Dixieland

The Two-Four consisted of eight acres, two by width, four by depth, just outside the north most suburb on 87. When it was summer at the Two-Four, it was like a Kiss song—hot, hot, hotter than hell; in the winter, it was just hot. Carter had four kids, two girls, grown and off at A & M, and two boys at home. You had to look hard to realize that the boys weren’t his—a product of his second wife’s first marriage, step-kids. Not to Carter. To Carter, they were his boys. End of story. And Cheryl loved him for that; “Cher,” the lovely and talented, as he called her on his radio show every weekday morning during rush hour (such as it was) in Sendera.  The day she saw his body, propped up against a tree trunk on the back one acre, as if he were a migrant worker taking a break against the merciless South Texas sun, was, however, not a weekday morning. That day in fact was a Sunday and the boys, Randy and Shooter, were getting ready to go to the Baptist church down the street. On pleasant days, they could probably walk to the church from the back one. Or at least throw a rock at it. But there were no pleasant days in Sendera. Surely not after today. Not after this particular Sunday in August.

Shooter, the younger one, was sullen and belligerent, just like his biological father. “Could really use your help, Carter,” Cheryl muttered under her breath, looking at the younger kid, half-dressed, laid out on their bed, half on, half off, while Randy, the good one, was fully dressed, ready for the preacher, eating his cereal in the living room, watching CNN. “The fuck are you,” she asked quietly of her absent husband.

She went to the door of her bedroom, the bad kid behind her, his legs dangling off the side of the bed, leaned out into the hallway and yelled, “Raaanndeee!”

Randy repeated “yes ma’am” from the living room and all the way down the hall, until he was outside his parents’ bedroom, looking up at his mother’s face. Cheryl was sure that her husband was out by the pear tree, touching the fruit, seeing if it was ready to come down but—even though they had plenty of time before  the 11:00 a.m. service—she wanted her husband's company. His help, sure, but mainly she wanted his company, his voice—that baritone radio voice, the way he calmed her down before she even knew she was agitated. He had been out there for at least an hour. She asked her oldest son to scout around outside, find his dad. (“Mom was asking,” Randy would say and Carter, getting the hint, would wipe his brow with that blue hanky of his and head back into the house with the kid.)

Cheryl paid her dues.  Kicked out of her home when she was sixteen, beaten and bruised in her first marriage, ready for anything life had to throw at her. She could throw it right back. But she wasn’t ready for Randy’s face when he came back inside—alone—to his mother’s bedroom. He was quiet when he appeared in her doorway.

“Momma,” he said, standing in the doorway as she looked at Shooter, wondering what to do with him, the bad kid, lifeless as a squashed bug. She turned her attention to the brother standing in the doorway.

“Babe,” she asked, turning her body and looking over at her oldest son, “what’s wrong?”

“I think Daddy’s dead,” Randy said.

Cheryl went to the doorway and crouched down in front of her son, saying, “No, no, baby, he’s fine, he’s fine.”

The little problem, Randy’s discomfiture, momentarily overcame the bigger problem, the knot in her stomach, the bile rising in her throat, the knowledge of the death of her husband, the denial being the only reality she could process.

“He’s fine,” she said to Randy as Randy slowly shook his head “no.”

Shooter, the bad kid, coming out his sleep, legs hanging off the edge of the bed, got up on his elbows and asked, “Momma?”

She lurched forward, hugging and comforting Randy. Then she sat back on the grey-green carpet of her and her late husband’s bedroom and sobbed, knowing the dilemma—find him or keep hoping Randy is wrong—needed to end. Their lives flashed before her eyes. She stopped crying.

Standing, she said, an octave lower than usual,  “Shooter, stay put.”

He did not answer her, deep in his own processing, legs dangling off the edge of the bed, still up on his elbows, blinking.

Cheryl took Randy’s hand in hers and instructed him, “Show me,” gently pushing him between the shoulder blades.

The deepness of her voice and the hand on his back scared the “yes ma’am” out of him and he began walking down the hall, out the back door, toward the dead body under the pear tree, his mother in tow, hand in hand, her grip tightening with each step.

Outside, five steps away, Cheryl saw the ruddiness of Carter’s  face and said, “Oh, baby,” breaking the grip of Randy’s hand. Randy stopped walking and watched as his mother walked, crouched next to her husband, felt his face, his neck. She didn’t know how to check for a pulse and she didn’t need to. She knew every nuance of Carter Williams, every breath, every chuckle, every grimace, every sneeze, every snarl. Carter is dead.

Then she saw something that Randy, in his obedience, had failed to see. She gasped. She had been, sobbing in the bedroom, willing to accept a heart attack, heat stroke, an aneurysm. He was, after all, twelve years older than she was.

“Mom,” Shooter, approaching the scene, yelled at her.

“God damn it, Shooter! Go back inside,” Cheryl yelled back, the one and only time in her good Baptist life she would ever take the Lord’s name in vain. Randy ran away from her to usher his little brother inside to start to recover from his mother’s cursing. She glanced at the two boys traversing the acreage back to the house, Randy’s arm around Shooter’s shoulder, and then focused on the scene.

There were two holes in Carter’s white tee shirt, one in the middle of his left pectoral muscle and one just below his right breast. She pictured the killer adjusting his stance from left (tish) to right (tish) and then fleeing the scene like the goddamn coward that he was.

She stood and put her right foot on Carter’s left shoulder and shoved, grateful the kids were inside. Carter’s back was free from the tree. She walked around the back of the tree to get a better look.

This was no boating accident.

The back of Carter’s shirt had changed colors, crimson with his blood. The bullets must have exploded around her man’s heart. One, two, less than a second of work. She felt like throwing up but she had two more men to contend with. First, she would apologize to Shooter. Then she would call 911. She could scream and cry and throw up later. She had the rest of her life without Carter to do that.

She executed her plan and then found herself back outside, well after noon, talking to one of the dumbest law enforcement officers that she had ever met in her life, a real dingleberry. Sunglasses, Stetson, tobacco. Over-actor.

“He have any enemies,” the constable asked her after the paramedics had carted him off, strapping his body to the gurney for no apparent reason. The constable was looking past her, to the setting sun. He was probably wanting dinner. Or at least thinking about it, judging by his girth.

“Sheriff,” she said, even though he wasn’t the sheriff, “every morning he spouted his opinion to thousands of people here.  He was opinionated and if you disagreed, you were an idiot. People called him a racist, a bigot, a Nazi. If we didn’t pay airtime for his show and the owner of Voice 105 was not his brother, he never would have stayed on air. Outside of this family and a few vets, no one liked him. We never had company.”

Sergeant McGillis touched the brim of his Stetson, nodded,  and said, “Yes ma’am,” his eyes hidden behind his reflective sunglasses.

“A better question,” Cheryl continued, “would be, ‘Did he have any friends?’”

“Well,” Constable McGinnis said after a short silence, “that’s a fuck of a suspect list, ain’t it?”

Seeing the reaction on Mrs. Williams’ face, McGillis again touched the brim of his Stetson, spit out some brown spit behind him, bowed his head slightly and said, “I’m sorry, ma’am,” before walking to his cruiser, a stone’s throw from Sendera Baptist Church of Christ.

Within a week, the usual arrangements were made and then Cheryl, Shooter and Randy returned together to the empty house. The boys—both sullen now—were absentmindedly watching whatever was on the TV in the living room when Cheryl, on the bed in her and Carter’s room, only managing to take her high heels off before putting her head down on their pillow, tight black skirt around her waist, heard her phone go off. It was a number she didn’t recognize. She braced herself for “I’m soooo sorry, Cheryl. Are you OK? Is there anything I can do?”

“Hello,” she said, bringing the phone to her ear, barely audible to herself.

“Cheryl,” the voice said, “can I have the boys this weekend?”

(“Fuck yes you can!”) was her immediate thought but she had to orient herself first.

“Don,” she asked.

“Well I hope so, babe. Who the hell else is asking for our kids?”

Cheryl needed a weekend alone, to think, to grieve. To plan. This was a gift from God. Of course the boys can go with their father. Of course. I’m so grateful. That’s what she thought. That’s not what she said.

“You never want to see them,” she said, fully waking up now, adding, “don’t call me ‘babe.’”

She fully expected a “fuck you” followed by a dead dial tone, as usual.

“I’m sorry,” he started.

Oh, shit, Cheryl thought, this is worse, feeling her nascent tears. Fuck, please do not say you’re sorry about Carter. I just can’t.

“I shouldn’t have called you ‘babe,’” Don continued, “you’re a bitch. Can I get the kids tomorrow at 6 or not?”

There. There you are.

“Sure,” she said, hoping her relief didn’t show, “I’ll meet you at Snap’s.”

“Let me get them from your house, one time, why don’t you?”

She went silent. That would be even better, no make up, no bra, maybe even not even out of bed. She almost said “Don?” again.

“Cheryl,” Don said, just like he used to when she started acting crazy. Then, hearing no reply, he said, “Just send them out at six.”

She still did not say anything.

“I’ll see the boys then,” he said and ended the call.

Cheryl let her head fall back on the pillow, exhaled, and drifted off to sleep, dressed in black, head to foot.

That Saturday morning, kids gone with Sometimes Weekend Dad, she drifted outside, back to the scene of the crime—literally. She put her back against the pear tree, sitting on the ground of the Two-Four, forty-five degrees away from where she had found Carter, almost like she was sitting next to him. She closed her eyes, letting the heat burnish her chest, and re-saw the back of Carter’s  crimson shirt. She smiled then, remembering the first time she saw him at Haligan’s, walking up to him, saying, “Hello.”

She dug the toes of her bare feet into the unusually soft ground in front of her, under the barely-there shade of Carter’s pear tree, thinking about Constable McGillis’s  two theories. Remembering that evening, he is standing on her porch. She is in the doorway, listening patiently.  Here’s the summation: one, the scumbag murderer shot Carter, he fell and then the dirtbag trigger man dragged the body and propped it against the tree; two, the coward shot Carter Williams with a silencer (tish, tish) and then fled. Then Carter dragged himself to the tree and breathed his last. Cheryl Williams believed the second version.  Carter looking up at the fruit as he slowly bled out alone.

“Yes ma’am,” McGillis had drawled that day, the light color of his brown shirt losing the fight against the man’s dark growing sweat stains. Cheryl  hoped this was the last she would see of him.  Her conclusion (the second version) did not help the investigation. “Yes, ma’am.,” he had slowly repeated. The theories were about as useful as that fucking Stetson.

Cheryl smiled again, back at Haligan’s, accepting Carter’s offer to buy her a drink, absentmindedly burrowing her toes into the soft, warm Sendera dirt as she remembered. Her mind dwelt on that drunken first night with him—eyes almost closing—until (Tish! Tish!) she was brought back into now. She shuddered.

Now she saw herself with an inscribed locket in her hand, deciding at the last moment not to slip it into her husband’s casket, just off his right shoulder, as she had planned. Instead, she cupped it in her left hand for the rest of the service, leaving her right arm open to meet, greet, console and be consoled. Carter Williams WAS a good man but, Lord on High, if she heard that one more time. Carter said, “Babe, it’s only just one more thing. Move along.” At this, the sound of his voice from the grave, she laughed.

Cheryl looked down at her feet and gasped. Her feet had burrowed a hole in the ground in front of her.  She brought her heels in front of her and gasped again. Her big toenails, one on each side, were bleeding. She stretched her legs out in front of her and shoved her hands into the pockets of her lime green shorts.

In the left was a crucifix she always kept with her and in the right was the locket she had kept from the funeral. She took the locket out and threw it in the hole, smiling again, remembering the first weekend she spent alone with Carter. She grinned, got on her knees and used her hands to scoop the loose dirt together, covering the locket and filling the hole. Standing, she patted the dirt down with the soles of her bloody feet and started walking back to the house, all hers now, to snag a couple of band-aids, recalling the inscription on the black locket she had just buried.

“Cher, I love you. Literally forever,” it read. “C.W.”