By Jim Hagarty
1986
It was like a scene from a cowboy movie, if cowboy movies had automobiles. I was sitting in my car outside an old general store – complete with wooden verandah – on the main street of a local village recently when a teenage boy, armed with a .22 calibre rifle, rounded a corner and started walking toward me. He strolled unconcerned up the street and villagers who met him seemed equally undisturbed by the firearm he was carrying.
For my part, I was beginning to get slightly nervous, wondering when this young gunslinger might decide to “waste” somebody. Then I began to think maybe it was me he’d come to gun down. I quickly counted up past sins but couldn’t find any severe enough to have won me an enemy so bitter as to want my life. And he didn’t fit the description of the revengeful Ms. Karma I keep hearing about.
The boy kept coming and my mind kept racing. I had left my bulletproof vest in my garage. Finally, he passed my car, crossed the street and disappeared around another corner.
Somebody ought to tell Billy the Kid he’ll set back the village’s tourism 20 years if he keeps that up. I’d tell him, but I’m busy. You tell him.