Gun Church

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  She laughed or what passed for her laughing. “You could always do that to me, you know, make me laugh. You look older, Kip, but fit.”

  “I run.”

  “Talk about heresy! The only running you used to do was from bed to bed.”

  When the waitress came over and began reciting her prepared little speech, Meg cut her off and ordered a dry Ketel One martini with four olives. I held up my half-finished beer and said I was fine. Meg looked relieved.

  “This was an interesting choice for lunch,” I said. “What happened, all the tables at Applebee’s and Ruby Tuesday’s were booked?” She knew I didn’t want an answer. “And the good old Algonquin, thanks for that. Maybe I’ll find an old pair of Dorothy Parker’s knickers to sniff. Her crypt’s in the basement, right?”

  The martini arrived and Meg swirled the contents around with the olive-laden plastic sword. She sipped it, curled her lips, and slid an olive into her mouth.

  “Look, Weiler, if I could have kept you in a straitjacket and leg irons until after dinner tomorrow night, I would have. But I figured the Algonquin and this dreadful joint were the most I could get away with without you acting out.”

  “It’s fine. I’m fine. You don’t have to worry.”

  “If you’re trying to make me laugh again or reassure me, it isn’t working.”

  “I guess I’ve given you ample reason to be skeptical.”

  “Ample? Since when is understatement part of your repertoire?”

  That was my cue for a segue and I took it. “So, did you read the new pages I added to the original manuscript? What did you think of the plot synopsis?”

  “I’ve read them both.” Meg did that curly lip thing again, took another sip, and a second olive. She actually turned to face me, a very un-Meg-like thing to do. “Kip,” she cleared her throat, “before we go to dinner tomorrow night, I have to … um … ask you a question.”

  Meg hesitating! Surely, this was the end of days.

  “What’s the question?”

  “Is it your book?”

  Of all the things she could have asked, I didn’t see this coming. I was shocked and angry. “What the fuck kinda question is that to ask me?”

  “Think about it, Weiler.” She held up her right index finger. “One: You haven’t sent me a manuscript in god knows how long and your last three books were, to put it mildly, disasters.” Her middle finger. “Two: I call you with a big rights deal and what, magically there’s new book?” Her ring finger. “Three: The voice in this new book doesn’t sound like your old voice at all.” Pinky. “Four: Your new characters aren’t anything close to what your old characters used to be like. These people have souls.” Thumb. “Five: The writing is done in pitch-perfect Irish dialects.” Left thumb. “Six: And all of a sudden you’re an expert on handguns?”

  “Better stop now before you run out of fingers and have to remove your shoes,” I said. “You forgot to mention that GunQueer doesn’t contain a dream sequence.”

  “That’s not an answer, Kip.”

  “You want an answer?”

  “Yes.”

  I would have told most people to go fuck themselves, but Meg had earned the right to hear the truth about where the book had come from. “Okay,” I said. “Order another martini or two. I’ve got a story to tell you that you might not believe.”

  She took my suggestion and about forty minutes later she knew more about my life in Brixton County than she ever wanted to know. Meg gulped down her third martini and didn’t bother fussing with the olives.

  “Are these people dangerous?”

  “Anyone with a weapon in his hand can be dangerous, but there’s only one asshole in the bunch,” I said. “Mostly they’re harmless and just plain bored. There’s a lot to be bored with in Brixton no matter what you do. This world they invited me into is the one place they can shine. It’s like a cross between Kabuki and Catholicism.”

  “What is the significance of those rituals you were telling me about?” she asked, turning once again to face me.

  “Some come from how the chapel was founded, like the ashes from the first tree they shot at. The number of steps you take to get to the chapel floor and to shooting position have their roots in how many people were originally a part of things. And the things we recite come from the Bible when Jesus is talking to Doubting Thomas, but there are other things we do that have to do with status.”

  “Status?”

  “Look, Meg, I don’t think you can appreciate what these people’s lives are like. The people at the chapel, they’ve got no futures. They either work in dead-end jobs in a dead-end town or go to community college in order to get dead-end jobs. There’s no way for them to derive any self-esteem or achieve anything worthwhile outside the chapel. The chapel is really their salvation. It’s a way for them to prove themselves as something other than a clerk or a short-order cook.”

  “But how do they measure status?”

  Now I hesitated. It was one thing for me to create a fictionalized version of the chapel, but I actually felt a pang of guilt. I was breaking the big rule. I was talking about the chapel openly, naming names, discussing it with an outsider. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to give all the details about the shooting, especially the part about shooting with only a vest for protection. I decided to fudge a little.

  “We get red crosses on our shirts every time we shoot. It shows how brave we are and how we trust each other. The higher the number of crosses, the higher the status. Each time we shoot, the test is different. Sometimes it’s who’s fastest, other times it’s who’s most accurate. It’s even in how well we perform the rituals. For instance, when we walk four paces away from each other, stop and take one last step before turning to face one another, we strive to be as close to thirty feet apart as possible. When the real experienced people shoot together, they often are exactly thirty feet apart. I don’t know all the nuances or intricacies yet because I’m still new, but it’s all carefully thought out.”

  Meg shook her head. “Still, why don’t you consider moving up here to finish the book? I would feel safer with you close by.”

  “To make sure I don’t go off the rails, you mean.”

  “That too,” she confessed.

  “No need to worry, Mom. Staying down there is good for the book and good for me.”

  “And this blond, the St. Pauli Girl-”

  “Renee.”

  “Renee. Do you love her?”

  “I’ve been faithful to her probably longer than I was faithful to Amy.”

  “I was waiting for that name to pop up. She’s miserable, you know.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  “You should call her,” Meg suggested.

  I didn’t know what to say. Had I known, I don’t think I could have managed to say it. No matter what Renee was to me, she would never be able to touch the way I felt at just the thought of hearing Amy’s voice over the phone. Then it dawned on me-I guess it was a day for revelations, large and small-that I had nearly achieved the goal I set for myself the year before. With the book deal, the money from the rights deal, my keeping on the straight and narrow, and my newfound monogamy, I was nearly in a position to win back Amy’s respect and my own.

  “And one more thing, Weiler,” Meg interrupted my reverie.

  “What’s that?”

  “I ran the title by Dudek and as I anticipated, he thinks GunQueer would be too controversial. It’s got to be Gun Church.”

  “Gun Church it is.”

  Twenty-Five

  Potato Farmer

  The big powwow had been at a chichi steak restaurant in the Meatpacking District. There wasn’t a T-shirt or bottle of hot sauce anywhere in sight. There were four of us for dinner: Meg, Franz Dudek, his trophy wife Amelia, and me. Meg was in a black silk cocktail dress over black hose and a different pair of pointy-toed pumps. She left her industrial-strength jewelry home for the night, wearing instead a silver-clasped black leather bracelet, pearl stud earrings, and a si
mple string of pearls around her neck. This was about as girly as Meg Donovan got in public.

  Amelia Dudek, all curves, legs, and lips, was about thirty, give or take. She’d probably done plenty of both: giving and taking, I mean. Her features were not so very different from Renee’s, though she wasn’t as naturally pretty. But Amelia knew the tricks: how to dress, how to makeup, how to accentuate and obscure. Franz Dudek wasn’t at all what I expected. I guess I thought he’d be slight and regal, the last viscount in a long line of vanquished Slavic nobility, shipped off to Eton and Oxford at an early age before surfacing in New York. Instead, he looked like a sixty-year-old potato farmer in a good suit. He was big-boned and broad-shouldered. His peasant hands were thick, his fingers gnarled, but he had a kind, handsome face. There were many such faces in Brixton and with a little coal dust on his cheeks and a hard hat on his gray head, he would have fit right in.

  I don’t know what Dudek was expecting from me, but the look on his face when I met him and Amelia at the bar was fucking priceless. He seemed almost disappointed that I wasn’t some drunken monster with a drippy junkie nose and a blond on each arm. The late Haskell Brown had no doubt filled his boss’s head with endless tales of the Kipster’s debauchery and his exponentially diminished talent. It’s not like I hadn’t disappointed people before. I’d nearly turned it into a second career. It was that I hadn’t ever done it in quite this manner before.

  Earlier, when the wine steward poured glasses of the old Cabernet Dudek had ordered to accompany our steaks, I’d noticed the sick look on Meg’s face. There’d been no need for her to say the words. This is when he’s going to fuck it up. I knew I’d been on probation from the moment I agreed to come up to New York. That’s why I had club soda and lime at the bar before we were seated and why, during dinner, I barely finished half a glass of wine. I was being watched, tested at every turn. The Kipster would have been glad to live down to their expectations by asking Amelia how much the prenup was worth or whether she’d had her boob job done before or after marrying old Franz. The impulse for self-sabotage was irresistible to the Kipster and he would have jumped at the chance. Why bother writing a crappy book that tanks, when you can just blow yourself up in front of your publisher? But Gun Church wasn’t a crappy book and I wasn’t the Kipster. His last vestige was parked in the Hippodrome Garage, directly across 44th Street from the Algonquin.

  The hard part came later, after the contracts were signed and Dudek promised to have the checks cut to Meg Monday morning. Publishers don’t pay the author. They pay the agent and the agent pays the author after her percentage comes off the top. Nor do publishers fork over all the money at once. For the rights deals, it was half on signing and half on publication. For Gun Church, payment-like Caesar’s Gaul-was divided into three parts: one-third on signing, one-third on manuscript approval, one-third on publication. But any way you carved it up, I walked out of the restaurant well over a hundred grand ahead of when I walked in. It wasn’t about the money. I didn’t even mind that the advance for Gun Church was less than the advance the Kipster had received for Beatnik Souffle a million years ago. That was the Kipster’s first book and GunChurch was mine.

  No, the hard part wasn’t about the advance, but about being left alone in a city that I no longer knew and one that no longer knew me. Meg offered to take me out for a drink, but her heart wasn’t in it. I could always tell when there was someone keeping the bed warm for her at home. And frankly, I wasn’t in the mood for trying to celebrate while simultaneously sitting on my hands. Franz Dudek might have looked like a farmer, but he well understood human nature and knew better than to press his luck. Instead of offering me yet another chance to fuck up, he just patted my shoulder and told me to go home and finish that book.

  What I did was go back to the hotel. Success came so easily to the Kipster that he never quite trusted it. Hence, when things fell apart, he had no coping skills on which to rely. So this was new for me, achieving something through hard work that I wasn’t willing to piss on or away. I didn’t know what to do with that. In the jumble of feelings, the only thing I thought I wanted to do was to call Renee. I wanted to share the moment with her, but I couldn’t pick up the phone. Maybe it was because I so regretted not bringing her or maybe because I didn’t. Maybe to call her would have indicated she meant way more to me than I was willing to let on. I wasn’t sure of anything.

  And there I was, the.38 in my hand, looking at the bedside phone. I kept snapping the cylinder of the Smith amp; Wesson in and out the way some smokers flick on their old Zippos in one fluid motion. That I found comfort in this didn’t much surprise me. Nor did it surprise me that I loaded a single round into the cylinder and spun it like a roulette wheel. I wasn’t going to do anything stupid. That impulse had passed with the concussion. I just liked the clickity-clicking, the feel of its weight in my hand. Then the phone rang and I jumped. I hoped it was Renee, but I’d given up magical thinking during the first Clinton administration.

  “Hello,” I said, snatching up the phone, keeping the.38 in my other hand.

  “Ken?”

  The last time my equilibrium was this out of whack was during Fox Hunt, but this was more disorienting. The woman at the other end of the phone could cut me down faster than any bullet ever could.

  “Amy, what are you-How did-”

  “Meg told me you were in town.”

  I could not speak.

  “Ken. Ken, are you there?”

  “I’m here, but why are you calling?”

  “Do you really have to ask me that?”

  “It’s been ten years, Amy. I thought you never wanted to speak to me again.”

  “I thought so too.”

  “What’s changed?”

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately, about us, since the incident when you saved your class. I thought about calling a hundred times, but I could never find the right moment.”

  Funny, that September afternoon that Vuchovich took my class seemed like a thousand years ago, almost like it never happened. I didn’t understand how just hearing Amy talk about it made it all real again.

  “What made this the right time?”

  “Proximity. Knowing you’re in town. I’m not sure. Meg says you’ve just signed a new book deal.”

  “Meg’s been telling tales out of school.”

  “Is it true?” she asked.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t already know. I thought Peter would have told you.”

  “Peter and I don’t really communicate much. We just grumble at one another in passing. Even if we did speak in full sentences, I doubt he would have wanted to tell me anything positive about you. It is positive, isn’t it?” she hedged.

  “It’s good news, yes, but I don’t think you’d recognize my writing. I don’t feel enough like a god anymore to snicker down my sleeve at my characters. You spend seven years in Brixton and you see what real hopelessness is like. Living on the edge isn’t having to move into a Tribeca condo because you were forced to sell your place in Amagansett. I couldn’t write a book about Wall Street now. I wouldn’t want to.”

  “You sound different.”

  “I’m old, Ames,” I said, before I could catch myself using my pet name for her.

  “No one’s called me that in a very long time, Ken.” Then she stopped and there was silence, but something in her breathing told me she wasn’t finished. “Come see me.”

  “I–I can’t. I’m leaving first thing and-”

  “No, Ken, tonight. Right now.”

  This wasn’t what I had envisioned. Of course, I had thought of Amy constantly since I agreed to come up to New York. And I’d fantasized about us bumping shoulders on the street or us hailing the same cab, but not this. If I was going to see her again, I wanted it to be when the book was out and I had something tangible to prove all the pain I’d caused her, and myself, had come to something worthwhile.

  “I’m beat, Ames. I don’t have it in me now. Sorry.”

&
nbsp; “That’s okay. You don’t have to go anywhere except to the elevator.”

  “What?”

  “I’m in the lobby.”

  Twenty-Six

  Gun Math

  Of course, in my fantasies Amy hadn’t aged a day: her hair was black and cut in a simple bob, her face unlined, her sad mouth smiling only at the corners. Her gold-flecked green eyes, the most God-awful sexy eyes on earth, would glow in low light. Her breasts, always so firm and assertive, would be untouched by gravity and time. And the rest of her body, paradoxically lean and lush, would fit together with mine, as it always had even at our worst moments. Of course there would be speckles or smudges of paint on her jeans, T-shirt, and running shoes, on her hands, cheeks, and forehead.

  The lighting in the Algonquin lobby is famously soft. Still, when she stood up from the sofa and edged around the marble coffee table, Amy’s eyes did not glow green. Her hair was indeed black, but long and lined with threads of gray, and any hints of happiness in her smile had been buried deeper than Brixton coal. Gravity had been kind to her body, but she was too thin. It didn’t suit her. She had abandoned her uniform of T-shirt, ripped black jeans, and duct-taped running shoes for a proper woman-of-means wardrobe: a tasteful white cashmere sweater, navy blue flannel slacks, and gray heels. Paint? Not a drop on her. Yet, when she came up to me, softly stroked my cheek with the back of her hand, and kissed me lightly on the lips, none of the rest of it mattered.

  When I fell out of the moment, I noticed that I was kissing Amy and not lightly. I noticed too that she was kissing back. It was a stupid thing for both of us to do, really stupid. Then again, we had been stupid in love with each other. It was always like that between us: we knew better, but couldn’t help ourselves. It wasn’t like we’d had some blissful period together at the start before it all went south. We were trouble for each other from day one. Yet no matter what damage we inflicted on each other or, worse, on ourselves, we were completely and utterly stupid for each other. Even now, ten years totally removed from each other’s lives, it was still there. That’s why it had taken us so long to fall apart in the first place.