Chapter 4: The Gun Show

Hialeah Park is a racetrack with a pink-and-white grandstand, a six-acre lot, and flamingos living on the infield.

It was built in 1925, and on the fourth Saturday of October the lot belongs to the Sunshine Gun and Knife Show.

I came in through the service gate just before noon with forty dozen pastelitos in the back of the van.

The slabback had gotten there three minutes ahead of me.

The show had four thousand buyers, three hundred tables and one rule that it applied to everyone.

Every gun for sale had a plastic zip tie through its action, so nobody could fire it in the aisle.

I heard the slabback before I saw it.

The sound was four thousand zip ties being cut.

Then the slabback came across the lot in a straight line, and it did not slow down for a single table.

It was twenty feet from nose to tail.

Gray plates overlapped down its back like shingles, and its head sat low and square.

It walked through a table of holsters and stepped on a case of ammunition, and the case burst.

Four thousand people opened fire at once.

I parked the van behind a food truck and got out.

More rounds were leaving more barrels in that lot than I had ever pictured in one place.

They hit the plates and sparked, and they flattened and fell on the asphalt.

A few went straight up.

A few went somewhere else.

I thought the word Appraise, and I held onto it, because I needed the card more than I needed to hide.

[Slabback. Class II. Health 400 of 400.]

[Condition: Following noise. Seam: left forward hinge.]

It had been following noise since Okeechobee, and the show was the loudest place within ten miles.

The card said the thing was walking at the biggest noise it could find, and the biggest noise was us.

I did what a person does who has to explain to himself why four thousand people are wrong.

I counted.

After two minutes the plates had a few scratches, and the slabback had not slowed.

[Unsigned rounds today, Florida: 5,260,331.]

The number in my corner kept up with the noise, and nobody else could see it.

A man next to me sold a rifle out of his hands in the middle of it.

The vendors had started charging triple for ammunition while the wave was still going.

By noon a box of 5.56 was two hundred dollars and a handshake, and the price board had been rewritten four times.

The buyer paid and fired the box into the plates, and the vendor counted the cash with one eye on the monster.

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