Gun Church

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  I grabbed her biceps and pushed her away. Not because I could feel everyone in the lobby watching us. Everyone but the cat. The cat couldn’t give a fuck and neither did I. I pushed her away because this wasn’t the way I wanted it to happen. I’d wanted her respect, not this. Falling into bed for us would have been as easy as falling down and if we were going to fall, I didn’t want it to be about how unhappy she was with Peter Moreland.

  “I’m sorry, Amy. I can’t do this,” I said, looping a strand of her hair behind her ear.

  I moved her gently aside and made for the lobby door. I needed air, more air than was in the hotel lobby or maybe in all of Manhattan. Thank goodness she didn’t follow me out. I couldn’t have withstood a scene out there on the street. That was such a part of the dance of Amy and the Kipster. I so didn’t want that to be part of my life again. Bent over, taking deep, slow breaths, I cursed Meg for doing this to me. And knowing Amy could not stay inside the lobby forever, I took my hands off my knees and walked east along 44th towards 5th Avenue.

  As I walked, I thought I heard a familiar sound. It was the sound of a truck’s ignition. Jim’struck! Jim’s truck sounded like that. I was so fucked up that I actually started looking for his old F-150. I didn’t find it, of course. Hearing it was a product of wishful thinking and a longing to be rescued. I needed more than just fresh air. I ran across 44th, headed back west and ducked into the garage where the Porsche was parked. From the entrance of the garage, I watched the front of the hotel. When Amy finally left, I went back up to my room and retrieved the.38.

  There had been a time when I knew exactly where to find trouble and what kind of trouble I would find when I got there. But the trouble I had in mind would have a gun in its hand, a gun pointed at me, and there would be a gun in my hand too. There was a gun in my hand, a.38 with one bullet in the chamber. Then I put it away.

  Having exhausted all the old familiar places in Manhattan, I drove the Kipster’s Porsche to some of his former Brooklyn drug haunts. Brooklyn was where I went when I was desperate for blow, when I didn’t give a shit about how many times the coke had been stepped on. What I discovered was that in my absence more than just the Liars Pub had been turned into a theme park. The whole of New York City, it seemed, had been scrubbed clean and neutered, turned into a silly Las Vegas hotel-like version of itself. Even Red Hook, once the toughest neighborhood in all of New York, had gotten its ass wiped and been forced to take a long soapy shower. I mean, it had an IKEA and cutesy little tapas bars.

  Good thing about Brooklyn is that it’s big and I knew there couldn’t have been enough soap and disinfectant to scrub behind the ears of all its neighborhoods. About twenty minutes or so after I’d left Red Hook, I was driving up Linden Boulevard at a crawl. I pulled off Linden onto a side street and into the mostly vacant parking lot of a strip mall. It was the time of morning when it was either very early or very late, the time when too much alcohol, frayed nerves, and perceived slights led to blood. And the only business still open in the strip was what looked to be a third-rate topless joint. The lurid red neon sign flashed Black Honey. If I couldn’t find trouble in East Flatbush at that time of the morning in front of a topless bar named Black Honey, I wasn’t going to find it anywhere. Forget Red Hook. Much easier, I thought, to pick a gunfight at a topless bar than a tapas bar.

  With the motor still running, I sat on the front fender of the Porsche. The.38 was in my waistband and tucked behind the bottom of my famous brown corduroy blazer. I could hear the muffled thumping of the drum machines through the door and walls of Black Honey. No one entered or left, but it was only a matter of time till somebody came outside to smoke a cigarette or a joint or tried to cop some drugs to keep them awake till the sun rose up. I didn’t have long to wait.

  Three hard-looking black men came staggering out the front door of the club. They were all in their early thirties. At first, they didn’t notice me at all. They were just laughing a little too loudly, fist-pounding, jostling each other around: the same shit all half-in-the-bag guys do outside topless bars. Then one of the men noticed me noticing them.

  “What you starin’ at?” he said. The smile disappeared from his face.

  The smiles on his friends’ faces went to that same mysterious place. Except for the continued muted pounding of the drum machine, the world got eerily quiet.

  “I’m staring at you. Something wrong with that?”

  For a brief second I thought they might let it go at that: just dismiss me as some stupid old white boy who didn’t know how to mind his business or his manners. And maybe if it had been earlier in the night, or if there hadn’t been so much to drink, or if … But it wasn’t earlier and I wasn’t going to get dismissed, not easily, anyway.

  “Will you listen to this cracker motherfucka?”

  “Yeah, you get the fuck outta here, you know what’s good for your ass.”

  “But I don’t feel like going,” I said.

  The third man, the man who hadn’t yet spoken, reached around behind him. That’s when the rush went full throttle and I got that tunnel vision thing. But this wasn’t the chapel and these guys weren’t playing Cutthroat. They weren’t playing, period. Jim’s words rang in my head, “The Colonel used to say it wasn’t a sport unless both sides knew they were playing.” I had no vest, not even a white T-shirt to protect me. Never mind that I had only one round in the.38. I knew it was possible to divide one by three, but this was gun math and bullets didn’t work that way. And suddenly my rush was overwhelmed by fear.

  I moved my hand slowly under my jacket, feeling confident I could get to the.38 before the man reaching behind him could draw, aim, and fire. Then what? I was hot shit with a gun in my hand and bullets in my gun, but what would I be worth with an empty cylinder? A lot of my life had been a bluff, but bluffing wasn’t going to get me very far after shooting a man through his heart in the parking lot of a titty bar in the armpit of Brooklyn. I froze for a second time that night. Good thing too, because when the man brought his arm back around in front of him, his hand wasn’t holding a gun, but a badge.

  “Get gone, motherfucka.”

  He didn’t need to tell me twice and I got gone.

  Twenty-Seven

  Aftershocks

  I’d been back from New York for about a week, and that week had been a tale of two lives: both mine. On the one hand, everything was exactly the same. On the other, everything was exactly different. It’s fucked up and a little hard to explain because if you were looking from the outside in, from the vantage point when crystal clarity just begins to soften at the edges, you wouldn’t have noticed the spectrum shift.

  I got up early, wrote, crawled back into bed with Renee for a few minutes, went running with Jim, taught my classes, went shooting with Jim, came home and wrote, ate with Renee, wrote, fucked, and went to bed. That was pretty much my routine before I left for New York and it was my routine when I returned. The transition felt seamless, like the perfect pass of a baton during a relay race. I had handed off the baton on my way out of town and grabbed it back on my way in. I don’t think I could have adequately expressed to Renee how happy I was to be, for lack of a better word, home.

  But something had changed and, at first, I could only describe the symptoms of the change, not what they meant or what had caused them. Renee seemed pleased enough at my return, but she wasn’t herself, or more accurately, she was like her old self. The fucking between us, which had undergone a steady transformation from ferocious and hungry to delicate and soulful, had turned back again. Since I’d gotten home, she had insisted on me taking her from behind and urged me to do it harder and harder still. When I’d crawl into bed with her in the morning, she wanted me in her mouth much more than she wanted my arms around her. She was back to making up and dressing like the St. Pauli Girl. Lots more makeup. Lots less clothing. It was almost as if she were trying to make me conscious again of just how young she really was and to make me wonder what it was we were doing together. If that was he
r intent, it was working.

  Initially, I put it down to me. That I was sending out weird vibes because I regretted my decision not to take her with me to New York and worse, that I felt guilty for kissing Amy while I was there. Can you even believe it, Kip Weiler feeling guilty for kissing another woman? It was my ex-wife, for fuck’s sake, and it wasn’t like I initiated it. Compared to some of the Kipster’s past antics, kissing Amy was like an act of atonement. Still, it felt like a betrayal. I’d never understood what that word meant before now, but I knew it wasn’t the kiss that was the betrayal. It was the way I reacted to hearing Amy’s voice on the phone, the way I got hard at the brush of her hand against my cheek.

  I came around to see that it wasn’t all me, that Renee had a little residual anger and resentment over my not taking her with me. Probably more than a little. But when I tried to discuss it with her, she either denied it or put the onus on me. “It’s in your head,” she’d say and give me a dismissive kiss. Whether it was her or me or both of us, at least I got to a point where it made some sense. None of that, though, could explain away Jim’s behavior.

  Jim’s I-know-all-about-you-Kip-Weiler smile made an unwelcome comeback. I can’t say that I liked it either, not for a second. I wasn’t sure what had caused him to start flashing it again. I was pretty certain he hadn’t noticed me pilfer the Smith amp; Wesson before I left for New York, and I made quick work of slipping it back into the Colonel’s duffel bag the first chance I got. But even if he knew I’d nicked the.38, I couldn’t really see him getting too bent out of shape over it. In fact, given the basics of Brixton logic, he should have been proud of me. Of course, he might have been a little less proud had he an inkling of how close I’d come to getting into a gunfight with an off-duty cop. But it was more than just his smile that caught me off guard.

  When we got up into the woods that Monday, he had some unexpected news for me that was more unwelcome than his smile.

  “Time to move up to a real weapon,” he said, handing me the.45 Browning. “You’re good with the.38. Better than I thought you’d be. Let’s see what you can do with this.”

  I wasn’t ready. I was barely used to the.38. I’d fired the Browning a few times over the last several months with very mixed results. It was a lot of gun for me. Even with sissy loads in the clip, it had wicked kickback. Jim was great with it, but he was great with anything he put in his hand. And if what Jim had said before I left was still the plan, I was about to step into the chapel wearing only a vest for protection, with an unfamiliar gun in my hand.

  “But I haven’t really gotten good with the.38 yet.”

  “Modesty doesn’t sound right coming out of your mouth, Kip. You were good enough with it. Sometimes good enough is good enough. It’s time to move on.”

  “Says who?”

  I saw something in his eyes and in the shape of his lips that looked more cruel than wounded, but he caught himself.

  “You know how it is,” he said. “This isn’t a democracy. Things get decided for you when we shoot in the chapel. You just have to trust we know what we’re doing. We’ve been right so far, haven’t we? Someday you’ll be deciding things for yourself. Just not yet. I thought you understood that for us the chapel is life and we need the rules and rituals. It’s what separates us from each other and from the rest of the world. I get that it isn’t your whole world and that someday you might leave and not come back, but you can’t be treated specially or it takes the meaning away for the rest of us.”

  He kept saying we and us, but it felt an awful lot like the decisions were his and his alone. I mean, fuck, I was already edgy enough about shooting with only a vest and this sudden shift in weapon gave me no comfort at all. Nor was I reassured by his vague promise of future choice. I’d have to live long enough to exercise that franchise.

  Jim saw the apprehension on my face and was quick to reassure me. “Don’t worry about it, Kip. I’ll be in there with you and I won’t let you kill me. You’ll be fine like you always are.”

  I was glad he was so sure because I wasn’t. After seeing him clip the maintenance guy in the arm, my faith in Jim’s guarantees had been shaken a bit. So I took our practice sessions in the woods a little more seriously. They became a lot more businesslike and a lot less fun. Still, the potential danger of it gave me some wicked rushes.

  The most unnerving moment since coming back to Brixton came in the dark and quiet of my bedroom. It was Friday night. Renee and I had just finished fucking our brains out. We were just lying there in the dark, me staring up at the ceiling, Renee still shuddering slightly. Soon she’d get up, go into the shower, and I’d follow. But that Friday night, Renee didn’t immediately get up to shower and her shudders weren’t the quiet little aftershocks of orgasm. She rolled over to face me. She was crying, her tears pouring onto the bed. I reached out to hold her, but she slapped my arms away.

  “What is it?”

  She said, “I love you and I know you don’t love me.”

  I wanted to lie to her. It would have been hard not to want to lie to her, even for the Kipster, but I couldn’t. “Being with you these last few months has been wonderful. Our time together has been the healthiest relationship I’ve ever had, but I don’t suppose that’s love. I understand that that’s not enough for you.”

  “Kip, please go back to New York. Tonight. Right now! I’ll send your things after you. Just get in your car and go before it’s too late.”

  “Too late?”

  I reached out for her again, but she was already rolling out of bed, heading for the shower. I stumbled after her, but she’d locked the bathroom door. Eventually, I went back to bed and passed out.

  When I woke up early Saturday morning, she was gone. Renee hadn’t packed up her things or left a note. It wasn’t anything so dramatic as all that. By the next day, by the time I returned from my morning run with Jim, she was back. I tried asking her about what she’d said, about my leaving before it was too late, but she acted as if I were mad, that I must’ve dreamed it. I might have very well been mad. Still, I hadn’t dreamed it.

  Twenty-Eight

  Terrible Twos

  More had changed than the shifts in the tide among Renee, Jim, and me. Gun Church had taken a dark turn. Whether it was playing Cutthroat, Fox Hunt, my trip to New York, or the need to self-destruct, I couldn’t say. Maybe the fear over having gotten the deal and the need to actually deliver a manuscript had pushed me over the line.

  McGuinn’s notebook was filled with bomb diagrams, drawings of booby traps, plans for ambushes. There were names and places, body counts, reports of how specific operations had turned out: some bloody and successful, some bloody and disastrous. By the time I’d read halfway through his notes, I was numb to the havoc, the blood, the destruction, the baby’s arm lying in the road, hand still clutching a rattle. That was the horror I believe he was getting at: how even the slaughter of women, children, and friends had become as mundane as the image that looked back at him from the mirror every morning. But that was not the book I wanted to write nor the book I believe he’d wanted me to write. There was no deeper truth in the mundanity of violence. That truth sat on the surface and required no mining at all. That book had been written a thousand times over, and the truth of it had played out across the entire twentieth century and continued unabated into the next. There were other truths he wanted exposed, though he was vague about them.

  The only deeper truth I’d ever exposed was that I was a fraud. My work, even my early good work, said almost nothing about the human condition. What it said a lot about was a particular time-the 1980s; a particular place-New York City; and a particular group of people-voracious yuppies who were nothing more than ridiculous children in adult bodies who had never grown out of their terrible twos. What is the deeper truth of a two-year-old? I want. I want. I want. My books were snapshots, cute snapshots, better than most of the period, perhaps, but not worth much more than an airing every twenty years so that people might say, “How nice.
How quaint.”

  What happened to the man I thought of as McGuinn was that he lost his soul, not by killing. It wasn’t about the killing itself. I don’t think that troubled him, really. Nor was his giving me his notebook an act of a man who had found God or cared to find him. Religion wasn’t the point. He had lost his soul and I think he wanted me to find out why and to retrieve it somehow, whether he was alive to see it or not.

  McGuinn was numb with cold, exhausted, and bleeding from his shoulder wound, but he had found himself a place to hide that the others were unlikely to find.

  He went back over it in his mind; how after the incident in the alley, a week had passed before they contacted him again-Zoe waiting for him outside the front door to his flat. How she had stayed that night and the next. How they had fucked until they were raw, only to do it again and again. How in spite of her orgasms, she seemed as far away as the streets of Belfast. Two days later, when she left him, Zoe gave him the ultimatum he was sure would come.

  “If you ever want me again, you have to meet us tonight,” she said, handing McGuinn a slip of paper. “We’ll have company for you, an old friend of yours.”

  McGuinn would have gone regardless of that last wee bit of enticement. He had to know what these people knew of him, about who he really was, and how they had targeted him. What good would it do him to run if he was easily found out?

  When he showed at the address that night, they were waiting for him and this time there were more of them and better prepared. He was asked politely at the point of several guns to join them in the back of a van. Before he got in, they took his Sig and a black bag was thrown over his head. It was taped loosely around his neck. He’d done this routine before, from both sides. They weren’t going to kill him, at least not yet. It was very odd, for as they drove there was little or no chatter in the van, but McGuinn felt a familiar, almost comfortable presence that he could not make sense of. There was nothing and no one in this town he was familiar with.