Gun Church (24 page)

The campus of Brixton County Community College was actually quite pretty. Lots of red brick and ivy, big live oaks and maples sprinkled in amongst the predominant pines, and a classic clock tower atop the library. It was easy to understand how some administration types mistook its looks for its quality. The former dickhead president of BCCC was wont to say that Harvard was the Brixton County Community College of the northeast. Was it any wonder he hadn’t lasted very long?

The ever-popular Miss Crouch had prepared all my sabbatical paperwork for me to sign. There were tabs and little yellow Post-it notes with instructions on each of the forms. No wonder she’d survived seven department chairpersons. As warm and friendly as J. J. Beauchamp was, the Engagin’ Cajun was no administrator. Disorganized and drunk a good deal of the time, he had his head stuck so far up his ass that he needed someone like Miss Crouch to steer the ship. Trust me, at BCCC, there was no political intrigue involved in landing the chairman’s job. No one yearned to be English Department chair. It was a short-straw job that people accepted only because it came with a five-thousand-dollar per-term stipend.

The one thing Miss Crouch couldn’t do was to fill in the section of the paperwork that asked for an explanation of the reason for the sabbatical. Not that anyone probably gave a shit, but you were required to fill it out before a sabbatical could be granted. This is where you were supposed to mention some lofty research study or scholarly project you were working on like a Cartesian reinterpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I wrote simply that I was taking the time to finish a book. I didn’t bother mentioning that the book in question was about as scholarly as the back of a baseball card and was sort of a cross between pulp fiction and an idiot’s guide to existentialism.

“You’ll be missed around here, Professor Weiler,” said Miss Crouch as I handed back all the signed and completed forms. This was the most the woman had said to me in seven years.

“Really, why’s that?”

“Because the female adjuncts will have to find a new form of entertainment in your absence.”

I stood there, stunned. I wanted to say something but Miss Crouch had already moved on to other matters, dismissively turning her back to me. And what would I have said? I was just grateful she hadn’t mentioned the co-eds I’d bedded during my tenure at Brixton. Although that particular form of “mentoring” was frowned upon by the current administration, our state university system was one of the last holdouts that hadn’t formalized a ban on such relationships.

With the fall term having ended the previous Friday, the campus was very quiet. There were a few students around. Mostly there were squirrels, crows, and a few other faculty members. I much preferred the squirrels and crows. For the first time since the incident with Frank Vuchovich, I walked over to the southwestern corner of the campus, to the building where it had all taken place. The building had been closed for the term, but was scheduled to reopen for the spring semester. I was glad I wouldn’t be there to see it.

I stood outside Halifax Hall staring up at the windows the police marksmen had shattered with their bullets. I turned to look at where the shots came from, imagining a straight red line drawn across the sky from the roof of the lecture center through the new windows of Room 212. I recalled the confused look on Frank Vuchovich’s face. I wondered now as I wondered then about what the kid had expected to happen. He must have known he wasn’t leaving the police with very many options, yet he seemed almost surprised by the spray of glass and blood, and the burning bits of metal ripping through his body.

There was another imaginary string holding together a narrative that led from the death of Frank Vuchovich to the chapel to Haskell Brown’s murder to here. It was a line of perplexing coincidences and good fortune that I grabbed hold of to pull myself out of my perpetual tailspin. This line was red too. I didn’t believe in God. I’m not sure I ever did, but if he did exist, I wondered if he would send angels and omens in the form of blood and bullet wounds.

“Gun Church, indeed,” I whispered aloud and walked on.

I didn’t get fifty feet before I felt a strong hand latch on to my bicep. I gasped and my ribs barked at me. It was the maintenance guy, rake against his shoulder, lit cigarette dangling from his lips.

“We need to talk, you and me, Professor,” he said, letting go of me.

“What about?”

His head was on a swivel, looking around, behind him, over my shoulder. “Not here.”

“Then where?”

“Not your house either.”

“Okay, not my house,” I said. “How about the Dew Drop Inn? I’m going over there in a little while to get something to eat. It’s usually pretty empty this time of day.”

“I’ll be there in an hour or so.”

That was it. He walked away from me without another word and didn’t look back. I didn’t know what it was all about, but I could guess. He had some nasty things to say about Jim and he figured I’d be a good audience. He was right, but I didn’t give it much thought as I turned to the student union.

At the student union, I picked up the paper and threw my change on the counter just as I had that September afternoon when all of this began. I found I was no longer thinking of the late Frank Vuchovich or the maintenance man, but of shooting in the woods with Jim. I would miss it. I would miss Jim’s company too. I would miss the sweaty-handed, heart-thumping rush of the chapel. I didn’t regret my decision to walk away from it, but I had no doubt that the junkie in me would always be tempted to put a gun back in my hand. In the end, some of Jim’s wacky notions about the essential nature of the handgun proved true. Although I tried to hold myself apart from the other people at the chapel, I had been seduced. I had proven myself in a way most people in the regular world never dare try. I was special. Staring down the barrel of a loaded handgun imparts a certain kind of wisdom unobtainable through most other means.

Even armed with that wisdom, the temptation would always remain. I once had a girlfriend who lived by what she called the three-doughnut rule. She had weird food allergies and trouble regulating her blood sugar, but knew she could safely eat two doughnuts without having her body go batshit. Still, on occasion, she would eat three. When I asked her why, she said, “Because sometimes it’s just worth it.” I’d come to realize that we all have our own versions of the three-doughnut rule. I knew that if I stayed in Brixton, I would eventually have ashes dabbed on my forehead to step back into the chapel, to eat that third doughnut.

On my way to the Dew Drop, I stopped at the hardware store in town to buy a package of light bulbs. My ribs were sore and I was short of breath, so I sat down on a stack of bags of rock salt. I guess I was too preoccupied by my pain to notice I had unwanted company.

“What’s the matter, pussy, your ribs hurtin’ you?” It was Stan Petrovic. He had a bag of screws in his hand and a cold, drunken stare on his face. “I played whole fucking games in the NFL with broken ribs and two wrecked knees.”

“Good for you, Stan. Maybe they’ll throw you a parade someday.”

I wasn’t in the mood or in shape for one of our little skirmishes, but since he’d hurt Renee and hit me in the back of the head, I had no patience for his bullshit.

“What’s the matter, your asshole hurt from letting Jim stick his fist up there? You ain’t such a hero without a gun in your hand, huh? Think you have the balls to vest-shoot with me?”

That got my attention. One thing I’d found over the last few months was that the people who showed up at the chapel kept their mouths shut tight about it. Over that period of time, whether on the street or in school, I’d crossed paths with everyone who had ever been to the chapel. The only time I’d mentioned it was to Meg and I felt guilty about that. Even the maintenance guy hadn’t alluded to the chapel when he pulled me aside not twenty minutes earlier. Not once did any of them even hint at our connection. There wasn’t a nod, a wink, or a gesture. Nothing. And now this drunken fool was standing in the aisle of the hardware store talking about the chapel like it was common knowledge.

“Keep it down, Stan. You know the rules.”

“Fuck you and fuck the rules.”

“Shut your mouth.”

His saw-toothed smile was raw and cruel. “Why don’t you do it for me, cunt?”

I thought to speak, but instead I planted my left fist into Stan’s groin. It wasn’t the hardest punch I’d ever thrown. It didn’t have to be. Petrovic groaned, grabbed his balls, and fell to his knees. He teetered for a second or two and collapsed backwards into the shelves that held boxes and bags of nails and screws. A few of the boxes crashed to the floor.

“Don’t fuck with me again, Stan,” I growled, standing over him. “Fuck with me again and I’ll kill you.”

When I turned to leave, I noticed everyone watching. Half of them looked about ready to applaud. I just wanted to go get something to eat and read the paper in peace.

The Dew Drop Inn was what you might have expected: a seedy and frayed hole in the wall, a working man’s bar. There were two beer pulls, one for light beer and one for regular. There was one kind of scotch, one kind of bourbon, one kind of vodka. No one ordered mojitos. Even the burger choices were limited: with or without cheese, with or without fries. If you wanted avocadoes or roasted poblano strips, you were shit out of luck. As I anticipated, the place was pretty empty except for Richie the barman and a few stubborn flies that forgot it was December. Richie nodded hello. I nodded back.

“I’ll have a burger with cheese and fries and a ginger ale,” I said, making my way to a back booth.

I settled in and unfolded the paper. The
Brixton Banner
was birdcage lining, as local as local papers get. It featured articles on subjects as diverse as advances in coal-mining technology, belt tightening in the lumber industry, and who had won the charity pierogi-eating contest at St. Stanislaus Church. The war in Afghanistan was reduced to a few inches worth of body counts buried between the car ads and obits. At the end of things with Janice Nadir, reading the
Banner
in bed became my way of telling her we were done for the day, that it was time for her to run along back home to Jerry.

My favorite things in the
Banner
were the letters to the editor. No highfalutin’ horseshit in Brixton, just conspiratorial paranoia at its most rabid. Distrust and hatred for government—federal, state, and local—ran deep around here and with it came the usual substrains of white supremacy, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, et cetera. I loved the letters that tried to tie all of these things into one tidy, hateful little package. My all-time favorite had been this one letter from a woman who claimed that the area coal mining was just a government cover for digging secret shafts. That the shafts were to be used to protect the Jews’ money during the nuclear war being instigated by the dark races in order to wipe out the Aryan peoples. Now, I’m sure letters of this nature get sent to the
New York Times
on a daily basis—the difference being that the
Banner
actually published them, and frequently.

Just as I unfurled the paper and began to scan the letters, Richie arrived with my ginger ale. He asked me how I was doing, why I hadn’t been in lately. I said something generic about being busy and watching my weight. That seemed to satisfy him and he left, saying my burger would be up in a few minutes. When I turned back to the paper, my eyes drifted to a column to the left of the letters with a heading:
Murdered (continued from page 1)
.

In New York City in the ’80s, when homicide was a cottage industry, I would have simply ignored the headline. But these days, in these parts, murder wasn’t usually part of the landscape. Premature death was common enough in a region where mining and logging were how folks earned their keep. There were plenty of hunting accidents and alcohol-fueled suicides too. There was the occasional migrant worker killed by a piece of farm equipment, but murder was rare. I could only remember two other homicides in seven years: one stemming from a barroom brawl. The other involved a woman who stabbed her husband through the heart with a kitchen knife because he’d pawned her Lladró figurines for meth money.

I skipped the letters for the moment, reading instead the continuation of the story from page one. The victim’s body, it said, was discovered Sunday morning by two deer hunters just across the state line, along the banks of a tributary to the river that fed the Crooked River Falls. The victim was found in a car registered to his father, his body with three or four gunshot wounds. One of the hunters said, “We just figured he was drunk and sleeping it off, but when we got close you could see the bullet holes in the windshield and that he was dead.”

The hunters were still pretty shaken and though they weren’t considered suspects, they were being questioned by the sheriff’s department. There was a hotline number to call, but not much else. It was only when I backtracked, turned to the front page and saw the full headline that I went cold.

R
EDTAILS
R
ECEIVER
M
URDERED

A photo of a handsome African American kid with a white, self-assured smile stared up at me. He was wearing a football jersey over his shoulder pads, and holding his helmet tucked between his chest and his left arm. The logo on his helmet was that of a bird of prey, wings spread, talons unsheathed. The caption said his name was Lance Vaughn Mabry and that he had been a starting wideout for the Coggins and Hale College Redtails.

Coggins and Hale was a small school about twenty miles across the state line from Brixton. Academically, it was the four-year equivalent of BCCC: a place to jerk off while earning a degree of dubious quality and value. But for a school its size, it had a solid football program that had the reputation of producing good-quality, late-round, NFL draft picks. According to the first paragraph of the article, Lance Vaughn Mabry had been on just such a career path. Not anymore.