Open Carry in the Time of the Pandemic

“Channeling Uncle Bill, who died over a decade ago, I invite his ghost to weigh in. But rather than answering, he walks me downstairs in his old Brooklyn house, where we stand together in his paneled den—the perfect skin we’d heard about, now on the floor.”

Shopping at my neighborhood Walmart—the enormous supercenter near my home in Fayetteville, North Carolina—I enter, wearing my KN95 mask, wheeling my cart into the produce area. I pick up a package of tofu, shop for broccoli crowns, oranges, arugula, and take off to locate rice, coffee, milk, and dried white northern beans, which, if I remember correctly, is in the international food aisle.

Although I sometimes shop here, I’m not sure where everything is located, and I confess that this cavernous Walmart isn’t my favorite place. But it’s cheap and convenient, and here I am.

On another aisle, I bend to retrieve a bag of brown rice from a bottom shelf as a shadow looms above me, and I look up to find a short stocky man with a buzz cut. He stretches his arm up to lift a box of quick rice from an upper shelf, and I notice that his thick belt holds a black holster with a large handgun in it.

Rising, I assess. He seems benign. I notice his tattoos—a faded flower on his forearm and words that I can’t read on his neck. But as I glance again at his gun, my mind flashes to the recent mass killings at the Indianapolis Fedex facility, the Colorado grocery store, and Atlanta spa, then back to the San Antonio Walmart, where a gunman opened fire. And further back to Stoneman Douglas High School, Newtown, Connecticut, Charleston, Tree of Life Synagogue—the list goes on….