look innocent. “Why didn’t you use Flintstone and be done with it?”
“Sh-sh!” said Dwight as he concentrated on the bickering voices their bug was beaming over from Dallas’s house.
Terry Wilson tried to give me a hug. “Sure do ’preciate you going in there and asking all those questions for us. We didn’t get doodly with ol’ Fred and Wilma here.”
“Go to hell!” I flared. “What’s my Aunt Zell going to say when I tell her one of her best chicken casseroles is sitting down there in a murderer’s refrigerator?”
2
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It was almost Halloween before the worst of the kidding died down.
Cherry Lou Stancil and her son-in-law Tig Wentworth were sitting in jail waiting to be formally arraigned on first-degree murder charges. Both were going to be under such high cash bonds that neither would be able to raise it. Cherry Lou’s main collateral was the farm, but Mr. Jap had retained John Claude Lee, my cousin and former law partner, to roadblock her putting any liens on the land till after the trial. Under North Carolina’s Slayer Statute, she’d forfeit any claims to Dallas’s estate if convicted as a principal or accessory, and since Dallas had no children from his first two marriages either, John Claude was pretty sure he could get the farm reverted to Mr. Jap as Dallas’s closest blood kin.
Turns out that the land may have triggered the shooting. A local speculator offered Dallas a hundred thousand for his place. Soon as Cherry Lou heard that, she got visions of returning to Florida in glory.
Maybe they’d even buy a house right next door to Disney World.
“In your dreams,” Dallas told her.
From that day forward, according to Mr. Jap, she was at him like a hound dog after biscuits—just wouldn’t let it alone—till one day Dallas looked around and realized he was supporting a wife, a stepson, a stepdaughter, a stepson-in-law and a step-granddaughter. And he didn’t really like a single one of them anymore except for maybe the little girl. Mr. Jap said Dallas told Cherry Lou he was going to see a lawyer about a divorce when he got home from his next run to Galveston. In the meantime, he wanted Ashley and Tig’s trailer off his land. Ashley, Tig, and Bradley, too, for that matter.
Three days later he was dead.
Cherry Lou’s two children had been charged with conspiracy, but at their probable cause hearing, the DA cut them a deal when they agreed to testify for the prosecution. They were out on relatively small bonds, secured by Bradley’s truck and Ashley’s trailer.
Tig swore he’d kill them both if he ever got turned loose and he kept badgering his court-appointed attorney to forget about murder charges for a minute and start filing divorce papers on Ashley. “And put in there that I want sole custody of my little girl. Ain’t no fit momma that’d tell on her baby’s daddy.”
Cherry Lou had disowned the whole bunch. She admitted buying the shotgun the day Dallas told Mr. Jap he was going to divorce her—how could she not with her signature on Kmart’s credit card receipt?—but it was supposed to be a Christmas present for Dallas, she said. Along with a box of shells, she said. She didn’t know why Tig decided to try it out on Dallas two months early.
“Trick or treat maybe?” Dwight suggested.
They buried Dallas at Sweetwater Missionary Baptist Church, next to his mother, who’d been the only churchgoing person in the Stancil household. She was a Yadkin though and her niece, Merrilee Yadkin Grimes, Dallas’s first cousin, made all the funeral arrangements for Mr. Jap, right down to picking out the music, “This Little Wheel’s Gonna Turn in Glory,” and the text, Ezekiel 1:21—“
The preacher was good with metaphors, but even he seemed to have a right hard time stretching that particular text to fit the occasion. Merrilee was pleased with the sermon though. “Dallas loved trucking and I thought Ezekiel was real appropriate for a truck driver.”
The words of the Old Testament prophet must have touched Mr. Jap more than Merrilee could’ve hoped for. Or maybe it was losing his only child like that.
Anyhow, the next thing I heard was that Mr. Jap had got religion and painted a purple cross on his front door right above the words “Holyness Prayr Room.”
Daddy said he had about twenty pictures of Jesus tacked up on the walls and he’d made a simple cross out of two tobacco sticks and some baling wire. “Other’n that, the living room looks just like it did when Elsie was living, ’cept now Jap sits in there and reads the Bible to a couple of Mexicans that show up every Sunday morning.”
“You, too?” I asked, knowing Daddy seldom stepped inside any kind of a church except for weddings and funerals.
“Be different if he’d just read,” Daddy said regretfully. “Jap and me, we been knowing each other our whole lives, but I never much cared for being preached at.”
3
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By the middle of October, I get pretty tired of any leftover summer dregs—the midday heat, the dust, the
