Reed Coleman - Gun Church

Then a strange voice broke the trance. “You guys wanna go get a room or something?”

The first thing I saw when I turned around was his badge. The first thing he saw was the panic in my eyes.

“Yo, buddy, relax,” he said. “I was only busting your chops.”

“Sorry, officer. You startled me.”

“No problem, but I think you and your girlfriend better get going anyways unless you wanna become Mr. and Mrs. Snowman. It’s coming down pretty good. S’posed to get at least two feet.”

“Thanks.”

“And you might wanna pick up these cups. Love ain’t an excuse for littering. You know what I mean?” He winked as he walked past us. “Have a nice day.”

We watched his dark blue figure disappear into the snow. Finally breaking our embrace, Amy scooped up the cups and threw them in the corner trash basket. I used those few seconds to get my heart out of my throat. My breathing was almost normal when Amy got back to me, but she wasn’t fooled.

“What was that about, Kip? You nearly jumped out of your skin when you saw the cop. I could feel your heart pounding through your coat. You’re not carrying, are you?”

Carrying? I panicked again, then realized she was talking about drugs, not guns.

“I told you, I’ve been clean for a long time.”

“Then what? You can’t tell me that reaction was nothing. You were scared to death.”

See, about a month ago, I killed a man. Shot the motherfucker right through his heart in front of witnesses .

No, somehow I didn’t think this was the appropriate time or the place for that confession, but I had to tell her something.

“This sheriff’s deputy in Brixton used to harass the shit out of me because I slept with a woman he was hot for. It was years ago and it didn’t last, but he could never let it go. So when he found out I was moving back here, he promised to make sure the bullshit would follow me north.”

“Same old Kip. At least you’re consistent.”

That cut me, deep. I don’t know what I expected her to say. I told her a lie I knew she would believe and she did, without question. I realized then it was going to take more than her missing me or one embrace to make her see the Kipster was really dead. She did, however, seem to read the hurt in my eyes. I think she apologized. Her mouth was moving and she hung her head slightly, but I was too distracted to hear her. My focus had already shifted elsewhere.

Just like that night at the Algonquin, I heard a noise I thought I recognized. Jim’s truck . I was sure I heard Jim’s truck. I’d been in that old pickup nearly every day for four months and knew its idiosyncrasies like I knew my own. Its exhaust system had come loose. Jim had jerry-rigged a clamp by twisting together a few wire hangers, looping the hangers around the pipe leading to the muffler, and then hooking the makeshift clamp over the rear axle. When the truck accelerated quickly, the pipe kind of rattled and scraped against the hangers. I snapped my head around, but the snow was now coming down in blinding, wind-whipped sheets. I caught a glimpse of a taillight disappearing around a corner, the snow turning its glow from red to pink.

Was it Jim’s taillight? Of course not. Just like with the Mabry kid’s death, it was the Kipster’s narcissism rearing its ugly head once more for old times’ sake. Amy and I were right by the Holland Tunnel and even in a snowstorm, thousands of cars poured out of its exits, spilling onto the cobblestoned Tribeca streets. I was already off balance from being with Amy, from holding her again, and I was still reeling from the scare I got from the cop. I didn’t know that I would ever be able to see a cop again without going into full fight or flight, or thinking of Stan Petrovic’s body moldering in a grave somewhere in the backwoods of Brixton.

“Kip, are you all right?” Amy asked, pulling me along.

“I should have worn a hat.”

“Come on, my studio’s only three blocks away.”

But even as we walked towards Amy’s warm, dry studio and all the possibilities it had to offer, I could not help but play Lot’s wife and look behind me.

I hadn’t turned to salt, but in some sense I was still looking behind me.

It was three in the morning and I’d yet to shake the afternoon’s chill. It was a chill not from the cold or the wet of the snow. That chill was gone fifteen minutes after we got to Amy’s studio. No, the chill I carried with me was in my marrow, a feeling that the specter of Stan Petrovic would not be so easily buried as his body. If the day had taught me anything it was to not trust what you think you know. It went beyond imagining the scrape and rattle of Jim’s pickup. It extended all the way from Brixton into Amy’s bed.

When we first met, Amy was just beginning to taste the fruits of success. And that early success was more about critical kudos and good press than paychecks. In those days, she was sharing cramped studio space with a bunch of other painters in the basement of an old factory building. The light sucked and she didn’t really care for some of the people with whom she shared the space. Worse, she despised their work. I bought her the loft studio as an engagement present. It was a stretch then, before I got my big contract, but I was in love. It might have been the first and last selfless thing I’d ever done. Until I met Amy, the concept of love-inspired art of any kind made me gag. Once we were together, I understood it was possible to love someone so much that promises of the moon and the stars weren’t just a load of crap. But I never was a guy to hang the moon or promise the stars; and in Amy’s universe, a spacious loft with natural light was more valuable than all the lofty promises and metaphysical conceits of a thousand ardent poets. Did that love stop me from fucking around? Not for very long, no. To be human was to be a contradiction, and in that way I was more human than most.

Of course, as I sank further and further into living out the myth of the Kipster, the loft became less Amy’s workplace than retreat. Finally, it was where Amy moved when she left me. I think maybe that accounted for some of the discomfort I felt here. Coming here had started well enough. First off, it was dry, warm, and-even ten years removed-familiar. We talked a lot, mostly about how her marriage to Moreland had fallen apart.

“With you, Kip, there was always lust to fall back on. With Peter … ” The shrug of her shoulders as her voice faded was quite eloquent. “We started drifting apart after only a couple of months and we’ve been living fairly separate lives for a long time now. I guess we should have gotten divorced years ago, but neither one of us has felt the urge or had the energy to pursue one.” Again, she didn’t say the words, but the forward lean of her body and the smile in her eyes spoke for her. Until now , they said.

We discussed her work and she showed me her latest paintings. Her recent work had taken a turn away from twentieth-century abstraction toward a kind of hyper-realism, which, as Amy explained, was simply another form of abstraction. Looking at those paintings, I think, was when the real discomfort began to set in. She had done a series of in situ portraits of us as a couple at different stages of our marriage. She had based the paintings on photographs taken of us by her friends at various parties. Some of the paintings were of posed group shots. Some were candid shots.

In the paintings from early in our marriage, Amy and I were painted in full color, so vivid they almost hurt my eyes. Our features, as were everyone else’s, were so subversively subtle and cruelly perfect that to stare at them too long was to look into the invisible light of an eclipse. In these first portraits, only Amy and I were done in color. Everyone else was done in shades of black, white, and gray. But as the series advanced with our years of marriage, the pattern gradually reversed until only Amy and I were black, white, and gray. In the last in the series, I was nothing more than an outline. To look at them was far more painful than my broken ribs or concussion.