Gun Church

inches up his shin from the top of his boot. His face was aglow with pride.

“If you had hit me, Kip, it wouldn’t be the first time. What you and me were just doing, you shooting and me standing over near the target, that’s how this started out,” he said. “There’s just something about standing across from someone holding a gun in your direction, even if it’s not pointed right at you. It’s … I don’t know how to put it in words. It’s like you’re scared, but alive, really alive for the first time. And once you feel that, there’s no going back. Do you know what I mean?”

Did I. Anyone who’s experienced the first fifteen minutes of a good cocaine high knows that feeling. Problem is you spend the rest of the night doing more and more blow getting less and less high. You try to get back to that first rush, but you can’t. You can’t no matter how hard you try and believe me, I tried.

“This,” he said, rubbing the scar like a lucky rabbit’s foot, “was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“How do you figure?”

“Opened up my eyes.”

“To what?”

“To everything.”

“Everything?”

He laughed. “What I’m saying is that I was reborn.”

“Jim, no offense, but getting shot in the shin isn’t exactly a near-death experience.”

“Near enough,” he said, his face cold and serious. “Look, I know I’m just some dumb hick from a little mining town, but it doesn’t mean I don’t think about big things. Before I got shot, I was dead inside. Everybody’s dead inside in a place like this. It’s a world of the dead. You think we all don’t know that community college is a dead end? But what else is there for us growing up around here? We’re just wasting time until we get a job mining coal or logging or we enlist. There’s no great challenges waiting for us. None of us is growing stem cells in the cellar in our spare time. Our world is built on nothingness. There are no dreams anymore.

“Listen, Kip, people in these parts, they have that ignorant faith in God. In spite of everything they see around them in this fucked-up place where there’s nothing waiting for them at the end of the rainbow, they believe. Well, for me, for those of us who shoot, it’s a lot easier to believe in guns than God. Guns don’t make empty promises, and they answer our prayers. Out here, in this dead world, we’re nothing. Look at the bunch of us: a guy who works in a copy center, a cook, an ugly girl. Who are we? Where are we going? Nowhere. But when we’re inside the walls of the chapel, we matter and it’s the rest of the world that’s insignificant. Every gesture has meaning for us. We’re only really alive with guns in our hands. Like you wrote in Flashing Pandora, there’s no meaning of good without bad, no light without the dark. For us, there’s no life without the threat of dying.”

“A man should think about big things,” I said.

He had no doubt spent hours preparing this little speech and had waited for just the right moment to lay it on me. Although I found his philosophy half-baked, I couldn’t help but be flattered that he so much wanted my approval. I actually enjoyed our time together. Other than the card game I used to have with Jerry Nadir, my weeks hanging with Jim were the most sustained contact I’d shared with another man since my career fell apart. It’s not like my writer friends dumped me. It was me who distanced myself from them. I could not bear their successes in the face of my failures; so, like a wounded animal, I crawled off to let my career die far away from the pack.

Jim was an eager listener and when he wasn’t trying too hard to impress me, he seemed a pretty interesting kid. He was genuinely fascinated by my stories of New York and of my week-long coke-fueled benders. He loved hearing about the famous people I’d met. Yes, Jim, Truman Capote did sound like that and I don’t know if he was nicer when he wasn’t drunk because he was always drunk. The kid especially enjoyed the stories of the famous women I’d fucked. I explained to him that although I didn’t have the scars to show for it, I’d faced death down a few times myself.

“My scar tissue’s on the inside,” I said, sounding like bad movie dialogue.

While I wasn’t quite ready to get all teary-eyed over not having fathered a son of my own-Amy couldn’t have kids and given my self-absorption and my own role model, I was ill-suited to fatherhood-it did stir some unexpected feelings in me.

After shooting, Jim would drop me off at school. After class, I’d head back home for another few hours of writing. Then the St. Pauli Girl would come by. She’d cook for me, I’d help her with her school papers, then write a little more myself, and we’d end the night in my bed. Last night, we didn’t even fuck. I was worn out. We seemed to need a night of simply falling into sleep, our bodies twined together for warmth and comfort and nothing more. I woke up early and slipped into my office.

About an hour after that, Renee, wearing only what she was when she came into the world, showed up at my office door, a faded old accordion file tucked under her arm. “What’s this, Ken?”

“What?” Still tired, I barely glanced at her. I kept peering through the curtains in my office, watching for Jim’s truck. The St. Pauli Girl walked over to me, pressing her body against my back, wrapping one arm around me. I heard the file land on my desk.

“Are you bored with me?”

“What are you talking about?” I sounded annoyed, but regretted it. I spun around and tried to hug her, but she pushed away from me and moved back by the door.

“Does Jim fuck like me?”

“What?”

“Look at me,” she said, rubbing her right hand over her breasts, letting it brush over the trim triangle of dark blond hair between her thighs. “Are you more interested in Jim than me? More interested in that book? Aren’t I enough to keep your attention?”

“Don’t be silly. Come here.”

She didn’t hesitate. I kissed her softly on the mouth and then turned her around so that her bare, muscular back rested against my chest and abdomen. I threw my right arm around her breasts, pulling her so close that not even the Holy Ghost could have slipped between us. Brushing her lush blond hair away with the point of my chin, I ran my mouth over the light down on the nape of her neck, kissed her ears. I let the fingertips of my left hand trace the curve of her hip. I slid my fingers slowly across her flat belly and down into her soft, trimmed thatch of hair. Her breaths grew short and rapid and she was already wet as I ran my fingers gently along her folds. I nudged the tip of my finger into the split at the tip of her labia. Not wanting to rush her, I made lazy, gentle passes, increasing the speed and pressure just a little with each stroke. Finally, she grabbed my wrist and pressed my fingers hard against her. Her back arched, body shuddered. She sighed and relaxed, falling fully against me.

We stood there like that for a few minutes, the tension flowing out of her body. She felt small and vulnerable in my arms. It was dawning on me that I did in fact know far more about Jim than I did about the St. Pauli Girl. I really had cut myself off from women. I’d sleep with them, but I didn’t want to know them or anything about them.

“I’m sorry about before,” I said, kissing her on top of her head. “I didn’t sleep much last night.”

“Why not?”

“Meg’s supposed to be calling soon about the book deal and the tension’s starting to get to me.”

“Oh, the publishing stuff.”

“Yeah, that.” I kissed her again, let her go, and retrieved the file from the desk. “You were asking about this.”

“I found it in bed instead of you,” she said, wrapping herself up in an old quilt thrown over the back of my desk chair.

I brushed a loose strand of hair out of her eyes, tucking it behind her ear, and kissed her on the mouth.

“What about the file?” she asked, sitting down in my desk chair.

I reached into the file. “You’ve seen me writing lately.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m writing about what’s in here,” I said, handing her a tattered spiral notebook.

“What is it?”

“It’s the diary of a murderer.”

She got a sick look on her face. “A murderer?”

I told her about being sent to do a piece on the Troubles and detailed how I’d met the man who’d hunted me