The Trials of Solomon Parker

by Eric Scott Fischl

  I’m a good worker, sir. I can help out, if you need someone. I can do pretty much whatever.

  Sol had just pointed to the stack of crates he’d been carrying in and then it was years and years together, after that. Good years and bad and all the rest, all that had happened, and now they’re right back to it, circled around once more.

  “I’m a good worker, Sol,” he says, now. He’s looking the other way to hide the wet in his eyes. Billy isn’t even sure why he feels this swell of emotion. Maybe there’s just been so much out of kilter lately that seeing the familiar again, feeling it, makes it that much bigger. Maybe it’s the idea that these years without Sol in them would have felt hollow; maybe there was a fear there that things would be different, this time, worse. It’s why he’d stayed away from Stevensville for so long, almost didn’t come at all. A worry that something would have gone bad, that Marked Face had poisoned it. But now here they were again.

  “Might could find a spot for you then, son,” Sol says, reaching over to squeeze Billy’s skinny shoulder. “Might could find a spot for you.”

  Evening now, and they still haven’t talked about things, about what’s passed before. It’s there in the room like that elephant you hear about. Billy has a hint of the feeling of maybe I’m just crazy, a fear that, if he brings it up, Sol will shake his head, furrow a worried brow. Say what now? Or maybe Sol feels that way too. But Billy knows, knows, deep down, that he’s not crazy, that what’s happened has happened but, still, there’s a shyness about bringing it out in the open. He wants Sol to go first, to break the seal on all that memory but, so far, even several whiskeys to the good, neither of them has taken the step.

  Instead, Sol has spent most of his time talking about Elizabeth and Owen and the tangled mess their lives have become. That maybe there’s nothing he can do about it, either. Nothing he can do to make it better, now that he sees it for what it is.

  “I think I got to just go, Bill,” he says, finally. “I just got to go. You can keep hold of the bar for me for a while, can’t you?” Seeming to forget, with the whiskey, that this Billy is fourteen. “Just for a while, is all. It don’t seem right, but I think Owen and I need to go, at least for a spell. Lizzie isn’t getting better, Billy, she’s not. She’s worse, maybe. I try to do what I can but Lizzie has problems and she needs to get them sorted out. Maybe having us around isn’t helping. I’m worried.” About as close as he’s gotten to bringing up what came before, about what she did.

  Billy hadn’t known Elizabeth, that other time, aside from seeing her at the hospital sometimes, later, when he’d go to visit his father. He’d arrived in Stevensville after the fire, the last time, and he has only Sol’s memories of her to build her image in his head.

  “You sure about that, Sol?” he says now.

  “Hell no, I’m not, Billy. How can you be sure about something like that? But I got this feeling. Feeling like nothing I do is going to go right with her. So maybe best I just leave. Take Owen and go.”

  “What are you going to do with him, Sol? Baby needs a mother.”

  “I know that, Bill, don’t act like I don’t. I know it. But maybe best if I just take him to Ag and Sara for a spell, until things get sorted out with Lizzie. They’ll take him in.”

  Billy doesn’t want to say it, doesn’t like to even think it. Not about Sol, who he knows is a good man. But it sounds just like what happened before: Sol just upping stakes and leaving when things got hard, for which Billy knows Sol has beaten himself up over the years. Guilt at letting things happen as they did, compounded with the guilt at abandoning Owen with the Rideouts. One reason he never went to see Lizzie at the hospital, after the first while.

  Sol might not see it, but maybe he’s just doing what he wants to do, not what’s right. Maybe he’s convinced himself, but that still doesn’t make it a thing that should be done.

  “I think you need to think on this more, Sol.”

  “Goddamn it, Bill, I’ve been doing nothing but think on it.”

  “Well, maybe just wait a little longer, OK? Give me a chance to get up to the reservation, finish up what I need to do there, then I’ll be back. I’ll help you however I can, Sol.” That’s why I’m here, now, he thinks, and maybe together we can sort it out, this go-round. If not, we’ll just make the best of a bad thing. That’s what you do. You help your friends. You help your family and together you just work things out. Might not turn out perfect, but you had to stick. You don’t leave family, Sol. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that? Billy tries not to think that he himself is doing just that, getting away from Bad Bird. But he’ll be back, he’s not leaving leaving, he’s just opening up some space for a time.

  “Help how? What the hell are you going to do, Billy?”

  Billy turns, looks at Sol. Both of them want to say it, bring it into the open, what passed before. Perhaps all that matters is that they both know and that, knowing, they can head off the bad that would come, a month or so from now. Lizzie and the fire and everything else. Even leaving it unsaid, they know and they’ll make it better. He tries not to think about the Penn fire. They’ll make it better, this time. His father has told him some things, about his uncle, he understands it all a little more. They’ll fix it. There’s a way to make it right.

  “I’ll do whatever it takes, Sol. Just give it a month, OK? We’ll figure it out.”

  Sol won’t look at Billy, but stares into his whiskey. Part of him wants to just stop caring, because he feels like maybe he’s just walking through those footsteps ahead of him, that, no matter what he tries, it will go bad on him, one way or another. That that’s to be the course of his life, maybe. Repeating the same mistakes or building worse ones out of bad decisions and stupidity.

  He knocks his drink back, gritting his teeth. That’s bullshit, though. Coward talk. Whining. Fucking weak. Billy’s right. He’s not going to just run away – because that’s what it feels like, whatever the reason – at least not yet. He’ll stick it out but he damn sure isn’t going to just let things happen the way they did before. Fucking stand up and take what comes. Yes, Billy is right, and they have some time. Not much, but there’s time to straighten this out. The fire didn’t happen until September.

  He’ll get Lizzie to the hospital this time, drag her there tied up if he has to. Come visit her. Get her healthy and then she’ll come home and they’ll start again. It’s what he should have done before, if he hadn’t been so blind and stupid. He’ll be ready, this time.

  “All right, Bill. A month.”

  6.

  But it wasn’t a month.

  Smoke in the air, still. Something is always burning, that summer. The fires in Idaho and Washington have been going for weeks. Ash blown east dusts the trees, the ground. Billy walks down to the little mission church. He looks up at a sun the color of a trout’s belly, glowing through the haze like an ember. Something is always burning, lately.

  It wasn’t a month. Sol’s house burned only a couple of days after Billy left Stevensville. He’d barely made it past Missoula when he heard the news and turned around. Sick in the gut, heart charred to coal inside him. It was a mistake thinking that everything was going to be just as before. On the same schedule, a repeat of that other time. Things change. They should have fucking known it. Didn’t matter where that month went, or why. Things change. They’d made a mistake, and now Owen was gone, again.

  He opens the church door, sees Sol sitting down at the front, elbows on his knees, head down. His hands are working the brim of a battered, brownish hat, pulling it in slow circles, around and around. The church is otherwise empty; Lizzie is nowhere to be seen. The air hangs hot and heavy, dust swirls in the light that lays across the small coffin that’s not much bigger than one of the box planters outside, home to wilted, fading orange flowers. It’s hard for Billy to understand – though he knows it, it’s hard to understand, internalize in a visceral way – that it’s Owen in that little wooden box. Owen, a baby, shriveled and burnt, as if presaging his fate a
s the young man that he would have one day become, the young man that Billy remembers: lanky, all elbows and knees, dumb with the lack of years but filling up with a life that was just starting to blossom. Years from now, when Billy knew him.

  Owen, with his spraddled, sprawling stride, pushing the heavy ore-cart up and down the track all day. Owen, counting out the fifty rocks per cart – no more, no less, goddamn it – while the rest of them damn near piss themselves, laughing into their sleeves. Owen passing out in the Stope after half a beer and most of one whiskey, night after night, waking as often as not to something wet stuck in his ear: a finger, a beer-soaked peanut shell, a lump of well-chewed tobacco. Owen, Sol’s boy come back, who will die in a fire down the Penn in 1916. Who’s died in a fire in his own house, now, all these years before.

  Sol doesn’t even look up when Billy sits down in the pew next to him, just continues to twist his hat around in circles. Billy looks down at his own hands. He’s afraid to say something, to meet Sol’s gaze even. He picks at a rime of dirt under one of his nails, to give himself something to do. So he doesn’t have to think. Just dig the dirt out, move on to the next finger. He’s so focused on trying not to think that he doesn’t even notice Sol’s fist before it cracks into the side of his head.

  “It’s your fucking fault. Yours.” Sol’s following left hits Billy’s raised shoulder and, fortunately, Sol is very much a right-handed man, his off-side punching weak and loose. That first shot has rung Billy’s chimes something fierce and it’s all he can do to scramble up and drop over the end of the pew, painfully, onto his hands and knees, do what he can to put something, anything, between himself and Sol, who is doing his best to clamber over the end of the bench and down onto Billy’s skinny frame. With an agility born of desperation, Billy hoists himself upright and behind the second pew, separating himself from Sol with one low length of pine.

  “Sol! Sol! Stop!”

  “Your fucking fault, Billy.” Sol’s brow is crumpled over bloodshot eyes; his teeth are bared, clenched as he spits the words through them. “You killed him.”

  “Sol!” He backs up again, sideways, bumping into a low table at the end and knocking over a candle that’s burning in a mason jar; it falls to the floor and the glass cracks into several pieces. Even scared as he is, Billy has the presence of mind – given all that’s happened – to stomp on the candle as he backs away, to kill the guttering flame.

  “Sol, stop!”

  Sol can feel with a remote, distant sliver of himself that what he’s doing now is wrong. That Billy Morgan is his one last friend, the one man caught up in this shitty mess who understands it as much as Sol does, even if that means not at all. They’re in it together though, for better or worse, have seen it together, the whole sorry snarl of it. Billy, who’s been at Sol’s side through the good and the bad and the much, much worse. Billy, who Sol damn near loves like another son.

  But now, while his real son lays crisped and shrunken in a coffin the size of a breadbox, all Sol can see when he looks at Billy Morgan is Owen. Who would be alive now if it weren’t for the boy in front of him. The boy who convinced him to stay, when he was ready to take his son and leave. To keep him safe. Instead, Lizzie had caught him off-guard, did what she did, a month too soon. Owen wouldn’t be dead if Sol had just left when he wanted, before Billy made him stay. Billy, whose fucking uncle had brought him here in the first place. Fucking Indians and their fucking witchcraft. Fucking Indian bastards.

  Sol knows at some small and faraway level of thought that the logic is wrong. That it’s the mad product of grief and anger and everything shabby that lives between those two things but, now, all he wants to do is grab hold of the bastard. Who’s right here in front of him, as if the fact he showed up somehow makes it all OK. He wants to wrap his hands around that bony throat, choke the life out of him, like it had been choked out of Owen by the fire and the smoke. Maybe whatever has gotten inside Lizzie, whatever drove her to do what she did, has cut free and crawled into him, too. Sol doesn’t care, he can’t think through this sudden stabbing knife of fury in his head that’s come upon him, from where, he doesn’t know.

  He knows this is wrong. He can’t think, can’t reason, but there’s something about a favor, a favor, and then the thought is gone though he tries to hold on to it, the thought passing into his rage. It’s wrong, it’s wrong, but it doesn’t matter.

  He hears laughter, or maybe it’s only his own gasping breath.

  With a quick motion, he stretches across the low pine bench, grabbing Billy by the front of his ill-fitting shirt, pulling him closer. He raises an arm. Sol can feel the tendons pop in his good right hand as he makes the fist.

  “Sol!”

  Billy shouts it before the fist comes down, hopes that he’ll be heard. Sol doesn’t pause, though; there’s no time to dodge so Billy does the only thing he can do, which is to hurl himself backwards, hoping to absorb some of the punch that way. From the burst of pain strobing his vision as his nose breaks, he presumes he wasn’t all that successful, but his head is at least still on his neck, most likely. Stumbling back, eyes streaming tears, blood pouring down his lips, he pulls Sol forward with the fistful of shirt he has. Their legs tangle together and they go down in a heap, Sol’s weight pinning Billy to the floor underneath.

  Billy arches, bucking upward, trying to get an arm between them. He gasps for air around the forearm Sol is pressing to his throat now with slow, sickening downward insistence, pushing the wind out of him. He can feel himself starting to black out so he uses a trick he learned as a boy, trying to fend off Bad Bird or Marked Face when they got in one of their rages: he spits, the surprise of a mucky bloody spray, right into Sol’s face. Sol flinches backward for an instant, just long enough for Billy to snake one skinny arm up and jab his thumb into an eye.

  There’s a howl and the pressure on his neck eases slightly, which allows Billy to draw a breath and try to twist his way out from under Sol, but then the forearm comes back down on his Adam’s apple with a force that makes him gag, head arching forward, guts churning. He flails, trying to get hold of the other arm, down by his side, before it can come up and bring another fist crashing into his face. Sol’s leaning far enough back that Billy can’t even reprise a spit, though he hasn’t the air to do so anyway. The only hope is that Sol will come back to himself before he finishes killing him.

  Sol’s arm pulls free of Billy’s weakening fingers. When the hand is raised above him, Billy can see not a fist, but the glint of broken glass, a shard of the cracked mason jar held in Sol’s cut, bleeding fingers, like a knife.

  He needs to tell Sol the things his father had told him about Marked Face. If he could just get the air in his lungs, he’d explain it to Sol and maybe they could set things back to right. Maybe not to perfect, but back somewhere closer to right nonetheless.

  All Billy wants, right now, is a second’s reprieve, one short, shallow breath. That’s all he needs, to get the little sentence out: I know how to fix it.

  Instead, the world being like it is, the glass comes down, down towards that hollow spot below his jaw, where a swollen vein throbs above Sol’s heavy wrist. Even as Billy tries to twist away, he’s knows it’s too late and that, now, he’ll never be able to tell Sol those six quick words.

  I know how to stop it.

  Billy barely feels the glass as it goes in.

  APPEARANCES

  – 1910 –

  Butte, Montana

  1.

  “Goddamn it, get your fucking hands up, you nancy.”

  The kid just cowers so Sol gives him another slap upside the head, not sparing the weight of it. Sends the fucker stumbling sideways. Before the boy can get too far, Sol lets go with a left, staggering the little shit back to somewhere closer to facing him.

  “Sir, stop, OK…” The boy is trying to hunker down into himself, shoulders up, neck bowed. “Listen, I didn’t know–”

  Sol slaps him again. “I said get your fucking hands up. Try to be a f
ucking man, all right? You just going to stand there and let me hit you?” He looks over at Faraday. “You believe this little bastard?”

  “Kids today, hey Sol?”

  “Fucking kids today is right.” Sol slaps the boy once more, harder this time. “Hands up, shitbird. Jesus.” Finally, scrawny little Michael Conroy, who once fancied – will fancy, although by now Sol barely thinks of any of that – himself a pugilist, raises his arms in a weak imitation of a fighter’s stance: chin down, fists up and in front of his nose, left foot forward. As an intimidating spectacle, it’s not much, given that Michael is what, fifteen now? All of a buck-ten, short, spindle-limbed and bony, a wild, dirty shock of hair that sticks up on most sides of his head.

  “There, that wasn’t so hard, was it, son? Need to rotate those fists in some, though, like that. No, don’t drop them, just turn them. There you go.” Sol looks back to his colleague. “What do you think of that stance, Nick? You’re the professional and all.”

  Nick Faraday gives an appraising eye. “Looking good, lad,” he says. “You make sure to keep those hands up and in front of you, and step into your punches, using your hips, like, but not too far, eh? You got to keep yourself balanced.” He demonstrates, slowly showing the progression of punch from the plant leg all the way through the hips and torso and shoulder to make it land with weight. “You got to punch with your whole body, kid, see? Don’t just punch with your fuckin arms.”

  In the middle of one of Faraday’s illustrative remarks about the merits of a high-handed stance, the proper line of force from fist to foot, Sol takes a quick step forward and drives his own fist, as hard as he can, into the boy’s unprotected gut.