Black River

by S. M. Hulse

  “Evening, Wesley,” he’d said, as though it were just past supper and not the wee hours of the morning. “Something I can help you with?”

  Wes had walked straight up to him, hadn’t missed the way Farmer stepped forward to meet him, leaned a little to match his movements. Wes got just inside the barn, and he was surprised by its warmth, by how sweet the hay made it smell. “Dennis ran off,” Wes said evenly. “You ain’t seen him, have you?”

  “Nope. Something upset him?”

  Wes shrugged. “He’s a teenager.”

  “Don’t always seem to think real straight at that age,” Farmer agreed.

  They’d stood there a few long moments more.

  “I don’t usually see you up this late, Arthur.” Wes was suddenly aware of the feel of the barn aisle beneath his feet, the rocks embedded in the packed dirt pressing against the soles of his boots. “Got day watch tomorrow, don’t you?”

  “One of my mares is colicky,” Farmer said. “Got to sit up with her.”

  That’s when Wes had seen him. Just when he was ready to let his suspicions go, to assume his stepson was lying low out in the pasture, Dennis had let his curiosity get the better of him. Wes spotted his face peering out from the open doorway of one of the stalls, the barn lights casting a mocking halo on his glossy child’s hair before he ducked back inside.

  Farmer saw Wes see Dennis. Wes knew he had. Farmer’s gaze had been set on Wes’s face; he’d have seen his eyes dart away, seen the twitch at his jaw.

  “Well,” Wes said carefully, “you give me a call if you see him, all right?”

  “Will do,” Farmer agreed. Lied right to him, blue eyes innocent as could be. Like he already knew Wes wasn’t gonna call him on it.

  Lord only knew what Dennis had told him. Maybe nothing, maybe it’d all been assumptions on Farmer’s part. Thought he was hitting Dennis, Wes supposed, treating him bad. Black River had its share of wife- and child-beaters, most of whom were repentant come morning. Not everyone could leave it at the gate, and some of those who took it home didn’t know what to do with it when they got there. (Lane’s wives left him for good reason.) Wes, though, had never lost control. Not ever. Not even in those first weeks back at work after the riot, when every other CO in the prison, Farmer included, would’ve looked the other way if Wes had decided to take out his frustrations on the inmates now and then. Folks almost expected it of him, as though he was beholden to some kind of equation that stated being hurt meant he was gonna turn right around and hurt someone else. But Wes, though he’d had plenty of anger, plenty of rage, had never laid a hand on anyone, Dennis included. Not till years later, till that last night with the gun. But there was a reason Wes didn’t challenge Farmer that night in the barn, though it was the first time Wes recognized one of Farmer’s lies, the first time he saw how easily they came to him. The anger that had been kindled in Wes with the riot hadn’t begun to lessen with time the way he had first thought it would. It lived in him like a chronic disease, like a cancer, multiplying, growing, coursing through every part of him. Better, maybe, that Dennis was out of reach just then.

  “That was a long time ago,” Farmer said now. There was a caution in his tone Wes wasn’t used to. Sounded borrowed.

  “You asked what I was thinking,” Wes said. Took another swallow of the beer. “Don’t mean that’s what we got to talk about.”

  So he and Farmer spoke about safe things while the meat grilled, unimportant things. The new housing development, the new pastor, the new stores. All the things that had changed that didn’t matter. They went inside the kitchen to eat, and Wes saw that this, at least, had stayed the same; Farmer had kept his house just as it was when Madeline was alive. There were lace valances over the windows, a yellow-checkered cloth on the table, and a cross-stitched Bible verse—one of the gentle ones—in a frame over the sink. Madeline had liked cats, Wes remembered, and Farmer kept one now, a small calico. It crouched primly on a windowsill and watched them through copper-colored eyes. How did Farmer do this, coexist with his wife’s memory day after day? Wes thought about his own house, back in Spokane. Doors locked, blinds drawn, drafts stilled. It had been just two weeks, but he imagined the house as if it had been left untouched for years. A veil of dust over everything, the color leached from the furnishings, stale air suited only to ghosts.

  A banjo case stood propped in the corner of the room, half hidden behind Farmer’s guitar. Wes nodded to it. “That Lane’s Gibson?”

  Farmer looked, like it might’ve appeared since he last glanced that direction. “Yeah.”

  “You ever play it?”

  He shook his head. “You know I can’t get a decent roll going. The fingerpicks trip me up.” He sliced a strip of meat from his steak. A sharp movement. “I keep thinking I ought to find some young up-and-comer to give it to. Too good an instrument to be gathering dust in a corner.”

  “But?”

  “But it’s twenty years on and I still ain’t done it.”

  Wes wondered if Farmer, like himself, found he could no longer think of Lane without thinking of the way he’d died. Seemed an unfair thing: so many memories of good times, of music and county fairs and the worst dives and long applause, of practices in Wes’s living room or Lane’s garage or on Farmer’s porch, of drinks and laughter shared, and all of it, all of it, superseded by imagined images of a crushed skull and glassy eyes.

  The sudden silence lingered uneasily, and then Farmer cleared his throat. “I been meaning to talk to you about this hearing, Wesley.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t.” Wes concentrated on holding his fork. Damn thing like that took concentration now.

  “I’m not saying you should go and I’m not saying you shouldn’t, but there are some things you ought to give some thought to beforehand.”

  Wes picked up the knife with his right hand. It had a narrow molded plastic handle, and Wes couldn’t force his fingers to close on it with any degree of workable pressure. “I guarantee you I spent plenty of time thinking about Bobby Williams already,” he said. “We really gotta let him spoil dinner, too?”

  “Ain’t exactly my favorite topic of conversation either, but—”

  “I don’t want to hear the ‘but,’ Farmer. I got no interest in talking about this with you or anyone else.” Wes heard his voice rising before he could check it, but Farmer didn’t flinch.

  “I’m not aiming to be rude, Wesley, I’m really not. I just want you to go into this with your eyes open.”

  The knife slipped from Wes’s grip and clattered onto his plate. Farmer glanced down and saw Wes’s untouched steak.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Farmer muttered. “I’m so sorry, Wesley. I didn’t think.”

  “It’s fine,” Wes said quickly, loudly, over Farmer. “Fine. The arthritis is all. These hands, they’re no good for anything anymore.”

  “I should’ve thought.”

  “No, it’s fine,” Wes said again. He tried to force a smile, but felt it twist into a grimace on his flushed face. “Can’t do the simplest things sometimes.”

  “Here, let me.” Farmer reached awkwardly across the table, averting his eyes, and Wes stared at the little calico while the other man cut his meat for him.

  The threat of a baton above his head. Blood already in his hair.

  “Take off your shirt.”

  The buttons at the cuffs first, then the buttons down the front. Ten altogether.

  “Unlace your boots.”

  His broken ribs grated when he leaned over, but he held the pain behind his teeth. Unknotted the laces, slid them from their hooks and eyelets two at a time.

  “Tie your ankles to the chair. Tight. Do it right.”

  The last easy things he ever did with his hands.

  He had a morning routine of sorts now. Coffee at the house, then the short drive to the near end of town. He’d park the truck, buy a second cup of coffee at the kiosk in the Jameson’s parking lot and walk the length of Main Street to the IGA, where he’d buy cigarett
es or beer to replace those Dennis had shared with him, or if those things didn’t need buying, a copy of the Elk Fork Herald, or if he didn’t want to face the headlines, a single random item from the shelves, the price of entrance, justification for walking the aisles. A waste of time and money both, he knew that. But it was fair exchange for an hour in which he could pretend not to think about Dennis or Claire or Williams.

  “Hey!”

  Wes turned to see Scott marching across the parking lot toward him. The young woman in the espresso kiosk pushed his coffee across the counter along with his change, which Wes deposited in the jar with Tips scrawled across it. She didn’t thank him.

  “Hey!” Scott called again.

  “What, you forget my name?”

  “You told me you were a musician,” Scott said, stopping short a little too close to Wes, as though he’d gotten so near without meaning to. “You said you could teach me to play the fiddle.”

  “I was, and I can.” Wes took a sip of his coffee. It was a little burnt. “Ain’t you supposed to be in school?”

  “You lied to me.”

  “I did no such thing.”

  Scott’s eyes were all pupil, like he was drugged on his anger. Lines had etched themselves into the skin of his forehead, all the starker for his youth. “You weren’t a musician. You were a fucking CO.”

  Wes stepped right into the kid. “Quit staring at my shoes. If you’re gonna swear at me, you’ll look me in the eye while you do it.”

  Scott took a half step back, caught himself—he was quick, like Dennis had always been—and met Wes’s eyes. One hand went to the earbuds dangling from his sweatshirt collar, and he twined the cords around his fingers until they doubled and twisted. “Maybe you played on the side or whatever, but you worked at that freaking prison just like every other asshole in this town.”

  “Listen good, Scott.” In the street, a gust snapped the Harvest banner hard against its restraints. “Being a CO? That was to feed my wife and my stepson and keep a roof over their heads. Because that’s what a good man does; he provides for his family.” Wes lowered his voice, pitch and volume both. “Though I guess you might not know that.”

  “Shut up about my dad. You don’t know shit about my dad.”

  “I know he’s locked up, and I don’t need to know more. Ain’t your fault, but it is what it is.”

  The kid was getting ready to punch him, or bolt. Hard to say which. “You’re still a liar.”

  “You grow up in this town, you go to work at the prison. That’s how it works.” Wes had forgotten to get one of those cardboard sleeves for the cup, and the coffee burned his fingers through the paper. “But God’s honest truth, Scott: when I think about what I used to do when I was a younger man, music’s what comes to mind.”

  Scott was shaking his head over and over, each movement sharp and automatic. “Nope,” he said. “No. No way.” He leaned into Wes, tried to get him up against the wall, but Wes didn’t move and Scott backed off with a snarl. “You COs all think you own this shithole of a town, and you think you’re like God or something, just because you have an ugly uniform and you put people in prison.”

  “People put themselves in prison,” Wes said automatically, and Scott’s face collapsed into a grotesque grimace.

  “You liked it and you know it,” he said.

  Wes sighed, took another long sip of coffee. He held the liquid on his front teeth until the heat shocked the nerves and only then did he swallow, pressing his tongue against the lingering pain. “You ever been in there?” he asked finally, gesturing with his cup to the old prison across the street.

  Scott looked, shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat. “No. We were supposed to go one time on a field trip, but I skipped.” Found Wes’s eyes again. “Nobody cared.”

  “Come on, then. I got something to show you.” He started across the street. Didn’t hear footsteps behind him until he was halfway across.

  They’d turned the old prison into a museum a few years after Wes and Claire moved to Spokane. Pulled a few tourists off the interstate during the summer months with tacky billboards featuring a cartoon ball and chain. There were a few rooms of exhibits and educational materials, but the real draw was the opportunity to tour the old prison itself, to walk through the narrow, damp corridors and duck into one of the tiny, close cells, to touch stone and brick and imagine who else had done the same years ago. Wes had never been inside the museum, but Claire had, on one of her visits to Black River, and it was because of her he knew what he was looking for.

  There was an older woman behind the desk in the lobby, someone who looked vaguely familiar to Wes, like she might have been the wife of someone he’d known a little, once, but he passed her with just a terse nod. He bypassed the entrance to the prison itself and instead turned right and walked briskly through the first exhibit rooms. Kept his eyes ahead, but in his peripheral vision Wes saw the glass-fronted displays of shanks confiscated from inmates—makeshift knives fashioned from toothbrushes and spoons and broken broom handles, or cobbled together with disposable razor blades and lengths of thread unraveled from clothing or bedding—and the neat panels on the walls that explained the history of the old prison and of law and order in Montana as though it was all a neat, purposeful progression to some sort of idealized present.

  Scott almost ran into him when Wes got to the last room and stopped. Credit the kid a little for following him. “So what’s the deal?”

  Wes stepped to one of the panels, a smooth sheet of plastic mounted at an angle to the wall, like a drafting table. The title was neat and ordered and printed in black, black ink: THE 1992 PRISON DISTURBANCE. Disturbance. Always liked that. Like calling a war an action or an operation; everyone knew it was a war but understood that the politicians didn’t want to call it one. ’Ninety-two had been a riot—and if you asked anyone in town about it, that’s what they’d call it—but disturbance must’ve sounded better to someone with a desk and a brass nameplate.

  Wes scanned the panel, the plastic cool beneath his fingertips, and tapped the line when he found it: . . . two officers were killed and a third was held hostage for thirty-nine hours before . . .

  “I’m the third officer,” he told Scott. “You want the gory details, I’m sure they’re on the Internet somewhere.”

  Scott looked down at the panel, back up at Wes. “I didn’t—”

  “I’ll be at the house Saturday if you still want those lessons. Put new strings on the fiddle for you.” Wes left the kid there alone. He dropped a ten at the front desk for the woman to fold into her donation box, and then he pushed back out onto the street and into the cold.

  When Wes got back to the house he heard hammering. Rhythmic, bright, almost tuneful. He’d intended to make an entrance. Stride in, back Dennis up against a wall, demand to know what the hell he was thinking, telling Scott he’d been a CO, knowing full well how the kid would react. But something about the hammering stopped him, and he stood there beside his truck, listening to the melody of metal on metal.

  After a couple minutes he followed the sound to the workshop. He scarcely recognized it. It’d been transformed into something purely functional, industrial, with none of the charm or comfortable snugness of his father’s shop. Maybe there was a wash of nostalgia over his memory of the place, but he wouldn’t have guessed metal was so very different from wood. Dennis, back to the door, stood over his anvil, right leg thrust forward, left leg back. Wes could see him brace himself before each strike of the hammer. He worked quickly, but unhurriedly. Gray-white flakes of metal scattered across the concrete floor below the anvil, marrying with spirals of wet, trailing water droplets. Behind Dennis, the coal forge rumbled and glowed, the light ever changing, and Wes could feel its heat even from where he stood in the wide doorway.

  Dennis wore safety glasses with earplugs at the ends. The hammering didn’t seem loud to Wes, but hour after hour, day after day, perhaps it took its toll. He himself didn’t hear as well out of his left ea
r as his right, his fiddle having stolen, over the years, a shade of the very sense it loved best. Abruptly, Dennis stopped hammering and dipped the horseshoe into the bucket at his feet; the water boiled and hissed. He spoke without turning. “Why are you still here, Wes?”

  “Watching you is all.”

  Dennis stepped sideways, used his tongs to pull an orange-glowing length of straight metal from the forge. “In Black River. I meant why are you still in Black River.”

  “You want me to get a motel, all you got to do is say so.”

  “Jesus, Wes, I don’t want you to get a motel. I want you to go home.” He began hammering again, and spoke between strikes: a few words, strike, a few words, strike. “We took care of Mom’s ashes, and that’s good. You went to Harvest for old times’ sake or whatever, and I guess that’s good, too. But I don’t understand why you haven’t gone back to Spokane.” Dennis’s posture seemed suddenly fatigued, and each ring of his hammer sounded a bit louder and duller than the one before. He glanced up only once, a stolen look while he wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his wrist, quick enough to deny. He repositioned himself, shifted his feet and squared his shoulders; when the hammering started back up, it was again the familiar sharp ring.

  Wes crossed to the workbench on the other side of the anvil, where he could see Dennis’s face. Hotter still here, the heat just about scraping skin. He ought to tell Dennis about the hearing. But the more people he told, the more real it became. The harder it would be to back out.

  “Tell me this,” Dennis said at last. “What possessed you to offer Scott fiddle lessons?”

  “He expressed an interest.”

  “Don’t give me that shit, Wes.”

  The shoe was already half formed, curving gently around the horn of the anvil. Incredible, this something from nothing. This gift of shaping, creating. He wondered if Dennis appreciated it for what it was. “He’s got talent.”