It is said, and it is probably said by those with more experience in the matter of relevant statistics than I, that guns don’t kill people. Whether or not that statement is true, angry wives with guns might be another matter entirely, particularly if they bothered to aim before they fired.
It wasn’t much of a gun. It was a Remington .22 with a 4X scope that Bernerd’s daddy gave him on the Christmas before his thirteenth birthday. Twenty years later, Berned still remembered the moment he saw it, wrapped in red paper and propped against the wall by the scrub cedar Christmas tree, and he realized that he had actually gotten a real rifle. Everything about it was shiny, from the soft brown wood stock and the blue-black barrel to the glass lenses of the scope. Even the red ring around the safety, down there by the shiny trigger, was shiny. Bernerd shook a little, and his arms felt weak, as he held his Christmas present. He pressed the cold stock to his cheek and looked through the scope. He blinked and drew back from the details that rushed at him through the lens, and then felt himself drawn back through the lens, hungry for the newly-revealed ridges in the particle-board wall covering and the edges of the shadows on the fabric of the lounge chair next to the still-dark tree. At that moment he thought he understood how Lee Harvey Oswald had felt a little more than a month earlier. When he was giving me his statement about the incident, Bernerd volunteered that it had felt right, somehow, when he saw the barrel of that same gun pointed toward him, saw the flash of the fluorescent tube that hung over the kitchen sink reflected in the front lens of the scope. Right, not only because it was “proper retribution” for his guilt, but because he felt like he was part of a circle that was closing.
My name is Earl Bomback, and I’m the sheriff of Keane County, South Carolina. We’re a little county just above North Myrtle Beach, where rednecks with a weekend’s worth of money come to ride the roller coasters with drunk southern college kids. I’ve been the sheriff for twenty-four years. I ran the last two times unopposed, so I guess folks think I’m doing something right, or at least that I’m less wrong than the fellows that run against me. Used to be that crazy Crum. He’d come out of his hole once every four years with his two dozen hand-painted signs reading “Crum for Sheriff,” stick them by people’s mailboxes and at intersections, and then go back in his hole. Wrote one letter to the paper, a rant about how corrupt government gets in the way of the little man, and how a vote for him was a vote for God and Freedom and Democracy, but he never gave any interviews or showed up at debates. Did all his talking leaning over the bed of his Dodge pickup truck. And he’d get a few votes. Somebody’s always willing to vote for God.
Particularly in our county, where most of us live as far as we can afford to get from things, pushed back against the creeks that feel their way in from the Atlantic. Two-lane blacktop, and dirt roads that run till they end in scrub pine and piles of trash and the occasional washing machine, or meander back toward those creeks, like capillaries that come almost close enough to touch, and let things pass between them to keep a body alive. And that’s mostly where we live, in that little space between the dirt roads and the creeks. Live oak and Spanish moss for the romance of it, and scrub pines, trailer parks, and red clay that you can’t turn into a decent yard, just to keep us honest.
And that’s where Bernerd and Diane live, back in a group of trailers grown up over twenty years into a kind of community just a little walk from Cherry Creek, where you can drop your skiff and push off quietly into a warm afternoon for a little fishing and a little dreaming. Nobody’s ever seen a cherry tree down that close to the brackish water, so they say the name means something else. There are still high school boys who drive through with their girlfriends on Friday or Saturday nights, looking for a place to park.
Most of the trailers that they find scattered into those old parking spots were related in some way, at least back at the beginning. Diane’s daddy and his brother put the first ones back there in the sixties, when it was getting too expensive to live closer to the beach and why would you want to, anyway, because there wasn’t anything to do there any more for the working man, no jobs you’d want to take, and you wouldn’t want to raise your children around those people, so they drove up to Dillon a couple of times and found a deal on a couple of used trailers. “Single wides!” the salesman exclaimed, smiling and lifting his head up. “You won’t have no trouble getting them back into your lots,” and took their wives out riding till they found some property they could put a down payment on. They got somebody’s cousin’s friend with a backhoe and gave him a case of Budweiser to come out one Sunday afternoon and push the brush and brambles, shredded retreads, condoms and empties and somebody’s old couch with its floral print faded till it was beige, back into the creek so they’d have a place to park the trailers. It took them a few weeks extra’s worth of weekend odd jobs to get the hundred and fifty dollars together, plus gas and lunch, for a man from Jeb’s New and Used Mobile Homes to haul them down.
Bernerd believes in signs. He believes in things like his horoscope, although he can’t say why, and more than that, he believes in coincidences. Once, he saw three crows together in a tree and felt a little tingle in his stomach. He spent the rest of the day on the lookout for another event that would confirm the message he had created from his dim recollection of some old poem he sat through on one February morning in Miss Dunbar’s twelfth grade English class. The connections he makes are natural messages straight from the universe to him and to him alone. He is always watchful for them, and even when they don’t pan out he doesn’t question their authenticity or his willingness to follow them. So when a black-haired girl with a tight little body and a swagger drew Bernerd’s attention in the convenience store, he didn’t ask questions. She would have been pretty if you didn’t look too closely, but if you did, you saw that her make-up was applied a little too heavily in an attempt to strengthen her cheekbones and distract folks from the fact that her nose spread a little too far across her face and not far enough in front of it. And when she announced to the checkout line in general that she was new around here and did anybody know where a girl could set up a beauty parlor, “‘cause this town sure looks like it could use one,” Bernerd did not challenge the fact that his brain called up the image of the trailer that stood empty just down the road from his own. He piped right up and said, “Sure! Got just the place!” She sidled up to him, exaggerated the tilt of her head, smiled real big, and said in a breathy whisper, “You do? My HE-ro!” Bernerd reached over to the lottery stand, took a pencil and a lottery card from their slots, and wrote down a phone number. Then he handed it to her and said, “This is my Uncle Boone’s number. Tell him you got this from Bernerd Bevins. I live just up the road from a trailer of his that’s been sitting empty for a while. It ain’t too much, but it’ll get you started.”
Hearing Bernerd’s voice and seeing his offer, her voice changed tone, became less a stage act and more conversational. She let out a long breath, almost a sigh, and said, “I really appreciate this. Thank you.” Bernerd said, “Nothing to it. Glad I can help make this county a more beautiful place.” Then he shot out the door, his face turning red. But he knew that meeting this woman was a sign of something.
Most places burst into loud color in the fall. Reds that will put your eyes out, notions of orange that you wouldn’t believe if somebody painted them, wild varieties of shades that fill you with excitement and confusion, and every day you go past one place, it’s a different place, painted different colors, until you can see the sky through the branches again for a while. Down by the creek, it gets chilly, then it gets cold, then Indian summer comes through around Thanksgiving, and then it gets cold again until late February. The live oak holds on to its dull gray-green, and the wind whips the dry clay and dead leaves with the painful pointed ends into little dust devils in the yard, and fall isn’t really exciting at all. Bernerd sat at his kitchen table smoking a cigarette, pushing a pack of Marlboro Lights around on the placemat in front of him and considering the circular copper-red ashtray with welled-out places on opposite sides so two people could smoke at the same time. But Diane had given the habit up a couple of years ago, so it was just Bernerd using this ashtray that already held three smoldering butts, and it wasn’t even nine in the morning. For a moment, Bernerd considered quitting, then his thoughts went back outside, and he stared out the little glass window in the front door at the top of the live oak tree, the only thing he could see from where he sat. Then he smashed the unfinished cigarette on top of one of the other unfinished cigarettes, stood up, and walked to the door. His head rotated steadily, almost mechanically, as he scanned, expressionless, the familiar scene in front of him, a scene made emptier by the absence of vehicles.
It was Thursday, and everyone was at work, except for Diane, who was doing the four to midnight shift at the dispatch chair for the sheriff’s department and was still asleep, because when she got home at one, she was too wound up to go straight to bed and so she’d sit up, watching what she called “crappy TV’ until she nodded off in the recliner. Then that loud local used car commercial with the guy yelling in a fake Mexican accent would wake her up some time around three-thirty, and she’d stumble into bed, pull the covers around her, and already be snoring while Bernerd was still trying to remember where he was and what was going on.
It took Suzy three trips in her red Camaro to get her belongings moved into the trailer. Bernerd sauntered over during the second trip, re-introduced himself, and offered to help move the heavy things, a couple of leatherette suitcases, and cardboard boxes stuffed with dishes, pans, and knick-knacks, into the house. Suzy recognized him immediately. Her smile made Bernerd’s face flush, a reaction he tried to hide. Then she reached into the back seat of the car, presenting her blue-jeaned rear end to his imagination, and wrestled a box to the car door. She said, “She’s all yours,” and stepped back, pointing to the box that was now wedged between the Camaro’s back seat and its door. Bernerd leaned forward, lifted the box and turned it slightly on edge, then eased it back toward him until he could get his arms around it. He lifted it the rest of the way into the driveway and asked, “Where you want it?” Suzy said, “Anywhere will be fine … no, wait; follow me,” and led him through the door and cleared a space on the kitchen counter that the box almost fit into. Bernerd slid one of the plastic-cushioned chairs that came with the place out from under the table with his foot, and dropped the box on the seat. Then he looked around the room. “Nice little place. Uncle Boone’s wife decided she doesn’t like it out here. Too much nature for her tastes.” Suzy looked out the window and said, “It’ll do.”
“Where you coming from, if I’m not being too nosy?”
“You know Calhoun County, up over the state line? I’ve been there since I was ten, and it’s time for me to go somewhere else. I come down here all the time, so this was a natural, but I can’t afford anything any closer to the beach. I’ve been working in a little beauty salon since I got out of high school. You ever hear of Lurlene’s House of Styles?” Bernerd pursed his lips and shook his head. “It’s right there next to the old Woolworth’s in the center of town, down from the railroad tracks.”
Bernerd pinched the muscles of his forehead to indicate that he was concentrating. “No,” he said, “I don’t get up that way too much any more. Pretty little area, though.”
Suzy shrugged. “I guess, but everybody knows too much about you, and those people are so small-minded. It was time for me to make myself scarce. But now that I’ve got my cosmetology license I’m gonna start up my own beauty shop.”
“Really? You found a place?”
“You’re standing in it.”
“No kidding? You think it’ll work way out here?”
“We’ll see. What do you pay for a haircut?”
“Anywhere between ten and fifteen dollars, depending on where I go. I usually just go to a barber shop down the road.” Bernerd lied, but he persuaded himself instantly that it wasn’t really a lie. Diane cut his hair most of the time, and washed it afterwards, leaning his head back into the kitchen sink and using the spray nozzle to chase the suds from his head. But every so often he did go to the barber shop down the road, where they still had razors and strops, lilac water, detective magazines, and old-time hillbilly music, although Bill Monroe came through the speakers courtesy of an eight-foot satellite dish in the back yard.
After they had joked their way through unloading the rest of the car and had walked around the trailer while he observed how little effort the last tenants had put into cleaning the place when they left, and she told him about her plans, and how she was going to rearrange the furniture, Suzy offered Bernerd a haircut, even though Diane had trimmed the back and sides last week. Suzy said his hair could use a little work. When Bernerd tried to give her ten dollars, she refused it, saying, “Oh, no. The first one’s one the house, for good luck.” She took a long, thin, salad dressing bottle out of a box on the counter and pulled the cork out of the top with a wave. “My signature fragrance,” pronouncing the word “sig-nah-tyour.” She poured a few drops into her hand, then put the bottle back on the counter, rubbed her hands together, and placed her hands, palms first, in front of Bernerd’s nose. “Whoo. Nice,” he said, trying not to draw his head back enough to give offense. It smelled like air freshener, with overtones of powder he remembered from his mother’s dresser. “But it’s a little too girly for me. The boys’ll never let me get away with this.”
“Awww. Don’t you think they’ll all want some?”
“Yeah, I think they’ll all want some, all right.” Bernerd paused for a beat, waiting for a reaction. Suzy’s expression didn’t change. “I just think I’ll admire it on your pretty little hands for now.”
When Diane got home she curled her nose and asked, “What’s that awful smell? Have you been trying to clean the kitchen again?” Bernerd shrugged his shoulders and said, “Maybe it was something in that new girl’s stuff. I was helping her move some boxes in. She’s got some mighty smelly notions.” When Diane asked more about the new girl, Bernerd said that they hadn’t talked much, but her name was Suzy and she was moving down from up north to set up a beauty parlor.
“Did she give you a haircut?”
“I never say no to a freebie.”
“Didn’t you tell her I just gave you one?”
“Like I said, I never say no to something that’s for free.”
“Well, you just make sure it stays free, you hear? And you know what I mean.” And Diane dropped her voice and turned “know” into two syllables.
“Yes, dear,” Bernerd mimicked her exaggeration. “There’s nothing to it. You’re the one for me. She’s just a kid down the street.”
Diane turned her back and looked down at the dishes in the sink. Bernerd went down the little hall to the bathroom, where he washed his hands and face twice.
Five haircuts and the accompanying hours of banter later, Bernerd made his move. Suzy was washing her scissors and combs in the hot water at the sink when he walked up behind her and put his arms around her. Suzy exhaled. “But you’re married!” she exclaimed, without moving. “What about your wife?”
“But isn’t there something special about us, too? Admit it, now. Don’t you feel something?”
She sighed. “I knew it the first moment I laid eyes on you. I felt it when you spoke right up in the store. I knew there was something to you, the way you looked me in the eye and got so creative so you could give me your uncle’s phone number.” Bernerd moved his arms down her waist. “But Diane’s such a nice person. She has good cheeks. You can tell a lot by a person’s bone structure.” He moved his hands farther, past the waistband of her Dianes and toward the V of her crotch.
Suzy turned off the hot water, steam rising out of the drain. She reached down, took each of Bernerd’s hands in her own, and moved them gently out and away as she turned to face him. She let go of his hands. “Not until I have one of these,” she said, pointing with the index finger of her right hand to the fourth finger of her left. Then she turned her back to him again. She reached out with her forearm and wiped the steam off the window over the sink. Then she gazed out the smeared glass into the underbrush and scrub pine behind the trailer. Bernerd walked up behind her again and slipped his arms around her waist, hands over the placket of her jeans. She softened slightly into his embrace.
It was a gray Saturday morning in mid-November, “gettin’ on toward football weather,” the boys joked, with the college season nearly over and the high schools done already, except for the lucky few in the state playoffs. Bernerd was sitting in the kitchen, on his second cup of instant coffee and his third cigarette. Z-106 was promoting its familiar blend of classic beach music “of the sixties, seventies, and eighties,” on the little black radio over the sink, and Bernerd was waiting for Diane to get home from work. Pay day. During football season she let him go into town to deposit her check, and when he asked, take out enough for a six pack of Bud Lite and a bag of Doritos for the game. He always promised to split it with her, and she always said she was going to lie down for a bit and asked him to wake her up before kick-off, but it used to be that when he’d put his arm around her and kiss her on the neck and whisper, “Honey, the game’s about on,” she’d mumble, “Gimme a minute,” and then she’d roll away from him and pull the blanket around her shoulders. She’d come padding out at about 4:30, stick her hand into what was left of the Doritos and ask who won and why didn’t you wake me up and did you save me any beer. There was usually one left in the refrigerator.
Today the Bulldogs were going down to the Swamp to play the Gators. Could be good. He heard the truck door slam, but then the trailer door opened more quickly than it should have. He looked up, and there she was with her face red and her trembling index finger pointed about three inches from his nose.
“You. Son. Of. A. Bitch! How could you?”
“What?” It was the cussing that told Bernerd this was serious. Diane made it a point never to curse or call people names.
“It’s all over town about you and that thing. She’s spreading it around about how she’s got you wrapped around her little finger and how poor me, I don’t have a clue about what’s going on behind my back. I got half the deputies in two counties hitting on me. One of ‘em even said he knew somebody who could free me up right quick, if I knew what he meant. Did you have sex with her?”
Bernerd remembered what a lawyer had advised him once. Don’t volunteer anything. Answer the question the other side asks, and don’t lead him anywhere. He shook his head. “Nooh.” Two syllables, like the answer should be obvious.
“Did you try?” Damn.
“Well, she came on to me once, but it didn’t go nowhere. We was just playin’. She’s so proud of her damn virginity and all.”
“Her what? How many different kinds of fool are you? My deputies told me a few more things. She’s got herself run out of the last two places she’s lived, and the only reason they let her run is because of who she was having sex with. If you ain’t got nothin’, you ain’t gettin’ nothin’.” Diane stopped herself. “Now get.”
“Baby, what? I ain’t done nothin’. She’s just tryin’ to stir things up.”
“Well, she’s stirred it up, all right, and I bet you’ve been in there stirring with her. Now get your ass out of here. You can get your shit when I’m at work.”
Ten minutes and two cigarettes later, Bernerd had walked to where his daddy had pulled his trailer after Bernerd’s mother left them for what she called “a new life in New Mexico.” His daddy had said that he intended to start over, too, but that he wasn’t going to need to go all that far to do it, and besides, he could see the creek from here, and that was pretty much all he wanted. He still had a two-room gas station that he had converted into a cabinet shop, and he worked when he felt like it and there was a job that interested him. He let Bernerd work with him when Bernerd asked, which was usually in between Diane’s paychecks, when he needed “money for the Marlboro man” or when a birthday or anniversary was coming up and he didn’t want to ask Diane for money for her own present.
His daddy was where he expected him to be on a Saturday morning, tinkering on his ‘72 Ford F-150.
“What is it this time?” Bernerd asked, sticking his head under the hood.
“Nothing. Saw an ad for these new spark plugs, supposed to fire hotter so gas’ll burn cleaner in the cylinder, and I’m gonna see if there’s anything to it.”
“What do you think? Better mileage and a little more jump?”
“That’s what they say. Pull that one out of the box and check the gap on it, would you?”
“Ain’t they preset?”
“Yeah, but I don’t trust ‘em, and it don’t take a minute. Besides, I like mine just a scosh wide.”
“What do you want? Twenty-six?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Whatever you say. Shouldn’t make too much difference.”
“Twenty-seven.”
They worked in silence for several minutes, until Bernerd had emptied the paper bag of spark plug boxes. His daddy backed out from under the hood.
“That’s what I like about these little trucks. You can get to everything. Now what do you want?”
“What do you mean, ‘What do you want’?”
“I know you and your Saturdays, and I know what you’re like when you’ve got yourself into something. Don’t play me for the fool, boy.”
“Diane ran me off.”
“Damn.” His daddy’s eyebrows rose. “What’d you do?”
“She thinks I’m cheatin’ on her.”
“Are you?”
“No.”
“You’d be a damn fool if you did.”
“She’s pretty mad. Can I stay over here for a while?”
“Where’d she get the idea you was playin’ around?”
“You know that girl moved into Boone’s place? I went over there a couple of times for a haircut, and now she wants to make something out of it.”
“Tell me the rest of it, boy.”
“Nothin’ to tell, Daddy. We didn’t do nothin’. Just a little smooch or two.”
“Sounds like more than nothin’ to me.”
“Yeah, but I ain’t interested in her. I was just playin’. If I had to choose between one and the other, Diane’d win, hands down.”
“You lookin’ for a job?”
“No sir, no contest at all.”
“You lookin’ for a job?”
“I’m gonna.”
“A thing like that’ll make a good woman mighty tired, boy. If I thought you wanted it, you could run the store, take the jobs I don’t want to do. I don’t know how much there’d be, but it’s a start.”
“Let me think about it, Daddy. I’m nowhere near as good as you.”
“That don’t matter. It’s time you made a start at something.” He slid into the driver’s seat of the F-150. “Let’s take her for a test drive.”
They rode silently, heads turning from side to side to listen to the engine. They hit one or two straightaways and Bernerd’s daddy pushed the pedal closer and closer to the floorboard. The first time, Bernerd glanced over at the speedometer. Seventy-five.
“How’s the pedal feel?” Bernerd finally asked.
“Aah, it’s all right. Nothing much, I don’t guess. We’ll have to see about the mileage.” They pulled back into the trailer park and past Bernerd’s daddy’s spot. They kept going till they got to Bernerd’s trailer.
“Now go on in there and get things straight. I’ll wait out here.”
“I don’t know. Oughta give her a day or two to cool off.”
“Son.”
Bernerd’s daddy leaned over the tailgate as Bernerd went up onto the front stoop, jiggled the door handle, put the key in the lock, and stepped inside. He looked down at his hands, then looked up again, across the half-dozen trailers situated in an approximation of a semicircle around two live oaks and a dusty clump of bayberry bushes. Then things got loud in the trailer and burst out onto the stoop and into the front yard.
Diane told me later that after she kicked Bernerd out of the house, she took a shower, and while she was in the shower she got scared of being in the trailer by herself, but after she put all her clothes back on she was too tired to go anywhere, so she locked the front door, took Bernerd’s rifle out of the closet in the spare bedroom, and lay it on the carpet by the bed. The next thing she knew, she heard a noise in the living room, so she reached for the rifle and pushed it out in front of her through the bedroom door, where she ran into Bernerd.
Bernerd says that he said “Baby,” and stepped toward Diane with his arms outstretched. Diane says that she had taken her contacts out before she went to bed and all she saw was an intruder lunging at her. She says she didn’t even raise the rifle to her shoulder, didn’t aim it, barely even pointed it toward the dark form in her living room. She says she knows it’s a sorry excuse, but she didn’t know the gun was loaded, and she sure didn’t know the safety was off. She doesn’t even remember pulling the trigger. She just remembers the little ping that the gun made when it spit the bullet out the barrel and then five feet across the room, so close to Bernerd’s face that it nicked his ear, then the smack and shatter when it went out the jalousied living room window and into the yard, where it made its last sound when it added a little dent to the inside of the tailgate next to Bernerd’s daddy’s hands and dropped into the bed of his truck.
Bernerd said, “Jesus, Diane!” as she dropped the gun and stood, shaking, across from him in the living room. His daddy yelled, “What’s going on in there?” as Bernerd scrambled out the door and down the porch stairs toward the truck. A half-dozen curious heads turned from the football game, where the Dawgs were already down 18 – zip in the second quarter, and appeared at windows and doorways of the ragged semicircle of trailers. Diane stepped into the doorway. “Bernerd? You OK?”
“Damn, Diane, you coulda killed me!”
“You shouldn’ta sneaked up on me like that.”
“Damn, Diane. I just wanted to talk. Daddy, I told you she wasn’t ready to talk yet.”
“You all right, son? What’s that on your ear?”
Bernerd reached his hands up to his ears, pulled them back, and stared at them. Then he quickly put his left hand up to his ear again and felt around with his fingers.
“Damn, Diane, you shot me!”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Bernerd.” She ran down the steps toward him. “Here. Let me look.” Bernerd pulled his fingers back. “I can’t see a thing for the blood. Let’s get you back inside and clean it up a little.” Diane led him by his bloody hand into the trailer and sat him in a kitchen chair, then walked to the sink and put a dishrag under the faucet for a moment. Bernerd’s daddy stood in the doorway.
“Yup. I got you, all right, but I just took a little off the top.” Diane paused. “Asshole. Daddy, did he tell you about his new hobby?”
Bernerd’s daddy stepped into the living room and picked up the rifle. “I’m sorry, Diane. I drove him back here to make it right with you. You damn fool, don’t you take the cartridges out of your rifle before you put it away?”
“Hey, wait a minute! I’m the one that’s got shot here. How’s it my fault that I’m bleeding?”
“Son, if you don’t take care of your things, they’ll let you know about it.”
“Baby, you got a band-aid for the victim?”
Diane sighed. “I probably ought to drive you to the ER and call the sheriff.”
Bernerd’s daddy looked toward the road. “Sounds like somebody beat you to it.”
That’s when I pulled up in the squad car. And that’s when the neighbors came out of their trailers, quietly first, then talking to one another, standing in a clump behind Bernerd’s daddy’s truck. One of them pointed at the shattered window, and another one started trying to figure the trajectory and noticed the pock mark on the back of the tailgate. It didn’t take too long before I was trying to get a half-dozen statements, call up an ambulance, and find my latex gloves and a baggie for a flat worn-out .22 bullet.
I decided right off that it was an “accidental mishandling” of an improperly stored firearm. Diane thought she ought to ride to the ER with Bernerd, so I let her, and Bernerd’s daddy said that he was all right, and somebody was going to need to drive the damn fool back home, so I let him follow them in his truck. One of his cousins said he’d cut a piece of plywood to go over the window, so I let him do that, too. People do better after excitement if they can contribute in some way to the reestablishment of the civil order.
Diane said later that she guessed they were even now, even if he had strayed deliberately and she had shot him on accident, so she let Bernerd back into the house. For his part, Bernerd decided that if ever there was a set of signs, this was it, even if his horoscope had only warned him to be cautious because Sagittarius was moving into the house of Capricorn, or something like that. He took the key to his daddy’s shop and started going over there. He bought a lock for the rifle and snapped it over the trigger guard, and carried that key around on his key ring, too.
You didn’t see too much of Suzy after that. Her business dropped off and she took to parking her little Camaro right at the porch so she could scoot out the driver’s side and in the door. She parked so near the door that one of the neighbors who had never cared for her too much joked that if it was raining out she wouldn’t even get wet.
Then I heard she was seeing some preacher from down south whose specialty was migrant workers, and she started spending less and less time in the neighborhood. She married him not too long after that and joined him on the revival circuit, where she’d stand at the front of the wooden stage with him, playing the tambourine. She wore a white peasant blouse and a long skirt with a somber print, drawn tight at the waist to emphasize the difference between her waist and her breasts. She hit the tambourine piously but vigorously with the palm of her hand as she swayed, eyes half-closed and chin lifted toward the peak of the canvas tent. Bernerd couldn’t see her shoes, but he knew she was wearing the same pair of scuffed black pumps she always wore except when her feet were bare.
Bernerd could picture the scene so well because he saw her from the back of the revival tent one Friday night on a softball field just outside Cape Fear. Suzy and her new husband were developing a reputation, and the tent was crowded. They traded off, singing some songs in English and some in Spanish. Bernerd thought the preacher did a good job of peppering his sermon with Spanish words. Suzy saw him and smiled, but it didn’t seem to Bernerd that she smiled at him, exactly.
The more I see, the less I’m sure of, but I’m pretty sure that if Diane had known that Bernerd sneaked off to that revival, she would have pulled the rifle out again, and this time she would have aimed.