Gun Church by Reed Farrel Coleman

much.”
    “It’s been that way from the day I showed up here and it’s degenerated since what happened with Frank.”
    There was fire in the kid’s eyes. “Listen, Professor Weiler, you’ve stared down the barrel of a gun. Me too, more than a few times. Once you’ve done that, bullies like Stan don’t scare you. That’s the thing with guns: they are what they seem. You’ll see.”
    “Is that what the other night was all about, staring down the barrel of a gun?”
    He swiveled his head about to make sure no one was in earshot. “That’s a part of it. Look at it this way, Professor—”
    “For chrissakes, Jim, outside of class call me Kip or Ken.”
    Now the kid was smiling like the circus was in town. I half expected him to say
golly gee
and ask to blow me. “Really, I can call you Kip?”
    “If you’d like.”
    He leaned across the table, his whispers conspiratorial. “Well, it’s like I said the other night: it didn’t start out as anything. Me and some friends would go out into the woods above the Crooked River rapids and shoot at shit. ’Round here, that’s no big thing. Every group of friends in these parts shoots out in the woods somewhere. If you haven’t noticed, there isn’t much to do in Brixton.”
    “Tell me about it.”
    “But you have your head to live in,” he said. “The rest of us aren’t that lucky.”
    “Jim, you’ve got a peculiar definition of luck.”
    He looked wounded.
    “Sorry,” I said. “Go on.”
    “Most guys take rifles. We did, too. Rifles are what you grow up with, but I have all these guns from the Colonel’s collection.”
    “The Colonel?”
    “My daddy. That’s what he used to make me and my mom call him, the Colonel. He had his guns and I had your books. Anyways, my mom said he cared more for his guns than he ever cared for us, so she made sure she got them in the divorce settlement. She said that if she couldn’t have his balls, his guns were the next best thing.”
    “Remind me not to piss off your mom.”
    He liked that. “Anyways, we stopped taking rifles and only took handguns with us into the woods.”
    “So you stopped taking rifles … ”
    “Yeah, between all of us, we had access to all sorts of sidearms and we got real good with them, but we were ignorant of the guns themselves. I mean, we knew how they worked and everything, but we were ignorant of their nature. It was only when we got so good with them that it became boring that I began to understand.”
    “Understand?”
    “Understand their nature.”
    “I’m sorry, Jim, but you lost me.”
    He thought about that. “Okay, let’s say you have this beautiful, custom-fitted set of golf clubs, but all you ever did with them was go out and hit balls into a net in your backyard. And let’s say the government said that the most you could ever do with those clubs was to go to some driving range somewhere. Sure, the driving range is better than hitting balls into a net in your backyard, but how much better? Golf clubs aren’t made for driving ranges. Nets and ranges and such are untrue to the nature of the clubs and to the man who owns them. The nature of the clubs is to be used to play the game. To be satisfied to hit balls into a net or to go to a range is like a sin in the scheme of things.”
    Guns, Metaphysics, and the Art of Golf
, by Jim Trimble. Was this kid for real? I felt like a character in a Woody Allen movie and not one of the good ones, either. Come to think of it, fuck Woody Allen! Talk about a guy who lost his muse and got tens of millions of dollars worth of second chances. So, yeah, I wrote a few bad books and broke a few university rules, but I hadn’t been fucking my own stepdaughter. Even the Kipster had his limits.
    “Golf, Jim? Do they even have golf courses in Brixton?”
    “Two, up by Mirror Lake. The mine executives need something to do when they’re not counting their money.”
    “Good line, I’ll have to steal it.” Uh oh, he got