Gun Church

Nineteen

Ironic thing is, it took me standing there in the chapel a second time to realize it wasn’t Amy’s respect I wanted, but my own. Regardless of the forces that got me there, I was there, the.38 in my raised hand. Standing across from me was the security guard from the abandoned base, a Glock in his raised hand. Although I wasn’t nearly as proficient with the.38 as I was with the Beretta, I wasn’t going to complain or balk at another chance for the big rush.

“Even with all the practice, you’re so nervous that first time that if you didn’t just raise up and shoot, you’d probably kill someone in the crowd,” Jim had said. “Ain’t that different than being a real virgin, you just aim and shoot.” We both had a laugh at that.

The second time was different. Gone was the profound nervousness, the panic that came with not knowing. The nauseating smells that had nearly caused me to swoon were expected, almost comforting, and the protective gear, though still cumbersome, didn’t irk me quite so much. The sweat that poured out of me was from excitement, not fear. I moved out of the locker room to the chapel under my own steam. There was no change in my perceptions. My hearing was fine. I wasn’t particularly conscious of my breathing or of the beating of my heart. What I felt was alive. I was fully in the moment maybe for the first time in my life. The ritual of the ash seemed to have the paradoxical effect of both heightening my sensations and calming me even further.

Through the door and padding, I stood shoulder to shoulder with my opponent, the security guard from the base. Our helmets were strapped on. We took eight measured strides to the center spot on the chapel floor. We did not bow or shout, “Blessed are they who have not seen, and yet believe.” Jim had told me, “Only virgins do that.”

I felt my opponent’s back to mine. I counted out the four strides, stopped, then took the one last step and about-faced. I zeroed in on my opponent’s chest. This time I didn’t need to imagine a red fist pumping inside a rib cage. I simply focused on the center of his vest. Jim placed the.38 in my hand, placed a Glock in the hand of my opponent, and stepped off to the side. He asked the both of us if we were ready. When we nodded that we were, Jim told us to raise our weapons and said, “Begin.”

“Each visit to the chapel is a different test,” Jim had explained. “The second time is as much a test of wills as a matter of marksmanship. It’s sort of like a game of chicken. How long can you stand there staring down the barrel of another weapon before one of you gives into the tension? Big balls won’t do you any good if you miss and take one in the chest. It’s a balancing act.”

I had to constantly weigh the loss of accuracy, the gun getting heavier in my hand the longer I waited, versus the macho factor.

As we stood there, rain pelting the corrugated metal roof of the hangar, there was a palpable sense of anticipation in the dank air. Maybe the same energy was there the first time too and I had been so consumed by the experience I hadn’t noticed. The longer I held back, the bigger the rush. I could feel the thousand little crosscuts in the textured grip of the.38. Then I saw or thought I saw a tensing in my opponent’s stance, but I could not react quickly enough. A flash. Bang! Then I fired.

A second later, I was still standing, still breathing freely. Nothing hurt. The freight train missed me. Across the way, the security guard was down, writhing on the floor. I was staring at him, admiring my handiwork, buzzing inside my own skin like a total freak. I’d hit him, but I couldn’t lose control. I walked over to him, gave him my hand, and pulled him to his feet. We removed our helmets and stood across from each other. He looked utterly dejected. His hand was on my shoulder, my index finger in the hole in his shirt above his heart. Only I spoke, “Stop doubting and believe.” When the receiving line was formed, only I passed along from person to person, repeating the phrase.

Someone clapped me on the back. Jim. “Great shot, Kip. Maybe you can get as good as me. You okay?”

I didn’t answer right away. I couldn’t. Just nodded my head yes.

“Come on.” His arm urged me forward. “Let’s get a beer.”

I unhitched all my gear. As it fell to the floor at my feet my energy level dipped, but it was nothing like the crash I experienced the last time. Renee kissed me on the cheek and we slowly walked over to the beer coolers. I was already fantasizing about my next time in the chapel, about how I wanted to try this without the monkey suit and helmet. Addiction isn’t only about the here and now but about the buzz of anticipation. It may well be a physical phenomenon, but it’s equally romantic. In a wonderfully perverse way, addiction is like falling in love.

This time, Jim didn’t come back to the locker room with me. It was only me and the security guard washing up, mostly in silence. What would we have had to talk about, anyway? I was lost in thought, feeling good about where I was at in my life. I wasn’t sure I had ever felt this way before, even at the height of my fame and talent. How completely fucking weird was that? Life was good. I was writing again. Things between Jim and me had pretty much returned to normal. My times with Renee were really pretty amazing. I wasn’t nearly bored with her and more surprisingly, she didn’t seem the least bit tired of me.

When we went back into the chapel, the next two shooters were the big guy from the BCCC maintenance crew and Jim. They were dressed only in vests covered in white T-shirts. The front of Jim’s shirt was covered in red crosses and black smears. The big guy’s shirt bore about ten or so crosses. The St. Pauli Girl stood next to me, holding my hand. There was a very different kind of tension in the air and in the crowd than earlier. The pinging of the rain on the roof was foreboding, each drop the tolling of a bell. I could feel the change in atmosphere in Renee’s grip as she could in mine. This was gladiatorial and it came with the very real possibility of blood or death.

Something else was different, too. Although both men acted out the same rituals the security guard and I had just performed, there was a marked change in how they were done. The both of them moved with such amazing grace and precision that it seemed like a pas de deux. Although they were different sizes and different ages, the length and timing of their strides was nearly identical.

The snaggle-toothed girl handed each man his weapon-the maintenance guy the.38 I’d shot earlier and Jim the Browning-and stood back. She asked if they were ready. They nodded that they were and then, just as Jim had done before, she said, “Begin.”

I figured the maintenance guy had to be pretty good to have done this kind of shooting ten times and for Jim to risk his life facing him. Still, the BCCC maintenance man was clearly the more nervous of the two. Jim stood there, steady as a rock, weapon raised, seeming not to breathe. Sweat was visible on the big man’s brow and he wasn’t nearly as solid as Jim. His breaths were louder and raspy, probably a result of all those cigarettes he always smelled of. He fired. Jim fired. They both went down, but it was obvious something was wrong. There was blood.

“Oh fuck! Oh fuck!” the big man screamed in pain, clamping his right hand over his left bicep, blood seeping through the tight spaces between his fingers. “Oh, Jesus, it burns.”

Jim lay still where he fell as he had the first time. Nearly everyone rushed to the blood. Renee and I ran to Jim. We pulled him to his feet, but he bent back over in pain. When he stood straight again, I saw the hole in his T-shirt. He’d been hit in his belly and it clearly hurt, Kevlar or not.

“How is he?” Jim asked, thrusting his chin at the maintenance man.

“You hit him in the arm. What happened?”

“Later.”

Jim rushed over to his bleeding opponent, who had a white towel wrapped around the wound. The blood hadn’t yet leaked through.

“He’ll be all right,” said the guy from the copy center. “The shot just sort of cut through his tricep. Good thing it didn’t get lodged in there. It’ll hurt, but we’ll get him patched up.”

Jim went over to him. That weird silence fell over the chapel and everyone stood back to form the line. Jim stuck his index finger onto the bloody towel. The big man stuck his bloody finger to Jim’s belly and they recited. Then they moved along the receiving line. Unlike in the world outside the chapel, wounded or not, you were expected to finish what you started. A few weeks back, Jim told me that short of death, there were no excuses. Now I knew it wasn’t just hyperbole.

Jim gave the wounded man the customary hug, but didn’t apologize. The maintenance guy didn’t utter an angry word, but there was obvious puzzlement in his eyes and hesitation in his demeanor. As he was led back into the locker room, his eyes met mine and he held his gaze until he was helped through the mattresses and out of the chapel. There was something in his stare that I couldn’t understand and by the time he disappeared from sight, I stopped trying to comprehend.

Jim said it fell on the two of us to clean up, so I sent Renee on ahead as we waited for the place to clear out. I looked forward to having a chance to talk to Jim about what had happened, but I wanted Jim to be the one to bring it up. He had a slightly different agenda.

“So, how was it the second time around? Different, right?” he asked, tying up the last of the plastic garbage bags. “Not like your old life.”

“Let me tell you something: guns and books, they’re not as different as you think. The first book is all about excitement and anticipation. You just write the damn thing because you don’t really know what you’re doing. But the second book … Watch out! Especially if the first book got people’s attention. When the second book is published-that is if you can manage to write a second book-they lie in the weeds for you wielding their long knives or worse.”

“Worse?”

“Much worse,” I said. “They can ignore you.”

“That’s a bad thing?”

“The worst thing there is, to be ignored,” I said. “Better to be despised. So what happened with-”

He shook his head. “I was off tonight. My head was someplace else and I waited too long to fire. By the time I squeezed, he’d already hit me.”

“Shit!”

“He’ll live.”

“But what if he hadn’t?”

“You know those rules you were complaining about? Well, we got them for that too. Are you scared about shooting now?”

“Pretty much the opposite, Jim.”

He smiled proudly. “Good thing. Come on, let’s go.”

Outside the hangar, the rain had given way to an achingly clear sky and a chilly northeast wind. I loaded the garbage bags into the box of Jim’s pickup while he went to shut down the generator and stow it. Without the rumble of the generator all I could hear was that eerie creaking of the buildings in the wind.