Reed Coleman - Gun Church

I tried to recall how Bart had taught me to handle a pistol of this size. I held the big revolver with both hands, tried to relax, and squeezed one off. My arms jumped up and back. Brown bark splinters and pieces of juicy white pulp flew from the trunk of the tree about fifteen yards ahead of me. I got an instant reminder of the thunder that thing produced as the report echoed through the woods. Some birds took wing. Water tumbled down the falls. Wind blew back the tops of the trees. Nothing much changed except my heart rate. There it was again. I was rushing. The first snort of coke, the first taste of a woman, the first sip of scotch: every high is different, but somehow the same.

“Very good. Now watch what happens with the second shot,” Jim said, that knowing smile on his face.

I took a few deep breaths and calmed myself, then aimed at the same tree and let go the second shot I’d ever taken. No splinters this time, only the echo.

“What happened?”

“Funny thing about shooting, Kip. Before you took your first shot, you didn’t know how the Python would recoil. Once you knew, you anticipated. So even before you got the second shot off, you were pulling your arms back. The only thing you were in danger of hitting with that second round there was a red-tailed hawk in the wrong place at the wrong time. Don’t fret. You’ll get better.”

I hoped so, but for now I was perfectly happy to play with all the Colonel’s toys. I fired a Luger, a.38 Police Special, a.45 Browning, a.40 Glock, a Walther PPK, and a.25 Beretta. It didn’t matter what I shot. I got that same rush every time. The Colonel’s duffel bag was like a magician’s hat. Each time Jim reached in, he seemed to pull out a different automatic or revolver. Whatever I fired and regardless of how badly I missed what I was aiming for, Jim assured me that I would get better.

“Amateur hour’s over, Jim. Now let me see some real shooting,” I said, reaching into the bag and handing him the Browning.

He positively beamed, as I knew he would, at the chance to show off for me. Jim surveyed the landscape, picking out a target.

“See that dried pine cone wedged in there between the branch and the trunk,” he said, pointing the muzzle of the.45 at a tree about fifty feet away.

“I do, the one-”

Before I got the rest of the words out of my mouth, the round obliterated the pine cone. Shot after shot, no matter the weapon in his hand, Jim hit whatever he set his sights on. Then switching hands, he did much the same thing. He even took a few blind shots and hit most of his targets.

“I can make you better at this,” he said, “but I don’t think you’ll ever get as good as me.”

“This is fun, but why would I want to get as good as you?”

“Well, you don’t really have to get as good as me, I guess; but you do have to get better, much better.”

“Why?”

His expression went through several changes in the course of only a few seconds. At first, he seemed confused, then annoyed, and then he smiled as if finally understanding my question.

“The only reason we came up here was to get you better, so you can come back to the chapel.”

“The white blockhouse?”

“Yeah, the chapel. You do want to go back there, don’t you?”

He knew I did. A pusher always knows a junkie when he sees one.

“Absolutely.”

“Well, Kip, you want to go back to the chapel again … ” His voice dropped to a whisper as he picked up the little Beretta and snapped back its slide. “You have to shoot.”

Then, to underline the point, he swung the freshly loaded Beretta around and put several bullets- pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop -one on top of the next, into a nearby tree. That I was sitting against the tree and the shots might’ve parted my hair down the middle had they been a few inches lower was apparently beside the point.

“What the fuck!” I jumped to my feet, rushing on adrenalin. I poked my finger into the hole in the tree.

“ Reach out your hand and put it into my side ,” said Jim. “ Stop -

“- doubting and believe ,” I completed the sentence.

He looked pleased. “You remember?”

“From the other night and from the Bible,” I said. “That’s Jesus to Doubting Thomas. It’s been a long time since I recalled scripture.”

“Around here, Kip, it’s all about the Good Book. It’s the only hope people got.”

“I imagine the spear in Jesus’s side went in a lot deeper than these bullets,” I said, only the tip of my finger disappearing into the tree.

He shrugged his shoulders. “What do you expect? It’s a.25. No stopping power.”

“That wasn’t very funny, Jim, shooting above my head that way.”

“It wasn’t meant to be funny. I wanted to give you a taste of what it feels like to stand in the chapel. It’s not fooling around.”

“I figured that out the other night. I get it. You’re not fucking around.”

“So you want back in?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

Fuck yeah ! “I guess.”

“Then you have to shoot.”

“Shoot?”

“Shoot.”

I was still a bit dazed. As the effects of the adrenalin faded, I became conscious of the ringing in my ears and a profound weakness in my legs. I sat back down before gravity made the decision for me. I heard what the kid was saying, but couldn’t make sense of it. He must’ve seen the puzzlement in my eyes.

“Shoot,” he repeated, voice steady and calm, letting the clip slide out of the Beretta, racking the slide to make sure the little automatic was empty, tossing it into the duffel bag. “You have to face someone else down. That’s the rule. No exceptions, not even for you.”

“Renee?”

“Renee too. You know those little red crosses on our shirts?”

“I noticed them, yes,” I answered. “I was going to ask you about them.”

“Those crosses mark how many times we’ve shot and where we’ve been hit. If you look closely next time, you’ll see that the holes in the shirt have been sewn together.”

“But you let me in without-”

“You earned the right by what happened in class, but if you want back in-”

“-I have to shoot. I get it, Jim.”

“You understand, but you don’t get it. You won’t get it until you raise a gun up at someone raising a gun up at you. Until then, regardless of how good you get out here, it won’t matter.”

“Kind of like hitting golf balls into a net,” I heard myself say. “It’s not the real thing.”

He was beaming again. “Just like that, but different. There’s more than just the shooting. The shooting is a means to an end, not an end in itself.”

Guns, golf, and metaphysics: I figured we’d get back around to it eventually.

“But what about hunting?”

Jim’s face went blank. He stood up, walked to the bag, fished out the Police Special, and loaded it with a single round. Without a word to me about his intentions, Jim scanned the woods. He raised up and fired. A few seconds later, a squirrel tumbled out of a nearby tree.

“My daddy was a cruel man, Kip, but he hated hunting. After we went out shooting a few times, I killed a squirrel like I did just now. The Colonel beat me senseless right out here in these woods. The Colonel liked to say that a sport’s only a sport when both sides know they’re playing. I never forgot that. For something to matter, both sides have to know.” He looked back up into the trees. “Come on. It’s getting late.”

My body wasn’t as achy as it had been when we began. I had to confess that for the first time since coming to Brixton, I had a routine that required a level of engagement beyond sleepwalking. Having a routine of any kind made me feel less like a fraud. No mean feat, that, but Jim had bigger plans for his hero and his hero had had his fill of disappointing people. So for the last few weeks I was up at 5:00 A.M., writing. Jim would come by at 7:00 A.M. and we’d go running. We hadn’t yet made it past a mile, but you wouldn’t have been able to tell by the burning soreness in my legs. My lungs … forget my lungs. That first week I would begin gasping for breath when I heard the crunch of Jim’s tires on the gravel driveway. Yet, there was something incredibly pleasing about the pain, about feeling anything beyond the drip, drip, dripping dull ache of regret for a life flushed down the shitter.