Shooting at Loons

“What?”

“We handle divorces.”

“You’re kidding. That’s your whole practice?”

Okay, we’ve all gotten older, more cynical, more interested in security maybe, less interested in ethics, but to sell out so completely? “Somehow I never pictured you as part of the Me-Me-Me decade.”

Again that quirky shrug. “I thought we had a truce.”

“Sorry.”

“The paper said you found a body Sunday night?”

“Yes.” I didn’t want to discuss it; didn’t want Andy Bynum’s death and the way I’d found him to be part of idle cocktail chatter.

As if he could still read my mind, Lev changed the subject yet again. “Your friend also tells me you’ve been a judge almost a year?”

“Since last June, yes.”

“You like the view better from that side of the bench?”

Another round of shooting began and Lev flinched with distaste. “I’ve heard that every damn pickup in the south has a gun rack in the back, but I didn’t know women got off on guns, too.”

Anyone else I’d have accused of chauvinism. In Lev’s case, I figured it must be the alien corn he was standing in.

We had a good view from where we stood and the shooters now were two Jaycee types, Barbara Jean and Linville Pope. After another four rounds, only the two women were still in. Chet said they’d had four guns stolen and now I realized at least one of them must have been Barbara Jean’s. Linville barely came up to Barbara Jean’s shoulder, but her barrel followed the arc of the clay pigeon just as smoothly as she shattered her fifth in a row.

It was so incongruous. Barbara Jean in pearls, heels and a slinky dress, the late afternoon sunlight turning her blonde curls strawberry as she killed her sixth “bird” in a row; Linville in a floral silk cocktail suit, carefully tucking her hair behind her ears and out of her eyes before she loaded and fired a sixth time.

As the eighth round began, Barbara Jean missed.

“Pull,” said Linville and, without glancing at the ceramic disc, shot her gun straight up into the air.

The crowd clapped her show of good sportmanship and Barbara Jean shook her head, but her smile was just a little too bright as she handed her gun over to Chet, who had stepped up for the next round of competition.

With the shooting making coherent conversation almost impossible, we stepped back inside the house and made for the bar. Both barmen were down helping with the guns, so Lev poured himself a whiskey and soda and I refilled my glass of ice water, then we passed through the opposite set of French doors onto a narrower terrace completely walled on all three sides with head-high azaleas that dazzled the eye with clear pinks and corals, vibrant reds and cool whites.

Muffled gunshots and massed azaleas.

Lev shook his head and chanted, “And that’s what I like about the South!”

As our eyes met, we heard the clink of glassware, then voices in the room behind us.

“I don’t need any fucking concessions from you,” a woman said angrily. I recognized Barbara Jean’s voice.

“No? But you will take them from everyone else?” came Linville Pope’s quiet silky tones.

A questioning sound.

“The way you play the beleaguered benefactor to twenty-three black families—that is how you put it every time anybody tries to regulate your trawlers? Twenty-three black families who could not buy even a gallon of milk if not for the paychecks you sign? So easy to play the race card when it suits you, but I have done a little research on Neville Fishery. What happened to all the black families that were cut loose when your father switched over to hydraulic winches to pull the nets and started using hoses to suction the fish out of those nets?”

“You leave my daddy out of this.”

“Look, Barbara Jean—” Her voice was that of a patient adult reasoning with a fractious child. “The tide is running out. Fishing was a wonderful way of life. Last century. Menhaden generate what? Four million a year? Tourism brings in half a billion. Face it, honey, you are history. Maybe not this year, maybe not next, but it is coming. That little factory of yours sits squat in the middle of—”

“I’d die before I’d sell it to you,” Barbara Jean snarled.

“No one is asking you to,” Linville soothed. “My principals are the ones who want it bad enough to offer you more than it is worth.”

“My granddaddy built that factory and my grandsons—”

I missed the rest because Lev put his lips close to my ear and whispered, “There has to be a path somewhere through those flower bushes. Maybe there at that corner?”

I hesitated.

“Knowledge is power,” the pragmatist reminded me, straining to hear what was being said just inside those open doors.

“And you were accusing HIM of lapsed standards?” the preacher lectured.

Reluctantly, I tiptoed after Lev, across the terrace and through the bushes.