Black River (7 page)

“If it could be with you again,” he said.

 

It was early afternoon when Wes left the hospital, but seemed like twilight because the clouds that still spilled rain rode low over the valley, settling like slow-churning froth onto the peaks surrounding the city. The sun was so well hidden behind them Wes couldn't say where in the sky it hung.

He saw the kid on the interstate ramp. Leaning there against the guardrail, thumb over his shoulder, a sodden, overloaded bookbag at his feet. Wes took a few seconds to decide to take his foot off the accelerator, pulled over well ahead of the kid. He turned to see the boy slinking toward the truck. Stopped a few feet shy. Wes leaned across and unrolled the passenger window, and the kid stepped forward, ducked his head partway into the cab. His sweatshirt had a hood, but it hung limp down his back, and raindrops nested in his hair before soaking in. “Hey, Mr. Carver, you remember me?”

“Wouldn't have stopped if I didn't.”

The kid didn't smile, but his features relaxed. “Right. Scott,” he added, tapping his chest, and Wes was irritated to think the kid might've realized he couldn't remember his name.

“Help you with something, Scott?”

The boy looked at the ground, shrugged the bookbag higher onto his shoulder. He had two metal rods jammed through one eyebrow; Wes tried not to stare, but the glint drew his eye. “Think you could give me a ride to Black River? If you're going there.”

“I don't suppose I got to tell you that hitching a ride ain't the smartest thing in the world.”

“I have a car,” Scott said, with a vehemence only a teenager could muster. “But it's a piece of shit.”

“You really gotta talk like that?”

“Sorry,” Scott said, without conviction. “It got me out here but now it's dead. The mechanic says it needs a new starter, and that's, like, three hundred bucks I don't have.” Rain dripped from his hair into his eyes, but he didn't wipe it away, just blinked hard. Wes felt a little sorry for making the kid stand out there while he interrogated him. A little.

“Can't your momma pick you up?”

“She's at work.”

“All right. Get in.” Wes didn't trust the kid—he had no illusions about what a kid who wanted to lie could do to an honest man's reputation—but you did what you could for your fellow man, especially if it didn't put you out any. Even if your fellow man was a teenager who shoved sharp objects through his own face for recreation.

Scott plunked his bookbag down on the seat between them, and Wes waited until the kid had buckled up before pulling back onto the ramp. Scott slouched against the window, staring out as they drove through Elk Fork and into the canyon. This close, Wes could see his eyelashes were dark red. Hair was dyed, then. Earbuds dangled against his chest on a white cord that sprouted from the collar of his sweatshirt, and he pulled his sleeves down over his knuckles. The laces of his boots were untied and clotted with mud where they'd dragged on the ground. A button pinned to his bookbag read,
If I were you, I'd hate me too.

For a good ten minutes neither of them said anything. At Milltown, the rain poured down so hard Wes had to turn the wipers to their highest speed just to see the taillights of the semi up ahead. A deer dashed into the road, its legs skittering every which way, and Wes hit the brakes hard. The deer flung its head high and spun back the way it had come.

Wes accelerated again and cleared his throat. “So I hear you like horses.”

Scott didn't turn away from the window. “They're all right, I guess.”

“You been working for Dennis long?”

“Since June.”

“He said you were from out of town. Originally.”

“Yeah. Miles City.”

“My wife was from out that direction.”

Scott straightened in his seat. “Dennis said she died.”

Hands tight on the wheel till they hurt. “That's right.”

“Sorry.”

Not much as condolences went, but it sounded genuine enough, and Wes had to admit that surprised him. He nodded his thanks, didn't look to see if the kid saw.

More rain. More road. A silence more awkward than the last.

This time Scott broke it. “Did Dennis tell you why my mom and I moved here?”

“Might've mentioned it.”

“That's good he told you, 'cause you were probably the only person in the whole town who didn't know.”

Wes glanced sideways. The kid was staring right at him, arms crossed over his chest. “You get to see your father much?”

“My mom makes me visit him every week. I wouldn't call it a ‘get to' kind of thing.”

Wes could believe that. They'd tried, in a halfhearted sort of way, to make the visiting room at the old prison somewhat welcoming. There was a mural on one wall—a flat, childlike painting of the landscape that lay outside the gate—and a soda machine that dispensed off-brand cola. But no two ways about it, the place had been depressing as hell, and he doubted the new prison was any better. Wes never could decide what was worse: the visits where the inmate and his visitor sat stiffly, barely talking, or the ones where they held hands across the table and stared into each other's eyes until you had to just about drag one or the other of them out. Scott, Wes guessed, was one of the former. The barely-talkers. But you could never tell.

“So what do you do?” Scott asked. “For a job.”

“I'm retired.”

“From what?”

Wes steered around a flattened, sodden piece of cardboard in the road. “I was a musician,” he said. Sounded like a lie.

The kid raised his metallic eyebrows. “Seriously?”

“Yeah.” He could feel Scott's eyes on him and felt oddly nervous. Wondered if the kid could tell he'd been a CO, if it was apparent somehow in the way he moved, the way he talked. Sometimes it seemed that criminals could sense a cop a long way off; maybe it was hereditary.

Scott leaned forward—for a moment Wes thought he was going for the glove compartment; he remembered the revolver and his heart seized—and punched the power button on the radio. Music filled the cab, accompanied by grating static. Never could get a clear signal in the canyon. “Country, huh?”

“Not your cup of tea, I'd guess.”

The kid surprised him. “A lot of it sucks. But some of it's all right. The older stuff.”

“I played the fiddle.”

“Yeah?”

“Old-time, mostly. Some bluegrass.”

“I hear strings are hard.”

“Hard to do right,” Wes agreed.

“I'm a singer.”

Wes thought about that. Maybe the kid was a singer the way every kid thought he was a singer. They all wanted to be famous, stand at center stage with folks screaming their name and begging for autographs. Thought they could do it, too, with all the shows on TV now promising instant celebrity. Most of them had no idea how talentless they were. But something in the way Scott said it—plain, confident, no mitigating “kind of” or “pretty good” or even “want to be”—made Wes think there might be something to it.

They came around a curve, and Black River spilled along the canyon before them. Not raining quite as hard here. The sun occupied a horizontal gap between cloud and mountain over the south slopes, and light glared off the wet asphalt. “I always thought if I was going to learn to play something it would be the guitar,” Scott said. “But maybe fiddle would be cool, too.”

Wes didn't say anything.

“Can you still play?”

He looked at Scott. The kid rubbed a thumb over his nose, across his freckles, and looked about five years younger than he had when he got into the truck. His eyes were on Wes's hands, hooked over the yoke of the steering wheel.

Wes didn't answer him.

 

He and Dennis shared dinner that night, the first time they'd sat down together rather than stood over the counter in the kitchen. The table was a small cherry wood square, set against one wall of the living room. Tonight Dennis sat on the side nearest the kitchen, where Wes always used to sit, and Wes sat opposite, in Claire's old place. It put his back to the door, but that was better than sitting the way they used to, the way they had on that last night.

Dennis spoke while Wes's head was still bowed, grace running silently in his head. “I hear you gave Scott a ride into town today.”

Wes thought his
Amen,
looked up. “Seemed like he needed it.”

“Didn't rip off your truck's stereo or anything, did he?”

“Do you really got to do this tonight, Dennis?”

Dennis held up a hand. “Fine, sorry.”

Wes watched his stepson push a single pea back and forth with his fork, a millimeter one way, a millimeter the other. Wes wasn't sure if this edginess was because of his presence or because that was just who Dennis was. Everything he did, every move he made, it was like he was trying to hold back, keep from exploding. It gave him an odd aura of stillness, but with a great deal of force behind each minute movement. “Seriously,” Dennis said finally. “What'd you think of him?”

“Why ask me? Ain't like you've ever bothered with my opinion before.” Hell.
Hell.
Why say that? Must be this house. This damned table.

Dennis dropped his fork onto his plate. “Jesus, Wes. Do
you
have to do this?”

“Sorry. I didn't mean nothing by it. Let it go.” He took a long swallow of water, set the glass down harder than he meant to. “Scott. I don't know. Seems like a nice enough kid, I guess. Not real happy to be here.”

“You blame him?”

“No.” Wes set his fork down, pushed his plate away, most of the food still on it. No appetite since Claire died. “I'll tell you one thing, though: that kid don't seem especially interested in horses.” Dennis looked up, and Wes saw he wasn't saying anything his stepson didn't already know. “Which I suppose means he must really like you.”

Dennis smiled, not at Wes. “And you find that hard to believe?”

He noticed Dennis's nose all of a sudden, the way it ruined his profile. Wes broke it eighteen years ago, at this table, the one and only time he'd ever laid a hand on him in anger. Hadn't strictly meant to, but he still wasn't sorry for it; Dennis had deserved that and more. What he thought he might be sorry for was the afterward. The leaving. It was a new idea, that he might be sorry for that. And he thought again about Scott, the anger that poured out of the kid so you could almost smell it on him, sharp and sour. “Dennis,” Wes said, looking back across the table, “I don't think I know you well enough anymore to say.”

 

He stayed up late that night, later than Dennis, though he had church in the morning. He walked around the silent house, treading close to the walls to keep the floorboards from creaking. Still a house he could move through in the dark. Still a house whose shadows he knew, the cast of moonlight through the uncurtained windows familiar as it fell.

The walls were most different. Gone, of course, were the things he and Claire had taken with them when they'd left: the cross Wes's father had carved from a knotted piece of deadfall; the wooden calendar with a painting of a goose Claire ordered another year's worth of pages for every November; the small poster from the last time the band played Harvest, a few weeks before the riot. Gone, too, were the things they had left behind: a handful of pleasant but generic art prints, a collection of haphazardly framed family photographs. The walls of the house now were nearly bare, cool white almost everywhere he looked.

The exception was the space over the mantel, where Claire's wide mirror used to be. When he was fifteen and in the midst of one of his rages, Dennis threw a book at the mirror and cracked it. All the way across, from one corner of the frame to the other, a finer spiderweb of fractures at the point of impact. Now there were a handful of photographs in its place, each carefully matted and framed. A yellow stand of aspens in low sun; a distant image of a broad-antlered bull moose; a horse running blurred, scattered sharp catches of image standing out: the glint of a steel shoe nailed to a hoof, the bristly texture of a tangled mane, a taut line of muscle powering a stride.

And his wife. A photograph Wes had never seen before. Dennis must have taken it during one of Claire's last visits before she became ill. She had never liked having her picture taken, and Wes was suffering the consequences of her aversion now; he had so few photographs of her. Soft light on her skin, highlighting her profile as she turned from the camera, her hair in a thick, heavy braid over her shoulder, a shy close-mouthed smile curving her lips. A beautiful portrait. But her eyes were aimed a few degrees away from the viewer, and no matter where Wes stood, he couldn't pretend she was looking at him.

 

The Black River Presbyterian Church was a block off Main Street, in a wide building whose geometric shape had probably seemed innovative (rather than ugly) when it was built. The sign by the road had been replaced, but that was the only obvious change Wes could see. Same kinds of trucks in the lot. Same kinds of people walking in.

He waited until three minutes to nine before he went inside. The usher looked distantly familiar, but he smiled through Wes and handed him a program with a rote greeting. The town had grown in the last eighteen years, but the sanctuary was emptier than he remembered it, no more than half full, and the sign outside listed this as the only service of the week. Wes took a seat in the second-to-last pew, near the windows, dotted today with a scattering of raindrops making a slow descent toward the ground outside. The stained glass spanned the entire left wall of the sanctuary and reflected a typical Presbyterian austerity: no figures of Christ or saints, just thin bars of color: pink, gold, blue, green. As a young child, Wes thought the windows looked like they were made of sheets of hard candy. Knew it was mere fantasy even then, but as he and his father filed out of the pew one morning, he'd leaned close and touched the tip of his tongue to the cool glass.