Gun Church

Sixteen

The St. Pauli Girl was barely recognizable in her protective gear, but it would have been impossible not to recognize the hulking figure standing across the room from her. Although the helmet and face mask obscured his pocked and scarred visage, Stan Petrovic stuck out like a malignant cyst. For the second time since we met, Renee seemed small and vulnerable. I realize that’s an odd thing to say about someone with a.40 Glock in her right hand, but the menace that Stan Petrovic exuded couldn’t be contained by all the padding in the world. Protective armor is meant to keep things out, not keep them in.

“I don’t like it,” I heard myself say.

“Don’t worry about Renee. She’s good. She can take care of herself.”

“Thanks, Jim, but you’ll excuse me if I find little comfort in that.” I started to get up. The kid held me down in my seat.

Before I could get another word out of my mouth, the chapel echoed with gunfire. The next thing I was conscious of was kneeling over Renee, searching her shirt and suit for where the bullet had hit. I couldn’t find an indentation anywhere. My mind was racing with the illogic of it. She was down, so she had to have been hit, but there was no hole, no blood. She was down, but she wasn’t writhing in pain. The St. Pauli Girl was deathly still, and quiet. Frantically, I ran my hands along the makeshift leg armor. Then a disembodied voice called out: “Headshot.”

And there it was: a thumb-sized hole in the front left side of the thick flak padding glued onto the Army surplus helmet. Before I could move, I was being shoved out of the way and Renee seemed to disappear behind a wall of bodies. They moved around her like worker bees attending their fallen queen. I think I was in shock and just stood there for what felt like hours. Then I heard something else and turned to see Stan getting up onto his hands and knees. He was grunting, struggling to pull off the face mask and helmet. I ran at him, rearing back my leg to kick the cocksucker in the face, but Jim tackled me before I swung my leg forward. He kept me pinned to the floor.

“Stop it, Kip,” he whispered in my ear. “You’re going to fuck everything up. You can’t do that now. You can’t fuck it all up now.” He was almost pleading.

“That fuck shot her in the head. He killed Renee.”

“It was Stan’s first time too, just like you.”

“I don’t give a-”

“She’s okay. She’s okay. Calm down! She was just stunned and knocked her head when she fell back. Look.”

I raised my head up as far as I could against Jim’s mass and saw the St. Pauli Girl smiling at me in that way she had.

“Okay, okay, let me up.”

When everyone was certain Renee was steady on her feet, they moved away from her. She moved toward Stan and repeated the same ritual Jim and I had performed only a half hour before. Then it was Stan’s turn for the beer bath, for the adulation, and eventually for everything else I’d gone through earlier.

“Are you okay? Are you okay?” I was shouting at the St. Pauli Girl.

“I’m fine. I just feel stupid. Christ, you’d think I’d never done this before.”

“But you’re okay?”

“I’m okay, Ken. I promise,” she said, pecking me softly on the cheek. “You really do care about me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She didn’t answer, instead pulling me over to where Stan was the center of attention, his fat gut wet with beer, a small red mark blooming in the center of his chest. When he looked around, he noticed me at the back of the crowd. I smiled at him as he had smiled at me. Tonight I would make nice like everyone else, but this wasn’t over between us.

The St. Pauli Girl didn’t say a word as we drove back to my house. Maybe Jim was right about her and she could handle herself as well as anyone, but her silence was eloquent. I wouldn’t have known what to say had she spoken. Renee had come very close to dying, very close; closer, I suspect, than she thought possible. I was more than a bit lost myself, caught in that post-adrenalin netherworld of my rush-crash-rush cycle and the panic and relief over her close call. I was trying to make sense of it, to filter it; yet I knew that even if I squeezed everything out of the events of that evening, leaving nothing but pith and peel, it wouldn’t have added up. There are some things in life that can be reduced down to their molecules and yet yield nothing of their nature. Maybe it was all too raw.

Finally, Renee leaned over, resting her head on my thigh. I finger-combed her hair and she began softly sobbing.

“Does your head hurt?” I asked.

“That’s not why I’m crying.”

“Why then?”

“Because of what you did back there.”

“I was worried about you.”

“I care about you too, Ken.”

“Shhhh. Relax.”

Her tears dried up and she closed her eyes as if to sleep. As she rested there, an ugly thought came to mind. It was a question, really. One I thought I knew the answer to, an answer that, if correct, was more unpleasant than the question itself. I knew it was a question better left alone and unspoken, but when the St. Pauli Girl stirred it spilled out of my mouth.

“Why did you shoot with Stan?”

“Why do you think?” she said, pushing herself upright. “Why did you shoot with Jim?”

“Jim says the first time you shoot, you shoot with the person who trained you.”

“Then stop asking me questions you already know the answers to, especially if you don’t like the answers.”

“But why would you train Stan?”

“He had to be trained by someone.” Her voice was steady, cool, distant.

“But why you? Who picked who? Did Jim have anything to-”

“You sound jealous,” she said, a mischievous glint in her eyes.

“Maybe a little.”

“Only a little?”

I swung the steering wheel hard right and skidded to a stop on the shoulder. I undid my seatbelt, reached over, pulled Renee to me, and pressed my mouth onto hers, hard. My tongue was between her lips before she had a chance to breathe and my hand was undoing her jeans. She didn’t fight, but she didn’t help either. I didn’t care. Once I got my hand under her panties, she became decidedly less passive.

When we finished, the windows were fogged over and the car smelled intensely of sex. We sat back in our seats, half-naked, taking it all in. In Brixton, we could have been parked in the middle of the road for the lack of traffic. From the time I pulled over until the time I started back to the house, a half hour must have gone by and not one car passed us in either direction.

“I’m the third most experienced person, Ken,” the St. Pauli Girl said as I put the car in gear. “That’s why I trained Stan. That’s all.”

“It’s okay, I was just being an idiot. Who’s the second most experienced shooter?”

“He’s moved on,” she said, “so now I’m next in line.”

We didn’t say much more on the drive, but when we got to the house we let our bodies do the talking until we lost our voices.

I am sorry to inform you that due to a decrease in sales and a lack of demand over the past several years, we find it necessary to reduce and sell off our overstock of inventory of the following titles: Clown Car Bounce, The Devil’s Understudy, and Curly Takes Five. Prior to reducing the inventory, I can make copies available to you at the special rate of $2.60 per unit.

— TRENA KEMPTON, LIQUIDATIONS MANAGER