Late One Night

by Lee Martin

  “Nowhere in particular,” he’d told her. “Like I said. Just driving around.”

  Now he was thinking about how he’d driven that last quarter mile to the trailer with his headlights off so no one would see the Firebird making its way so slow and easy through the cold night.

  Even now in the warmth of Brandi’s bed he was trembling, chilled to the bone. He knew it would be a long time, if ever, before he’d be able to talk about that night and what had happened out there at the trailer. So for the time, he tried to hold himself suspended in that last quarter mile, the Firebird gliding along in the dark. He could see the trailer ahead of him, not a speck of light anywhere. He was almost there—just a little bit farther—almost to that place he’d known so long as home.

  “Bite-ass cold night to have to fight a fire,” he finally said to Brandi. He listened to the trucks’ sirens start up and then grow faint. “Somewhere out in the country it sounds like.”

  “Yes, it does,” said Brandi, in a faraway voice.

  He lay there shivering until, finally, he fell into a fitful sleep.

  Then someone was knocking on the front door of the house, knocking in a way that brought Ronnie up from sleep with a start, his heart pounding in his chest.

  Brandi was up and slipping into her old chenille bathrobe, the yellow one with red hearts on it. A big one across the back had pink letters in the center that said BE MINE. She took her time. She pushed her bare feet into her house shoes. They were sock monkey house shoes, ones with the face from that kids’ doll across the toes: black buttons for eyes, red-and-white mouth. Just a silly thing to make the winter a little brighter, she’d told Ronnie. Normally, when he saw her wearing them, he got a light-in-the-heart feeling, but tonight, still groggy from sleep, he was trying to figure out why she was taking time to put them on. She even picked up a brush from the dresser and ran it through her hair.

  “Guess someone wants to talk to us,” she said. Then she went to find who’d come knocking in the middle of the night.

  Ronnie tried to get his wits about him. He got out of bed and started toward the knocking. Then he realized he was only wearing his boxer shorts, and he stopped to fumble around for his jeans. His foot kept getting caught in one of the legs, and finally he stumbled backwards and sat down hard on the bed.

  That’s where he was when Brandi came back and said to him in a voice so soft he had to take a second to make sure he’d heard her right, “Ronnie, you better come out here.”

  She helped him pull on his jeans, and while he fastened them, she brought him a flannel shirt from the closet. She held it for him and he put his arms through the sleeves. Then, with a gentle nudge against his shoulders, she turned him around so she could do up the buttons.

  Her fingers were trembling, and it took her a good while with each button. He watched those fingers, and he knew something was wrong—so wrong that even she didn’t know how to handle it.

  Pat Wade was in the living room. He’d come because he’d asked to be the one to carry the news. He’d told Ray Biggs that he’d gone to school with Ronnie, had known him all his life, and he wanted to be the one to tell him. Better for this kind of thing to come from someone familiar rather than someone in a uniform who was merely doing his duty. Besides, Pat had been at the trailer long before Biggs arrived. He’d taken Sarah when Shooter handed her to him, and he knew he’d never forget the way she put her arms around his neck and clung to him, the way her body quivered, and the little whimpering noises she made in the cold night.

  “Where’s my daddy?” she said. “I want my daddy.”

  Biggs would never be able to tell Ronnie something like that, something to make him understand that no matter the choices he’d recently made he still had a family to see to, and he’d have to make sure he did right by them. Pat had taken it upon himself to be the one to try to hold him up and ease him along, knowing that if, God forbid, he ever found himself in his shoes, he might very well say the hell with it all.

  He’d never been in Brandi Tate’s house, never had any reason to be there until that night. Even in a nothing town like Goldengate, which wasn’t more than the three blocks of Main Street, the B & O Railroad tracks crossing the heart of it, and streets named after trees and presidents running at right angles—a town of a thousand people living in small frame houses like this one on Locust—you could go your whole life and not think that some of those people would ever matter to you at all. Then a night like this would come to prove you wrong.

  Pat felt ill at ease standing in Brandi’s living room surrounded by the signs of her and Ronnie living together in what Missy had always called their “love shack.” Ronnie’s work boots on the floor by the couch, a pair of his gray wool socks lying across the toes. An empty plastic bottle of Mountain Dew was on the coffee table, along with an issue of Gearhead Magazine he’d apparently been looking at earlier in the evening, before what Pat had now come to tell him had happened.

  “Who is it out there?” he heard Ronnie ask from the bedroom down the hall.

  “It’s Pat Wade,” Brandi said.

  “Pat Wade? This time of night. Maybe he wants me to come to work tomorrow.”

  “No, sugar. He’s not come about a job.”

  The soothing tone of her voice caught Pat by the throat, and he choked down the ache it left. He’d never really thought of her in any way at all before. Or if he had, he’d only seen her through Missy’s eyes. Home wrecker, concubine, tramp. A girl not yet thirty—maybe no more than twenty-five—who’d worked her charms on Ronnie and stolen him away from Della and the kids. Temptress, Jezebel, harlot. Missy always stopped just short of the harsher words—slut, bitch, whore—but Pat knew they were right below the surface of everything she said.

  Here was her voice, soft and low, and a little shaky with what she knew that Ronnie didn’t. Here on the coffee table was a necklace she must have unfastened from around her neck sometime while she was sitting on the couch with Ronnie. Just a simple silver necklace with a heart on the end of it. Maybe she’d had the television on. Maybe she’d asked if he wanted a Mountain Dew. Maybe they’d just been a couple like that, spending an ordinary night at home the way Pat and Missy had done before she looked out the window and saw Della’s trailer on fire.

  As he stood in Brandi’s living room, waiting, he felt whatever ember of moral judgment Missy might have wanted him to stoke go cold. He could only think of Brandi as one more person whose life was going to change forever because of what had gone on out the blacktop.

  The first thing that registered with Ronnie when he came out to the living room was the odor that Pat had carried into the house: a sharp scent that reminded Ronnie of the smell around the burn barrel at one of his foster homes, where they let him set fire to the trash for the time he lived there. Cold and smoke and something like burnt plastic and melted tin.

  “Ronnie, there’s been trouble.” Pat had on an orange sock hat and he took it off and twisted it around in his hands. “That’s why I’m here.” He could barely bring himself to look at Ronnie. He looked down at that sock hat instead as if it were the most fascinating thing.

  Ronnie was used to Pat’s easygoing ways, and he’d always liked having him as a neighbor. Pat even tossed some work his way when he could. He always did Ronnie square even when Ronnie knew he didn’t deserve his favor. He never felt like Pat sat in judgment of him—he wished he could say the same thing about Missy—but instead just took him for what he was. Pat never got ruffled or took a sideways route toward anything troubling that stood before him, but now he looked like he was having a hard time getting his bearings. He looked worn out: coppery whisker stubble on his face, creases in his forehead as he bunched up his brow, slump of his shoulders as if he carried so much weight he could hardly stand. He was a lanky man with big hands beat to hell from hammers and crowbars and roof shingles and concrete. He had a long, narrow face and big old hound dog eyes. Eyebrows so white it seemed like they’d been permanently coated with plaster dust.
A bald spot on top of his head.

  “Sugar, listen to him.” Brandi slipped her arm around Ronnie’s and held on. “I’m right here,” she said, and she squeezed his bicep with a fierce grip that made fire shoot up his arm.

  Pat didn’t know any other way to deliver the news but to say it straight out.

  “Ronnie, there’s been a fire,” he said. “The trailer’s gone, not much left but the gas furnace and the hot water heater.”

  “They were having trouble with that furnace,” Ronnie said. “Della’s dad was supposed to fix it.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” said Pat. Then he gathered himself for the next thing he had to say. “Missy saw the flames from our place, and she called 911. By the time I got up there, Shooter Rowe and Captain were already doing what they could.”

  Ronnie said, “Thank God Della and the kids weren’t there. Good thing they went to her folks’ tonight.”

  Pat let him have that one moment of comfort, that brief time of believing that no one had been inside the trailer. Then he started in again. He took it slow. He let Ronnie have time to take in each thing he was saying. “They were there,” he said. “Della was in the trailer, and she was seeing to the kids. She was handing Emma to Shooter when I got there. Angel and Hannah were already out. Then Sarah. Then—”

  “They were there?” He couldn’t believe it. He’d called from the payphone at Casey’s, and no one had answered. Della’s car hadn’t been in the lane the way it always was. He’d gone out there to burn the trailer—that’s how mad he’d been because Della had filed papers on him—but he hadn’t intended anything like this. “She got them all out, right? Della? She got all the kids out?”

  Just then, a clock on the wall marked the hour—one o’clock—with birdsong. A robin’s happy call: Cheerup.

  Brandi explained that the clock had a light sensor to keep it from sounding when the room was dark. She pointed up. “Ceiling light,” she said, to make it clear why the clock had sounded.

  Pat knew he couldn’t take any of the pain from Ronnie. All he could do was say the rest.

  “Della went back for Emily and Gracie and Junior. By that time, the fire was too hot, the smoke was thick.” The orange sock hat slipped from his hands, and he had to bend over and pick it up from the floor. “I couldn’t go in there, Ronnie.” His voice was nearly a whisper now. “The roof and walls were already starting to go. If I could’ve done something. If I’d been there sooner.”

  Ronnie felt, then, like he was somewhere far, far away from where he really was, and, when he finally spoke, it was like he was listening to someone he didn’t know—someone who was a stranger to him.

  “Not one of them?” he asked Pat. “Not Della or Emily or Gracie? Not Junior?”

  When Pat didn’t answer right away, he turned to Brandi. She reached out and laid her hand to Ronnie’s cheek. “No, sugar. Not a one.”

  Then Pat found his voice again, and he said the hardest thing of all. “The roof and the walls. They just went before Della could get the others.” He remembered how the heat had forced him and Shooter and Captain and the four saved girls out into the road, where they could do nothing but watch the trailer collapse and listen to the sirens on the fire trucks as they came out the blacktop from town. “They’re gone, Ronnie. Della and the baby and Emily and Gracie. They’re all gone.”

  It was said now—everything—and Pat waited for whatever would come next.

  Ronnie got a hard look to his face. That gaunt face with the sharp cheekbones and the watery blue eyes and the little knob of a chin that wasn’t much of a chin at all. He looked the way he had the first day he’d come to Bethlehem School, a new kid. He was no more than seven or eight, then, and yet he looked like an old man fretting something to death.

  He took a few steps across the room, and for a moment Pat was afraid he was coming to do him harm with his fists, enraged because Pat had stood as witness to the fire. Then Ronnie stopped, and he said with a no-nonsense tone, “Where are my girls?”

  “They’re at my house,” Pat said. “Missy’s seeing to them.”

  Ronnie turned to Brandi. “I’ve got to go there. I’ve got to be with them.”

  She nodded. “I’ll get dressed.”

  “Brandi.” He stopped her as she started toward the bedroom. He reached out a hand. “Baby?”

  She came to him and she threw her arms around his neck and pressed him to her, saying, “Sugar. Oh, sugar.”

  They stood there, rocking back and forth a little, and Pat, watching, didn’t know what to do with this tenderness between them on such a night. “I guess sometimes, the hurt’s so big,” he’d say to Missy later, “nothing matters except getting over it.”

  He’d tell her about the way Brandi held onto Ronnie and told him she’d do whatever she needed her to do. “If you want me to stay here,” she said, “I will. I’ll be right here waiting for you to come back.”

  “I expect that’d be best,” he said.

  He knew she was offering to stand by him, the way she would if she were his wife.

  That word was strange to him now. It flamed inside his head and got all twisted up with what he felt for Brandi and the child she carried—his child—and the life he’d shared with Della until he’d decided to walk out of it. He’d had this wife and seven children, and now three of them were dead, and Della too, and it made no sense—it nearly brought him to his knees—that they were gone and he was alive.

  11

  Shooter Rowe, if push came to shove, would admit that deep down there were times when he wished to be free of Captain, when he wished for a different sort of son.

  It was the kind of truth a man comes up against late at night when he’s alone with his thoughts, and he has no choice but to face facts. When he has to say, okay, this is who I am. The fact was, ever since he and Merlene knew something was wrong with Captain, that he wasn’t ever going to be the sort who could stand on his own two feet and take responsibility for his steps through the world, sure or uncertain, Shooter tried to stay clear of him, wasn’t a good father at all. But then Merlene took sick and died, and now here he was, trying his best.

  Captain was incapable of understanding when he’d done something to deserve a stern word or a lick with Shooter’s belt. It was so much easier to call Ronnie on his missteps. When he did something stupid, Shooter told him he’d fucked up, and Ronnie said, “Shooter, you’re right. If I’d had you as a daddy, I would’ve turned out to be a better man.”

  Shooter wasn’t sure about that—he was no kind of father—but he knew that to Ronnie he must have seemed exactly the man he needed to keep him on the straight and narrow.

  Ronnie had never known his own father. Then his mother died when he was a toddler, and he grew up in a series of foster homes, each one of them leaving him with a little more meanness inside, a little more hurt, a little more ache for comfort and love. Finally, when he was fifteen, he lied about his age and got that tattoo on his neck. BAD MOON. Let the world know it; he was burning a short fuse.

  So there they were, Ronnie and Shooter, each of them all mixed up, needing each other in ways they couldn’t completely understand, ways that were complicated by the love and envy they both felt, and Shooter didn’t know how he’d say any of this if he had to.

  “You just fucked up big time,” Shooter told Ronnie after he walked out on Della.

  It was a night when Ronnie had come for the last of his things and Shooter caught him as he was about to toss a pile of clothes into the backseat of the Firebird. It was after dark, a quarter moon in the sky, the air with the chill that said winter was waiting, the chirr of crickets in the fencerows, the smell of wood smoke coming from the trailer.

  “I mean it, Ronnie,” Shooter said. “You’re not thinking about how many lives you’re affecting.”

  For the first time, Ronnie didn’t take kindly to Shooter’s assessment—his criticism—nor did he admit that there was any truth to it.

  “Shooter,” he said. �
��What do you know about what it is to love someone anyway?”

  For a good while, Shooter didn’t say a word. He knew what Ronnie didn’t have the nerve to say. That Merlene had talked to him in a way that another man’s wife shouldn’t, that she and Ronnie had come to some closeness of their hearts.

  Shooter said, “You and Merlene—”

  Then he stopped, unable to say more, unwilling to admit that he’d found the photograph of Ronnie that she’d saved and the card she’d hidden away. He was afraid of what Ronnie might say about the two of them.

  “She was a good woman,” Ronnie finally said. “She deserved better than you.”

  Shooter was determined not to show how deeply he was cut. He’d had all those years with Merlene, a woman who—yes, Ronnie was right—didn’t deserve the way he disappointed her too many times. For a while, he’d even blamed her for the way Captain was, told her she hadn’t done something right when she was pregnant, but that didn’t mean he didn’t love her or that he didn’t miss her now every minute of every day. It didn’t mean he wasn’t trying his best with Captain. It didn’t mean he had to tolerate the way Ronnie was treating Della, even though there’d been a time in his life when he might have treated Merlene the same way.

  “You’re going to have a hard row,” he finally said to Ronnie.

  “Maybe so,” said Ronnie. “But it’ll be my row and not yours. You stick to your problems and I’ll stick to mine.”

  “I suppose you think I’ll take care of Della and your kids?”

  Ronnie shook his head. “I can’t think of them right now.”

  “You can stop.” Shooter grabbed his arm. “You can go back in that trailer and you and Della can work things out.”

  Shooter wanted it to be so because he wanted to believe in the power of love. He wanted to believe that there were men who would always stay true, who would swallow whatever discontent they felt, all for the sake of the woman who had given birth to their children and for those children themselves. He wanted Ronnie and Della and their kids to be all right, to be a family, so he could believe there was still a chance for him and Captain.