Lee Martin - Late One Night

“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.