Gun Church

Seven

Logging and mining towns are rough and tumble places. Brixton was no exception. It was the kind of place where even the emo kids had grown up hunting and field dressing deer. None of the locals wasted time mourning Frank Vuchovich. They crossed themselves and moved on. Brixtonians were stoic and not given to hand wringing or calling Child Protective Services. The parish priest was their first responder of choice. So, yeah, I fit right in here, like a foot in a glove.

I didn’t exactly have my choice of jobs when I moved to Brixton. The only reason I got this dream job was because I once charity-fucked Ellen Gershowitz, a new girl in the publicity department at Ferris, Ledoux. The head of PR had arranged for five journalists to have lunch with me at The Quilted Giraffe-an aptly pretentious venue for the decade of wretched pretension. The luncheon was a big deal at the time because I had stopped giving interviews. The moratorium was a total bullshit publicity stunt in order to create some hype for Flashing Pandora. Unfortunately, no one had cued in Ellen G, who had arranged for me to give an interview to her alma mater’s newspaper that morning.

Needless to say, Miss Gershowitz received the reaming of her life and was forced to apologize to me in person prior to the luncheon. That she had to throw herself on my mercy was indicative of just how low on the totem pole poor Miss Gershowitz was. Readers have some peculiar notions about the status of writers, the most foolish of which is that writers are treated like royalty by their publishers. Yeah, right! By the time Clown Car Bounce was published, I couldn’t get the PR department to return my calls. When I complained to the head of publicity that they misspelled my last name in the press release for Curley Takes Five, the editor in chief at Ferris called me up and told me to concern myself less with other people’s spelling and to concentrate more vigorously on my own vanquished skills. I was royalty, all right: King Shit.

Ellen Gershowitz was pleasant enough on the eyes when she wasn’t crying and apologizing. God, she was so miserable that day I think I would have slept with her even if she’d been a beast. Women aren’t the only suckers for wounded lovers and I was particularly vulnerable to tits and tears. I was never quite sure if she was more grateful for the mercy fuck or for the interview I gave her college newspaper the following day. I was too vain to ask. Regardless, a few more months of abuse at Ferris, Ledoux cured Ellen Gershowitz of publishing and drove her straight back to graduate school and a life in academia.

It’s not like my academic travails were closely guarded secrets. On the contrary, my deconstruction had been quite a public affair. The issue was that the newsworthiness of my plummet from grace had diminished in direct proportion to my sales. No one cared. I wasn’t old news. I was no news. I was forgotten. Better to be dead than forgotten. Just ask my father. That I’d suffered through seven years in Brixton without throwing myself into an industrial meat grinder was testament to my narcissism. People often mistook my egregious lack of pride for poor self-esteem. That wasn’t it at all. At the bitter end of our marriage, Amy used to say I was born with an ego in place of a heart. I didn’t disagree. Generally, writers are the most appalling narcissists.

When Ellen Gershowitz contacted me after hearing about my being run out of yet another job, I was amazed anyone had taken notice. I doubted colleges could get any more obscure than the schools I’d been thrown out of. My mistake was projecting my utter lack of pride onto those schools. When you’re fourth-rung material, even third-rung schools look down their noses at you. Ellen, who had passed through Brixton as an adjunct and was a friend of the chairman of the English department, got me the job. Only very recently have I stopped regretting that long-ago mercy fuck and forgiven her.

While Brixton was not a college town, per se, the area in the immediate proximity of the campus was a bit softer at the edges than the rest of the place. Although I thought BCCC a beshitten little pimple, kids came to school here from all around the state. I still wasn’t quite sure why, but I knew it wasn’t for the English department. After the Nadirs left and since our current chairman was a Cajun, I was the only member of the English department faculty on cordial terms with the mother tongue. Stan’s Diner was kind of the crossroads-the one place where the two area populations met.

When I walked in, Jim Trimble was seated in a booth at the back of the diner reading a yellowed, dog-eared copy of Beatnik Souffle.

“That stuff’ll rot your brain,” I said, sliding in across from him. “A lot more dangerous than guns.”

“Hey, Professor Weiler.” He put the book down and shook my hand. “I’ve read it so many times I can recite whole passages. Listen … ”

With that, Jim handed me the book, pointed to his place so I could follow, and recited, verbatim, an entire page. I don’t mean just any page. It was a page where the protagonist, Moses Gold, recites a long, complex poem. Man, I’d forgotten most of it and here was this kid reciting it from memory. Very scary stuff. It reminded me of the crazy kid in the movie Diner who only spoke in dialogue from the movie Sweet Smell of Success. I couldn’t help but wonder how deep his obsession with the Kipster went.

I bowed with false humility. Was there any other kind? At least now I understood the faint echoes of my old style in Jim’s assignments. Imitating voice is what nascent writers do. Imitating mine was a death wish.

“I’ve read everything you’ve ever written.”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but you’ve read everything I’ve published, not written. If you’d read everything I’d ever written, you’d still be throwing up.”

He smiled that disconcerting smile of his. “I don’t care what you say. You’re a great writer.” There was a level of admiration in Jim’s voice that bordered on fanboy gushing. I’d once been quite used to the sound of it, once liked it, once expected it. Now it made me feel like a fraud.

“I was pretty good thirty years ago.”

“And just so you understand, Professor, it’s not the guns that are dangerous, it’s not the bullets. It’s the man holding the gun.” There was a subtle, but immodest bend at the corners of his mouth.

Just then, Stan Petrovic hobbled over to take our order. Stan, the son of a Brixton miner, was an ex-Cleveland Browns linebacker and special-teamer who’d spent time enough in the NFL during the late ’70s and ’80s to permanently fuck up his knees, and to save the money to buy the diner. Petrovic was fond of self-medication and his small-town celebrity. Over the years, as the generations churned and his celebrity lost most of its luster, his need for self-medication increased. Neither the loss of status nor the alcohol had done much to improve Stan’s famously surly personality.

“If it ain’t the local hero and the local zero,” he said, tossing menus at us.

Petrovic had always been a bit of a dick to me, but since the shooting incident at school, his distaste for me had ratcheted up another notch. He seemed to take my recent notoriety as a personal affront. Like I said, you only realize how intoxicating celebrity is after you begin losing it; so while I didn’t much like him, I could empathize with Stan. Jim was not as forgiving.

“Better than being the local hero that became the local zero. Who knows, Stan, a few more years and maybe they’ll vote you into the Football Hall of Lame.”

“Watch your mouth, kid.”

Jim persisted. “Did they have face masks when you played or were you born like that?”

Petrovic’s cheek twitched, his pock-marked, leathery skin flushing red, but he just limped away without a word and sent over a waitress.

When we were done ordering, I asked, “What’s with you and Stan?”

“We don’t like each other much.”

“No shit? I never would have guessed. Took balls to talk to him like that.”

“Grabbing a loaded Colt from Frank Vuchovich’s hand, that took balls. What I just did was nothing. Stan’s a bully. Bullies are naked once you stand up to them.”

“Just the same, you should be careful.”

“Don’t worry about me, Professor. Stan won’t touch me. He dated my mom a few times and he’s still hung up on her. But he really doesn’t seem to like you very much.”

“It’s been that way from the day I showed up here and it’s degenerated since what happened with Frank.”

There was fire in the kid’s eyes. “Listen, Professor Weiler, you’ve stared down the barrel of a gun. Me too, more than a few times. Once you’ve done that, bullies like Stan don’t scare you. That’s the thing with guns: they are what they seem. You’ll see.”

“Is that what the other night was all about, staring down the barrel of a gun?”

He swiveled his head about to make sure no one was in earshot. “That’s a part of it. Look at it this way, Professor-”

“For chrissakes, Jim, outside of class call me Kip or Ken.”

Now the kid was smiling like the circus was in town. I half expected him to say golly gee and ask to blow me. “Really, I can call you Kip?”

“If you’d like.”

He leaned across the table, his whispers conspiratorial. “Well, it’s like I said the other night: it didn’t start out as anything. Me and some friends would go out into the woods above the Crooked River rapids and shoot at shit. ’Round here, that’s no big thing. Every group of friends in these parts shoots out in the woods somewhere. If you haven’t noticed, there isn’t much to do in Brixton.”

“Tell me about it.”

“But you have your head to live in,” he said. “The rest of us aren’t that lucky.”

“Jim, you’ve got a peculiar definition of luck.”

He looked wounded.

“Sorry,” I said. “Go on.”

“Most guys take rifles. We did, too. Rifles are what you grow up with, but I have all these guns from the Colonel’s collection.”

“The Colonel?”

“My daddy. That’s what he used to make me and my mom call him, the Colonel. He had his guns and I had your books. Anyways, my mom said he cared more for his guns than he ever cared for us, so she made sure she got them in the divorce settlement. She said that if she couldn’t have his balls, his guns were the next best thing.”

“Remind me not to piss off your mom.”

He liked that. “Anyways, we stopped taking rifles and only took handguns with us into the woods.”

“So you stopped taking rifles … ”

“Yeah, between all of us, we had access to all sorts of sidearms and we got real good with them, but we were ignorant of the guns themselves. I mean, we knew how they worked and everything, but we were ignorant of their nature. It was only when we got so good with them that it became boring that I began to understand.”

“Understand?”

“Understand their nature.”

“I’m sorry, Jim, but you lost me.”

He thought about that. “Okay, let’s say you have this beautiful, custom-fitted set of golf clubs, but all you ever did with them was go out and hit balls into a net in your backyard. And let’s say the government said that the most you could ever do with those clubs was to go to some driving range somewhere. Sure, the driving range is better than hitting balls into a net in your backyard, but how much better? Golf clubs aren’t made for driving ranges. Nets and ranges and such are untrue to the nature of the clubs and to the man who owns them. The nature of the clubs is to be used to play the game. To be satisfied to hit balls into a net or to go to a range is like a sin in the scheme of things.”

Guns, Metaphysics, and the Art of Golf, by Jim Trimble. Was this kid for real? I felt like a character in a Woody Allen movie and not one of the good ones, either. Come to think of it, fuck Woody Allen! Talk about a guy who lost his muse and got tens of millions of dollars worth of second chances. So, yeah, I wrote a few bad books and broke a few university rules, but I hadn’t been fucking my own stepdaughter. Even the Kipster had his limits.

“Golf, Jim? Do they even have golf courses in Brixton?”

“Two, up by Mirror Lake. The mine executives need something to do when they’re not counting their money.”

“Good line, I’ll have to steal it.” Uh oh, he got that aw-shucks-can-I-blow-you look on his face again. I’d have to watch how I worked this kid. “But why golf as allegory?”

“Because I know you play,” he said. “You were captain of your high school golf team.”

“That’s right, I was, wasn’t I? I forgot about that. Forgetting is a skill you’re still too young to appreciate.”

He shrugged. “But you can see the analogy, right?”

“Sure.”

“When we reached the point where we were bored by how good we’d gotten at hitting targets, it dawned on me. I understood. It was like a revelation from the Bible. We were bored because, like with the golf clubs, we were hitting balls into a net. That’s not what handguns are for.”

“No, they’re for killing people.”

“Exactly!”

At that moment, the waitress delivered our food. “Fries with gravy for you,” she said, sliding the plate in front of Jim. “And a burger for you, Professor Weiler.”

She wasn’t as enthusiastic about serving me as she’d been only a few weeks ago. All fame is fleeting. The waitress’s once-pretty face had plumped up and frayed with time. She looked like she’d been squeezed into her polyester uniform by a blind sausage maker. Funny, she’d been working here since the day I arrived in Brixton, but I never really noticed her before. I mean, really noticed her.

“Do you know our waitress?” I asked Jim as she walked away.

“Irina? Sure. Everybody knows Irina. You must’ve seen her in here.”

“But what’s her deal?”

“She was Stan’s high school girlfriend. He knocked her up, made her get an abortion, and then he split for Penn State.”

“At least Stan is a consistent asshole, but how do you know about Irina and him? That had to be before you were born.”

“C’mon, Kip, I haven’t been much of anywhere, but I don’t think places get much smaller than Brixton. Everybody knows everybody else’s business ’round here.”

“Sounds like publishing.”

He laughed, but didn’t know why.

I realized that I had lived in Brixton for seven years and not only didn’t I know the lay of the land, I didn’t know the people. Sure, I knew about Stan Petrovic, but only because he wore his surliness like clown makeup. I didn’t know the place or the people because I hadn’t wanted to know. I held myself apart. I didn’t know anything about the women I slept with. It wasn’t like they didn’t try to tell me. Christ, Janice Nadir would’ve told me the pet names for her vagina had I shown the least bit of interest.

“You going to eat your burger?” Jim asked, stuffing a handful of gravy fries in his mouth. “You seem kinda distracted.”

I bit into the burger only to heave it right back up. The meat was cold and raw. When I looked up, I saw Stan Petrovic, his eyes twinkling, his crooked lips bent into a smug, self-congratulatory smile. I removed the top of the bun from the burger to confirm what my taste buds and gag reflex had already told me.

“What an asshole!” Jim jumped up like he’d done that day in class.

I grabbed his arm. “Sit down, Jim. This is my fight.”

As I walked up to Petrovic, I took notice of what a nasty package he really was. The bad knees, the alcohol and bitterness, the fried and fatty food had turned him into a pitiable-looking fat man; but I knew there was an angry, second team All-American linebacker still living inside his blubber suit. By the time I got close to him, he’d swapped his smile for a sneer. He was puffed up, the fingers on both his hands twitching in anticipation. The diner was silent except for the bubbling and hissing of oil in the fry-o-lator.

I’d done a little boxing in college-just enough to know that fights never went the way you expected and to know when I was going to get my ass kicked. Short of a miracle, I was about to get my ass kicked.

“Hey, hero, what you think you’re gonna do to me? I ain’t no college kid with a gun in his hand and there ain’t no SWAT team here to save your faggoty ass.”

“I guess I could kick you in the balls, but that would require you to have some.”

He snickered, but said nothing. His now clenching fists were going to do the rest of his talking, so I let mine get in the first word. I feinted with my left shoulder, but threw my right hand. Stan lifted his arms to protect his face as my trunk twisted to power the punch. Too bad for him I wasn’t going for his head. I caught him flush in the liver with the hook. I figured the liver was as good a target as any. Given his intake of vodka and deep fried food, it must’ve been foie gras central.

That bent him over and the rush of air that went out of him was pretty impressive. But instead of following up, I did what I always do: I spent too much time playing to the crowd. Stan, still bent over, charged me, his left shoulder burying itself in my ribs. I tried keeping my feet, but it was no good. I was going down. My left hand spun off a counter stool and that was my last moment of verticality.

Petrovic was on me, pulling at my legs trying to get me out from between the stools. But I’d hitched my arms around the stool poles on either side of me to anchor myself and I kicked out my legs. My left heel connected with something hard. His jaw, I hoped. Whatever it was just pissed him off. He gave up on my legs and brought his right forearm down across my diaphragm and abdomen. Something big and spongy, my left lung probably, caught in my throat and I gasped for air. Suddenly that first punch I threw didn’t seem like such a brilliant move. I tried turning on my side and curled into a ball like a hedgehog, but I lacked protective quills. Petrovic kicked me in the back, but it didn’t land with much force as his foot deflected off one of the poles.

The front door opened; the string of sleigh bells tied to the handle clanged against the glass. I felt a gush of cool, fresh air and I saw a pair of polished black boots walking my way. Christmas coming early. Maybe Santa was bringing me a shotgun.

“That’s enough, Stan!” Black Boots barked. Petrovic disagreed, stomping instead of kicking me. This time his shoe didn’t deflect off anything but my ribs. Good thing I already couldn’t breathe or it might’ve really hurt.

“Enough!”

I recognized the voice. It was the deputy sheriff who’d been at the Air Force base three nights ago. I guess he was taking a break from high school skirt patrol. Still, I was wary enough of Stan to brace myself against another stomp. It never came. Arms were pulling me up and I was standing-well, sort of standing-between Deputy Dog and Jim Trimble. I managed some shallow breaths.

“You all right, Professor Weiler?” the deputy wanted to know.

Do I look all right, you yokel motherfucker? “Fine. I’m fine.” I straightened myself out and noticed Petrovic about ten feet away over by the front door. He was snarling. I can’t say that I’d ever actually seen a human snarling before. “Somebody get Stan a bone or some Liv-A-Snaps or something before he goes batshit.”

“Fuck you, asshole. This isn’t over.”

“Shut up, Stan,” the deputy said. “And, Professor, I think we could use a little less of your lip at the current moment. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Now what the hell was goin’ on here?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Stan?”

“Nothing.”

“So, that’s the way it’s gonna be, huh?” the deputy said, shaking his head. “Have it your way, boys, but next time I’ll haul both your asses in. Professor, why don’t you take this opportunity to depart?” It wasn’t a suggestion.

Jim made sure to keep himself between Petrovic and me as I walked out.

“Remember, hero, this ain’t over,” Stan said as we passed.

I caught a glimpse of Jim’s face. He wanted me to say something. I could see it in his eyes and for some reason it was suddenly important for me not to disappoint the kid.

“Yeah, you’re right, Stan. It isn’t over. You started it, but I’ll finish it. Next time it won’t be me they’re peeling off the floor. Remember that.”

Out on the street, I took a few deep lungfuls of Brixton’s best. Jim was holding on to my elbow, walking me away from the diner.

“That was great in there, Kip,” he said.

“The part where I curled up in a ball like an insect?”

“The first punch. Do you know how many people in this town would like to pop Stan Petrovic one? You actually did it.”

“Yeah, Jim, but you heard him in there. He’s going to kick my ass sooner or later.”

“Or, like you said, maybe you’ll kick his.”

“That was just my anger talking.”

“No way,” he gushed. “Are you on campus tomorrow?”

“Freshman Comp at nine fifteen,” I said.

“Meet me by the student union after class.”

“Why?”

“So we can go hit some balls.”