“Why?”
His expression went through several changes in the course of only a few seconds. At first, he seemed confused, then annoyed, and then he smiled as if finally understanding my question.
“The only reason we came up here was to get you better, so you can come back to the chapel.”
“The white blockhouse?”
“Yeah, the chapel. You do want to go back there, don’t you?”
He knew I did. A pusher always knows a junkie when he sees one.
“Absolutely.”
“Well, Kip, you want to go back to the chapel again … ” His voice dropped to a whisper as he picked up the little Beretta and snapped back its slide. “You have to shoot.”
Then, to underline the point, he swung the freshly loaded Beretta around and put several bullets-
“What the fuck!” I jumped to my feet, rushing on adrenalin. I poked my finger into the hole in the tree.
“
“-
He looked pleased. “You remember?”
“From the other night and from the Bible,” I said. “That’s Jesus to Doubting Thomas. It’s been a long time since I recalled scripture.”
“Around here, Kip, it’s all about the Good Book. It’s the only hope people got.”
“I imagine the spear in Jesus’s side went in a lot deeper than these bullets,” I said, only the tip of my finger disappearing into the tree.
He shrugged his shoulders. “What do you expect? It’s a.25. No stopping power.”
“That wasn’t very funny, Jim, shooting above my head that way.”
“It wasn’t meant to be funny. I wanted to give you a taste of what it feels like to stand in the chapel. It’s not fooling around.”
“I figured that out the other night. I get it. You’re not fucking around.”
“So you want back in?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
“Then you have to shoot.”
“Shoot?”
“Shoot.”
I was still a bit dazed. As the effects of the adrenalin faded, I became conscious of the ringing in my ears and a profound weakness in my legs. I sat back down before gravity made the decision for me. I heard what the kid was saying, but couldn’t make sense of it. He must’ve seen the puzzlement in my eyes.
“Shoot,” he repeated, voice steady and calm, letting the clip slide out of the Beretta, racking the slide to make sure the little automatic was empty, tossing it into the duffel bag. “You have to face someone else down. That’s the rule. No exceptions, not even for you.”
“Renee?”
“Renee too. You know those little red crosses on our shirts?”
“I noticed them, yes,” I answered. “I was going to ask you about them.”
“Those crosses mark how many times we’ve shot and where we’ve been hit. If you look closely next time, you’ll see that the holes in the shirt have been sewn together.”
“But you let me in without-”
“You earned the right by what happened in class, but if you want back in-”
“-I have to shoot. I get it, Jim.”
“You understand, but you don’t get it. You won’t get it until you raise a gun up at someone raising a gun up at you. Until then, regardless of how good you get out here, it won’t matter.”
“Kind of like hitting golf balls into a net,” I heard myself say. “It’s not the real thing.”
He was beaming again. “Just like that, but different. There’s more than just the shooting. The shooting is a means to an end, not an end in itself.”
Guns, golf, and metaphysics: I figured we’d get back around to it eventually.
“But what about hunting?”
Jim’s face went blank. He stood up, walked to the bag, fished out the Police Special, and loaded it with a single round. Without a word to me about his intentions, Jim scanned the woods. He raised up and fired. A few seconds later, a squirrel tumbled out of a nearby tree.
“My daddy was a cruel man, Kip, but he hated hunting. After we went out shooting a few times, I killed a squirrel like I did just now. The Colonel beat me senseless right out here in these woods. The Colonel liked to say that a sport’s only a sport when both sides know they’re playing. I never forgot that. For something to matter, both sides have to know.” He looked back up into the trees. “Come on. It’s getting late.”
Eleven
My body wasn’t as achy as it had been when we began. I had to confess that for the first time since coming to Brixton, I had a routine that required a level of engagement beyond sleepwalking. Having a routine of any kind made me feel less like a fraud. No mean feat, that, but Jim had bigger plans for his hero and his hero had had his fill of disappointing people. So for the last few weeks I was up at 5:00 A.M., writing. Jim would come by at 7:00 A.M. and we’d go running. We hadn’t yet made it past a mile, but you wouldn’t have been able to tell by the burning soreness in my legs. My lungs … forget my lungs. That first week I would begin gasping for breath when I heard the crunch of Jim’s tires on the gravel driveway. Yet, there was something incredibly pleasing about the pain, about feeling anything beyond the drip, drip, dripping dull ache of regret for a life flushed down the shitter.
After classes, Jim would pick me up and we’d drive back to the spot above the falls to shoot. For now we worked with the little Beretta because he said it was the most easily tamed. Eventually, Jim felt confident enough in my shooting-or just crazy enough-to stand a few feet to the left or right of the target I was aiming at. I think I probably flinched more than he did. The flinching scared him more than the bullets.
What Jim couldn’t know was how hard I was rushing. I was flinching because I could not slow my heart. With the haze and sharp tang of the gun smoke filling the air, it was all I could do not to swoon. I was in four places at once: here, the lake house, my classroom, and the chapel. With each shot I took I was everywhere. It was like one continuous gestalt dream: I was the bloodied curtains, the broken glass, the ashes, the guns, and the bullets. I was my father, Frank, Jim, the fat kid. I was me, watching.
Each squeeze of the trigger was a burst of adrenalin, every shot had a life of its own. Although I could not control my pulse rate, the world seemed to slow down. The more I fired, the slower it got. I swore I could watch the ejected shells spinning, tumbling in space as if gravity were more a suggestion than a law of nature.
When I’d grabbed Frank Vuchovich’s gun, I had opened a portal to a different universe, one I thought I’d never get back to; but here I was at the event horizon, almost at the point of falling into the black hole. And I wanted into the darkness. I wanted to reclaim some dignity and I knew in my gut this was the way to do it. It had already fired me up so much that I had produced more work in a few weeks than I had produced in fifteen years, and better work than I had managed in twenty.
“Kip, relax. You keep clenching up like that, you’ll hit me. Those bullets are sissy loads, so don’t worry too much. There’s less powder in the cartridge, so there’s less of an explosion and less power at impact. If you hit me with one of them, you probably won’t kill me, but it’ll require more treatment than rubbing some dirt on it.”
I guess I relaxed a little after that because he didn’t say another word about it. When we took a break, he rolled up the left leg of his jeans. There was a pink splotch of scar tissue like a wad of chewed bubble gum a few
