Reed Coleman - Gun Church

After classes, Jim would pick me up and we’d drive back to the spot above the falls to shoot. For now we worked with the little Beretta because he said it was the most easily tamed. Eventually, Jim felt confident enough in my shooting-or just crazy enough-to stand a few feet to the left or right of the target I was aiming at. I think I probably flinched more than he did. The flinching scared him more than the bullets.

What Jim couldn’t know was how hard I was rushing. I was flinching because I could not slow my heart. With the haze and sharp tang of the gun smoke filling the air, it was all I could do not to swoon. I was in four places at once: here, the lake house, my classroom, and the chapel. With each shot I took I was everywhere. It was like one continuous gestalt dream: I was the bloodied curtains, the broken glass, the ashes, the guns, and the bullets. I was my father, Frank, Jim, the fat kid. I was me, watching.

Each squeeze of the trigger was a burst of adrenalin, every shot had a life of its own. Although I could not control my pulse rate, the world seemed to slow down. The more I fired, the slower it got. I swore I could watch the ejected shells spinning, tumbling in space as if gravity were more a suggestion than a law of nature.

When I’d grabbed Frank Vuchovich’s gun, I had opened a portal to a different universe, one I thought I’d never get back to; but here I was at the event horizon, almost at the point of falling into the black hole. And I wanted into the darkness. I wanted to reclaim some dignity and I knew in my gut this was the way to do it. It had already fired me up so much that I had produced more work in a few weeks than I had produced in fifteen years, and better work than I had managed in twenty.

“Kip, relax. You keep clenching up like that, you’ll hit me. Those bullets are sissy loads, so don’t worry too much. There’s less powder in the cartridge, so there’s less of an explosion and less power at impact. If you hit me with one of them, you probably won’t kill me, but it’ll require more treatment than rubbing some dirt on it.”

I guess I relaxed a little after that because he didn’t say another word about it. When we took a break, he rolled up the left leg of his jeans. There was a pink splotch of scar tissue like a wad of chewed bubble gum a few inches up his shin from the top of his boot. His face was aglow with pride.

“If you had hit me, Kip, it wouldn’t be the first time. What you and me were just doing, you shooting and me standing over near the target, that’s how this started out,” he said. “There’s just something about standing across from someone holding a gun in your direction, even if it’s not pointed right at you. It’s … I don’t know how to put it in words. It’s like you’re scared, but alive, really alive for the first time. And once you feel that, there’s no going back. Do you know what I mean?”

Did I . Anyone who’s experienced the first fifteen minutes of a good cocaine high knows that feeling. Problem is you spend the rest of the night doing more and more blow getting less and less high. You try to get back to that first rush, but you can’t. You can’t no matter how hard you try and believe me, I tried.

“This,” he said, rubbing the scar like a lucky rabbit’s foot, “was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“How do you figure?”

“Opened up my eyes.”

“To what?”

“To everything.”

“Everything?”

He laughed. “What I’m saying is that I was reborn.”

“Jim, no offense, but getting shot in the shin isn’t exactly a near-death experience.”

“Near enough,” he said, his face cold and serious. “Look, I know I’m just some dumb hick from a little mining town, but it doesn’t mean I don’t think about big things. Before I got shot, I was dead inside. Everybody’s dead inside in a place like this. It’s a world of the dead. You think we all don’t know that community college is a dead end? But what else is there for us growing up around here? We’re just wasting time until we get a job mining coal or logging or we enlist. There’s no great challenges waiting for us. None of us is growing stem cells in the cellar in our spare time. Our world is built on nothingness. There are no dreams anymore.

“Listen, Kip, people in these parts, they have that ignorant faith in God. In spite of everything they see around them in this fucked-up place where there’s nothing waiting for them at the end of the rainbow, they believe. Well, for me, for those of us who shoot, it’s a lot easier to believe in guns than God. Guns don’t make empty promises, and they answer our prayers. Out here, in this dead world, we’re nothing. Look at the bunch of us: a guy who works in a copy center, a cook, an ugly girl. Who are we? Where are we going? Nowhere. But when we’re inside the walls of the chapel, we matter and it’s the rest of the world that’s insignificant. Every gesture has meaning for us. We’re only really alive with guns in our hands. Like you wrote in Flashing Pandora , there’s no meaning of good without bad, no light without the dark. For us, there’s no life without the threat of dying.”

“A man should think about big things,” I said.

He had no doubt spent hours preparing this little speech and had waited for just the right moment to lay it on me. Although I found his philosophy half-baked, I couldn’t help but be flattered that he so much wanted my approval. I actually enjoyed our time together. Other than the card game I used to have with Jerry Nadir, my weeks hanging with Jim were the most sustained contact I’d shared with another man since my career fell apart. It’s not like my writer friends dumped me. It was me who distanced myself from them. I could not bear their successes in the face of my failures; so, like a wounded animal, I crawled off to let my career die far away from the pack.

Jim was an eager listener and when he wasn’t trying too hard to impress me, he seemed a pretty interesting kid. He was genuinely fascinated by my stories of New York and of my week-long coke-fueled benders. He loved hearing about the famous people I’d met. Yes, Jim, Truman Capote did sound like that and I don’t know if he was nicer when he wasn’t drunk because he was always drunk . The kid especially enjoyed the stories of the famous women I’d fucked. I explained to him that although I didn’t have the scars to show for it, I’d faced death down a few times myself.

“My scar tissue’s on the inside,” I said, sounding like bad movie dialogue.

While I wasn’t quite ready to get all teary-eyed over not having fathered a son of my own-Amy couldn’t have kids and given my self-absorption and my own role model, I was ill-suited to fatherhood-it did stir some unexpected feelings in me.

After shooting, Jim would drop me off at school. After class, I’d head back home for another few hours of writing. Then the St. Pauli Girl would come by. She’d cook for me, I’d help her with her school papers, then write a little more myself, and we’d end the night in my bed. Last night, we didn’t even fuck. I was worn out. We seemed to need a night of simply falling into sleep, our bodies twined together for warmth and comfort and nothing more. I woke up early and slipped into my office.

About an hour after that, Renee, wearing only what she was when she came into the world, showed up at my office door, a faded old accordion file tucked under her arm. “What’s this, Ken?”

“What?” Still tired, I barely glanced at her. I kept peering through the curtains in my office, watching for Jim’s truck. The St. Pauli Girl walked over to me, pressing her body against my back, wrapping one arm around me. I heard the file land on my desk.