Black River

by S. M. Hulse

  “Right.” Dennis started walking back toward the house, didn’t check to see if Wes followed. “Didn’t take us long to revert back to form this morning, did it?”

  “Guess not.”

  Dennis reached the porch and turned. One corner of his mouth tugged into an ironic smile. “At least I didn’t pull a gun on you this time.”

  “Don’t think I’m ready to joke about that, Dennis.”

  His stepson sighed, a short exhalation like a bull’s snort. He sat on one end of the top step, and Wes took the other. Yeah, the place looked good. Not much to criticize. It still felt like his house, though. Still felt like it belonged to him, like he might hear the creak of the screen door any moment now, like Claire might step out onto the porch and smile down at them, call them my boys. Like that last night and the gun and the eighteen years since hadn’t happened at all.

  “Got a cigarette?”

  Dennis glanced sideways.

  “You got nicotine stains on your fingers,” Wes said. “Probably ought to cut back, you’re smoking that much.”

  Dennis frowned, but he pulled a pack of cigarettes from his toolbox—Wes’s old brand—and shook one out. He held it out to Wes without looking at him, like he’d just as soon let it drop into the dirt. “Mom said you quit.”

  “I did.” Wes had to use both hands on the lighter.

  “Want me to get that?”

  “No,” he said around the cigarette, “I don’t.” And finally the flame did catch and he pulled the smoke into his lungs. Didn’t bring him the same easing of tension it used to. “I went to the cemetery this morning.”

  “You said.”

  “They can’t bury her near Madeline. Full up or something.”

  “They got spaces in the rest of the place, right?”

  “It ain’t nice enough.” Wes’s fingers twisted over one another when he closed them—the doctors had a fancy name for that—so he held his cigarette with an open hand. Gave him a showy style that didn’t suit him. “I thought instead we might scatter her ashes somewhere pretty.”

  Dennis didn’t say anything right off, and Wes took that for acceptance. He was glad of it. Didn’t know if he could argue about this and keep his head.

  The end of Dennis’s cigarette glowed as he drew on it. He spoke without exhaling, so a bit of smoke escaped between his lips with each word. “There’s a good spot up in the mountains,” he said. “It’ll be best if we go up in the evening. Around this time.”

  “Tomorrow, then.”

  It rained hard during the night, though, and was still pouring the next morning. A good twenty degrees cooler than it had been, too. Happened like that sometimes. Summer one day, autumn the next. Winter not too far off. Dennis and Wes drank their coffee standing silent in the kitchen, and Dennis left for his first shoeing appointment.

  After Dennis was gone, Wes made the drive to Elk Fork. They’d remodeled the hospital since he’d been there last—new tile on the floors, prettier colors on the walls—but it still assaulted the senses like any other medical facility. The disinfectant smell everyone liked to complain about didn’t bother Wes much, but the sounds did: the rattle of metal casters as carts were pushed across tile; the dispassionate voices of the doctors and nurses; the breath-holding silences between the electronic beeps of monitors. Wes scanned the wide felt readerboard mounted near the elevator bank. Found “Oncology” out of habit, though Claire had never been admitted here. Fourth floor in this hospital. “Donation Center” was on the second.

  He’d called ahead, and the staff seemed pleased to see him. In Spokane they knew him by name, but here he had to go through the full screening again. The paperwork took him a long while, and by the time he finished his joints were aching. They weighed him, took his temperature, gauged his blood pressure, pricked his finger and finally guided him back to the donation area, where a woman in pale violet scrubs appeared at his side.

  “How are you this morning, Mr. Carver?”

  “Just fine,” he told her, because that’s what you said.

  She sat on a padded stool beside him, and he watched her eyes move back and forth over the sheet on her clipboard. Two years ago he would have called her a nurse, but he knew better now, knew she was a phlebotomist or a medical assistant. She was half his age, with curly black hair she’d piled on top of her head and fixed in place with a slew of bobby pins. The tag pinned to her scrub top said her name was Molly. She’d stuck a glittery sunflower sticker in the corner; it covered part of the y. “So,” she said, “it looks like you’re a regular platelet donor over in Spokane.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He shifted, couldn’t get comfortable. The chair was too like those in the infusion suite where Claire had taken her chemotherapy. In Spokane, Oncology was way up on the seventh floor, and he and Claire would sit facing the wide windows and watch the city journey through its day below, and she would hold one of his hands between both of her own as though he were the one who was sick. “You do single-needle apheresis here?”

  The phlebotomist—Molly—looked up from her clipboard. Tried and failed to hide her alarm. “No. But—”

  “It’s all right,” Wes told her. “Just curious.”

  “I’ll be very quick with the needles,” she promised. “I’m gentle.”

  Wes nodded. Let her think a phobia was the reason he’d rather not have a needle in each arm.

  “It’s wonderful you’re here,” Molly was saying. She’d forced an incredible amount of enthusiasm into her voice, apparently still concerned he might bolt. “We always need platelets.”

  “My wife had leukemia,” Wes said, without meaning to.

  Molly stopped fussing with her tray of equipment and found his eyes for the first time. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “She passed last week.”

  Molly sat back down on the stool and touched his hand. “I’m so sorry,” she said. He could tell she meant it, and felt the sudden horror of tears forming in his eyes. Molly turned away, and Wes hated her for that small kindness, because in granting it she betrayed the fact that she’d seen his grief.

  “She had a transplant, but she relapsed,” he said, forcing himself to talk through it, waiting for the constriction in his throat to ease. “We couldn’t get her in remission again. She needed a lot of transfusions. I wasn’t her blood type, but I figured if she was gonna be dependent on strangers, then I ought to do my part for someone else.”

  “It’s a wonderful gift,” Molly said, and Wes was relieved she’d retreated back to the usual banalities. She was ready, so he raised his right arm a few inches.

  “Could use a little help with the buttons,” he said. “My hands ain’t what they used to be.”

  She seemed thankful to be faced with a concrete task, a physical task, and Wes watched her unfasten the small plastic buttons at his wrists. Nurses and other medical types were the only people he didn’t much mind asking for help. They weren’t squeamish about disability or deformity, and most of them knew what was their business and what wasn’t. “I got it from here,” he said, once the buttons were free. “Mind getting the curtain?”

  Wes waited until the green cloth was drawn around them. He hoped Molly might turn away to prep lines or needles, but she didn’t, so while she watched he pushed his right sleeve up over his elbow and revealed the scars on the underside of his forearm. Six of them, spaced evenly from wrist to elbow, and impossible to mistake for anything but the cigarette burns they were. The left arm was worse, and Wes was careful not to look at Molly when he rolled up his other sleeve. Five letters carved into the flesh from elbow to wrist, each line thick and raised, lighter in color than the surrounding skin. The name still legible despite a crosshatching of newer scars defacing the letters. Impossible to see the muscle, the bone, the structure made strong and lean by a lifetime of fiddling. Impossible to see anything but that fucking mess of scar tissue.

  To her credit, Molly didn’t say anything. They usually didn’t. Wes was long used to his scars, but he a
lways felt an odd guilt for exposing them to the donation center employees, as though he were foisting knowledge upon them they hadn’t asked for and would rather have done without. He waited in silence while Molly tied the tourniquet around his right arm and ran her fingertips over the skin at the inside of his elbow. He held his breath at the rough, cool touch of the alcohol swab. Acknowledged the warning of “Here comes the poke” with a brief nod. Waited while she repeated it all on the left arm.

  It was hard for him. The riot had done a number on his body, but Wes liked to think he’d come through it with his mind relatively intact. He hadn’t had a breakdown. Hadn’t been reduced to a nervous wreck. Hell, he’d even gone back to work at the prison for two more years. But there were things. Small things, mostly, almost embarrassing in their predictability. He liked his back to the wall, always. He’d taken to carrying his father’s old pocketwatch because he could no longer tolerate the feel of anything tight around his wrists. And sitting in a chair and letting people lay their hands on him—that was damned near impossible. He’d never minded the dentist before the riot, but afterward he’d dreaded each appointment and finally quit going altogether. Asked Claire to cut his hair so he could avoid the barber. Even these platelet donations, strictly voluntary, were difficult; sometimes he was turned away for the day, his blood pressure having rocketed the moment he sat in the chair. He’d hoped, at first, that forcing himself to face this particular fear so often would ease its hold on him, but so far it hadn’t happened. His palms still sweated. His stomach still churned. His heart still raced.

  Molly arranged the lines and started up the machine. She offered him magazines and movies, which he declined, and she left him alone with promises to check on him frequently. Wes listened to the mechanical rhythm of the machine and looked where the reclining chair pointed his eyes, at the join between the green curtain and the ceiling. The fabric was pale, a sickly sea green, the same color as the U.S. Forest Service trucks that barreled down Montana’s back roads, the same color as the corridors leading to the warden’s office in the old prison.

  Almost two hours he sat there, while the machine beside him whirred and clunked, spinning his blood into different components and giving some of them back to his body. The gentle weight of the plastic tubing on his skin reminded him his arms were bare, but he didn’t look. He tried to be still. He tried not to think. Should’ve gotten easier, but it got harder, so by the time Molly sat back down on her stool Wes was just barely holding back from tearing the needles out of his arms. But he nodded, and thanked her when she buttoned his shirt cuffs, and made another appointment.

  “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.”