Gun Church

knees.”

“Good for you, Stan. Maybe they’ll throw you a parade someday.”

I wasn’t in the mood or in shape for one of our little skirmishes, but since he’d hurt Renee and hit me in the back of the head, I had no patience for his bullshit.

“What’s the matter, your asshole hurt from letting Jim stick his fist up there? You ain’t such a hero without a gun in your hand, huh? Think you have the balls to vest-shoot with me?”

That got my attention. One thing I’d found over the last few months was that the people who showed up at the chapel kept their mouths shut tight about it. Over that period of time, whether on the street or in school, I’d crossed paths with everyone who had ever been to the chapel. The only time I’d mentioned it was to Meg and I felt guilty about that. Even the maintenance guy hadn’t alluded to the chapel when he pulled me aside not twenty minutes earlier. Not once did any of them even hint at our connection. There wasn’t a nod, a wink, or a gesture. Nothing. And now this drunken fool was standing in the aisle of the hardware store talking about the chapel like it was common knowledge.

“Keep it down, Stan. You know the rules.”

“Fuck you and fuck the rules.”

“Shut your mouth.”

His saw-toothed smile was raw and cruel. “Why don’t you do it for me, cunt?”

I thought to speak, but instead I planted my left fist into Stan’s groin. It wasn’t the hardest punch I’d ever thrown. It didn’t have to be. Petrovic groaned, grabbed his balls, and fell to his knees. He teetered for a second or two and collapsed backwards into the shelves that held boxes and bags of nails and screws. A few of the boxes crashed to the floor.

“Don’t fuck with me again, Stan,” I growled, standing over him. “Fuck with me again and I’ll kill you.”

When I turned to leave, I noticed everyone watching. Half of them looked about ready to applaud. I just wanted to go get something to eat and read the paper in peace.

Thirty-Three

Redtails

The Dew Drop Inn was what you might have expected: a seedy and frayed hole in the wall, a working man’s bar. There were two beer pulls, one for light beer and one for regular. There was one kind of scotch, one kind of bourbon, one kind of vodka. No one ordered mojitos. Even the burger choices were limited: with or without cheese, with or without fries. If you wanted avocadoes or roasted poblano strips, you were shit out of luck. As I anticipated, the place was pretty empty except for Richie the barman and a few stubborn flies that forgot it was December. Richie nodded hello. I nodded back.

“I’ll have a burger with cheese and fries and a ginger ale,” I said, making my way to a back booth.

I settled in and unfolded the paper. The Brixton Banner was birdcage lining, as local as local papers get. It featured articles on subjects as diverse as advances in coal-mining technology, belt tightening in the lumber industry, and who had won the charity pierogi-eating contest at St. Stanislaus Church. The war in Afghanistan was reduced to a few inches worth of body counts buried between the car ads and obits. At the end of things with Janice Nadir, reading the Banner in bed became my way of telling her we were done for the day, that it was time for her to run along back home to Jerry.

My favorite things in the Banner were the letters to the editor. No highfalutin’ horseshit in Brixton, just conspiratorial paranoia at its most rabid. Distrust and hatred for government-federal, state, and local-ran deep around here and with it came the usual substrains of white supremacy, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, et cetera. I loved the letters that tried to tie all of these things into one tidy, hateful little package. My all-time favorite had been this one letter from a woman who claimed that the area coal mining was just a government cover for digging secret shafts. That the shafts were to be used to protect the Jews’ money during the nuclear war being instigated by the dark races in order to wipe out the Aryan peoples. Now, I’m sure letters of this nature get sent to the New York Times on a daily basis-the difference being that the Banner actually published them, and frequently.

Just as I unfurled the paper and began to scan the letters, Richie arrived with my ginger ale. He asked me how I was doing, why I hadn’t been in lately. I said something generic about being busy and watching my weight. That seemed to satisfy him and he left, saying my burger would be up in a few minutes. When I turned back to the paper, my eyes drifted to a column to the left of the letters with a heading: Murdered (continued from page 1).

In New York City in the ’80s, when homicide was a cottage industry, I would have simply ignored the headline. But these days, in these parts, murder wasn’t usually part of the landscape. Premature death was common enough in a region where mining and logging were how folks earned their keep. There were plenty of hunting accidents and alcohol-fueled suicides too. There was the occasional migrant worker killed by a piece of farm equipment, but murder was rare. I could only remember two other homicides in seven years: one stemming from a barroom brawl. The other involved a woman who stabbed her husband through the heart with a kitchen knife because he’d pawned her Lladro figurines for meth money.

I skipped the letters for the moment, reading instead the continuation of the story from page one. The victim’s body, it said, was discovered Sunday morning by two deer hunters just across the state line, along the banks of a tributary to the river that fed the Crooked River Falls. The victim was found in a car registered to his father, his body with three or four gunshot wounds. One of the hunters said, “We just figured he was drunk and sleeping it off, but when we got close you could see the bullet holes in the windshield and that he was dead.”

The hunters were still pretty shaken and though they weren’t considered suspects, they were being questioned by the sheriff’s department. There was a hotline number to call, but not much else. It was only when I backtracked, turned to the front page and saw the full headline that I went cold.

REDTAILS RECEIVER MURDERED

A photo of a handsome African American kid with a white, self-assured smile stared up at me. He was wearing a football jersey over his shoulder pads, and holding his helmet tucked between his chest and his left arm. The logo on his helmet was that of a bird of prey, wings spread, talons unsheathed. The caption said his name was Lance Vaughn Mabry and that he had been a starting wideout for the Coggins and Hale College Redtails.

Coggins and Hale was a small school about twenty miles across the state line from Brixton. Academically, it was the four-year equivalent of BCCC: a place to jerk off while earning a degree of dubious quality and value. But for a school its size, it had a solid football program that had the reputation of producing good-quality, late-round, NFL draft picks. According to the first paragraph of the article, Lance Vaughn Mabry had been on just such a career path. Not anymore.

By the time Richie brought over my food, I’d read the story twice. I no longer had an appetite. I was upset for the kid’s family, sure, but that wasn’t what was affecting me. It was hard for me to ignore the incredible similarities between this kid’s fate and the scene I’d written into Gun Church after my concussion- induced dream of McGuinn in the river during Fox Hunt. The victim in my book, just exactly like Mabry, was a young black athlete. In the book, he’s lured out of a bar by Zoe, the character based loosely on the St. Pauli Girl and named after the woman who had been Peter Moreland’s country club date all those years ago. Once outside, he’s abducted, dragged out into the woods to be hunted down, and shot like a wild animal, his lifeless body left to rot out in the countryside.

Although they’d found Mabry’s body in an area much like I’d described in the book, the kid was in his own car and there was no mention of his being lured by anyone to go anywhere. There were other differences too, but I still couldn’t get my head around it. I threw a twenty-dollar bill on the table and left, taking the paper with me and leaving the burger for the flies. Richie might’ve nodded and said something. He might not have.

I was halfway home before I got my legs back under me and remembered about meeting the guy from the BCCC maintenance crew. I was too preoccupied to care and whatever he had to tell me would keep. In the car, I listened to the local news-radio station. The murder was the lead story, but their report was equally as sketchy as the Banner’s. Back home, I planted myself in front of the TV, something I almost never