Gun Church

eyes may have been open. Words may have spilled out of my mouth, but I wasn’t there. The first clear memory I have is of waking up in the hospital in the dark, alone. I was so weary that the pain, and there was a lot of pain, felt like it belonged to someone in the next bed. I didn’t press the call button. I didn’t want to see anyone or speak or hear another voice. If I could have quieted my own internal chatter, I would have. I fell back asleep.

The next time I woke up, there were state troopers outside my door, detectives and a doctor at my bedside. I didn’t know what day it was or what hospital I was in, nor did I care. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what they wanted. The doctor told me my wounds weren’t life-threatening, that the shot in my side was a clean through and through. Jim’s bullet had hit me below the ribs, traveled in a relatively straight line, and exited out my back without chewing up any major organs or blood vessels along the way. The shot in my arm had just notched out some tissue.

“It will leave a little scar, but that’s about it,” he said.

Little scar? There could be no such thing as a little scar from anything connected to what had happened.

The detectives bought my story, as far as it went. They didn’t mention Haskell Brown, Lance Vaughn Mabry, or Stan Petrovic, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to broach the subject. Not yet, anyway. No one offered me a lawyer. No one read me my rights. When they asked me about Jim and Renee I tried not to be expansive. They were both ex-students of mine, I said. I’d had a relationship with Renee that had ended on good terms. Jim was a friend and fan whose attitude towards me changed when I moved back to New York. He had been stalking me, threatening me and my ex-wife. I guess that pretty much jibed with what Amy had told them and with the physical evidence. None of this is to say I was free and clear.

The media were all over the case. It had all the red-meat elements they lived for: famous victims, overlapping love triangles, stalking, small-town strangers lost in the strange land of the big city, and violence, lots and lots of violence. Best of all, it was easy and distracting. Since many of those involved were dead and the rest of us weren’t talking, the media could speculate themselves into multiple orgasms.

After I was released from the hospital, I stayed in a hotel in Manhattan under an assumed name. It was the only way to avoid being hounded by the press. Amy fell off the face of the earth after Moreland’s funeral. I didn’t blame her. Meg arranged for me to get daily visits from nurses who dressed my wounds and made sure my healing was progressing. I alternated between sleepless nights and days when all I could do was sleep. I cried a lot. I thought about Renee all the time, about her last words: “Your back pocket.” After wracking my brain for what she could have meant, I convinced myself that I must have heard her wrong. Of course I’d checked my back pocket, and of course it had been empty. I seldom, if ever, thought about Amy. Her respect, which I had made the centerpiece of my ambition for the last year, mattered little to me.

For weeks I considered going to the authorities in New York and Brixton to explain the full and bloody extent of Jim’s obsession, but I could never quite get my own head around it. You see, this student of mine was obsessed with me and my writing. He bought an unpublished chapter of my work off the Internet and hatched a plan that involved him giving me his girlfriend and getting me involved with a place where we used to fire guns at each other with live ammunition in order to restart my writing career. How the fuck was I supposed to convince the police when, in spite of everything that had happened, I still couldn’t quite believe it myself?

I should have done less considering, because it was much worse when the NYPD and the Sullivan County DA, with the Brixton County sheriff in tow, showed up at my hotel room door. I greeted their appearance with a kind of martyrly relief. I’d been carrying around a lot of guilt, and part of me felt like they couldn’t punish me enough for what I’d done or what had been done in my name.

The sheriff had found the Beretta in a plastic bag in the glove box of my old Porsche. They found Stan in my Porsche too, what was left of him. The sheriff made a point of telling me that his wife couldn’t get the stink out of his uniform.

“Had to burn those khakis, son.”

Now, what had for weeks looked like a nightmare perpetrated upon me and my ex-wife by a couple of crazy and lost kids, seemed much more like a joint venture gone utterly wrong. My prints were on the gun. Stan’s body was found in my car. States all along the eastern seaboard had toll records of my Porsche’s travel to and from New York City on the weekend Haskell Brown was murdered. Anyway you sliced it, I was fucked. Not only because the one person who could support my version of events-Renee-was dead, but because even if I could explain away every other aspect of the case, I had, in fact, killed Stan Petrovic and had stood by while others covered it up. In a grave somewhere, Jim was wearing that smug smile of his.

The last card I had to play was the sheriff’s own deputy. He had been witness to much of this, especially to the events surrounding Stan Petrovic’s death. But when I laid the deputy card down on the table, the sheriff just kind of smiled at me and said,

“Glad you brought him up, son. I was wondering where he got to.”

Meg got me a lawyer-two hours too late, in his opinion. I had already talked too much. He was right, of course. And while I wasn’t arrested that day, my lawyer said it was going to happen and sooner rather than later.

“They’re probably just waiting for the other sheriff, the one from the jurisdiction where Mabry’s body was found, to fly up to New York. Everybody involved in this case will want a piece of the press conference.”

He suggested I get myself back to Brooklyn to find some clothes to make me look presentable in court and to scour my papers for anything that might aid in my defense. He didn’t sound particularly hopeful. That made two of us.

Just enough time had passed since the murders at the bungalow colony so that my apartment in Brooklyn was free of news vans and reporters. And, apparently, no one had yet leaked word to the media of my impending arrest. My landlord wasn’t thrilled to see me given that his car had been impounded by the state police. I think I apologized, but I wasn’t exactly in full possession of my faculties that day.

I wandered around my apartment like a zombie. I knew there wasn’t a single fucking thing in there that was going to exonerate me, so I settled on looking for a decent outfit to wear to court. I had a few suits that would work, but I couldn’t help but feel like a condemned man worrying about shitting himself at the end of a rope. What would it matter what I wore to court? Rolled up in a ball at the bottom of my closet were the clothes I’d worn the night I met Amy at the Peking Brasserie. That was the night it had all started going terribly wrong: Renee showing up outside the restaurant, leading me on a chase to Jim, slapping my face on the street. It was also the last time I’d held her. I remembered the fragrance of her hair, how it felt against my face. I could almost feel her arms around me, her hand sliding down into my back pocket. My back pocket!

I refused to allow Gun Church to be published. It’s not like Franz Dudek didn’t want to publish it. I mean, in spite of Haskell Brown’s murder, you could never get free publicity like this in a million fucking years. Franz had even convinced himself-but not me-that the book needed to be published or Haskell’s death would have been in vain. He offered to raise the advance into the high six figures. In any case, the publicity would help sell the reprints of my old books. Maybe, if Brown had been the only victim, I might have consented to the publication of Gun Church. But there were more victims, many more-some dead, some still living-for whom the book’s publication would have been the ultimate symbol of disrespect. And then there was Jim. If ever there was a book written in blood, Gun Church was it. I couldn’t give Jim that victory. I tried to return the advance I’d received. Dudek refused it, so I sent it to Renee’s family. I didn’t fool myself that the book would never be published. Meg and Dudek had electronic copies of most of the pages and I would die eventually.

One thing I was sure of was that I no longer wanted to live in New York City. On the other hand, I didn’t want any part of Brixton either. I didn’t want to see the forest or the trees or to hear the sounds of rivers running or the din of quaint waterfalls. I never wanted to see the inside of another classroom or mark another paper or discuss Kant Huxley or Moses Gold. I did, however, like the notion of a mining town. Mining towns, as long as they don’t have a community college nearby, are about one thing: mining.

Miami, Arizona, is a copper mining town east of Phoenix in Gila County. I’m one of about two thousand residents, none of whom gives a shit about who I am or who I was. I like it that way. If anyone’s recognized me, I haven’t heard about it and, believe me, in a place as small as Miami, I would have heard. I spend my days in an office doing data entry for one of the few remaining active mines in the area. At night, I go back to my rented house and work on my new book. I’ve been able to shake almost everything else from my past, but not writing. From the moment I was sprayed with Frank Vuchovich’s blood, I knew the affliction-which is what writing is, an affliction-was