Late One Night

by Lee Martin

  “Like he had something to hide,” Missy said.

  She was still thinking on it the next morning when she set out for town. She meant to go to the bank to speak with the president, Faye Griggs, about the fund she’d set up for the girls. Missy wanted to make sure that Ronnie wouldn’t be able to withdraw that money. She was the account holder, and she didn’t intend to step aside. This seemed important to her, especially in light of Shooter’s story. If the authorities came for Ronnie, would he try to get what was in that account and then run?

  “Good folks gave that money,” she said. “Faye, it’d just kill me if it went for something other than what it’s meant for. Can we make it so I can divvy it out as I see fit to help with the girls’ care?”

  They were sitting in Faye’s office, Faye behind her desk and Missy in a chair in front of it. Faye leaned forward to close the space between them, and she spoke in a low, confidential voice. “You know, the world is full of folks who mean well. All sorts of people trying to do the right thing. What is it they say about the road to Hell? Paved with good intentions?”

  Faye had worked at the bank as long as Missy could remember. Her hair had gone gray in all the time she’d worked there, and the skin had gone loose under her chin. She’d been at the bank so long she knew about everything there was to know about the business of the folks who lived in and around Goldengate. She’d notarized their wills, handled their quit claim deeds on land sales, set up annuities for their retirements, sold them certificates of deposit, taken note of the balances in their savings accounts. She was known from time to time to let something slip about how well-off someone was or what had caused someone to have to make a significant withdrawal. She knew about sons and daughters who needed bail money. She knew who had disinherited whom. She knew about people with accounts they were keeping secret from a husband or a wife. She was sometimes—to put it plainly—a gossip. Over the years, she’d come to believe—at least Missy imagined this was true—that since she was the guardian of so many people’s business, she had a right to say whatever she wanted. “Sometimes it’s hard, isn’t it?” she said now to Missy. “I mean, it’s tough knowing the right thing to do.”

  The smell of eucalyptus coming from a candle burning on one of Faye’s filing cabinets was too strong for Missy’s preference. She coughed a little. “Are you saying it’s not right for me to watch over that money?” She’d lain awake long into the night thinking about what Shooter had said about Ronnie. She and Pat talked about it there in the dark of their room, wondering, again, whether they should carry Shooter’s information to Ray Biggs, fearing, finally, that such a move might be risky. If Ronnie was capable of burning that trailer, then what might he do to them if he found out they’d talked to the sheriff? “Shooter will do the right thing,” Pat said, and Missy agreed, but she didn’t feel absolved of the burden of carrying what she knew. Still, it was a bit of a relief to have to do nothing, to wait for Shooter to come forward. She and Pat came to the conclusion that she passed on now to Faye. “There’s no telling what he might do. Ronnie Black. You remember how he chopped up Della’s hair back in the fall?”

  “Night of the pancake supper. Oh, I know Ronnie Black.” Faye tipped her head and looked at Missy over the top of her glasses. “Not exactly a model citizen, is he?”

  “No, ma’am, not by a long shot.”

  Missy and Faye glanced at each other and then looked away, both of them aware that they were talking in less than flattering terms about a man who only a few days before had lost three of his children. Missy could hear the tellers chatting with customers at the counter outside Faye’s office. A telephone was ringing. Someone was counting out money—“That’s twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, a hundred.”

  “Well, it’s just a fact,” Faye finally said. “That’s what it is. Don’t worry, Missy. No one can get at that money except you.”

  “Thank you, Faye. That puts my mind at ease.”

  Missy stood up, and Faye came out from around her desk. “You’re a good soul.” She took Missy by the hand and squeezed. “Sometimes, though, you just have to trust folks to live their own lives.”

  “I wouldn’t say that Ronnie’s been any good at that up to now.”

  “No, sweetie, I guess not. But maybe he’ll do better. Second chances, you know.”

  “We could hope,” Missy said. “I guess.”

  When she came out of Faye’s office, she heard a voice—too loud, too angry—and without looking, she knew it belonged to Ronnie.

  “How in the world am I supposed to take care of my kids?”

  Missy turned and saw him leaning forward across the counter, the teller on the other side, a round-shouldered girl with limp brown hair, trying her best to keep her voice steady.

  “You’ll have to talk to Miss Griggs,” the girl said.

  “The hell with Miss Griggs.” Ronnie slapped his palm down on the counter. All the tellers had stopped their own business, as had the other customers in the bank. Everyone was looking at Ronnie now. “There’s money here for my girls, and now you’re telling me I can’t have it?”

  “You’re not the account holder.”

  “Well, if I’m not then who in the hell is?”

  The girl’s voice was shaking. “I’m really not at liberty. If you’d like to talk to Miss Griggs.”

  “I said the hell with Miss Griggs,” Ronnie said, and he stormed out of the bank.

  Missy heard someone call her name. From the far end of the bank, Laverne Ott was waving at her. Laverne’s voice rang out clear and strong the way it had so many times in a classroom. “Missy,” she said. “Missy Wade.”

  Faye Griggs came out of her office to see what the commotion was all about. The round-shouldered girl at the counter was crying. Another teller, a middle-aged woman with bright red fingernails, came to see what she could do to help her.

  Some of the customers were talking about what had just happened. A number of them were people who were familiar to Missy. They were talking all at once, their voices rising over one another’s.

  Then Lucy Tutor’s voice, high-pitched and nasal, fought free from the others, and she said, “It makes a body wonder.” Lucy drove a school bus and she was by nature a suspicious sort.

  “What’s that?” asked Roe Carl, a cashier at the Read’s IGA.

  “If Ronnie doesn’t have that money, then who does?”

  That’s when Faye whispered to Missy, “Don’t worry. I won’t tell. It’s no one’s business.”

  Laverne Ott was with them then, and she said to Missy, “I wish people weren’t so hard on Ronnie.”

  “You know what I heard?” Faye said. “Milt Timlin thinks there’s something suspicious about the whole thing.”

  “The fire?” Laverne said. “Oh, don’t tell me that. Hasn’t there been trouble enough?”

  Faye didn’t say a thing. A few moments went by, long enough for each of them to let their minds go where they wished they wouldn’t.

  Laverne turned toward Missy, such a scared, lost look on her face. She was recalling the night in September when Della came to the Kiwanis pancake supper with her hair cut ragged, and Laverne’s first thought had been that Ronnie was to blame. “Missy?” she said now, the way she had all those years ago when Missy was just a girl in her class and Laverne expected her to give the correct answer. “Missy, surely there’s no reason to suspect Ronnie of anything?”

  Missy could have said, no, of course not, don’t be silly. She could have said it would be ridiculous to think so. She could have put that thought right out of Faye and Laverne’s heads. But she couldn’t forget what Shooter had told her and Pat about Ronnie. It was such an incredible thought that she found herself talking to herself—at least she thought—and then she realized she’d said the words out loud.

  “I can’t believe Shooter saw him at the trailer.”

  “You mean earlier that day?” Faye asked. “I heard he was out there then.”

  Missy gave such a gentle answer, but later
she’d know it was the worst thing she could have said. She’d wonder if her words had been born of envy and anger and the desire to have those girls. “I don’t know.”

  She said it so softly, Laverne had to ask her to repeat herself. “Did you say you don’t know?”

  This time—one last chance to stop gossip before it began—she did the worst thing of all. She didn’t say a word. She turned and walked out of that bank.

  18

  That night, Pat came home and said to Missy, “Do you think Shooter told the fire marshal what he knows?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. You know how people like to talk.”

  Pat nodded. “You can bet they’ll run with it now. Maybe it’s only right. The truth has to come out one way or the other.”

  It was the dead of winter, and people spent the cold, snowy nights at home, too much time on their hands—enough time to allow for gossip. This neighbor called that one up and down the streets of Goldengate, out the blacktop to Bethlehem, and all through Phillipsport, and before the month was out, while everyone waited for the fire marshal’s report, there was more than one person who believed that Ronnie Black had tried to kill his wife and kids.

  What could be the reason?

  Speculation was he wanted a clean break and a new life with Brandi Tate that wouldn’t carry with it the burden of supporting his family.

  Well, look what he had now: four of those kids to raise.

  That is, if he didn’t end up in prison.

  The good will that some had built up for Ronnie at the funeral proved to be brittle. Now that the funeral was done and the grave covered over at the Bethlehem Church Cemetery, it was simple for some to believe that the man they’d first held responsible merely due to his absence from the family might turn out to be more villain than they’d first had cause to know.

  He’d been there. At the trailer.

  The night it burned?

  That’s right. Ronnie Black.

  People started wondering what they might say if asked. If the sheriff, Biggs, came wanting to know something about Ronnie and the months leading up to that fire, what would they recall that might be of use? They thought on the matter over lunch at the Real McCoy Café, getting their hair set at the Looking Glass, picking up a gallon of milk at the IGA, working their shifts at the oil refinery in Phillipsport, drinking shots and beers at Fat Daddy’s.

  Tweezer Gray, who tended bar there, remembered one night close to Christmas when Ronnie stayed until last call, and then said to Tweezer, “You know how much this divorce is going to cost me? Plenty, I can tell you that. A wife and seven kids. Jesus, what was I thinking?”

  Willie Wheeler, who lived next door to Brandi, said he saw Ronnie come out the door the afternoon of the fire and take up the street in his Firebird like there was no tomorrow. “He was steamed about something,” Willie told anyone who’d listen. “I’ll tell you that much for sure.”

  “He’s got a temper,” Alvin Higgins said. “I was uptown at the hardware store one day back in the fall—this must have been around the time he moved out on Della and took up living with Brandi—and he wanted to buy a snow blower on time, and Jingle Johnstone told him his credit was no good. ‘I can give you fifty dollars right now,’ Ronnie said, ‘and twenty a week until I pay it off.’ Jingle wasn’t going for it. ‘Nah, Ronnie,’ he said. ‘The word’s out around town. You’re a bad risk.’ Well, that set Ronnie off. ‘Goddamn you,’ he said. ‘Goddamn you and everyone else like you.’ There was a box of two-inch flat washers on the counter. Ronnie picked it up and slung it down the aisle, scattered those washers all the way to kingdom come. Then he just walked out, pretty as you please. I heard he came back later and apologized to Jingle, said he was just going through too much and sometimes he felt like he was going to bust, but still, there’s no call for an outburst like that.”

  Anna Spillman from over at the Real McCoy Café said Ronnie used to come in winter days when he hadn’t been able to scare up work, and he’d sit in a booth way back in the corner like he didn’t want anyone to see him. “He’d order coffee, and sometimes, if Pastor Quick wasn’t around, I’d let Ronnie have a piece of pie on the house because I felt sorry for him. I knew what he’d done to Della, but it was hard for me to think bad of him. He looked like he didn’t have a friend in the world, and one day I told him that. ‘Della’s out to get me,’ he said. ‘She’s going to make sure I pay for a good long while. She better be careful. Paybacks are hell.’ I thought he was just talking big, but now I’m not so sure, particularly after what I heard from Taylor Jack.”

  Taylor worked down the street at the Casey’s convenience store, and he saw Ronnie at the pumps the morning of the fire, filling a five-gallon gas can. He’d come back that night and bought five gallons more. That was the most damaging story of all. Two cans of gas in the dead of winter. What would a man who hadn’t been able to buy a snow blower, and who didn’t own a generator that anyone knew of, need with that gas?

  And there was everyone who’d seen Ronnie come up the blacktop the afternoon of the fire, gunning that Firebird, not even stopping for the school bus. The driver, Lucy Tutor, reported it to the principal. “Ronnie came up that blacktop just a-hellin’,” Lucy said. “Like if he killed someone he wouldn’t care.” She’d picked up all the latest lingo from the kids. “Trust me, that boy needed to slow his roll.”

  _________

  That’s what Ronnie was trying to do in those days after the funeral. He was trying to get his life back on an even keel. He had the girls, and he and Brandi were determined to make them a home, even if Angel wasn’t sure she was ready to accept it. The other girls were coming along just fine. Hannah, true to her good nature, accepted Brandi right away, weaving her a friendship bracelet from green and orange threads. She put it around Brandi’s wrist and fastened it by looping one end around the green button sewn to the other end.

  “You’re supposed to wish for something now,” Hannah said.

  “Like money?” Brandi asked. “Is that what I should wish for?”

  Hannah shrugged. “Something you really, really want,” she said. “Keep this bracelet on until the yarn wears out and it falls off your wrist. Then your wish will come true.”

  They were in the living room on the couch, and Ronnie was eavesdropping on them. He lay on the bed in his and Brandi’s room and listened to the sounds of the house after supper was done and the girls were chattering. Sarah was learning her part for a class play. She was the voice of the bridge in The Three Billy Goats Gruff. She kept saying, “Trip, trap, trip, trap, trip, trap.” And Ronnie thought it was wonderful to hear those words again and again, to know they came from his daughter. Even the angry bounce of a basketball in the bedroom that Angel shared with Hannah was a sound that pleased him. Emma passed by in the hallway, singing the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” song, only she was trying to sing the special verse that Della always sang to her, and she kept stumbling over the first line about a sweetie-weetie butterfly. Ronnie sang the verse in his head:

  A sweetie-weetie butterfly

  Flew around and ‘round;

  A strong wind came along and blew it to the ground.

  Out came its Daddy and gave it a kiss and hug,

  And the sweetie-weetie butterfly was as happy as a bug.

  Ronnie couldn’t say he was happy—no, not exactly that. It hadn’t been smooth sailing. Angel was still sullen and hateful sometimes. “Patience,” Brandi told him. “It hasn’t been easy for her. It hasn’t been easy for any of them.”

  Sarah woke some nights, screaming from nightmares about the fire. Hannah sometimes went quiet in the midst of playing a game or watching TV and tears filled her eyes. Nights, when Ronnie was tucking Emma into bed, she might claim she’d seen Emily somewhere in the house—Emily skipping rope in the living room, Emily hiding in the closet, Emily in the kitchen eating Oreos. Little bumps, Brandi told him. Little by little, they’d smooth out. Only Hannah—dependable, level-headed Hannah—seemed beyond ruin.

 
If he wasn’t happy, then at least he was thankful. He had his girls, and Brandi had opened her heart to them. They were back in school, and each day brought them closer to retrieving at least some of the life he’d taken from them when he’d left Della back in the fall.

  A few days after he’d gone to the bank and tried to withdraw some of the money from the account set up for his girls, Missy paid him a visit.

  She had a check she’d written out for him. Three hundred dollars for him to spend on the girls however he saw fit.

  It was midmorning and the girls were in school. Brandi was in Phillipsport at work at the Savings and Loan.

  Ronnie had just got home from the Real McCoy Café, where he’d sat drinking coffee and talking to the waitress, Anna Spillman. He’d just kicked off his boots when he heard the knock on the door.

  He stood in the open doorway, studying that check.

  “Missy?” he said.

  She looked down at his feet and then over to the side of the porch. “You should know I’m the one who holds that account at the bank.” She had her head turned toward Willie Wheeler’s house, a squat bungalow with brown asphalt shingle siding. The curtains were open at all the windows. She was having a hard time facing Ronnie. She wondered whether he’d heard the gossip and whether he could guess that she’d helped start it. She wanted to be done with her chore and on her way. “I’d like to see that money build up interest and be there for the girls when they get out of high school,” she said. “They might need it to help with college, or just to start their own families. I don’t know. I just don’t want to spend it down just for the sake of spending it.” She turned her head and looked him in the eye for the first time. “If they ever need anything between now and then, something you can’t afford, you let me know. How’s that?”

  “Is that the way you’ve decided it should be?”

  She gave him a stiff nod. “I won’t let those girls want for anything. You can count on that.”