Gun Guys (30 page)

“I have a table in the truck; it’ll tell you where you’ll be.”

“I got ’er loaded to a minute of angle at one hundred.”

“You guys,” I interrupted, “are more about math than anything else!”

“It’s Zen, too,” said the older of the two men, who had an intelligent eastern European face and an accent from somewhere north. “Shooting is a martial art, and it takes the same qualities that archery or tae kwon do or karate take: fitness, breath control, concentration, discipline. You have to connect yourself with your target; you have to breathe your shot there.”

“Do you hunt?”

“Used to. Gave it up.”

“Do you carry a gun?”

“Lord, no. You’re missing the point. This whole thing you’re seeing here has nothing to do with any of that. Imagine while you’re here that you’re at, I don’t know, a kung fu tournament or a yoga retreat. It’s the same thing—mastery of the mind, mastery of the breath, mastery of your concentration onto one distant point.” Juju.

I found Marcey and Jeremy sitting in a big, laughing circle in the hotel’s lobby, watching NASCAR on a huge flat-panel and shouting each other down about gun handling in the movies. Steven Segal was pretty good, one guy said, and another countered that Segal had lousy muzzle control and was always letting his muzzle sweep the girl. Bruce Willis, everybody agreed, had a creepy tendency to bring his gun up close to his face, and, in
Last Man Standing
, an irritating way of ejecting dozens of magazines onto the floor. “If they were mags like mine,” a chubby young bald guy said, “that’s about eight thousand dollars’ worth.” Everybody laughed and clinked beer cans; a good pistol magazine could cost eighty dollars. Jeremy ventured in his diffident way that he thought Bruce Willis was pretty good, but Marcey shouted over him, “Don’t listen to him! When we go rent a movie, you know what he wants?
Chick flicks
, like
The Notebook
and … what?
Princess Bride
!” Everybody laughed, and Jeremy held up his hands in surrender and chuckled, “That’s true, that’s true.”

“I’ll tell you what movie got it right,” Marcey said. “
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. You could just tell they had someone on the set who
knew
what he was doin’!”

A young man put down his can of Busch beer and raised both arms over his head in a victory salute. “I shot three-gun all day!” he yelled to nobody in particular, “and now I’m drinking beer and watching NASCAR without my wife yelling, ‘Get your ass up here and help me put the kids to bed!’ Shoot me now. It won’t ever get any better!” As though on cue, his cell phone rang, and he jumped up and walked out of the room, mumbling, “Yeah, yeah, honey, I’m having a good time.” He disappeared through the front door, the rest of the group razzing his back.

I had to make miles in the morning, so I excused myself. Marcey and Jeremy walked me across the parking lot to my distant wing of the resort.

“I can’t decide,” I told them, “if this is a really cool, harmless sport or if you’re all pretty weird.”

“I can see that,” Jeremy said judiciously. “Maybe it’s a little of both.”

“I went to a Pampered Chef party this one time, and all the ladies talked about what they liked to do,” Marcey said. “This one talked about her dogs. That one talked about flower arranging. Everybody was in their Sunday best; very girly. When I said, ‘I travel around the country and shoot competitively,’ you’d have thought I said we were Satan worshippers.” Jeremy laughed; he loved that story.

“But I don’t go into this with a killing mentality,” Marcey said again.
“I go into it as therapy. After a week’s worth of bullshit, shooting is better than the most expensive psychiatrist there is.”

“And how is it different from fencing?” Jeremy said. “I mean, what’s fencing if not sword fighting—as you say, ‘practicing to kill people’?”

“Or javelin,” Marcey said. “Or archery. Nobody thinks those guys are weird.”

True that. Maybe the difference was that fencing, javelin, and archery recalled outdated battlefields—though why that should matter wasn’t clear, given the millennia of slaughter that preceded the advent of firearms. Maybe the difference was, as Larry Zanoff had said, that wielding a sword, spear, or arrow required more physical strength than pointing a gun and pressing its trigger, and that overweight pseudo-warriors didn’t lift the soul like beautifully sculpted pseudo-warriors. Maybe the difference was in the aesthetic of the tool: Guns were noisy, while swords, spears, and arrows were silent. Whatever it was, while I’d enjoyed watching the gunners at Rockcastle test a matrix of skills—jogging through the woods with rifles, semi-automatic pistols, and pump-action shotguns, joyfully blasting at man-shaped silhouettes—I had a feeling the match would have sent a lot of people reaching for their smelling salts.

Being comfortable enough with guns to play with them put Marcey and Jeremy on one side of the great gun divide—a high, treacherous frontier that few ever crossed in either direction. Either you liked guns or you didn’t, as Greg Hepp had said, and no amount of jawing about hand-eye coordination was going to change that. I was glad that America was big and diverse enough to make room for something like three-gun. It was noisy; it imitated violence; you might reject it on a hundred different aesthetic levels. But it was harmless, and I hoped nobody would mess with it by, say, mounting another stupid campaign to ban the AR-15. I mentioned to Marcey and Jeremy as we threaded among the parked cars and trucks that this was the first place I’d been in rural America where I hadn’t seen a single gun-rights bumper sticker.

“We’re not all eat up in the head about gun rights,” Jeremy said. “We just like to shoot.”

Maybe. Or maybe three-gunners were simply less angry in general. Anybody who could afford such guns, ammo, and travel had one fewer reason to be.

M
argaret was flying to Cincinnati to join me on the road for a few weeks. I was in a hurry to get to a campground and do a load of laundry before her plane landed. But I wasn’t going to pass a cozy little farmhouse outside of Overton, Kentucky, that bore the sign
GENERAL STORE, RESTAURANT, GUN SHOP
.

Inside, it smelled of cinnamon candy and homemade rag dolls. The shelves were crowded with fudge, taffy, packaged summer sausage, smoked cheese, postcards, wooden toys, and doilies. I could picture a truck from Amalgamated General Store Supply LLC pulling up to off-load the exact same array of goods it had delivered to tourist-destination general stores from Maine to San Diego. I asked the man for some vanilla ice cream, and with a hearty cry of “Coming right up!” he began shoveling scoops into a quart-size Styrofoam container. “Uh, where are the guns?” I asked. He looked up, sweating and panting as he packed the container tight. “Downstairs. Feel free to have a look.” He handed me the container; it must have weighed three pounds. “That’ll be two dollars,” he said.

The cellar looked as though it had been dug to hide shoats from the Yankees. The staircase was no wider than my shoulders, very steep, listing precariously to the left, and low; I bumped my bald head painfully on the way down. Rubbing my bruised pate, I found myself in a room of white-painted
brick about twelve feet square and barely tall enough for me to stand up in. A single naked lightbulb dangled blazingly at eye level.

But what nice guns stood lining the four walls! Most of them were midcentury long-barreled pump-action shotguns—Winchesters and Marlins. The rest were either lever-action carbines or bolt-action hunting rifles that looked to have been passed down since Teddy Roosevelt’s day. Their metal parts had acquired a comfortable brown patina that almost matched the walnut of the stocks. Not an AR-15 in the mix.

In the corner stood a comically tall rifle that I recognized immediately as a Mosin-Nagant—the Russian army rifle from the time of the czars through what the Russians called the Great Patriotic War. It was a good eight inches longer than any other rifle in the room, and this one had its regulation eighteen-inch bayonet, which made it look like a pike. I’m more than six feet tall, and when I set the rifle’s butt plate on the floor, the tip of the bayonet reached my ear. I held it under the lightbulb: A sickle and hammer was etched into the top of the receiver, along with “1943,” which was two years after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. I tried to imagine how hurriedly this one had been thrown together at the Izhevsk Machine Building Plant, out there in the Udmurt Republic at the foot of the Urals, far from the reach of the Wehrmacht. It was sticky with brown grease, which meant it had never been issued. Price: $130.

I worked the rough-metal bolt and imagined a seventeen-year-old soldier shivering at Dukla Pass with nothing but this clumsy piece of furniture between his beating heart and the Nazis. Old guns worked on my imagination like a time machine.

“I’ll take it,” I told the white-haired man as I approached his ice cream counter with the Mosin-Nagant.

“A hundred and twenty-five out the door,” he beamed, putting out a hand and introducing himself as Tom. “And I’ve got the sling, cartridge belt, and oiler for it, too. All brand-new and unissued. I’ve even got thirty rounds of ammo I’ll give you.”

He didn’t have to run the computerized background check. Because I had a concealed-carry permit that Kentucky recognized, the state assumed I had been background-checked. “Yes, indeed,” Tom said, “if you’re ever stopped by the police, hand them your permit with your license.”

“I don’t know. Telling a cop I carry a gun? Seems like a lot could go wrong.”

“He may know it anyway; it may come up on his computer when he
runs your plate. He’ll probably ask if you’re carrying, and if you are, just tell him yes and keep your hands on the wheel. But he won’t be afraid of you. You’ve been checked out. In fact, it will probably make him
more
relaxed.” It had never occurred to me that a concealed-carry license could serve as a kind of good-citizen ID.

I filled out the 4473, handed him my credit card, and stepped out the door with my gigantic new rifle. I was a little worried about whether it would annoy Margaret to have to shoehorn into the overstuffed car a greasy firearm the size of an oar. But it wouldn’t have been a proper gun trip if I didn’t buy a gun.

As Margaret stepped into baggage claim, I realized how much I’d been missing her. We’d done lots of journalistic traveling together before Rosa was born, and now that Rosa was studying Arabic in Cairo for the summer, we were looking forward to this new window of roaming togetherness. As we walked to the car with our arms around each other’s waists, her hand fell on the holstered Colt hidden under my shirt.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she said. “Have you been wearing that thing?”

“Everyplace. I’m getting into the gun-carrier head. I’m trying to see if I get used to it.”

“Well, don’t get
too
used to it.”

Margaret was going to be good to have along, in more ways than one.

We were in Cincinnati to experience a gun tradition entirely divorced from man-killing but central to cultural identity—that of the German immigrants who’d created the modern city of Cincinnati. From what we’d read, Schützenfest—which means “shooting party”—was a big deal: three days of wursts, beer, oompah bands, and stylized target shooting that harked back 150 years or more. Nobody in the Winton Woods Campground, two miles from the site of Schützenfest, had heard of it.

Winton Woods was an enormous tract of forest smack in the middle of Cincinnati, with bike trails and a grassy car-camping complex alongside a murky-green but lovely lake. It was car camping at its most American and, in many ways, its best—with clean shower blocks, a food store, laundry, and WiFi. Margaret set up the tent on soft lawn and inflated the air mattress while I cooked our standard road dinner: rice, cabbage, carrots, and onions boiled in a pot on the little camp stove, seasoned at table with a mixture of crunchy peanut butter and Sriracha hot sauce. The air was as
thick and hot as dog’s breath, the mosquitoes plentiful. As night began to fall, an old pickup truck with Michigan plates pulled into the space beside us, and out climbed a shirtless man who looked hollowed out by either overwork or crystal meth, a gelatinous woman in pink spandex shorts, and a pale, sunken-eyed boy of about four. They set up a McMansion of a tent—room enough for a dozen to sleep and tall enough to stand in. The mom and boy went off to look at the lake while the man took a pack of cigarettes from the waistband of his oily gym shorts, lit up, and exhaled luxuriously. I hadn’t heard them say a word the entire time.

“Here for Schützenfest?” I called to him.

“Nope. Monster Truck.”

His name was Vic. He’d driven seven hours from central Michigan to watch comically jacked-up pickup trucks with tractor-size tires crush lesser vehicles. Tickets were fifty dollars apiece. When I asked Vic if he had a gun, he patted the pockets of his shorts. “Not on me, no,” he said, as though I’d asked him for a cigarette lighter or a pen. “Got one in the truck.” He gestured with his body that way, as if to say,
If you need one, I can fetch it
.