A COUNTRY STORY ABOUT MASS SHOOTING

Al and Pete were a debating society, just the two of them.  No one else wanted to join them, partly because their arguments were so complicated and unsupported that it wasn’t possible to do anything but contribute emotion, and this was a part of the country that didn’t support emotion.  “Country” in this story means exactly that — this was a small town that only existed because of the grain elevator, which was now approaching obsolescence because a much bigger and more efficient one was just about completed at the county seat.

The cafe didn’t have a name because there was only one in this tiny town and everyone just called it “the cafe.”  Al and Pete didn’t lurk in a back booth, they sat by the front window because what they did besides argue was to people-watch.  They knew everyone in town, better than folks knew themselves, because Al was the insurance agent and Pete was, well, Pete.  He’d been there since the beginning of time.  Or at least some people argued he was sitting there when the cafe was built — they must have built it around him.

Gladys owned the joint — sort of.  She ran it anyway, and she kept the coffee mugs full.  No one knew who subsidized her, though there were plenty of rumors and about why they did it.  She liked the two men sitting in the front because it made the place look open.  No one trusted signs in this town.  Not always even signs of life.

This morning the topic was the shooting in Vegas, which Al felt he had privileged knowledge about because he went to college for a couple of years before he inherited the insurance business from his aunt, who was a raving liberal.  He was quoting his favorite book:  “Games People Play” by Eric Berne.  

“I’m tellin’ you, Pete, this was a game of Uproar.”

“Remind me.”

“You know.  It’s when you losing at a board game like chess or checkers and you just stand up and overturn the the table, creating so much uproar that the game is over without knowing who won.”

“So this guy Paddock was losing?  Who was he playing against?”

“The house.  In Vegas you’re always playing against the house.”

“The people he shot weren’t even indoors!”  Pete gave a wry little laugh at his lame joke.

“He wasn’t shooting people.  He was shooting down the stock value of that joint.  And I’ll bet that shows up already.  No one wants shares in a shooting gallery for sitting ducks.  Someone was pretty mad at the Mandalay Bay.”

Pete decided to change the subject.  “No one seems able to figure out how this shooter was so rich.  He’s left almost no trace.  His family claims his very big income came from high stakes gambling.  You believe that?”

Al was ready.  “The shooter was an assassin, a professional assassin.”

“Whaaaaat?”

“Sure, I’ve seen it on television lots of times.  Quiet guy, disappears often, unremarkable, moves a lot.  Never really settles anyplace.  Neighbors don’t know much about him.  He avoids attracting attention.”

“Assassins are from Westerns.”

“Well, yeah, but I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that this very minute somewhere in a sleazy bar there is a script writer who is pleased to have found himself an assassin who drinks too much and talks too much, some guy who can pilot his own plane and who has more income than he can explain.  Spring-loaded.”

“Don’t you think this woman he sent money to is a connection to some kind of terrorists, maybe something like ISIS or Antifa?”

“I don’t get “antifa” — AntiFacists — what is that?  Kids against wealth?”

“Yeah.  Some guy with a shooting range is claiming that Muslims and women are showing up to practice in preparation for a war of liberals against the rest of us.”

Out the window they watch a brand-new cherry-red crewcab Toyota pickup with four-wheel-drive go by.  “Did you get the license plate?” one asks the other, but they didn’t because it’s one of those homage plates for some group — maybe a university.  This is a state that codes license plates to counties, but not plates that are custom, extra money.  (Don’t pay too much attention to this.  It’s not a plot point.)

Returning to the subject, Pete says, “I haven’t seen any muslims, blacks, or beaners in this town and I’ve lived here a long time.”

“Yeah, but the idea of women armed and shooting scares me.  That’s our most dangerous and defiant radical group.”  They laugh, a little bitterly.  Gladys comes to refresh their coffee and brings a plate of bran muffins.  They gave up “Danish” some years ago.

Pete remarks, “When they run the ballistics on those forty guns they found, I’ll bet they solve a lot of mysterious shootings.”

“If he was a pilot, they might be in Canada or Mexico.  They didn’t say what kind of airplane he had, or how far it would reach, but it could get him to a rendezvous with an airport that has flights to Africa or South America.  We have no idea what happens there.”

“Anything.”  Al bites off half a muffin and the other half crumbles.  He brushes the crumbs together on the table, then scoots them off into his hand — looks around for a place to dump them, finally dumps them into the unused ashtray.  These men’s wives forbid them to smoke.

Pete shakes his head.  “I’m trying not to think of all the insurance claims I’ve paid out for gun deaths, mostly accidents or suicides.”

“Yeah, around here we prefer to commit murder by putting our hands on someone to get the satisfaction of strangling them.”  He laughs to show he meant this to be a joke.

“Seriously, Al, I wouldn’t want guns to be banned because they are a beautiful mechanism, works of art, some of them.  Remember when that border patrolman and the biology teacher spent one August making a replica historic Kentucky squirrel-rifle from scratch?  Even made a barbecue and a hair dryer into a forge to melt brass for the butt plate and trigger guard?”

“It was the deal they invented for rifling the barrel that impressed me.”

Pete shook his head in admiration.  “My daughter tells me all guns, not just the long ones, are phallic symbols.”

“Except a phallus fires new life, not death.”  

Pete looks at Al.  “Hell, that’s plumb poetic.”

Gladys is back with the coffee, but the two men are staring out the window at the street where kids are passing by on the way to school, laughing and skipping.