“Once, if I fuck up?”
“Or if you get killed.” He smiled sadly and handed me the helmet.
Heavy as it was, I understood why it might take some getting used to. I didn’t put it on. “Ashes first, right.”
And for the first time that night, Jim smiled at me with a bit of confidence. “The ashes represent the origins of the chapel and the practice we put in. Also reminds us of where we’re headed if we make a mistake.”
And there it was again, the repulsion/compulsion thing. Jim had alluded to death twice in twenty seconds and I should have run. Instead I stood there and let him dab ashes on my forehead. As we rehearsed the rest of the rituals, I asked what each one meant.
“You have to earn the right to understand them,” he said. “And there’s only one way to earn the right.”
Fourteen
I rested my sweat-damp cheek on the cold porcelain rim, the sour stench of my vomit wafting up to me from the bottom of the bowl. When I had nothing left in me to give, I sat down with the back of my soaked-through shirt against the cool tile wall. My head was exploding. I was faint, shaking with the chills. I was afraid. I don’t know.
Five days had passed since I’d put that tight grouping into the trunk of the tree, four since Jim had walked me through the dry run in the chapel. My shooting had since faltered. My writing too. My focus was gone and when I booted up my laptop I was back to staring at the screen, helplessly. I was disgusted by my own fragility and I’d asked Renee not to come back to the house until I got the shooting over with. I was also afraid for the first time in my life that I would be impotent. I wouldn’t have been able to bear that, not now, not with the St. Pauli Girl.
Now, this was it: my first time shooting in the chapel. Jim came up to me, a bottle of water in one hand, a towel in the other. He poured half the bottle over my head. “Here, drink the rest,” he said, handing me the bottle and pulling me to my feet. When I was done drinking, he toweled me off. “Come on, Kip, it’s time to get dressed.”
I wasn’t looking forward to this part of the evening. Jim had dressed me in full protective gear the day before so I could get used to the feel of it; but there would never be a time when I’d get used to it, especially, as he had warned, the helmet. Cobbled from Army surplus, sports equipment, and whatever had been lying around people’s garages, the suit was bulky and stank of the sweat, vomit, and urine of the people who’d worn it before me. Jim slipped the giant white T-shirt over the padding, and I helped him do the same. The first time in the chapel, you shot against your mentor. That and the fact that Jim was dressed in a suit like mine were the only things that kept me from running. Armored as we were, it was unlikely either one of us was going to die tonight. Yet somehow, that was of little comfort.
Just as I was willing myself to calm down, I heard it: the eerie thunder of dozens of stomping feet and hands clapping in unison, echoing around the hangar. My knees got weak.
Jim grabbed me, steadied me. “Everyone goes through this. You’ll be fine.” Then, after a pause, “It’s time. Let’s go.”
As we walked slowly out of the locker room and toward the chapel, the noise grew louder and louder, the foot stomping and rhythmic clapping blending into an indistinct roar. We paused outside the wooden door, Jim daubing ashes on both our foreheads.
“Remember to do the things I showed you the way I showed you how to do them,” he said, staring me directly in the eyes. “Tonight, that’s as important as anything else.”
Jim entered first. When I squeezed through the space between the mattresses, it wasn’t only the din I couldn’t make sense of. There were more people there than the first time Renee brought me, but their faces were as a blur, like looking out the window of a moving subway at the faces in the windows of a passing train.
I heard Jim say, “Helmets on,” from a million miles away and felt something on my head. Hands and fingers snugged the helmet to my chin. The face mask limited my vision to a small window straight in front of me. My hearing changed again, taking on a muted, windy quality. An arm, Jim’s, looped through the crook in my left elbow and marched me exactly eight strides-one stride for each original member of the chapel, Jim had said-between the pews to a spot directly at the center of the chapel. As Jim had instructed, I touched my right index finger to a spot above my heart, and at the top of my lungs shouted, “Blessed are they who have not seen, and yet believe.” I bowed quickly, then stood erect.
I turned right to face a mattressed wall and felt Jim’s back against mine. I counted to five in my head and then took four slow, measured strides. Jim had explained that each stride was symbolic of the first four duels in the chapel by its eight original members.
“Stop!” The voice was a familiar one, the deputy sheriff’s.
I halted, bringing both feet together and, as instructed, I took one more stride.
“Turn!”
I about-faced. Jim was about thirty feet directly in front of me.
The crowd noise grew less distinct, but my sense of smell became extraordinarily acute. My head once again filled with the rank traces of fear that people had left on the suit before me.
The deputy sheriff showed me the little Beretta. He showed me the clip, slid the clip into place, thumbed off the safety, and racked the slide. He placed it in my hand and once again my perceptions shifted. Now all I could hear was my heartbeat and my shallow, rapid breaths bouncing around the inside of the helmet. In my head, all I could see was my father’s head flung backwards, his blind eyes seemingly focused on my mom’s fussy white curtains. Then, just as suddenly as it had come, the vision of my father vanished. Now all I could see was Jim. Not him, his chest. I imagined I could see his heart beating in his rib cage like a red fist, clenching and unclenching. When he raised the.38, my world grew silent and still. I became unconscious of my heart beating, of my breathing, of the smells. I felt on an island at the center of the universe and knew that Jim was right: things were going to work out somehow.
The deputy asked Jim, “Do you believe?”
Jim answered. “Blessed are they that do.”
“Do you believe?” the deputy asked me and the chapel grew absolutely silent.
“I will be blessed by gunfire.”
“Then be blessed,” he said, stepping back.
I raised my right hand and fired. That’s when the freight train hit me.
Fifteen
Sissy loads, my ass! The bullet hit me like Paul Bunyan’s axe. I’d been hit and hit hard. Rolling over, getting on all fours, I was still a little out of it-weak, shaken, kind of in a trance. Still, I was electric. The rush was like nothing that coke or pussy or fame had ever given me. I’d fired a bullet at another human being and, in spite of all the protective gear, it was as primal a thing as I’d ever done. I saw Jim coming my way, a smile as wide as could be hung across his rugged face. His mouth was moving, but I couldn’t make out any words. The roar was back and it filled up my ears and the rest of my head.
Now he was standing in front of me, pulling me up, throwing his arms around me. He let go with one arm and kept the other flung over my shoulders. When he stepped back, it got quiet once again. He reached across and put his finger in the hole his shot had made in my shirt.
He asked. “Are you blessed?”
“I have been blessed by gunfire.”
