When I was about 17 or 18 years old, a friend and I were sitting in a booth in a crowded honky tonk. It was a fairly large joint with a dance floor covering the center of the room. Our booth sat near the middle of several booths lining a wall. From the bandstand, a country band happily played for a happy crowd. The dance floor was full.

From the bar, my friend and I had purchased a fifth of Old Charter whiskey and a set-up, a bucket of ice and soft drink mixers. We were about halfway down the bottle of booze and were enjoying dancing with girls in the booths near us and at tables on the other side of the dance floor. For some reason we both had sat out that particular dance.

The band abruptly stopped playing in mid song. When I turned my head to see why, I saw the crowd of dancing couples suddenly part down the middle and scatter in opposite directions. A woman was walking across the empty dance floor and in my direction. Her right arm was out in front of her, and her hand seemingly pointed toward the booth beside mine, in front of me. About the time I noticed a small black object in the pointing hand and began wondering what it was, it fired.              

I have never before or since witnessed such confusion as then erupted. As the woman kept walking toward the booth, the pistol fired again and again with a noise like exploding firecrackers. My friend dove under the tabletop between us and knocked it over as he emerged on my side. As he was doing that, I was diving over the bench in which I sat and into the booth behind me, a booth whose occupants were frantically diving into the booth behind them.

Each pop of the little pistol was accompanied by heinous screams and the crash of breaking whiskey bottles and the rumble of tables and chairs hitting the floor. As I exited the booth in which I then found myself and ran for my life, I looked back and saw her target, a man. He was under the tabletop of the booth in which he had sat with a woman, and he was jumping back and forth with incredible speed.

The little pistol then emptied, but the woman kept walking and kept squeezing the trigger. She stopped beside the man's booth and continued squeezing the trigger, the pistol's muzzle no more than five feet from the man. If silence can erupt, it then erupted. Two men grabbed her and took the pistol away from her.

The speedy man raised himself from the floor and stood in the ruins of his booth. I expected to see blood spurting from little holes all over his body. Nothing. Miraculously, no bullet impacted his flesh or anyone else's flesh, especially mine. Turns out he was her husband. He took her arm in his hand, and they walked outside and did not come back inside. And that is the end of the tale.