Pull

I bought a gun today. No bullets. Just the gun, a revolver. I got it at a pawn shop down the street from the church. The guy at the pawn shop didn’t have any problems with me buying it even though I didn’t have a license or anything. I made a mental note to tell the congregation not to go there. The owner probably thought it was for self-defense; it wasn’t uncommon for drunks around the neighborhoods to come and harass you. The revolver’s not shiny or clean like the guns you see in the movies. There’s a bit of rust on the handle and inside the barrel, maybe some water got into it somehow. I imagine the previous owner standing on the ledge of a bridge near a calm river with the gun to his temple, standing there because of his indecisiveness on how to end his life. Maybe he jumped and then pulled the trigger, an impressive feat, or perhaps he pulled the trigger and fell into the water. In my fantasy, the gun is still in his hand as he sinks to the bottom and is washed away in the current.
The gun now looks aged and worn down from being pawned numerous times. With its solid black handle, short barrel, and empty cylinder it looked like one of those guns that cops keep taped to their ankles. Maybe it was used by a cop once when he was undercover on a drug deal, they made the mistake of not searching his ankles and he was ready to go all Ronin on their asses when they found the wire on him. Maybe the gun saved his life. Different characters come into my fantasies every time I look at the gun; the previous owner on the bridge was a student whose parents always made his decisions. His parents decided what college he would go to, what he would study, who he would marry, and he had enough. The gun still makes me nervous; I hold it in both of my hands as if I were examining it for prints. Big guns just freak me out. Thank God it’s not a Dirty Harry gun, I’d never touch it.
The only real memory I have of my father was the time I went hunting, we didn’t even use rifles. I was twelve years old and he didn’t like using guns; he preferred the bow and arrow. He had made it himself, carving the bow out of a part of an old tree he chopped down behind our house. He sharpened the branches of that same tree into arrows. “No fruit on that tree, but at least it had a use,” he said. I remember the wood peels that fell onto our grass and the smell of dead wood as he sculpted the weapon sitting on a rocking chair he also had made. We drove out early in the morning into a hunting area of a forest nearby. I was naturally a shy and quiet boy, so my father didn’t have trouble with me being silent. We tiptoed around until we found a good spot to wait at. I had hoped that I would see my father climb up a tree with a wooden spear and jump down to impale a wild boar like Rambo in “First Blood.” That didn’t happen. Instead, we waited. We waited for what seemed like hours. This only made me wonder how long Rambo was up in that tree holding that spear. There was so much blood. Thinking of the blood makes my skin crawl. My mind quickly comes back to my office, my desk, and the ritual before me.
I open the cylinder to make sure that it’s empty, as if by some miracle bullets would appear out of thin air. I roll the cylinder listening to the rapid clicks and snap the cylinder back into the chamber. I hold the gun and look around at my office to take in the scenery. My desk takes up half of the room and on it sit books that I’ve allowed to pile up over the few years I’ve been a pastor. There are three stacks of books, categorized into different genres: classic Christian literature such as Pilgrim’s Progress and Confession; fiction by Dostoevsky and O’Connor; and corny, modern Christian books that come off more as self-help books. The latter category piled up as members of my congregation thought I could use inspiring words by famous pastors to “encourage” my walk with the Lord. I’m pretty sure that they wanted me to take a hint, “This is the way you should preach. Short, concise phrases that everyone will get. Believe it and you can do it. Imagine it and it will happen.” I mentioned at one time that those pastors had nothing to do with the Bible and were more concerned with money than God. The next thing I know is the senior pastor coming to my closet sized office telling me to apologize to the entire congregation. I did, and lied saying that I would read the books. I went to confess to my priest after that, but some of the guilt remains. No pictures hang on my walls or sit on my desk because I don’t like thinking of my past mistakes. I found pictures to be reminders of the little imperfections that lay heavy on my shoulders; pictures were fake smiles trying to compensate for lack of joy.
I keep my diplomas in a box at home. All that hangs on my wall is a calendar that was given me this past New Year. A member of the congregation gave it as a present to wish me a year of happiness and joy. I use it to make sure of when Ash Wednesday is, to remind myself to tell everyone to give up something for Lent. As I lay back in my computer chair, I remind myself its Good Friday, and I put the gun to my temple.
The coolness of the barrel on my skin is always refreshing, but the grit of the rust quickly takes away that pleasure. The thought that I should be preparing for tonight’s sermon passes through my mind and then I breathe in deeply as the rush goes through me. I forget about the sermon, about the fact that the gun isn’t loaded; all of my focus is at the gun at my head and my finger on the trigger. My life doesn’t flash before my eyes, but all of my memories seem more significant. The excitement starts when I realize that I have control over whether I live or die, and having the gun in my hand does that to me. Regardless of it being loaded or unloaded, the adrenaline starts pumping as I cock back the hammer. I heard from somewhere that you’re supposed to squeeze the trigger as opposed to pulling it, but no one’s ever said that in the movies. “Squeeze the trigger.” That thought distracts me from the high, but it comes back as I close my eyes, pull the trigger, and hear the hammer hit the empty chamber. I breathe out slowly as I close my eyes to savor the moment. It’s a moment when I go absolutely blank. My mind goes white and I don’t feel the weight on my shoulders. The burden that lies so heavily on me goes away in that moment and I feel alright. It never lasts; it’s just a temporary fix to my guilty condition.
I open my eyes and put the gun in my lap; my hand moves away a stack of books to reveal my desk clock. It’s dead. I thought that the batteries were dead, but the clock remained still even when I switched them out. The short hand is right on six and the long hand on twelve. The same member who gave me the calendar offered me a new clock, but I refused. I didn’t want the clock to change. The dead clock was a gift from Mortimer or Morty, a friend I had grown up with in the church. We even went to Catholic school together and Morty was always the one rebelling. One time we were skipping class to go eat off campus; I justified it to my mother saying that we had finished all of our work for the school year and were only watching movies in class. In actuality, I was the only one out of my group of friends to have finished the work, Morty was nearly held back, not only because of the missing assignments, but because he had so many unexcused absences.
This was one of the rare times that I had chosen to skip with Morty and I had just turned 18. Morty decided to celebrate my coming of age and slight rebellion by taking me to an adult video store.
“It’s a rite of passage, man. Don’t worry about it; it’s just a venial sin,” Morty said.
He was wrong, it was a cardinal sin, one of the seven deadly sins; he never paid attention during Sunday school. I didn’t want to disappoint Morty and it was near the end of the school year before we went off to college. I humored him and we went. The guilt and burden that I feel now started there or at least that’s where I felt its presence clearly. The store was off a main road near our neighborhood and many complained of it being an eyesore to a generally clean and moral town. The store had a drive thru because it used to be a bank; the same suction tube used to deposit your paycheck was now used to rent dirty movies. We drove in Morty’s car, a 1990 Honda Civic with paint so faded that you can’t tell what color it was before. It looked slightly like charcoal when he had it, but Morty loved it because it was his. We drove down the street to the store and as we pulled in, I asked him if we could go through the drive thru.
“What? Why?” exclaimed Morty.
“I don’t want to go inside,” I said.
“But, that’s the whole point of a porn shop. It’s like a bookstore. You don’t have to buy anything; you can just read in the store. Well I mean you can’t do what you would do watching porn in the shop, but going in there is like getting a peep for free. It’s like a strip club… dude, we should just go to a strip club.” Morty started to turn the car around.
“What? No! Park the car, I’ll go in.”
“You’re so gullible, man. You know I don’t have money for a strip club. Alright, out the car,” Morty commanded.
I sighed and stepped out of the car. My heart pounded as I realized that I was still in my school uniform and took off my tie and jacket. Morty was already at the door, holding it for me. He smiled when he saw how nervous I was. My heart pounded as I approached the door to the store and I took a deep breath as I went in. The cool air hit me as Morty followed in behind me and a clerk welcomed us to the store. Morty was still in his school uniform, but the clerk didn’t care.
“You guys from St. Paul up the road?” asked the clerk.
“Yeah, do a lot of guys from there come here?” asked Morty.
“Yeah, you kids keep me in business. Let me know if you need any help.”
Morty smiled and continued on looking through the aisles to see if anything caught his eye. Everything caught my eye at this point, but I felt conflicted. We had just gone over the cardinal sins in Sunday school this past week. My teacher had gone into great detail over each of the seven deadly sins, but when it came to lust he simply said, “Get through it.” Those words echoed in my mind as naked bodies surrounded me and closed in. I quickly looked for Morty and kept close to him, afraid that God would smite me. I tried not to look at the bodies; I tried looking at the faces, the eyes of the actors and actresses on the boxes, but my eyes went to their bodies. “Just get through it, just get through it,” I told myself. We looked around for an hour until the clerk realized that we weren’t going to buy anything. He told us to get out or he’d call up the school. Morty couldn’t afford to get into any more trouble and I had enough, so we left.
“Not bad, right?” asked Morty. “Next time we’re going to a strip club,” he joked as we got in his car and I remained silent because all I could think about was how I felt in that store. My heart beat out of my chest and I couldn’t turn away from the naked bodies that were contained on the video boxes. The one image that caught my eye was one of a girl that was fully clothed, a rare sight, with her back turned dressed in a plaid shirt and short shorts. She had brunette hair, dark eyes, and legs that didn’t seem to end. At that moment I didn’t care if it was a cardinal sin or not, I burned that image into my mind for later comfort and it is still clear as day. Every time I brought up the image in my mind it seemed to add more weight on my shoulders. The accumulation of images didn’t stop there. Morty had kept his father’s collection of Playboy magazines and with the internet, things were only a click away.
I was at Morty’s house one day in the summer and we were in his room looking at the old Playboys. Morty got up to go out and have a smoke while his parents were still at work, they owned a flower shop close to the school. They were kind people. Once we graduated, I came home to a giant wreath of roses standing in front of our door. It had a card on it saying, “Congratulations, son.” I kept that wreath as long as I could and dried out the roses, so it would last longer. I stayed in his room looking at the magazines while Morty went out to his backyard. I turned the pages gazing at magnificent figures and I got to a page of an interview with one of the models. I hadn’t read anything since school ended and this was the most words on a page that I had seen since then; I figured it would be academic. The model was 19, she was in college and had dreams of becoming a full time model or actress. Her biggest inspiration was her mother because her father wasn’t around. She wanted to make a lot of money to take care of her mother. Her mother had worked three jobs to support her son and two daughters. She liked dark chocolates and hated sour cream.
I stopped reading. All these models, these girls, were somebody’s daughters. They lay on the page so bare and vulnerable, inviting eyes to feast on their flesh, their most intimate state. How many of their fathers had abandoned them? What would their mothers think of their daughters selling their innocence? And what would they think of me, one who had gazed with unclean eyes and a perverse desire for their touch. A debt came upon me, it was something that I had long carried around before, but had been blind to until that time. The debt lay heavy on my soul, a small crack that shattered any hope of perfection.
This burden and guilt remained on my shoulders still even though I did everything I could to alleviate it. I went to seminary hoping that working for God would repay back this debt, but the weight got heavier and heavier. I felt like an ignored child, unforgiven by his parents and looked up on with disappointing eyes. I had become my own reminder of my imperfection and my inability to be anything more. “Killing myself” with an empty gun was a new ritual for me, like the Eucharist, it nourished me, reminded me of my failures, and erased them, even if it was just for a moment.
Morty had gone on to graduate from high school and go on to college. He worked for a company crunching numbers day in and out, but lived for the weekend where his paychecks fueled his lusts for drink and women. Morty hadn’t been to church in a long time nor did he practice any part of the faith except one. Confession. He came every week to “confess” his sins to me and relived the events of the previous weekend before heading out to enjoy the next one. Every Friday he would come tell me of his exploits. It’s Good Friday today. I look over at my dead clock out of habit and then I hear a knock at my door. It’s Morty. The gun is still in my lap, so I grab it and before I can open my desk drawer he comes in. I have the gun in my right hand, hiding it behind my desk out of his line of sight and greet him as I stick out my left hand to shake his.
“Hey, Father, how’s it going?” he asks as he shakes my hand. He always called me Father even though I was a pastor of a Lutheran church.
“Not too bad,” I answer as I close my open drawer. Morty takes a seat in front of me and begins to tell his tale of the previous weekend.
“Hey, when was the last time you heard from Helen?” Morty asks.
Helen was my ex-girlfriend, who, last I heard, was currently a missionary in China. I remember when I met Helen for the first time three years ago when I had just graduated from seminary. She represented the reason why I had chosen to be a Protestant minister rather than a Catholic priest was because I hoped to marry. I didn’t have the gift of celibacy nor did I have the desire for it. I met her at a retreat that the recent graduates had to attend and after the initial welcome and congratulations we transitioned into worship. The lights dimmed and the slow, calm piano music began to play to get us into the right mindset. I looked up and as the light shone on the praise band and saw a medium sized girl with brunette hair that she wore up, dark eyes closed in prayer, dressed moderately in a plaid shirt and jeans. My heart raced out of my chest and I prayed fervently for an opportunity to meet her.
After worship we had a chance to settle into our cabins, but I spent my time looking for an opportunity to meet Helen. I hoped that she would start conversing with a person I knew and when she did I joined them as naturally as I could.
“Hey, Joe, great worship, right? Sorry to interrupt you guys. Hey, I’m Joe, I mean he’s Joe, but I’m Joe’s friend.” I nervously interjected. She smiled and I’m not quite sure what she saw in me then.
“Hi, I’m Helen. That was a crazy message wasn’t it?”
“Um, yes, yes it was.” I had no idea what the message was about. There were some bits of the message I had caught, something about apples, but I was too busy thinking of how to approach Helen.
“I’ve never heard the Gospel preached like that before. Like, how bearing fruit in our lives is so important in our walk with the Lord? It was really challenging.”
“Indeed, it was,” I wish I knew what she was talking about, but this was going better than anticipated.
“But, his analogy of how apples only grow during a certain time of the season encouraged me because I know I don’t bear the fruit of love as much as I would like to. What about you?”
“Uh, yeah. I know what you mean, but I feel like Jesus died and in that there’s fruit to be beared, like in John 12:24?” I was using the “Jesus is the answer to every question” method and that happened to be the only verse I knew with the word fruit in it, but it was effective because no one could refute it.
“Hmm. That’s really interesting.”
My hands were moist with sweat, I thought I had blown it, but then she said, “What’s your name? And could we talk more about this, later?” I cracked a smile and assured her that I was glad to do so. We never really talked about bearing fruit after; she just asked me to pray for her and we were inseparable for the next year.
She wanted me to be a “good tree that bore good fruit,” so I did everything she wanted me to, including coming to her church, which I pastor in now. I tried my best to bear good fruit, doing what I thought would make her happy and make her feel loved. But, to her it felt more like we had something in common that we loved, like estranged parents who stayed together for their children. She gave me a pained look of momentary contentment whenever she looked into my eyes. Her eyes softened, her mouth was slightly open, and she held my hand. Things went well when she gave me that look. At other times, especially near the end of the relationship, she looked at me with blank eyes, a firm mouth, and told me it looked like I just wanted to get through our relationship instead of maintaining it. It was as if the same quality that attracted me to Helen was holding her back from what she really wanted.
“I feel empty inside,” she once told me.
“You’re bearing fruit,” I told her.
“No,” she replied. “I’m not, I need to be better. I’m not doing enough good. How can I expect to get into Heaven when I don’t feel good enough? ” I tried to tell her that she was far superior to me, but it had no affect.
One day she told me that it was over. I wasn’t the one she wanted in her life for the long run and that was the last I saw her. I went into a deep depression, evident by the congregation, who kept asking me to preach on good stories of the Bible like David and Goliath, not Judas hanging himself. Later, I heard that she went and got married to a missionary and went off to China to “earn her keep.” That was about the time I had the idea of buying a gun. All those memories flooded back to me as Morty stood in front of me.
“Last I heard she was in China. Happily married.” I tighten my grip around the gun.
“Helen died,” Morty said. The burden bears its full weight on me. All the air in me goes out and I cannot utter a response.
“She killed herself.” My mind goes blank. Everything turns white and I drop the gun. I realize what she saw in me that day. Morty hears the gun drop and asks me, “Hey, what was that? Are you ok?” I pay no attention. Instead I go back to the day when I met Helen, her eyes looking into mine, the day she left me. Her dissatisfaction and discontent met with my own. She saw the same eyes in me and it comforted her knowing that she wasn’t alone, but it tore her apart because it was a constant reminder of her own imperfection.
My mind goes blank and I go back to the only memory I have of my father. We’re in the woods and as I zone out staring at mushy leaves at my feet, my father, without making a sound, pulls up his bow. He takes out an arrow and lines up the groove of the arrow along the string. Gripped tight with his dry fingers, he pulls back the arrow and closes his left eye. He lets go and then I hear a cry. My father and I walk up to where the deer lies, about 10 yards out. The arrow had hit the deer in his side. It’s still alive. I stare as it bleeds out the remnants of its life. My father goes up to the deer and grabs his arrow and plunges it deeper into the deer as it gives out its final cries. All I can remember is the blood. Like that of a sacrificial lamb pouring onto the altar of the forest floor.