Gun Church (12 page)

“It wasn’t all bad news, Jim,” I said, placing a consoling hand on his shoulder. “Brown’s boss was actually willing to give me a new book deal, but he wasn’t willing to risk losing his editor over me. I can’t blame him for that.”

“I guess not,” he said, but didn’t mean it. “So did you cave?”

“Not yet. I told my agent to tell them I needed two weeks to think it over, but I guess I’ll take the deal in the end.”

“Two weeks?”

“That’s if they don’t just call Meg tomorrow and tell the pair of us to go fuck ourselves.”

The kid’s face broke into a broad, goofy smile. “Cheer up, Kip.”

“What the fuck for?”

“Two reasons.”

“Enlighten me.”

He stood and raised his right index finger. “One: I think you’re ready for the chapel.”

“That’s a reason to run like hell, Jim, not to cheer up.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“We’ll see about that. What’s the second reason? And, please God, I hope it’s better than the first.”

“Took seven days to create the world. Just think of how many things can change in twice that time. Things will turn out all right. You’ll see.”

This time, we had only a cold wind to keep us company. When we got out of his pickup, I was distracted by the woeful groaning of the desolate hangars and by the creaks and shrill whines of the huts. Their complaints were like the laments of humpback whales. Jim seemed not to take notice. His flashlight cut careless holes in the blackness as we dragged the generator out of its storage spot. When it sputtered to life, the generator killed the mournful romance of the night.

Before we entered the hangar, Jim took me by the bicep. “Listen, this isn’t like up in the woods. This is serious. Pay real careful attention to what I’m doing and the way I do it. You’ll have to do it exactly like this or you can’t come back.”

“I understand,” I said.

That wasn’t enough for Jim. “I’m not kidding, Kip. The last time was a one-time-only thing. There aren’t second chances. Inside here, the rules always apply.”

“I get it, Jim. I do.”

He nodded with confidence, but he looked worried. This meant more to him than I realized. He couldn’t have known how important it was to me because I didn’t discuss, except in the most vague terms, what it was I was writing about. I couldn’t, not yet, maybe not ever. Haskell Brown wasn’t the only potential obstacle blocking my way. If I couldn’t get back inside the chapel, Terry McGuinn and I were fucked. Both of us would be remanded to the purgatory we’d only escaped from a month ago. Even I knew there were no words I could say that would reassure Jim. I had to perform.

We walked down the same lighted path the St. Pauli Girl and I had come down the night of my first visit. And I was once again struck by the incongruity of the white blockhouse in the midst of the huge hangar, and of the elaborate wooden door set against the concrete.

“What’s with that door?” I asked.

“We scavenged it and the pews from the base chapel.”

I had my answer. That’s how this place got its name.

“Everything in here,” Jim continued, “except the generator was scavenged from the base. Even the mattresses and white paint. There’s all sorts of basements and tunnels and things underground here that people on the base either didn’t know about or forgot about. You’ll see, but first things first. Wait here a minute.”

Once he stepped out of the light, it didn’t take long for him to be completely swallowed up by the darkness. I followed the sound of his footsteps scraping grit between the floor and the soles of his boots. I heard him clambering up a metal staircase and in less than a minute, come quickly back down.

“Here,” he said, coming into the light, holding out a white T-shirt so large it was like a shroud. “Put this on.”

“Why so big?”

“It’s going to be covering a lot of stuff,” he said.

I did as he asked. Only after I got it on did I notice Jim had removed his jacket and was wearing the T-shirt he had worn the last time. It was covered in way more red crosses than I had realized. And there was something else. Tucked in his left arm, against his ribs, Jim held a helmet that looked like it was designed by a hockey-playing gladiator. What I assumed was the face mask was a curved piece of padded steel with only a tiny slit for an eyehole.

He said, “You’ll wear this once or a few times at most, but either way it takes some getting used to.”

“Once, if I fuck up?”

“Or if you get killed.” He smiled sadly and handed me the helmet.

Heavy as it was, I understood why it might take some getting used to. I didn’t put it on. “Ashes first, right.”

And for the first time that night, Jim smiled at me with a bit of confidence. “The ashes represent the origins of the chapel and the practice we put in. Also reminds us of where we’re headed if we make a mistake.”

And there it was again, the repulsion/compulsion thing. Jim had alluded to death twice in twenty seconds and I should have run. Instead I stood there and let him dab ashes on my forehead. As we rehearsed the rest of the rituals, I asked what each one meant.

“You have to earn the right to understand them,” he said. “And there’s only one way to earn the right.”

I rested my sweat-damp cheek on the cold porcelain rim, the sour stench of my vomit wafting up to me from the bottom of the bowl. When I had nothing left in me to give, I sat down with the back of my soaked-through shirt against the cool tile wall. My head was exploding. I was faint, shaking with the chills. I was afraid. I don’t know.

Five days had passed since I’d put that tight grouping into the trunk of the tree, four since Jim had walked me through the dry run in the chapel. My shooting had since faltered. My writing too. My focus was gone and when I booted up my laptop I was back to staring at the screen, helplessly. I was disgusted by my own fragility and I’d asked Renee not to come back to the house until I got the shooting over with. I was also afraid for the first time in my life that I would be impotent. I wouldn’t have been able to bear that, not now, not with the St. Pauli Girl.

Now, this was it: my first time shooting in the chapel. Jim came up to me, a bottle of water in one hand, a towel in the other. He poured half the bottle over my head. “Here, drink the rest,” he said, handing me the bottle and pulling me to my feet. When I was done drinking, he toweled me off. “Come on, Kip, it’s time to get dressed.”

I wasn’t looking forward to this part of the evening. Jim had dressed me in full protective gear the day before so I could get used to the feel of it; but there would never be a time when I’d get used to it, especially, as he had warned, the helmet. Cobbled from Army surplus, sports equipment, and whatever had been lying around people’s garages, the suit was bulky and stank of the sweat, vomit, and urine of the people who’d worn it before me. Jim slipped the giant white T-shirt over the padding, and I helped him do the same. The first time in the chapel, you shot against your mentor. That and the fact that Jim was dressed in a suit like mine were the only things that kept me from running. Armored as we were, it was unlikely either one of us was going to die tonight. Yet somehow, that was of little comfort.

Just as I was willing myself to calm down, I heard it: the eerie thunder of dozens of stomping feet and hands clapping in unison, echoing around the hangar. My knees got weak.

Jim grabbed me, steadied me. “Everyone goes through this. You’ll be fine.” Then, after a pause, “It’s time. Let’s go.”

As we walked slowly out of the locker room and toward the chapel, the noise grew louder and louder, the foot stomping and rhythmic clapping blending into an indistinct roar. We paused outside the wooden door, Jim daubing ashes on both our foreheads.

“Remember to do the things I showed you the way I showed you how to do them,” he said, staring me directly in the eyes. “Tonight, that’s as important as anything else.”

Jim entered first. When I squeezed through the space between the mattresses, it wasn’t only the din I couldn’t make sense of. There were more people there than the first time Renee brought me, but their faces were as a blur, like looking out the window of a moving subway at the faces in the windows of a passing train.

I heard Jim say, “Helmets on,” from a million miles away and felt something on my head. Hands and fingers snugged the helmet to my chin. The face mask limited my vision to a small window straight in front of me. My hearing changed again, taking on a muted, windy quality. An arm, Jim’s, looped through the crook in my left elbow and marched me exactly eight strides—one stride for each original member of the chapel, Jim had said—between the pews to a spot directly at the center of the chapel. As Jim had instructed, I touched my right index finger to a spot above my heart, and at the top of my lungs shouted, “Blessed are they who have not seen, and yet believe.” I bowed quickly, then stood erect.

I turned right to face a mattressed wall and felt Jim’s back against mine. I counted to five in my head and then took four slow, measured strides. Jim had explained that each stride was symbolic of the first four duels in the chapel by its eight original members.

“Stop!” The voice was a familiar one, the deputy sheriff’s.

I halted, bringing both feet together and, as instructed, I took one more stride.

“Turn!”

I about-faced. Jim was about thirty feet directly in front of me.

The crowd noise grew less distinct, but my sense of smell became extraordinarily acute. My head once again filled with the rank traces of fear that people had left on the suit before me.

The deputy sheriff showed me the little Beretta. He showed me the clip, slid the clip into place, thumbed off the safety, and racked the slide. He placed it in my hand and once again my perceptions shifted. Now all I could hear was my heartbeat and my shallow, rapid breaths bouncing around the inside of the helmet. In my head, all I could see was my father’s head flung backwards, his blind eyes seemingly focused on my mom’s fussy white curtains. Then, just as suddenly as it had come, the vision of my father vanished. Now all I could see was Jim. Not him, his chest. I imagined I could see his heart beating in his rib cage like a red fist, clenching and unclenching. When he raised the .38, my world grew silent and still. I became unconscious of my heart beating, of my breathing, of the smells. I felt on an island at the center of the universe and knew that Jim was right: things were going to work out somehow.

The deputy asked Jim, “Do you believe?”

Jim answered. “Blessed are they that do.”

“Do you believe?” the deputy asked me and the chapel grew absolutely silent.

“I will be blessed by gunfire.”

“Then be blessed,” he said, stepping back.

I raised my right hand and fired. That’s when the freight train hit me.

Sissy loads, my ass! The bullet hit me like Paul Bunyan’s axe. I’d been hit and hit hard. Rolling over, getting on all fours, I was still a little out of it—weak, shaken, kind of in a trance. Still, I was electric. The rush was like nothing that coke or pussy or fame had ever given me. I’d fired a bullet at another human being and, in spite of all the protective gear, it was as primal a thing as I’d ever done. I saw Jim coming my way, a smile as wide as could be hung across his rugged face. His mouth was moving, but I couldn’t make out any words. The roar was back and it filled up my ears and the rest of my head.

Now he was standing in front of me, pulling me up, throwing his arms around me. He let go with one arm and kept the other flung over my shoulders. When he stepped back, it got quiet once again. He reached across and put his finger in the hole his shot had made in my shirt.

He asked. “Are you blessed?”

“I have been blessed by gunfire.”

“Do you believe?”

“I believe.”

“Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe.”

“I have seen and I believe,” I said.

Then the silence shattered in a roar. Jim’s proud smile was so broad I thought his skin might crack.

“Look! You hit me! You hit me!” He was beside himself, poking his finger into a small hole in his shirt above his abdomen. “Virgins almost never hit anything but the mattresses. They’re always so nervous and weak. People have a kind of built-in thing about not killing other people. It’s one thing to shoot close to them up in the woods. It’s really different to aim at another person and pull the trigger, no matter what they’re wearing. But you did it, Kip. You did it.”

We pulled off our helmets and shirts, the snaggle-toothed girl collecting the shirts from Jim and me. The St. Pauli Girl folded herself into my arms. Tears of relief streamed down her cheeks, but there was something else in her expression that I couldn’t quite decipher in my numb euphoria. Whatever it was quickly vanished and she kissed me. It felt like my first kiss, the best first kiss. But when I looked up, I saw an unwelcome face, one that I hadn’t noticed in the blur of preceding moments: Stan Petrovic’s. There he was, standing at the very back of the crowd that had circled around us—that sneer on his battered face as cruel as a serrated edge.

I didn’t have time to focus on Stan because Jim, Renee, and I were being carried away with the will of the crowd, our feet not seeming to touch the ground as we were swept along. Hands pulled at my protective gear and by the time we reached the beer coolers, Jim and I were naked from our waists up. He had a small red blotch on his stomach about the size of an old silver dollar. The splotch on my chest was similar in size. We were both going to be bruised and sore for a while. I could only imagine the kind of pain you’d be in wearing only the thinner vests.

Jim shook up a can of Bud. “Welcome,” he said and showered me in beer.

Everyone else repeated the gesture until I was thoroughly soaked. I loved it. I had on a full body buzz and could have left earth’s orbit under my own power. My fears and worries, my disappointment over the book, had all been washed away by the beer and evaporated with the gun smoke. There was definitely something transformative about coming out the other end of this. It had been maybe five minutes since Jim and I had fired live ammunition at each other, and fuck me if Jim wasn’t right: I felt reborn. There was my total dunghill of a life beforehand and there was now. I grabbed a beer of my own, shook madly, and gave Jim a taste of his own medicine. When I was done, we hugged again.