Gun Church

Thirty

We shot last. Who the fuck knew why the rules were the rules? I mean, I had come to understand some of them. I knew why we did a lot of the things we did: the ashes, the number of paces, the hierarchy of crosses, et al. But I was at the point where I believed that some of the rules were just another name for Jim’s fancies. Some of the rules didn’t make any sense except in the worlds of the chapel and Gun Church; but this one, the one about shooters in vests going last, made perfect sense. After all, there was real drama when people were actually risking their lives and that’s what Jim and I were doing. Given my penchant for drama, I should have been all for waiting, but waiting just made me want to run. I couldn’t force myself to run. For some godforsaken reason it was still important for me to not disappoint Jim. Renee was different. I think she would have helped me run.

The usual cast of characters was on hand, with the exception of the maintenance guy from the college. While I wasn’t exactly tearful about his absence, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was lingering resentment about his getting shot by Jim. I remembered the look on his face when we were in the berry patch, how he stared at Jim. All that vanished: Any thought about anything else disappeared the moment we stepped out onto the chapel floor and counted out our paces. Suddenly, I felt naked without the security blanket of the protective suit. I even missed the stink of sweat and puke left behind by the gun junkies who’d worn it before me. I felt utterly stripped bare there in my white T-shirt and vest.

When Jim turned to face me, I began to shake, and the harder I tried to stop it, the worse it got. Even my attempts to summon up McGuinn’s callousness paid no dividends. He’d abandoned me at the worst moment. There across from me, exactly thirty feet away, was Jim: rock steady, expressionless, calm as an executioner. It didn’t help that Renee was the one to hand us our weapons. Felt like everything that could unnerve me had been heaped on me. My shaking hand did not escape her notice. Her eyes were wide, but not with fear. Her expression was unreadable and she did not say a word to me as she stepped back. Instead, she asked us if we were ready. Jim said that he was. I lied that I was.

Renee said, “Begin.”

Then, as I raised the heavy.45 in my shaking hand, Jim did me a favor. He smiled that smile at me; the smile I had grown to hate, that smug, all-knowing smile. Suddenly, I didn’t need McGuinn. My hand stopped shaking and what I felt in my heart for Jim was nothing like love. I squeezed the trigger.

The emergency room doctor-the same guy who’d treated me for the concussion-was, to say the least, skeptical. “You’re getting to be a regular around here, Mr. Weiler. Let me guess, you fell off a ladder again.”

“Amazing,” I managed through teeth clenched in pain. “Do you… do … tarot card … readings … too?”

“I’ve worked trauma rooms for twenty years, five of them at Cook County in Chicago,” he said, gently pressing his gloved fingers against the bruised and swollen area on my right side. “You develop a sense about people in this line of work. You might say I have a built in bullshit-o-meter and the needle’s spiking pretty high at the moment.”

“Really?”

“Uh huh. Funny thing about working in a big city hospital, you see a lot of gunshot trauma. In fact, on about five occasions, I treated cops who’d been shot at relatively close range. Lucky for them, they’d been wearing their protective vests,” he said, pressing hard on the center of the bruise. I nearly passed out from the pain.

“Funny … what’s … funny about … that?” I asked, gasping for air.

“Funny because your injury there looks exactly like damage a person might sustain if he were shot and the bullet was stopped by protective armor like a Kevlar vest, for instance.”

Jim had been good to his word. His shot hit me squarely in the vest, a few inches below my right nipple.

“I don’t … look good in … vests.”

He ignored that. “See, the thing most laymen don’t understand about protective armor is that it will usually prevent a handgun round from boring a ragged little tunnel through your body, but it can’t stop the laws of physics. The energy from the bullet has to go somewhere. Sometimes the vest will dissipate the energy sufficiently so that the wearer only gets a bad bruise, but there are times the energy will crack the wearer’s ribs or do even more serious internal damage. I’m sending you for X-rays, Mr. Weiler, but you’ve got some cracked ribs there. I’d bet on it.”

“I fell on … the point … of a … wrought iron fence. I’m lucky it … didn’t break … the skin,” I said, the pain easing for the time being.

“And did you used to tell your teachers that the dog ate your homework? Did your teachers believe you? This is Brixton County, Mr. Weiler. There isn’t a wrought iron fence for fifty miles around. Look, I don’t know what you’re playing at, but you better stop it before someone gets seriously injured. Have you ever seen what bullets do to the insides of the human body?”

“Yes … as a matter of fact,” I said, remembering my father’s blood on the fussy curtains. “Thanks, Doc, but … I … fell on the point … of a fence.”

“Suit yourself, Mr. Weiler. I’ve got other patients to see.”

Still, it could have been worse for me, much worse. The occasional broken rib must have been pretty standard fare for the chapel, but there was no escaping the fact that the margin of error between broken ribs and bleeding out was miniscule. I was finally experienced enough with a gun in my hand to know that very little separated a great shot from a miss. All it would have taken to turn a bull’s-eye into a disaster was a momentary lack of concentration, an unexpected distraction, a cough or a sneeze, the buzzing of a mosquito. And as good as Jim was, he wasn’t immune to any of those things. I’d seen as much when he hit the maintenance man.

Jim’s own warning rattled around in my head. “You get killed, we’re just going to take you out in the woods and bury you somewhere where you won’t ever be found. Even if you’re real seriously wounded, that’s what we’ll have to do.” So as bad luck goes, I guess, I was ahead of the game. I meant to keep it that way. I was about a hundred grand richer than I’d been a few weeks ago and I had a book to finish. I was pretty determined not to step into the chapel again. Nothing like those rare moments of clarity in your life. Standing on the wrong end of a gun will make you focus like almost nothing else.

When the curtain around the examination table pulled back, I expected an orderly to come in, but it was Renee. She was positively jovial compared to the last time we were here. That night, she was red-eyed and shaking. Tonight, for the first time since I got back from New York, she seemed like the Renee I’d grown so comfortable with before I left. The edge was off, her smile broad. It lit up the room.

“How do you feel?” she asked, clasping my right hand in both of hers.

“Alive.”

“Good to be alive.” She leaned over and kissed my forehead.

“Very.”

“How are your ribs?”

“The … doctor … thinks they’re … broken. They … really hurt.”

“Probably are broken,” she said. “It happens to all of us sooner or later. Me too. They’ll tape you up and you’ll need to take it easy for a while.”

“Thank … you, Doctor Svoboda.”

She blushed. “You hit Jim, you know. Almost everyone misses their first time shooting that way.”

I was glad she was happy about it. All I was was relieved. Frankly, I didn’t give a fuck if I hit Jim or shot through the tarp and hit the hangar roof, as long as I didn’t kill him. I realized I was more frightened of that than getting killed myself.

“Renee,” I whispered. “I don’t … think I … want to do … this anymore. Shooting, I … mean.”

If I thought that was going to upset her, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

“Promise me you won’t,” she said, moisture forming at the corners of her fierce blue eyes. She kissed me again, only this time on the mouth. “Promise me you won’t.”

“I promise. Renee … there’s something else … we … need to talk … about.”

“Shhhhh.” She placed her index finger across my lips. “Not tonight.”

“Okay, Mr. Weiler,” the orderly said as he strolled in pushing a wheelchair ahead of him. “Time to take a ride to X-ray.”

He helped me into the chair. Renee promised to wait for me and when I turned back to look at her, she was still smiling, but there were tears too.