Shotguns And Missouri

We loaded the car with essentials - CDs, charts, alcohol, condoms, handgun — and headed south on the great concrete anaconda. This was the summer of 2003, with my girlfriend Amanda beside me and a score to settle. I was going to drive up the horizon and punch the sun in the face for waking me up so damn early. I expected that, at some point, we would cross into Arkansas.
We took a detour through Springfield, Missouri.

Springfield has the Bass Pro Shops world headquarters, with tens of thousands of square feet of interesting and fun ways to kill nature. Fuck vegetarians. We went to the hunting department and groped rifles, ran our fingers over loaded ammo, then Amanda asked, "So what kind of shotgun is good for me?" I told her. She whipped out the Masterchargecard and bought one, right then and there, a 20 gauge pump and a box of yellow cartridges. The trip was getting interesting.

We hit Branson and drove the gauntlet of billboards for vaudeville shows, a forest in the forest, hocking everything from Yakov Smirnoff's standup routine to the Haygoods' music revue. My car topped out at 94 when the governor tripped and cut the fuel injection to the engine, and the signs still weren't passing by fast enough. Rocketing past Branson, catching air on the Ozark hills, 94 was too slow - we still caught the stench of dentures from tour buses loaded with the elderly crowding the Vegas of Missouri.

Somewhere into Arkansas we stopped at a roadside produce stand. They were selling strawberries and I had to piss. The girl behind the counter charged me four dollars for two pounds of berries and I asked her where we could shoot. Amanda's shotgun called from the car, she called from behind the strawberry stand, and we couldn't take it anymore. You have to play with new toys. So the girl told me "Shit, yo'n shoot an'where down that road, jes don' shoot ma dogs nor an'one's house or they's gonna shoot you." Her grammar turned the strawberries sour. "Ah shoot thar all da time," she continued. She had about as many teeth as a football, with a similar shaped forehead, so I couldn't resist.

"That's sexy, where'd you learn to shoot?" I asked. Amanda heard me and started laughing.

"Ma daddy taught me, he's a bodyguard in da Mexican biker gang 'round here."

I choked on a berry, stared at her blonde hair and blue eyes, her backwoods skin and WWF t-shirt.

"You're white," was all I could manage.

"I know! There ain't a lot uh Mexicans up here, see'n how we don't get on with 'em so much, so it's an all white Mexican biker gang."

Her father is a bodyguard in an all white Mexican biker gang in Arkansas. We're about to fire a shotgun randomly into a hillside along a road somewhere north of Little Rock.

And this didn't strike her as odd in the least.