Lee Martin - Late One Night

“I’m not out to make things hard for you. Lord knows you’ve had trouble enough.” Biggs rubbed his hand over his mouth, considering. “Get in your car, then, and drive on over to the courthouse. I’ll be behind you.”

Next door, Willie Wheeler had come out to spread some salt on his walk, even though that walk was clear and there was no new snow in the forecast. Ronnie knew he just wanted to see if he could eavesdrop. A car came down Locust, Alvin Higgins in his old green Ford pickup with a tool case across the bed. He slowed down and took a good long look.

“All right,” Ronnie finally said. “But I can tell you I haven’t done a thing wrong.”

By the time the ambulance got to the IGA, Wayne was sitting on a folding chair that Roe Carl had found for him. The medics checked him over, took all his vitals, asked him whether he thought he should go to the hospital.

He told them, no, he just got dizzy sometimes. “It’s the vertigo,” he said. “That’s all. Tell them, Lois.”

“He gets the spins,” said Lois. “Been happening for a while now.” She was stroking Wayne’s head. “You feel better?”

“I feel all right.” He met the eyes of the two medics. He cursed the vertigo and how it turned him into a fall-down dizzy old man. “I’m sorry for all the upset,” he said, and that was that, so he thought. Just a little scare on a Thursday morning, that, thank goodness, came to nothing.

Ronnie eased his Firebird into a parking spot on the south side of the courthouse and watched Biggs pull his patrol car up the inclined drive reserved for the sheriff. Biggs got out and waited for Ronnie to come up the courthouse steps. It was twelve o’clock and the fire whistle was blowing to mark the noon hour the same way it’d done every weekday as long as Ronnie could remember. He knew Brandi would be leaving the Savings and Loan to slip out for lunch and maybe a little window shopping if she had time. She was starting to look at things for the baby. It would be a few weeks before the ultrasound would tell them whether they were having a boy or a girl. “It’ll be a surprise no matter when we find out,” Brandi told him when they were debating whether to have the ultrasound done, “so isn’t it better to find out in advance so we can be prepared?” But she was starting to look at things for both genders. One night, she’d come home from work all excited about a Willie Nelson Born for Trouble onesie. The next night, she’d be laughing about a pink Baby Boop and then get all teary-eyed over a Mommy’s Little Girl . Since it was her first, she was excited about everything, and because of that, Ronnie was thrilled too, even if he couldn’t always bring himself to show it. “Aren’t you excited?” Brandi asked him one night, and he said, sure, without a doubt, but she had to keep in mind that he’d just lost three of his children, and surely she didn’t expect him to ever get over that. It was no good to even try.

So he found himself moving through his days like he was in a dream, which is how he felt now as he came up the steps to where Biggs waited, and he knew there were people passing by watching him — the office girls from the Reasoner Insurance Agency on the east side of the square, the opticians from LensCrafters, some mechanics from Albright Chevrolet, even a few high school kids who’d walked uptown to grab lunch at the new Mi Casita Mexican place. Lord, what if Angel was one of them? What if she saw him there with Biggs, about to enter the courthouse? After that ugly run-in with her last night, he didn’t need something else to try to explain.

“I know I don’t have to talk to you,” he said to Biggs. “Not unless I’ve got a lawyer with me. I know that much.”

Biggs opened the heavy glass door to the courthouse and motioned for Ronnie to step inside. “This is just a friendly talk. There are things I need to tell you.”

“You couldn’t have told me back in Goldengate? You had to drag me over here?”

“It’s better done here,” Biggs said. “Just in case our little talk goes somewhere interesting.”

Ronnie hesitated. He had things he wouldn’t tell Biggs, not if he could help it. He had things he’d rather keep to himself forever.

“You’ve got no call to throw me in jail,” he said, “if that’s what you’ve got in mind.”

Someone in a car going by called his name. He thought it came from a red GMC Sierra pickup crammed full of high school boys going by on Fifteenth Street.

“Ronnie,” one of the boys said out the open window. He had red hair and freckles, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. “Hey, Ronnie. You got a light?”

The truck went on by, the boys’ hoots and whoops fading.

“Some people,” Biggs said. “If I could only arrest someone for being stupid or mean in the heart, I surely would enjoy it.”

“Let’s do this,” Ronnie said, impatient.

He stepped into the courthouse and then followed Biggs into the sheriff’s office, where a deputy, a man with neatly combed white hair and sad eyes, was sitting behind a desk. Biggs nodded to him, and then he took Ronnie into his office and closed the door.

“So what’s the fire marshal say?” Ronnie wasn’t going to wait for Biggs to work his way up to giving him the news — not give him a chance to hem and haw and see if Ronnie would squirm. He’d just ask him straight out. “Must have found something out of the ordinary?”

He hadn’t even sat down yet, didn’t know that he felt like it, didn’t want to give Biggs the notion that he meant to stay long.

Biggs unzipped his trooper jacket. He took it off and hung it on a coat rack in the corner. An American flag stood in the other corner, and Ronnie saw the plaques on the wall and the framed picture of the president, a man Ronnie hadn’t voted for but no one he wished any particular bad fortune. One wall held a large map of Phillips County, and Ronnie knew if he were to trace his finger along the right roads, he’d eventually end up down the blacktop out of Goldengate to where he once had a home with Della and their kids.

“You think there’d be a reason for the fire marshal to find something worth us talking about?” Biggs walked around behind his desk and peered at a computer screen for a moment. He put his closed fists on the desk and braced himself with his knuckles. The office smelled of the limestone walls, damp and moldy — that and the cherry-scented air freshener that Biggs was using to try to make things more pleasant. He had a row of photographs lined up on a wide ledge that ran beneath the wall of windows behind his desk. Ronnie could see the pictures were of him and his family: a blond-haired woman with her arm around Biggs, a boy in Marine dress blues, Biggs with what must have been a grandson riding on his shoulders. “Ronnie, is there anything I ought to know?”

The pictures of Biggs’s family had Ronnie all out of sorts. Here was a man who had everything right where he wanted it. A man with a wife and kids and grandkids, and here was Ronnie, a man fighting to keep his family together.

“I thought you already knew everything.” He sat down then, sat right down on the chair across from Biggs’s desk and let the sheriff look down on him. He sat down because he felt a trembling in his legs, and he feared if he didn’t sit he’d fall over. “Didn’t you say you had things to tell me?”

Biggs eased himself down onto his own chair. He rested his forearms on his desk and put his hands together, his thick fingers laced. “All I know is what the fire marshal’s office told me.” He looked at Ronnie for a long time, and Ronnie made sure to hold his gaze steady and not to glance away. “That fire didn’t start all by itself,” Biggs finally said. “It had help.”