Reed Coleman - Gun Church

Getting gingerly out the passenger door, it struck me that my red Porsche seemed completely out of place there among the pickups in a clearing above the river. It gave me pause, reminding me that in spite of all that had transpired since late September, I was just as out of place among these people as my car was among their trucks. It gave me pause, but didn’t stop me. I’d crossed a line the first time I walked into the chapel and there would be no stepping back now.

The fog shrouding the treetops and crawling a few feet off the ground felt like it was pouring right out of my head. Whether it was the early hour or that the ride along the bumpy dirt road had worn me out, I couldn’t say. What was obvious to me was that I was falling back down the well I’d only just crawled out of. I couldn’t quite focus on the words Renee spoke to me as we trudged up a low hill to where the others were seated in a circle on old tree stumps around a small campfire. Everyone I’d ever seen at the chapel was there, Jim giving me a slight nod of hello. I was glad to be able to rest on a stump as an unwanted and familiar throbbing began in my temples.

Laid out by the fire was one solitary protective suit, the Colonel’s duffel bag, and the can of ashes. I waited. We all waited for someone to come forward and when someone did, I was caught completely off guard. It wasn’t Jim who stepped to the fore, but Renee.

“This is Fox Hunt,” she said, looking everywhere but at me. “One fox. One suit. The rest of us are the hounds. Some of us have done this before, but I will explain it for everyone else. The rules are simple: The fox gets a fifteen-minute head start and we can’t watch where the fox goes. The fox can go anywhere, hide anywhere, and use whatever tricks it has to to survive, but the fox has no weapon. After the fifteen minutes, the rest of us have until sunup to kill the fox. The hounds will have only one round in their weapons. If the fox eludes us, we all have to swim across the river and back as punishment. Then we will meet this Friday at the chapel and burn our shirts in a fire. All but the fox will be worthless once again, all of our blood erased. Those who are not original members may never be invited back in.”

She nodded at the guy from the copy center who handed us neatly folded pieces of paper. That done, he retrieved the can of ashes and went around the circle, dipping his fingers into the can and touching them to our foreheads.

“If there is a mark on your paper, pick a weapon and walk down to the river, facing the water. Spread out far from each other. In fifteen minutes or so, a shot will be fired and then it begins.”

There was a slash across my paper and as I rose off the stump to get my weapon, I wobbled slightly. Jim grabbed my arm to steady me and whispered in my ear, “When it starts, stick by me.”

I was glad he made the offer, because as I moved down by the riverbank the fog only got thicker. The headache was worsening and I could feel myself retreating into that isolated place inside my own skull. Time lost all meaning as I stared into the black water. Then I thought I heard something and the world went crazy. People were running everywhere, but I was frozen. I looked for Jim, for Renee, to no good end. I couldn’t make sense of anything.

Suddenly, I was being pulled away from the riverbank and saw that it was Jim who had me by the wrist. He was speaking to me. I could hear that he was saying things, but his words were just jumbled sounds in my ears. I kept tripping over things, falling over, and sliding back toward the river on the slick ground. Jim was good, never letting me lose sight of him, never abandoning me, but it was just no good. Once we got out of the clear-cut section of the forest and into the trees, I lost Jim. I thought I heard his sharp whispers cutting through fog. Yet I could not focus well enough to locate him. His whispers faded and then disappeared altogether.

With my completely fucked-up sense of time, I can’t say how long I just stood there, deciding what to do and how to do it. Eventually I forced myself to move, taking small, measured steps to test the ground beneath my feet. I needed to find a place to wait the fox hunt out, to rest, but I had to choose wisely. These woods were dark under the best of circumstances and with the fog, it was impossible to see more than fifteen or twenty feet ahead of me. Bullets would be flying and there was always a chance of ricochet. The fox was actually in the least danger of any of us.

Walking did me no good, so I got on hands and knees and felt my way. I found a spot where some trees had fallen over each other to create a kind of barrier with a hollow just large enough to accommodate me. With a wall of big pines in front of the hollow, I felt I’d be pretty safe there until the sun came up. I lay down on my left side, the wet pine straw making a less than comfortable mattress. It didn’t take long for me to stop noticing the discomfort or the dampness or anything else.

I didn’t sleep, exactly, because I was conscious of occasional gunshots echoing through the trees, twigs snapping under foot. I also heard voices, passing footsteps. How close by, I could not say. And though I wasn’t asleep, I wasn’t awake either. Each sound seemed to set my mind off in another direction. Mostly I confused myself with Terry McGuinn, envisioning him, us, in the hyper-reality I’d created in the pages of the book.

McGuinn’s prayers were answered with the Almighty’s usual mix of mercy and malevolence. There were no lurking branches beneath the waterline on which he might be skewered, but the current did conspire to twist his body in such a manner as to ensure his wrecked left shoulder would absorb the full brunt of the impact against the felled tree that lay across the river, pushing him to the falls. When his shoulder smacked into the tree, the explosion of pain stiffened him so fierce it near snapped him in half. He’d never experienced the likes of it before and when the agony subsided enough for him to snatch a breath, he realized his bladder had let go. He laughed through chattering teeth.

“That’s right,” he said, looking skyward, “why impale me, for fook’s sake, when you can favor me with small indignities? This can’t be the extent of me punishment for the trail of bodies I’ve left in me wake, can it?” The Lord, he thought, may have chosen the Hebrews, but his sense of irony was purely Irish.

Now that his little moment with God had passed, he had to get himself out of the water. As the pain of the impact with the tree lessened, he realized he could not feel his legs and that his good arm was leaden and stinging like a basket of bees. But this wasn’t about pain any longer. Another few moments in the water would be his undoing, so he willed his right arm onto the tree. It was no good. Most of the bark had been stripped away by the pounding of the water and the exposed wood was as slippery as ice. Finally, his groping hand fell upon the jagged knob of a branch that had been torn away by the current. His hand anchored to the knob, he talked his near-frozen legs into feeling for a rock or some refuse he might use to propel himself up out of the water and onto the tree.

Bang! Something heavy-a smaller tree or orphaned canoe, perhaps-slammed into him, pressing the wind out of his lungs and nearly sending him back under. But Terry McGuinn, calling on whatever strength he held in reserve, kept himself up and eyed the flotsam that had almost cast him to his fate. He had been wrong, as wrong as he had ever been, for the thing that had hit him with such fury was neither a tree nor a canoe. It was the body of the poor footballer Zoe had lured out of the bar less than two hours ago. The bullet wound had destroyed the lad’s once-handsome face, but the shine of his wet, rich black skin under the moonlight showed his beautifully sculpted muscles, muscles now as useless as the prayers of the Brit soldiers who had kneeled before McGuinn and begged for mercy.