Gun Church

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  On my way to the Dew Drop, I stopped at the hardware store in town to buy a package of light bulbs. My ribs were sore and I was short of breath, so I sat down on a stack of bags of rock salt. I guess I was too preoccupied by my pain to notice I had unwanted company.

  “What’s the matter, pussy, your ribs hurtin’ you?” It was Stan Petrovic. He had a bag of screws in his hand and a cold, drunken stare on his face. “I played whole fucking games in the NFL with broken ribs and two wrecked knees.”

  “Good for you, Stan. Maybe they’ll throw you a parade someday.”

  I wasn’t in the mood or in shape for one of our little skirmishes, but since he’d hurt Renee and hit me in the back of the head, I had no patience for his bullshit.

  “What’s the matter, your asshole hurt from letting Jim stick his fist up there? You ain’t such a hero without a gun in your hand, huh? Think you have the balls to vest-shoot with me?”

  That got my attention. One thing I’d found over the last few months was that the people who showed up at the chapel kept their mouths shut tight about it. Over that period of time, whether on the street or in school, I’d crossed paths with everyone who had ever been to the chapel. The only time I’d mentioned it was to Meg and I felt guilty about that. Even the maintenance guy hadn’t alluded to the chapel when he pulled me aside not twenty minutes earlier. Not once did any of them even hint at our connection. There wasn’t a nod, a wink, or a gesture. Nothing. And now this drunken fool was standing in the aisle of the hardware store talking about the chapel like it was common knowledge.

  “Keep it down, Stan. You know the rules.”

  “Fuck you and fuck the rules.”

  “Shut your mouth.”

  His saw-toothed smile was raw and cruel. “Why don’t you do it for me, cunt?”

  I thought to speak, but instead I planted my left fist into Stan’s groin. It wasn’t the hardest punch I’d ever thrown. It didn’t have to be. Petrovic groaned, grabbed his balls, and fell to his knees. He teetered for a second or two and collapsed backwards into the shelves that held boxes and bags of nails and screws. A few of the boxes crashed to the floor.

  “Don’t fuck with me again, Stan,” I growled, standing over him. “Fuck with me again and I’ll kill you.”

  When I turned to leave, I noticed everyone watching. Half of them looked about ready to applaud. I just wanted to go get something to eat and read the paper in peace.

  Thirty-Three

  Redtails

  The Dew Drop Inn was what you might have expected: a seedy and frayed hole in the wall, a working man’s bar. There were two beer pulls, one for light beer and one for regular. There was one kind of scotch, one kind of bourbon, one kind of vodka. No one ordered mojitos. Even the burger choices were limited: with or without cheese, with or without fries. If you wanted avocadoes or roasted poblano strips, you were shit out of luck. As I anticipated, the place was pretty empty except for Richie the barman and a few stubborn flies that forgot it was December. Richie nodded hello. I nodded back.

  “I’ll have a burger with cheese and fries and a ginger ale,” I said, making my way to a back booth.

  I settled in and unfolded the paper. The Brixton Banner was birdcage lining, as local as local papers get. It featured articles on subjects as diverse as advances in coal-mining technology, belt tightening in the lumber industry, and who had won the charity pierogi-eating contest at St. Stanislaus Church. The war in Afghanistan was reduced to a few inches worth of body counts buried between the car ads and obits. At the end of things with Janice Nadir, reading the Banner in bed became my way of telling her we were done for the day, that it was time for her to run along back home to Jerry.

  My favorite things in the Banner were the letters to the editor. No highfalutin’ horseshit in Brixton, just conspiratorial paranoia at its most rabid. Distrust and hatred for government-federal, state, and local-ran deep around here and with it came the usual substrains of white supremacy, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, et cetera. I loved the letters that tried to tie all of these things into one tidy, hateful little package. My all-time favorite had been this one letter from a woman who claimed that the area coal mining was just a government cover for digging secret shafts. That the shafts were to be used to protect the Jews’ money during the nuclear war being instigated by the dark races in order to wipe out the Aryan peoples. Now, I’m sure letters of this nature get sent to the New York Times on a daily basis-the difference being that the Banner actually published them, and frequently.

  Just as I unfurled the paper and began to scan the letters, Richie arrived with my ginger ale. He asked me how I was doing, why I hadn’t been in lately. I said something generic about being busy and watching my weight. That seemed to satisfy him and he left, saying my burger would be up in a few minutes. When I turned back to the paper, my eyes drifted to a column to the left of the letters with a heading: Murdered (continued from page 1).

  In New York City in the ’80s, when homicide was a cottage industry, I would have simply ignored the headline. But these days, in these parts, murder wasn’t usually part of the landscape. Premature death was common enough in a region where mining and logging were how folks earned their keep. There were plenty of hunting accidents and alcohol-fueled suicides too. There was the occasional migrant worker killed by a piece of farm equipment, but murder was rare. I could only remember two other homicides in seven years: one stemming from a barroom brawl. The other involved a woman who stabbed her husband through the heart with a kitchen knife because he’d pawned her Lladro figurines for meth money.

  I skipped the letters for the moment, reading instead the continuation of the story from page one. The victim’s body, it said, was discovered Sunday morning by two deer hunters just across the state line, along the banks of a tributary to the river that fed the Crooked River Falls. The victim was found in a car registered to his father, his body with three or four gunshot wounds. One of the hunters said, “We just figured he was drunk and sleeping it off, but when we got close you could see the bullet holes in the windshield and that he was dead.”

  The hunters were still pretty shaken and though they weren’t considered suspects, they were being questioned by the sheriff’s department. There was a hotline number to call, but not much else. It was only when I backtracked, turned to the front page and saw the full headline that I went cold.

  REDTAILS RECEIVER MURDERED

  A photo of a handsome African American kid with a white, self-assured smile stared up at me. He was wearing a football jersey over his shoulder pads, and holding his helmet tucked between his chest and his left arm. The logo on his helmet was that of a bird of prey, wings spread, talons unsheathed. The caption said his name was Lance Vaughn Mabry and that he had been a starting wideout for the Coggins and Hale College Redtails.

  Coggins and Hale was a small school about twenty miles across the state line from Brixton. Academically, it was the four-year equivalent of BCCC: a place to jerk off while earning a degree of dubious quality and value. But for a school its size, it had a solid football program that had the reputation of producing good-quality, late-round, NFL draft picks. According to the first paragraph of the article, Lance Vaughn Mabry had been on just such a career path. Not anymore.

  By the time Richie brought over my food, I’d read the story twice. I no longer had an appetite. I was upset for the kid’s family, sure, but that wasn’t what was affecting me. It was hard for me to ignore the incredible similarities between this kid’s fate and the scene I’d written into Gun Church after my concussion-induced dream of McGuinn in the river during Fox Hunt. The victim in my book, just exactly like Mabry, was a young black athlete. In the book, he’s lured out of a bar by Zoe, the character based loosely on the St. Pauli Girl and named after the woman who had been Peter Moreland’s country club date all those years ago. Once outside, he’s abducted, dragged out into the woods to be hunted down, and shot like a wild animal, his lifeless body left to rot out in the countryside.

 
Although they’d found Mabry’s body in an area much like I’d described in the book, the kid was in his own car and there was no mention of his being lured by anyone to go anywhere. There were other differences too, but I still couldn’t get my head around it. I threw a twenty-dollar bill on the table and left, taking the paper with me and leaving the burger for the flies. Richie might’ve nodded and said something. He might not have.

  I was halfway home before I got my legs back under me and remembered about meeting the guy from the BCCC maintenance crew. I was too preoccupied to care and whatever he had to tell me would keep. In the car, I listened to the local news-radio station. The murder was the lead story, but their report was equally as sketchy as the Banner’s. Back home, I planted myself in front of the TV, something I almost never did. And though the TV news had remote pictures from where the body had been discovered, they had no fresh details to tell. I got out my laptop and read and reread and reread again the scene from Gun Church.

  Levon Dexter felt as if he was gagging on his own thundering heart as he ran through the brush along the riverbank, his mouth as dry as the combs of the reeds he swept out of the way that snapped back in his face as he pushed on. The muscles around his eyes, his cheeks ached from the prolonged tension, yet he felt no pain in his legs despite the blood. He knew there was blood. There had to be blood. He’d felt the nicks and cuts from the coarse grasses and brambles as they chewed into the bare skin of his ankles, calves, and thighs. The only persistent pain he felt was the burning stitch in his left side. Coach wouldn’t be happy about that. By this time in the season, Levon should have been in the kind of shape to play every down on defense and special teams without breathing too heavy.

  “Coach! Shit,” he thought to himself, “why the fuck I’m thinking about Coach now?” Even as he ran he fought the urge to stop and listen, to rest to catch his second wind. He also fought the anger in him and the desire to find a way to get that bitch who set him up. Part of him wanted a piece of her so bad he thought it would almost be worth it to sacrifice himself in order to get at her. But his instinct for survival and his daddy’s words drove him forward.

  “They can coach you stronger, boy, but they can’t teach you speed and speed is what you got. Just keep running. The rest of it will take care of itself.”

  His daddy, a hardass ex-Marine sniper, had schooled him good, so Levon had been careful to leave false traces along the way. He’d torn his shirt up and left a shred of it only a few hundred yards from where them crazy gun motherfuckers had shoved him out of the van. He’d left other shreds of shirt and pants here and there in a clear path toward the hills before doubling back and working his way along the river’s edge. They didn’t have no dogs with them as far as Levon could tell, so he didn’t worry about leaving a scent trail. He was a little concerned about the blood he guessed he was trailing as he went, but even in full moonlight it would be hard to pick up.

  Damn the full moon! If it had been cloudy or if the moon had been just a slice of itself, he might’ve risked fording the river at the point where he doubled back. If, if, if … But like Coach said, “if” was a loser’s word. Anyways, with that moon up there like it was, Levon couldn’t dare cross the river: so wide and violent along this stretch. He would be way too vulnerable. Dark black skin affords you only so much of an advantage. The light coat of mud Levon had spread over his face and body to matte the shine of his sweat would wash right off the second he hit the water. Then there was his unfamiliarity with the area. What if he made it across to the other bank and it was flat and wide open over there? He’d be too easy a target.

  No, he had come back by them, passing so close he could hear the crackle of dry grass beneath their feet. Only one of them spoke and loud, too: the old man with the Irish accent, the one that blond bitch called McGuinn. If Levon didn’t know better, he’d have thought that McGuinn was helping him out, signaling their position. But no, Levon thought, that was bullshit, a trap. He just continued on, using the roar of the river to mask his sound. Was a windy night, too, so his stirring the cattails didn’t draw any particular attention.

  He figured he must have been near parallel to where they’d cut the tape off his wrists and ankles and kicked him out of the van, so he willed himself to slow his pace and quiet his breathing. Levon didn’t stop, but his strides were careful now, measured and stealthy. He was no fool, realizing the river’s roar that helped provide cover also prevented him from hearing any trackers that were more than a few feet away. Then, in the distance, a shot. Another. Another and another. Pop. Pop. Pop, pop. Each echo seemed to overwhelm the one before it.

  A little ways farther along the bank, the river took a sharp twist and from there seemed to flow directly into a dense wood. He stilled himself completely, gathering himself as well as listening as best he could for sounds only humans make. Hearing nothing, Levon charged through the sedge and reeds for the bend in the river. By the time he made it, the stitch in his side was on fire and he could barely catch his breath. He thought about trying to cross the river here, but decided not to. He pressed his hand to his side where the stitch burned and knew immediately that the moisture on his hand wasn’t just sweat. Blood. There was blood, a lot of it, pouring out of his side. It glowed black in the moonlight. The cold water would sap his energy and he didn’t think he had the strength to make it. He needed a safe place to rest, to think.

  His daddy’s lessons came back to him again. “Most folks, they just plain lazy. Even most soldiers get that way. They just look straight on ahead of themselves or side to side. So you ever in a tight spot, boy, you get high or you get low. Most likely, they’ll walk right on past you.”

  He picked out a big old oak tree with a few thick, low-hanging branches-a tree that had stubbornly held on to many of its leaves in spite of the season. Levon was pretty sure that if he could kick off the trunk of the tree, he’d be able to grab one of the low branches and make his way up. With all those leaves still on its branches and all those gnarled and crisscrossed branches, they wouldn’t be able to spot him from the ground, full moon or not.

  Levon took several deep breaths-deep as he could, wounded like he was-and took off in a dead run for the oak. He thought he heard something to his left, a rustling of dried leaves, but did not lose focus. He had picked out a spot on the tree trunk where he would kick off with his right foot to propel himself up to that low limb. He heard the noise again, but kept thinking about what all his coaches had taught him about tackling. Focus on the ball carrier’s numbers. Stick your face mask right between those numbers, wrap your arms, and drive him into the ground. He focused on that spot on the tree and ran to it as hard as he could. This time, it wasn’t the rustling of leaves that tugged at his focus. He saw something, a flash, out of the corner of his eye. If he had held on a little bit longer, he might have heard the accompanying thunder, but he was beyond hearing, beyond pain, beyond the reach of his daddy or his coaches.

  Zoe and McGuinn heard the shots and came running. The others already had the kid’s ankles roped to the limb of a big oak, his body swaying to and fro in the stiff breeze, his lifeless fingertips no more than two or three feet off the ground. Zoe and McGuinn hung back as the others used their cell phone cameras to snap pictures with the body as if it were a fourteen-point buck …

  That was the last line I read when Renee walked through the front door.

  I didn’t have to say anything to her. “Kip, what’s wrong?”

  “That kid who was murdered.”

  “What kid? What are you talking about?”

  I handed her the paper and watched her read the story.

  “Oh, my god. That’s terrible, but what’s it got to do with you?”

  And that’s when it hit me, when Renee asked aloud the question that had been rattling around in my head for the last few hours: I had to get out of Brixton. I wasn’t thinking straight. It was the old narcissism kicking in. A black kid who just happens to be a football player gets murdered out in the woods near he
re and somehow I turn that into it being about me. How did that work exactly? What, I wrote things down on my magic laptop and poof, they came to be? I was losing my mind. The pressure of having to finish the book and anxiety over moving back to New York must have been getting to me. The time had come to relieve some of that pressure. I closed my laptop, took Renee by the hand, and walked her up the stairs to the bedroom.

  Night had fallen by the time we were done and the room was nearly pitch black. It’s hard to use the term “old times” when you’ve only been with someone for a couple of months, but that’s how it felt: like old times. She was relaxed in my arms and begged me to face her when we fucked. After each orgasm, she cuddled in my arms until one of us got an itch to begin again. This was the Renee I’d left behind when I went to New York. Being with her, inside her, felt so good and so right, I couldn’t believe I was about to tell her I was leaving. I didn’t get the chance.

  I was trying to summon up the words to say as we lay there in the dark, her back pressed against my chest, my arms surrounding her. It was incredibly quiet, but for the occasional wail of a passing train.

  “You’re leaving to go back to New York, aren’t you?” she whispered. It was perfectly loud against the utter stillness.

  “I am.”

  “Good.”

  “Do you really mean that?”

  “No and yes. You know I love you, but you don’t belong here, Ken. This isn’t your home. It never has been.”

  “It only ever felt like home with you here.”

  She spun around to face me. “Thank you for saying that.”

  “I mean it. This was a very lonely life without you.”

  “I know you mean it.” She kissed me. “I know you do.”

  She let me hold her for a little while longer. Then she took me by my hand and led me into the shower.