Black River (31 page)

Williams was watching him. He kept his head bowed, just a little, and Wes wondered if that was meant to look nonthreatening. Looked furtive, instead. His expression was still carefully guarded, but there was a slight crease between his brows, a suggestion in those pale eyes that he was troubled by what he'd heard. Whether that troubledness was due to the stirrings of newfound conscience or for fear of the effect Wes's words might have on the parole board's decision, Wes couldn't have said.

“We'll take this under advisement,” the lawyer said, and the COs by the door crossed the room to Williams, who stood obediently. He shuffled back to the door, his chains sounding with each step. He did not look at Wes again. Wes watched him go. Watched the door shut behind him. Watched the place where he had been. After a minute Wes realized the board members were staring, waiting for him to go out his own door.

“You all right, Mr. Carver?” the former police chief asked. Wes glanced distractedly back at the man, and instead of answering, he stood and left the room.

Lowell was right outside. The corridor was marginally warmer than the hearing room had been, the fluorescent lights a touch brighter. The air seemed somehow clearer, too, no longer molasses in his lungs, and Wes felt instantly more alert, more himself. His heart quieted in his chest. He wondered whether Lowell had been out here the whole time, whether he'd been able to hear. If so, he appeared willing to do Wes the service of pretending he hadn't. “Well?”

“Under advisement,” Wes said.

Lowell nodded tersely, went past him into the hearing room. He kept one hand on the side of the door but let it almost shut, and Wes winced at the unbidden thought that a single firm pull on the doorknob could shatter half a dozen bones at once. Lowell came back into the hall. “They're going to make a decision in a few minutes,” he said. “I think it's a good sign they didn't rule at the end of the hearing. Means your statement carried some weight.”

Wes walked with Lowell to the control booth at the end of the hall. It was large enough for three or four officers—though only one sat inside now—and had electronic locks and wired glass windows. A hell of a lot more secure than the chain link and iron of his control room back in the old prison. That had been little more than a space to do paperwork and radio the administrative offices without having to watch his back every second; this, on the other hand, was a true control room, with electronic mastery of all the gates and doors in this wing of the building. Lights and color-coded labels marked a map of the nearby area, and a computer screen on one end of the desk stuttered real-time updates of which inmates and staff were where. Wes let Lowell and the CO in the booth show him how it all worked, and he and Lowell halfheartedly reminisced about the medieval technology at the old prison. He felt a little like the children he had sometimes seen at the hospital during Claire's illness, kids with grave expressions who seemed to pretend interest in toys and games for the sake of the adults trying desperately to distract them from their families' crises.

After a short while Lowell slipped out of the room with a baldly casual “I'll be just a minute.” Wes nodded dutifully and listened to the young CO explain the gating system. He was more confident about the hearing now that he was feeling like himself again. Williams had hardly made a case for his parole at all. He had volunteered nothing, made no effort to show the board the changes he claimed had taken place within him, hadn't offered any formal apology for his actions or made any conciliatory gestures toward Wes. Hell, he'd behaved almost like a sullen teenager, answering reluctantly and in monotone. Wes knew he himself had fallen far short of the articulateness he'd aimed for, but at least there'd been some passion behind his words. He'd laid it all out there, and it'd cost him, yeah—the shame of exposing his scars and sorrows still burned within him, a small but searing flame—but it was gonna be worth it. He had come. Faced the man. Said what needed to be said. He was suddenly sure of the board's decision, so sure he wondered whether he'd somehow heard it from this far down the hall, through these solid walls; he could almost taste the strong corners of the word, the way it closed with the same sharp certainty with which it opened:
denied.

The door's magnetic lock sounded, and Lowell came back into the room. The young officer at the desk fell silent, and Wes looked up. Lowell knew how to guard his expressions as surely as Wes did, so there was no way to read the decision on his features, but Wes heard it again inside his own head:
denied.
Then Lowell's Adam's apple bobbed, and the word was coming up in his throat, but his lips were still pressed together and there was no glint of teeth, and the word vanished from Wes's mind and Lowell spoke.

“Paroled.”

 

That night Wes tipped a handful of bullets from his box of ammunition and loaded the revolver. Went downstairs carrying his boots under one arm. Waited till he was on the porch before tugging them on and shrugging his chore coat over his shoulders, the revolver heavy in one pocket. He walked briskly through Farmer's yard, skirting the silent tractor and the empty arena. A horse whickered from the darkness as Wes passed the shuttered barns. Autumn was still hanging on during the day, but night had given itself over to winter, and the air burned cold in Wes's nostrils and lungs. A waning moon idled high in the sky, veiled in cloud, and it cast just enough light for him to see the immediate exhalation of his breath before it dissipated into the dark. He heard the Wounded Elk before he saw it, a gentle sound for an entity of such power. The moonlight dipped into the hollows between the rises and swells of the water, but save for those slight flashes of silver, it was the blackest of rivers.

The bank eased into the shallows here, and Wes stood at the edge of the rocks and let the water lick at the toes of his boots. He couldn't see across the river, but he knew this to be one of the narrow places, no more than twenty yards from one side to the other. There was no bank opposite, no beach. Just the straight jut of the mountain, the land rising right from the water.

Wes took the revolver from his pocket and shaped his left hand around it, maneuvering his index finger into place inside the trigger guard. He knew his own frailty well; even with this much pain, he'd be able to manage a single shot. He turned the revolver so the tip of its barrel rested against his breast; moonlight glinted once off the bluing. He stood unmoving, feeling the trigger beneath his finger, the gentle press of metal against his chest. He thought his heart ought to be racing, but he felt no rush in his veins, no rise of his pulse against the revolver's steel, as though he'd stilled his heart already. Made sense, maybe.
Hard for a man to fight his own blood,
he always said, and whatever else this was—cowardly, selfish, desperate—whatever else, this was in his blood.

Wes could think of no reason not to do it. None. But his hand remained steady, his trigger finger still. This was a moment for prayer, but Wes knew too well that any words he dared speak would wisp away into the night air, unheard, unanswered. So instead he swung the revolver away from his heart, set his feet the way his father had taught him, and fired at the great rising earth across the river. Two rounds,
one-two,
and the pain ripped a growl from his throat and he let his hand drop. No way to know where the bullets had homed to, and for a moment Wes felt a flash of his old self and thought of the rules he'd broken by firing into the dark, the safeties and cautions he'd ignored. Then the mountains behind him sounded a mimicry of his shots, and their brothers across the river echoed more gently, and finally he stood alone in the deep silence, breathing cordite and cold.

 

The next day Farmer stayed close. Still had to take care of his horses, though, and when he went out to the barn for the evening feeding, Wes found Farmer's address book and turned the pages until he found Jamie Lowell's name.

“I don't know if I ought to talk about that with you,” Lowell said, when Wes had asked his question.

Wes leaned back against the kitchen counter, moved a ceramic saltshaker along the edge of the sink. “Bus station's right down on Main, Jamie. Can't really avoid it if I go into town.” The saltshaker nearly tipped over; Wes caught it in a loose fist. “Look,” he said, “I ain't exactly proud of feeling anxious as I do, but I figured you'd understand. You really gonna make me explain why I don't want to chance running into Williams?”

Lowell was silent for a long moment, and Wes knew he'd get his answer. He squinted through the window, didn't see Farmer. He could hear Dennis hammering across the pasture, the slightest of sounds at this distance, slight enough Wes ought to've been able to ignore it. “Friday,” Lowell said finally. “He'll be released late morning. The bus comes at two.”

“Appreciate it,” Wes said. He hung up the phone, put the address book back just where he'd found it.

 

“You seem like a good man,” Williams had said. No more than an hour before rescue. “Do you believe in God? You must. Most good men do.” Williams crouched behind him, a faceless voice. “Are you praying now, Wesley? Right now?” The shank at his throat, suddenly. The flat of the blade sticky against his flesh, warmed with his own blood. “I think you should.”

“God.” A word wrenched from between clenched teeth, a word spoken through the grimace of pain and terror. Prayer or worse. “God.” Better. Say it right. Make it worthy. “Help me,” Wes had whispered, “survive this.” The blade pulled tight below his jaw, arching his face up. He closed his eyes. “And if I can't—” he said “—survive—” the words coming faster, without thought, coming without his calling them, the way his music always had and never would again “—then ease my way home to You.” Eyes open now, sight blurred by tears that wouldn't fall. “And please, God, above all else, watch over my wife and my son. Shelter them in Your love.” No more. The blade was still there at his throat, his life moments—millimeters—from ending. If there were ever a moment in which to find faith, to be struck with the certainty of God's presence, Wes was enduring it, but he felt no comfort, no peace.

And then long seconds in which death did not come, in which no new pain was visited upon him. His breath, Williams's breath, audible, steady, matched. Finally: “You finished?” A nod—the slightest—even that minute movement a risk with the blade at his throat, but Wes wanted to say nothing else, wanted no lesser words to come between his prayer—even if unheard—and his death, if that was what came next. But then the shank was gone. Reprieve. Williams's lips beside his ear. “You're supposed to say ‘Amen' when you're done.”

 

What Wes needed was to speak to Bobby Williams. To hear Williams—the real Williams—speak to him. Society's justice had failed, far as Wes was concerned, and there was nothing he could do to stop Williams walking through that gate today. But he might still have the chance to find the truth, to know for certain what lay in the heart of this man about to be loosed upon the world, if only he could really speak to him. The parole hearing had been all wrong, and Wes ought to have known it would be. The hearing was a production, a performance, every man playing his part, Wes included. Hadn't he dressed for it? The suit coat, the polished shoes, the part in his hair. Done himself up the way he thought they'd expect him to. So Friday Wes dressed as he did on any other day. He chose his darkest jeans, his green chamois shirt, his square-toed roper boots with the leather soles scuffed almost through. He combed his wet hair with his fingers and let it dry fanned over his forehead. His father's pocketwatch was hard against his hipbone in his right front jeans pocket, and his wedding ring—the replacement he'd bought after the riot, the one Williams stole missing to this day—was on his finger, below a joint so swollen Wes didn't know that he could've taken the ring off if he'd wanted to.

Farmer watched him closely all morning, something untrusting in his eyes, but Wes looked as he did any other day, behaved—he was careful of this—as he did any other day. He sat at the kitchen table and drank his coffee and read the local section of the Elk Fork paper. (There'd been a fatal car wreck up on the Flathead reservation yesterday. A hunter from Ovando had bagged a record-setting elk. The animal shelter was waiving adoption fees for cats through the end of the month.) Wes read and Farmer, who'd had his own breakfast hours before, turned the pages of the sports section and watched Wes.

“You're worrying me a little here,” Farmer said after a while.

Wes flipped a sheet over. (One of the newly elected city councilmen had vowed to increase funding for snowplowing.) “You worry a lot,” he said. “Ain't good for your blood pressure.”

Farmer rapped the fingers of his right hand on the tabletop—ring-middle-index, ring-middle-index—and then stopped abruptly. Sensitive even in his nervous habits. “Jamie called for you yesterday,” he said. “Wanted you to know he double-checked the bus schedule and it comes at one, not two.”

Wes didn't stop his eyes going to the clock, and Farmer saw him look.

“He explained that you wanted to know so you could be elsewhere.” Farmer waited, having offered the challenge, but Wes looked at him and locked down anything dangerous behind his eyes, and soon enough it became clear to both of them that Farmer didn't have it in him to call Wes a liar.

Wes took his mug to the sink, rinsed it and went back upstairs. He was careful of his hands as he loaded the revolver, taking light hold of the weapon and its bullets, reserving what strength he could. He sat for a time in the rocking chair beside the window, watching the mountains and sky. It was thickly overcast, the space above the peaks clotted with heavy white clouds. Claire had once told him that white clouds piled atop one another like these meant snow.