Black River (23 page)

Wes took the fiddle and bow from him, and Scott disappeared around the front of the trailer. Wes walked to the lawn chairs, settled himself into one. It sank and creaked beneath his weight. He held the fiddle upright on his knee, the way he used to during breaks in practice, let the bow lie across his thighs. It was so tempting to put it beneath his chin, to bring bow to string. It was tuned now; he could draw open-string notes from it, maybe even one or two stopped notes before his fingers gave up. Might be able to coax the first couple notes of “Black River” out of it. Might be able to pretend for a few seconds he could still do what he'd always loved best. But Wes kept the fiddle where it was, waited for the eager readiness to dissipate from his hands and body.

The kid must've been trying on half his wardrobe. How long could it take to pick one black sweatshirt from half a dozen others? Wes tried not to feel the fiddle beneath his fingers. He listened to the train rumble past. He could see it through the trees lining the road: dulled blocks of color flashing by steadily, one after another. Wes found his foot tapping to the rhythm of metal grinding over metal. Lots of songs about trains.

Scott came half jogging back from the trailer. “Sorry,” he said, tugging the sweatshirt over his head. “I guess my mom washed it, and I couldn't find it.” He held out his hands, and Wes wasn't sure whether he was glad or sorry to hand the fiddle over.

“You know this tune pretty good?”

“Pretty good, yeah.” A little color in his cheeks. Been listening to it a lot, then. Wes felt a hint of that same prideful pleasure he used to feel when people below a stage called for the tune by name.

“All right,” he said. “Today I just want to go through the first melody line, okay? Just like this.” He sang the first part of the tune softly, wordlessly, the first gentle rise and fall of notes. “Key of G. Start on open D.”

Scott was eager—and he wasn't fibbing; he knew every note—but he attacked “Black River” the way he did the old-time dance tunes Wes had been teaching him, all rhythm and no elasticity. It was a beginner's way of playing—a talented beginner, yes, but still a novice—and Wes wondered if this had been a mistake, if it was simply too soon. The fiddle sang dutifully, and it rang nicely in the open air, but Wes knew it was capable of so much more than
nice.

“Gently,” he told Scott. “You want to draw the note like you're spinning it out of thin air.” He rose from his chair and knelt beside Scott's. Carefully he rested his right hand on the back of Scott's, helped him guide the bow across the strings. And there they were. The first of his notes. He felt them resonate through horsehair and wood, as surely as if his hand had been the one touching the bow.

“Whoa,” Scott said.

Reluctantly, Wes let go, sat back in his own chair. “Again.”

Slowly it came to him. Slowly the sound Wes remembered returned, the fiddle's true voice filling the canyon, building and rising with the mountains, inhabiting the air. Sometimes Scott got frustrated—“Don't you get that most folks playing as long as you are still mucking their way through ‘Oh! Susanna'?” Wes asked him at one point—but more often he got it right, or close to right. Didn't sound quite the way it did in Wes's head, of course. “Black River” had been, and always would be, Wes's tune first and foremost, his almost masterpiece, the song he heard in his head every day of his life, the notes he felt waiting in his fingertips every hour of the day. But Scott was going to have his own way of playing it, and it would be worthy. They played together for almost two hours—two hours for a single melody line, not even a quarter of the whole tune—and Wes thought about stopping only when he realized the winter-white sun had already sunk below the high horizon of the mountains. He let Scott play it through once more, and he watched his face and saw the way the music transformed this boy, saw that he had been right in coming here with nothing more than a song, that it was enough for Scott as it had been enough for him. Saw that he had done something good.

 

Enough indulgence. Enough of letting Bobby Williams drive him from sleep. Enough surrendering to the queasy memory of fear. Morning came and Wes was up with Dennis, the sun still closer to the east end of the canyon than the west. He drank his coffee, added a glass of orange juice to spike his blood sugar and got into his truck. It was just late enough he missed most of the commuters heading toward Elk Fork, and he had the interstate mostly to himself. Near Milltown a slew of police cars and ambulances flew past in the eastbound lanes, lights spiraling but sirens silent. Montana had its share of bad wrecks—the roadsides all littered with tiny white crosses—and Wes guessed they were headed to another. Even so, he drove as fast as he thought he could get away with—he missed the days when the official posted speed limit was simply “reasonable and prudent”—and cranked the radio louder than he usually liked it. Anything to keep up his resolve all the way to town.

Lord, it made him angry. The riot was twenty years gone. It had lasted just thirty-nine hours. Thirty-nine of the worst hours of his life, yeah, but still less than two full days. Didn't seem right that a few hours, however miserable, should still have such an effect on him so many years later. Plenty of folks had endured worse; he knew that. In some ways—not many, but some—he'd even been lucky. He'd heard rumors at the academy of what inmates sometimes did to COs during riots. Williams, twisted as he was, at least hadn't been interested in that. And all a man had to do was read the paper—any paper, any day—to realize that there was no shortage of people doing terrible things to other people. You picked up. You moved on. Wasn't quite that simple, maybe, but there was nothing stopping Wes from going to the hospital and asking for Molly and sitting quietly for a couple hours so he could do some good for another person.

Except when he got to the donation center, the receptionist told him Molly wasn't there. “She came in this morning,” she said, “but she went home sick. You just missed her.”

Wes set his palms flat on her desk. It was moments like this that made him a little glad he had so much trouble believing in God; he didn't like to think a higher power would toy with him this way. “She won't be back?”

The receptionist took a second look at him. Something came down behind her eyes, but he couldn't tell if it was guardedness or pity. “I don't think so, sir.” She glanced behind her, toward the donation area. “Emma could help you, though?” It came out a question, and the receptionist seemed relieved when, after several seconds, Wes nodded.

Emma was younger than Molly, and a little skittish. Wes didn't mind. Made him feel like he ought to take care of her, and that made it easier not to think about himself. She helped him with his buttons, and Wes rolled his sleeves himself, careful to keep the fresh burn on his right arm hidden. His scars startled Emma, and she hid it badly. Her voice jumped an octave, and her smile broadened into a rictus. Twice she dropped needles on the floor, and when she had the lines in place and asked if he'd like a magazine, Wes took pity on her and said yes, he sure would. She brought him half a dozen,
Field & Stream
and
Popular Mechanics
and
People.
He spent the next two hours dutifully flipping through them, reading about deer rifles and glossy cars and celebrities he'd never heard of, half afraid that Emma, in her nervous enthusiasm, might quiz him later.

Wasn't easy. Oh, he wanted to bolt. But he didn't, and when Emma came back for the final time and pulled the needles and taped cotton over each elbow, he was glad he'd stayed. It wasn't any sort of victory over Williams, not really, but it felt a little like one. The trial of it must've shown on his face, though, because Emma decided he looked too pale, and despite her jumpiness and his protests, she insisted that he stay another ten minutes and eat a pair of off-brand cookies.

He left the hospital feeling almost good. Maybe after school let out, he'd track down Scott again and try to teach him the next part of “Black River.” Might be a little too soon, a little too challenging for his skill level at this point, but the kid had surprised him before.

He was almost to Milltown when the ambulance passed him in the opposite lanes. No lights, no siren. No reason to notice. Just that he'd come from the hospital. Just that he'd seen another ambulance going the other way this morning.

It was gonna be a pretty evening later. Cold, but in that clear, crisp autumn way that seemed like a last gift before winter hit. Maybe he should swing by the IGA before going back to the house, grill up some burgers for him and Dennis tonight.

The police cars came from behind, when he was a few miles from Black River. The first hit its siren to alert him, an abbreviated whoop, and he slowed and pulled half into the breakdown lane. The next came a few minutes later, the third another minute after that. He'd been going almost eighty; they were going faster. Wes felt familiar tension settling back over his shoulders, tried to shrug it off. No reason to worry about a few cop cars. Wrecks all the time on the roads here. Hunting season. Folks starting up their woodstoves after the summer off. All kinds of calamity in the world; it wasn't all coming for him. But each time one of the police cars passed and Wes slowed, he held his weaker speed when he pulled back into the travel lane.

Slower.

Slower.

Slower.

 

He didn't drive through town. Didn't continue through the canyon to see what it might show him. When he got back to the house, the wind was blowing from the east, and it brought with it the high wail of a single siren, fractured against the mountain slopes. Dennis was sitting on the porch steps, and Wes wished he didn't have to go to him. He was still in his horseshoeing clothes: the heavy boots, the plaid flannel shirt with its tattered, turned-up cuffs. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped between them, and he looked like he was both waiting and not waiting. If Wes hadn't known better, he'd have thought Dennis was praying.

Dennis didn't look up when he approached, though Wes walked slow, the way Farmer had on that first day back in Black River. His stepson's face was still, so still. Eyes downcast but seeing something other than gravel and dirt. Wes wanted to leave. He feared this knowledge he didn't yet have. Maybe if sharing its burden could help Dennis, if it could soften the hard, weighty mask of misery that had taken hold of his features, Wes would have been more eager to ask. Since Claire's death, though, he often felt dangerously fragile, just a hairsbreadth from losing control.

The siren died abruptly, the echo lingering a few seconds more before succumbing to silence. “What is it?” His voice was too loud, compensating for his dread. “Is it the prison again?”

Dennis looked up sharply, like a hawk that had spotted prey. “The prison,” he repeated. He stood, a slow unfolding of his body. Walked toward Wes, stopped, moved a few steps left, a few steps right. “It's not always about the fucking prison, Wes. Not every goddamned thing that happens in this town is about the fucking prison.” Both hands to his forehead, pushing back through his hair. “Or maybe it is. Maybe it is. I don't know.”

Wes felt his protective instincts evaporate. The pacing, the hard glint in the eyes, these things belonged to the Dennis he had known years ago, the Dennis he didn't trust and didn't like. “What's happened?” he asked.

Dennis tapped a cigarette from a nearly empty pack and cupped his hands to light it. He held the smoke in his lungs for a long time, exhaled in Wes's direction; the wind carried it away before Wes caught the scent. “Tell me something,” Dennis said, turning his hand so he could see the tip of the cigarette. “When Williams burned you, did you scream?”

“What did you say to me?” Wes's voice low, the dangerous kind of low Dennis ought to have recognized.

His stepson moved close to him, too close, his face just inches from Wes's. “Did you scream,” he repeated, “when Williams burned you?”

He'd clenched his jaw so tightly he'd cracked a molar. He'd pulled so fiercely against the handcuffs the metal sawed through his skin. He'd damn near passed out, his exhalations were so hard and his inhalations so shallow. But the control room was open to the tiers, and all the inmates would have heard, and Williams would have heard, and Wes knew his own voice was the last thing—the only thing—he still controlled, so the one thing he did not do was scream.

He shook his head, just slightly.

“No?” Dennis raised an eyebrow, though the eye beneath stayed cold. “Five cigarettes and you didn't scream?”

“Six,” Wes said softly.

“Six,” Dennis repeated, nodding to himself. “Right.” He gestured toward Wes's left arm. A casual movement, one he had no right to. Shouldn't even know what was under that sleeve. “And what about when he cut you?”

It had been a different pain, easier to take in its way. Hurt more in the minutes and hours after than during, though the makeshift blade was dull enough it did plenty of damage on its way through flesh. The knife had frightened him more than the cigarettes. Williams sliced deep, and as he'd worked his way down Wes's arm toward the wrist, all Wes had been able to think was how close his arteries and veins ran to the surface. The blood slicked his arm—some dripped off the knob of his wrist, the rest curved beneath the cuff and into the cradle of his palm before slipping between his fingers and onto the floor, with a sound that was subtly not like water. He'd been too afraid of that blade to move. Too afraid to scream.

“No,” he said.

Dennis's eyes were starting to take on that wild, desperate edge Wes remembered from when he was a kid. From that night at the dinner table. “So you stayed quiet through all that,” he said. “Can't say I'm surprised, Wes. Guess I expected nothing less.” He nodded to Wes's hands. “What about the fingers?”