Reed Coleman - Gun Church

Beneath their shirts they wore protective Kevlar vests. It struck me that neither of them wore head or eye protection, or anything to cover their limbs. This was madness and I was sick with the need to know what was going on. I pushed my way between Jim and the fat boy, no one seeming to mind.

“Hey, Professor Weiler!” Jim slapped my back. He winced in pain. “Glad you could make it. The professor doesn’t have a beer. Somebody get Professor Weiler a beer!” Then he took my right hand and curled my fingers around the butt of the Luger. “You ever hold one of these before?”

“As a matter of fact, Jim, I have.”

He smiled that smile again and for an instant it felt like we were the only ones in the room. Then the St. Pauli Girl handed me a Bud.

“Would you like to try it sometime?” Jim asked, letting the question dangle.

“How about someone explaining to me what’s going on?” I tried to sound aloof, but it came out flat and unconvincing.

“Sure, Professor Weiler. You saved my life. Anything for you. Come on.”

We walked back out through the seam in the mattresses, through the door. I followed Jim through the hangar and up some stairs into a dimly lit locker room. I sat down on a narrow wooden bench that ran between two rows of facing lockers. I noticed the Luger was still in my hand and that I didn’t seem to want to put it down.

Jim removed his vest and not without difficulty. Even in the low light, I could see the angry bruise on his chest where the bullet must have hit his vest. It wasn’t so much the fresh bruise that caught my eye. No, Jim’s well-muscled body was a testament to old wounds, a map drawn in discolored blotches and scar tissue. All that was missing was a legend to help me understand the scale of the hurt. Some of the scars on his body were pink and waxy. Some were jagged, others symmetrical. Lines of cross-hatched stitches were scattered on his chest and abs, their color fading like half-buried railroad spurs.

“You’re staring, Professor.”

I said, “It would be hard not to stare.”

“The scars on my back are mostly from my daddy. He used to take the belt to me a lot when I was a kid. It was tough being his son, but when I found your books I had a place to go to be safe, a world far away from Brixton.” Jim shrugged. “This one here’s from a bullet,” he said, pointing at a particularly ragged scar halfway between his right hip and navel. “I stitched it up myself. Hurt like a son of a bitch.”

“What’s all this about, Jim?”

“ This ?” He seemed not to understand.

“This! Tonight.”

“It’s what matters,” he said as if that explained it.

“What matters?”

“What matters to us,” he said, wincing in pain as he tried to pull a hooded BCCC sweatshirt over his head.

I put the beer and the Luger down and helped him get the sweatshirt on.

“C’mon,” he said, grabbing the Luger and tucking it in his pants. “Let’s get back out to the party. We’ll need to talk about this another time. We can meet at Stan’s Diner or something.”

“Sounds like a plan. Stan’s for lunch tomorrow?”

“Make it a few days. I’m gonna be pretty sore.” He turned to go and then stopped to face me. “One thing, Professor Weiler … ”

“What’s that?”

“We don’t talk about what goes on here, not with anyone, not even with each other, okay?”

“Like in Fight Club ,” I said. “The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club.”

Jim’s shoulders slumped. “Yeah, like that. And we don’t use names, at least not while we’re here. ’Course they all know who you are.”

As we walked back to the bunker, my mind was zooming in another direction. I was still off balance, contemplating Jim’s wounds, remembering my own wounds-self-inflicted or otherwise. Words began forming in my head. I could see my list of seven first lines, could hear them in my own voice, repeating and repeating. There might be a second line in there somewhere, I thought, maybe even a third, maybe a paragraph. The rush of it was even more intense than it had been with the St. Pauli Girl. I swear I was hard. I felt like a writer again. I was Kipster come from the dead. Jim’s wasn’t the only resurrection of the evening.

My bedroom was heavy with the St. Pauli Girl’s scent and it wasn’t lost on me that my entire universe once smelled this way, of blonds and possibility. Peeking over the edge of my laptop, I studied the St. Pauli Girl’s curves. Her shape, like her scent, was still raw: curing, not cured. She was a demon in bed and it seemed to me she slept as fiercely as she fucked. Her orgasms may not have moved the earth, but they sure as shit moved me. Now fast asleep, Renee was squeezing the feathers out of my pillows and plowing over quilted mountain ranges with a sweep of her bare leg. There was nothing brittle about the blond in my bed tonight. Yet, I couldn’t help but wonder about where such ferocity had come from in such a young woman.

Funny thing about her was that she wasn’t quite so spectacular to look at without her clothes on. Don’t misunderstand, she was by far the hottest woman I’d been with since Amy. Amy was lush and moody and seductive. She had those gold-flecked green eyes that were just unfair, but Amy wasn’t head-turning. I think that’s what turned my head. When I was at the height of my fame and this week’s batch of blonds was taking numbers like at the supermarket deli counter, Amy couldn’t be bothered. The first time we met at Puffy’s in Tribeca, her clothes and hands were speckled and splattered with paint, and she was about as impressed by me as by a moth. Maybe less so. When Amy’s clothes came off, her imperfections blended into a kind of fleshy magic. Renee’s looks were nearly perfect and therefore less interesting. It was a puzzlement, a paradox. The exploration of paradox was why I thought I’d become a writer.

Once I lost my gift, I realized writing wasn’t about paradox at all, but about words. I had been in love with words my whole life and I didn’t think I could love anything more. When I got famous, I didn’t think there was anything I could love more than fame. Then I met Amy and I didn’t think I could love anything more than Amy. Cocaine proved me wrong and proved easier to love than words or fame or Amy.

When I was certain the St. Pauli Girl had settled down into a still sleep, I started typing:

From the moment McGuinn stepped off the bus and into the belly of a depot that was straight out of the B movies his aul wan favored, he knew he was well through the looking glass. Not even a man as accomplished at murder as himself could foresee the dangers awaiting him in this faceless, generic town on the fringes of the map of the States. He’d been to America before, many times, when he’d have to disappear for a while to let things settle down back home. But those other trips had been spent in Boston or New York, and in the bosom of the Republican underground. Here in this nowhere, he was wholly on his own, exposed without a coat against the chill, and felt as if everyone he passed walking from the bus depot was staring at him with accusation in their eyes.

While peace in the North was not quite at hand, it was on the horizon and McGuinn knew it. Someday soon, there would be handshakes and smiles between ancient enemies, promises of disarmament, and amnesty. Good news for everyone but the likes of himself, for there were sins not destined for forgiving and secrets never intended for telling. That was why he was in this godforsaken shite hole, because his own people would be as anxious to kill him as the Brits, maybe more so. Still, he hadn’t fully come to terms with it until he’d had a sit-down with Old Jack Byrnes.