Reed Coleman - Gun Church

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.

“My landlord,” I lied. “If he had repaired the porch like he was supposed to, I wouldn’t have been up on that ladder.”

“Here,” she said, “take these. They should help with the pain. And please try not to get agitated.”

When the nurse left the room, I repeated, “I’m going to kill that cocksucker.” And I swear I almost meant it.

This time we met at 4:00 A.M. not at the chapel and not at the old berry farm, but at a long-abandoned logging camp about five miles east of where Jim and I shot in the woods.

Here, the surrounding hills were not so steep nor as prevalent, and whole swathes of forest had been logged into submission in the years before anyone had heard of Earth Day. At this point in its travels, the Crooked River ran a straighter, wider course and whispered in comparison to its roaring by the falls.

Renee had been sullen and silent as she drove my car up into the hills. She hadn’t said so, but I knew she’d wanted me to stay home. I was feeling much better, though I wasn’t quite over my concussion symptoms. We both sensed it wouldn’t take much to send me backsliding. You have no idea just how awful concussion headaches are until you experience them. Considering my once prodigious consumption of cocaine and alcohol, I’d had some formidable headaches, but the ones I suffered through in the wake of Stan’s shot to the back of my head were titanic. Legion were the joys of concussion because the headaches weren’t the worst of it.

In the days following Cutthroat, I became depressed and disconnected, lost inside my own head. My internal voice was drowned out by a cloying and constant ringing in my ears and there were moments I found myself thinking life wasn’t worth living like this, that it wouldn’t take much more of it to send me following in my father’s footsteps. A bullet through my brain, I thought, couldn’t have been much worse than what I was suffering through. I suppose if the predawn festivities were just one more trip into the chapel for ashes and bullets, I would have stayed home, but the rush of something new pushed me to go. Even so, my head was a little cottony. I felt a beat too slow, a step behind.