Lee Martin - Late One Night

Why had he bought all that gas at Casey’s? Brandi’s boss, Mr. Samms, had verified that Ronnie brought five gallons to put in Brandi’s car the morning of the fire, but what about the five gallons more that he bought that night? Why did the T-shirt he was wearing then now smell like gasoline? Why had a strip of that shirt been cut away? Why were there footprints behind that trailer that matched the size and tread of his boots?

All Ronnie said was, “Everyone in town’s been talking about me. What I might have done. Guess there’s no reason for me to say anything. Folks have already made up their minds.”

The door opened, and a deputy, his bushy brows arched with urgency, stuck his head inside. “You need to come out here,” he said to Biggs.

“It better be important,” Biggs said.

“Shooter Rowe’s wanting to talk to you. Says he knows exactly what happened the night of the fire.”

Biggs nodded his head toward Ronnie. “See what you can get out of him.”

The deputy stepped into the room. Biggs went down the hall to see what Shooter Rowe had to say.

Brandi rubbed her thumb over the back of Angel’s hand, making that one gentle motion to let her know that things could turn out just fine. “I know you’ve gone through a lot,” Brandi said. “More than any girl your age ought to have put upon her, but there are people who love you, Angel. I love you, and your sisters love you, and so does your father.”

Angel wouldn’t look at Brandi. “But he left us. You took him away, and look what happened.”

Brandi didn’t know what to say to that. It was a fact she couldn’t deny. “Sometimes people are lonely,” she finally said. “So lonely they’ll do practically anything to feel happy again. Does that make it right? No, I suppose it doesn’t. I’m just telling you the way it was. I was lonely, and your father was lonely, and there we were.”

“Why was he lonely? He had us, my mother and all us kids. Why weren’t we enough? We all loved him.”

“Sugar, that’s something you’re going to have to ask him.” Brandi made herself count to ten. She took a deep breath and let it out. “But you should know what he told me before the sheriff came.”

At that moment, Brandi felt a sharp, stabbing pain in her abdomen. She held onto Angel and waited for the pain to pass. The sun had come out and the light splintering off the snow-covered ground was too much for her. She felt sick to her stomach. Everything started to spin. Then she could feel the light dimming. She was slipping away. It was like a curtain was being drawn slowly over her eyes, and she felt like she was ducking under a thick pile of quilts.

Angel , she tried to say. Listen, sugar . But she wasn’t sure any words were coming out of her mouth.

Then she heard Angel say, “Missy, help. What are we going to do?”

“It was like this,” Shooter said. “Ronnie Black ran out from behind the trailer that night. He was a man in a hurry, and it’s no wonder, seeing what he’d just done.”

Biggs had taken Shooter into his office. They were standing just inside the door behind the frosted glass with the word SHERIFF stenciled across it. Two men. One, Biggs, barrel-chested and broad-shouldered; the other, worn down by too much, his back starting to hump with the strain of it all.

“What exactly did he do?” Biggs asked.

Shooter couldn’t get the words out of his mouth fast enough. He’d kept them there so long. He’d thought of this moment over and over the past few weeks, and now it was here.

“He burned down that trailer is what he did.” Shooter realized his voice was too loud. He feared he was coming across like a lunatic. He tried to get himself calmed down, and then he tried to say it all again, this time in as steady a voice as he could manage. “He slopped gasoline all over it. He struck a match and lit it up. Then he ran.”

Biggs studied Shooter for a while. “Anyone else see him? Anyone who can corroborate your story?”

Shooter cleared his throat. He swallowed hard. Then he nodded. “My son,” he finally said. “He saw it too.”

Biggs didn’t waste any time. He told Shooter to wait in his office, and then he went back to the room where the deputy had been interrogating Ronnie.

“Well?” Biggs asked.

The deputy shook his head. “Nothing we don’t already know.”

“I’ll tell you who is talking.” Biggs pulled up a chair next to Ronnie. He leaned in close, but Ronnie didn’t try to move away. He met Biggs’s stare. “Shooter Rowe, that’s who. He just told me a very interesting story. Claims he and his boy saw you sloshing gasoline on that trailer and then lighting it up. Looks to me like if you didn’t do that, you might want to take this chance to say so.”

A space heater was running in the corner of the room, and for a while the only noise was the hum of its fan, that and the deputy tapping a pencil against the edge of the table.

Finally Ronnie shifted his weight in his chair, and the deputy put the pencil down. Ronnie cleared his throat.

“Go ahead, Biggs. You chase that story around and see where it takes you.”

Missy called 911 and soon the ambulance arrived, and the EMTs took Brandi away on a gurney. Angel’s fingers were trembling, and she tucked her hands up into her armpits to hide them.

She wanted to ride in the ambulance with Brandi, but Missy said, “You wouldn’t want to be in the way of the EMTs, would you?”

“But who’ll be there for her?” Angel said. “She shouldn’t have to be alone.”

“Honey,” said Missy. “I’m sure she’ll be all right.”

Missy tried to pet Angel’s hair, but Angel pulled away from her.

“You said my dad should be in prison.”

“I shouldn’t have said that. It was wrong of me. I just get mad sometimes.”

Angel could understand that. It was how she’d felt for a good while on both sides of the night of the fire. Before and after. Just mad, mad, mad. Hearing Missy admit that she sometimes felt the same caused something to let go inside her; that anger came unknotted. She let her hands drop to her sides, and she felt a great calm pass through her, the first time she could remember not being on edge, as if strands of barbed wire were tangled up inside her since the night of the fire. Ever since her father had walked out and taken up with Brandi she’d been mad. Just mad at everyone, even herself. Mad at her mother sometimes for not being able to keep her father there. Mad at him for leaving. Mad at Brandi for taking him away. Mad at herself for not being a better person the night of the fire.

Now Brandi was in trouble — and what about her baby? — and Angel was tired of being mad, tired of people’s messed-up lives.

“I want to go to the hospital,” she said. “I want to be there for Brandi. She’s been trying her best with me.”

It was then that Missy realized she was holding Brandi’s purse. It had slipped from her arm when she’d fainted, and somewhere in the bustle of the EMTs, Missy had seen it on the ground and picked it up so it wouldn’t be in the way. She’d been clutching it to her chest.

“Get in the van,” Missy said, and in an instant, though she didn’t yet know this would be true, she got a picture of Pat and her going on into old age alone. As much as that thought saddened her, she felt a light and airy space somewhere deep inside. Something was opening in her heart — some little part of her she’d kept locked ever since her missed chances to have a child of her own. Angel and her sisters — they’d be all their children now. Brandi’s and Laverne Ott’s and Lois and Wayne’s, and every person in Goldengate and on out the blacktop who loved them and wanted them to have a good and happy life. Missy knew that was what she wanted most of all. “Come on,” she said to Angel. “We’ll go to the hospital.”