The Second Doublewide on the Right, part 51

I’m Fixing to present Part 51 of The Second Doublewide on the Right:

Candy Sue Collins didn’t know what time it was when she woke up, just that she needed to go to the bathroom real badly. It was all that beer she had disposed of while waiting for James Earl to come home last night, and now she didn’t even remember him coming home at all.

After she returned from the bathroom in the darkness and got back into bed she reached across to touch some part of him. She needed the touch, but when she reached he wasn’t there. She bolted up in bed and called out his name, and got no answer. Now she was wide awake as she sat up on the side of the bed and turned the lamp on. Something was wrong, she could feel it. She could feel the emptiness of the trailer.

She knew he wasn’t in the bathroom because she had just been there. Other than the bedroom the only other room in the trailer was the big room up front which served as a sitting room, dining room and kitchen. She padded down the hallway and turned on the lamp next to the sofa and called out his name again, and was once again greeted with silence.

Afterwards, she walked to the window, parted the curtain, looked outside and all she saw was the dim outline of his cruiser in the darkness. Now she was scared. If he had had to leave due to some kind of police emergency he would have awakened her and told her he was leaving, plus he would have taken his cruiser.

There was a pistol in the trailer. James Earl had shown it to her. It was a .38 caliber revolver, which he kept in the very back of a drawer, and you had to reach way back into it to reach the weapon. She had never fired it but he had shown her how to. There wasn’t a safety on it. He had told her you just had to pull the hammer back and then pull the trigger to fire it.

Candy Sue considered taking the pistol from its hiding place, but she was shaking so badly she rejected the idea. Instead, she eased the front door open by just a crack and peeked outside, only to see or hear nothing to relieve her mind.

She retreated to the bedroom and donned a pair of jeans and a sweat shirt, and on the way back to the front door she bolstered up her courage and decided to go outside. With a quick glance at the digital clock on the microwave she saw that it was three o’clock in the morning.

As a woman will do, she changed her mind about the pistol, pulled it out of the drawer and carried it in her hand as she crept down the steps in her bare feet. The few sprigs of grass were wet with dew and it was causing the grit to stick to her feet It was quiet as death when she walked over to the cruiser and peered inside, only to see that it was empty.

She couldn’t think of anything else to do other than go back inside. Halfway back to the steps the silence was broken by the sounds of footsteps on the gravel road behind her!

Candy Sue whirled toward the sound, lifted the pistol, grasping it with both hands like James Earl had taught her. When she pulled the hammer back with her thumb she was surprised at how easy it was to cock the weapon, as the sound of the metallic clicks of it cut through the still night air.

With the weapon pointed in the direction of the sounds of the footsteps in the dark, the sound of James Earl’s voice boomed out, “What the devil are you doing? Lower that pistol, now!”

of her extreme nervousness and the shock of his sudden appearance she came within a hair’s breath of pulling the trigger, but then she relaxed her grip on the pistol and lowered it. “James Earl!” she gasped, “I didn’t know where you were! I woke up and you were gone!”

By then Deputy James Earl Murphy was next to her and roughly extracting the .38 from her grasp. “That ain’t no excuse for being out here in the dark pointing my own dang pistol at me! What are you doing out here in the dark of night?”

“What are you doing out here?” she answered with a question of her own. “I woke up and you weren’t anywhere to be found, so I came outside looking. I was scared, that’s why I had the gun.”

“It’s ain’t no gun, it’s a pistol,” he told her as he took her arm and began to guide her back to the trailer door. “Everything’s all right and I’m fixin’ to take you back inside.”