Gun Church

Fifteen

Sissy loads, my ass! The bullet hit me like Paul Bunyan’s axe. I’d been hit and hit hard. Rolling over, getting on all fours, I was still a little out of it-weak, shaken, kind of in a trance. Still, I was electric. The rush was like nothing that coke or pussy or fame had ever given me. I’d fired a bullet at another human being and, in spite of all the protective gear, it was as primal a thing as I’d ever done. I saw Jim coming my way, a smile as wide as could be hung across his rugged face. His mouth was moving, but I couldn’t make out any words. The roar was back and it filled up my ears and the rest of my head.

Now he was standing in front of me, pulling me up, throwing his arms around me. He let go with one arm and kept the other flung over my shoulders. When he stepped back, it got quiet once again. He reached across and put his finger in the hole his shot had made in my shirt.

He asked. “Are you blessed?”

“I have been blessed by gunfire.”

“Do you believe?”

“I believe.”

“Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe.”

“I have seen and I believe,” I said.

Then the silence shattered in a roar. Jim’s proud smile was so broad I thought his skin might crack.

“Look! You hit me! You hit me!” He was beside himself, poking his finger into a small hole in his shirt above his abdomen. “Virgins almost never hit anything but the mattresses. They’re always so nervous and weak. People have a kind of built-in thing about not killing other people. It’s one thing to shoot close to them up in the woods. It’s really different to aim at another person and pull the trigger, no matter what they’re wearing. But you did it, Kip. You did it.”

We pulled off our helmets and shirts, the snaggle-toothed girl collecting the shirts from Jim and me. The St. Pauli Girl folded herself into my arms. Tears of relief streamed down her cheeks, but there was something else in her expression that I couldn’t quite decipher in my numb euphoria. Whatever it was quickly vanished and she kissed me. It felt like my first kiss, the best first kiss. But when I looked up, I saw an unwelcome face, one that I hadn’t noticed in the blur of preceding moments: Stan Petrovic’s. There he was, standing at the very back of the crowd that had circled around us-that sneer on his battered face as cruel as a serrated edge.

I didn’t have time to focus on Stan because Jim, Renee, and I were being carried away with the will of the crowd, our feet not seeming to touch the ground as we were swept along. Hands pulled at my protective gear and by the time we reached the beer coolers, Jim and I were naked from our waists up. He had a small red blotch on his stomach about the size of an old silver dollar. The splotch on my chest was similar in size. We were both going to be bruised and sore for a while. I could only imagine the kind of pain you’d be in wearing only the thinner vests.

Jim shook up a can of Bud. “Welcome,” he said and showered me in beer.

Everyone else repeated the gesture until I was thoroughly soaked. I loved it. I had on a full body buzz and could have left earth’s orbit under my own power. My fears and worries, my disappointment over the book, had all been washed away by the beer and evaporated with the gun smoke. There was definitely something transformative about coming out the other end of this. It had been maybe five minutes since Jim and I had fired live ammunition at each other, and fuck me if Jim wasn’t right: I felt reborn. There was my total dunghill of a life beforehand and there was now. I grabbed a beer of my own, shook madly, and gave Jim a taste of his own medicine. When I was done, we hugged again.

It was like the rush from a roller coaster ride. When it’s over, you want to go again more than anything else in the world. The rush didn’t last. Nothing good ever lasts. The buzz drained out of me through the bottom of my shoes. Suddenly, my legs were rubbery and everything fell on my shoulders all at once. I was weak and I wanted nothing more than to lie down right there and pass out. Jim picked up on it right away.

“Come on, Kip, let’s get cleaned up.”

He fairly dragged me into the locker room and I lay down on the cold floor. I was vaguely conscious of Jim washing himself. I was utterly spent and my mind was as empty as it had been since the day I was born. My internal voice was asleep and I wanted to be. I think I nodded off there for a few minutes.

“Okay, Kip,” Jim said, lifting me to a sitting position. “Drink this and then wash up.” He handed me a cold bottle of water and pointed at three more bottles on the locker room bench.

I guzzled the water and made to stretch out again. “Just let me die here in peace.”

He laughed. “It happens to everybody. It’s the fear and the adrenalin. It gets to you, but we have to go back inside.”

“Why?”

“We’ve got to watch the others shoot.”

“I’ll read about it in the morning papers.”

He laughed again. I had my moments.

“But there’s someone you’ve got to see shoot.”

“Who?”

“Renee.”