Reed Coleman - Gun Church

As I stood to clean up, it occurred to me that a new book might mean more to me than I could have imagined. I went to my office afterwards to follow Meg’s orders. I typed “Outline.” Yet in spite of the news of Haskell Brown’s death and the blood in the chapel that night, nothing came to me. For the first time since starting the book I felt pressure. And there I was staring at the nearly blank screen, the cursor mocking me at the end of the “e” in outline. E as in empty.

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.