Only the Truth (2 page)

I thought maybe he had gone to town when the place went up but then I hadn't
see him on the road either way so I figured he should be somewhere around. He
wasn't the type to sleep during the day, so the fire couldn't have caught him
unawares. From my porch, I could always see him
movin
'
around, nervous as a
cat,
probably stinking of drink,
but the drink never seemed to put him down. I wasn't even sure the man slept at
night.

As I pulled up to our house, I didn't see him outside and Charlene wasn't
outside neither. I jumped out of the truck and raced into the house.
"Charlene! Where are you, Charlene?"

"I'm right here," she said and she was. She was sitting just
inside the front door staring out the window and she looked happy. She had a
slight smile on her face and it was then that I realized she had spoken for the
first time in a month.

"Is the old man in there?" I asked her.

"He's in there," she answered. She smiled bigger this time.

"Did you try to get him out?"

"No."

I stopped asking her questions and together we watched the house burn itself
to the ground. Our house was ungodly hot from the summer heat and what with the
fire burning so
close,
we sat there with sweat pouring
down our faces. But we sat there anyway, mesmerized by the fire. I was just
happy to be with Charlene, a Charlene with a smile on her face who was talking
again. Charlene… who just seemed to be happy watching her neighbor's house burn
down. And if she was happy, so was I.

********************

Sheriff Hathaway showed up in time to watch the last bit of the flames
sputter out. I joined him on the road.

"What the hell happened?" he asked, wiping his eyes with a hanky
to get the ash out of them.

I shook my head. "I
dunno
. When I left for
town, the house was there. When I came back, it was near gone."

The Sheriff squinted through the smoke over at the remains of the
house.
 
“Do you know anything about the
old man who moved in there? When I first run up on him in town, he told me his
name was Otis Barnes, and since no one ever had a complaint about the man, I
never asked much more about him. He bought his groceries and liquor once a
week. That was it. I passed him a few times on the road." The Sheriff
shook his head. "I got no clue where he
come
from
or what he was doing here. No one seems to know."

I couldn't tell him
nothing
more.
"Never talked to me.
Kept to his side
of the road."
I didn't tell him how his moving in seemed to have
made Charlene go silent.

The Sheriff nodded toward the house. "I hear you got yourself a
girl?"

I grinned.
"Yep."

"Who's the girl?"

I told him her name. "Charlene."

"What's her last name?"

Took me a while to think about that question.
I
could feel the Sheriff's eyes on me but I didn't have
no
answer to tell him. She'd never told me her last name and I guess I never asked
it.

I looked at my feet. "Don't know."

I heard the Sheriff sigh.

"Where'd she come from?"

"Don't know."

The Sheriff
look
exasperated.

"Come on, Billy Ray. Take me on inside to meet this girl of
yours." He opened the front door and I walked him into the house.

I pointed toward Charlene in the chair next to the window. "There she
is. There's my Charlene."

The Sheriff took off his hat.
"Ma'am."
He
nodded at her.

She nodded back.
"Sir."
At least Charlene
was still speaking.

"You see what happened?"

Charlene nodded again, "There was a fire."

"Did you see how it started?"

"It just started." She still had that faraway look in her eye.

The Sheriff pursed his lips. He ran his hanky over his face and neck. He was
perspiring a lot, as stifling as it was with that heat in the air.

"Did you see the old man leave the house?"

Charlene shook her head. "No."

"Do you know if the old man was in the house?" The Sheriff
emphasized "was in the house."

"Yes."

"Yes, you know, or, yes, he was?"

"Yes." She stated again. "Yes, he was."

"Was he drunk?"

"Probably."

Sheriff Hathaway looked like he was becoming irritated.

"Did you try to save him?"

"No."

I pulled on the Sheriff's arm. "Come out on the porch, Sheriff. I need
to talk to you." I didn't like the way he was looking at Charlene, not
understanding her.

The air on the porch, although it was still hot from the fire, felt good
compared to the air in the house.

The Sheriff wiped at his face again. His hanky was drenched so it likely
didn't help much.

"What's wrong with that girl?" he asked.

"She's just Charlene. She's quiet like that. She
don't
talk much. She
don't
go out of the house. Even if she
saw the fire, she wouldn't go out of the house. She just
don't
go out of the house."

The Sheriff sighed. "All right, Billy Ray. I won't ask her nothing more
right now." He opened the door to his patrol car. "I'll be back up
with those fire folks from the city. You two just keep staying on your side of
the road so you don't mess up
nothing
."

I nodded. I couldn't see the point of walking around over there anyhow.

That night Charlene and I made love, and she whispered "Sweet Billy
Ray" when she shuddered.

********************

Life had returned to normal. Charlene was back to cooking and laughing and
Charlene and I slept like spoons together on the bed with Big Dog.
The Sheriff came with a bunch of other cars and men to the
burned-up house across the road and for days I watched them sifting through the
ashes from my front porch.
Charlene never came out to watch, but she
left out the back of the house to go to the latrine and I didn't have to clean
the chamber pot any more.

Finally, the men went away, leaving the remains of the fire to be grown over
by the woods. I could see little pine trees starting to pop up between the
ashes and some clinging vines working their way up the burnt out stove and
refrigerator. I started feeling my two mistakes were being forgotten.

Then Sheriff Hathaway came back. I saw him step out of his car and stand in
front of the house looking none too happy. He had some other policeman with
him. He turned to him and said something and then came to the front door. I
opened it before he knocked.

He cleared his throat and said he was sorry he had to come.

Then he told me to step outside.

He put his hand on my shoulder. "We have to talk some more, Billy
Ray."

"Okay." I didn't know what about.

"I'll come straight to the point." He took his hand off my
shoulder. "That old man was killed."

I
wasn't understanding
what he was telling me this
for. "Oh. Well, then you found him in the house." I figured as much,
since no one saw him since the fire.

The Sheriff cleared his throat again. He took out his hanky and wiped his
face, even though the day was cool. "No, Billy Ray, you aren't getting me.
The old man was killed before the fire started. He was shot with his
rifle."

"He killed
hisself
?"

"No, Billy Ray, he was shot. The ballistics people say he was shot
above his ear from a ways away.
Seems like he was sitting on
the side of his bed when he was shot.
He fell on the floor and that's
where he was when the fire burnt him up."

I shook my head. "I didn't see no one come up the road before I left
and I didn't see
no one
on the way back. Maybe someone
came up while I was in the store."

The Sheriff shifted from one foot to the other. He mopped at his face again.

"Billy Ray, the old man was killed,
then
the
fire was set with gasoline."

I didn't say
nothing
. I didn't really understand
what the Sheriff was getting at.

"Billy Ray,
where's
your gas can? The one you
had in your truck?"

I shrugged. "I'm guessing it's in the truck."

"Why don't we take a look, Billy Ray?" The Sheriff started over to
my truck and I followed him. We looked in the bed and I didn't see anything.

"Where's the can, Billy Ray?"

"I
dunno
. It was there before."

"Before when?"

"Before...," I didn't know when before, except I had seen it
before today, sometime before today.

I shook my head. "I
dunno
."

The Sheriff slumped back against the side of the truck. "We found the
can, Billy Ray, out in the woods behind the old man's house."

"My can?"

"Well, it was a gas can."

Lots of people got gas cans in their trucks around these parts. The gas
station wasn't open some days and it was easy to get stuck with no gas in the tank.
I never bought more than a few dollars when the tank was empty
cause
I never needed much and I never had much to spend. But
I kept that gas can full in case there was reason to need to get to the city on
a day the tank might be empty.
Same for other folks.

"How do you know it's my gas can, Sheriff? It wasn't
no
special can. Just one the station gave me."

The Sheriff looked at me very seriously. “You understand anything about
evidence testing, Billy Ray?"

"No."

"Well, Billy, they can do this testing these days on all kinds of
things. They did some testing on that can. There was a dent in the can, Billy
Ray, a dent with some paint in it. They tested that paint."

I still didn't understand what that would tell him.
"Paint?"

"Paint.
Orange paint.
What color is your truck, Billy Ray?"

"Orange."

Sheriff Hathaway looked right at me. "Did that old man do something to
your girl, Billy Ray? Something you didn't like?"

I was feeling scared now. I wondered why he was looking at me that way and
asking me what the old man had done to Charlene. "I
dunno
.
She started
actin
' strange after he
come
here that one day but I never knew that he done
anythin
' to her."

"Why did you go to town that evening?"

"I was out of cigarettes. I wanted to buy Charlene some candy."

"Are you sure you weren't looking for a reason not to be home when the
fire started? You knew Charlene wouldn't leave the house, but wouldn't you have
left the house to save the old man if you were there?"

I started to cry because now the Sheriff was saying I killed the old man.

He put his arm around me and pushed me toward the police car, nodding to the
other officer who opened the back door for me. The Sheriff slid his hand up to
the top of my head and pushed down on it so I wouldn't hit myself on the
doorframe.

The two of them got in the car and said nothing more. We drove to the
station in town. I cried all the way because Charlene wouldn't know what
happened to me and I didn't know what was happening to me.

********************

"Roll your finger like this," the younger police officer said and
showed me how to ink each finger and press it into the little box on the
cardboard square. All my fingers and my thumbs turned black and then I was
allowed to wash them with some special soap.

I spent the day in a cell with time out for sitting in a little room to talk
with the Sheriff. He kept asking me the same questions about what the old man
might have done to Charlene that made me so mad I would want to kill him. But
all I wanted was to go home to Charlene.

"If I tell you, will you let me see Charlene?"

"Sure, Billy Ray."

"Okay." I tried to think hard. "He was a dirty old man and he
was drunk all the time and he said dirty things about Charlene. I thought he
would hurt her."

The Sheriff nodded. "So you decided she would be safer if he was
gone?"

I looked at him and what he said seemed to make sense. "Yeah, she would
be safer."

"So you went over to his house?"

"Yeah, I went over to his house."

"And you shot him with his gun?"

"Yeah, I shot him with his gun."

The Sheriff looked pleased. "Then you went and got your gas can out of
the truck?"

"Yeah."

"And you got some matches from the kitchen?"

"Yeah."

"And you poured the gas around the house and lit a match?"

"Yeah."

"Then what did you do with the gas can and the matches?"

"I threw them behind the house in the woods?"

"Okay."

I was doing
good
now. I could see the Sheriff was
happy. "Then I went to town."

The Sheriff had written all this down while I was talking. "Good job,
Billy Ray. Now sign right here at the bottom that what you said was the
truth."

I signed the paper where he pointed at. "Can I go see Charlene
now?"

The Sheriff looked down at the paper.
"Maybe later."

********************

I was put back in the cell. He didn't let me see Charlene. I watched out the
cell and I could see the Sheriff and the other policemen writing lots of papers
and whispering among themselves. It got to be lunch time and they brought me a
sandwich and a soda pop. I was just finishing my sandwich when the whispering
stopped and I heard the Sheriff say, "What?" and another officer say,
"No kidding." I could see everyone gathered around the Sheriff, who
was staring at a piece of paper.