Something else was different, too. Although both men acted out the same rituals the security guard and I had just performed, there was a marked change in how they were done. The both of them moved with such amazing grace and precision that it seemed like a pas de deux. Although they were different sizes and different ages, the length and timing of their strides was nearly identical.
The snaggle-toothed girl handed each man his weapon-the maintenance guy the.38 I’d shot earlier and Jim the Browning-and stood back. She asked if they were ready. They nodded that they were and then, just as Jim had done before, she said, “Begin.”
I figured the maintenance guy had to be pretty good to have done this kind of shooting ten times and for Jim to risk his life facing him. Still, the BCCC maintenance man was clearly the more nervous of the two. Jim stood there, steady as a rock, weapon raised, seeming not to breathe. Sweat was visible on the big man’s brow and he wasn’t nearly as solid as Jim. His breaths were louder and raspy, probably a result of all those cigarettes he always smelled of. He fired. Jim fired. They both went down, but it was obvious something was wrong. There was blood.
“Oh fuck! Oh fuck!” the big man screamed in pain, clamping his right hand over his left bicep, blood seeping through the tight spaces between his fingers. “Oh, Jesus, it burns.”
Jim lay still where he fell as he had the first time. Nearly everyone rushed to the blood. Renee and I ran to Jim. We pulled him to his feet, but he bent back over in pain. When he stood straight again, I saw the hole in his T-shirt. He’d been hit in his belly and it clearly hurt, Kevlar or not.
“How is he?” Jim asked, thrusting his chin at the maintenance man.
“You hit him in the arm. What happened?”
“Later.”
Jim rushed over to his bleeding opponent, who had a white towel wrapped around the wound. The blood hadn’t yet leaked through.
“He’ll be all right,” said the guy from the copy center. “The shot just sort of cut through his tricep. Good thing it didn’t get lodged in there. It’ll hurt, but we’ll get him patched up.”
Jim went over to him. That weird silence fell over the chapel and everyone stood back to form the line. Jim stuck his index finger onto the bloody towel. The big man stuck his bloody finger to Jim’s belly and they recited. Then they moved along the receiving line. Unlike in the world outside the chapel, wounded or not, you were expected to finish what you started. A few weeks back, Jim told me that short of death, there were no excuses. Now I knew it wasn’t just hyperbole.
Jim gave the wounded man the customary hug, but didn’t apologize. The maintenance guy didn’t utter an angry word, but there was obvious puzzlement in his eyes and hesitation in his demeanor. As he was led back into the locker room, his eyes met mine and he held his gaze until he was helped through the mattresses and out of the chapel. There was something in his stare that I couldn’t understand and by the time he disappeared from sight, I stopped trying to comprehend.
Jim said it fell on the two of us to clean up, so I sent Renee on ahead as we waited for the place to clear out. I looked forward to having a chance to talk to Jim about what had happened, but I wanted Jim to be the one to bring it up. He had a slightly different agenda.
“So, how was it the second time around? Different, right?” he asked, tying up the last of the plastic garbage bags. “Not like your old life.”
“Let me tell you something: guns and books, they’re not as different as you think. The first book is all about excitement and anticipation. You just write the damn thing because you don’t really know what you’re doing. But the second book … Watch out! Especially if the first book got people’s attention. When the second book is published-that is if you can manage to write a second book-they lie in the weeds for you wielding their long knives or worse.”
“Worse?”
“Much worse,” I said. “They can ignore you.”
“That’s a bad thing?”
“The worst thing there is, to be ignored,” I said. “Better to be despised. So what happened with-”
He shook his head. “I was off tonight. My head was someplace else and I waited too long to fire. By the time I squeezed, he’d already hit me.”
“Shit!”
“He’ll live.”
“But what if he hadn’t?”
“You know those rules you were complaining about? Well, we got them for that too. Are you scared about shooting now?”
“Pretty much the opposite, Jim.”
He smiled proudly. “Good thing. Come on, let’s go.”
Outside the hangar, the rain had given way to an achingly clear sky and a chilly northeast wind. I loaded the garbage bags into the box of Jim’s pickup while he went to shut down the generator and stow it. Without the rumble of the generator all I could hear was that eerie creaking of the buildings in the wind.
Twenty
I was worn out and when Jim dropped me off, I dragged my ass upstairs and into the shower. Renee was nude on the bed, dead asleep. As I let the water run over me, I realized my grasp on the inner workings of the chapel wasn’t as firm as I thought it was. But I’d survived this long without understanding most of the mysteries of the universe and one more, give or take, wasn’t going to ruin my day. I would either figure it out for myself or Jim would reveal the knowledge to me one day when we were out in the woods shooting. He enjoyed that, doling out information in tiny doses. I think it helped him feel in control, which, I suppose, he was.
The St. Pauli Girl came into the bathroom just as I finished shaving and kissed me on the cheek.
“There’s three phone messages for you,” she said.
I laughed. “I wonder who died?”
She punched my arm. “Don’t even joke like that.”
“When you’re my age, kiddo, it’s not a joke.”
Feeling re-energized by the shower and Renee’s lack of clothing, I was prepared to ignore the messages, but I was too curious. I hadn’t received three messages in a single day since Janice Nadir had taken her act on the road. She used to call me all the time and tell me how much she wanted to suck my cock or how she liked it when I fucked her hard from behind. I didn’t miss those messages. Suddenly, irrationally, my focus shifted away from Janice and I found I was thinking of Amy. Had something happened to her? Is that what those messages were about? If they were, what would I do? How would I feel? Where would that leave me? Even I was a little bit embarrassed by my thinking of Amy only in terms of myself.
I splashed my face with aftershave, rolled on deodorant, and slipped into my old terry bathrobe-a long-ago gift from Amy. I kissed Renee on the mouth, desperately-a kiss like a prayer-and told her I’d be back up in a few minutes. Now she looked worried too. My mind raced with a hundred scenarios, one worse than the next, as I took the stairs two at a time. I listened to the three messages-all from Meg. The brittle tone of her voice and the cryptic “You need to call me back” did little to allay my fears.
“What the fuck, Donovan? Is Amy all right?”
“Amy?”
“My ex-wife,” I whispered into the mouthpiece. “You remember her?”
“Don’t be a schmuck, Kip. As far as I know, Amy’s miserable being married to that dickhead Peter Moreland, but otherwise fine.”