Black River (15 page)

“I've got an idea,” Dennis told him, and disappeared down the hall. Wes heard him rummaging in the bedroom closet, and he returned a minute later with a sturdy shoebox. He offered it to Wes.

There were cassette tapes inside, a few with cases, most without. The lettering on the labels was precise, sharply angled. Claire's handwriting. Wes turned a few of the tapes over. Dates only. “You kept these?”

Dennis shrugged.

They were mostly performances, Wes knew. Recordings made from a distance at Harvest, or in a school gym. Coughs and chatter intruding upon the notes, dozens of pairs of feet stamping dance steps over the music. A few of the tapes—the later dates—preserved afternoons in this house, one fiddle, his fiddle, moving from one tune to another with whatever purpose he'd had in mind that day. Wes had never listened to these. When he was younger he'd only been able to hear his errors, and later, after the riot, he didn't dare listen. He'd wanted to get rid of them—had one of his rare, real fights with Claire about it—but she'd flat-out refused.

“I know it's all at speed and a lot of it's with the band,” Dennis said. “But maybe it'll at least help Scott get familiar with some of the tunes.”

Wes nodded. Met Dennis's eyes and nodded again. “Thank you.”

Dennis reached into the box, tapped one of the tapes with two fingers. “That one's got ‘Angelina Baker,'” he said. Flipped another tape. “And this one has ‘Cripple Creek' on the B side.”

“You know these.”

Dennis nodded. “I know them all.”

 

He sat alone in the living room the next afternoon, the shoebox balanced on his knees. Fourteen cassettes, with twenty-three dates. This, all the extant proof of what he once was. How many more recordings might there have been, if not for the riot? Wes selected one of the cassettes at random and wrestled it into the tape deck in the stereo beside the television. Hissing silence first. Then his voice, as simultaneously familiar and strange as the sound of one's own voice always was. “That thing on?” And Dennis, seven or eight, voice still pitched high: “The little wheels are moving.” His own self again. “You ready?” “Yeah!” “Okay, here we go.”

And he lit into “Hop High Ladies,” played it fast as he knew how. Here was his fiddle: the rich, round, woody sound of it. Part of him wanted to fast-forward until he found a slower piece, something with long, sustained notes, so he could savor the sound, welcome it, wallow in it. But he was transfixed by the tune playing now, by how
easy
it had been. Wes closed his eyes, and though he did not move—his arms stayed at his sides, his hands relaxed, fingers curled into their new skewed normal—he could feel himself playing. The weight of the fiddle in his left hand, the bite of it at his collarbone, the pressure of the strings against his fingertips, the smoothness of the ebony beneath. He could feel how it had been to play like this, too fast to think about the notes, each of them just miraculously
there,
exactly when and where they were needed, the tune unraveling almost of its own accord, seeming to bring him along almost as a simple courtesy, an afterthought.

There were other sounds on the tape, too, beneath the music. A mischievous little boy's giggle, a steady thumping. More distant, a single ring of metal on metal, the duller clank of glass or ceramic on a countertop. And then, when the playing stopped, his fiddle eased into silence, Claire's voice: sweet, gentle, a little huskier than he'd expected the first time he heard her speak. “Denny, must you always be such a whirling dervish? He's going to bring this house crashing down, Wesley. Something a little slower this time, please.”

He stopped the tape player, pressed the rewind button.
A little slower this time, please.
God, these things that had been his, these voices, so close. Rewind, again.
This time, please.
Again.
Time, please.
Please. Please.

 

Monday he woke to snow. It was coming down hard, but wouldn't stick; Wes could tell by the way it didn't gather on the gravel, the way there seemed to be fewer flakes in the air the closer they got to the ground. A little early for the first snowfall of the season, but not remarkably so. Wes knew there were probably curses flying around Black River; most folks dreaded the coming of winter in a place where it could stay for five months at a stretch. Wes, though, had always liked winter. The way it sounded. The way the gray tint that winter brought to the world seemed almost audible, a certain hushed and muted quality over everything. Calm.

He saw Rio a moment later. Couldn't have said why the sight startled him so. Horses did lie down from time to time; he knew that. And Rio wasn't flat on his side; he was settled on his chest a few yards beyond the gate, legs gathered at his side, head up. The way normal horses rested. But the red horse and the mule were standing a few yards away, nose to tail, hunched a little against the cold, ears turned back just a bit. They didn't look unhappy, really, but they knew they were standing in a storm. Something about Rio was . . . off.

Wes pulled on his chore coat and boots and then crossed the yard, the snow stinging his cheeks. The black horse watched him come, his white-rimmed eye unsettlingly human. Wes stopped at the gate. The red horse and the mule sauntered over, eager to see if he'd brought food, but he waved them off, and they backed away with an annoyed toss of their heads. Wes crossed his arms over his chest, wished he'd put on a hat. He clucked at Rio the way he'd heard his father do when he wanted his hunting horses to move. Rio's ears pricked sharply forward, but he didn't get up.

The gate had a chain wrapped around it, a bull snap on the clasp. Wes tried to pull it open, but the spring was too strong, the wedge slickly dotted with melted snow, and he couldn't get a grip on it. Metal rattled against metal. He leaned down next to the fence, but heard the telltale metronome click of the electricity. “Goddamn,” he said aloud. With his coat off, he could just squeeze between the metal pipes of the gate, but it was an uncomfortable fit, and he cracked the back of his skull against the metal. He clapped his hands as he walked toward Rio, clucked again. This time the horse got his forelegs out in front of him and tried to stand, but his hind legs didn't straighten, and he ended up sitting on his haunches like a dog. Wes saw the heavy muscles of his quarters tremble before Rio settled back onto his sternum. He shook his head and neck, sending a crystalline spray of ice into the air above his mane. Then he stared back at Wes, blinked once, twice. Wes understood. He used to think the whole “my knee knows when it's going to rain” thing was a crock, an old wives' tale. But the cold pained him now, sharpened the ache that was always with him, bolstered the stiffness in his joints. And Rio, whose arthritic joints were weight-bearing, must have been even more troubled when the temperature dropped. Wasn't that he didn't want to get up—he couldn't.

Another squeeze through the gate, a brief call to Dennis's cell. Dennis swore when Wes told him Rio was down, said he was coming right away. Back outside, Wes crossed to the shed beside the workshop. Inside, Wes found a green horse blanket with a silver duct-tape
X
across a tear on one side. He bundled the blanket into his arms and went back into the pasture. Orange baling twine knotted a dangling buckle to the fabric, and it jingled lightly with each step. Wes spread the blanket over Rio's body so his back and rump were covered, the straps and buckles loose on either side.

No Dennis yet. Wes knelt in the grass. Snow melted into his jeans, chilled his skin. He patted the horse on the neck, belatedly remembered his father telling him that most horses preferred to be stroked. Rio's hair was smooth beneath his palm, and softer than Wes expected. He let his hand glide down Rio's neck, over and over, and once he slid it beneath the blanket, afraid the animal was as cold as he was. He was shocked by the heat that surrounded the horse's body. He glanced at Rio's face: the same sharp white-rimmed eye, ears flopped a little to the sides. If he was unsettled, Wes couldn't see it. He slipped his other hand beneath the blanket and rested his palms on Rio's shoulder, let the animal warmth soothe his own aches.

Dennis's truck came up the drive too fast, and he stalled it out next to the gate. Slid out the passenger side and left the door open, the dome light inside glowing yellow against the gray veil of the day. “Shit,” Dennis said. He opened the clasp on the gate—easy, so easy—and slid a hand across his mouth as he trotted toward them. “Shit, Rio. Don't do this to me today.” Rio whickered softly, and Wes stood. Dennis put his hands on his hips, paced hard, a step to the right, a step to the left, again. He stopped abruptly, pulled his cell phone from his pocket and stared at the screen. He took several steps backward and a wide step to the side—searching for a signal, Wes supposed—then dialed and listened. He didn't speak before snapping the phone shut. “Arthur's not picking up.”

“Why do you need him?”

“Might be we can get Rio back up,” Dennis said, and his voice had lost all its assertiveness. Sounded more like prayer than certainty.

“I'm right here, Dennis.”

Wes had meant it to sound gentle, but Dennis looked at him sharply. He glanced back at Rio. “You put this blanket over him?”

“I worried he was cold.”

“That was good,” Dennis said. He went down on one knee next to Rio, rubbed a hand over one ear. Rio bumped Dennis's shoulder with his muzzle. Dennis spoke without standing back up. “It'll take ropes.”

Wes glanced at his hands. The skin was red with cold, the pain starting to needle its way up his arms. “I can wrap 'em around my wrists.”

“That's not safe.”

“You want to get this horse up or not?”

Dennis worked quickly, and soon there was a halter on Rio's head and a pair of ropes looped under his barrel and behind his haunches. The red horse was still grazing, but the mule provided an audience. “All right, buddy,” Dennis said quietly, and Wes wondered why he hadn't thought to speak to the horse during the long stretch of time he'd sat with him. “You ready?” Dennis asked, and Wes nodded.

He coiled the ends of his ropes around his arms, and felt an instant of reflexive panic when the cotton tightened around his wrists. Then Dennis was hauling on his ropes and on Rio's lead, and he was saying, “Let's go, let's go, let's go,” and Wes didn't know if he was talking to the horse or to him, but he leaned on his own ropes and clucked again for good measure. And Rio tried for them, he did. First the forelegs stretched out, and then he heaved his body upward, but again he only made it to the dog-sit position, but Dennis didn't quit and so neither did Wes, and he saw Rio's muscles quivering and he heard Dennis groan and he felt the rope bite into his wrists. And then Rio was standing, legs splayed, wavering a bit, but up. Dennis dropped his ropes, and Wes let his fall, too. Rio took a hesitant, unsteady step forward, and Dennis was there to greet him, his hands on either side of the horse's face, and he leaned in until his forehead met his horse's, and he stayed there. The snow had almost quit now, but it dusted Dennis's hair and Rio's mane, and Wes didn't know if he should stay or go.

“Winter's hard on him,” Dennis said, his head still touching Rio's. When Wes looked at him again, he saw his eyes were closed. “After last year I swore I wouldn't put him through another.” His tone was strange, the usual hard edge gone, and Wes heard a Dennis he'd thought had disappeared years ago. A Dennis he'd long forgotten how to talk to. “I swore,” he said again.

 

Wes hadn't thought he'd be so disappointed. He'd already moved the kitchen chairs, already taken his fiddle down from the mantel and held it waiting on his knee. He didn't turn in his chair, but at four the clock chimed and there was no sound of gravel beneath tires, no hesitant step on the porch. He waited, fingers tightening painfully on the neck of the fiddle, until the clock chimed its solitary notice of the half hour, and then he packed the fiddle into its case and carried it out to his truck. He drove to town and stopped at Jameson's; the first cashier he spoke to gave him directions.

Scott Bannon and his mother lived near the end of a dirt road that dead-ended up against the mountains, in a white trailer with rust stains streaking from beneath the window frames and a tacked-on porch that listed sharply to one side. A trailer like that would've been crowded next to a couple dozen clones in Spokane, but here it was settled on its own three-acre lot. Not much else on this side of town: a couple other trailers, a few run-down houses, a bar that catered to the most hopeless drunks, a lot where the logging trucks deposited their sap-bloodied cargo to wait for the freight trains. It was the side of town away from the river, on the far side of the interstate and the railroad tracks, the side that stayed dark longest when the sun rose, and was battered hardest during storms when the wind whipped through the canyon.

Wes parked his truck in the gravel drive behind a blue sedan with a green driver's side door. Up close, the trailer bore some small evidence of care: a few potted geraniums still hanging on in the autumn chill, a wooden
Welcome
sign beside the door. He hesitated on the front steps. Maybe he wasn't doing the kid any favors. Seemed like he had enough trouble fitting in; encouraging an interest in music that had peaked in popularity more than a hundred years ago hardly seemed likely to help. But he remembered the eagerness in Scott's eyes that first lesson, the way he'd grinned the first time he'd pulled a clear note with the bow. Wes opened the screen door, knocked on the aluminum behind it.

He knew her. Scott's mother. He recognized the black curls, the telltale cigarette wrinkles above her upper lip. Hell. The phlebotomist from the blood donation center.

“Mr. Carver,” she greeted smoothly. “Good to see you again.”