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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

Resurrection
     
    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