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
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 sideshow 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.