Late One Night

8

Ronnie drove out to the trailer to see her the day he got the papers, one of those gray winter days in southeastern Illinois when the sun, if it ever tries to come out, is just a watery light for a speck or two before it goes back behind the clouds. Corn stubble dusted with snow in the fallow fields. Bare branches of woodlands black against the sky. Smoke curling up from chimneys at farmhouses along the blacktop. Wind scattering snakes of powdery snow across the road.

Shooter told Missy later he saw Ronnie’s car — that old Pontiac Firebird he’d bought on auction at a salvage yard and rebuilt and painted cherry red — sitting in the gravel lane alongside the trailer that afternoon.

“Captain spotted his car,” Shooter said, “and he told me to come look.”

Captain’s head was filled with motors and cars. A good thing something was up there, folks said. Maybe he could make a mechanic someday. He hadn’t come out of the oven right, they said, but Laverne Ott, who’d had him in school just before she retired, didn’t care for that sort of talk, nor did she have patience for the other words—“special,” “challenged,” “developmentally disabled,” and especially not the harsher ones like “dummy,” “moron,” “retard.” To her, Captain was Captain. Child of God. A boy who was who he was. She asked no more of him and no less. Each night she said a prayer that he would find a place in the world, that people would be kind to him, that he would know love.

“You know he was always nuts about that Firebird,” Shooter told Missy. “He stood at the front window and said, ‘Sugar tits!’ Forgive me for talking like that, but you remember how Ronnie always said that when something tickled his fancy. I guess Captain picked it up from him. I’ve tried to break him of it, but no luck. ‘Ronnie’s back,’ he said. He wanted to go over there, but I told him, no, leave those folks alone. He put up a fuss. That’s been his way ever since his mother died. Now he’s getting more bullheaded every day. Just wants to do what he wants to do. I told him whatever was going on over there at the trailer wasn’t any of our concern, and that was that.”

Shooter tried to keep to himself, to live a quiet life on the other side of his wife’s death. But on occasion, when he caught someone making fun of Captain, his temper got the best of him. He’d been known to use his fists, and on occasion to level his twelve-gauge. He’d gotten his nickname from that fact: high school kids come to toilet paper his trees and soap his windows, hunters trespassing on his posted land, meth cooks snooping around his anhydrous tanks? The word was out: Look out for Carl Rowe; he’s a shooter.

“You can’t be threatening people with guns,” Biggs told him when such matters came to his attention.

“I’m not asking for trouble,” Shooter said, “but I’m going to protect my property, and I’m sure as hell going to look out for my son.”

So, yes, Shooter told Missy, he and Captain were watching out the window that winter day when Ronnie pulled his Firebird into the lane and got out.

Della heard the car door slam. She went to the trailer’s front door, where she fingered the edge of a curtain panel and saw Ronnie looking her way. He had on a flannel shirt and an orange insulated vest. He took a breath and let it out, his steam hanging a moment in the frigid air.

She let the curtain fall back and waited.

He was taking in the sight of that trailer, remembering when he and Della had first moved there. The two of them, alone for a few months before Angel came, and then all the babies after her. Could he say for sure that he no longer loved Della? The divorce papers had made that a hard question to answer, hitting him, as they did, with the knowledge that what he’d thought he wanted might not be what he wanted at all. He’d come to Della’s to talk it over with her.

In a snap, she heard his boots on the steps to the double-wide. Then his fist pounding on the door. She took a breath and opened it.

He started right in. What did she mean by having those papers served on him? What gave her the right to do something like that? To determine that they were done when he hadn’t decided that at all?

“Jesus, Della. I just need some time to figure out what I want.”

“Time’s up, Ronnie. I’m telling you the same thing those papers are telling you. You walked out. You made a fool of me, and I’m not going to let that happen anymore.”

“I want to see the kids.”

“Ronnie, you know it’s still school time.”

“I want to see Gracie and Junior.”

“Junior’s asleep.”

Gracie poked her head around Della’s leg. Gracie with her chubby cheeks and her big gray eyes and her blond hair pinned up on her head with a pink clip in the shape of a star.

“Daddy, the goats been eating too much.”

The girls kept them in a pen out behind the trailer. These cold days, the goats huddled up in the low-roofed shed inside the pen.

“That right, sweetheart?” Ronnie reached down and cupped his hand at the back of her head. “Maybe they’re just hungry in this cold weather.”

It was a gesture Della had seen him make so many times over the years she wouldn’t even know how to count them. That hand cradling a head, holding it up when the kids were just babies, petting them when they got older the way he was now with Gracie. His hands were beautiful, but she’d never told him that because it wasn’t the sort of thing a man like Ronnie would want to hear. It was true, though. His hands were long and narrow with thin fingers, and when he spread them like he had now, palming Gracie’s head, the tendons stood up on the back of his hand, and there was something strong and delicate all at the same time about the way he touched his children. When Della looked at his hand, it was hard for her to believe that she was looking at the hand that had touched Brandi Tate in all sorts of ways she didn’t want to imagine.

Gracie grabbed onto his other hand with both of her little ones. “Come inside, Daddy. Come on. I’m getting cold.”

So Della let Gracie pull him into the trailer, and she shut the door.

It felt strange to have him there after so much time. Strange and familiar all at once. The sound of his footsteps — a whisking shuffle she’d know even if a million years went by before she heard it again. “That boy never picks up his feet,” her mama told her shortly after they were married. “Not even at the church during the wedding march. Did you notice that? He was dragging his feet like he was on his way to get hung. Oh, Lord, I hope this hasn’t been a mistake.”

“You getting on okay?” He looked around the trailer, and she knew he was taking note of the pile of laundry on the couch in the living room, waiting to be folded, and the scatter of crayons and coloring books on the breakfast table, and the mess of CDs Angel and Hannah had left by the boom box on the kitchen counter. Maybe he was looking for something that would make him come back. Maybe all she had to do was admit she needed his help. “Della, you got more than your hands full.”

“We’re doing just fine,” she said.

He looked down the hallway. The double-wide had three bedrooms. She and Junior and Gracie slept in one of them. Angel and Hannah in another. The last one was for the twins. A bath and a half. Fifteen hundred square feet. A double-wide Fleetwood trailer with underpinning set on a piece of ground Della’s parents owned along the blacktop. It’d been her home for fourteen years, and even if it was a little worse for wear these days, it was still hers.

“See you got a fire going.” Ronnie nodded toward the Franklin stove in the corner of the living room where Della had just put on a new split of wood. “Guess you need it in this weather.”

“The furnace has been acting up. Daddy thought he had it fixed, but it keeps cutting out. Sometimes I don’t even notice it until I wake up in the middle of the night, froze to death.”

“The blower?”

Della shrugged her shoulders. “Something about the pilot light, I think.”

“Want me to see what I can do with it?”

“Daddy’s coming over today to take another look. If he can’t fix it, I expect we’ll all go over to their house to sleep tonight.”

That was enough — that mention of Wayne Best possibly appearing at any moment — to put Ronnie into action. He went down the hallway, and Della followed him, Gracie skipping along between them.

Junior was asleep in his crib. “I don’t want you waking him,” Della said in a whisper. “He’s got the croup and I just now got him to sleep.”

“Does he need a doctor?”

“If he does, I’ll see to it.”

“He sounds like one of the goats,” Gracie said, whispering in imitation of Della. “I heard him last night.”

Ronnie was whispering, too. “I didn’t mean to suggest you couldn’t take care of him, Della.”

“It’s all right. I’m just tired. Haven’t been sleeping much.” She put her hand on Gracie’s back. “Why don’t you go out and color Daddy a picture?”

“I’ll draw you something nice, Daddy.”

“All right, baby. You do that.”

Alone, Della and Ronnie watched Junior sleeping the way they’d stood together at cribs over the years looking down on their children.

“Guess it’s my fault you haven’t had your sleep,” he said.

“Guess it is,” she told him. “You and seven kids.”

She watched him looking down on Junior whose jaw was slack, a little bubble of spit at his lips. The room smelled of the Vicks Vapo-Rub she’d used on his chest, and it was, at least to her way of thinking, a good smell. A scent she always associated with her own mother and how she’d cared for Della when she was a little girl. That heady smell of camphor and eucalyptus that said Mom was there and she knew exactly what to do.

“I hate this, Della. I really do. I hate the way it’s turned out. All this burden on you and now these divorce papers. It’s got me shook. I can tell you that.”

Junior squirmed a little in his sleep, his arm flying over across his chest, and Della held her breath, hoping he wouldn’t wake.

She and Ronnie were talking in such small voices now they had to stand close to each other to hear.

“You want to do something about it? You want to come home and give up this nonsense with Brandi Tate?”

For a long time, he didn’t say a word. Then she heard a little choke of breath, and his shaky voice said, “I can’t do that.”

It came to her, then, something she should have known. “She’s pregnant, isn’t she?”

He wouldn’t admit it. He couldn’t face her and own up to it, but she felt sure she’d hit on the truth. She knew it in the way he looked at Junior, the way he reached into the crib and dabbed the little spit bubble with his finger. She could tell it from the way he wouldn’t look at her, the way he got all shy, the way he said, “Della, I—” and then couldn’t go on. She knew he wasn’t completely done with babies.

“You better get a lawyer,” she told him, and he said, “All right, then, if you’re saying it’s over, then by God let it be over. I can make it so you’ll wish you never started this.”

“I didn’t start it. So don’t you come in here threatening me.”

“Oh, I’m not threatening. It’s long past that now.”

“What in the world does that mean?”

“You’ll find out, Della. You can count on that.”