Given the lack of nightlife in Brixton, you’d think seven years here might have afforded me more than adequate opportunity to chart every square inch of this green and unpleasant land. I suppose had I gotten a personality transplant somewhere along the way, I might have been willing to explore the corners of purgatory. Frankly, I was more interested in contracting malaria than exploring the Brixton environs. Part of me knew I should’ve been grateful to have a teaching job, any teaching job, and that there was no less writing talent here than most anywhere else I’d taught, but all I had for the place was a bellyful of resentment.
I was in exile and complicit in my ignorance of Elba. I knew how to get to and from school, to and from the five local restaurants, to and from the multiplex in Stateline. I also used to know the to-and-from for Hendricks Motor Court-a motor court! How fucking quaint is that? See the USA in a Chevrolet-and both area bars. And yes, one was called the Dew Drop Inn. The other one wasn’t. I hadn’t been to Hendricks in quite some time. My trysting had suffered since Janice Nadir and her husband, Jerry, had gotten appointments at a four-year college upstate somewhere. Just as well. It was getting to the point where I enjoyed playing cards with Jerry more than I liked boning his wife.
About a year ago, I got this silly notion in my head that I wanted Amy back. I had always wanted Amy back, but she wouldn’t have me back. That much was clear the day after the divorce. I’d burned bridges between us that had yet to be built. It dawned on me during a rare moment of clarity that I wanted to be worthy of Amy’s respect and that sleeping with other men’s wives wasn’t the way to go about it. I wanted to be worthy of Amy’s respect even if she would never know it. So I stopped smoking, cut way back on my drinking, and tried-rather too successfully-to keep my dick in my pants.
Before coming to Brixton, two bouts of detox and rehab had pretty much cured me of my coke habit. Blow actually proved easy to stay away from once I’d put some time and distance between me and the rock. A smoker with a chest full of cancer can spend the rest of his days lighting one half-smoked cigarette with another, perspective being beside the point. My dependency was different because when I came out the other end, I had the thoroughly mixed blessing of getting to survey the scorched landscape of what had once been my promising life. It was nearly depressing enough to make me start using again. But no, I had myriad ways of punishing myself without sliding back down into that particular hell.
I wasn’t as lost as I thought I was, and kept checking the invitation the St. Pauli Girl had delivered me. I hadn’t made a wrong turn after all. That too was a change. Till I got to Brixton, I was defined by my wrong turns. Then, when I came over one last hill I saw a cluster of squat buildings on what had to be the flattest stretch of land in the county. At the bottom of the hill, the road sign let me know I was getting close.
While the letters RSVP were nowhere to be found on the piece of paper Renee had slipped into my hand after she kissed me, I couldn’t quite imagine that I’d been invited to anything but a party. It didn’t really matter. With the way the St. Pauli Girl had kissed me on the porch that night, I would have come even if it were a cockroach rodeo. That simple little kiss had been the object of my obsession for several days now and there were limits to how much self-denial I was willing to put up with in the name of Amy’s unknowing respect. From the moment that Renee had walked into my classroom, she had been testing those limits.
The old industrial park was about as welcoming as a clenched fist. The six-building complex was strictly Warsaw Pact chic: drab, impersonal, desolate. This place was nowhere in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t want to perseverate on the implications of that for me.
I put my car in first gear and rolled into the old industrial park, listening for any sign of life. Mostly I heard the tha-dumptha-dump of my tires rolling across the cracked pavement. That was another thing about Brixton: it was a mostly silent place. You’d hear whistles from the mines, the distant buzz of cars along the interstate, the blaring horns of freight trains, but the cars never seemed to stop here. Brixton was somewhere to pass by, not through, a blur in the rearview mirror: a faceless place not worthy of forgetting. I remembered my inability to adjust to the silence when I first moved here. Even Manhattan, Kansas, and Bloomington, Indiana, were loud enough to drown out the not inconsiderable noise in my head. That first year in Brixton I spent a lot of time with the Jack brothers-Yukon Jack and Jack Daniel’s-adjusting to the silence.
I stopped the car along the rear border of the industrial park. A tall cyclone fence topped with curls of razor wire marked the boundary. The fence seemed to have no end, disappearing into opposite edges of the night. Somehow the abject desolation of the place made the night seem that much darker on the other side of the fence.
When the silence broke, it broke hard.
There was a loud rapping on the passenger door window. My heart leapt into my throat. The St. Pauli Girl waved at me, amused at the sight of me jumping out of my seat. She let herself into my old Porsche, trying and failing to suppress her laughter.
“Glad you find me so funny.”
She did that shhhh thing again, pressing her finger across my mouth. “I thought you’d never get here. We’re going to be a little late.” She brushed the back of her hand against my cheek.
“Late for what?”
“You’ll see.”
Before I could ask the next question, her tongue was pushing through my lips and her right hand was unbuckling my belt. I forgot the question.
When she was done, Renee looked up at me.
“Was that all right?”
I smiled. It was my turn to shush her. I stroked her hair as she rested her head on my thigh. I wanted to tell her that she was more than all right, but how was I supposed to explain that the only thing standing between her and perfection was the memories of my ex-wife?
“Let’s go,” she said.
“Go where?”
She rose up, kissing me softly on the lips; my taste still on her breath. “Just drive,” she whispered. “Drive.”
I wasn’t wrong about the darkness on the other side of the fence. There wasn’t a light anywhere but in the night sky. That was one thing about Brixton; you could see stars, millions of them. I wasn’t the star-gazing type, nor, it seemed, was Renee. She didn’t need a star to guide the way.
“What is this place?”
“Hardentine Air Force Base. They flew, like, tankers and cargo planes out of here. Some fighter planes too, I guess.”
“Not quite Area 51, huh?”
“You’re the closest thing we got to an alien around here, Professor Weiler.”
I stopped the car. “Look, Renee, given what just happened, I think you’re going to have to call me Kip or Ken, at least outside of class.”
“I’ll try.”
We drove for what felt like another half hour, but was probably no more than ten minutes. In between the occasional “turn right here” and “loop around these huts,” Renee explained that the base had closed in the late ’90s. Hardentine AFB and I shared a common history: we’d both gone fully into the crapper at roughly the same time.
“Jim’s dad-”
“Jim Trimble?”
“Yeah, his dad was a colonel here, but when they closed the base, Jim and his mom stayed behind. Jim hates his dad.”
“Jim’s got some writing talent,” I said, still rushing on my orgasm and feeling magnanimous.
“Oh, my god, he’ll like freak when you tell him that. It’ll mean so much to him.”
“Are you two close?” There was a jealous edge to my voice that only I seemed to notice.
“We went out for a while, but it didn’t work. We’re friends.”
We zigged and zagged a few more times before she said, “We’re almost there.”
Ahead of us, I could make out the shape of several aircraft hangars rising up out of the night. When we got closer, the St. Pauli Girl had me turn into a narrow alley between two of the vacant behemoths. The gap wasn
’t actually narrow at all, but the darkness and the huge scale of the hangars just made it feel claustrophobic. I was paying too much attention to the soaring walls surrounding us when Renee shouted for me to stop. There, parked in front of us, were about ten other vehicles: pickup trucks, mostly.
“Come on,” she said, kissing me again, then giving me a little shove towards my door. “Let’s go.”
Now outside the car, I detected the first sounds of activity since Renee’s soft moans and my own strained sighs. There was engine noise coming from somewhere close by and the comforting smell of spent gasoline blew upwind into our faces. We shimmied our way past the pickups. As we walked, the engine noise grew louder, the odor of the fumes more pronounced. After about twenty yards, I spotted a gas-powered generator coughing out a small but steady stream of exhaust. Renee walked ahead, seeming to follow two heavy-duty orange extension cords leading away from the generator. We came to a door held ajar by the extension cords. She shouldered the door open and we stepped inside.
I’m not sure what I expected: music at least, hip-hop or country. Maybe a cloud of pot or cigarette smoke. Maybe a sow’s head on a stick. Whatever I might’ve expected, I didn’t get it. The hangar was cold and cavernous as a giant’s empty crypt. It was dark, but not lightless. Beyond the door, the two extension cords separated by a few feet and ran a parallel course straight ahead of us. Every ten feet or so, caged bulbs-the type mechanics use when checking the undercarriage of your car-lit the way. Appropriate to our surroundings, the path looked kind of like a runway at dusk. And while it wasn’t exactly the Yellow Brick Road, we followed it just the same, our footsteps echoing as we walked.
Twenty yards ahead of us, rising up from the hangar floor was an incongruous rectangular structure with ten-foot-high walls made of concrete blocks. Painted a stark white, it didn’t seem to have any contextual relationship to the rest of the vacant hangar.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at the concrete blockhouse.
She didn’t answer, instead walking quickly ahead of me. As I trotted to catch up to her, I noticed an elaborately carved wooden door built into the white concrete wall. The door seemed as out of place on that blockhouse as I did in Brixton.
“Ken, come over here.” Renee beckoned, standing off to the side of the structure. “I need to get you ready.”
“Ready. Ready for what?” I asked, as I came to where she stood.
“You’ll see. Take your jacket and sweater off and put this on,” she said, handing me a clean white T-shirt about one size too large.
I did as she asked, dropping my jacket to the floor, my sweater on top of it, and donning the tee. Renee removed her jacket too. Beneath it, she too was wearing a white tee that fit loosely over the curves of her upper body. Her T-shirt was faded with age and covered in gray-black smudges. There was one more rather stark difference between her shirt and the pristine one I wore. The front of her shirt was marked in small, blood-red crosses.
I pointed at the crosses. “What are those about?”
“Soon,” she said, “soon.” She knelt down to the floor, reached behind her, and came up holding a coffee can in her left palm. She dipped her right thumb into the can and pressed her thumb to my forehead above the bridge of my nose. She dipped her thumb again, only this time she pressed it to her own forehead, leaving a gray smudge.
I opened my mouth, but the St. Pauli Girl put her finger across her lips.
“Ashes,” she whispered.
I thought I heard muted human voices coming from inside the blockhouse and caught a whiff of rank beer. I also caught the scent of something else. It had a sharp metallic tang. The odor gnawed at me, but I couldn’t or wouldn’t place it. I turned, reached for the handle on the carved door.
Renee grabbed my arm. “Not yet.”
Standing there, her hand on my forearm, the smell filling up my nose, it came to me. Suddenly I was twelve again, standing there at my father’s desk, enveloped in that sickening and intoxicating cloud of gun smoke and blood, my stomach twisted in knots. Then time shifted like sand under my feet and I was in my classroom, standing over Frank Vuchovich’s body; his warm blood running out onto the cool tile floor, his face utterly confused.
Suddenly I was overwhelmed with the need to see behind that door, and grabbed the handle.
Five
Resurrection
From the second I pulled back that door and stepped toward the smell of the spent gunpowder, I was on my way to getting hooked. Getting hooked, that was something I knew a little bit about. Vuchovich’s death had stirred things up in me that hadn’t seen the light of day in a long time. Now the smell of the gunpowder had opened up that clogged vein once again. I couldn’t get inside fast enough, but behind the door my path was blocked by a wall of thick padding. I squeezed myself through a seam in the padding like the world’s most impatient baby determined to be born. Finally through, I was born, but into what?
It was much brighter inside the blockhouse. Portable stand lights were rigged all around the room. The room itself was not like any I’d seen before. All four interior walls were covered from floor to top ledge with ratty old mattresses. The ceiling itself was nothing more than a blue plastic tarp that sagged in the middle out of habit. On either side of me were two rows of salvage-yard church pews. There were people seated in the pews, their faces barely registering. But it was what my eyes beheld before me that got my full attention. Jim Trimble, a gun-shaped hunk of metal in his hand and wearing a white T-shirt like the St. Pauli Girl’s, stood twenty feet ahead of me to my right. To my left, thirty feet in front of Jim, stood a white-shirted fat kid, gun in hand.
Someone yelled “Go!” And my old world blew apart with two explosions that came so close together they were nearly one. The padded walls did little to dampen the noise. Jim and the fat kid were down. Frozen in place at first, I talked myself into moving forward.
Jim Trimble lay motionless on the gray industrial floor. As I approached, I saw a Luger clutched in his hand. A gun-smoke ghost lingered above his body like a waiting cab and then drifted away. There were those knots in my belly. I was time traveling yet again. It was like a weird logical progression from my father’s suicide to Frank’s death to here to now. The fat kid was red-faced and rolling around on the floor, hugging his ribs, a pistol at his feet. He made honking noises as he struggled to catch his breath. Was I scared for Jim lying motionless-maybe dead-there on the cold floor? Yeah, I was scared for him and for myself a little bit, too. I had stepped through a wooden door into another world, but it didn’t matter.
That vein had been opened all the way now and I was feeling things again, things other than the self-pity and resentment that had sustained me. I was buzzing, humming. I was my own generator. I was electric. Every inch of me felt alive for the first time in nearly two decades. It was that revulsion/revelation push and pull all junkies know from when they stand at the precipice before taking the dive; that don’t look/I can’t look away tug of war we all suffer through as we pass slowly by the scene of a car accident.
But just as suddenly as the rush had come, the bottom dropped out. It is the writer’s curse, I think, standing back to observe and record. I got very close to Jim’s body when I saw that there wasn’t a spot of blood anywhere. Just as I thought I was getting a sense of things, the ground crumbled beneath me. The current surreality shifted away from his bloodless body to the cheering of the assembled crowd. My senses were being pushed and pulled all over the place. I’d barely noticed the others in the room to begin with, but now they were all I could see, all I heard. They were shaking up cans of Bud, popping the tops, and showering each other with the spray. While their faces remained featureless blurs, I saw that they all sported the gray forehead smudges and that their white shirts were covered in those red crosses. A few of them embraced. Some kissed. The absurdity of the setting, the audience’s whoops and high-fives, their whistles and applause were like a Dr. Strangelove tent revival. The only missing elements were sid
eshow freaks and a calliope.
I willed my eyes to focus and I recognized some of the faces in the crowd, if none of their names. There was a snaggle-toothed girl with bad skin I’d seen drifting through the halls at school like a faint shadow, and this skater boy who boarded around campus with a duct-taped backpack slung over his shoulders. There was the bald, barrel-chested man from the BCCC maintenance crew who reeked of stale cigarettes. Not all the faces I recognized were from school. There was the short-order cook from Stan’s Diner; a nondescript local nobody who worked at the copy center in town; and a deputy sheriff whose main duty seemed to be hitting on high school girls. And there was even a guy in uniform: a rent-a-cop security guard with a 9mm strapped to his thigh. I couldn’t place any of the other people besides Renee and Jim.
I’d forgotten about the St. Pauli Girl. Turning, I saw she was lending Jim a hand, helping him to his feet. I witnessed the resurrection. Jim stared me directly in the eye as he stood, smiling the most unnerving smile: I know all about you. I froze in place, pinned but not wriggling. Jim broke his stare and went over to the fat kid, offering his hand, pulling him up. They did a fist pound and embraced hard.
Suddenly-without any cue I could see or hear-things turned again. An eerie silence settled over the blockhouse, the smiles falling away from everyone’s faces. Jim and the fat kid stepped back from one another and, using their index fingers, drew invisible crosses on each other’s chests. As they did so, they recited in unison: “Stop doubting and believe.” Next, the crowd formed a straight line in front of the pews. Renee tugged my arm and whispered for me to sit and watch. The deputy was at one end of the line, Renee at the other. Jim and the fat kid turned to face the line. Jim walked up to the deputy. The deputy reached out and placed his finger on Jim’s chest above his heart and recited, “Stop doubting and believe.” Jim remained silent. When Jim moved on, the fat kid approached the deputy and the ritual was repeated. And so it went until they had both stopped by everyone in line. When it was over, Jim and the fat kid removed their T-shirts and handed them to the snaggle-toothed girl. The silence broke.
Gun Church Page 3