No one looked up, especially not Airman, who was returning alone from the boy's rest room, and struggling valiantly to preserve the last partially clean pair of Air Jordan XIX’s in the camp. It had not even been necessary for Peter to hide behind the tree before he leapt out and swung the two-inch thick branch at Airman's back, protected only by a plastic poncho and a mesh shirt.
The blow caught Airman precisely over the left kidney, and he plunged to earth faster than the rain. Peter didn't stay to see the further results of his work, but ran through the woods until he was back in his cabin, where he grabbed his duffel bag and started down the path to the main lodge.
His parents were there when he arrived, and he went home never knowing how long Airman might have lain in the mud. The rain was falling so heavily that he could not possibly have heard Peter's footsteps as he ran away, and Peter hoped the boy would think it was God's hand that had struck him down.
He told himself that he had not done it for his own satisfaction, to pay back the countless taunts that Airman and his cronies had tossed his way like stones at a stray dog. No, he had done it to teach Airman a lesson in righteousness, and that God is not mocked.
It was a lesson he had enjoyed teaching, and one he promised himself and God that he would teach again.
~ * ~
By the time he entered ninth grade, Peter Hurst attended Youth Fellowship every Sunday night, and the youth bell choir every Tuesday. He would have sung in the youth choir, but was unable to persuade his young voice to match the pitches that he heard.
He participated in no school activities, although he had wanted to try out for track. His father had been supportive, but his mother refused to even consider it, and gave no explanation for her antipathy toward athletics.
To make up for his son's lack of athletic opportunities, Peter's father set up a basketball pole, and bought a set of weights and a bench at Sears. Peter used the weights often, and found that his mother's admonition to exercise when your thoughts became sinful had the reverse effect of what she desired. When he lifted weights, Peter became more aware of his body than ever, and constant repetitions of lifts hardened more than his muscles, as he thought about the strength he was gaining, the power for the struggle he would wage for good.
His first real crush on a girl occurred in the fall of his freshman year of high school. Her name was Jessica Keller, and she was Paul Blair's niece. Paul's sister Rachel and her husband Thad had moved to the Buchanan area from Pittsburgh, when the communications media company in which Thad was a marketing manager consolidated their offices in the eastern part of the state.
Peter knew only that a new girl was in his school and his church, and that she was beautiful. He saw her frequently with her parents and her uncle, Mr. Blair, who was Peter's Sunday school teacher, and the man who owned the clothing store.
And that was all that Paul Blair was to Peter Hurst. He had seen Paul's face only twice during his kidnapping, once from the ground, looking up, seeing the big man and the gun as through a haze, and again, just for a second, through the window in the semi-darkness, only long enough for him to know that this was the same Uncle Mistletoe who watched and protected.
And now Uncle Mistletoe was a moment of magic from the past, no more than a dimly recalled blur of features, bearing no resemblance to people he knew and saw often in bright daylight, no similarity to an everyday, kind and smiling man who went to church and taught Sunday school, a man like Paul Blair. All Paul Blair was to Peter Hurst was a kind and boring man who had a princess for a niece.
He kept his infatuation to himself. He never mentioned girls to either his mother or father, and this lack of enthusiasm worried Clyde Hurst, who feared that his son, due to his wife's overprotectiveness and dominance, as well as his nightmarish childhood experience, might be a budding homosexual. So he began to tell his son stories of the four years he served in the Army. To his surprise, Peter enjoyed the tales, and asked his father for more details, which Clyde was happy to give.
Peter was particularly fascinated by Clyde's talk of firearms, and one Saturday afternoon when Miriam was out shopping, Clyde came into the living room gingerly holding a pistol in his right hand, its muzzle pointing at the floor.
"Your mother doesn't even know I have this, so don't mention it to her, okay?"
Peter could feel his heart pounding. "Sure. What kind is it?"
"It's an old one, Remington .45 ACP. An Army model. Semi-automatic. That means that it'll keep firing every time you pull the trigger, you don't have to cock it or anything. Here, I'll show you..."
His father pushed a button, and an empty metal clip popped out of the bottom of the grip. "See, the bullets go in here, then you put the clip back in..." He did, then pulled back the slide. "Look in there, you can see the clip, huh? Then you push down on this thing." Clyde pressed hard on a lever on the left side of the barrel, and the slide jumped forward with a loud clack. Peter saw that the hammer was cocked.
"She's set to go," Clyde said. "But your hand's gotta press this thing for the trigger to fire." He gripped the pistol, showing Peter how the web between finger and thumb depressed a safety on the grip itself. "Wanta hold it? You saw it's not loaded."
Peter took it instantly, fitted his hand around the grip, his finger through the trigger guard. It was the finest thing he had ever touched. It was solid and heavy with the weight of justice, and he knew that as long as he held it he could never be afraid of anything.
"Where did it...come from?" Peter asked, unable to take his gaze from the gun, looking at it from all angles, seeing that the muzzle opening was big enough to put a finger into, and imagining the size of the bullet that would come out of it.
"Black market," Clyde answered. "Never even shot it."
Peter kept looking at the pistol in his hand. The hammer particularly fascinated him. It was like the fist of God, ready to rain down.
"Better put it away," Clyde said. "Your mother'll be back soon. Hold the hammer there, and pull the trigger, let it down slow. They say it doesn't do them any good to dry fire them. Uh, that's shooting it with no bullets in it."
Peter did as his father asked, then handed him the pistol. He stayed in the living room, and listened as his father went back into the bedroom. Peter heard the closet door slide open, then a short clattering sound, and the door slide shut.
The next time he was alone in the house, he went into his parents' bedroom, opened the closet door on the side where his father kept his clothes, and looked for the gun. It didn't take him long to find it.
It was in a shoe box under and behind several others. In the box was also a dark brown cardboard cartridge box that contained the bullets. They were remarkably squat and short, like fat soldiers dressed in bronze, wearing gray helmets. The box said "50 cartridges," but Peter counted only thirty-seven.
His parents had gone to the mall together, and Peter thought they would not return for at least another hour, so he closed and replaced the shoe box, put it under the others, and took the pistol and the box of shells into his room.
He thought about loading the clip, but he knew nothing about pistols or bullets, and was afraid that if he applied too much pressure to the silver primer that it might make the bullet go off like a bomb. So he left them in the box, and played with the pistol.
There was a mirror on his closet door, and he opened it and pointed the gun at his reflection, first holding it waist high, then at arm's length, aiming through the iron sights directly at his face, so that the black hole of the muzzle stared at him.
"Pow..." he said softly, then went into a number of poses in which the gun was always prominent. He unbuttoned his shirt, threw out his chest, tried to look like The Terminator. Liking the effect, he removed his shirt and posed some more.
After a few minutes, the narcissistic preening, the contrast of his skin to the dull gray metal, had given him an erection, and he took off his jeans and continued to pose with his penis a bulge in his underwear, then outside of it, pointin
g upward like the gun he held. He started to think of Jessica Keller, and wondered what she would look like naked, pictured her that way, looking at him naked, with his gun in his hand, and the imagined look in her eyes whirled him about, made him reach down to the box of bullets, pop the clip the way he had seen his father do, then fumble with the fat cartridges, trying them first one way, then the other, until they fit, heedless of his previous fears of their premature detonation.
The caked and dirty spring of the clip allowed him to load only three rounds easily, but that was enough, and with shaking hands he reinserted the clip and cocked the hammer.
Now it was right, now it was loaded and dangerous and capable of dealing out retribution, and he brandished it in his right hand like God did the lightning, pointing it everywhere at once, and tugging at himself with his left hand until he grew harder and harder and could feel the blood pulsing faster and the juice rising, and he saw himself and Jessica and then it started to jet from him, so hot it burned, and his fists, left and right, both tightened so that he pulled the trigger...
The knowledge that he had done so passed through him before the hammer fell, and in that fraction of an instant between realization and the dry click of the hammer striking the firing pin he experienced again the terror of that bad day years before, before his fear had become acceptance, before he had begun to wish for death.
There was no explosion, no sound of a gunshot, but Peter froze nonetheless, his only movement the involuntary one of his penis, its intractable and unreasoned pumping slowed to a foolish, rhythmic trickle. He pointed the gun at the floor, not knowing what to do, then decided to push the button and try to remove the clip. It popped out on the rug, all three cartridges safely within, and then he remembered that he had not pulled back the slide as he had seen his father do. There had not been a shell in the chamber to begin with.
He started to laugh in relief, and simultaneously thanked God for his blessing and cursed himself for his sin of self-abuse, looking at the white puddle on the rug and knowing that he would have to clean it quickly before it stained, and he would have to dress, and he would have to put back the gun and the bullets.
That night in bed, he thought about what he had done, and decided that the sex part had been wrong. He should not have pulled his penis, should not have undressed. Those things made him lose control, and if there had been a bullet in the chamber, he would have shot something, and might have shot himself.
The sex part, he thought, wasn't what was best about holding the gun. The best part was having the power, knowing that you had the power, and knowing that with the gun no one would dare to hurt you.
In a way, the sex part had scared him, losing control the way he had. In his mind, he had seen Jessica naked, and when he started to spray he had seen himself hurting her, doing terrible things, dirty things...
Bad things.
He didn't want to hurt Jessica, didn't want to do bad things to her. He knew that he loved her, because she was pretty and seemed nice, and smiled at him, and made him feel things that no one else did. And he wanted to feel love.
But he didn't want to feel bad things.
So he prayed. He asked God to forgive him for masturbating, and asked him to take the dirty thoughts away from his mind, so that he could love Jessica the way God intended for men to love women. He did not ask for forgiveness for taking his father's gun, or for loading it, and he did not ask for the strength to resist the temptation to do it again. That would have been foolish.
The gun was strength. The gun was a good thing.
Chapter 16
During the next four years, Peter Hurst proceeded down the narrow road of militant Christianity, assiduously avoiding the temptations of the flesh. He never drank, and his lips never touched a cigarette, neither marijuana nor tobacco. He never dated Jessica Keller, or even asked her out, because he was too attracted to her, and feared that close proximity to her could only result in lust.
The few dates he did have were for activities in church and Youth Fellowship, friendly pairings of convenience, with no opportunities for romance. His partners for those occasions were nice girls, with all the unattractiveness and eagerness to please that that word conveyed.
One girl had suggested, during a YF game and dance night, that they sneak out to his father's car and "see what happens," but he parlayed the suggestion into a lecture about morality and sexually transmitted diseases. The girl did not repeat her invitation.
In 2007, Peter joined the Buchanan chapter of the Conservative Christian Youth Coalition. The group met every Friday evening, and Peter felt at once that he had found kindred spirits. They were as young as Peter's sixteen years, and the oldest member was in his early twenties. The group's adult advisor was Ronald Wilber, the preacher at the Church of the Holy Word, an evangelical congregation even more fundamentalist in view than the Buchanan County Bible Church. Although he allowed the youthful officers to run the meetings and plan the activities, his prayers that opened and closed every meeting were calls to, if not arms, at least the threat of as militant demonstrations, boycotts and picketing as possible.
The Reverend Mr. Wilber was a firm follower of James Dobson's Focus on the Family, and urged the young members of the CCYC to participate in whatever activities Dobson's group suggested. Peter Hurst embraced such actions with a passion, and picketed irreverent movies, Democratic Party headquarters, and family planning clinics with equal zeal. His chosen art form had become non-violent warfare on anything that went against the teaching of the scriptures, as interpreted by himself and Ronald Wilber.
By the time he was a senior, he had decided what his mother had long taken for granted, that he would continue to live at home and attend Buchanan Bible College in preparation for his entry into the ministry. His mother had urged it both subtly and conspicuously as Peter grew up, and he felt that his own predilection for such disparate qualities as self-discipline, military order, and the need for the comfort that only his God could give made the service of Christ an ideal choice.
But while he studied and read and prayed, he also remembered his father's pistol, and the power that he felt when he touched it. And he touched it often. Nearly every time his parents were away from home, he took it out, held it up, aimed it, and fought, in his mind, the enemies of God and Peter.
To the sinful world, he wielded his Bible like a weapon. But what he wished for in his heart was to wield a weapon in the name of God.
And while he wished for it, Paul Blair began, once more, to do it.
Chapter 17
For four years, Lee Boller had been the crown of thorns for the youth workers at Buchanan County Bible Church, thorns because of the agony in dealing with him, and a crown because he had not yet committed, or at any rate been apprehended during, a felony.
The Boller family had belonged to the church ever since they had moved to Buchanan from Philadelphia. Jeremy Boller, an attorney, had left that city under a cloud. No one knew the circumstances, but from the rumors Paul Blair gathered that it had something to do with illegal drugs, though the man had been neither charged nor disbarred.
Boller had set up an office as a defense attorney in Buchanan, and made a good enough living to buy a house in Riverview Heights. When the well dressed, immaculately groomed, and soft spoken Bollers first came to BCBC, they were the kind of visitors who were welcomed immediately, and in another three months they had become members.
Their son's reputation, however, had started out bad and grown worse. When he was twelve, Lee Boller already stood a few inches short of six feet, and was as wide through the trunk as many adults Paul had known. He had the gangliness of youth, however, and there was an unpredictability about his movements that made one cautious around him, as though one of his long arms might suddenly jerk out into a nearby face.
Physical attributes aside, there was always something scary about Lee Boller and the sullen looks he shot from the corners of his eyes. He seldom laughed, but often smiled unpleasantly, a har
sh contrast to his overly friendly and gracious parents.
The crisis with the boy came the week after Thanksgiving. Paul was now teaching the twelve to sixteen year-olds. He moved to that higher age group when he realized that adolescence was the age at which most children choose their path, and felt that he could be more of a positive influence (and surreptitious observer) than with the younger children.
It was more difficult, as they were less communicative than the guileless elementary students. But he persevered, and became friendly with most of them. He decided to stay in that class, watching his charges come up the years, keeping them from danger.
And he had begun to feel that Lee Boller might be one of the greatest dangers they would ever face.
His conduct at Sunday school was far from perfect, but the violations were generally disrespectful remarks that indicated the boy's contempt for whatever was being taught. Whenever there was a chance to question faith, he took it. Still, the misbehavior was verbal only.
Youth Fellowship was another matter. Because of the looser structure, Lee had more opportunity for devilment and for social contact. Paul and the other adults often suspected that the boy had taken drugs before he came. At times he seemed in a stupor, barely troubling to respond to questions. Other times he seemed hyperactive, unable to keep his body still, and those times were the most frightening.
For Lee Boller had seemed to shoot up in the past few months. Now, at sixteen, he stood well over six feet tall and must have weighed 180 pounds. His explosion of dark red hair was never brushed, and he cultivated a moustache that gave the impression of a shadow of dirt beneath his nose. His very presence was threatening, but that did not stop a handful of students from getting friendly with Lee, laughing at his cruel jokes and subtle blasphemies.
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