Cannot Wait to Get to Heaven - Fannie Flagg [113]
She then looked around for something heavy, and picked up a lamp. “Lock the door behind me,” she said, and walked back into the kitchen, ready for a fight. But the naked man had not moved from where he had been. Still, Elner took no chances. She knew he could be playing possum and jump up at her, so she picked a rolling pin up off the counter. And now, armed with a lamp and a rolling pin, she walked over slowly, but the man did not move. She nudged him with her foot, and he fell over onto his side with the bucket still on his head and just lay there motionless. Satisfied it was safe, she then reached down and pulled the bucket off the man’s head and recognized him as Louise’s hired hand. He was not a pretty sight. No wonder Polly had put a bucket over his head. Elner walked over and pulled the tablecloth off the kitchen table; she did not care to look at a naked man dead or alive. After she had covered him up, she went back into the bedroom. Polly had evidently put up a pretty good fight, because she had not been raped, and other than being roughed up, she was not too badly hurt. After they got her into bed with her doll, Elner said in a calm, matter-of-fact tone of voice, “Louise, when you get her to sleep, could I see you in the kitchen for a minute?”
When Louise came back to the kitchen, she was still shaking all over. Elner was sitting at the kitchen table calmly drinking a cup of coffee and eating a piece of her own pecan pie.
“Is he still here?”
“Oh yes.” Elner nodded over at the man underneath the red and white tablecloth. “Polly may be retarded, but she’s a good shot, I’ll say that for her. Got him right between the eyes.”
“What?”
“That’s your hired hand over there.”
Louise looked over at the covered-up body. “Oh my God. Is he dead?”
“He sure is. As far as I can figure, he must have pulled a gun on her and she somehow got it away from him.” She indicated a gun lying on the table beside her. “I found it on the floor near the sink.”
Louise looked down at the gun, then gasped. “Elner, that’s my gun! Do you think he shot himself with it?”
“It’s not likely he could shoot himself between the eyes, throw the gun across the room, and then put a bucket on his head.”
“Then who shot him?”
Elner said, “I think it would be safe to say that it was Polly.”
“But how did she get the gun?”
“I don’t know. Where did you have it?”
She ran over to the door of the pantry. “I kept it in here.” When Louise opened the door, she saw that inside the pantry there were cans and broken jars strewn all over the floor. “I kept it right here, on the second shelf behind the beans,” she said, pointing.
Elner got up, walked over, and looked in at the mess. “Well, Louise, she must have run in here trying to get away from him, and it got knocked off the shelf, and she picked it up and pulled the trigger. She might have thought it was a cap pistol. I don’t know.”
“Oh my God. We have to call the police right away and let them know somebody’s been shot.”
Elner looked at her and said, “We could do that, but let’s take a minute before we do anything.”
“But what about him, I mean, don’t we have to call right away?”
“Oh, don’t worry about him, he’s not going anywhere.” Elner stepped inside the pantry with Louise, closed the door behind her, and said, “Now listen, Louise, I’ve been thinking. The fact that he’s shot between the eyes could be looked on by some people as a murder.”
“Murder!” Louise said loudly, then lowered her voice. “But he was trying to rape her. It was self-defense, an accident. She didn’t mean to kill him.”
“Self-defense or not, the police are going to have a lot of questions, there may even be a trial, and it would be in the newspapers. You don’t want poor little Polly dragged through that, it would scare her to death, she probably doesn’t even understand what happened yet.”
“You’re right, she would be terrified.” Louise started wringing her hands. “I know, I’ll just say I did it! I came in and saw what he was trying to do and I shot him.”
“Louise, honey, think. Again, no witnesses. I’ve seen this kind of