to where the others were seated in a circle on old tree stumps around a small campfire. Everyone I’d ever seen at the chapel was there, Jim giving me a slight nod of hello. I was glad to be able to rest on a stump as an unwanted and familiar throbbing began in my temples.

  Laid out by the fire was one solitary protective suit, the Colonel’s duffel bag, and the can of ashes. I waited. We all waited for someone to come forward and when someone did, I was caught completely off guard. It wasn’t Jim who stepped to the fore, but Renee.

  “This is Fox Hunt,” she said, looking everywhere but at me. “One fox. One suit. The rest of us are the hounds. Some of us have done this before, but I will explain it for everyone else. The rules are simple: The fox gets a fifteen-minute head start and we can’t watch where the fox goes. The fox can go anywhere, hide anywhere, and use whatever tricks it has to to survive, but the fox has no weapon. After the fifteen minutes, the rest of us have until sunup to kill the fox. The hounds will have only one round in their weapons. If the fox eludes us, we all have to swim across the river and back as punishment. Then we will meet this Friday at the chapel and burn our shirts in a fire. All but the fox will be worthless once again, all of our blood erased. Those who are not original members may never be invited back in.”

  She nodded at the guy from the copy center who handed us neatly folded pieces of paper. That done, he retrieved the can of ashes and went around the circle, dipping his fingers into the can and touching them to our foreheads.

  “If there is a mark on your paper, pick a weapon and walk down to the river, facing the water. Spread out far from each other. In fifteen minutes or so, a shot will be fired and then it begins.”

  There was a slash across my paper and as I rose off the stump to get my weapon, I wobbled slightly. Jim grabbed my arm to steady me and whispered in my ear, “When it starts, stick by me.”

  I was glad he made the offer, because as I moved down by the riverbank the fog only got thicker. The headache was worsening and I could feel myself retreating into that isolated place inside my own skull. Time lost all meaning as I stared into the black water. Then I thought I heard something and the world went crazy. People were running everywhere, but I was frozen. I looked for Jim, for Renee, to no good end. I couldn’t make sense of anything.

  Suddenly, I was being pulled away from the riverbank and saw that it was Jim who had me by the wrist. He was speaking to me. I could hear that he was saying things, but his words were just jumbled sounds in my ears. I kept tripping over things, falling over, and sliding back toward the river on the slick ground. Jim was good, never letting me lose sight of him, never abandoning me, but it was just no good. Once we got out of the clear-cut section of the forest and into the trees, I lost Jim. I thought I heard his sharp whispers cutting through fog. Yet I could not focus well enough to locate him. His whispers faded and then disappeared altogether.

  With my completely fucked-up sense of time, I can’t say how long I just stood there, deciding what to do and how to do it. Eventually I forced myself to move, taking small, measured steps to test the ground beneath my feet. I needed to find a place to wait the fox hunt out, to rest, but I had to choose wisely. These woods were dark under the best of circumstances and with the fog, it was impossible to see more than fifteen or twenty feet ahead of me. Bullets would be flying and there was always a chance of ricochet. The fox was actually in the least danger of any of us.

  Walking did me no good, so I got on hands and knees and felt my way. I found a spot where some trees had fallen over each other to create a kind of barrier with a hollow just large enough to accommodate me. With a wall of big pines in front of the hollow, I felt I’d be pretty safe there until the sun came up. I lay down on my left side, the wet pine straw making a less than comfortable mattress. It didn’t take long for me to stop noticing the discomfort or the dampness or anything else.

  I didn’t sleep, exactly, because I was conscious of occasional gunshots echoing through the trees, twigs snapping under foot. I also heard voices, passing footsteps. How close by, I could not say. And though I wasn’t asleep, I wasn’t awake either. Each sound seemed to set my mind off in another direction. Mostly I confused myself with Terry McGuinn, envisioning him, us, in the hyper-reality I’d created in the pages of the book.

  McGuinn’s prayers were answered with the Almighty’s usual mix of mercy and malevolence. There were no lurking branches beneath the waterline on which he might be skewered, but the current did conspire to twist his body in such a manner as to ensure his wrecked left shoulder would absorb the full brunt of the impact against the felled tree that lay across the river, pushing him to the falls. When his shoulder smacked into the tree, the explosion of pain stiffened him so fierce it near snapped him in half. He’d never experienced the likes of it before and when the agony subsided enough for him to snatch a breath, he realized his bladder had let go. He laughed through chattering teeth.

  “That’s right,” he said, looking skyward, “why impale me, for fook’s sake, when you can favor me with small indignities? This can’t be the extent of me punishment for the trail of bodies I’ve left in me wake, can it?” The Lord, he thought, may have chosen the Hebrews, but his sense of irony was purely Irish.

  Now that his little moment with God had passed, he had to get himself out of the water. As the pain of the impact with the tree lessened, he realized he could not feel his legs and that his good arm was leaden and stinging like a basket of bees. But this wasn’t about pain any longer. Another few moments in the water would be his undoing, so he willed his right arm onto the tree. It was no good. Most of the bark had been stripped away by the pounding of the water and the exposed wood was as slippery as ice. Finally, his groping hand fell upon the jagged knob of a branch that had been torn away by the current. His hand anchored to the knob, he talked his near-frozen legs into feeling for a rock or some refuse he might use to propel himself up out of the water and onto the tree.

  Bang! Something heavy-a smaller tree or orphaned canoe, perhaps-slammed into him, pressing the wind out of his lungs and nearly sending him back under. But Terry McGuinn, calling on whatever strength he held in reserve, kept himself up and eyed the flotsam that had almost cast him to his fate. He had been wrong, as wrong as he had ever been, for the thing that had hit him with such fury was neither a tree nor a canoe. It was the body of the poor footballer Zoe had lured out of the bar less than two hours ago. The bullet wound had destroyed the lad’s once-handsome face, but the shine of his wet, rich black skin under the moonlight showed his beautifully sculpted muscles, muscles now as useless as the prayers of the Brit soldiers who had kneeled before McGuinn and begged for mercy.

  McGuinn bowed his head over the body, not in prayer, but in frustration. It was his attempt to save the lad that had gotten his own self shot in the shoulder and caused him to go tumbling into the river. With a gentle pat goodbye, Terry maneuvered the lad under the tree and sent the body on its way. As he did so, a bullet bit into the pulp of the tree not a few centimeters from his hand. He had no more time to mourn the boy. It was his life at stake now and he was determined not to die on someone else’s terms.

  I’m not sure what roused me finally. It might have been the snapping of a twig, the echo of another gunshot, or the sound of soft steps on the forest floor. My headache was better, if not fully gone, and the fog had lifted both inside and outside my skull. The s
ky was lightening in preparation for dawn, but I was still a little disoriented and stiff from the awkward position I’d had to keep myself in. Then things got very real all at once.

  I heard footsteps, rapid footsteps coming my way. I forced myself up out of the little hollow to peek over the fallen trees that had sheltered me. And there, two hundred or so feet away, running right at me was the fox. It was impossible to mistake that bulky suit. Bulky suit or not, the fox ran gracefully through the woods. One big problem with that suit was the eye slit in the face mask. It didn’t allow for much peripheral vision and when running, it wouldn’t allow for very good vision straight ahead either. The fox hadn’t seen me.

  I tucked my head back behind the trees, pulled the.38 out of my waistband, and checked that my one round was in the right chamber. I had to act quickly now as dawn couldn’t be more than a minute or two away and the fox would soon be on me. Figuring the fox might try to take cover where I had passed the last few hours and that he wouldn’t be able to leap over the top, especially not in that suit, I crawled around to the side of the felled trees that followed the downhill slope. That was the path of least resistance and even if the fox turned in the other direction, I would have a pretty clear shot at his back.

  I did what I had done during Cutthroat and made a bipod of my arms, but as I took square aim at the fox, something struck me. There was a familiarity in the fox’s gait, things about the way it moved that I recognized. Renee! Fuck, it was Renee and she was turning toward me. I clicked back the hammer and began to squeeze the trigger when the woods exploded with thunder. The fox wrenched sideways, then tumbled forward, landing right in front of me.

  I yanked the straps and pulled off her face mask. I’d been right. She was breathing hard, her face wet with perspiration and twisted in frustration. Still, her mouth smiled a little bit up at me. But before I could say a word, another figure appeared, standing above us. Jim.