Late One Night

by Lee Martin

  That made him mad. First the cut on his hand and now this. He could feel time ticking away, and he still had so much to do.

  Methuselah kicked up straw with his hind hooves. Captain decided to leave him alone. He needed to get back to work.

  Then Methuselah charged him, and Captain turned and ran out of the shed, out of the pen, ran through the snow toward the trailer.

  Methuselah stopped. He went quiet. Captain turned and watched him to make sure he was calm enough not to cause trouble. The goat went closer to the trailer, right up to the back steps, and there he got something in his mouth and started chewing on it. A spray of sparks danced in the air, and that startled the goat, and he stepped away from what Captain could now see was a cardboard box.

  He thought that shower of sparks was a beautiful thing, something he, like Methuselah, didn’t expect. It reminded him of fireworks on the Fourth of July, which had always been his mother’s favorite holiday. He could remember sitting on a blanket at the State Park with his father and her. He lay on his back with his head in her lap, and he watched the fireworks burst into sprays and showers in the night sky above the lake. “Look at that one,” his mother said. “Oh, and that one. How pretty they are.”

  He liked to imagine that the fireworks were the wings of angels, painting the sky red and blue and silver and gold as they streaked down to Earth to see to this or that.

  His mother had something she liked to say to him when she told him goodnight. It came from a poem she learned in school when she was a girl:

  Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,

  Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.

  He wasn’t sure he could say exactly what that meant, but he’d never forgotten the sound of her voice when she said those words—hushed and dreamy—and he knew, without her having to say as much, she was telling him that he was one of those lovely stars. He was one of the forget-me-nots of the angels, and no matter where he found himself, he could count on them to keep him from harm.

  Methuselah was coming back to the box now. Well, just let him, Captain thought. He realized then that there was a man behind the trailer, and he knew that man was Ronnie.

  “That’s when he saw me,” Ronnie told the deputy. “I knew I was caught, so I stood up. Methuselah stopped in his tracks, stopped bleating, just nosed at the snow. Captain turned back to watch him, and then, after a while, he came up to me, and he said, ‘You come back for good?’”

  The wind was really howling now, and Ronnie had to get up close to Captain to make himself heard. He leaned in toward the boy’s ear. He said, “No, not for good. I came out to check on Della and the kids.”

  “They’re gone,” Captain said. “Car’s nowhere to be seen.”

  Ronnie nodded. “Good thing I came, though.” He pointed down toward the other end of the trailer. About two-thirds of the way down, his Marathon can sat in the snow. “Hole in the siding there. Wind could’ve blown out the pilot light on the furnace. I patched it up.”

  Captain looked down at the Marathon can and then back at Ronnie. Captain’s nose wrinkled up, and Ronnie knew he smelled the gas. He waited for Captain to ask him about it, and when he didn’t, Ronnie knew he was afraid to ask him what he was doing with a can of gas back there because he was up to something himself that he didn’t want to have to explain.

  “So you’re not back for good?” Captain finally said.

  He was clearly disappointed, and Ronnie, who couldn’t work a miracle and make that gas jump back into the can, felt ashamed to be standing there in his presence.

  “No, Captain,” he said. “It’s too late for that.”

  “Your daddy would never hurt you,” Brandi told Angel. “You know that, don’t you? You know he loves you, and I love you.”

  Angel’s bottom lip quivered. “It’s all been so hard,” she said.

  Brandi gripped her hand. “It’s going to be all right. Everything. You’ll see.”

  She was thinking of the night that Ronnie told her he was going for a drive, that he was feeling antsy. She was reading one of her baby books, and when he came back, she couldn’t have said how long he’d been gone. He came in and went right into the shower. She wouldn’t know until he told her later that on his way back to town, he smelled gasoline and recalled that earlier in the day, when he’d brought the gas for Brandi’s Mustang, the cap on the can’s spout had been difficult and he’d crouched down and used the tail of his T-shirt to get a better grip so he could twist it off and get about the business of pouring gas into the Mustang’s tank. All day, he’d thought he was catching the faint scent of gasoline, and finally that night as he sped up the blacktop, he imagined that not even the strip of the shirt that he’d cut away while he was behind the trailer was enough to get rid of that smell—a smell that seemed dangerous to him now on account of what he’d just done.

  At the city limits, he pulled off into the parking lot of the Dairy Dee, closed for the winter, and there he slipped off his coat and pulled the T-shirt over his head. He wadded it up and stuffed it under the passenger seat. Then he put his coat back on and zipped it up. He went on to Brandi’s, and he went straight into the bathroom and undressed and got into the shower.

  When he came out, he was ready for bed. She heard the siren at the fire station but barely gave it a thought. Then she reached up and turned off the lamp, and the two of them drifted off to sleep.

  When Shooter woke and couldn’t find Captain in the house, he put on his barn coat and went out the back door to look for him.

  The pole light in the barnyard was enough for him to spot the footprints in the snow. He recognized the corrugated tread of Captain’s Big Horn Wolverine boots, and the hoof prints the goats had left. Shooter followed the prints to the barn door. Inside, he found four of Della’s goats, bleating their dismay over whatever had happened to move them there. The lights were on in the feedway. Dust motes and chaff hovered around the bare bulbs.

  “Wesley,” Shooter shouted, but there was no answer.

  _________

  In her bedroom, Della thought she heard voices, but she was so far down in sleep she convinced herself it was only the wind.

  The baby was asleep. The twins were asleep, and Gracie, and Sarah, and Hannah, and Angel. They were snuggled down in their dreams. The furnace was working fine, and they were cozy in their beds on this cold winter night.

  Shooter stepped out of the barn and heard the back door of the house go shut. He hurried inside, and there he found Captain at the bathroom sink, letting the water run over his hand. The only light in the room was a nightlight plugged into the wall below the mirror, that and the light from the snow cover coming in through the little window in the wall facing the road. It was enough light for Shooter to see Captain’s sock hat and his bloody glove on the vanity top.

  “You’re cut.” Shooter grabbed the hand and looked at the slice across the hock of Captain’s thumb. “How’d that happen?”

  “Knife slipped,” said Captain.

  “Knife? Your pocketknife? What were you using it for?”

  “To cut baling twine. I found a bale of straw. I didn’t want the goats to get hurt.”

  “How were they going to get hurt, Wesley?”

  Captain wouldn’t answer. He hung his head and wouldn’t look at his father. Shooter reached over and turned off the faucet. “Wesley, I asked you a question.”

  “I meant to start over.” Captain’s voice was flat. “Just like you told me. Put a match to that fence.”

  Shooter remembered then what he’d said in passing that afternoon when he and Captain had been mending the fence over at Della’s.

  “Oh, good Christ,” he said. “That was just something to say. Something because I was mad. Why would you ever think I was serious?”

  Captain shrugged his shoulders. “I just wanted to help Della.”

  Shooter looked down at the sock hat and the glove on the vanity. The glove had blood on it.

  �
��Where’s your jacket?” he asked him. “Did you have it on? Where’s your knife?”

  “My jacket’s behind the trailer,” Captain said. “It fell off. I don’t know what happened to my knife. I must have dropped it.”

  Shooter didn’t know that he was lying about the knife, that he still had it in his jeans pocket, the blade stained with his blood. Shooter was about to tell him to go get his coat and to look for that knife, but then—it was almost imperceptible—the light grew brighter in the room, just enough of a change for Shooter to register. He turned his head toward the window, and he saw light waver behind the curtains. He drew one of the panels back and looked out across the road.

  He stood there longer than he should have because he thought Della and her kids weren’t home. He stood there, watching the flames licking through the roof of the trailer, thinking, if he had to be honest, that even though he was stunned to see the fire, a small part of him thought he’d found a convenient answer to his problem with the goats. If the trailer burned, Della and the kids would have to find somewhere else to live, and they’d take the goats with them or else sell them, and spring would come, and he wouldn’t have to worry about them getting loose and eating up his garden. He stood there watching until he saw the first girls, Angel and Hannah, come running from the flames and out into the cold night.

  Then he caught a whiff of gasoline, and he knew it was coming from Captain. “My god.” He spun around to look at his son. “Surely you didn’t tote a can of gas over there.”

  Captain bowed his head. He didn’t say a word, and Shooter’s mind raced ahead, convinced that his assumption was true.

  “Oh, Wesley,” he said. “What in the world have you done?”

  30

  Biggs had just backed out of Shooter’s drive when he saw Pat Wade up the road at his place waving his arms in the air, motioning for him to come down there.

  “There’s something you ought to know,” Pat said, when Biggs pulled his patrol car into the driveway and got out to see what Pat wanted. “He put that goat down,” Pat said. “Shooter. He killed that billy goat, one of Della’s goats. Shot it back there in his woods. Told Missy it had foot and mouth.”

  “Foot and mouth?” Biggs said. “Hasn’t been foot and mouth in this country since before you and me.”

  “That’s what I know.”

  “Missy see him shoot that goat?”

  Pat shook his head. “She saw him push it down into a gully. Come inside and she’ll tell you.”

  Missy was waiting just inside the front door. She’d left Hannah and Angel to heat up some soup and make cheese sandwiches for her and her sisters and Brandi, and then she’d left the girls there to drive Lois home and then to come and talk to Pat.

  “He killed that goat.” She started right in once Biggs and Pat were inside the house. “Then today he was back there with his Bobcat and his chainsaw. Filling in that gully, I expect. Burying what he put there.”

  “Seems odd that he’d tell you it had foot and mouth,” Biggs said.

  “He threatened me,” she said. “Today. He told me I had what I wanted and not to do anything to ruin my happy-ever-after.”

  “Della’s girls,” Pat said.

  “I want to know why Shooter killed that goat.” Missy crossed her arms over her chest and tipped her head back a little so her chin pointed out. “And I want to know what brought him to lie about why.”

  “I’m going to find out,” said Biggs, and he told Pat and Missy goodnight.

  Once he was gone, there wasn’t much for them to say. They stood awhile just inside the front door, though they didn’t speak until the patrol car left their drive and started back up the blacktop toward Shooter’s.

  Then Pat said, “Missy?”

  His voice was strained, and it was clear he wanted to say more—wanted to know what it meant that she’d left the girls with Brandi—but he didn’t know how.

  “That’s done,” Missy said.

  She’d unloaded the groceries from the van and put the perishables away. She still had canned goods to stack in the pantry. Then she had the rest of the night, and the ones after that, to get through.

  Pat nodded. The quiet of the house and all the sadness it held choked him. “All right,” he managed to say, but by that time, Missy was gone.

  Biggs drove back to Shooter’s and said he had more questions. He could tell that Shooter was surprised to see him again, but he let him into the house, and he answered his question about the goats.

  Yes, he had Della’s goats, he said.

  “I’ve been keeping them as a favor to Wayne Best.” He knew Wayne and Lois weren’t up to seeing to them, and he didn’t mind footing the feed bill for a while since the goats gave Captain so much pleasure. “My boy loves taking care of them,” he said.

  Biggs said, “Where is your boy?”

  The house was quiet. Night had fallen and stretched on past the supper hour, and there was no sign of Captain. From where Biggs stood in the living room, he could see through the archway into the kitchen, and he noticed there were no signs of a supper having been prepared and eaten—no frying pans on the stove, no dishes in the sink or in the drainer, no pots or pans left to soak, no sign at all that Shooter and the boy had seen to their supper after Biggs left their house earlier. A light above the sink was on. That was the only sign that someone had at least passed through that kitchen long enough to switch it on. Biggs couldn’t have said why he found that tidy, quiet kitchen unsettling, but he did. Something about it told him that Shooter and his boy had been too busy to even think of supper.

  “He’s at a 4-H meeting,” Shooter said.

  “Isn’t Missy Wade the 4-H leader?”

  “One of them.”

  “How come she’s home if there’s a meeting tonight?” Biggs waited for that to sink in. Then he said, “I just came from there. I had a talk with Missy and Pat.”

  Shooter clapped his hands together and the noise was loud in the quiet house. “How the hell would I know that? I’m not Missy Wade’s keeper.”

  Biggs took a step closer to Shooter. He liked to do that when he knew someone wasn’t telling him the whole truth. He liked to get into their personal space just to see what they’d do.

  Shooter took a step back and bumped into the coffee table.

  “Why’d you kill that billy goat?” Biggs asked.

  “He was sick.” Shooter turned around and started straightening a stack of magazines on the coffee table—Popular Mechanics, Car and Driver, Reader’s Digest. “Nothing the vet could cure. I had to do it. Didn’t have any other choice.” Shooter was quiet for a while, and Biggs let the silence build. He knew that in cases like this, when someone had something they didn’t want to say, as he suspected was true about Shooter, the longer the silence went on the more likely they were to fill it, which eventually Shooter did. “I guess Missy told you all about it.” Still Biggs waited, not saying a word. “Guess she thinks it’s her business—everything that goes on around here. Sick goat. That’s the whole story.” He turned back to Biggs. “Now was there something else you wanted?”

  Biggs asked the question that had been going through his mind since he’d left Shooter’s house earlier. He hadn’t been able to forget something he’d noticed as he was leaving. The boy was sitting on the couch, his jacket wadded up in his lap. A sleeve of the jacket had come loose and was trailing down to the floor. For some reason, the image of that jacket sleeve kept coming to Biggs after he talked to Missy and Pat. Something about that sleeve that wouldn’t let him go.

  Finally, as he stood here with Shooter, he knew what it was that was troubling him. That sleeve. A patch of the vinyl was missing and the lining beneath it was ratty with holes. Biggs swore that when he recalled those holes he could see charred edges, as if they’d been burned into the material.

  “Where’s your boy’s jacket?” he asked Shooter now. “The one he had with him when I was here before. I want to look at it.”

  “That jacket?” Shooter
said. “Well, that jacket was old.”

  “He can’t show it to you.” Captain’s voice startled Biggs. The boy had come down the hallway that led from the living room to the bedrooms. How long he’d been standing there, listening, Biggs didn’t know. “He burned it,” Captain said. “He put it in the burn barrel and set it on fire.”

  “Like I said.” Shooter’s voice all of a sudden got too bright and cheery. “It was old.”

  “I’m tired of lying.” Captain stepped out of the hall and fully into the light of the living room. “I want to tell the truth.”

  So it was Captain who told Biggs the story of what happened the night of the fire. He stood in his own house, his father no longer able to keep him quiet, and he said all of it, starting with what his father had said about that goat pen and how it would be best to put a match to it and start over.

  “I got worried about the goats that night,” Captain said, “and I went outside to check on them. I remembered what my dad said, and I thought I could help Della.”

  He took his time. Biggs could tell that the boy had thought about this moment when he’d go against his father’s wishes and confess everything, had steeled himself for it and was now reciting the facts with little show of emotion. He told Biggs about leading the goats over to his father’s barn. It was just the billy, Methuselah, he said, that wouldn’t go.

  “He charged at me, but, finally, he settled down. He saw Ronnie there, and he just stopped.”

  “So Ronnie was behind the trailer?” Biggs said. “Just like you told me earlier? You’re sticking by that?’

  For a long time Captain didn’t say a word. He looked down at his feet. Then he raised his head. His lip trembled. “Yes,” he finally said, “Ronnie was there.”

  Captain was talking fast now, telling Biggs how Methuselah got stirred up again and came charging at him, butted him in the stomach and sent him sprawling backwards into the snow. Then Captain was back on his feet and trying to get away from the goat, running, spinning in circles, dodging this way and that. He unzipped his jacket and slipped his arms out of the sleeves. He stood still and let Methuselah come at him. Then, when the goat was close enough, he threw his jacket over his face and stepped to the side.