Lee Martin - Late One Night

Captain shrugged his shoulders. “I just wanted to help Della.”

Shooter looked down at the sock hat and the glove on the vanity. The glove had blood on it.

“Where’s your jacket?” he asked him. “Did you have it on? Where’s your knife?”

“My jacket’s behind the trailer,” Captain said. “It fell off. I don’t know what happened to my knife. I must have dropped it.”

Shooter didn’t know that he was lying about the knife, that he still had it in his jeans pocket, the blade stained with his blood. Shooter was about to tell him to go get his coat and to look for that knife, but then — it was almost imperceptible — the light grew brighter in the room, just enough of a change for Shooter to register. He turned his head toward the window, and he saw light waver behind the curtains. He drew one of the panels back and looked out across the road.

He stood there longer than he should have because he thought Della and her kids weren’t home. He stood there, watching the flames licking through the roof of the trailer, thinking, if he had to be honest, that even though he was stunned to see the fire, a small part of him thought he’d found a convenient answer to his problem with the goats. If the trailer burned, Della and the kids would have to find somewhere else to live, and they’d take the goats with them or else sell them, and spring would come, and he wouldn’t have to worry about them getting loose and eating up his garden. He stood there watching until he saw the first girls, Angel and Hannah, come running from the flames and out into the cold night.

Then he caught a whiff of gasoline, and he knew it was coming from Captain. “My god.” He spun around to look at his son. “Surely you didn’t tote a can of gas over there.”

Captain bowed his head. He didn’t say a word, and Shooter’s mind raced ahead, convinced that his assumption was true.

“Oh, Wesley,” he said. “What in the world have you done?”

Biggs had just backed out of Shooter’s drive when he saw Pat Wade up the road at his place waving his arms in the air, motioning for him to come down there.

“There’s something you ought to know,” Pat said, when Biggs pulled his patrol car into the driveway and got out to see what Pat wanted. “He put that goat down,” Pat said. “Shooter. He killed that billy goat, one of Della’s goats. Shot it back there in his woods. Told Missy it had foot and mouth.”

“Foot and mouth?” Biggs said. “Hasn’t been foot and mouth in this country since before you and me.”

“That’s what I know.”

“Missy see him shoot that goat?”

Pat shook his head. “She saw him push it down into a gully. Come inside and she’ll tell you.”

Missy was waiting just inside the front door. She’d left Hannah and Angel to heat up some soup and make cheese sandwiches for her and her sisters and Brandi, and then she’d left the girls there to drive Lois home and then to come and talk to Pat.

“He killed that goat.” She started right in once Biggs and Pat were inside the house. “Then today he was back there with his Bobcat and his chainsaw. Filling in that gully, I expect. Burying what he put there.”

“Seems odd that he’d tell you it had foot and mouth,” Biggs said.

“He threatened me,” she said. “Today. He told me I had what I wanted and not to do anything to ruin my happy-ever-after.”

“Della’s girls,” Pat said.

“I want to know why Shooter killed that goat.” Missy crossed her arms over her chest and tipped her head back a little so her chin pointed out. “And I want to know what brought him to lie about why.”

“I’m going to find out,” said Biggs, and he told Pat and Missy goodnight.

Once he was gone, there wasn’t much for them to say. They stood awhile just inside the front door, though they didn’t speak until the patrol car left their drive and started back up the blacktop toward Shooter’s.

Then Pat said, “Missy?”

His voice was strained, and it was clear he wanted to say more — wanted to know what it meant that she’d left the girls with Brandi — but he didn’t know how.

“That’s done,” Missy said.

She’d unloaded the groceries from the van and put the perishables away. She still had canned goods to stack in the pantry. Then she had the rest of the night, and the ones after that, to get through.

Pat nodded. The quiet of the house and all the sadness it held choked him. “All right,” he managed to say, but by that time, Missy was gone.

Biggs drove back to Shooter’s and said he had more questions. He could tell that Shooter was surprised to see him again, but he let him into the house, and he answered his question about the goats.

Yes, he had Della’s goats, he said.

“I’ve been keeping them as a favor to Wayne Best.” He knew Wayne and Lois weren’t up to seeing to them, and he didn’t mind footing the feed bill for a while since the goats gave Captain so much pleasure. “My boy loves taking care of them,” he said.

Biggs said, “Where is your boy?”

The house was quiet. Night had fallen and stretched on past the supper hour, and there was no sign of Captain. From where Biggs stood in the living room, he could see through the archway into the kitchen, and he noticed there were no signs of a supper having been prepared and eaten — no frying pans on the stove, no dishes in the sink or in the drainer, no pots or pans left to soak, no sign at all that Shooter and the boy had seen to their supper after Biggs left their house earlier. A light above the sink was on. That was the only sign that someone had at least passed through that kitchen long enough to switch it on. Biggs couldn’t have said why he found that tidy, quiet kitchen unsettling, but he did. Something about it told him that Shooter and his boy had been too busy to even think of supper.

“He’s at a 4-H meeting,” Shooter said.

“Isn’t Missy Wade the 4-H leader?”

“One of them.”

“How come she’s home if there’s a meeting tonight?” Biggs waited for that to sink in. Then he said, “I just came from there. I had a talk with Missy and Pat.”

Shooter clapped his hands together and the noise was loud in the quiet house. “How the hell would I know that? I’m not Missy Wade’s keeper.”

Biggs took a step closer to Shooter. He liked to do that when he knew someone wasn’t telling him the whole truth. He liked to get into their personal space just to see what they’d do.

Shooter took a step back and bumped into the coffee table.

“Why’d you kill that billy goat?” Biggs asked.

“He was sick.” Shooter turned around and started straightening a stack of magazines on the coffee table— Popular Mechanics, Car and Driver, Reader’s Digest . “Nothing the vet could cure. I had to do it. Didn’t have any other choice.” Shooter was quiet for a while, and Biggs let the silence build. He knew that in cases like this, when someone had something they didn’t want to say, as he suspected was true about Shooter, the longer the silence went on the more likely they were to fill it, which eventually Shooter did. “I guess Missy told you all about it.” Still Biggs waited, not saying a word. “Guess she thinks it’s her business — everything that goes on around here. Sick goat. That’s the whole story.” He turned back to Biggs. “Now was there something else you wanted?”

Biggs asked the question that had been going through his mind since he’d left Shooter’s house earlier. He hadn’t been able to forget something he’d noticed as he was leaving. The boy was sitting on the couch, his jacket wadded up in his lap. A sleeve of the jacket had come loose and was trailing down to the floor. For some reason, the image of that jacket sleeve kept coming to Biggs after he talked to Missy and Pat. Something about that sleeve that wouldn’t let him go.