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.
Finally, as he stood here with Shooter, he knew what it was that was troubling him. That sleeve. A patch of the vinyl was missing and the lining beneath it was ratty with holes. Biggs swore that when he recalled those holes he could see charred edges, as if they’d been burned into the material.
“Where’s your boy’s jacket?” he asked Shooter now. “The one he had with him when I was here before. I want to look at it.”
“That jacket?” Shooter said. “Well, that jacket was old.”
“He can’t show it to you.” Captain’s voice startled Biggs. The boy had come down the hallway that led from the living room to the bedrooms. How long he’d been standing there, listening, Biggs didn’t know. “He burned it,” Captain said. “He put it in the burn barrel and set it on fire.”
“Like I said.” Shooter’s voice all of a sudden got too bright and cheery. “It was old.”
“I’m tired of lying.” Captain stepped out of the hall and fully into the light of the living room. “I want to tell the truth.”
So it was Captain who told Biggs the story of what happened the night of the fire. He stood in his own house, his father no longer able to keep him quiet, and he said all of it, starting with what his father had said about that goat pen and how it would be best to put a match to it and start over.
“I got worried about the goats that night,” Captain said, “and I went outside to check on them. I remembered what my dad said, and I thought I could help Della.”
He took his time. Biggs could tell that the boy had thought about this moment when he’d go against his father’s wishes and confess everything, had steeled himself for it and was now reciting the facts with little show of emotion. He told Biggs about leading the goats over to his father’s barn. It was just the billy, Methuselah, he said, that wouldn’t go.
“He charged at me, but, finally, he settled down. He saw Ronnie there, and he just stopped.”
“So Ronnie was behind the trailer?” Biggs said. “Just like you told me earlier? You’re sticking by that?’
For a long time Captain didn’t say a word. He looked down at his feet. Then he raised his head. His lip trembled. “Yes,” he finally said, “Ronnie was there.”
Captain was talking fast now, telling Biggs how Methuselah got stirred up again and came charging at him, butted him in the stomach and sent him sprawling backwards into the snow. Then Captain was back on his feet and trying to get away from the goat, running, spinning in circles, dodging this way and that. He unzipped his jacket and slipped his arms out of the sleeves. He stood still and let Methuselah come at him. Then, when the goat was close enough, he threw his jacket over his face and stepped to the side.
But Biggs wanted to know what Ronnie was doing when Captain saw him.
“He wasn’t doing anything,” Captain said.
“Was there gasoline?” Biggs kept his voice low and as gentle as he could manage, coaxing Captain. “Son, listen to me now. Did you see Ronnie pour gasoline on that trailer?”
Captain said, “No, I didn’t see him do that.”
“But you told me you did. Said he slopped it all over that trailer and lit it up. Son, were you lying?”
“Wesley.” Shooter’s voice was flat and worn out, as if he were giving in to what he knew he couldn’t stop. “Tell him the rest.”
At the courthouse, Ronnie told the deputy that when he drove back to town that night, the smell of gas was too much for him. He had the Marathon can resting on the floor in front of the passenger seat, and he couldn’t bear to hear the gas that was left in it sloshing around.
“I was disgusted with myself,” he said. “So I pulled over to the side of the road, and I got that can out, and I poured what was left into my car, as much as it’d hold anyway.”
The deputy said, “There was about a gallon left in it when we found it in Brandi’s shed.”
“That sounds about right,” said Ronnie. “That was all I could do. So I went back into town, and I put that can in the shed and then went in to go to bed.”
Captain said, “We were in the bathroom when we first saw the fire. My dad went to the phone to call 911, and I ran out the front door and across the road. Angel and Hannah were outside. I ran around the end of the trailer to see if I could get in the back door. People think I’m stupid, but I knew what was happening. That trailer was on fire, and Della and the other kids were inside, and they needed help.”
The whole back side of the trailer was in flames — flames leaping up to the windows, the siding already curling and melting, the back door wreathed with fire.
For the first time since he’d begun to tell his story, Captain’s voice quavered. He bit his lip. He closed his eyes, squeezed them shut so tightly his face pinched up in a grimace. “There wasn’t anything I could do,” he finally said in a shaky whisper.
Shooter kept quiet. He let Captain tell his story.
“Then I saw Methuselah,” he said.
The goat, calm now, had Captain’s bomber jacket in his mouth. The sleeve of that jacket had gotten wrapped around one of his forelegs.