Gun Church (2 page)

So much for my fantasies of the St. Pauli Girl. It was bad enough to be compared to their fathers, but grandfathers! I’d hit a new penis-shriveling low.

“Thanks, Renee. This jacket’s probably older than your grandpa.”

I was exaggerating, but not wildly. My mom had gotten me the brown corduroy blazer on the day in late ’79 when my first novel,
Beatnik
Soufflé
, had been bought by the legendary Moira Blanco at Ferris, Ledoux. Moira was legendary for more than her editorial skills. She had a writing stable full of the decade’s angriest young men shuttling in and out of her offices and bedroom. As she got older, the men got younger, less angry, and less talented. I was amazed that the jacket, which smelled of ancient chalk dust and was worn shiny at the elbows, still fit like it did the day I got it.

“Mr. Crable … Mr. Trimble … Good job, Jim.”

“Thanks, Professor Weiler.” Jim didn’t brush my sleeve or offer a flirtatious smile. Good thing, as I didn’t think I had much more shrivel room left.

“Mr. Vuchovich … ”

Frank Vuchovich came to collect his paper, but never left. He was a small, wispy kid who cast a bigger shadow across my desk than his stature might have suggested.

I looked up, really looking at Vuchovich for the first time. He had inky black hair, a twisted beak of a nose, and opaque eyes that peered through slits in a mournful Slavic face. There were many such faces in Brixton and neighboring counties. A large percentage of the local population was descended from the families of the Eastern and Central Europeans who had come to work the area mines over a century ago. Most of the men still worked the mines or in the paper mills.

“Is there something else, Mr. Vuchovich?”

The kid didn’t move, didn’t speak, but screwed his face into a red twisted mess that was only vaguely human. Just because I no longer had the rage in me didn’t mean I was blind to it. And once I recognized it, I forced myself to look away from Vuchovich’s face and scan down. The kid was dressed in military fatigues covered by an oversized black trench coat. As I focused more carefully, I noticed an elastic strap and a leather band slung under the kid’s left arm.

“Shit!” I thought I heard myself say.

Before the word was fully out of my mouth, Frank had pulled a dark blue hunk of metal out from under his coat and was now pointing it at my nose. It took a second for me to accept what was going on. The world was at a standstill. I was lightheaded. My hearing took on that bizarre windy quality like when I was a kid and I’d hold two empty cardboard towel rolls up to my ears. I could make out distinct noises: the scraping of grit trapped between the chairs and the tile floor, the scuffling of feet, the snapping of gum, the hammer clicking back under Vuchovich’s thumb. As distinct as they all were, they sounded as far away as my old life. That all changed when Vuchovich squeezed the trigger.

I was still alive and, all things considered, I was in better shape than the blackboard. Unfortunately, my left ear hadn’t stopped ringing and the burn on my cheek was hurting like a bastard. The stink of my singed hair was masked by the puff of gun powder residue that came in the immediate wake of the shot. My initial reaction, after the kid had inched the barrel away from my nose and put a hole in the blackboard, was relief: relief I hadn’t shit my pants or pissed down my sock. I had had all the indignity I could handle for one lifetime, thank you very much. The last twenty years hadn’t left much pride in the tank and there was nowhere left to fall after BCCC.

The acrid scent of spent powder, the sickening stink of singed hair, and burnt skin brought it all back to me: the smell of my dad’s suicide. Suddenly, I was twelve years old again at the summer house on the lake. My mom and sister were in town shopping when I heard it. I didn’t know what it was exactly. I knew what it wasn’t. Why would my dad light a firecracker inside the house anyway? He was at his desk, but it wasn’t him I looked at. What I remembered most vividly was first staring at the curtains: those fussy, frilly, white lace curtains that my mother adored and he detested. They were splattered with his blood like a sneering last “Fuck you!” to my mom. His head was thrown back over the ledge of the chair as if he were studying the morning sun through the shattered window behind him. The image of him, of the curtains, of the gun on the planked floor, comes back to me sometimes, but I had shut away the fresh smell of his death the way a kid buries something in his backyard and forgets about it.

About two hours had passed since the first shot. In the meantime, the brooding Mr. Vuchovich hadn’t put another round in anything more threatening than an overhead light fixture. He’d herded the other students and me into a corner at the back of the classroom, away from the windows. The kid had planted himself in the opposite corner, across from the door. Anyone making a run for it or attempting to storm the classroom via the door would’ve been quite dead quite quickly. The state and local police had done as expected. They had cell-phoned, texted, bull-horned, cajoled, coaxed, negotiated in all manner and forms. They had offered him food, friendship, psychiatric help, a bus, a car, a helicopter, a lawyer, his priest, his mom, his dad, his stepdad, and his ex-girlfriend. They’d offered up everything short of hookers and an all-expense-paid trip to Vegas, but the problem wasn’t theirs. Apparently, Frank Vuchovich didn’t seem interested in doing much of anything except brooding.

Given the minor nature of my injuries and my close proximity to Renee, I suppose things could have been worse, much worse. The St. Pauli Girl had had her arm looped through mine, her head pressed against my chest. It probably made her feel safe, like being close to Grandpa. Whatever the reason, I was glad for the touch. The brief affairs I had managed since coming to Brixton were of the roll-over-and-feign-sleep or take-a-shower-and-get-the-fuck-outta-there variety. However hopefully my dalliances would begin, they always ended in disappointment.

With the coeds, the disappointment was categorically mutual. The adjuncts were another matter. The adjuncts had usually read me or at least heard of me. The ones who’d read me expected … I didn’t know what the hell they expected. Maybe the Kipster, maybe somebody more like one of my ultra-hip ’80s cool-boy protagonists: greedy, coked out, and horny, with a taste for ruby port and tawny pussy. They certainly didn’t expect me: a bitter, talentless, middle-aged boor. The ones who had only heard of me expected some hard-drinking romantic hybrid of Hemingway (pre-shotgun) and Mailer (post-stabbing). I’m not sure what I expected—probably very little—but I always hoped for Amy. Disappointment was inevitable.

I tried engaging Vuchovich in conversation, which netted the reply, “Shut the fuck up and get back in the corner.”

Hey, I didn’t need to be told twice. I guess I felt some responsibility for the students, but I wasn’t exactly overwhelmed by it. Look, I didn’t know these kids and they sure didn’t know me. They were in community college, for fuck’s sake—the academic equivalent of jerking off. What the hell did these kids think they were going to get out of this? They were sleepwalking in the land of denial. It was a land I was well familiar with. Maybe if we got out alive, I’d draw them a road map.

I may not have had any attachment to my students, but I didn’t
want
anything to happen to them. They had as much right to fuck up their lives as I’d had, even if they were apt to do it in less spectacular fashion. I had once been good with people. “A real schmoozer,” Bart Meyers used to say. But that was a long time ago, before I’d become disconnected from my wife, my life, and my talent. I was struggling with how to approach Vuchovich when circumstance forced the issue.

Jim Trimble jumped to his feet. “This is bullshit!” he growled.

That impressed the hell out of me. While I hadn’t stooped to begging Frank for my life and the lives of my students, I hadn’t exactly acted very heroically either. I decided right then and there, that if we came through this, to give Jim a second chance.

“Sit down, Jim!” I got up, stepping between Vuchovich and Jim. “Sit down!” I repeated, actually shoving Jim away. “Go sit next to Renee.”

I took a few tentative steps toward Vuchovich. Frank raised his weapon, but he was sufficiently sharp not to move out of his corner. After spending the last two hours with him, I figured Tom Clancy novels were probably Frank’s favorite masturbation material. No doubt he was acutely aware of the snipers on the adjoining roofs. I was sure he knew what kind of rifles and ammo they used. He was probably hard thinking about it.

A ray of light from the afternoon sun caught the raised revolver just right. Until then, I hadn’t paid it much mind. It had bullets and it went “bang.” I’d seen close up what guns could do to the human skull. What else did I need to know? But now as its blue finish gleamed in the sunlight and its unusual shadow was cast against the blackboard, I had an idea. One that, if my drug- and alcohol-atrophied brain fucked up, would likely get me killed.

“Colt Python, right? Royal Blue finish, eight-, no, six-inch barrel.”

The kid didn’t say anything, but his eyes got big and his right index finger eased off the trigger onto the trigger guard.

I kept going. “That thing on top of the barrel, that’s a ventilated rib.”

Frank was impressed. “That’s right.”

“Colt Python, the Rolls-Royce of American handguns.” I said, repeating verbatim the words Bart Meyers had said to me twenty years earlier. Truth was I knew more about the location of Schrōdinger’s cat than handguns. Let’s just say that since the day I found my father, I hadn’t been especially keen on guns. That was until I needed to write about them.

I had outlined a chapter in my second novel,
Flashing Pandora
, where my tragically cool futures-trading prince, Kant Huxley, and the eponymous Pandora are confronted outside CBGB by the gun-toting Harper Marx, one of Huxley’s ruined partners. Kant Huxley and Harper Marx, indeed! Christ, I used to think I was so fucking witty. Could I have been any more pretentious? I heard Joe Heller thought I was a schmuck for riffing on what he’d done with names in
Catch-22
. He was right.

In any case, I had foreshadowed that scene earlier in the book when Kant is forced to improvise a new trading strategy as a crisis in the Middle East
—yeah, like that could ever happen
—forces oil prices to soar. Pandora, who up until that point had been cool to Huxley’s advances, gets totally hot for him while watching him ad-lib a new strategy with billions of dollars on the line. Later in the book, when Kant feels Pandora slipping away, he pays the desperate Marx to act the role of the vengeful partner. Of course it all goes wrong in the end.

“It has to be a distinctive-looking gun,” I had told Bart.

Bart, who was a complete gun nut, had first selected a Luger. “Behold!” he said, carefully removing the Luger from its original packaging, handling it as delicately as a slippery newborn. He laid it across the palms of his white gloves. “Fine German craftsmanship and machining; an intricate firing mechanism, beautifully balanced, and its shape … Kipster, there are few things on this earth as immediately recognizable simply by its shape than a Luger.”

“No, Bart. I want something brutal and American, the firearms equivalent of a muscle car.”

“I’ve got just the thing: an elegant beast.” With that, he curled the fingers of my left hand around the grip of a hefty, blue metal revolver with a weird-looking barrel. “Meet the Colt Python .357 Magnum: the Rolls-Royce of American handguns. That’s a 1955, one of the first Royal Blues with a six-inch barrel off the production line.”

Now as I stood across the classroom from Vuchovich, I struggled to remember what else Bart had taught me that day nearly three decades back and how I had used it in the book. Problem was he hadn’t told me much.

I played for time. “Is the Python yours?”

A smile. “It’s mine now.”

Good. This was progress. I gave myself an invisible pat on the back.

“A 1955?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Vuchovich, his cold eyes receding into their original broody slits. “
You
tell me, since you seem to know so much.”

This was not progress. In the span of a few seconds I’d changed the dynamic from common ground into a pissing contest.

“That’s a trick question, Mr. Vuchovich,” I said, inching slowly closer. “I’d have to see the serial number.”

The smile turned malevolent, detached—a smile as disconnected from joy as a legless man’s collection of spare shoes. His finger was back on the trigger. “You think you’re pretty clever, don’t you?”

Clever! I hated the word. Clever is what my father used to call me. I wasn’t smart or bright or talented. I was clever. Drunk as he was most of the time, I suppose I should have been pleased he noticed I was alive.

I found that I was no longer inching toward Vuchovich, but taking full strides. The room got deadly silent.

“Hold the gun out into the light again!” I barked at the kid.

He complied, extending his arm and lifting the Colt so that it was once again captured by the sun. I was now no more than a few feet away and on a very, very lonely island.

The scene in
Flashing Pandora
, as originally conceived, had Harper Marx angrily waving the gun at Kant and Pandora. Kant, as always, would act like he had everything under control, which—having paid Marx off to load the burly gun with blanks—Kant would assume he had. Already rendered impotent, literally and figuratively, by his financial ruination and impending trial, Marx had different plans. There would be no blanks in this gun. He meant to kill Pandora, the only possession in Kant’s life that was more to him than just another proper noun. I needed a way for Kant Huxley to prevent Harper Marx from taking a shot at him after shooting Pandora.

“That’s easy, Kipster,” Bart said. “Have Kant grab the cylinder and hold it tight against the gun frame.”

“Grab the cylinder? That’s fucking crazy!”

“Here, try it. There’s not a person alive who can exert enough trigger pressure to make the cylinder spin if it’s being held properly. Pull the hammer back and then when I grab the cylinder, try to pull the trigger. Ready?”