Black River (3 page)

Elk Fork was still in the midst of a long autumn twilight, a golden stretch of hours between the time the sun dipped below the mountain peaks and when darkness truly fell. The canyon had already succumbed to shadow, though, and Wes turned on the headlights as he steered around the first curve. He was starting to feel the tension high in his back, between his shoulder blades. The joints in his hands were aching, too, though he'd been careful to drive mostly with the heels of his hands, tucking his wrist over the crosspiece of the steering wheel on the curves and gripping with his fingers only when absolutely necessary. He opened and closed each hand a couple times, did his best to put the pain out of his mind. Plenty of practice.

Just before the Black River exit was the familiar large sign:
Montana State Prison, 6 Miles.
Then the smaller signs, every couple hundred yards:
Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers.
The house was west of town, and Wes was glad. Meant he didn't have to drive through Black River yet, didn't have to confront all that had changed and all that hadn't. Didn't have to set eyes on the prison. He took the exit, drove three miles down the frontage road. Long strands of barbed wire sagged along the periphery of the fields, tattered white ghosts of plastic bags fluttering where they'd snagged. A pair of ribby horses swished their tails in a grazed-down pasture. Crumpled cans glinted amid the weeds in the ditch, and the speed limit signs bore round silver dents where kids or drunkards had used them for target practice. The final cutting of alfalfa stood in the few cultivated fields, and the heavy, sweet scent filled the cab of the truck. Seemed to Wes it ought to have smelled strongest at midday, beneath a hot sun, but it was always evenings, when the grasses began to cool.

He knew he was approaching the house even before he saw the welded pipe gate across the drive. Something about the pitch and roll of the mountains, the cant of the trees. There was a clasp on the gate's chain, but it was unfastened. Wes wondered if Dennis had done that on purpose, if he knew the clasp would've been too much for his hands. Maybe he always left it like that. Another six-tenths of a mile to the house, through evergreen woods. The weave of the forest was just different enough—trees missing, new deadfall on the ground, trunks leaning at steeper angles—that looking too closely was unsettling. Through a lattice of pine, Wes saw the mercury-vapor lamp at the house blazing against the coming dark.

Dennis was waiting on the front steps. Already not like him. The Dennis Wes remembered would've been watching from behind a parted curtain, or while pretending to be absorbed in some task, fixing a fence or working on his truck. Not just sitting there, watching steadily with those familiar wary dark eyes. Here, suddenly, was the face Wes had searched for so many years, looked for in the features of every inmate on his tier. His stepson, no longer a teenager but an adult. Same taut features, skin skimming close over muscle and bone. New lines at the edge of his mouth that ran so deep they looked like cuts. He was just thirty-four, but his dark hair was already going steadily gray at his temples, and he'd cut it short, shorter even than Wes wore his. He stood when Wes pulled up, but didn't move off the porch.

What to do. No hug. Not after so many years, and not after the kind of leave they'd taken from each other. And no handshake, either. Dennis almost forgot, offered his hand before awkwardly dropping it back to his side. Claire had come back to Black River for two weeks every spring. And Dennis had come to Spokane when she fell ill, of course, and to Seattle after the transplant. But in the hospitals, Dennis always phoned Claire's room before he visited, and Wes made sure he was gone. He'd called Dennis a few times, when Claire was too sick to do it herself. And last week, after she died. Maybe ten minutes of conversation in eighteen years, all of it on Claire's behalf. And now Wes stood on the porch that had once been his, with a stepson who used to be his to care for, and he had no words.

Dennis hooked his thumbs behind his belt, cocked his weight onto one hip. “Trip all right?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Lot of tourists?”

“A few RVs. Not so many as I thought there'd be.”

“Season's kind of winding down.”

He should've rented a room at a motel. There was a decent one in town, a dozen cottage-like buildings with peeling gray paint spaced evenly around a gravel horseshoe. Wes had no idea what'd possessed Dennis to offer to put him up at the house, even less what'd made him agree. (He'd lived here with her.)

“You want a beer?” Dennis asked finally.

The house still smelled the same. Lemon, linen, smoke. Would've figured it'd have a different scent after all this time. Wes found himself anticipating each squeak of the floorboards. Dennis went to the kitchen, and Wes set Claire's ashes on the dining table, near where she used to sit. It seemed somehow wrong, so he moved them to the floor; that was worse. Decided, at last, on the wicker chair next to the front door. When he turned, Dennis was in the doorway, watching, two opened bottles in one hand.

Wes sat on the couch. Dennis settled on the hearth, one wrist balanced on a bent knee, the other leg straight out ahead. His casual sprawl was a little too conspicuous, the effort of it showing.

“You look good,” Dennis said.

“So do you.” Wes turned the beer bottle in his hand, the condensation wetting his palm. Dripping off his wrist like blood. (No. Not like blood.)

Dennis glanced down, smiled briefly at some unshared thought. He set his bottle on the brick of the hearth, got to his feet and meandered around the perimeter of the room, glancing sidelong at Wes every few steps. He stopped beside the dining table, his back to Wes. Put one hand on the fiddle case. “You've kept it all this time.”

Wes said nothing.

Dennis moved his fingertips over the pebbled surface of the case, over the yellow line of stitching that chased itself around the contours of the lid. And then his hands went to either end, positioned over the brass clasps, and Wes saw tendon push against skin as his fingers flexed, and Wes said, “Don't.”

Dennis looked down at his hands. They stayed taut for a long moment. Then he sighed, and his hands fell away from the case. He turned around but didn't look at Wes. “I made up the guest bedroom for you.”

 

It was the same twin bed Dennis had slept in when he was a boy. Wes's old bedroom—his and Claire's—was across the hall. Dennis's now, of course. All of this was his, the house, the land, all of it signed over to Dennis on his eighteenth birthday. A far more generous gift than the boy had deserved, but one that had pleased Claire, eased the anxiety she'd felt since leaving Dennis behind in Black River. Wes lowered himself onto the edge of the bed, the creak of the springs so sharp as to be almost tangible. A palm out to touch the quilt. Claire had made it. Pieced and quilted it all by hand. She started it when Dennis was a toddler, finally finished it for his twelfth birthday. He remembered her in the front room in the evenings, red and blue scraps of calico joining in small strips and squares, slowly working into a bigger pattern that covered her lap and then most of her body. The hoop and thimble and needle. So nimble with that needle. She'd seemed reluctant to work in front of him after the riot, sewed mostly in the mornings before he got up.

The quilt was soft beneath his hand, the fabric gentled by repeated washings. Touching it was almost like touching her. The stitches like writing. Or scars. After the riot, Wes wore long sleeves, hid what he could. Late at night, he and Claire together on the couch in winter or the porch swing in summer, she would take first one, then the other of his hands into hers—her skin always cooler than his—and she would move her fingers across skin and tendon and bone, soothing his most persistent aches in a way doctors and pills never could. Then she would unfasten the buttons at his cuff, and she would feel him try not to pull away, feel his muscles go hard under his skin, and she would wait but not draw back. She moved her hands over his wrists, his forearms, touching skin and scar tissue he let no one else set eyes on. Claire could make the ugly, hated letters on his left arm disappear. She never traced them, never avoided them. Moved across them like they were any other flesh. She did touch the six smooth rises on the soft underside of his right forearm, hid each beneath the pad of a fingertip. When she stretched her hand to its widest span she could cover five of the scars, obliterate them from existence. But there was always one left, stubbornly visible.

He drifted into sleep, woke to the moan of a train whistle. Dark still. It took him a moment to remember where he was—still a shock at every waking to realize Claire was gone—and another moment to recognize the whistle for what it was. Long and low, an animal sound. They were all freight trains here in the canyon; the Amtrak only ran up north on the Hi-Line. Freights didn't look like they moved fast, but when you stood right next to the tracks you saw they barreled along pretty good. There was a trestle over the river not far from the house, and when the trains crossed it the river ran beneath at matched speed. Silent, though.

The whistle sounded again, more distant this time. Across the hall, Wes heard a sigh, the sound of shifting weight on bedsprings. Then a long stillness. He'd never been a good sleeper, not even before the riot. He used to get up in the middle of the night and take his fiddle outside, unless it was cold enough to throw it out of tune. He'd walk halfway across the field toward the river and the mountain slopes, hearing the shifting steps of Arthur Farmer's horses in the pasture across the fenceline, and when he was far enough away not to wake Claire or Dennis he'd play. Music for the moon and stars. Claire would still be asleep when he returned to bed, but in the mornings she hummed what he'd played.

 

When Wes woke a second time, the sun was already high over the mountains and Dennis was gone. In her last weeks, Claire had slept more and more, going to bed early and rising late, naps throughout the day. The doctors said it was normal, that she'd be harder to wake as they got closer to the end. Wes had slept less and less himself, staying up to watch the rise and fall of her chest, deluding himself into believing vigilance might make a difference. It'd been all he could do not to constantly bring her out of sleep, and sometimes he found himself shifting heavily in bed beside her, just enough to rouse her but pretend it was an accident. A little too easy to sleep long and deep now.

There was coffee in the pot on the kitchen counter, a clean mug beside it. Dennis feeling civil this morning. Wes poured, added a little sugar but no milk. Outside the night chill lingered despite the sun, and the wooden seat of the porch swing felt damp through his jeans. Wes waited for his coffee to cool, enjoying the heat of the mug on his palms. The property looked good. It wasn't much—twelve acres in all—but it'd always been plenty for Wes's family, the land narrow east to west but stretching south toward where the river hugged the bottom of the mountain slopes. The foothills rose abruptly here, as though the earth had suddenly run aground of something much stronger and sturdier and been left with nowhere to go but skyward. Old logging roads crossed the bare slopes like neat surgical scars. North of the house it was all wooded, but this side was pasture. Dennis had mowed it, replaced the old barbed wire with white rope, built a metal run-in shed. There were three horses in the field. No—two horses and a mule. They stood a few yards from one another, muzzles buried in separate piles of faded green hay. Wes watched the steady working of their jaws, the absent swishing of tails and twitching of ears.

The letter was still in the glove compartment. Still in its envelope. It had arrived the day of Claire's last biopsy, sandwiched between a medical bill and an insurance statement. He'd left it alone then. Overwhelmed. Other things to attend to. Truth was, Wes had a pretty good idea what was inside that envelope, and he thought he might put off opening it until it'd be too late to do anything about it. Probably not too late yet. Probably ought to leave it alone for a few more weeks.

In the pasture, the red horse began eating the mule's hay. The mule pinned his long ears, squealed and brayed, but the red horse ignored him and after a minute the mule walked to the vacant hay pile, swishing his meager tail hard against his flanks.

Wes set his coffee on the porch, crossed the yard to the truck. One of the horses, the black one, raised his head to watch. The envelope was made of cheap paper, had lost its crispness after a night in the glove compartment. There was a familiar black ink-stamped return address in the corner, not straight:
The State of Montana Department of Corrections.
Been a long while since Wes got a letter with that mark. He settled back on the porch and took his pocketknife off his belt. Twice he got his thumbnail against the groove in the blade, and twice the knife slipped from his fingers. He tried once more, forcing his grip until the deep ache flared in his joints and the knife clattered to the porch, skittering across the wooden boards and over the edge into the grass. The simplest fucking things. The black horse was still watching.

Wes stood, retrieved the knife. Finally got it open, slipped the blade beneath the envelope's flap and sliced. One sheet inside, the message short and to the point: The State of Montana Department of Corrections inmate Robert F. Williams had come eligible for parole. He, Wesley J. Carver, had the right to deliver a statement at the hearing. No acknowledgment there that he'd given twenty-one years of his life, and then some, to the service of the state. Just the same duty-done letter Victim Services sent to everyone, impersonal enough it took a more generous man than Wes not to think they were hoping folks would stay out of it altogether. It was dated three weeks ago. Still relevant for another five.

So there it was. Bobby Williams, getting another chance. Wes waited for shock, disbelief, but he'd kept a tally of the months and years going in his head, and he knew the math was right. He wasn't naïve. Money played a role in parole decisions, and space, and manpower, and politics. All sorts of things that had nothing to do with justice. He could accept that. What made him angriest, then, wasn't anything to do with the DOC or the state or the parole board, but the fact that Williams's name still brought with it the memory of the sloppy crunch of breaking bone, that it still sent Wes's gut into spasm and set his heart racing. That the mere memory of the man still brought forth these symptoms of fear.