Lee Martin - Late One Night

Then Methuselah charged him, and Captain turned and ran out of the shed, out of the pen, ran through the snow toward the trailer.

Methuselah stopped. He went quiet. Captain turned and watched him to make sure he was calm enough not to cause trouble. The goat went closer to the trailer, right up to the back steps, and there he got something in his mouth and started chewing on it. A spray of sparks danced in the air, and that startled the goat, and he stepped away from what Captain could now see was a cardboard box.

He thought that shower of sparks was a beautiful thing, something he, like Methuselah, didn’t expect. It reminded him of fireworks on the Fourth of July, which had always been his mother’s favorite holiday. He could remember sitting on a blanket at the State Park with his father and her. He lay on his back with his head in her lap, and he watched the fireworks burst into sprays and showers in the night sky above the lake. “Look at that one,” his mother said. “Oh, and that one. How pretty they are.”

He liked to imagine that the fireworks were the wings of angels, painting the sky red and blue and silver and gold as they streaked down to Earth to see to this or that.

His mother had something she liked to say to him when she told him goodnight. It came from a poem she learned in school when she was a girl:

Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,

Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels .

He wasn’t sure he could say exactly what that meant, but he’d never forgotten the sound of her voice when she said those words — hushed and dreamy — and he knew, without her having to say as much, she was telling him that he was one of those lovely stars. He was one of the forget-me-nots of the angels, and no matter where he found himself, he could count on them to keep him from harm.

Methuselah was coming back to the box now. Well, just let him , Captain thought. He realized then that there was a man behind the trailer, and he knew that man was Ronnie.

“That’s when he saw me,” Ronnie told the deputy. “I knew I was caught, so I stood up. Methuselah stopped in his tracks, stopped bleating, just nosed at the snow. Captain turned back to watch him, and then, after a while, he came up to me, and he said, ‘You come back for good?’”

The wind was really howling now, and Ronnie had to get up close to Captain to make himself heard. He leaned in toward the boy’s ear. He said, “No, not for good. I came out to check on Della and the kids.”

“They’re gone,” Captain said. “Car’s nowhere to be seen.”

Ronnie nodded. “Good thing I came, though.” He pointed down toward the other end of the trailer. About two-thirds of the way down, his Marathon can sat in the snow. “Hole in the siding there. Wind could’ve blown out the pilot light on the furnace. I patched it up.”

Captain looked down at the Marathon can and then back at Ronnie. Captain’s nose wrinkled up, and Ronnie knew he smelled the gas. He waited for Captain to ask him about it, and when he didn’t, Ronnie knew he was afraid to ask him what he was doing with a can of gas back there because he was up to something himself that he didn’t want to have to explain.

“So you’re not back for good?” Captain finally said.

He was clearly disappointed, and Ronnie, who couldn’t work a miracle and make that gas jump back into the can, felt ashamed to be standing there in his presence.

“No, Captain,” he said. “It’s too late for that.”

“Your daddy would never hurt you,” Brandi told Angel. “You know that, don’t you? You know he loves you, and I love you.”

Angel’s bottom lip quivered. “It’s all been so hard,” she said.

Brandi gripped her hand. “It’s going to be all right. Everything. You’ll see.”

She was thinking of the night that Ronnie told her he was going for a drive, that he was feeling antsy. She was reading one of her baby books, and when he came back, she couldn’t have said how long he’d been gone. He came in and went right into the shower. She wouldn’t know until he told her later that on his way back to town, he smelled gasoline and recalled that earlier in the day, when he’d brought the gas for Brandi’s Mustang, the cap on the can’s spout had been difficult and he’d crouched down and used the tail of his T-shirt to get a better grip so he could twist it off and get about the business of pouring gas into the Mustang’s tank. All day, he’d thought he was catching the faint scent of gasoline, and finally that night as he sped up the blacktop, he imagined that not even the strip of the shirt that he’d cut away while he was behind the trailer was enough to get rid of that smell — a smell that seemed dangerous to him now on account of what he’d just done.

At the city limits, he pulled off into the parking lot of the Dairy Dee, closed for the winter, and there he slipped off his coat and pulled the T-shirt over his head. He wadded it up and stuffed it under the passenger seat. Then he put his coat back on and zipped it up. He went on to Brandi’s, and he went straight into the bathroom and undressed and got into the shower.

When he came out, he was ready for bed. She heard the siren at the fire station but barely gave it a thought. Then she reached up and turned off the lamp, and the two of them drifted off to sleep.

When Shooter woke and couldn’t find Captain in the house, he put on his barn coat and went out the back door to look for him.

The pole light in the barnyard was enough for him to spot the footprints in the snow. He recognized the corrugated tread of Captain’s Big Horn Wolverine boots, and the hoof prints the goats had left. Shooter followed the prints to the barn door. Inside, he found four of Della’s goats, bleating their dismay over whatever had happened to move them there. The lights were on in the feedway. Dust motes and chaff hovered around the bare bulbs.

“Wesley,” Shooter shouted, but there was no answer.

_________

In her bedroom, Della thought she heard voices, but she was so far down in sleep she convinced herself it was only the wind.

The baby was asleep. The twins were asleep, and Gracie, and Sarah, and Hannah, and Angel. They were snuggled down in their dreams. The furnace was working fine, and they were cozy in their beds on this cold winter night.

Shooter stepped out of the barn and heard the back door of the house go shut. He hurried inside, and there he found Captain at the bathroom sink, letting the water run over his hand. The only light in the room was a nightlight plugged into the wall below the mirror, that and the light from the snow cover coming in through the little window in the wall facing the road. It was enough light for Shooter to see Captain’s sock hat and his bloody glove on the vanity top.

“You’re cut.” Shooter grabbed the hand and looked at the slice across the hock of Captain’s thumb. “How’d that happen?”

“Knife slipped,” said Captain.

“Knife? Your pocketknife? What were you using it for?”

“To cut baling twine. I found a bale of straw. I didn’t want the goats to get hurt.”

“How were they going to get hurt, Wesley?”

Captain wouldn’t answer. He hung his head and wouldn’t look at his father. Shooter reached over and turned off the faucet. “Wesley, I asked you a question.”

“I meant to start over.” Captain’s voice was flat. “Just like you told me. Put a match to that fence.”

Shooter remembered then what he’d said in passing that afternoon when he and Captain had been mending the fence over at Della’s.

“Oh, good Christ,” he said. “That was just something to say. Something because I was mad. Why would you ever think I was serious?”