Gun Church (15 page)

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.”

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.

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.