Reed Coleman: Gun Church

I may not have had any attachment to my students, but I didn’t want anything to happen to them. They had as much right to fuck up their lives as I’d had, even if they were apt to do it in less spectacular fashion. I had once been good with people. “A real schmoozer,” Bart Meyers used to say. But that was a long time ago, before I’d become disconnected from my wife, my life, and my talent. I was struggling with how to approach Vuchovich when circumstance forced the issue.

Jim Trimble jumped to his feet. “This is bullshit!” he growled.

That impressed the hell out of me. While I hadn’t stooped to begging Frank for my life and the lives of my students, I hadn’t exactly acted very heroically either. I decided right then and there, that if we came through this, to give Jim a second chance.

“Sit down, Jim!” I got up, stepping between Vuchovich and Jim. “Sit down!” I repeated, actually shoving Jim away. “Go sit next to Renee.”

I took a few tentative steps toward Vuchovich. Frank raised his weapon, but he was sufficiently sharp not to move out of his corner. After spending the last two hours with him, I figured Tom Clancy novels were probably Frank’s favorite masturbation material. No doubt he was acutely aware of the snipers on the adjoining roofs. I was sure he knew what kind of rifles and ammo they used. He was probably hard thinking about it.

A ray of light from the afternoon sun caught the raised revolver just right. Until then, I hadn’t paid it much mind. It had bullets and it went “bang.” I’d seen close up what guns could do to the human skull. What else did I need to know? But now as its blue finish gleamed in the sunlight and its unusual shadow was cast against the blackboard, I had an idea. One that, if my drug- and alcohol-atrophied brain fucked up, would likely get me killed.

“Colt Python, right? Royal Blue finish, eight-, no, six-inch barrel.”

The kid didn’t say anything, but his eyes got big and his right index finger eased off the trigger onto the trigger guard.

I kept going. “That thing on top of the barrel, that’s a ventilated rib.”

Frank was impressed. “That’s right.”

“Colt Python, the Rolls-Royce of American handguns.” I said, repeating verbatim the words Bart Meyers had said to me twenty years earlier. Truth was I knew more about the location of Schrodinger’s cat than handguns. Let’s just say that since the day I found my father, I hadn’t been especially keen on guns. That was until I needed to write about them.

I had outlined a chapter in my second novel, Flashing Pandora , where my tragically cool futures-trading prince, Kant Huxley, and the eponymous Pandora are confronted outside CBGB by the gun-toting Harper Marx, one of Huxley’s ruined partners. Kant Huxley and Harper Marx, indeed! Christ, I used to think I was so fucking witty. Could I have been any more pretentious? I heard Joe Heller thought I was a schmuck for riffing on what he’d done with names in Catch-22 . He was right.

In any case, I had foreshadowed that scene earlier in the book when Kant is forced to improvise a new trading strategy as a crisis in the Middle East -yeah, like that could ever happen -forces oil prices to soar. Pandora, who up until that point had been cool to Huxley’s advances, gets totally hot for him while watching him ad-lib a new strategy with billions of dollars on the line. Later in the book, when Kant feels Pandora slipping away, he pays the desperate Marx to act the role of the vengeful partner. Of course it all goes wrong in the end.

“It has to be a distinctive-looking gun,” I had told Bart.

Bart, who was a complete gun nut, had first selected a Luger. “Behold!” he said, carefully removing the Luger from its original packaging, handling it as delicately as a slippery newborn. He laid it across the palms of his white gloves. “Fine German craftsmanship and machining; an intricate firing mechanism, beautifully balanced, and its shape … Kipster, there are few things on this earth as immediately recognizable simply by its shape than a Luger.”

“No, Bart. I want something brutal and American, the firearms equivalent of a muscle car.”

“I’ve got just the thing: an elegant beast.” With that, he curled the fingers of my left hand around the grip of a hefty, blue metal revolver with a weird-looking barrel. “Meet the Colt Python.357 Magnum: the Rolls-Royce of American handguns. That’s a 1955, one of the first Royal Blues with a six-inch barrel off the production line.”

Now as I stood across the classroom from Vuchovich, I struggled to remember what else Bart had taught me that day nearly three decades back and how I had used it in the book. Problem was he hadn’t told me much.

I played for time. “Is the Python yours?”

A smile. “It’s mine now.”

Good. This was progress. I gave myself an invisible pat on the back.

“A 1955?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Vuchovich, his cold eyes receding into their original broody slits. “ You tell me, since you seem to know so much.”

This was not progress. In the span of a few seconds I’d changed the dynamic from common ground into a pissing contest.

“That’s a trick question, Mr. Vuchovich,” I said, inching slowly closer. “I’d have to see the serial number.”

The smile turned malevolent, detached-a smile as disconnected from joy as a legless man’s collection of spare shoes. His finger was back on the trigger. “You think you’re pretty clever, don’t you?”

Clever! I hated the word. Clever is what my father used to call me. I wasn’t smart or bright or talented. I was clever. Drunk as he was most of the time, I suppose I should have been pleased he noticed I was alive.

I found that I was no longer inching toward Vuchovich, but taking full strides. The room got deadly silent.

“Hold the gun out into the light again!” I barked at the kid.

He complied, extending his arm and lifting the Colt so that it was once again captured by the sun. I was now no more than a few feet away and on a very, very lonely island.

The scene in Flashing Pandora , as originally conceived, had Harper Marx angrily waving the gun at Kant and Pandora. Kant, as always, would act like he had everything under control, which-having paid Marx off to load the burly gun with blanks-Kant would assume he had. Already rendered impotent, literally and figuratively, by his financial ruination and impending trial, Marx had different plans. There would be no blanks in this gun. He meant to kill Pandora, the only possession in Kant’s life that was more to him than just another proper noun. I needed a way for Kant Huxley to prevent Harper Marx from taking a shot at him after shooting Pandora.

“That’s easy, Kipster,” Bart said. “Have Kant grab the cylinder and hold it tight against the gun frame.”

“Grab the cylinder? That’s fucking crazy!”

“Here, try it. There’s not a person alive who can exert enough trigger pressure to make the cylinder spin if it’s being held properly. Pull the hammer back and then when I grab the cylinder, try to pull the trigger. Ready?”

… Kant’s ears were still ringing from the shot. Harper Marx’s eyes were as loving as a shark’s, black and cold as the sea at night. He turned and saw Pandora slumped against the soot-stained Bowery brick, her blood turning pink in the rain .

“Too bad it’s raining, Huxley, old chum,” Marx snickered. “You’ll never hail a cab in this weather. Let me save you the trouble.”

Kant grabbed the gun .

Bart grabbed the gun.

I grabbed the gun.

It dawned on me, perhaps a little too late, that this was hand to weapon and not words on the page. I peeked over my shoulder to see my students frozen in place, still huddled in the opposite corner.