Gun Church (16 page)

I wasn’t empty for long.

A blanket of autumn snow in a hardscrabble place like Brixton County had that falsely purifying picture-postcard effect. You could fool yourself that the snow somehow stopped the miners and loggers from getting shitfaced after their shifts and going home to beat the crap out of their wives. If you listened carefully enough, you could almost hear John Denver singing some cracker-barrel hymn to the simplicity of rural life. Simplicity, my ass. Life was no less complicated here than anywhere else. If anything, life in Brixton had a more desperate edge than almost any place else I’d unpacked my bags. It was the land of coal and pine, not milk and honey. Like Jim once said to me, the only options for kids who grew up here were the mines, the pines, or the military recruitment signs. So, no, as pretty as it all looked as Jim drove Renee and me up into the hills that Friday at dusk, I wasn’t buying into the notion of Brixton’s snow-white baptism.

We started out the way Jim usually drove when we were going to shoot, but somewhere along the route he took a turn away from the river and we were in unfamiliar territory. We weren’t headed to the chapel either. Not even Renee seemed to know where we were going. The confusion in her eyes was manifest. Funny, I thought, how I barely noticed the beauty of her eyes anymore. I used to see her features as a collection of distinct physical assets—the suede blue eyes, her impossible cheekbones, that perfect ass—as aspects of herself, as the St. Pauli Girl, but not as a woman. It dawned on me that these days I thought of her less and less as the St. Pauli Girl.

Finally, Jim pulled off the pavement onto a pitted dirt road that bounced us all around like a mechanical bull in a honky-tonk bar. We drove through a gap in a slatted wooden fence that had seen better days. The sky was already turning darker when I noticed some familiar vehicles parked along the side of the road. Jim hadn’t said what we were up to and I still couldn’t be sure, but the sight of those other pickups relaxed me. It had quite the opposite effect on Renee, the confusion in her eyes morphing into worry. Jim didn’t pull over until we emerged into a clearing about the size of two football fields placed side by side.

“Used to be a berry farm,” he said. “Guy went bankrupt after they shut the base down.”

When we piled out of the Jim’s old F-150, people emptied out of their trucks too. This was a long way from the chapel, but it was the same ragtag cast of characters. The deputy sheriff was there. Stan Petrovic too, in all his pock-marked glory. In fact, the only one missing was the security guard from Hardentine. Guess he actually had to watch the abandoned base.

Jim asked, “Did you set up the logs like you were told?”

The fat kid said, “Everything is ready.” He retreated to his 4x4, started it up, and turned it so that it faced the clearing. In the truck’s high beams, I could make out several piles of logs. Some were stacked no more than one or two high, while others were piled maybe three or four feet high. They were set at odd angles to each other and there didn’t seem to be a pattern to how they were arranged.

Jim was pleased. “Good, let’s collect the equipment here, and then go and park our trucks at even intervals around the patch. Don’t forget to leave them running and to turn your brights on.”

I think that’s when I started rushing. My head was spinning so that I barely noticed Renee go back to Jim’s truck with him. I was vaguely aware of the displeasure in her voice as she spoke to him, but I was already too far gone to care. Things were starting to make sense, a twisted kind of Brixton sense. We were going to shoot, but it wasn’t going to be done like the carefully choreographed Kabuki of the chapel. No, this was going to be very different indeed.

“We have four full suits,” Jim said when he returned from his truck and dropped the Colonel’s duffel bag to the ground. “If we do this fast, most of us can shoot tonight.”

There was much rejoicing in Mudville, except from the maintenance man. Jim reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a handful of folded pieces of paper, which he dumped into his Carhartt baseball cap and shook around.

“Line up. I’m going to give you all numbers and then we’ll pick from the hat.” With that he pointed to himself, “One.” Renee: “Two.” Me: “Three,” … and so on until he got to Stan Petrovic, “Seventeen.”

Jim thrust the hat out in front of the maintenance guy from BCCC. If this honor was some attempt at reconciliation for Jim having wounded the man, it wasn’t working. The guy glared at Jim as he stepped forward, rubbing the coat over his bicep where he’d been hit by the bullet. Jim seemed oblivious and told him to pick four numbers. He did without enthusiasm and handed the four slips of paper to Renee, who didn’t seem at all pleased to be calling the numbers. The undercurrent was a far cry from the chapel.

“Eight. Three. Nine. Seventeen.”

The fat kid, the deputy sheriff, Stan, and I stepped forward or maybe everyone else stepped back. I was now rushing so hard I couldn’t tell.

“Here’s the deal,” Jim said, dabbing his finger into the now familiar coffee can and touching it to each of our foreheads. “Get your suits on. I’ll load your weapons with four rounds each. This is Cutthroat: every man for himself. You take a hit anywhere, you’re dead. You’ve got to stay within the confines of the clearing and the only things you can use for cover are the log barriers, the snow, and anything else that you can find out there. You can’t hide behind the trucks and you can’t sit behind any one barrier too long. When my truck horn blows, you have to move. You don’t move: you’re dead. You have fifteen minutes to kill everyone else out there with you. Got it? Good. Then get dressed. When you’re suited up, pick up your weapon, walk out there, and select a barrier. When all four of you are out there, I’ll blow the horn to begin.”

Ten minutes later I was flat on my belly, taking cover behind one of the low log barriers. I had the .38 in my hand, my heart thumping. In spite of the cold, I was sweating through my underwear. This was going to be a test of so much more than marksmanship and machismo. The wind was up, and depending upon your position, snow might be blowing into your eyes through the slits in the face mask of your helmet. You’d have to think your way through this and I figured my brain was about the only advantage I had.

The deputy sheriff was far more likely to have been trained for situations like this even if the most dangerous thing he ever did was to chase pleated skirts. Stan may have been a surly motherfucker and a belligerent drunk, but you don’t play special teams in the NFL for as long as he had without a giant set of balls and an incredible instinct for survival. And the fat kid had been good enough to have faced down Jim in the chapel.

Jim stood on his truck horn for the game to begin. Instead of running out from behind the barrier, I rolled to my left, made a bipod of my elbows and steadied the .38. I took the chance that one of my opponents would stand and run across my path. I figured right. The fat kid burst out from behind the tallest barrier. I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and squeezed the trigger. He went down in a heap, grabbing his left thigh and screaming in pain. As usual, I spent too long patting myself on the back. Dirt and snow kicked up a few inches in front of my face, through the eye slits, and blinded me.
Shit!
My eyes filled with tears and I couldn’t stop blinking, but I had to move and move fast.

I rolled back behind the barrier, which was probably against one rule or another. I couldn’t afford to care. This was about survival and about winning. Fuck the rules, I thought. As my eyes worked hard to flush out the dirt, I realized that at least some good had come of what had happened: The fat kid was out of the game, leaving me only two adversaries to worry about, and one of those adversaries had wasted a bullet. I had three bullets to make two kills and so did one of my opponents. The other still had four, but I had to use my head for something other than math.

Figuring it was human nature for people to stay safely hidden behind one of the barriers until Jim blew the horn to move, I decided my best chance at survival was to go now, before the horn. Problem was, I had only a vague notion of where one of the others might be. Since the shot that kicked the dirt into my eyes had come from in front of me, I guessed that one of the shooters was behind the barrier about sixty feet ahead of where I was. I had no sense of where the other shooter might be. If I chose wrong, I’d probably be running straight into a waiting bullet. Having decided to go, I took a few deep breaths, but the equation changed before I could move.

Strange, I almost felt as if I wasn’t thinking as me anymore, but as McGuinn. Early on I had made the decision not to confine McGuinn to a place like the chapel and now here I was struggling in a setting not unlike the one I was creating for McGuinn. Sometimes art imitates life and sometimes it’s the other way around. Out here, it was both. Writers often inject themselves into their characters. Now, I was trying to inject my character into me.

Just as I stuck my head out from behind the logs, I caught sight of the deputy coming out from behind the barrier straight ahead of me.
So he was the one who almost got me
. He was making a mad dash for a low stack of logs thirty yards to his left. I guess he’d also thought the element of surprise was the smart play. Only it wasn’t.

He didn’t get five feet before Stan rose up from a prone position to the left of another barrier and blasted the deputy square in the back. He pitched forward from the force of the bullet and his own momentum. He lay there still for a few seconds, but didn’t writhe in pain or scream anything except, “Goddammit!” The bullet must have caught him in a heavily protected spot and the only thing wounded was his pride.

Now there were two: Stan and me.

Stan stayed upright, making the same mistake I had, taking a lap of honor before he’d won anything. He was pretty far away from me and my eyes weren’t yet totally clear of grit, but I doubted I would get a cleaner shot at a stationary target later on. Taking the shot right then is what McGuinn would have done. He’d written that you had to take your shot when the opportunity presented itself because second chances are never guaranteed. I fired. Splinters flew off the edge of the log barrier just at Stan’s back. He turned his head my way. I couldn’t see his face beneath his helmet, but it was easy to imagine his sneer. I ducked back behind the logs.

The rush was gone and in its place was fear. It didn’t matter that the suit afforded me full protection or that I had two rounds left. I was being hunted and I was hunting. This was worlds apart from the controlled situation of the chapel. I’d been scared before, but not scared like this, not even when Frank Vuchovich stuck the Colt in my face.

The horn blew and I moved, combat crawling as fast as I could to a tall stand of logs to my right. I stopped long enough to rise up to try and catch a glimpse of Stan. I thought I heard something, but I’d lost him. I crawled again. Something crashed down loudly to my left. I sat up on my knees and aimed the .38. That’s when the baseball bat hit me in the back of the head and I went to sleep, face mask down in the snow.

My head burned with pain and when the trauma room doctor shined his pen light in my eyes I thought my skull might literally explode.

“You’ve got a textbook concussion there, Mr. Weiler,” said the doctor. “We’ll get you something for the pain, do a scan to make sure it’s nothing more serious, and we’ll keep you here overnight.”

I was in no shape to argue with the man. I didn’t even know how I’d gotten there and wasn’t a hundred percent sure of how I got concussed. The last thing I remembered was being on my belly in the snow behind a log and thinking about how scared I was.

“I’ll let your wife come in while I arrange for your scan and get a nurse to bring you something for the pain.”

Wife? Amy was here?
Jesus, I
really
was confused.

Renee came into the examining room. She was red-eyed and shaking.

“The doctor says you’re going to be okay in a few days, but you have to stay here tonight,” she said, her voice brittle.

“What happened?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Some of it, but not how I got hurt,” I said.

“Stan threw a big rock that landed over your left shoulder. When you got to your knees, he came up behind you and … and … ”

“And what?”

“He shot you in the back of the helmet from about twenty feet. The round got between some of the padding and the helmet took almost all the impact. If it was one of those old metal helmets … I told the doctor you fell off a ladder.”

“Did anyone do anything about it? Did Jim?”

“We can’t. It’s against the rules. You get into this and you take the risk. Anything else would ruin the whole idea of it,” she said, her heart not in it.

I knew. Jim had told me a hundred times. Didn’t mean I had to like it.

“I’m going to kill fucking Stan. I’m telling you, Renee, I’m going to kill him.”

“Who are you going to kill, Mr. Weiler?” It was a nurse, a small cup in one hand and a larger cup in the other.