He is forgotten now but not gone. We will see him soon enough. Our tribe is now smaller by one. Our circle is one link shorter. And there is one more name on the honor roll of pure warriors who saw the great light and leapt for it.
The Shootist: A Short Tale of Extreme Precision and No Fear
September 18, 1997
William had a fine taste for handguns, and later in life he became very good with them. I remember shooting with him one afternoon at his range on the outskirts of Lawrence. He had five or six well-oiled old revolvers laid out on a wooden table, covered with a white linen cloth, and he used whichever one he was in the mood for at the moment. The S&W .45 was his favorite. “This is my finisher,” he said lovingly, and then he went into a crouch and put five out of six shots through the chest of a human-silhouette target about twenty-five yards away.
Hot damn, I thought, we are in the presence of a serious Shootist. Nicole had been filming it all with the Hi8, but I took the camera and told her to walk out about ten yards in front of us and put an apple on her head.
William smiled wanly and waved her off. “Never mind, my dear,” he said to her. “We’ll pass on that trick.” Then he picked up the .454 Casull Magnum I’d brought with me. “But I will try this one,” he said. “I like the looks of it.”
The .454 Casull is the most powerful handgun in the world. It is twice as strong as a .44 Magnum, with a huge scope and a recoil so brutal that I was reluctant to let an eighty-year-old man shoot it. This thing will snap back and crack your skull if you don’t hold it properly. But William persisted.
The first shot lifted him two or three inches off the ground, but the bullet hit the throat of the target, two inches high. “Good shot,” I said. “Try a little lower and a click to the right.” He nodded and braced again.
His next shot punctured the stomach and left nasty red welts on his palms. Nicole shuddered visibly behind the camera, but I told her we’d only been kidding about the apple. Then William emptied the cylinder, hitting once in the groin and twice just under the heart. I reached out to shake his hand as he limped back to the table, but he jerked it away and asked for some ice for his palms. “Well,” he said, “this is a very nasty piece of machinery. I like it.”
I put the huge silver brute in its case and gave it to him. “It’s yours,” I said. “You deserve it.”
Which was true. William was a Shootist. He shot like he wrote—with extreme precision and no fear. He would have fired an M-60 from the hip that day if I’d brought one with me. He would shoot anything, and he feared nothing.
Memo from the National Affairs Desk: More Trouble in Mr. Bill’s Neighborhood
March 19, 1998
The devil made me do it the first time.
The second time I done it on my own.
—Waylon Jennings
That is how it goes with politicians. The worst are relentless greedheads, and the best can’t control their own lusts. Spiro Agnew took brown bags full of cash, and Bill Clinton will suffer the little children to come unto him. Some people go to jail or get impeached for these things, while others are hailed as New Age Wizards and stylish rogues with unfortunate personal addictions. One man’s Innocent Child is another man’s Raging Slut—and, as always in combat, one loose cannon on your own deck is more dangerous than six enemy cannons.
Welcome to Mr. Bill’s Neighborhood, folks. It may be weird, but it’s ours. We like it here—except for a handful of worrywarts and Sex Nazis who will never be happy anyway. They are in the Minority now, and their atavistic thinking is about to take another serious whack. They hate perverts, but so what? They hated Joey Buttafuoco, too, and he became a major folk hero and a legendary Sodomite in spite of them.
Ah, but we are not talking about Joey Buttafuoco here. We are talking about William Jefferson Clinton from Hope, Arkansas, the forty-second president of the U.S.A.
Try a booming 73 percent approval rating in the polls, Bubba—up from 51 percent before the Sex Scandal. That’s not a bad bump on the charts for a lame-duck, degenerate president with a minority in both houses of Congress and a whole raft of sex-related lawsuits on his hands from women who may or may not be claiming that they were preyed upon by a brute worse than Hermann Goering or even Benjamin Franklin.
Seventy-three percent is big numbers on the campaign trail, Bubba. Very big. I would feel safe in betting heavily that there aren’t too many members of this Congress who came in with 73 percent of the vote. That is a Landslide. That is Victory.
Newt Gingrich had his victory, too. Remember the Republican Revolution of 1994? Now the only people who still have any respect for it are cops, preachers, and creeps who hang out on the fringes of Klan rallies and worship Charlton Heston. And in November, Gingrich is looking at a Total Loss of personal and political power as the year 2000 looms down on us. Things happen faster and faster in the nineties.