Black River Part 9

PART III.

BURN.

Claire has never seen Arthur Farmer in his uniform before. He is one of the few officers who change into street clothes before leaving the prison, so when she opens the door at two in the afternoon and sees him there on her porch in his crisp blue shirt and slacks, bra.s.s bits gleaming, she knows. Wesley.

An incident, Arthur calls it. Stumbles over the word. It is so obviously not his own, a parroting of something the administration has said, bureaucratic euphemism. When he finishes speaking, Claire steps toward him and he opens his arms to her and she raises her hand and slaps him hard across the face. She feels it all the way up in her shoulder. Arthur takes it-a blink, nothing else-and his calm makes her want to hit him again, but she crosses her arms over her chest and steps back when he reaches for her.

When? she asks.

Not quite an hour ago, he tells her. I came as soon as I could.

Not quite an hour. Is that fifty-nine minutes? Forty-five? Thirty-one? So much could have happened in not quite an hour. Wesley could already be dead. Jaw slack, eyes gla.s.sy. Or they could be hurting him. Landing blows on his body, slicing skin and what lay beneath. Worse. Claire forces herself to imagine every possibility, every potential pain and terror. She wants no more surprises. Wants nothing else to shock her the way this has. She must start to look crazed, because Arthur risks reaching for her again, and this time she lets him steer her to the couch.

Maddie's gone to pick up Dennis at school, he says. I'll stay with you until she gets here, and then I'm going back to the prison. I'll stay until I can bring him home to you.

Vague phrasing. Bring him home. Claire is sure it's intentional. Care on Arthur's part not to make a hollow promise.

At that moment, Wesley is already in the chair in the control room. Ankles bound with his own bootlaces, wrists fastened behind him with his own handcuffs. Williams is slouched on the floor opposite, back against the wall. He has found Wesley's cigarettes in the desk drawer and lets one dangle, unlit, from his lips.

Mac Dalloway comes by in the evening. Stands just inside the door and looks somewhere over Claire's head while he asks if there's anything he can do. He works the ground-floor tier, two levels below Wesley. One level below Lane. He is here because he feels guilty, because it could so easily have been him. Like Arthur, he is still in his uniform. It's as though the men are reluctant to leave the prison behind while their brothers remain inside, so they carry it with them on their backs. Before Mac leaves, he tells her about the candles. People are putting them in their windows, he says. All over Black River. Three. One for Bill, one for Lane. One for Wesley.

It's a nice idea, Madeline says when he has gone.

There are tea lights in the cupboard over the stove, Claire tells her.

Except there aren't. There are matches, the box still wrapped in cellophane; it crinkles when she folds her fingers over it. But no candles.

Maybe in the linen closet? Madeline asks.

No. Candlesticks, in the back, not real silver but chrome, flaking at the base. Claire throws them back inside and they clank against each other.

Now it isn't such a nice idea, these three candles in the window. Now it's a necessity. She is negligent for not having lit them before, even if she didn't know. She should have thought of the idea herself. Every minute that pa.s.ses with her windowsill unburdened by flame is a minute that might somehow, through some ugly magic or mysticism, hurt her husband. Madeline comes up behind her and puts her hands on Claire's shoulders; Claire shrugs her off. Already she's sick of being comforted. Claire doesn't want comfort. She wants Wesley, and barring that, she wants hysteria. She wants to embrace it, succ.u.mb to it, fling herself into it headlong and let it take her.

How can there be no candles in this entire f.u.c.king house?

At that moment. Five hours in. Bobby Williams is putting out cigarettes on the soft underside of her husband's forearm. Six touches of ember to flesh.

She goes out for the candles herself. Madeline doesn't want to let her-Claire sees it in the way she lets her pressed lips turn down on one side, a gesture she's inherited from their mother-but Claire already has the keys to the old farm truck in her hand. Stay with Denny, she says. There is hay on the bench seat, pierced through the worn upholstery, and it presses uncomfortably against Claire's thighs as she drives.

She gets the candles at Jameson's. They have already put a box at each register, blocky white votives. The girl who sells them to her is young, still a teenager. Someone's daughter. Claire knows her but can't think of her name. The girl watches Claire with unabashed fascination as she puts the candles in a paper bag. It will be like this all the time if Wesley doesn't come home, Claire thinks. I will be The Widow.

It's okay, the girl says when Claire tries to hand her a dollar. I think Mr. Jameson would want me to give them to you.

Claire holds the money between them for a moment, across the counter. It's an old bill, soft and limp, a little damp between her fingers, and it flutters under their breaths. Thank you, she says finally, and puts the dollar back in her purse.

At the frontage road, she turns right instead of left. It is only just night, and both horizons glow. West for the sun, east for the reflected blaze of lights at the prison. The first a restful sort of light, an easing into dark, the second harsher, a fighting against it. And there, at the far end of Main Street, is the prison. It is ugly enough on its own, uglier still juxtaposed against the gently ordinary buildings of her adopted hometown. The parking lots are full, police cars and media vans spilling into the s.p.a.ce below the great gray wall. Lights everywhere, the harsh sentinel lamps rising above the wall and its towers, and below, the sharp square lights of the news crews and the frenetic, spiraling reds and blues of the emergency vehicles. Claire spots Wesley's truck in the officers' parking lot: a green Chevy, bought last year from Arthur Farmer for five hundred dollars. If Wesley doesn't come home, someone-maybe Mac, probably Arthur-will drive that truck back to the house. Already Claire knows they won't park it properly, will let the tires edge off the gravel drive, forget the emergency brake.

Claire parks on the side of the frontage road, an empty field stretching between her and the rear wall of the grounds. She could get closer, head back up Main toward the prison gates, but then she will be amid people. They will know her, and then there will be cameras in her face and men pushing the cameras away and other men trying to comfort her. They are good people, these officers-her friends' husbands, her husband's friends-but they spend their days enforcing rules, suppressing emotions, intimidating and refusing to be intimidated. They won't know what to say, and will try to say it anyway.

She gets out of the truck, the candles rolling away from her, white wax gathering dirt and hay. There is broken gla.s.s in the gra.s.s at the side of the road, a single sagging strand of rusty barbed wire linking skewed fenceposts. She wades through the knee-deep gra.s.s, steps over this first feeble fence. Moths fly up and halo her face before disappearing into the night. Claire notices the cold for the first time this season. Her skin much cooler than the blood beneath.

He is there. In the main cellblock, near the top; his tier is the highest. That's all she knows. She has never been inside the prison. She doesn't know what color the walls are, how many cells on a tier, how wide the walkways. It's terrifying, these gaps in her knowledge. They make Wesley seem farther away, already beyond her reach. If she could create an accurate picture of him in her mind-where he is kept, how the light casts on his face-she might protect that picture, protect him. How many yards away is he? She isn't good with distances. But not so many. Not so far. It would take mere minutes to walk to him, if only she could. But there are walls. Fences. Concertina wire. It is piled along the top of the perimeter wall, coil upon biting coil. She has always thought it an odd name, concertina. A beautiful word, musical, a word Wesley might like. Wesley.

She wants to scream his name.

He wouldn't hear her. Couldn't possibly. But she can feel her voice collecting in her chest, rising in her throat. A sound the shape of his name. Wesley. Her husband, her love, her trusted one, her idiot for staying here and working this miserable, dangerous job, and hasn't he done it all for her, her and her son, and if he dies, it will be all because of her, won't it, and he's right there, G.o.dd.a.m.n it, right there, and no one can get to him. And even if she screams his name until her voice abandons her, he won't hear.

Claire is on her knees in the field, fistfuls of dried stalks and blades in her white-knuckled hands. She closes her eyes and grinds her teeth together and waits until the need to scream has been forced back down to wherever it lives. Until she can part her lips and hear only breath.

While she is there in the gra.s.s, Williams carves his name into Wesley's skin. His shank is an appalling example of inmate resourcefulness, a sharpened shard of fibergla.s.s from a mess hall tray, a strip torn from a pillowcase wrapped around one end for a handle. It is not quite as sharp as a real knife would be, and he has to press hard. The O gives him the most trouble. He goes over it more than once.

That night, after first Dennis and then Madeline drop into sleep, Claire stays up and watches the three flames dance in the window, each reflection nearly as brilliant as its living twin. The one in the center, she has decided, is Wesley's. It starts to smoke sometime after midnight, gasps, disgorging short bursts of swirling ethereal black. She should blow it out. Trim the wick and relight it. She should. (She doesn't.) After another hour or so, long after the startling scent of ash has deadened into familiarity, the flame settles again, stretching steadily back toward the ceiling.

Williams sleeps for a few hours. Wesley does not.

How to fill the minutes. The hours. She sits on the couch. Lays a hand on the telephone. Notices the way the sunlight moves across the living room, an elongating patch of bright. She lets her sister sit beside her and tell her comforting things. She tries praying, silently, but she doesn't know how, and she doesn't want something Wesley believes in to feel so much like a lie, so she stops.

Arthur calls every hour on the hour. There is nothing for him to say. (At ten-sixteen a.m., just over twenty-one hours into the riot, the inmates climb onto the catwalk and send Bill Harris's body through the cellblock window. He is dead already, but the fall breaks his neck. Afterward people will say this is when they should have gone in-Claire will disagree; they should have gone in before Williams had a chance to torture her husband-but the warden decides negotiation is the word of the day. Arthur tells her none of this when he calls.) Madeline boils macaroni and dresses it with mayonnaise for lunch. This was Claire's favorite meal when she was a child; she is both touched that Madeline remembers such an inconsequential detail from so long ago and angry that her sister thinks such a small thing could possibly matter now. She eats only because Dennis refuses his own meal until she has finished hers. Twenty-four hours of riot. Twenty-four hours at least since Wesley has eaten. He must be hungry. In some part of herself, Claire realizes this is a trivial concern, the least of her fears, but it's a comprehensible worry. Nothing like blood. Nothing like death.

At half past four, Sara Gregory calls and tells her about Bill. (These first rumors say he was beaten to death-it's strange the way the details build; by the end of the next day Claire will hear that his spleen ruptured, that he bled to death without a single drop leaving his body-but the autopsy will reveal a heart attack. Scared to death. The reality, when it trickles out in bits and pieces over the coming weeks, is this: Bill was in the ground-floor guard station, safely behind iron. The riot began when the inmates doused him with gasoline from the auto shop, lit a mop on fire and threatened to push it through the bars unless he gave them the keys. He did, and died anyway. Claire cannot blame him for giving in, but for the rest of her life, a black whisper in her heart will insist he got what he deserved.) They say he's been dead since yesterday, Claire. Since the start.

Claire hears the unspoken words, and though she doesn't like Sara, not even now-maybe especially not now-it's a relief to offer even false comfort to someone else. Lane and Wesley are fine, she says. Her voice is so steady it surprises her.

But there's no way to know that.

They're fine.

When she hangs up, Claire carefully winds the spiral coil of the phone cord. She takes her hair out of its braid and twists it up into a bun. Then she thinks about Bill, and she thinks about Wesley, and she goes to the bathroom and vomits up the macaroni.

His fingers are last. Williams breaks them slowly, over the course of the day and night. Right hand first. This is one of the only details Claire will learn directly from Wesley, one of the only things he tells her. But he doesn't say, My right hand. He says, My bowing hand.

She has finally fallen asleep, and the phone wakes her. Four-seventeen a.m. Arthur on the other end.

He's alive, Claire. She will be so grateful to him, when she thinks of this later, for speaking those words first.

Where is he?

We just went in. We've got the cellblock back. I was the first one to him.

Is he all right?

They're taking him to St. Pat's in Elk Fork. Get Maddie to drive you. I'll come as soon as I can.

What am I going to see?

Silence.

Arthur, don't you think about what to tell me. Just say it.

They tied him up. Gave him more than bruises. It was . . . methodical.

Silence again.

I'm sorry, Claire.

What about Lane?

I can't say.

Can't?

The deputy warden is driving out to see Sara right now.

Oh. Oh, G.o.d.

The litany: Dehydration. Concussion. A four-inch laceration above his right ear. A bruise building below his left eye, transitioning from swollen red to dark mottle. Blood crusting black on his lower lip, a broken tooth behind the split flesh. Two fractured ribs, a heel-shaped bruise shading the skin above. Abrasions around his wrists and ankles. Six cigarette burns. Five carved letters. Nine broken fingers. (Claire thinks of it another way: A broken pinkie. A broken ring finger. A broken middle finger. A broken index finger. A broken thumb. Another broken pinkie. Another broken ring finger. Another broken middle finger. Another broken index finger. And she could pa.r.s.e it further still, because she learns that most of those fingers have more than one shattered bone. Condylar fractures, the doctors tell her, split into the joints. Williams didn't just snap. He twisted.) Wesley refuses most of the medicine the nurses offer. The pain's not intolerable, he says, and who will argue with him? He knows intolerable. Claire sees it wearing him down, though, sees the way he doesn't quite look at her, his gaze a few degrees off. He has been in the hospital three days; they are talking about letting him go home soon. He is restless here, and while Claire doubts her husband would be an ideal patient under any circ.u.mstances, she thinks it is especially difficult for him now. He goes very still whenever the doctors or nurses are in the room, holds his breath when they touch him.

I wish you'd let them give you something more for the pain, she says. They are walking down the hallway outside Wesley's room. He takes short steps, but they come steadily, one after another.

I don't like the way it makes me feel.

How's that?

Like I ain't entirely here.

Maybe that's not such a bad thing right now, Wesley.

His eyes shift to hers. Let's go back, he says.

She helps him turn; he can't hide the wince. His ribs this time, she thinks.

The nurses don't like her being here so often. They cluck at her about visiting hours, try to guilt her into leaving by telling her Wesley needs his rest. But they don't know her husband. He is wearing sweats and a bathrobe she had to buy for him two days ago at Jameson's, because he doesn't own such casual clothing. His hands are useless; he can't feed himself, can't bathe himself, can't dress himself. He will not accept help from anyone else. Will not rest in front of anyone else. The nurses don't know what it costs him just to be here.

It's gonna be all right, Claire.

I know.

I love you.

It's not something he says often. I love you, too, she says.

I love you, he repeats. They are back at his room; Claire pulls the door closed behind them. That's all that matters, Wesley says. I love you, and you're here, and we're together.

She stays quiet. Puts her hand on his arm, above his elbow. She wants to take his hands in hers, but they are too swaddled in gauze and tape.

The rest of it ain't important. I know that.

Wesley . . .

There's a chance I might play again, he says. Can't look at her when he speaks. She tries to guide him to the bed, but he won't allow himself to be moved. Even if the doctors don't think so, he says, there's a chance.

Shattered was the word they used. Claire has seen the x-rays. Shattered doesn't begin to describe what Bobby Williams did to Wesley's fingers. They had to go in and take out bone fragments. They're still talking about amputation.

Baby, she says. She wants, suddenly, to shut him up. To put her hands over his mouth, hold his jaw closed.

It was just a hobby, he says.

And she sees the tears building in his eyes, and knows something inside him will break if they fall. Claire has never seen her husband cry, and she doesn't want to. She rises on her toes to kiss him, and as she does she takes his face in her hands, and she wipes the tears from his eyes before he can know they are there.

After he comes home, Claire waits for the nightmares. She is prepared to comfort him, ready with soft words and a light touch. A small, shameful part of her actually looks forward to it. She is so eager to help, and Wesley so reluctant to let her. In the dark, just back from the dreamworld, maybe he'll allow it. But either the nightmares don't come or Wesley bears them with stillness and silence. (She suspects the latter, because when she wakes she often finds his eyes already open, and she can smell the sweat damp in his hair.) Instead, Dennis is the one with plagued dreams. He is fourteen, but starts to call for her in the middle of the night the way he did as a young child. His voice must wake Wesley, too, but he lies unmoving beside her, so Claire rises and finds her slippers and robe and crosses the squeaking hardwood hall to Dennis's bedroom, and she sits on the edge of his bed and brushes his hair back over his forehead and tells him over and over that everything is okay until he believes her and lets sleep take him again.

Claire comes to know about the riot-the times, the details, what her husband endured while she waited-because she reads the reports. Wesley almost never speaks about his hours as a hostage, and when he does, it is only a few words, which appear between them as if by accident. Always the sense that Wesley wishes he could take them back. Always the certainty that he conceals more than he reveals. So Claire drives to Elk Fork one day while he is at work, sits at a metal table in an over-air-conditioned room in the courthouse and turns the pages of the file.

She thinks of the way the little Wesley has told her has seemed wrenched from his lips against his will, and she tries to imagine her husband voicing the words on these pages, admitting to all this pain and fear. Such detail, line after line. So vivid. She is wearing a good dress, and has put on makeup, something she rarely does. She remembers it only when she touches a page and leaves a smear of red lipstick on the pristine paper, realizes she has had her hand to her mouth as she read.

The warden resigns. The situation, it is acknowledged, was handled badly. A plaque is set into a boulder just outside the gate, Bill's and Lane's names engraved on it. They plant some flowers nearby, but they are annuals, and no one replaces them after the first winter.

Almost a year beyond the riot, Claire will come home from Jameson's and find Wesley bent over the bathroom sink, blood twining over his wrist and off his fingers. A jackknife with slicked blade gripped awkwardly in his other hand. She stares at his blood, impossibly red against the white porcelain, and thinks, It's not the way I would have expected him to do it. She has always worried about his revolver, certain that if he ever took this route, he would leave as little to chance as possible. She has never worried about the knife. (All this in a moment. A moment in which she would have expected to scream, drop her bags, faint. Exhibit some symptom of shock. Instead, the shock comes a heartbeat later, when she realizes she is shattered but unsurprised.) Then Wesley looks up, and she realizes this isn't suicide. The blood wells from higher on his arm, above the wrist. Beads red over his scars. He opens his hand, lets the knife clatter and settle on the countertop. He straightens but doesn't say a word, offers no explanation, as though he already knows nothing he can say will satisfy. As though he doesn't need to justify this. His green eyes are steady on hers, unapologetic.

She will learn to ignore these new scars just as she ignores his old ones. And she will even understand why he did it, will imagine the hurt of carrying his devil's name on his skin, will remember that her husband is a man starving for control. But though she tries-she tries-she will never forgive Wesley for those seconds between the sight of blood and the meeting of their eyes.

"The h.e.l.l is this born-again bulls.h.i.t?" Wes demanded.

Farmer stood in the center of his round pen, pivoting on one heel to follow the horse trotting around the rail. He'd glanced over when Wes pulled his truck up next to the barn, but didn't quit working the horse. Glanced up again when Wes crossed the yard to the hitching rack just outside the pen, but again, didn't quit working.

"Farmer. What's this s.h.i.t I'm hearing about Williams?"

No answer. Three days Wes had been trying to catch Farmer to talk, and now that he had, the other man just kept fooling with that d.a.m.ned horse. It was a buckskin, with a yellow coat and a black mane and tail, a matching stripe down the center of its back. Young, Wes guessed. Still kind of skinny the way colts sometimes were, like no amount of feed could keep up with the speed at which they were growing. There was a battered old saddle on its back, a rope halter on its head. Every time it pa.s.sed the place where Wes stood, the talc.u.m-fine dirt in the pen got kicked up and found its way to Wes's lungs.

He waited until the horse was on the far end of the pen, raised his voice. "Were you ever plannin' on f.u.c.king telling me?"

"I tried that time you came to dinner," Farmer said, "but you weren't having none of it." He slapped the coiled rope in his left hand against his thigh, and the colt broke into a high-headed lope. "I'd have told you before the hearing if no one else did, but frankly, Wesley, I figured I'd let you hear it from someone else if I could."

"Yeah? Why's that?"

"'Cause I knew you'd be p.i.s.sed as all get-out. Fact that you're swearing up a storm tells me I wasn't wrong." He slowed his pivot a little, said "Easy" in that same low voice Wes had heard Dennis use before, and the buckskin fell back into a hurried trot.

"Well, someone tells me that Bobby Williams of all people has gone and-Farmer, would you leave the G.o.dd.a.m.ned horse alone for two minutes and talk to me?"

Farmer turned toward Wes and quit moving. Abruptly, the horse slowed to a walk and then came to an uneasy halt, legs awry as though frozen midstep. "Good boy," Farmer said absently. He tugged on the brim of his hat, crossed slowly to where Wes stood, but stayed on his side of the pipe fence. He looked very much the cowboy today: jeans, the hems brown with dust, stacked over work boots with curled kilties; a ch.o.r.e coat with cuffs that looked chewed on; his well-worn bone hat. A new uniform. He raised one foot to the first rung of the fence, pushed it forward until the boot heel hit, crossed his arms over one of the other rungs. Then he looked at Wes in that way he had that let a man know he had Farmer's full and unwavering attention.