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Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, Off to the Gun Show We Go . . . Billy Wayne Takes in the Gun Show Lest there be some confusion with the living or the dead, I have changed the names of the people in this piece—instead of using Willard, the actual name on the fellow’s coveralls and tattoo, I have used Billy Wayne, and the girl’s name on the tattoo has been changed from Tammy to Lynelle; to be extra safe, I have changed the flower color on the tattoo from violet to orange. Publishers are very sensitive about the use of actual names and descriptions in pieces. Billy Wayne knows only that what he’s holding in his hand is a gun that was probably made long before he was born and is likely to rust away to nothing before he ever reads a book. He is in fact holding an Enfield Martini , made famous by British troops during the Anglo-Zulu War of the late nineteenth century, but it is not a fact that concerns him—he is disturbed that the chamber is too large for a .410 and too small for a twenty gauge, and every military cartridge he knows anything about slides way down into the bore. In short Billy Wayne cannot shoot his gun, and this troubles him no end. What if terrorists attacked his trailer? His name is sewn in white on a dark-blue oval patch on the back of his coveralls, which are a dark-striped lighter blue with old and new grease smudges on them, which means, I ’spect, that he does not work in upper management. I will assume that his name is on his back so that others will know what to call him, or so that he can tell his coveralls from someone else’s, should he for some reason leave them hanging somewhere. For selfidenti fication he needs merely to glance at the tattoo on his wrist, where his name is emblazoned on a blue ribbon that threads through the fangs of a large-mouth snake wreathed in vines with orange flowers dotting them. A smaller ribbon, pink, with Lynelle on it, dangles from the snake’s lower jaw. The Gun Show 129 I have spent enough time in the halls of academe that I should be able to decipher the symbolism, but Billy Wayne would have to be still awhile for me to do it, and it takes a special need to ask someone with a gun—especially someone who looks like him—to hold still while you study his arm. I want to tell him about the rifle, but the tall man dressed in khaki he’s talking to, before whom a table ripples with lever-action Winchesters on blue velvet, is doing it for me, patiently explaining that the Martini will not accommodate any cartridge that Billy Wayne has ever seen and that if by chance one did lodge in the chamber within striking distance of the firing pin, to pull the trigger on it would probably be supreme folly. Understanding man that he is, he does not phrase it this way to Billy Wayne. He puffs up his cheeks, holds his hands to them, then expels the air with an explosive sound, carrying his hands out as wide as he can fling them, suggesting that his fingers might be disconnected pieces of Billy Wayne’s face—nose, ears, eyes, lips, etc. Billy Wayne nods unh-hunh and moves on down the line, where eventually I lose sight of him. If the Martini did not look like it had been used to drive steel fence posts in bad weather, he might well sell it. My bet is that Billy Wayne will end up trading his tortured Martini and a hundred dollars for another exotic, say a Russian Nagant revolver with machining so crude you can sharpen an axe or saw through jail bars with the barrel and currently selling for sixty-five dollars through Gunlist and Shotgun News. He will take it home and try to fit .38 Specials into it, and if that won’t work—and it won’t, not by a long shot—he’ll hang it on a wall for show or use it to weight a trotline, which is what he should have done with the Martini . But that’s Billy Wayne’s problem, not mine. Then too, I could be wrong about the outcome. Anything can happen here. Billy...

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