After a
big breakfast and a
disturbing conversation with Angelo, Joe had spent the body of the afternoon roaming around the bar, and after finding it, the lake, which was almost too beautiful and green for eyes accustomed to the desert to handle. He'd also seen some strange creatures in the distance, though, and once again he was pre-occupied with being disarmed.
He approaches the bar furtively and leans close before he speaks. "Bar... can I have a gun, please?"
When he was a kid they would go into Kansas City two or three times a year, and always in the big glass window of the mercantile was The Gun. Not a gun, The Gun. Easily twice the size of his mother's little pistol that he'd learned to shoot on, with a huge wooden stock to balance the long gleaming barrel. It was a patented revolver, and he'd known without ever touching it the tension he'd feel under the hammer and the trigger if he had it in his hand.
It was, basically, the same drive that would send kids of a hundred and thirty years later buying Nikes and Louisville Sluggers--the simple childlike faith that with the right tool skill would come not by hard discipline and practice, but descending from Heaven like a mantle of greatness.
The gun that appeared on the bar was a perfect replica of The Gun.
A perfect replica in
chocolate.