Gun Church (33 page)

“Sorry. So how did you—”

“eBay.”

“eBay what?”

“I always scan eBay for stuff of yours. I have signed first editions of all your books, signed paperbacks, uncorrected galleys, promotional bookstore posters, videos of your TV appearances, all kinds of shit. One day last March I saw that Moira Blanco’s daughter was selling some of her stuff on eBay and I bought it cheap. It was mostly crap, but there were these envelopes with chapters from your manuscripts. How cool is that?”

“Pretty cool,” I said, not wanting to set him off again. “But I’m still not seeing the connection between the chapter and—”

He annihilated his beer and squashed the can against the table. “Let’s get the fuck out of here. I don’t like it here as much as I thought I would.”

“The Hunt Club is gone, Jim. Humans are sentimental. The universe doesn’t give a shit.”

“Fuck the universe.”

“Doesn’t work. I’ve tried.”

He kind of snickered at that. “Yeah, well, we’ll see.” And he was out of the bar as quickly as he’d come in.

“Your friend okay?” the waitress asked, sliding the credit card receipt and a pen at me.

“Not sure,” I said, adding a twenty-dollar tip.

“Not sure of what?”

“Of anything.”

I think she said thanks, but I wasn’t even sure of that.

It had been a long time getting to Coney Island—a long time and a lot of beers. Jim had it in his head to do the stations of the Kipster’s cross. After buying two six-packs of Bud at a deli, we criss-crossed Manhattan, paying homage at sites Jim Trimble had determined were significant in my life or the lives of my characters. The drunker he got, the greater his reverence, the blurrier the lines between the Kipster and his characters, and the longer he prayed at my various altars. The only person for whom these places held any meaning was him. When we stopped at the building Kant Huxley had lived in, Jim nearly wept.
Flashing Pandora
was his favorite book ever, a point he repeated so many times during the course of our pilgrimage I wanted to scratch my own eyes out. He said he had a particular affinity for Kant Huxley. Did I know why? Did I care?

As the night wore on, it got more difficult for me to keep a lid on my emotions. Clearly, something was going on with Jim that was straying pretty far from the center line. I kept cycling through a spectrum of feelings, from anger to worry, from disappointment to fear, from boredom to disdain. At points, I even felt pity for Jim that he was so heavily invested in a writer whose time had come and gone. Still, there had to be more to it than this magical and miserable tour. Renee’s warning was never far from my thoughts, but by about one in the morning, I’d pretty much had it. I was so drained and so tired of indulging his fanboy adventures that I exploded.

“That’s it, Jim!” I yelled, slamming my hand down on the dashboard. “I want some fucking answers and I want them now. If you don’t start explaining what you’re playing at, I’m getting the fuck out of this truck.”

But if I thought my outburst would push him to melt down or to give me the answers I wanted, I was wrong. He just floored the truck, flew through a red light, and turned down Chambers Street.

“Amy’s loft is beautiful. I really like the portraits she’s done of the two of you.”

Words formed themselves in my head to say, but they caught in my throat like shards of bone. Fuck, he’d broken into the loft.

“You don’t want to yell at me,” he said, his voice feral and menacing. “The last person to do that to me was the Colonel. No one’s gonna do that to me again. Stay or go, it’s up to you, but all sorts of bad things happen when pets go off leash.”

Fuck! Now he was quoting Satan to me, literally. Although what I’d said to Jim earlier in the evening was true, that I’d forgotten my books once they’d been written, I hadn’t forgotten everything of my old work and I certainly remembered that line. In a chapter in
The Devil’s Understudy
, Satan discusses the dangers of free will with his future replacement, a young investment banker. I never thought I’d have it thrown back in my face. Where only seconds ago I’d been nearly paralyzed with fear, I was now furious. If Amy weren’t part of the equation, I might have smacked Jim across the jaw for using my own words to compare me to a dog on his tether, but Amy
was
involved and getting in one good shot wouldn’t have been worth it.

“Staying?” It wasn’t a question, not really, and ten minutes later we were across the Brooklyn Bridge, heading to Coney Island.

Jim was insistent. “Which bench was it that Romeo used? I want to sit on that bench.”

We’d come to the end of the line, the terminal station of the Kipster’s cross. In
Romeo vs. Juliet
—as Jim kept reminding me on our way here—Romeo bones his divorce lawyer on a bench in Coney Island. For reasons known only to Jim, he’d chosen this as our last stop.

“It was
that
bench,” I said, picking one out at random.

He didn’t question it and sat down on the cold moist slats, a beatific smile on his sloppy, drunken face. For all his bluster and menace, he’d believed me like a lost little boy believes the nearest grownup. I didn’t join him on the bench. It was damp and raw by the ocean, a cold fog hanging over the boardwalk like a gray veil. The wind blowing in off the Atlantic had jagged edges, the salt air cutting right through my sports jacket and sweater. I turned my collar up against the cold and damp to no avail.

“So this was the bench Romeo fucked his lawyer on, huh? I loved
Romeo
vs
.
Juliet
too. I used to jerk off imagining what it would be like having a hot girl like Romeo’s lawyer straddling me, her panties torn and her skirt flared over my lap. I asked Renee to fuck me like that once, just like in the book, but she wouldn’t. She thought it was weird. Did she ever fuck you like that, Kip?”

“I can’t remember.”

“I bet you can’t.”

“You in the mood to talk now?” I asked. “I’m freezing to death out here.”

“I don’t … feel so … good. I got … to … puke.”

He ran unsteadily across the boardwalk and down onto the sand, fell on his haunches and emptied his guts. I stood at the rail on the boardwalk above him, facing the last vestiges of the amusement park. Those rides that remained were ancient beasts, hibernating through another brutal winter. Coney Island was a hopeless place, a place for dying. Jim trudged back up onto the boardwalk, a sheen of sweat covering his ashen face.

“Let’s walk,” I said. “It’s too cold to stand still.”

Jim didn’t argue and followed me as I turned away from Coney Island and toward Brighton Beach.

“What was that crack before, Jim, quoting Satan back to me about pets off the leash?”

“I’m sorry I said that. I really am, I swear.” I thought I saw tears welling up in his eyes.

What, I thought, did a few tears matter at the edge of the ocean? His tears worried me, though. Jim was mercurial. Sure, he was sad now, but manic and belligerent too. He was the kind of drunk who beats the shit out of his wife, then tearfully swears his undying devotion to her as she spits out broken teeth. Those kinds of drunks are sorry only for themselves and that makes them dangerous.

“We’re way past sorry. What did you mean by it?”

“Did you know I got accepted into the best state university, but I stayed home in Brixton just so I could take your classes?” he said, as if he hadn’t heard the question.

“I’m honored.”

“You got me through high school. You did, you really did. I used to wish you were my dad. You would have been the coolest dad, not like the Colonel.”

“I’ve always been barely able to be responsible for myself. I would have been a nightmare as a father, Jim, but I appreciate the sentiment.”

Still choked up, he gathered himself before answering. “I wanted to give something back to you for what your books had given me, for what you meant to me. I could swear that sometimes you were writing the words in your characters’ mouths just for me.”

“Why not just come by and introduce yourself? I would have liked that.”

“Because that’s what anyone else could’ve done, but me and you, our connection is different. I knew that when I repaid my debt to you, it had to be something more than adoration. It had to be worthy of what you’d given me. When the chapter from
Flashing
Pandora
fell into my hands, it was a sign. I didn’t understand it at first, what it meant, but God is like that sometimes. He gives us the tools and signs, only we have to figure out how to use them. It was just like with the Colonel’s handgun collection; I had it, but I needed to figure out what to do with it to give it meaning.”

“God, Jim? I guess he’s moved on from burning bushes to eBay.”

“It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand,” he said, wiping tears and sweat off his cheeks. “As long as I did, that’s what mattered.”

“Understand what?”

“I kept reading the chapter over and over again until I knew what I was supposed to do, how I could use it to give as much back to you as you had given to me. You’d saved me and now I would save you.”

“Save me? Save me from what?”

“From your fate.”

“My fate?”

“Are you kidding? Look at where you were, Kip. You were once one of the most famous and admired writers in America and you ended up teaching writing to kids who didn’t give a shit and who had no idea of who you were. You didn’t give a shit either. It was like you weren’t alive anymore. Now look where you are and what you’re doing. Did you think that all just happened? Brixton was no place for someone like you. Brixton is for people like me.”

“But, Jim, by definition, you can’t save someone from his fate.”

The tears vanished as quickly as they’d come, replaced by that smug smile. “But I did save you from your fate and from Brixton, didn’t I? That’s why the
chapter I
found was so important. I used your own ideas to save you, to put you on a different path. Of course Frank going crazy helped too.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Come on, Kip, did you really think it was just coincidence that Frank Vuchovich used a Colt Python with a six-inch barrel and a royal blue finish? I knew Frank his whole life. He was one of the original members of the chapel. I showed him the chapter from
Flashing Pandora
last spring. He wasn’t the smartest person and he didn’t read much, but I knew he would love the gun stuff. I couldn’t believe it when he showed up in class that day in September with the Python. That’s when I knew.”

“Knew what, Jim?”

“Knew it was the final sign that I could save you. Don’t you see? Frank was never the shiniest lump of coal in the bin, always moody and a little nuts, but I didn’t think he would ever just snap like that. I knew it had to be a sign. After that, I used the chapter like a script. You were Kant Huxley and Renee was Pandora.”

“And Renee just happily went along with this?”

“Renee was the easy part to begin with. She was always hot for you and she never loved me like I loved her. I broke up with her and told her to go for it, to invite you to the chapel. She didn’t have to think twice about it. Later when she caught on, I had to persuade her to help me to help you.”

“You’re not serious.”

His smile disappeared. He grabbed my arm and yanked me around to face him. “Serious? Why else would the chapter have fallen into my hands?”

“What if Frank hadn’t snapped or if he had used a different gun or—”

“But he did snap and he did use that gun and he did get killed. What more proof do you need, Kip?”

“Get out of here.” I pulled free of his grasp, rubbing my arm where his fingers had held me. “This isn’t funny anymore. You’re really scaring me.”

“Did you know that when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, Lazarus smelled pretty bad because he’d been in the ground for a while?”

“And what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” he said, “but before you laugh at what I’m saying, you should think about it.”

“I don’t have to think about it. This is crazy.”

“Crazy? I guess that Haskell Brown guy who wouldn’t touch your book just conveniently got himself murdered to suit your career.”

“What are you telling me?”

“Just that you must be the king of coincidences, Kip. Bad things happen to other people so good things happen to you. Is that the way the universe works?”

“Jim, come on, you’re a sharp guy. Now you’re stringing together unconnected incidents into a wishful narrative.”

“And you’re whistling through the graveyard.”

“Very cute.”

“It’s not meant to be.”

“What do you think you’re going to get out of this, Jim? You don’t need to build yourself up in my eyes. You taught me how to shoot, how to handle my fears. All that, your friendship, getting me back in shape, helping me write again, isn’t that enough for you?”

“That’s like me asking you if you’d mind someone else putting their name on your book. Without me, there’d be no you, no
Gun Church
.”

“When you say those kinds of things, it worries me. I’m worried about you.”