Late One Night

by Lee Martin

  But Biggs wanted to know what Ronnie was doing when Captain saw him.

  “He wasn’t doing anything,” Captain said.

  “Was there gasoline?” Biggs kept his voice low and as gentle as he could manage, coaxing Captain. “Son, listen to me now. Did you see Ronnie pour gasoline on that trailer?”

  Captain said, “No, I didn’t see him do that.”

  “But you told me you did. Said he slopped it all over that trailer and lit it up. Son, were you lying?”

  “Wesley.” Shooter’s voice was flat and worn out, as if he were giving in to what he knew he couldn’t stop. “Tell him the rest.”

  At the courthouse, Ronnie told the deputy that when he drove back to town that night, the smell of gas was too much for him. He had the Marathon can resting on the floor in front of the passenger seat, and he couldn’t bear to hear the gas that was left in it sloshing around.

  “I was disgusted with myself,” he said. “So I pulled over to the side of the road, and I got that can out, and I poured what was left into my car, as much as it’d hold anyway.”

  The deputy said, “There was about a gallon left in it when we found it in Brandi’s shed.”

  “That sounds about right,” said Ronnie. “That was all I could do. So I went back into town, and I put that can in the shed and then went in to go to bed.”

  Captain said, “We were in the bathroom when we first saw the fire. My dad went to the phone to call 911, and I ran out the front door and across the road. Angel and Hannah were outside. I ran around the end of the trailer to see if I could get in the back door. People think I’m stupid, but I knew what was happening. That trailer was on fire, and Della and the other kids were inside, and they needed help.”

  The whole back side of the trailer was in flames—flames leaping up to the windows, the siding already curling and melting, the back door wreathed with fire.

  For the first time since he’d begun to tell his story, Captain’s voice quavered. He bit his lip. He closed his eyes, squeezed them shut so tightly his face pinched up in a grimace. “There wasn’t anything I could do,” he finally said in a shaky whisper.

  Shooter kept quiet. He let Captain tell his story.

  “Then I saw Methuselah,” he said.

  The goat, calm now, had Captain’s bomber jacket in his mouth. The sleeve of that jacket had gotten wrapped around one of his forelegs.

  “It was on fire,” Captain said. “My jacket sleeve. It was burning.”

  So was Methuselah, the vinyl of the burning sleeve melting into his hair and the skin beneath it. Captain ran to him.

  “I threw my arms around him,” he said, “and I wrestled him down. I hoped the snow would put out the fire.”

  Which it did. Captain got the bomber jacket free from Methuselah. Then he let the goat up and watched it run, disappearing into the night—into the place where the darkness held, black and deep, in spite of the fire.

  When Captain got back around front, his father was there, and soon Pat Wade came running from his house, and Della was handing one of the twins out to Shooter. Captain stepped up and took her in his arms, tears running down his cheeks now because he knew.

  “I knew exactly what had happened,” he said. “I didn’t want to know it, but I did.”

  For a good while, no one said a word. The clock ticked. The refrigerator hummed. The furnace clicked on.

  Biggs waited for Captain to tell the rest of his story, but it was Shooter who spoke next. He said, “That vinyl from Captain’s coat melted into that goat’s leg, and I couldn’t get it out. When the fire marshal’s deputies started coming around, I was afraid they’d see it, and I didn’t want them to know that Captain had been anywhere near that fire. That’s why I put that goat down. I couldn’t take the chance.”

  Biggs could see the guilt that must have wracked Shooter all those weeks. He could see it deep in his eyes—the pain he’d never be able to rid himself of, not even now that the story had been told. The telling only made it worse. The telling made it true.

  “I had to protect Wesley,” Shooter said.

  His Adam’s apple slid up and down his throat as he swallowed words he could hardly make himself say. Finally, though, he said them, and, when he did, Biggs felt his heart catch. He was a father, too.

  “You’re telling me your boy started that fire,” Biggs said.

  “I was afraid you’d take him away from me if the truth got out. Put him in a juvenile home. Or worse, try him as an adult and lock him up. I promised his mother I’d always look out for him.”

  Biggs said to Captain, “Son, you need to tell me everything. If you started that fire, I need you to tell me exactly how you did it.”

  It was a trick that Ronnie had showed him, a trick Captain had tried and tried to master and finally had.

  That night behind the trailer, he said to Ronnie, “I won’t tell anyone.”

  Ronnie knew he was saying he wouldn’t let it out that he’d been there, wouldn’t say a word about the gasoline. Captain was telling him he’d keep it all a secret. There was still time then to believe that such a thing was possible, that they could go their separate ways, step back into their lives and no one would be the wiser.

  “You’re a good friend,” Ronnie said. “You’re better than a million of me.”

  He knew he didn’t deserve such goodness. He’d come out in the night to do a bad thing, but he’d spotted that hole in the trailer’s siding, and then Captain was there, and now as much as Ronnie was relieved, he was humbled and ashamed to be standing before this simple boy who, no matter what he was up to with those goats, was good of heart enough to know there were things a man should ignore, things too ugly to let out into the air. Captain was doing him that favor, leaving him to go back into town and to do his best to face the truth about himself. He was the kind of man who could burn out his wife and kids, and Captain was passing no judgment on him for that, was telling him that would be his and his alone to live with.

  “You always treated me good,” Captain said. “You let me be your right-hand man.”

  Ronnie couldn’t stop himself. He asked Captain why he’d come for the goats. “Why’d you take them?”

  Captain’s voice, when he finally spoke, was tinged with just the slightest air of disbelief, as if he couldn’t imagine how Ronnie didn’t know. “They need a better place,” Captain said. “It’s a cold, cold night. They need a warmer place to be.”

  That was enough to break Ronnie, the fact that Captain had come to do this favor. The wind was sweeping across the open fields. Overhead, the stars were brilliant in the clear sky. He wanted to put his arms around Captain. He wanted to thank him for being there on this night when he’d come to do harm. He wanted to press the boy to him and believe that people, even him, could be good.

  But instead he said, “Guess we both need to get inside where it’s warm.”

  Then he gathered up the Marathon can and made his way to his car. He was moving into the wind now, and he couldn’t hear Captain calling his name. He didn’t know that the boy had taken the box of Diamond matches from his jeans pocket, didn’t know that he’d pressed the head of a match against the strike strip, didn’t know that he’d flicked it with his finger—at that moment, the wind died down, and Ronnie felt the eerie calm after all the ruckus—didn’t see that match, perfectly lit, twirling in the dark.

  “Look what I can do,” Captain said. “Look what you taught me.”

  But Ronnie couldn’t make out the words. He was too far away.

  Captain heard the Firebird come to life, not with a revving of the engine like Ronnie usually gave it, but with a low rumble of the exhaust pipes. The Firebird’s tires cracked through the thin ice at the shoulder of the blacktop as the car eased forward. Captain went to the end of the trailer in enough time to see Ronnie creeping up the blacktop, no headlights on, the white of the snow cover on each side of the road enough to guide him before he felt it was safe to turn on his headlights and make his way back into
town.

  “Ronnie,” Captain said, and he felt something warm his chest, something he had no words for—he only knew it had something to do with the way his mother had always made him believe that he was special, the Captain of the Universe. He only knew it had something to do with his father and Ronnie and Della and all the kids and Missy and Pat and, yes, even with Brandi Tate. Even the goats. All of them on this cold night.

  Captain held that feeling inside him. He let it lead him home. He didn’t know that his legs had brushed through the dry grass or that his boots had tracked through the gas that had pooled up on the frozen ground. He didn’t think a thing about the match he’d lit and sent twirling toward the trailer. He didn’t know that the match had fallen onto the old chair, but later he’d know—the kind of knowing you know in your knower, nary a need for proof—that the lit match had twirled and dropped through the suddenly still night and fallen in a place where the first flame, such a small thing it must have been, caught hold, took in fuel and air and before long became something headstrong and wild, nothing anyone could hope to stop.

  Biggs listened to the story of the match. Then he said, “Son, where did that gas come from?”

  “There was a can sitting on the ground behind the trailer.”

  “You didn’t tote it from your place like your daddy thought?”

  “No, it was just there.”

  Shooter said, “But you gave me cause to believe—”

  Biggs interrupted him. He was growing impatient. “So you poured the gasoline around the trailer?”

  Captain wouldn’t answer. He got interested in the scab on his hand, picking at the crust. Biggs knew he wouldn’t answer because he hadn’t thought his story all the way through. He didn’t have an answer because he hadn’t been the one to spread that gasoline.

  “Son, if there was a can of gas back there,” Biggs said, “what happened to it?”

  Shooter answered for him, “I guess it burned up in the fire.”

  “Fire marshal deputies went through everything left over there.” Biggs shook his head. “No gas can. You know why, son?” Biggs waited for Captain to look at him, but he wouldn’t. “Because Ronnie took that can away with him, didn’t he? He was the one who poured that gas. Isn’t that so, son? He poured it, and then, if what you’re telling me is the truth, you lit it up.”

  Captain’s voice was barely a whisper. “I didn’t mean to. I just wanted to show Ronnie what I could do with that match.”

  “I didn’t know any of that,” Shooter said, his voice getting softer now. “I thought Wesley—you know—I thought—well, I wasn’t too far off from what I thought to be true. I couldn’t take a chance that you’d find out.”

  “So you made up that story about Ronnie,” Biggs said, “and it turned out to be near enough true.”

  Shooter’s voice was fierce now, pleading with Biggs. “Wouldn’t you have done it too? Tell me, wouldn’t you have done whatever it took to save your son?”

  Biggs couldn’t say what he would have done had he stood in Shooter’s place, nor did he have an answer to the next question that Shooter asked.

  “So tell me, Biggs, who’s to hold to account? My boy or Ronnie Black?”

  31

  That was the question that haunted the folks in Phillipsport and Goldengate all through the rest of winter. It was a question, really, that wouldn’t go away, not as long as there were folks alive who knew the story of Ronnie Black and his wife, Della, and how she and three of their children died late one night when their trailer caught on fire.

  Caught on fire because a simpleminded boy loved a man who may have loved him back, but who, in the end, had no right to his devotion. Because the man made the boy feel special, and as a result the boy wanted to impress him with the trick he’d learned. Because the man went as far as to pour out that gasoline. Because the wind died down at the moment that lit match was twirling through the air. A trailer burned and four people died, and some said, well what do you expect from a boy like that, and some said, that poor boy, no mother and now this.

  Laverne Ott said, “Wesley Rowe is God’s child. He may not always think the way you and I do, but I’ll tell you this, he knows what it is to love someone.”

  Of course, there was the matter of what to do now that the facts were clear: a pissed-off man sloshing gasoline on a trailer with the intent of setting it on fire and then coming to his senses and walking away; a boy who meant no harm striking the match that started the blaze.

  Spilled gasoline, a fancy match trick, a cold winter night.

  “I never meant to hurt anyone,” Captain told Biggs. “Della was always good to me. I wanted to do something nice for her.”

  In the swirl of all the talk that followed Captain’s confession, that was the one indisputable fact—he hadn’t intended to set that trailer on fire.

  “I didn’t know anyone was in there,” Shooter said again and again when he told his story. “I thought Della had taken the kids to her folks’ house.”

  After Ray Biggs had Captain’s story, he went back to the courthouse, and one more time he sat across the table from Ronnie in the interrogation room, and he questioned him again about the events of the night the trailer burned.

  “Tell it to me again, Ronnie,” Biggs said. “Take your time.”

  So Ronnie went through it all—the gas can, Wesley Rowe, the goats, patching the hole in the siding with a strip from his T-shirt, the trip back to town, taking off the T-shirt and stuffing it under the passenger seat before going on to Brandi’s house and getting into bed.

  “I didn’t want her to see that shirt, torn up like that. I was afraid if she saw it and asked what happened, I’d tell her everything. I didn’t know how to tell her I’d gone to Della’s meaning to burn the trailer.” He bowed his head and didn’t say a word for a good while. Then in a voice he was straining to hold steady, he said, “Then Pat Wade came with the news. He came to tell me—”

  He couldn’t go on, and Biggs took pity on him. “It was the boy.” He told Ronnie about Captain and the lit match. “He wouldn’t say that you poured that gas. Guess he was trying to keep that a secret. But we know you did, now don’t we?”

  Ronnie nodded, choking back the thickness in his throat that came to him when he thought of how Captain had done his best to protect him. He thought how there were two kinds of people in the world. There were people like Captain, and then there were people like him. There were people who were faithful, and there were people who weren’t. “I patched that hole in the siding.” Ronnie’s eyes were wet. “I could do that much for my family, and that’s what I did.”

  “You know that boy’s not to blame for this,” Biggs said. “But you? Even though you didn’t do what you went out there to do, you still had the intent, a criminal intent, and you poured that gas, and then you walked away.” He let Ronnie think about that a while. “You understand what I’m saying? Four people are dead because you did what you did. That’s reckless homicide, Ronnie. That’s exactly what that is.”

  “I’d go back and change it if I could.”

  The next day, Biggs carried the story to Lois and Wayne Best, and when Lois had heard all there was to hear, she asked Biggs if he could drive her over to the Rowes’. She had things she needed to say.

  Biggs brought her to Shooter’s house in his patrol car. She walked into that house, her back bent from her years of trying to move forward through the world, her worn-out knee balky but her head lifted and her eyes set straight ahead.

  She didn’t bother to take off her coat or to accept Shooter’s offer of a chair.

  “Ma’am,” he finally said. He hadn’t shaved—had barely slept, Biggs would wager—and now he looked wrung out and ready to pin to the line. “My boy, he didn’t mean any harm.”

  Lois drew herself up as straight as she could. “I know what it is to have a child. Della knew that too. She did everything to make sure her kids were loved and safe. Put up with Ronnie’s mess, cleaned other people’s houses n
early every day of her life. We all did what we could for those kids.”

  Shooter rubbed his hand over his face. He looked so scared and lost. “I keep worrying over what’s going to happen to Wesley. You know how some of the kids make fun of him.”

  “Where is he?” Lois asked. “Is he here?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Shooter said. “I kept him out of school today. I figured the talk would be making its way around. He’s back there in his room.”

  “I want to see him, please.” Lois pointed down the hall. “This way?”

  “First door on your left.”

  Shooter took a few steps ahead of her before Lois stopped him by grabbing onto his arm. “I’d like to be alone with him, please. Just the two of us. Just him and me.”

  “Well—” Shooter glanced at Biggs, looking for a sign of what he should do, and Biggs gave him a nod. “I guess that’d be all right.” He stepped aside so Lois could move past him. “Yes, ma’am.”

  She tapped on the closed door with her knuckles. “Honey?” she said. “It’s just Lois. You know me. I want to make sure you’re all right.”

  When no answer came, she turned the knob and opened the door a crack. “I’m going to come in, honey. Is that all right?”

  Captain’s voice seemed to come from somewhere very far away, just a mumble, saying, “You won’t yell at me?”

  “Oh, honey. Don’t you worry now.”

  He was sitting up in bed, a quilt over his legs, and Lois recognized that quilt right away. She knew it was one his mother had made after she got sick, working on it little by little as she felt up to it. It was a pattern called Heart after Heart—five rows of four hearts each, all pieced and appliquéd. “I want to do this for Wesley,” she told Lois once when she came to visit. “I want him to know that I might be gone, but my heart will always be part of his.”