Gun Church

were names and places, body counts, reports of how specific operations had turned out: some bloody and successful, some bloody and disastrous. By the time I’d read halfway through his notes, I was numb to the havoc, the blood, the destruction, the baby’s arm lying in the road, hand still clutching a rattle. That was the horror I believe he was getting at: how even the slaughter of women, children, and friends had become as mundane as the image that looked back at him from the mirror every morning. But that was not the book I wanted to write nor the book I believe he’d wanted me to write. There was no deeper truth in the mundanity of violence. That truth sat on the surface and required no mining at all. That book had been written a thousand times over, and the truth of it had played out across the entire twentieth century and continued unabated into the next. There were other truths he wanted exposed, though he was vague about them.

The only deeper truth I’d ever exposed was that I was a fraud. My work, even my early good work, said almost nothing about the human condition. What it said a lot about was a particular time-the 1980s; a particular place-New York City; and a particular group of people-voracious yuppies who were nothing more than ridiculous children in adult bodies who had never grown out of their terrible twos. What is the deeper truth of a two-year-old? I want. I want. I want. My books were snapshots, cute snapshots, better than most of the period, perhaps, but not worth much more than an airing every twenty years so that people might say, “How nice. How quaint.”

What happened to the man I thought of as McGuinn was that he lost his soul, not by killing. It wasn’t about the killing itself. I don’t think that troubled him, really. Nor was his giving me his notebook an act of a man who had found God or cared to find him. Religion wasn’t the point. He had lost his soul and I think he wanted me to find out why and to retrieve it somehow, whether he was alive to see it or not.

McGuinn was numb with cold, exhausted, and bleeding from his shoulder wound, but he had found himself a place to hide that the others were unlikely to find.

He went back over it in his mind; how after the incident in the alley, a week had passed before they contacted him again-Zoe waiting for him outside the front door to his flat. How she had stayed that night and the next. How they had fucked until they were raw, only to do it again and again. How in spite of her orgasms, she seemed as far away as the streets of Belfast. Two days later, when she left him, Zoe gave him the ultimatum he was sure would come.

“If you ever want me again, you have to meet us tonight,” she said, handing McGuinn a slip of paper. “We’ll have company for you, an old friend of yours.”

McGuinn would have gone regardless of that last wee bit of enticement. He had to know what these people knew of him, about who he really was, and how they had targeted him. What good would it do him to run if he was easily found out?

When he showed at the address that night, they were waiting for him and this time there were more of them and better prepared. He was asked politely at the point of several guns to join them in the back of a van. Before he got in, they took his Sig and a black bag was thrown over his head. It was taped loosely around his neck. He’d done this routine before, from both sides. They weren’t going to kill him, at least not yet. It was very odd, for as they drove there was little or no chatter in the van, but McGuinn felt a familiar, almost comfortable presence that he could not make sense of. There was nothing and no one in this town he was familiar with.

As the van came to a halt, the doors opened and McGuinn was helped outside. He didn’t need to see to feel there was grass beneath his shoes or to know he was at a river side. Someone else was being taken from the van, but with fewer manners than had been shown to McGuinn. There was a bit of a tussle, a body hit the ground at McGuinn’s feet, and there was a distinct grunt. Again, McGuinn felt that familiar presence. The bag was removed from his head and when his eyes adjusted to the gloaming light, he understood. For there at his feet was Old Jack Byrnes.

The footballer from the slaughterhouse spoke first. “He came to kill you, Irish. That’s what he told us after we spoke to him.”

McGuinn looked down at his mentor, but Old Jack didn’t bother to shake his head in denial. Whatever was left of McGuinn’s heart sank. He’d known they would come for him eventually, but he never imagined it would be the man who was more father to him than his real da. Now it was Terry McGuinn shaking his head.

“He came snooping around work, asking about you about ten days ago. Your good luck we already had our eye on you for membership.”

“Membership! Membership in what?” McGuinn wanted to know.

The footballer spread out his arms and gestured at the woods, the waterfall, and the running river. “In this. In our church.”

“Church? And what church would that be, boyo?”

“Gun Church.”

“Gun Church,” McGuinn repeated. “One church has already failed me, son, and I’ve no heart for another.”

“But we won’t fail you, Irish, ever.”

Terry McGuinn smirked. “And what proof would you give of that, son?”

“Fair question,” the footballer admitted. Then he turned to the juicer and motioned for him to cut Old Jack’s hands and feet free. He left the gag in.

Old Jack tried rubbing some feeling into his wrists and ankles, but couldn’t bring himself to look at McGuinn.

After a few minutes, the footballer knelt down by Old Jack and whispered in his ear. With that, Old Jack Byrnes took off, running towards the woods. The footballer reached into his jacket pocket and came out with McGuinn’s Sig in his hand. He gave it to McGuinn, handle first.

“He’s all yours, Irish.”

“What if I don’t want him?”

“Well, Irish, someone’s going to get hunted down tonight. If it’s not him, then … ”

“So that’s how it is?” McGuinn asked.

“Consider it a tithe. Don’t worry, though. When you’re done with him, we’ll clean up after you. Like I said, Irish, we won’t fail you.”

The Thursday after my return from New York, when Renee grew weary of my asking what had changed between us, she turned the tables on me.

“You’re the one who’s different, Ken. Since you got back, all you do is grunt at me if I come into the office while you’re working.”

“It’s the pressure.”

But it wasn’t the pressure at all. It was that I had woven the fictional McGuinn so deeply into the fabric of my own life that it frightened me. That feeling I’d had out in the old berry patch and up in the woods during Fox Hunt, seeing things as McGuinn might, had grown stronger. Now, anything connected to the chapel was filtered not only through me, but me as McGuinn. When I stood in the chapel, I stood with McGuinn at my shoulder. When I was woozy during Fox Hunt, it was McGuinn I had dreamed as. GunChurch was proof that he was part of this before I was ever fully aware of it. I wondered how long it would be before I was found out. That the canvas on which I was painting Gun Church was a semi-urbanized permutation of Brixton County, and the characters thinly veiled grotesques of Jim and Renee and the rest of them.

Okay, it was true that the things I had my characters doing with McGuinn were nothing more than expressions of my own personal darkness. And yes, it had all come out of my head and my sense of the man I knew and wrote about as McGuinn. But I could not escape the sense that with a little push at just the right moment, the snaggle-toothed girl, the deputy, Jim, Renee, and the rest of them would gladly cross over from the real world into the world of Gun Church. That, maybe more than anything else, made up my mind for me. The time had come to see the chairman of the department.

Twenty-Nine

Buyer’s Remorse