Eddy Licklighter is in a fight with God for his very own soul. You can't mess around half-assed when fighting with God. You've got to go at it whole-hearted. Eddy loses his wife and baby girl in a fire. Most might have cried, or wailed, or gone rigid silent. Eddy just looks up in the sky and says, "You dirty fucker."

Bulley's protagonist is a contemporary version of the Old Testament character of Job. Licklighter wants nothing from God except His presence so he can kill him off. And that is the Catch-22. The humor, warmth, pathos and ultimate redemption of Licklighter will make you hold your sides with laughter at the same time you shed common tears for his "God-awful" dilemma. Licklighter's reaction to the loss of the woman and child he loved as much as life itself is an authentic and impassioned outcry shared by most of us when we are confronted with grief and loss.

About the Author:

David Bulley's fiction has been published in Portland Monthly Magazine, Words & Images, Tatlin's Tower, The Story Garden, 15 Minutes, Outsider Ink, Hubris Magazine, Clean Sheets, The Columbia River Reader, Literary Potpourri, Short Stories, Akkadian, and other publications. He won first place in the $1000 brassring.com war of the words for fiction and he also won the Writelink.com fiction weekender challenge. Weapon in Heaven is David Bulley's first published novel.

Excerpt:

Most men might have gone all rigid silent or fallen belly to dirt wailing, pounding the earth sobbing huge tears; not Eddy Licklighter. Eddy just looked straight up into the sky, direct in God's face and said, "You dirty fucker." Then he stood there and everyone around him, all the police and firefighters and onlookers and whoever else, just let him.

That morning Eddy was standing in front of a pine, bigger than any tree in the north Maine woods had a right to be. He started up his saw and revved it a few times. "You're going down big fella," he said to the tree. He walked around the whole of it twice, looking for the best place to start and how it might fall and if it needed a notch cut in it, and then he sat down hard on a root and thought about it. That tree was older than the country. It shouldn't even of been there in forest timbered twice, maybe three times since white people in Maine, and yet there it was.

Eddy hit the kill switch on the saw and looked up at the sky, blinking in the shock of silence. "God," he said, "you want me to cut this tree or leave it be?" He laughed at his rhyme. The answer came to him clear as October sky. He heard it in the click of dead leaves stirred by air, and the creak of the pine, and he heard it in the furious wing beat of a grouse some couple hundred yards away. Eddy stood up and walked away.

He drove home excited, leaning forward rocking in the seat of his truck as if urging himself just a tiny bit faster toward home. Epiphanies were rare in the life of Eddy Licklighter and he wanted to share it with Mary. He wanted to tell her every tiny detail and stretch it out and taste his own words and savor them. If he tried true and hard enough maybe he could tell it so she could feel it too. God don't answer every day. This was special stuff and worth loosing a job, which he knew without even checking. Twenty guys probably lined up to take that job just as soon as he left it. Nobody was gonna pay for a man who refused to cut the best trees and just wandered on home any time he felt like it. That was okay fine with Eddy. Eddy had spiritual matters to deal with now.

Mary sat at the kitchen table one leg crossed over the other waving her top leg back and forth enough to stir dust on the floor--if there had been any dust to stir. She lit another cigarette from the butt from the last and jabbed the used one into the ashtray hard enough to send a tiny plume of ash up and out like a geyser.

When Mary, at twenty-two, discovered that she was pregnant with their daughter Cindy, she took the pack of Marlboro lights from her purse and dropped them into the trash can right there at the doctors office. She never touched another until a month after she quit nursing Cindy. Eddy smoked all through the pregnancy, but quit the very same week Cindy started again. Eddy didn't believe in doing things half-assed, so once he quit he stayed quit. Mary was trying to catch up with all the cigarettes she hadn't smoked during the time she wasn't smoking. She was up to two packs a day.

Eddy rocked back in his chair, arms waving, smiling big. He told Mary all about how God asked him not to cut that tree. Eddy watched her face change into a scowl. The scowl turned into a look of love and worry and then the scowl fought back hard. Eddy clipped his jaw tight and shut up to wait.

"How we going to pay the mortgage, Eddy?"

"Don't worry, sweetheart. If I got to, I'll flip burgers up the McDonalds."

Mary rolled her eyes and laughed a tiny sound in spite of the scowl. "You always say that, Eddy, but you never do it."

Eddy hadn't realized that Mary might have been angry until then. When the talk turned down the familiar trail signaling the end of a fight, Eddy, for the first time, realized that they had been fighting. Always when they fought, it came to a close with Mary forgiving Eddy for being who he was, as if that was why he couldn't help but screw up, but also why she loved him anyway. He slurped his coffee for time to think. What he thought was, too late now. Then he thought, my God how I love that woman. Then Eddy thought how he'd like to kiss her, and their daughter Cindy was still napping and now was a perfect time for such a thing. He lifted his feet from the floor, letting the front legs of the chair fall.

Sometimes love feels like a luxury, like richness. When that happens the best you can do is just stretch out in it, the same way you might stretch out in silk underwear, or smack your lips together under the taste of just-right lobster. After loving, Eddy and Mary stretched out inside that richness and reveled in it, and drifted off into napping until Cindy woke them up with kisses and giggles.

Mary slipped on sweats and a tee-shirt, and then herded Cindy downstairs so Eddy could get dressed. Eddy stood to pull his pants on, but then stopped. He felt the wetness of a tear on his cheek. He thought hard on it. He dropped to his knees. "God," he said, "even if you hadn't talked me out of cutting that tree, I just wanted to make a few seconds for being grateful. I am, you know." He waited just for a second in case God thought to answer, but none came and Eddy didn't really expect it anyway. What would God have said? You're welcome? It didn't seem dignified enough for omnipotence.

Eddy Licklighter was, just then, the happiest man on the face of this earth. He loved Mary with a fierce softness. Thinking of her made his insides ache the same way they had when he was a teen, but without all the worry about: am I good enough and like that. He'd been right there watching Cindy come out of her mother. Other men he knew from working said how watching that was disgusting and made them not interested in sex. Eddy was just the opposite. Watching Cindy be born added significance to sex. Made sex better by ten times ten. Eddy looked into the mirror over the bureau and smiled at himself the way people smile at children they love. Then he laughed at his own foolishness and skipped downstairs to help with supper.

Eddy lay on Cindy's undersized bed, flat on his back stretched out in that love luxury. For a story, he told all about the tree and how he knew God wanted him not to cut it. Cindy rested her head on his chest curled up under his arm. Warmth pulsed out of her, the way it does a bird or mouse whose heart beats about a thousand times a minute.

"I'd like to see that tree," Cindy said.

"I'll show it to you." said Eddy. He was sure by now that other people wouldn't even notice the tree, or if they did notice, not cut it. God had a plan for that tree, and Eddy had a plan for it too, which was to show it to Cindy first thing in the morning. Until he found another job they probably couldn't afford the daycare anyway. He'd just keep her with him until then. That thought pleased Eddy a great deal. He kissed her a hundred goodnights, tucked the covers around her and tiptoed out in an exaggerated, silly way. She was wide-awake and the tiptoeing made her laugh. That was why he did it.

Months later, when Eddy would piece it all together and try to figure out what happened and when, this is how he figured it must have went.

Mary fell asleep reading like she always did, but this time she forgot she had a lit cigarette in her fingers. The cigarette rolled out and fell through the grate over the heating duct. It smoldered for awhile in the lint and dust, then when the heat came on, blowing air through the system, it caught fire. Fire zipped through the lint faster than dry grass on a windy day. The ducts superheated between the hundred year old plaster and lathe walls. Lathes that old and dry only need an excuse to catch fire.

An hour later the upstairs floor could have sizzled meat. Mary and Cindy were already dead from asphyxiation. Eddy was asleep on the downstairs couch, some fat psychic on the TV.

The cast iron claw foot tub was full of water--one of Cindy's bath toys caught in the drain after her bath. When the bathroom floor weakened enough, the tub came crashing through, caught itself by its pipes and drenched Eddy, who shot to his feet and screamed, "Mary!"

He looked over his shoulder at the stairs, but all he could see was red. The house roared. He twisted around, but by that time flame was everywhere, over everything, surrounding him in a circle of wetness drying fast. The tub, hanging on its pipes, let go adding crash to roar in a wall of superheated sound. The water pipes, bent from the tub and free from the valves squirted water in a straight path from where Eddy stood directly to the front door, which had already fallen loose dangling on one hinge. He followed the path, and kicked the door out of his way and stumbled outside. Eddy fell on his face and breathed earth.

Minutes later, the fire department blared onto the street, having responded to a neighbor's nine-one-one call. The EMTs slapped an oxygen mask on Eddy's face and had him lay back. "Breathe," they told him in unison like it was rehearsed, "breathe deep."

They had four hoses going. They sprayed water into the house through the windows. Bright yellow slickers glowed eerie in the firelight. Eddy watched it all but didn't see any of it. His head was a wall of confused. The whole world was reduced to a chaos of color and undefinable sound. Then the fire Chief stalked over and asked a question. The question slapped everything into sharp painful focus.

The Chief said, "Is anyone in the house?"

Hearing the question changed everything. Eddy tore off the mask and bolted, leaning forward arms pumping ragged breath, charging toward the burning front door. The EMTs and fire Chief and a cop standing close all charged after, but they weren't gonna catch him. Eddy didn't even know they were trying.

Ted Freeman was at the front manning the hose. He dropped his hose and grabbed at the bootless blur that was Eddy. Eddy drew back his fist and punched Ted right through the Plexiglas faceplate of Ted's air mask. The mask cracked, and the fist struck nose. It drove Ted backward into the dirt. Eddy stepped toward his house.

He was going in and nothing could stop him. Nothing but God who chose that moment to allow the front door frame to collapse. Eddy stood close enough that the hair on his arms and head, the three days of beard all shriveled and burned and he didn't move. He stood stock-still. Then he looked straight at the sky, straight into the face of God, and said, "You dirty Fucker."

Ted manned his hose. Rather than try and move Eddy, he just tried to keep the flames from eating him. He knocked back the fire, and left Eddy be. The fire department, on orders from a crying fire Chief, changed tactics and concentrated on containing the fire to Eddy's house, which they let burn to the ground. Eddy stood three feet away until the house was so much ash, and the sun came up bright and glorious behind him.

A few people snuck up behind Eddy and touched his shoulder all gentle, but didn't dare say anything. They didn't know what to say. The police Chief, Bruce Telyawhig stood behind Eddy for a good half-hour before he hung his head and walked back to his car to wait.

Eddy was conscious of the sun warming his back, and how it felt nice after the long night. He realized that this might be God's first pathetic attempt to make up. Eddy would have none of it. He turned and hopped in his truck and drove away. He drove straight to the woods.

On his way to the tree, roots and rocks cut the socks off his feet, but Eddy didn't notice. He carried his chainsaw straight to that pine. When he got there all he saw was a stump, big as a dinner table, treeless stump representing again how God was the dirtiest dirty fucker in the universe. Eddy revved up his saw. Into the stump, in block letters across the top he carved, "GOD IS A DIRTY FUCKER." Then he lay down and slept.

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