by S. M. Hulse
Dennis stood to one side of the barn door, his back half turned to Wes, eyes on the anvil before him. He had a hammer in his right hand, tongs in the other, a blazing orange horseshoe at one end. The strike of metal on metal was gentler than Wes would’ve expected, each note almost musical in its pitch and cadence. He could see the taut flex of Dennis’s muscles beneath skin, though, and wings of sweat had bloomed over his back. Dennis used the tongs to turn the horseshoe on its side every few strikes, the duller sound metered in with the hammering. Wes watched carefully, but whatever Dennis looked for when he turned the shoe, Wes couldn’t see it. A few more minutes of hammering and turning, and then Dennis disappeared into the darkness of the barn; a moment later Wes heard a hiss, and a cloud of acrid smoke spilled lazily from the aisle. He fought the urge to cough. Dennis came back out and dropped the shoe into a bucket of water. Steam rose from the bucket as he straightened and passed the back of his wrist across his forehead, and if he was surprised to see Wes, it didn’t show in the easy, half-lidded glance he gave him. Dennis crossed to the forge and switched it off. Silence hit hard. He met Wes’s eyes again. “Everything all right?”
“Just got back from the cemetery.”
“Something wrong?”
“We ain’t burying her there.”
For a moment Dennis just watched him, and Wes looked back and saw the way the interior of the forge still glowed behind Dennis, the way the heat rising from it made the air over his head shudder. “All right,” Dennis said finally. “Hang on.” He turned and called, “Scott!”
A teenage boy appeared in the barn doorway. He was probably fifteen or sixteen, though Wes was too distant from that stage of his own life to be sure of his guess. A slight kid, with freckles bridging his nose and black hair that might’ve been dyed that color. He wore the same sullen look Wes had seen on the faces of kids at the mall where he’d worked security in Spokane, an expression that plainly announced to the world how much he resented it. “What?”
Dennis nodded toward the barn. “I’m almost done with Beau. Go bring Caesar in for me, will you? Big gray in the far pasture.”
The boy picked up a halter and lead rope off the hood of the truck, but stopped short of the pasture gate and gave Wes a suspicious up-and-down glance. “Who are you?”
Dennis spoke before Wes could. “This is my stepfather, Mr. Carver. Wes, this is Scott Bannon.”
The kid’s expression didn’t change, but he shifted the halter and lead to his left hand and mechanically offered his right, like an obedient dog performing a trick. Wes took it cautiously and stilled his own features against the pressure on his hand. “Good to meet you, Scott,” he said.
Scott couldn’t play his half of the charade, though, and his mask broke. “What the hell happened to your fingers?”
“Scott,” Dennis warned.
“Someone broke them,” Wes said. “Long time ago.”
“On purpose?”
“Yep.”
Scott waited, but Wes didn’t elaborate. The boy studied him with the slightly bemused expression people wore when they hadn’t yet decided if you were smarter than them, or if they were smarter than you. Inmates did it all the time.
“Well, shit,” the kid finally said.
“Scott.” Dennis’s voice carried the gently admonishing edge of a parent’s. “Caesar. Big gray.”
“Right.” Scott disappeared through the gate with a final backward glance.
Wes waited until he was out of earshot. “He work for you?”
“Sort of. He’s a kid I’m . . . mentoring, I guess they call it.”
“You sign up for a program or something?”
“Nah. I did this career day thing at the high school last spring.” He smirked. “Not sure anyone told them my education tops out at halfway through eleventh grade. Anyway, Scott said he was interested in horses.” Something in the way Dennis phrased that. “His father’s in prison and his mother moved them to Black River to be near him. He doesn’t exactly fit in real well.”
“Lady ought to have known better.” Black River was a CO town, full stop.
“No shit.” Dennis shrugged. “But she didn’t want him to lose touch with his father, and they come from Miles City.” Well. Not exactly a short trip.
“What’s his father convicted of?”
A long moment before Dennis answered. Thinking again. Deciding how much to tell. Wes always noticed hands, and his stepson’s were tanned and sinewy, the right still gripping the hammer hard enough for tendon to rise and bone to blanch the skin over his knuckles. “He says armed robbery. Don’t know if that’s the truth.”
“You better be careful with him around your things.”
Dennis smacked his hand hard against the tailgate, and Wes heard the rattle of chains from the barn as the brown horse tossed its head. “Jesus, Wes!” He laughed, but his eyes stayed hard. “Don’t tell me you still buy into that bad-seed shit.”
“I’m just saying.”
Dennis fished the cold shoe out of the water bucket, shook it hard. “Whatever happened to that scripture you like so much? The sins of the father and all that. Thought you were supposed to treat everyone as his own man.”
Amazing how quick anger could tighten up a man’s chest, like it was a physical thing pressing down on his heart. “Bible argues both sides of that one, Dennis.”
“And didn’t God say something about free will? Seem to remember that being in there somewhere.”
Wes’s hands were starting to throb, and he quieted the impulse to rub them. “Just told you to be careful is all. You’re doing a good thing for that kid, but it’s hard for a person to fight his own blood.”
The muscles at Dennis’s temples bulged and hollowed as he worked his jaw, and the way he kept his palms pressed against the tailgate suggested he was deliberately keeping himself corralled behind it. “Yeah? That mean you’re still waiting for me to go out and start forcing myself on women?”
Wes stepped straight to him. “Don’t you dare bring your momma into this.”
“Thought you came here to talk about her,” Dennis said, his voice flat and careless and exactly the way Wes remembered it.
“Don’t you dare,” he repeated, feeling the words drop to a growl in his throat. His voice carried authority, and people listened to him, even when they didn’t want to. It was a gift Wes had put to good use all his life. He’d had to learn the rest of it when he started work at the prison: how to walk and carry himself, how to keep his face from betraying any trace of fear or intimidation, how to let his body show he was not afraid. But he’d never had to train his voice.
Dennis knew better than to fight that voice. But he didn’t look away, and Wes matched his gaze and wondered if it was true, if he was, in fact, still waiting for the poisonous half of Dennis’s blood to show itself. He’d done all he could to keep that from happening, to raise Dennis right and teach him discipline and values. And he’d succeeded, at least in that Dennis was living in Black River by choice and not because someone had locked him in a cell behind coils of razor wire. But in doing the job, Wes had cast a wide gulf between them, and it seemed the years hadn’t begun to mend it. Shouldn’t have surprised him. The only thing he and Dennis had in common was that they both loved Claire, and now that she was gone, so too was the fragile, frayed thread that tied them together. Still, Wes had loved Dennis once, when his own straight fingers had been fast on the strings, when Dennis was a child who danced while Wes played. Felt like he was carrying that memory for someone else, though, for another man who had lived in his body before him.
“Well, you haven’t changed one fucking bit,” Dennis finally said, biting off each word almost before it left his mouth. No different than as a boy, everything just barely controlled, just waiting to crack. “And I sure as hell don’t know why Mom wasted her life on you.”
“That’s it,” Wes said. His tone was even; he almost wished it weren’t. “Had enough of this.” He backed away from the truck a few steps, an
d when he turned hard he just missed the black-haired kid, gray horse in tow.
His name was Shane, Claire had told him once. And for a while, she said, when I was sixteen, I thought I was in love with him.
That was it. His name was Shane. Claire thought she was in love with him. The phrase stuck in Wes’s ear, a wrong note. Thought she was in love with him. Why not just was? (Claire looked at the floor when she said his name.) At the time, Wes had known little of Claire’s life before she and Dennis arrived in Black River, and he might have put aside his misgivings about Shane—assumed the man was simply a run-of-the-mill deadbeat—if it weren’t for Claire’s sister. Farmer and Madeline never had any children—couldn’t, was the impression Wes had, though no one ever said as much—and Madeline doted on other people’s. She taught fifth grade at the elementary school and worked in the church nursery on Sunday mornings. Always kind, always gracious. It made the fact that she didn’t love her own nephew that much more obvious. Even when Dennis was just four, five years old, she could barely stand to look at him, and when she spoke to him her voice took on an oddly rigid quality. Once Wes caught her eyeing the boy with an expression of what could only be called disgust.
One night—after the engagement but before the wedding—Wes went to see Madeline when Farmer was at work. They sat in the kitchen. Condensation beaded the untouched glasses of lemonade Madeline put before them. A fly buzzed around the daisies in the center of the table, alighting for a fraction of a second before going airborne again. Madeline, who was six years older and six inches taller than Claire, but shared her sister’s face, sat staring at her folded hands.
“She won’t call it rape,” she said.
It was merely a confirmation of his suspicions, but the word charged his blood. Hard not to stand up and rage right there.
“She was his girlfriend,” Madeline continued. “Your typical high school infatuation. Puppy love, you know? Talked my ear off about him for a time. But she didn’t want that. What happened, I mean. I know she didn’t.” Madeline batted the fly away with the back of her hand. “She called me afterward. There was no real ambiguity about it, Wes. Not the way she told it to me. But I think it hurts her more to think of it as rape, so she invents excuses for him. Says he was confused, that she led him on. That sort of thing.”
“Where is he now?”
Madeline looked up sharply, and Wes was afraid he’d frightened her. But Madeline wasn’t fragile, and her expression was bitter. “He’s gone. After it happened, our father went looking for Shane with his shotgun over his shoulder. He left town. Probably the state.”
But Wes never quit searching for the name on the inmate rosters, never quit studying faces for one that looked like Dennis. A man who would force himself on a woman once would do it again.
If Claire knew Wes had talked to Madeline, she didn’t say so. Wes tried to bring the subject up a few times, but she had a quiet way of refusing to answer his questions, of redirecting the conversation with a delicate absoluteness. At some point, around the time Dennis quit being a child and started being a teenager, Wes became gradually aware that the boy knew the truth about his father. Wes certainly hadn’t told him, but maybe Dennis had picked up on the same things Wes had. If he had gone to his mother, Wes knew, she would have told him the truth. She held things back from Wes sometimes, even lied to him on occasion—always lightly, always gently—but she had never seemed able or willing to do the same to her son. There was a bond between them as mother and child that allowed, or demanded, the frank discussion that he as husband wasn’t entitled to. There were other things over the thirty years of their marriage that Wes and Claire didn’t talk much about, that they avoided: the riot; that last night at the house; the decision to leave Black River. But Shane and what he had done was a forbidden subject the way nothing else was. There were just those few words, just that once: His name was Shane. And for a while, when I was sixteen, I thought I was in love with him.
During the riot, Bobby Williams took his wedding ring. Slid it off Wes’s blood-slicked finger, raised it to the light, squinted one eye shut. “Is your wife pretty?” he asked. The ring palmed, gone. “I bet she is.” His breath hot and moist on Wes’s ear. “I bet she’s real pretty.” The words parceled out slow: “I wish she were here.”
Most of the folks in Black River who owned land ignored it. Maybe they kept a few chickens or goats, or grew a little hay, but most just let the land go to seed or used it as a repository for rusted, beaten cars and appliances that had long since stopped working. Wes had expected to see more of the same at Dennis’s, but if anything, his stepson had bettered the place. He’d replaced the siding on the house, painted the porch swing, graded the road, expanded the workshop, improved the pasture. When Wes went back to the house a few hours after his argument with Dennis, he found the other man on one knee beside a fencepost near the pasture gate, toolbox open at his side. He looked up when Wes pulled his truck into view, but turned his eyes straight back to his work. An Indian summer was beating down on the canyon, and Dennis worked bare-chested, yellow work gloves with dirt-blacked palms on his hands. He had the same body he’d had as a teenager, small but strong, all lean muscle, skin that looked tanned even in winter. Wes noticed a couple of tattoos: a ring of barbed wire around his biceps—the Montana special—and some kind of bird on his shoulder blade, a barn swallow, maybe. Wes tried not to judge. Lots of folks had tattoos these days. More did than didn’t, he’d read somewhere.
Wes walked to the fence and waited, waving away a hardy late-season fly that buzzed around his head. Dennis had replaced the old barbed wire with three lines of braided white rope shot through with coppery threads, studded at each post with yellow plastic insulators. The red horse and the mule were at the far end of the pasture, heads down to the grass, but the black horse who had watched Wes so closely this morning stood easily a few feet beyond Dennis’s crouched figure, one hind hoof resting so the toe just touched soil.
After a few pointedly silent minutes, during the last of which it looked to Wes like Dennis wasn’t doing anything but running thoughts through his head, Dennis stood, shut his fencing pliers into the battered toolbox and started toward Wes with a careless, loose-jointed stride. On the other side of the fence, the black horse followed at a pace’s distance. There was something awkward in the way the animal moved, a deliberateness to each step that Wes recognized.
“Wait here,” Dennis said, walking past Wes without even glancing at him. About enough to make Wes turn around and leave. You’re here for Claire, he reminded himself.
Dennis headed for the outbuilding near the house, where Wes’s father used to have his workshop. The black horse raised his head over the fence and swiveled his ears toward Wes. It was an old horse, he saw now. A smattering of colorless wiry strands tarnished his black mane, and short white hairs edged the long angles of his face. The hollows over his eyes were deep enough for a man to sink his thumbs into.
“You hear that fence now?” Dennis called from inside the shed.
Abruptly the horse stepped back from the rope, lifting his head high, and a short ticking noise sounded every couple seconds, regular as a metronome. “It’s going.”
Dennis ambled back, pulling a T-shirt over his head. Wes felt Dennis’s eyes on his long sleeves, on the sheen of sweat Wes knew must show on his face. He pushed his hands into his pockets. “Listen,” Dennis said. “Sorry about all that shit I said earlier. Should’ve kept my mouth shut.” He forced the words out like a nauseated man who just wanted to vomit already and be done with it.
Wes accepted the apology with a short nod. “These your animals?”
“This one is,” Dennis said, reaching a hand over the fence to gently slap the side of the black horse’s neck. The horse turned, and Wes saw that while the near eye was normal, a deep syrupy brown, the far one had a white around it, like a human eye. It was unnerving, robbed him of the vaguely benevolent gaze most horses had. “His name’s Rio.”
“You get him
from Farmer?”
“Years back. That sorrel and the mule are his.”
Wes watched Dennis rub Rio’s face, and thought it was a small miracle that a man who’d loved something so much as a child still loved that same thing so many years later. Most folks were mercurial in their passions, changing quick from one to the next, or they cultivated a whole slew of interests, parceling out a little time and energy to each in turn. Maybe to really love something you had to be born with it, had it pressed into your soul before you even took a breath, so that it was something you could neither explain nor deny. The fiddle was like that for Wes. For Dennis it was horses. When he was a kid he’d spend entire afternoons watching the broodmares slowly meander around Farmer’s pastures, and his favorite toys were his plastic horses. He’d had dozens of them, and increased his herd every Christmas and birthday. All of them, Wes remembered, had names and complicated made-up histories that Dennis could recite on the spot and never varied. Once, he dropped one on the floor and its front leg snapped in two. Cried so hard you would’ve thought they’d had to shoot the thing in the head. Wes spent the night in his father’s workshop, measuring and drilling tiny holes into each half of the broken leg and setting it with a pin and glue. Took three tries to get right, and he finished four hours before he had to go back to the prison. Put an end to the tears, though.
Wes wondered if Dennis remembered that. It had been a gray horse. Dappled gray. “We didn’t talk about your momma yet,” he said instead.
