Black River

by S. M. Hulse

  “I don’t believe in God,” Scott said. He turned to face the window, and the bruise on his face seemed to disappear into the light.

  Wes watched him carefully, trying to decide what it was about the kid today that left him so uneasy. He couldn’t help but feel he was missing something important, not hearing it, not seeing it. The harder he looked, the more elusive it became. “You all right, Scott?” he ventured.

  The kid didn’t look at him. “They’re letting my dad out next month,” he said. “We’re going to go back to Miles City.”

  “That a good thing?”

  “Are you shitting me?” A quick sideways glance. “Sorry. But yeah, it’s good.” He brushed a hand through his hair; Wes could see the red roots. “I can’t stay here anymore. I can’t. God. You have no idea.”

  He fell silent. Wes glanced out the window. The mountains filled the pane, nothing but sharp pine and risen earth. Sometimes he just wanted them gone. Wanted to set his eyes on horizon. I can’t stay here anymore.

  “That eye healing up okay?”

  “It’s all right,” Scott said. Something in his tone. Wariness, or anger. Too subtle to say which.

  “I just wondered,” Wes said. “Because it’s lasted a good few days and I couldn’t help notice you never said nothing about it.” He thought to look at Scott’s knuckles; they were smooth and unbroken.

  The kid leaned over the arm of the couch and twisted the knob on a radio; he spoke as soon as the sound filled the room. “You remember that time you gave me a ride from Elk Fork?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It wasn’t the starter. That’s what I told you, right? The starter?”

  “Think so.”

  “What really happened was these guys at school poured bleach in my oil tank,” Scott said. No inflection. “That totally wrecks the engine, you know that?”

  Wes licked his lips. “I’d guess it would.”

  “Yeah,” Scott said, still in that dead monotone. “I got about as far as Milltown and then my car started smoking like crazy and I pulled over and it wouldn’t start up again. I mean, I thought it just up and died, but I had it towed to Elk Fork and the mechanic figured it out.”

  “You tell anyone about this?” Wes asked.

  “Well, I had to tell my mom,” Scott said. “She kind of wanted to know why my car was ruined all of a sudden, you know?” He went silent for a minute. “I didn’t tell Dennis, though, because he’d freak.”

  “I meant the police,” Wes said. “You tell the police?”

  Scott shook his head.

  “That’s a crime, what those boys did. Ought to be reported.”

  The kid smirked a little, let his eyes go unkind for a moment. “I don’t get how a guy like you can be so fucking naïve,” he said. “It must take a lot of work.”

  You have no idea.

  Wes knew he’d been standing in the IGA aisle too long. Someone would notice soon, if they hadn’t already, and he’d have to try to explain, and he doubted he’d be able to get a single word out with his throat this tight. It was dish soap that’d tripped him up. Dennis was almost out, had asked Wes to pick some up next time he went to buy cigarettes. And here Wes stood, four shelves of jewel-bright bottles in front of him, and he couldn’t remember which one Claire would buy. Thirty years she’d used the same kind, he knew that. Thirty years it’d sat beside the kitchen sink, thirty years he’d looked at it, and now he couldn’t remember the brand. He’d thought it was the purple kind, the kind with Lilac Fresh! emblazoned across the front of the label, but it didn’t smell right when he took the cap off. None of them smelled right. Each time something caught his eye—the picture of a lemon in the corner of one label, the tinted orange plastic of a bottle—he felt certain he’d remembered, but when he took the caps off, none smelled like his wife’s kitchen.

  He knew he’d lose things with time, that this was how a person kept from going mad with grief. Already immediacy had begun to fade from his memories of Claire; already he found that when he tried to focus on certain details, they slipped to one side or blurred into uncertainty. But this, the dish soap, this inconsequential thing, this was the first memory to vanish entirely, beyond the grasp of conscious recall. It didn’t matter—Dennis wouldn’t care; Claire had probably chosen the brand for frugality’s sake, nothing more—but it shattered him.

  “Wes? Wes Carver?”

  Wes turned to see a man standing beside him in the aisle. He was maybe ten years younger than Wes, carried a basket filled with frozen pizzas and beef jerky. Wes swallowed hard, took a deep breath to clear his lungs of the disappointing fragrances. “I know you?”

  “Clancy Johnson,” he said. “I worked the overnight with you years back, when you were on Two South.”

  “Oh.” Wes could see that he was a CO now—the way he stood with his feet a little farther apart than most people would, the suspicious glint behind the otherwise friendly gaze—but he couldn’t claim he remembered the guy. He’d worked Two South just after the riot, and those days, getting through his shift, even on a quiet night, took about all he had.

  “Good to see you again,” Johnson said. He tugged on his sleeve. “I heard you’re gonna speak at Williams’s hearing.”

  “Looks like.”

  The other man slammed his palm against the shelf, and a single bottle of dish soap fell to the floor. Wes glanced at it in case it was the one he’d been searching for, but no, Claire hadn’t liked strawberry. “Man,” Johnson said, “can you believe this born-again bullshit?”

  “Born-again.”

  “As if a cocksucker like Williams could ever find Jesus. Christ,” he added, with no sense of irony.

  “Not sure I heard about that,” Wes said. He felt the dull tightness of grief in his gut morphing into something sharper, queasier.

  “Oh, yeah. Williams’s been claiming he’s seen the light, turned into a good repentant Christian. Never reads nothing but the Good Book, prays with the chaplain, the whole nine yards. They’ve even got him leading some Bible study group twice a week.”

  An odd fact: the COs weren’t supposed to know what the inmates had done to get locked up. Or at least they weren’t told. Public record, of course—an officer could look it up if he cared to—but it wasn’t really necessary. Half of them bragged; the rest an officer could guess, or heard about through gossip. Williams, he’d bragged. Late one night he’d broken into a farmhouse belonging to an elderly couple. Bound husband and wife with duct tape, then spent hours terrorizing them before stealing all the cash and jewelry in the house. The husband came out of it with what the police report Wes later tracked down called “numerous contusions and lacerations.” The wife suffered a stroke that the coroner testified might not have killed her had she received immediate medical treatment. (“Had a real good time that night,” Williams had whispered in Wes’s ear.)

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Johnson said now. “Only people dumb enough to fall for that reformed-sinner bull are inmates’ girlfriends and—”

  “Parole boards,” Wes finished.

  PART III

  BURN

  Claire has never seen Arthur Farmer in his uniform before. He is one of the few officers who change into street clothes before leaving the prison, so when she opens the door at two in the afternoon and sees him there on her porch in his crisp blue shirt and slacks, brass bits gleaming, she knows. Wesley.

  An incident, Arthur calls it. Stumbles over the word. It is so obviously not his own, a parroting of something the administration has said, bureaucratic euphemism. When he finishes speaking, Claire steps toward him and he opens his arms to her and she raises her hand and slaps him hard across the face. She feels it all the way up in her shoulder. Arthur takes it—a blink, nothing else—and his calm makes her want to hit him again, but she crosses her arms over her chest and steps back when he reaches for her.

  When? she asks.

  Not quite an hour ago, he tells her. I came as soon as I could.

  Not quite an
hour. Is that fifty-nine minutes? Forty-five? Thirty-one? So much could have happened in not quite an hour. Wesley could already be dead. Jaw slack, eyes glassy. Or they could be hurting him. Landing blows on his body, slicing skin and what lay beneath. Worse. Claire forces herself to imagine every possibility, every potential pain and terror. She wants no more surprises. Wants nothing else to shock her the way this has. She must start to look crazed, because Arthur risks reaching for her again, and this time she lets him steer her to the couch.

  Maddie’s gone to pick up Dennis at school, he says. I’ll stay with you until she gets here, and then I’m going back to the prison. I’ll stay until I can bring him home to you.

  Vague phrasing. Bring him home. Claire is sure it’s intentional. Care on Arthur’s part not to make a hollow promise.

  At that moment, Wesley is already in the chair in the control room. Ankles bound with his own bootlaces, wrists fastened behind him with his own handcuffs. Williams is slouched on the floor opposite, back against the wall. He has found Wesley’s cigarettes in the desk drawer and lets one dangle, unlit, from his lips.

  Mac Dalloway comes by in the evening. Stands just inside the door and looks somewhere over Claire’s head while he asks if there’s anything he can do. He works the ground-floor tier, two levels below Wesley. One level below Lane. He is here because he feels guilty, because it could so easily have been him. Like Arthur, he is still in his uniform. It’s as though the men are reluctant to leave the prison behind while their brothers remain inside, so they carry it with them on their backs. Before Mac leaves, he tells her about the candles. People are putting them in their windows, he says. All over Black River. Three. One for Bill, one for Lane. One for Wesley.

  It’s a nice idea, Madeline says when he has gone.

  There are tea lights in the cupboard over the stove, Claire tells her.

  Except there aren’t. There are matches, the box still wrapped in cellophane; it crinkles when she folds her fingers over it. But no candles.

  Maybe in the linen closet? Madeline asks.

  No. Candlesticks, in the back, not real silver but chrome, flaking at the base. Claire throws them back inside and they clank against each other.

  Now it isn’t such a nice idea, these three candles in the window. Now it’s a necessity. She is negligent for not having lit them before, even if she didn’t know. She should have thought of the idea herself. Every minute that passes with her windowsill unburdened by flame is a minute that might somehow, through some ugly magic or mysticism, hurt her husband. Madeline comes up behind her and puts her hands on Claire’s shoulders; Claire shrugs her off. Already she’s sick of being comforted. Claire doesn’t want comfort. She wants Wesley, and barring that, she wants hysteria. She wants to embrace it, succumb to it, fling herself into it headlong and let it take her.

  How can there be no candles in this entire fucking house?

  At that moment. Five hours in. Bobby Williams is putting out cigarettes on the soft underside of her husband’s forearm. Six touches of ember to flesh.

  She goes out for the candles herself. Madeline doesn’t want to let her—Claire sees it in the way she lets her pressed lips turn down on one side, a gesture she’s inherited from their mother—but Claire already has the keys to the old farm truck in her hand. Stay with Denny, she says. There is hay on the bench seat, pierced through the worn upholstery, and it presses uncomfortably against Claire’s thighs as she drives.

  She gets the candles at Jameson’s. They have already put a box at each register, blocky white votives. The girl who sells them to her is young, still a teenager. Someone’s daughter. Claire knows her but can’t think of her name. The girl watches Claire with unabashed fascination as she puts the candles in a paper bag. It will be like this all the time if Wesley doesn’t come home, Claire thinks. I will be The Widow.

  It’s okay, the girl says when Claire tries to hand her a dollar. I think Mr. Jameson would want me to give them to you.

  Claire holds the money between them for a moment, across the counter. It’s an old bill, soft and limp, a little damp between her fingers, and it flutters under their breaths. Thank you, she says finally, and puts the dollar back in her purse.

  At the frontage road, she turns right instead of left. It is only just night, and both horizons glow. West for the sun, east for the reflected blaze of lights at the prison. The first a restful sort of light, an easing into dark, the second harsher, a fighting against it. And there, at the far end of Main Street, is the prison. It is ugly enough on its own, uglier still juxtaposed against the gently ordinary buildings of her adopted hometown. The parking lots are full, police cars and media vans spilling into the space below the great gray wall. Lights everywhere, the harsh sentinel lamps rising above the wall and its towers, and below, the sharp square lights of the news crews and the frenetic, spiraling reds and blues of the emergency vehicles. Claire spots Wesley’s truck in the officers’ parking lot: a green Chevy, bought last year from Arthur Farmer for five hundred dollars. If Wesley doesn’t come home, someone—maybe Mac, probably Arthur—will drive that truck back to the house. Already Claire knows they won’t park it properly, will let the tires edge off the gravel drive, forget the emergency brake.

  Claire parks on the side of the frontage road, an empty field stretching between her and the rear wall of the grounds. She could get closer, head back up Main toward the prison gates, but then she will be amid people. They will know her, and then there will be cameras in her face and men pushing the cameras away and other men trying to comfort her. They are good people, these officers—her friends’ husbands, her husband’s friends—but they spend their days enforcing rules, suppressing emotions, intimidating and refusing to be intimidated. They won’t know what to say, and will try to say it anyway.

  She gets out of the truck, the candles rolling away from her, white wax gathering dirt and hay. There is broken glass in the grass at the side of the road, a single sagging strand of rusty barbed wire linking skewed fenceposts. She wades through the knee-deep grass, steps over this first feeble fence. Moths fly up and halo her face before disappearing into the night. Claire notices the cold for the first time this season. Her skin much cooler than the blood beneath.

  He is there. In the main cellblock, near the top; his tier is the highest. That’s all she knows. She has never been inside the prison. She doesn’t know what color the walls are, how many cells on a tier, how wide the walkways. It’s terrifying, these gaps in her knowledge. They make Wesley seem farther away, already beyond her reach. If she could create an accurate picture of him in her mind—where he is kept, how the light casts on his face—she might protect that picture, protect him. How many yards away is he? She isn’t good with distances. But not so many. Not so far. It would take mere minutes to walk to him, if only she could. But there are walls. Fences. Concertina wire. It is piled along the top of the perimeter wall, coil upon biting coil. She has always thought it an odd name, concertina. A beautiful word, musical, a word Wesley might like. Wesley.

  She wants to scream his name.

  He wouldn’t hear her. Couldn’t possibly. But she can feel her voice collecting in her chest, rising in her throat. A sound the shape of his name. Wesley. Her husband, her love, her trusted one, her idiot for staying here and working this miserable, dangerous job, and hasn’t he done it all for her, her and her son, and if he dies, it will be all because of her, won’t it, and he’s right there, goddamn it, right there, and no one can get to him. And even if she screams his name until her voice abandons her, he won’t hear.

  Claire is on her knees in the field, fistfuls of dried stalks and blades in her white-knuckled hands. She closes her eyes and grinds her teeth together and waits until the need to scream has been forced back down to wherever it lives. Until she can part her lips and hear only breath.

  While she is there in the grass, Williams carves his name into Wesley’s skin. His shank is an appalling example of inmate resourcefulness, a sharpened shard of fiberglass fr
om a mess hall tray, a strip torn from a pillowcase wrapped around one end for a handle. It is not quite as sharp as a real knife would be, and he has to press hard. The O gives him the most trouble. He goes over it more than once.

  That night, after first Dennis and then Madeline drop into sleep, Claire stays up and watches the three flames dance in the window, each reflection nearly as brilliant as its living twin. The one in the center, she has decided, is Wesley’s. It starts to smoke sometime after midnight, gasps, disgorging short bursts of swirling ethereal black. She should blow it out. Trim the wick and relight it. She should. (She doesn’t.) After another hour or so, long after the startling scent of ash has deadened into familiarity, the flame settles again, stretching steadily back toward the ceiling.

  Williams sleeps for a few hours. Wesley does not.

  How to fill the minutes. The hours. She sits on the couch. Lays a hand on the telephone. Notices the way the sunlight moves across the living room, an elongating patch of bright. She lets her sister sit beside her and tell her comforting things. She tries praying, silently, but she doesn’t know how, and she doesn’t want something Wesley believes in to feel so much like a lie, so she stops.

  Arthur calls every hour on the hour. There is nothing for him to say. (At ten-sixteen a.m., just over twenty-one hours into the riot, the inmates climb onto the catwalk and send Bill Harris’s body through the cellblock window. He is dead already, but the fall breaks his neck. Afterward people will say this is when they should have gone in—Claire will disagree; they should have gone in before Williams had a chance to torture her husband—but the warden decides negotiation is the word of the day. Arthur tells her none of this when he calls.)