Black River Part 3

"Could use a little help with the b.u.t.tons," he said. "My hands ain't what they used to be."

She seemed thankful to be faced with a concrete task, a physical task, and Wes watched her unfasten the small plastic b.u.t.tons at his wrists. Nurses and other medical types were the only people he didn't much mind asking for help. They weren't squeamish about disability or deformity, and most of them knew what was their business and what wasn't. "I got it from here," he said, once the b.u.t.tons were free. "Mind getting the curtain?"

Wes waited until the green cloth was drawn around them. He hoped Molly might turn away to prep lines or needles, but she didn't, so while she watched he pushed his right sleeve up over his elbow and revealed the scars on the underside of his forearm. Six of them, s.p.a.ced evenly from wrist to elbow, and impossible to mistake for anything but the cigarette burns they were. The left arm was worse, and Wes was careful not to look at Molly when he rolled up his other sleeve. Five letters carved into the flesh from elbow to wrist, each line thick and raised, lighter in color than the surrounding skin. The name still legible despite a crosshatching of newer scars defacing the letters. Impossible to see the muscle, the bone, the structure made strong and lean by a lifetime of fiddling. Impossible to see anything but that f.u.c.king mess of scar tissue.

To her credit, Molly didn't say anything. They usually didn't. Wes was long used to his scars, but he always felt an odd guilt for exposing them to the donation center employees, as though he were foisting knowledge upon them they hadn't asked for and would rather have done without. He waited in silence while Molly tied the tourniquet around his right arm and ran her fingertips over the skin at the inside of his elbow. He held his breath at the rough, cool touch of the alcohol swab. Acknowledged the warning of "Here comes the poke" with a brief nod. Waited while she repeated it all on the left arm.

It was hard for him. The riot had done a number on his body, but Wes liked to think he'd come through it with his mind relatively intact. He hadn't had a breakdown. Hadn't been reduced to a nervous wreck. h.e.l.l, he'd even gone back to work at the prison for two more years. But there were things. Small things, mostly, almost embarra.s.sing in their predictability. He liked his back to the wall, always. He'd taken to carrying his father's old pocket.w.a.tch because he could no longer tolerate the feel of anything tight around his wrists. And sitting in a chair and letting people lay their hands on him-that was d.a.m.ned near impossible. He'd never minded the dentist before the riot, but afterward he'd dreaded each appointment and finally quit going altogether. Asked Claire to cut his hair so he could avoid the barber. Even these platelet donations, strictly voluntary, were difficult; sometimes he was turned away for the day, his blood pressure having rocketed the moment he sat in the chair. He'd hoped, at first, that forcing himself to face this particular fear so often would ease its hold on him, but so far it hadn't happened. His palms still sweated. His stomach still churned. His heart still raced.

Molly arranged the lines and started up the machine. She offered him magazines and movies, which he declined, and she left him alone with promises to check on him frequently. Wes listened to the mechanical rhythm of the machine and looked where the reclining chair pointed his eyes, at the join between the green curtain and the ceiling. The fabric was pale, a sickly sea green, the same color as the U.S. Forest Service trucks that barreled down Montana's back roads, the same color as the corridors leading to the warden's office in the old prison.

Almost two hours he sat there, while the machine beside him whirred and clunked, spinning his blood into different components and giving some of them back to his body. The gentle weight of the plastic tubing on his skin reminded him his arms were bare, but he didn't look. He tried to be still. He tried not to think. Should've gotten easier, but it got harder, so by the time Molly sat back down on her stool Wes was just barely holding back from tearing the needles out of his arms. But he nodded, and thanked her when she b.u.t.toned his shirt cuffs, and made another appointment.

"If it could be with you again," he said.

It was early afternoon when Wes left the hospital, but seemed like twilight because the clouds that still spilled rain rode low over the valley, settling like slow-churning froth onto the peaks surrounding the city. The sun was so well hidden behind them Wes couldn't say where in the sky it hung.

He saw the kid on the interstate ramp. Leaning there against the guardrail, thumb over his shoulder, a sodden, overloaded bookbag at his feet. Wes took a few seconds to decide to take his foot off the accelerator, pulled over well ahead of the kid. He turned to see the boy slinking toward the truck. Stopped a few feet shy. Wes leaned across and unrolled the pa.s.senger window, and the kid stepped forward, ducked his head partway into the cab. His sweatshirt had a hood, but it hung limp down his back, and raindrops nested in his hair before soaking in. "Hey, Mr. Carver, you remember me?"

"Wouldn't have stopped if I didn't."

The kid didn't smile, but his features relaxed. "Right. Scott," he added, tapping his chest, and Wes was irritated to think the kid might've realized he couldn't remember his name.

"Help you with something, Scott?"

The boy looked at the ground, shrugged the bookbag higher onto his shoulder. He had two metal rods jammed through one eyebrow; Wes tried not to stare, but the glint drew his eye. "Think you could give me a ride to Black River? If you're going there."

"I don't suppose I got to tell you that hitching a ride ain't the smartest thing in the world."

"I have a car," Scott said, with a vehemence only a teenager could muster. "But it's a piece of s.h.i.t."

"You really gotta talk like that?"

"Sorry," Scott said, without conviction. "It got me out here but now it's dead. The mechanic says it needs a new starter, and that's, like, three hundred bucks I don't have." Rain dripped from his hair into his eyes, but he didn't wipe it away, just blinked hard. Wes felt a little sorry for making the kid stand out there while he interrogated him. A little.

"Can't your momma pick you up?"

"She's at work."

"All right. Get in." Wes didn't trust the kid-he had no illusions about what a kid who wanted to lie could do to an honest man's reputation-but you did what you could for your fellow man, especially if it didn't put you out any. Even if your fellow man was a teenager who shoved sharp objects through his own face for recreation.

Scott plunked his bookbag down on the seat between them, and Wes waited until the kid had buckled up before pulling back onto the ramp. Scott slouched against the window, staring out as they drove through Elk Fork and into the canyon. This close, Wes could see his eyelashes were dark red. Hair was dyed, then. Earbuds dangled against his chest on a white cord that sprouted from the collar of his sweatshirt, and he pulled his sleeves down over his knuckles. The laces of his boots were untied and clotted with mud where they'd dragged on the ground. A b.u.t.ton pinned to his bookbag read, If I were you, I'd hate me too.

For a good ten minutes neither of them said anything. At Milltown, the rain poured down so hard Wes had to turn the wipers to their highest speed just to see the taillights of the semi up ahead. A deer dashed into the road, its legs skittering every which way, and Wes. .h.i.t the brakes hard. The deer flung its head high and spun back the way it had come.

Wes accelerated again and cleared his throat. "So I hear you like horses."

Scott didn't turn away from the window. "They're all right, I guess."

"You been working for Dennis long?"

"Since June."

"He said you were from out of town. Originally."

"Yeah. Miles City."

"My wife was from out that direction."

Scott straightened in his seat. "Dennis said she died."

Hands tight on the wheel till they hurt. "That's right."

"Sorry."

Not much as condolences went, but it sounded genuine enough, and Wes had to admit that surprised him. He nodded his thanks, didn't look to see if the kid saw.

More rain. More road. A silence more awkward than the last.

This time Scott broke it. "Did Dennis tell you why my mom and I moved here?"

"Might've mentioned it."

"That's good he told you, 'cause you were probably the only person in the whole town who didn't know."

Wes glanced sideways. The kid was staring right at him, arms crossed over his chest. "You get to see your father much?"

"My mom makes me visit him every week. I wouldn't call it a 'get to' kind of thing."

Wes could believe that. They'd tried, in a halfhearted sort of way, to make the visiting room at the old prison somewhat welcoming. There was a mural on one wall-a flat, childlike painting of the landscape that lay outside the gate-and a soda machine that dispensed off-brand cola. But no two ways about it, the place had been depressing as h.e.l.l, and he doubted the new prison was any better. Wes never could decide what was worse: the visits where the inmate and his visitor sat stiffly, barely talking, or the ones where they held hands across the table and stared into each other's eyes until you had to just about drag one or the other of them out. Scott, Wes guessed, was one of the former. The barely-talkers. But you could never tell.

"So what do you do?" Scott asked. "For a job."

"I'm retired."

"From what?"

Wes steered around a flattened, sodden piece of cardboard in the road. "I was a musician," he said. Sounded like a lie.

The kid raised his metallic eyebrows. "Seriously?"

"Yeah." He could feel Scott's eyes on him and felt oddly nervous. Wondered if the kid could tell he'd been a CO, if it was apparent somehow in the way he moved, the way he talked. Sometimes it seemed that criminals could sense a cop a long way off; maybe it was hereditary.

Scott leaned forward-for a moment Wes thought he was going for the glove compartment; he remembered the revolver and his heart seized-and punched the power b.u.t.ton on the radio. Music filled the cab, accompanied by grating static. Never could get a clear signal in the canyon. "Country, huh?"

"Not your cup of tea, I'd guess."

The kid surprised him. "A lot of it sucks. But some of it's all right. The older stuff."

"I played the fiddle."

"Yeah?"

"Old-time, mostly. Some bluegra.s.s."

"I hear strings are hard."

"Hard to do right," Wes agreed.

"I'm a singer."

Wes thought about that. Maybe the kid was a singer the way every kid thought he was a singer. They all wanted to be famous, stand at center stage with folks screaming their name and begging for autographs. Thought they could do it, too, with all the shows on TV now promising instant celebrity. Most of them had no idea how talentless they were. But something in the way Scott said it-plain, confident, no mitigating "kind of" or "pretty good" or even "want to be"-made Wes think there might be something to it.

They came around a curve, and Black River spilled along the canyon before them. Not raining quite as hard here. The sun occupied a horizontal gap between cloud and mountain over the south slopes, and light glared off the wet asphalt. "I always thought if I was going to learn to play something it would be the guitar," Scott said. "But maybe fiddle would be cool, too."

Wes didn't say anything.

"Can you still play?"

He looked at Scott. The kid rubbed a thumb over his nose, across his freckles, and looked about five years younger than he had when he got into the truck. His eyes were on Wes's hands, hooked over the yoke of the steering wheel.

Wes didn't answer him.

He and Dennis shared dinner that night, the first time they'd sat down together rather than stood over the counter in the kitchen. The table was a small cherry wood square, set against one wall of the living room. Tonight Dennis sat on the side nearest the kitchen, where Wes always used to sit, and Wes sat opposite, in Claire's old place. It put his back to the door, but that was better than sitting the way they used to, the way they had on that last night.

Dennis spoke while Wes's head was still bowed, grace running silently in his head. "I hear you gave Scott a ride into town today."

Wes thought his Amen, looked up. "Seemed like he needed it."

"Didn't rip off your truck's stereo or anything, did he?"

"Do you really got to do this tonight, Dennis?"

Dennis held up a hand. "Fine, sorry."

Wes watched his stepson push a single pea back and forth with his fork, a millimeter one way, a millimeter the other. Wes wasn't sure if this edginess was because of his presence or because that was just who Dennis was. Everything he did, every move he made, it was like he was trying to hold back, keep from exploding. It gave him an odd aura of stillness, but with a great deal of force behind each minute movement. "Seriously," Dennis said finally. "What'd you think of him?"

"Why ask me? Ain't like you've ever bothered with my opinion before." h.e.l.l. h.e.l.l. Why say that? Must be this house. This d.a.m.ned table.

Dennis dropped his fork onto his plate. "Jesus, Wes. Do you have to do this?"

"Sorry. I didn't mean nothing by it. Let it go." He took a long swallow of water, set the gla.s.s down harder than he meant to. "Scott. I don't know. Seems like a nice enough kid, I guess. Not real happy to be here."

"You blame him?"

"No." Wes set his fork down, pushed his plate away, most of the food still on it. No appet.i.te since Claire died. "I'll tell you one thing, though: that kid don't seem especially interested in horses." Dennis looked up, and Wes saw he wasn't saying anything his stepson didn't already know. "Which I suppose means he must really like you."

Dennis smiled, not at Wes. "And you find that hard to believe?"

He noticed Dennis's nose all of a sudden, the way it ruined his profile. Wes broke it eighteen years ago, at this table, the one and only time he'd ever laid a hand on him in anger. Hadn't strictly meant to, but he still wasn't sorry for it; Dennis had deserved that and more. What he thought he might be sorry for was the afterward. The leaving. It was a new idea, that he might be sorry for that. And he thought again about Scott, the anger that poured out of the kid so you could almost smell it on him, sharp and sour. "Dennis," Wes said, looking back across the table, "I don't think I know you well enough anymore to say."

He stayed up late that night, later than Dennis, though he had church in the morning. He walked around the silent house, treading close to the walls to keep the floorboards from creaking. Still a house he could move through in the dark. Still a house whose shadows he knew, the cast of moonlight through the uncurtained windows familiar as it fell.

The walls were most different. Gone, of course, were the things he and Claire had taken with them when they'd left: the cross Wes's father had carved from a knotted piece of deadfall; the wooden calendar with a painting of a goose Claire ordered another year's worth of pages for every November; the small poster from the last time the band played Harvest, a few weeks before the riot. Gone, too, were the things they had left behind: a handful of pleasant but generic art prints, a collection of haphazardly framed family photographs. The walls of the house now were nearly bare, cool white almost everywhere he looked.

The exception was the s.p.a.ce over the mantel, where Claire's wide mirror used to be. When he was fifteen and in the midst of one of his rages, Dennis threw a book at the mirror and cracked it. All the way across, from one corner of the frame to the other, a finer spiderweb of fractures at the point of impact. Now there were a handful of photographs in its place, each carefully matted and framed. A yellow stand of aspens in low sun; a distant image of a broad-antlered bull moose; a horse running blurred, scattered sharp catches of image standing out: the glint of a steel shoe nailed to a hoof, the bristly texture of a tangled mane, a taut line of muscle powering a stride.

And his wife. A photograph Wes had never seen before. Dennis must have taken it during one of Claire's last visits before she became ill. She had never liked having her picture taken, and Wes was suffering the consequences of her aversion now; he had so few photographs of her. Soft light on her skin, highlighting her profile as she turned from the camera, her hair in a thick, heavy braid over her shoulder, a shy close-mouthed smile curving her lips. A beautiful portrait. But her eyes were aimed a few degrees away from the viewer, and no matter where Wes stood, he couldn't pretend she was looking at him.

The Black River Presbyterian Church was a block off Main Street, in a wide building whose geometric shape had probably seemed innovative (rather than ugly) when it was built. The sign by the road had been replaced, but that was the only obvious change Wes could see. Same kinds of trucks in the lot. Same kinds of people walking in.

He waited until three minutes to nine before he went inside. The usher looked distantly familiar, but he smiled through Wes and handed him a program with a rote greeting. The town had grown in the last eighteen years, but the sanctuary was emptier than he remembered it, no more than half full, and the sign outside listed this as the only service of the week. Wes took a seat in the second-to-last pew, near the windows, dotted today with a scattering of raindrops making a slow descent toward the ground outside. The stained gla.s.s spanned the entire left wall of the sanctuary and reflected a typical Presbyterian austerity: no figures of Christ or saints, just thin bars of color: pink, gold, blue, green. As a young child, Wes thought the windows looked like they were made of sheets of hard candy. Knew it was mere fantasy even then, but as he and his father filed out of the pew one morning, he'd leaned close and touched the tip of his tongue to the cool gla.s.s.

When Wes was a boy, church was for him and his father alone. His mother bowed her head at the dinner table, and on the bookshelf at home there was a small Bible with her name in script on the dedication page, but she stayed home Sundays. Later, when he was an adult, Claire stayed home, too. She had never come with him to church, not in Black River and not in Spokane. Not even to the chapel in the hospital. But she never laughed at him, never belittled his commitment, though she knew the strength of his doubts.

The pastor today was new to him, a younger man with a voice that was stronger than his thin face and slight frame suggested. Wes pa.s.sed judgment on him over the course of the hour and decided he was a good pastor for a town of corrections officers, hitting the Old Testament heavily, making plentiful references to justice and duty. During the litany of sorrows and misfortunes that made up the weekly prayer list, Wes heard Claire's name. It rang in his head, seemed a strange convergence of his own thoughts and the outside world. Claire Carver, Claire Carver. Claire Carver, dead and gone, pitied and prayed for. It took Wes a minute to find Arthur Farmer in a pew near the front; he'd gone bald beneath his hat. He'd have put her name on the list. He'd have thought it was his business. The ringing of her name died, the service went on. Wes bowed his head for the prayers and recited words that were good by virtue of their familiarity, offered up notes in a low voice for the hymns. He put a twenty in the collection plate when it pa.s.sed. Didn't take communion. Never did.

When Wes was fourteen, his father switched from evening watch to day watch at the prison. It was a change he had waited years for, but it meant he was now inside the gate Sunday mornings. They began attending evening service, and it was a habit Wes held to as an adult; he was sorry to see it had been done away with. At evening service, the sanctuary was peopled mostly by men who sat alone, wide gaps between them in the pews. The pastor's voice was tired but unyielding, and the hymns took on an appealing strangeness when sung only in low men's voices. It was during that spare, solemn hour, in the largely empty sanctuary, the bright candy windows dark, that Wes came closest to believing.

His father died on a Sunday. It was autumn, but the long arctic summer evenings lingered, and the sun was just beginning its slow sink below the mountains when the service let out. His father sent him to walk home alone, said he had an errand to run in town. When he thought back on it later, Wes realized this was a mere veneer of a lie; everything in town was closed on Sunday evenings. He hadn't recognized it then, though, and for years he felt guilty, wondered if his father had been intentionally clumsy with this untruth, hoping his son would catch him in it. But Wes had accepted it easily, and his father had smiled and said, "Help your mother." Another warning there, maybe, a deeper meaning, but Wes missed it, too, and when he arrived home, he didn't go straight for his fiddle as usual but went instead to the kitchen and helped his mother chop carrots and peel potatoes.

They said later that his father didn't jump from the trestle before the train hit him. How they knew this with such certainty went unsaid, but Wes was old enough to imagine. He took a macabre pride in the knowledge. Wondered if he, too, would have the fort.i.tude to stand his ground with a freight train bearing down on him, no railings restraining him and the river black and heavy far below, the water offering a chance, however distant, of rescue, reversal.

Wes had been up on the trestle twice. Once was days afterward, when he made a white-knuckled climb of the iron scaffolding and walked between the rails in a frightened crouch. At the midpoint, the river evenly split below, he found a dark stain on one of the wooden ties that might have been blood or might have been grease. The other time was years later, the night his relationship with Dennis had shattered. A harder climb, not for age but because even then his hands were halfway to useless. There was a chill breeze blowing on the trestle that he'd been sheltered from at the bottom of the canyon. It lifted his short hair and cooled his skin almost to the point of pain. Wes walked straight that night, his arms held slightly out from his sides, maybe for balance, maybe to better feel the movement of the air around and against him. The height was seductive, and he didn't stay long.

Late Sunday afternoon the storm broke into pieces and drifted apart, and Wes and Dennis decided to go up the mountain. The suit he'd brought stayed on its hanger in the closet, and he wore his good jeans and a green shirt instead, the one Claire bought for him because she said it matched his eyes.

He found Dennis outside, tying the black horse to a heavy hitching rack beside the shed. The red horse was tied too, already saddled. Wes crossed the yard, mud pushing up from beneath the gravel and squelching over the sides of his boots. The red horse skittered sideways at his approach, jerking its head up and startling itself all over again when it hit the end of its rope. Dennis reached out to the animal, laid his palm flat on its neck. "Easy, Serrano," he said, voice low.

"The h.e.l.l is this?"

"It's a long way up," Dennis said, without looking at him. "We'll ride."

"You couldn't have told me this before?"

"Didn't see any reason to." Dennis ran a bristle brush over the black horse's back and laid his free hand over its withers. "I'll put you on Rio. He's a good horse."

Wes didn't say anything. He could ride. Didn't especially like to, but his father had kept a couple horses, chunky animals with coats that never shed all the way out and hooves that chipped on the rocks in the pasture. He'd used them to pack elk out of the mountains, and for a few seasons Wes went along. Fine. He'd do it Dennis's way, this once. For Claire.

He watched Dennis smooth the blanket over Rio's back and swing the saddle up so it settled easy. His stepson moved with the kind of speed and confidence a person exhibited only when he didn't have to think about what he was doing. Wes watched his hands. They expertly tightened the cinch and knotted the latigo, moving swiftly over leather and metal and still finding time for a gentle glide over muscle and hair. "Let's get Mom's ashes set up here," he said.

Dennis's hands crowded each other when he held the small box. The brown paper wrapping was still on, and it rustled as Dennis gently settled the box into the bottom of a leather bag. He tied it to the skirt of Rio's saddle so it lay against the horse's flank and rose and fell slightly with the animal's breath.

Dennis turned away from the saddlebag too quickly. "Ready?"

Wes nodded.

Rio took the bit readily when Dennis offered it, closing his eyes as Dennis guided the leather straps of the bridle over his ears and fixed the buckles. The reins were split, and without so much as a glance at Wes, Dennis balanced them out in his hands and knotted them together. He started to lead the horse toward a bale of hay near the fence, but Wes stopped him. "I'm good." He took hold of the saddle horn, set his foot in the near stirrup and hauled himself into the saddle. He could often force his way through a single action-mind over matter lasted that long, at least-but his hand punished him good when he tightened his grip on the horn. A sweet pain on a day like this. Tangible.