Late One Night

by Lee Martin

  Winner of the 1995 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction,

  selected by Amy Bloom

  “Together, the pieces make for a hauntingly coherent first collection, often about pitiful family scenarios in which loyalties are tested, lies offered and exposed, and in which ironies abound.… Bleak, Midwestern landscapes well serve many of these stark and solid narratives.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Most of the stories in this debut collection revolve around the relationship between teenage sons and their fathers in the Midwest of the 1950s and ’60s. Although Lee Martin favors endings in which the young protagonist’s world is shattered by a selfish paternal act, he manages to infuse each of these similar situations with its own particular twist.… What (his characters) learn…is just how easily a life can come apart.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “These are beautifully written stories of violence, fathers and sons, and the large and small improvisations that make up American life. Lee Martin’s is a very impressive first collection.”

  —Lorrie Moore, author of A Gate at the Stairs

  “Martin’s work resists the pull of shiny look-at-me prose.… Martin wants to tell the story. He wants us to know everyone and give them a chance, to understand what is happening, even as we are shaking our heads at how appalling, how lame, how stupid, how vulnerable we all are.”

  —From the Foreword by Amy Bloom

  Late One Night

  Late One

  Night

  a novel

  Lee Martin

  5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd.

  Ann Arbor, MI 48103

  www.dzancbooks.org

  LATE ONE NIGHT. Copyright © 2016, text by Lee Martin. All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Dzanc Books, 5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48103.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Martin, Lee, 1955- author.

  Title: Late one night : a novel / by Lee Martin.

  Description: Ann Arbor, MI : Dzanc Books, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015040872 | ISBN 9781938103490 (hardback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Thrillers. | FICTION / Crime. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3563.A724927 L38 2016 | DDC 813/.54--dc23

  First US edition: May 2016

  ISBN: 978-1-941531-78-5

  Book design by Michelle Dotter

  This is a work of fiction. Characters and names appearing in this work are a product of the author’s imagination, and any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Cathy

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

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

  —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  1

  Ronnie swore it was talk and nothing more. Jesus. Just the hasty words of folks eager to blame someone. They’d wanted answers ever since the news first broke and then traveled across the southern part of Illinois and as far north as Chicago, where the AP wire service picked it up and sent it all over the country. News from a house trailer along a blacktop road ten miles east of Goldengate in the dark of a winter’s night. News the like you’d never want to hear if you could help it.

  “You really think I could do something like that?” Ronnie said to the sheriff, Ray Biggs. “You think I’m that kind?”

  Biggs was a tall man with dark hair that came to a widow’s peak. He squinted his eyes, the worry crease above the bridge of his nose furrowing into his brow. “Motive and opportunity.” He slapped his hand down on the table twice, the heavy gold band of his Masonic ring making a sharp clacking noise. “Doesn’t take a blind man to see you had both.”

  Ronnie watched out the window as snow fell on the courthouse lawn. Half rain, with just enough snow mixed in to add to the cover already on the ground. Through the bare limbs of the giant oaks, he looked down onto State Street. Lights were on in the windows of the J.C. Penney store, and the Mi Casita Mexican restaurant, and the Reasoner Insurance Agency. A man came out of Penney’s, a blue scarf wrapped around his face, his shoulders hunched up against the frigid air. He leaned into the wind as he hurried down the sidewalk. Ronnie wished he could be that man, making his way through the cold, making his way home to his family.

  “You better start talking.” Biggs leaned back in his chair. “You better tell me something I’ll believe.”

  “So it’s a story you want?” Ronnie kept staring out the window, thinking how pretty that snow was on the grass and the boughs of the evergreen trees on the courthouse lawn.

  “A true story,” Biggs said. “A story so real it’ll save you. A story as real as that.”

  2

  Della and the kids—the oldest fourteen, the youngest still a baby—lived in a trailer just south of the Bethlehem corner. Lived there by themselves because late in September, Ronnie moved out and took up living in town with his girlfriend, Brandi Tate. For a while, it was the talk all around Goldengate and out the blacktop to the farms and the shotgun houses and the trailer homes. All that autumn and up through Thanksgiving, folks spoke of it at Read’s IGA, Inyart’s Sundries, Johnstone’s Hardware, the First National Bank, the Real McCoy Café: Ronnie Black had walked out on Della and all those kids.

  It was ten thirty on a bitterly cold night in January when Missy Wade, Della’s neighbor, looked out her bedroom window and could hardly believe what she saw.

  The trailer was on fire.

  Missy and her husband, Pat, lived a hundred yards to the west of Della, a barren cornfield between them. It was mostly open land out there. The flat fields stretched back to thin bands of woodland. That night, there was snow cover on the fields and the temperature had gone down below zero. Across the road from Della’s, a pole light lit up Shooter Rowe’s barnyard and the square, low-roofed ranch house where he lived with his son. Missy saw them running toward the trailer: Shooter and Wesley, the simpleminded boy everyone called Captain.

  Pat was already asleep, and Missy shook him hard. The phone was in her hand, and she was calling 911.

  “Wake up,” she said. “Pat, wake up. Della’s trailer’s on fire.”

  Pat was up in a snap, throwing on the Carhartt overalls he’d left draped over a chair, pushing his feet into boots, grabbing a coat, and then running out into the cold night, running up the blacktop, his heart beating hard, the frigid air stinging his nostrils and pushing an ache into his throat and chest.

  Shooter was already at the trailer. The front door stood open, and his bulk nearly filled it, his broad back and shoulders, his height, the mane of his long silver hair. When Pat got there, he saw that Della was handing out one of the twins. The little girl was in a white sleep shirt, and Shooter held her and turned to Pat with the most helpless look on his face, as if he wasn’t sure what to do with this bare-legged, barefoot girl.

  Captain stepped up. He was nearly as tall as his father, a sixteenyear-old boy whose body was growing into manhood. Without a word, he took the girl from Shooter and handed her to the oldest girl, Angel, who was in sweatpants and a T-shirt. Hannah, the next in line, was there too, a wild look in her eyes, her face red from the heat of the fire.

  Pat counted in his head—three kids safe and four more still inside.

  The air stank of burning plastic and fiberglass insulation and melting vinyl. It all popped and crackled. The roof was starting to go.

  “Oh, good Lord,” Shooter said.

  He started to go into the trailer, but then Della was back. This time she had Sarah, the one born a few years after Hannah. Della handed Sarah out to Shooter, and he gave her to Pat. She clung to his neck, and he could smell the smoke on her, could feel the
heat from her body.

  Off in the distance, the sirens from the first fire trucks grew louder.

  “You better get out of there,” Shooter yelled.

  Della shook her head. “I’m going back for Emily.” So the first twin had been Emma. Pat would tell Missy later that Della was calm. She wasn’t panicked at all. “I’m going to get Emily and Gracie and Junior,” she said. “I’m going to get them all out.”

  3

  Earlier that evening she’d scooped the hot ashes from the Franklin stove into a cardboard box. She was burning wood in the stove because the wall furnace had been cutting out. She couldn’t have that, not with the baby, Junior, sick with the croup.

  Her parents dropped by around suppertime, carrying in hot dogs and buns and bags of potato chips, and after they ate, her father, Wayne, gave the furnace a check. Slowed by age, he still did a few home repairs and small jobs here and there, but nothing to count for anything. Wayne Best used to be able to go longer than the day itself, folks said, but now he had tremors in his fingers and sometimes dizzy spells that knocked him flat. He was a lean man who kept his white hair cut in a flattop. He had a white moustache that his wife, Lois, kept neatly trimmed.

  “Your pilot light’s out,” he told Della.

  He relit it, the match flame wavering in his unsteady hand, and after a while he said everything seemed to be working fine.

  “Maybe you should gather up the kids and come spend the night at our place,” Lois said. “Just to be on the safe side. Weather on the radio said we might get down to ten below.”

  “Daddy’s got the furnace running.” Della was too tired to think about all it would take to get the kids bundled up, and pajamas and things gathered, and then over to her parents’ house. “I’ll keep the Franklin stove burning just in case.”

  Wayne helped Lois on with her coat. She was a heavy woman with a knee that needed to be replaced. A round-faced woman with deep lines around her eyes and on her forehead from her tendency to worry things to death. She took Wayne’s arm and they started for the door.

  “Better pull your car into the garage.” Wayne opened the door and the cold air came rushing in around Della’s legs. “Save your battery.”

  The garage sat at the end of the short lane that ran alongside the trailer. Since Ronnie had left her back in the fall, she’d never had a thought of putting her car in the garage, which had always been for the Firebird he’d restored. It was easier now for her to leave her Ford in the lane.

  “I will, Daddy,” she said. “Be careful on those steps. They’re icy.”

  The wind was up now, out of the north, sweeping across the flat land. Lois and Wayne leaned into that wind. Wayne opened the passenger-side door and helped Lois up. He tucked the hem of her long coat into the truck and then closed the door. He turned back to the trailer and gave Della a wave. She waved back. Then she stood there in the cold as Wayne got behind the wheel, backed out onto the blacktop, and set out for home.

  After they were gone, Della asked Angel to carry the box of hot ashes out to the compost pile when she went to feed the goats the girls kept for their 4-H project. Five Nubian goats—two nannies with long floppy ears, two kids stubbing around on their short legs, and the billy with his horns curved back over his head.

  “It’s Hannah’s turn to feed,” Angel said. She was fourteen and strongheaded, a girl with light blue eyes that went icy when she cut them at someone who’d rubbed her the wrong way. Her blond hair fell across her forehead, and she swept it back with a jerk of her arm.

  “I just went out for more wood,” said Hannah. How rare it was for her to put up a fuss. She was twelve, the dependable one, the obedient one—a Sunday’s child, bonnie and blithe and good and gay. Her hair was in a neatly wrapped braid.

  “Mom?” said Angel. Della just stared at her until finally Angel said, “Whatever.”

  But then American Idol came on TV, and the girls settled in. Even Della watched. She liked the reality shows like Idol and Dancing with the Stars. Everyone always looked so glamorous, and for at least a while, she could ignore the mess of her own life.

  The twins, Emma and Emily, were six, just old enough to be excited when their older sisters were. Sarah, the forgetful one, was nine, and Gracie, a pistol and a scold, was three. Junior was just barely a year. Della’s family. Hunkered down in their trailer on a cold winter night.

  After the show was over, the phone rang, and it was Lois calling to see whether Della had put her car in the garage. “Your daddy wants to know.”

  “Tell him I’ve taken care of it,” Della said, and then, after she was off the phone, she put on a coat and went out to make good on her word.

  What little was left of the evening whirled by in a tangle of voices, the music of her children rising and then gradually falling as they got ready for bed, slipped between the covers, and drifted off to sleep.

  Della was so tired. She was flat worn out. So tired that when she took one last trip through the living room, switching off lights, and saw the cardboard box of ashes still by the Franklin stove, she couldn’t bring herself to wake up Angel and tell her to finish her chore. Nor did Della feel like getting her coat back on to haul the ashes out to the compost. She opened up the back door and set the box outside on the wooden stoop. The wind was still up, and she shivered as she closed the door.

  Just then, the phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number on the caller ID, so she let it ring and ring. She was too worn out to talk to someone anyway. What a day it had been—all the houses she’d cleaned, and a run-in with Ronnie to boot.

  She put another log in the Franklin stove.

  “Who was on the phone?” Angel called to her as she passed by in the hallway.

  “Wrong number.”

  She went into her bedroom, where she checked on the baby and then lay down and quickly fell asleep, not giving that call a second thought.

  In town, Ronnie hung up the payphone at the Casey’s convenience store and got in his Firebird. He had a five-gallon can of gasoline on the seat beside him, and he knew the way out the blacktop, knew it by heart.

  4

  Della, nor anyone else for that matter, had any way of knowing that a few weeks before the fire, Shooter had forced himself to go through more of his wife’s things, a task he’d been doing a little at a time since she died back in the spring. All that was left were a few boxes still in her closet, just a few cardboard boxes that held who knew what and then it’d all be over, nothing more to do but take care of Captain. And that was turning into a full-time job and then some.

  Shooter sat on the floor outside the closet and opened the first of the three boxes that he’d eyed throughout the summer and autumn and into December, putting off the moment when he’d open them, trying to make his chore last as long as he could, dreading the time when it’d be done and the ache of Merlene’s absence would settle around him with a completeness he feared would bring him to his knees.

  The box was full of photographs, some of them as old as Merlene’s girlhood. Little girl with her hair in braids and a calico cat squirming in her arms. Teenage girl in her high school graduation gown, a pair of white pumps on her feet. Pictures of her and Shooter when they were young and just starting out. Merlene was such a tiny thing next to his bulk.

  In one picture, she stood in their kitchen archway, turned sideways so the swell of her stomach showed. She was pregnant with Captain, and looking at that picture Shooter felt his throat close, overcome as he was with what it’d felt like to be that young couple expecting their first baby, thrilled and in love. Then he’d come, Wesley, and Shooter hadn’t known what to do with him, had been afraid to hold him, had little by little slipped away from him and Merlene, and now here he was, the one left to do right by their son.

  The second box had mementos in it: Captain’s storybooks from when he was a kid, drawings he’d done, cards he’d made for Merlene on Mother’s Day. Some of Merlene’s favorite books were there, too, like The Diary of Anne Frank. Sho
oter leafed through its pages, and to his surprise a snapshot fell out. A shot of Ronnie sitting inside Shooter’s house, sitting backwards astraddle a ladder back chair, his hands folded on the top slat, his chin resting on top of them, his eyes closed.

  At ease.

  The words popped into Shooter’s head. It was plain that Ronnie was content to be where he was. At peace. It came to Shooter, then, that Merlene had taken that picture—he couldn’t remember ever having seen it—and had kept it back so she could look at it any time she chose.

  “He’s trouble,” she said about Ronnie once. Shooter had never forgotten it. “But he’s got a sweetness about him. Sweet like a little boy.”

  Shooter scoffed at that. Ronnie was just mean and tricky enough to do some damage if the punching and gouging got going. He had a tattoo on the back of his neck, BAD MOON. Shooter knew enough of his history—orphaned young and farmed out to one foster home after another—to make him believe it was true; he’d been born under a bad moon on the rise.

  Now, looking at that picture, Shooter wondered for a moment whether Merlene had been more smitten with Ronnie than Shooter had ever known. Something about that photo nestled there with all those family pictures—when in the world would Merlene have taken it, sometime when she and Ronnie were alone in the house?—pricked at Shooter and led him to imagine things he’d be ashamed to admit.

  Just his mind running away with him, he thought. Just nonsense. Nothing more than that. Merlene had thought the world of him. She’d never have done anything to be ashamed of, and particularly not with the likes of Ronnie.

  Then Shooter opened a blue stationery box. He remembered buying it for Merlene one year for Christmas. Oh, how she loved that stationery, each sheet embossed with her monogram. “Now, that’s fancy,” she said when she opened it, and she held up a single sheet and traced her finger over the M, and the R, and the E. Merlene Elizabeth Rowe. “My, my, my,” she said. “It’s fit for a queen.”