Black River (24 page)

Williams had given him time to dread. Wrapped Wes's right pinkie in his fist, coiled and uncoiled his own fingers around it like a man getting a better grip on a golf club or a baseball bat. Bent Wes's finger back slowly until Wes felt the warning pains shoot all the way to his elbow. So he expected—but was not prepared for—what came next: the sudden wrenching, the pop and crack of bone and cartilage and tendon, the explosion of pain. He hadn't been able to hold it behind his teeth that time, so he channeled it into words, into the longest string of profanity he'd ever let pass his lips, all of it directed at Williams, who had hardly seemed to hear. It took him hours to break the rest of Wes's fingers; he'd snap one or two at a time, take hold of another but then let it go, whole, twist another he'd already ruined hours before. Wes's eyes crusted with unspilled tears, and later, when they came too fast to hold in, they streaked his face. When Williams broke his thumb, the pain so seized Wes he leaned over and retched onto the floor. He lost what little control he still had during those hours, witnessed the unwavering command he'd always held over his voice abandon him. He gasped. He swore. He begged. And yes, after Williams started in on his left hand—the hand that had always danced so easily up and down the neck of his fiddle—he screamed.

“Well?” Dennis asked, the word almost an accusation.

Wes reached out and grabbed Dennis's wrist in his left hand, closed his right around his stepson's index finger and forced it back far enough to hurt. He saw the brief flash of pain and surprise rise behind Dennis's mask before the other man forced them off his face. It didn't shame him. “You'd have screamed, too,” he whispered.

Dennis snatched his hand away from Wes—he did it easily, Wes's hands no match for Dennis's strength—and shook out his fingers once. “I've got no doubt of that,” he said. “Hell, I'd have been hollering before the bastard ever touched me.” He took a step back, and suddenly Wes felt he could breathe again. Let out a shuddering lungful of air. He could still feel the ghost of Dennis's finger in his fist, the landscape of calluses and half-healed nicks against his own skin. “I know better than to question your strength, Wes. Whatever's between us, I ain't ever been stupid enough to think I could stand up to half of what you've been through. But not all of us are you.” He was pacing again, a few steps one way, a few steps the other. Arms crossed over his chest, eyes back on the ground. “Not all of us can hold it all in the way you can, Wes. We just can't. And you've never understood that. Never seen how hard it is for the rest of us, how we can only dream of that kind of self-control . . .” He was crying, Wes realized. Wet tracks through the dust on his face, a cracking voice losing the battle to conceal the sobs waiting to break through.

“Dennis,” Wes said, as gently as he could, “tell me what happened.”

His stepson stopped pacing. Looked up bleakly. “Scott took a gun to school.”

Wes felt his gut contract, but he kept his features still. Better, maybe, if he hadn't, if he instead showed Dennis what he felt, but he didn't know how. Didn't know how to let that stuff show, and didn't know how to rein it in once he had. He swallowed, licked his lips. Held his voice steady. “Did he use it?”

Dennis shook his head. Sniffed hard and cleared his throat. “He pulled it out in one of his classes,” he said. “Threatened a couple kids with it. A teacher. I don't know what happened exactly. They're still piecing it together.”

Wes wished Dennis would sit, so he could sit, too. Felt a little lightheaded. “Where is he now?”

Dennis looked at him. No expression.

“Scott,” Wes prompted. “Is he still at the school?”

“He left,” Dennis said. “I guess he only stayed five, ten minutes after he pulled the gun. They were looking for him everywhere. The sheriff found me out at Jim Filmore's place. Thought Scott might be with me, or maybe came back here.” He looked around the property, as though Scott might be waiting by the workshop or leaning against the hood of the truck.

Wes didn't prompt Dennis again. He waited and listened to the wind blow through the heights of the pines. So quiet. Wished it could stay this quiet always.

“I heard the whistle,” Dennis said at last. “Don't think I've ever heard it so long or loud.”

“No,” Wes said. “No. I don't want to hear it.”

“It was the crossing on that forestry road out past the new prison.” Dennis's words reduced to a monotone now, the way people's voices got when they weren't sure they could say what needed to be said. “No one thought to look there. That road doesn't go anywhere.”

Wes went down on one knee, put a hand to his face. Curled it into a fist, once, twice, three times.

“Those freight trains don't run on a schedule,” Dennis said, as though making conversation. “They'd have looked out there eventually. On a different day they might have found him in time.”

The tears surprised Wes. He hadn't cried for his father. Hadn't even cried for Claire. Come close, yeah, real close, but he'd always held it in. Only the physical pain Williams had inflicted upon him during the riot had made him spill tears, and that was reflex, nothing more. But now there were two glistening dark spots on the gravel beside his boot, and when he passed his hand over his face his fingers came away wet.

“I think it would have been instant,” Dennis said. The words delicate on his tongue, like they might be easily damaged or torn. “Don't you? I don't think he felt anything.”

Wes stood slowly. It was as though the pain and stiffness he always felt in his hands had spread throughout his body. Dennis was watching him, his arms still crossed, his shoulders hunched as though he were chilled. Those deep-set eyes Wes had never been able to trust were watching him, pleading. “Come on,” Wes said, and put his hand on Dennis's back, between his shoulder blades. He guided him to the porch, and they sat together on the steps.

“I don't think he felt anything, do you?” Dennis asked again. He sounded like the child Wes barely remembered, the boy he had been back when Wes was a different man. “I think it was easy,” Dennis said. “Don't you think so, Wes? That it was easy?”

Wes so wanted to take his hand back, but he moved it around Dennis's back to his far shoulder, and his stepson accepted the touch, leaned his whole body into Wes's, the way he had when he was very young, too young, probably, to remember. “Yes,” Wes said. “I think it was easy.”

 

After the riot, a makeshift memorial for Lane and Bill had sprung up outside the prison. Flowers and candles, letters and cards, photographs, the odd cross or whiskey bottle. Wes had never gone close enough to see any of it in detail, though it'd stayed there for months, long after he'd taken his first shaky walk back through the gate, the sutures from his second surgery still pulling at the skin of his right hand.

There was no memorial beside the railroad crossing on the forestry road. No flowers, no notes. It was the right place, though. A wide twist of metal in the tall grass beside the gravel track bed. A yellow tatter of police tape knotted to the pole of a crossing sign. Too many tire tracks in the mud. Wes parked at the edge of the road, half on the dirt, half in the long dying grass. He stepped out and flipped his collar up against the wind, jammed his hands into his pockets. He'd left Dennis at the kitchen table, a cooling cup of coffee at one elbow, the newspaper—still rolled—at his other. Half the headline visible:
Black River Student Threatens.

The train had come from the east. Wes stood on a tie, squinted down the track. It didn't disappear behind the curve of the mountains for a good quarter mile. Scott would've seen it coming. Had to sit there in that little run-down car and see that light bearing down and hear the whistle and desperate braking. He'd have had time to embrace, or regret. Wes turned back to the west, walked toward his truck. The spaces between the railroad ties glittered with hundreds of tiny pebbles of safety glass, strewn over the gravel like diamonds. Wes had a sudden vision of those bits of glass, bright against Scott's dyed black hair. Hard not to think of the mechanics of it all. The collision, the force, the folding of careless metal around fragile flesh. Through flesh.

He got back in his truck and turned the heat up high, but didn't put it into gear. He'd had to come out here this morning. Not so much to see the place, though Wes believed there was something that forever marked a place where someone had died. He'd felt it up on the trestle where his father had met his own train all those years ago, and he'd felt it walking past the spot on Two South where Lane had been killed, and he knew he would always, always feel it in the house in Spokane, if he went back there. And he felt it, as he'd known he would, here at this lonely railroad crossing. But that wasn't why he'd come. He was starting to know something he didn't want to know, had been starting to know it ever since Dennis first told him about Scott. He'd kept it at bay all through yesterday afternoon and all night, but he wasn't going to be able to fight it off much longer, and he knew he'd better not come to know it for certain while he was with Dennis.

Wes took his hands from his pockets, held them in front of the dash vent. He thought about the last fiddle lesson. The way the instrument had started to sing again, the way “Black River” began to take shape in the canyon for which it had been named. That long trip for the sweatshirt.

He reached across the cab and lifted the latch of the glove compartment. It fell open easily. He took in the contents in an instant, looked again before letting knowledge root itself in his heart. Maps. A flashlight. Napkins left over from a fast-food restaurant. Registration papers, owner's manual, tire gauge.

No gun.

 

Dennis was gone when Wes got back to the house—his heavy horseshoeing boots and chore coat missing from the front closet—and he was still gone when the sheriff's deputy pulled up outside the house a few hours later. The dark green pickup coasted to a stop beside Wes's own truck; the weak afternoon sun reflected hard off the dark rack of lights atop the cab, and Wes squinted when he stepped onto the porch. The deputy was close to retirement age, his thick mustache and the short hair showing beneath his broad hat gone white. He walked stiffly toward the house, carrying a rumpled paper bag with a rolled-down top. He looked somehow uneasy in his uniform, though he must have worn it most of his life. “Mr. Carver,” he said, and it didn't sound like a question.

Wes nodded.

The deputy reached the porch, extended a hand. “Deputy Randall Morrow,” he said. “With the Elk Fork County Sheriff.” The handshake was mercifully brief.

“I guess you're here about Scott.”

Morrow shifted his weight onto his heels, put his hands on his heavy belt. The bag rested against his holster. “I understand you were close to him,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

“He stole the revolver.”

Morrow looked relieved not to be the one to bring it up, but he frowned a little and said, “You should've called when you learned it was missing.”

“Just realized this morning,” Wes said. “Figured you boys would put it together in short order.”

“Where did you keep it?”

“Glove compartment,” Wes said. “Locked. Ain't exactly a gun safe, I know, but I never guessed he'd bust into it.” That was true, Wes realized. He hadn't thought twice about letting Scott see where he kept the revolver.

“You really ought to keep your weapons better secured,” Morrow said. His voice lacked conviction.

“Guess I know that now,” Wes said evenly. He took a step back onto the porch stairs, so he was a couple inches higher than Morrow. Cheap trick. The deputy could've followed if he'd wanted to, but he stayed on the gravel.

After a minute, Morrow pulled the revolver out of the bag, handed it to Wes butt-first. “That yours?”

Wes took the grip in his hand, turned it so the barrel shone in the light. He thought of this gun in Scott's hand, aimed at other people, other children. He wondered how the weight of it—the weapon, what it could do—had felt to him. Whether he had liked it. He wondered, too, whether Scott had taken the time to put the revolver inside the trailer before coming back to sit beside Wes and take up his fiddle for that final lesson. Maybe he'd instead kept it tucked into the oversized pocket of his sweatshirt; maybe it had been there the whole time, that whole afternoon, waiting there while Wes deluded himself into thinking he was making a difference in Scott's life. Had it been that close, this secret?

“Mr. Carver.”

“It's mine.” Wes snapped the cylinder out. Empty, of course. “He didn't get the ammunition from me,” he said. “I keep it separate, and it's all there. Counted it this morning.”

“There was no ammunition,” Morrow said. “Not so far as we can tell. The weapon was unloaded when it was recovered. We haven't found any cartridges at the school or at the site of the collision. It's possible, I suppose, that he dumped them somewhere between the two locations, but it hardly seems likely.”

Wes passed his thumb across the rear of the cylinder, the voids of the chambers. Dennis had loaded the revolver when he'd taken it before their dinner table confrontation so many years ago. Wes had tapped the bullets into his palm after leaving the house that night; they'd rattled against one another in his trembling hand.

“One of the students we interviewed said it looked to him like the chambers were empty during the incident at the school,” Morrow continued. He crumpled the paper bag into a tiny ball, clenched it in his fist. “But the sus—Bannon—was threatening him with the weapon at the time, and the student wasn't willing to bet his life on it.” Morrow looked up at Wes, something reproachful in his eyes. “Those kids are awfully shook up.”