Lee Martin - Late One Night

For a good while, Brandi didn’t say anything. Then in a quiet voice — she could barely bring herself to form the words — she said, “I expect that would be best, at least for now.”

Missy heard a noise from the woods, a percussive blast she felt in her chest. Crows lifted up from the trees. She put the phone down and pressed her hands to the window glass.

“Thank you,” Brandi said. She had no way of knowing that Missy was no longer listening. She was staring out the window, waiting for Shooter to come out of those woods. “Can you come to the school?” Brandi asked. “Can you meet Laverne and me there?”

Brandi waited for a response, and when none came — and when Mr. Samms gave her one more stern look — she did the only thing she could. She put the handset back in its cradle and glanced at the clock. Two-thirty. She needed to leave for Goldengate and whatever might be waiting for her there.

At a quarter till three, she pulled her Mustang to the curb in front of the grade school. Ronnie’s Firebird was already there, parked across the street. The driver’s door was open and a Prairie Farms milk truck rumbling by had to move to the left to safely pass. She didn’t know where Ronnie might be, but she didn’t like the sight of that car door open out into the street. When he’d gotten out of the Firebird, he’d still been mad. He hadn’t even stopped to shut the door. She feared that he might already be inside the school, waiting to grab up Emma and Sarah. Maybe he’d make his way to the house and tell Hannah to come with them — maybe he’d force Angel to do the same — and then he’d take off, even if he didn’t have much money. A crazy stunt like that. Brandi had no idea what he might try to do, but none of the thoughts that came to her were good ones. She remembered the knife he’d pulled when she’d thrown him out of the house last night, and a shiver went up her neck.

She got out of her Mustang and looked up and down the street. No sign of Ronnie. No sign of Laverne. The wind had picked up, and it hit Brandi in the face as she turned to the north. The chain-link fence around the school playground shook and rattled. The snap hooks clanged against the flagpole with a banging that set her heart to pounding. Such an insistent sound, one that told her to move.

First, she slung her purse strap over her shoulder and crossed the street to Ronnie’s Firebird. She’d seen the way the driver of that Prairie Farms truck, a little man with clip-on sunglasses flipped up now that the light had weakened, had shaken his bald head in disgust as he’d swerved to the left to avoid that open door. Brandi couldn’t bear to look at it, knowing it was a sign to anyone who saw it that the life she’d thought she was making with Ronnie was coming apart. She wanted it shut.

She started to close the door, and then she saw something inside the Firebird that caught her attention. Poking out from underneath the passenger seat was one of Ronnie’s T-shirts, his favorite T-shirt, one he’d found in the Goodwill in Phillipsport. A black shirt with the Sun Records logo on the chest, that yellow disc of music notes and inside the circle at the top the word SUN in big black letters, shaded with yellow and an arc of what Brandi supposed was to be sun rays, though she could turn them into piano keys if she took a notion. A crowing rooster stood atop a yellow bar beneath that arc. The bar said RECORD COMPANY, and below that, in yellow letters, were the words, THE LEGENDARY SUN STUDIO and its address on Union Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee.

Ronnie was thrilled to death to find that shirt in the Goodwill. He rattled off all the big stars that had started at Sun — Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Elvis. “What a deal,” he said to Brandi. “Cool.” That shirt was such a treasure to him, it struck Brandi funny now to see it wadded up and stuck under the car seat. She leaned in and pulled it out, meaning to fold it neatly — just force of habit, she guessed — and that’s when she noticed something that puzzled her.

The shirt, along the bottom, had been ripped. Not just a little tear. It was clear from the jagged cloth that someone — Ronnie, she assumed — had torn a strip all the way around the bottom of the shirt. A strip needed for a purpose, and though she didn’t know what that purpose might have been, she knew Ronnie would have had to have been in dire need of that cloth to ruin his favorite shirt.

She held it up in front of her to get a closer look at its now jagged edge, and that’s when she caught the scent of gasoline. She pressed the shirt to her face and breathed in through her nose. Just the faintest smell of gas.

She’d run out of gas on her way to work the morning of the fire, and Ronnie had carried some to her in a can. Could he have sloshed some on his shirt? She didn’t know. Toward bedtime that night he went out for a drive — just a little jaunt to help him work out the heebie-jeebies. Just needed to unwind a little, he said. At the time, she’d believed him. Driving did that for him, especially when he could get the Firebird out on a straight stretch of country road like the blacktop and let it go. That was all right with her. She was cozy in bed where it was warm. She was reading her baby books.

When he came back — she wasn’t sure how much time had passed; she’d been so caught up in what she was reading — he called to her from the hallway and then went into the bathroom and took a shower. He was naked except for his boxers, and he slipped into bed beside her. In the midst of all the upset after the fire, she’d had no reason to notice that Ronnie had stopped wearing that Sun shirt, and she’d never stopped to think that it wasn’t showing up in the weekly laundry. She hadn’t given it a thought until now. Nor had she given much thought to the fact that Ronnie said he made a call to Della the night of the fire, a call that wasn’t answered.

“Brandi.” She heard her name and, without turning around, she knew it was Laverne calling to her. “Brandi, have you seen Ronnie?”

She shoved the Sun T-shirt into her purse, snapped it closed, and spun around to see Laverne coming down the sidewalk in front of the school. Her long wool coat was unbuttoned, billowing out behind her in the strong wind.

Brandi held her own coat closed and hurried across the street as best she could to meet her.

“His car was there when I pulled up.” Brandi was talking fast. “His car door was open. A truck almost hit it. I went over to close it. Now what are we going to do?”

Just then, bells in the school started ringing, signaling the end of the day. Laverne glanced over her shoulder at the front door. Soon there would be students streaming out, book bags drooping from their shoulders, the coats the teachers and aides had zipped already undone, the mittens tugged on now stuffed into pockets.

“We’re going in there to get Sarah and Emma,” she said. “Come on.”

_________

At that moment, out in the country, Missy was still watching out her window, praying that any moment now she’d see Shooter come out of those woods, and it would be even better if he had that goat with him. She knew that what she’d heard had been a shotgun going off, and she waited and waited and waited. At one point, she realized that she’d put down the phone while Brandi had still been talking to her. How long ago had that been? She glanced at the anniversary clock on the fireplace mantle. Ten minutes till three. Missy picked up the phone, and even though she knew it was ridiculous — she’d been talking to Brandi nearly twenty minutes ago — she said, “Hello?” She said it in a timid voice, and it startled her to hear it in her quiet house. “Hello?” she said again, but there was no one on the other end of the line to hear her.