Lee Martin - Late One Night

Missy knew that if she and Pat got the girls, they’d come with all the hurt they carried after the fire. She knew everything wouldn’t be smooth sailing at first, but she’d win them over with love. She’d give them all the love she’d saved up for the babies she’d lost.

“I was out in the woods,” she said to Pat.

“What in the heck were you doing out there?”

She told him about Shooter and the goat and how she heard the shot and had to go see what had happened. “I stood and watched for as long as I could stand it.”

“Why did he put that goat down?”

“He said it had foot and mouth.”

For a good while, Pat didn’t say a word. Then, finally, he said in a very quiet voice, as if he were afraid of what he was saying, “Missy, there hasn’t been any foot and mouth in this country for nearly eighty years.”

Inside Shooter’s house, as dark settled around the open countryside, he was explaining to Captain, as gently as he could, why he’d had to put down Methuselah.

“That goat was sick,” he said. “We’ll be lucky if he hasn’t made the others sick too.”

Captain had his pocketknife open, that Case Hammerhead, the one he’d said he’d lost. Now he was using the point of the blade to dig at the soles of his Big Horn Wolverine boots. Size elevens, just like the ones that Ronnie wore. Captain had come in from feeding the other goats, and he was sitting at the kitchen table, head down, as if he weren’t listening to Shooter at all. He just kept digging at those boots, gouging out pieces of the rubber soles until finally Shooter noticed the blood stains on the blade.

He was drying a pot with a dishtowel now, and he dropped the pot into the sink. The clanking sound caused Captain to jerk up his head. Shooter was standing over him with his hand out, palm up, and he was saying, “I thought you lost that knife.” Captain didn’t answer. He just kept digging at his boot soles. “Give it to me.” Shooter’s voice was harsher now. “Wesley, I mean it. I won’t stand for you lying to me.”

Captain closed the blade and started to stuff the knife back into his jeans pocket, but Shooter wasn’t about to let him off easy. He grabbed his arm and narrowed his eyes at Captain. “I’m not playing,” he said. “I want that knife.”

Finally, Captain let him have it.

Shooter snapped it closed and slipped the knife into his own pocket.

“That goat was sick,” he said. “We didn’t have any choice but to put him down. Right?”

After a time, Captain nodded. Shooter put his hand on his back, rubbing a slow circle.

“That’s right,” Shooter said. “That’s one thing we know for sure.”

Ronnie, at that very moment, was on the river. He’d parked his Firebird at the fishing camp, three miles out of Phillipsport, where one of his foster fathers had kept an old Airstream trailer. Ronnie had gotten out of the Firebird and walked a hundred yards or so down to the water.

The river was iced over, frozen thick enough for him to walk out onto it, all the way to the center — the deepest part — where for a moment, he tipped back his head and looked up at the sky. The stars were out and a crescent moon, just enough light to let him see the snow-dusted ice. Wind moved through the bare limbs of the sycamores and red oaks and hackberry trees that lined each bank. The smaller branches clicked together.

He liked being out there in the cold night, gazing up at the sky, imagining a heaven where Della knew the truth of what he’d done. Maybe in that heaven she’d even forgive him.

At any rate, she’d be the only one — at least it was so in Ronnie’s mind — who’d bear witness to what he was about to do, and she’d be the only one he’d feel inclined to tell why he had to do it.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the sky. He got down on his knees. “I’m so sorry.”

Then he took his pocketknife, the one Angel had found in the snow behind the trailer, and he opened the blade.

All through Sarah’s class play, Brandi couldn’t stop thinking about that moment in the kitchen when Laverne said it was time to talk to Sheriff Biggs. It was then that Brandi felt the two storylines begin to merge — her story with Ronnie and the girls, and the story of what had happened the night of the fire.

The youngest Billy Goat Gruff, a boy wearing a white sweat suit on which his mother had dyed brown spots, was trying to cross the wooden footbridge set up on the stage. The boy wore whiskers that were supposed to look like a billy goat’s beard and a set of droopy ears. A brown tail hung down from the seat of his sweatpants.

Sarah’s voice rang out, “Trip, trap, trip, trap.”

Hearing Sarah, her voice so full of confidence, made Brandi remember all the evenings at the house when she’d helped her practice her part. She thought of how the girls had been shy around her at first and how Emma had finally asked her to read her a story and then Sarah had stood by her one evening when she was on the computer, nestling in close, inviting a hug. Hannah had made her the friendship bracelet she still wore, and there had been times when even Angel had asked if she could put her hand on her stomach and see if the baby would kick.

Laverne was standing along the wall. Brandi could see her profile in the shadows cast by the stage lights. She’d left her house less than two hours ago with a promise to talk to Sheriff Biggs.

Missy and Pat were sitting a few rows in front of Brandi, to her right, and Brandi could see the way Missy was positively beaming as she watched the play unfold.

“Who is that walking on my bridge?” the troll in the play said. He was a scrawny boy who stood all hunched over. Someone had put wrinkles on his face and warts on his nose.

“It’s only me, Little Billy Goat Gruff.”

Brandi knew the story, remembered it from when she was a girl and her mother read it to her from a Little Golden Book. It was a fable of greed and trickery, the troll persuaded to let the two smallest goats pass over the bridge in favor of making a meal of the largest goat who would soon come his way. But the largest of the three goats knocked the troll off the bridge, and there you had it. “Snip, snap, snout,” it said in the book. “This tale’s told out.”

In Sarah’s play, the narrator merely said this: “Big Billy Goat Gruff ran across the bridge. He ate the green, green grass and apples. That mean, ugly old troll never came back to the bridge. He learned that being mean never pays.”

Brandi leaned forward and glanced down the row at Hannah, who was sitting with her hands folded neatly in her lap, and little Emma, who was bouncing up and down on the edge of her seat, and then Angel, who was clapping. Brandi wanted to find a way to keep them. That is, if they wanted to stay. She had no idea, though, what would happen to her and Ronnie. She had no idea where he was or what might happen when Sheriff Biggs found him.

After the play, Brandi sat through the curtain call, the actors executing their curtsys and bows. Then she and the girls went to gather up Sarah.

“Was I good?” Sarah grabbed on to Brandi’s hand. “Did I do everything right?”

Brandi gave her a hug. She bent over and whispered in her ear. “You were the best.”

Then it was out to the lobby for cookies and punch, and parents cooing over their children, and the kids hopping about and laughing their squealing laughs. And it was all the most wonderful music to Brandi.

Then Laverne found her. She said, “I talked to Sheriff Biggs. He’s out looking for Ronnie right now.”

For a moment, Brandi wondered if she’d done the right thing by showing Laverne that T-shirt. As much as she still didn’t know what she felt about Ronnie, she could imagine him out there somewhere thinking the world was against him, and that tore at her as much as the disgust she felt, imagining that it might be true that he’d started that fire.