Black River

by S. M. Hulse

  “I don’t understand,” Dennis said after a while.

  “I ain’t gonna be able to explain it so you do.”

  He ought to go run some cold water over his arm. The pain was still bright, the way it stayed with burns. But Williams hadn’t exactly given him ointment and Band-Aids, and he’d healed okay back then.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t go to this hearing.” It was as hesitant a tone as Wes had ever heard Dennis take. He knew he was treading into territory that was none of his business.

  “Got to. No one else is gonna be there. I don’t go, you can bet Williams walks.”

  “So let him walk!” There was the arrogance Wes was used to. Something under it, though, something almost desperate. Wes glanced sideways, expecting to see Dennis’s eyes on his scars, but his stepson was looking at him, waiting to meet his gaze. “Maybe they’ll parole him and maybe they won’t, Wes, but so what if they do? Let the bastard go back to East Jesus wherever. Let him live his miserable little life and die, and don’t give him another thought.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand enough,” Dennis insisted. He touched Wes’s wrist, thought better of it and pulled his hand away, the touch of his fingers so brief it was almost imagined. “I remember Mom taking me to visit you in the hospital, right after. You gave me the strangest look. Like you’d never expected to lay eyes on me again.”

  Across the yard, Rio stepped gingerly into the barest wash of light that reached the pasture, sidled up to the hot wire and raised his head over it. Drawn by the sound of voices, Wes supposed. His white eye glinted across the distance.

  It’d be easier if night never lifted. If all Wes had to do was sit on this porch and watch the darkness while the world slept. He’d have liked that, liked to ignore the business of life, the troubles that demanded attention, action, during daylight hours. Here, now, the burn of cold on his bare arms had almost equaled the round point of pain above his elbow. Here, now, he could speak almost freely with the stepson he seemed unable to coexist with at any other time. Here, now, he could pretend that there was only this porch, this yard, these animals, the invisible river and road, the world the limit of his senses. No prison. No parole.

  Long minutes of quiet. Dennis shifted beside him, and Wes heard the click of his teeth as he opened his mouth, shut it again. At last his stepson risked another touch, awkward, his hand hesitating, hovering just above Wes’s shoulder, so close Wes could feel the warmth of Dennis’s palm even before it finally settled.

  He slept afterward, and woke late. It was darker than he expected in the bedroom, and a glance through the slats of the blinds confirmed that the sun had already passed its peak and crossed to the western half of the sky. Whole morning wasted. Wes couldn’t bring himself to be sorry about it. First time he’d rested like that in days. Before dressing he passed his thumb over the fresh burn above his elbow. Still sharp. Soon it’d fade to a lesser hurt, reduced to something milder than the bone ache he lived with every day. Gone entirely, given enough time. He wondered if that’d happen before the hearing.

  Wes skipped the coffee—didn’t seem right to drink it when it was already afternoon—and settled for dry toast and the pulpy dregs of a carton of orange juice. He ate in the kitchen and listened to the metallic tapping he’d come to recognize as hammer and anvil. It was early for Dennis to be home, and Wes guessed he’d canceled appointments, found excuses to linger near the house.

  He went out to the porch, leaned over the railing. Dennis had parked his truck near the hitching rack; the canopy was up, the small gas forge blowing. The anvil stood on its stand a couple feet away, the hammer resting—for the moment—beside it. Rio was tied to the hitching rack, ears flicked backward, posture stiff, and Dennis was bent almost double near one of his hind hooves. It wasn’t the way Wes had seen him work on horses before, the animal’s leg propped over his own. Instead, Rio’s hoof rested with the toe grazing the ground, and Dennis worked his knife from there. As Wes watched, Dennis stifled a grunt and slid down to one knee. Rio shifted, putting his weight back onto the hoof Dennis was trying to work on. Dennis stayed on the ground but straightened, pressed his palm to the small of his back.

  “One more time,” he said a few seconds later, cupping his hand beneath Rio’s fetlock. The horse pivoted his hoof back onto the toe, and Dennis hunched over again, his knife switched out for a rasp. Got only a few seconds’ work in before Rio put his foot back down.

  “That don’t look very comfortable,” Wes called.

  Dennis stood, tried not to show how much it strained him. “Yeah, well,” he said, “working like this is a little harder on me and a lot easier on him.” He crossed to the anvil but didn’t pick up the hammer.

  Wes stepped off the porch, walked cautiously across the gravel. Dennis was watching him, but Wes went to the horse instead, stopped on the other side of the hitching rack and brushed the back of his hand down the side of Rio’s neck. “How long it take you to do his shoes?”

  Dennis shrugged. “Couple hours, give or take.”

  “And that red horse,” Wes said. “How long it take you to do him?”

  “Hour.” The word came out sideways, like it hoped not to be noticed.

  “Less?” Wes asked.

  Dennis looked away. “Sometimes.”

  Wes patted Rio one more time. Dennis was firmer with him, Wes knew, his pats more like slaps, but Wes couldn’t help but feel there was something fragile about this black horse, something that made him want to touch him only gingerly. “You’re patient with him.”

  “Ain’t his fault he hurts.”

  Wes turned to look at Dennis. “How long till he hurts enough it don’t matter how patient you are?”

  Dennis’s mouth tightened. So hard, Wes thought, to see his mother in him. In almost every way he looked nothing like her. Different hair, different skin, different eyes. The lines of his body hard and angular where Claire’s had been soft. But the slight wariness Wes saw in him now, the fine veil of caution over his features . . . that he shared with his mother. “Not long,” he said finally. “But not now.”

  It didn’t look like anyone was home when Wes pulled up to the trailer Scott shared with his mother—blinds drawn, no light showing in the gaps—but Scott’s hatchback was parked out front, and Wes had cruised Main Street from end to end twice, scanning the crowds of kids just out from school, with no sighting of Scott’s familiar slouch. (And he needed to find the kid—any thoughts of Scott’s hurt on finding out about his father’s revoked release had, like Claire’s memory, succumbed to his panic at the donation clinic yesterday, just one more thing he’d had no time to notice among thoughts of the hearing and the riot and Williams.) The frost had lingered here in the deep shade of the mountains, and the patchy lawn outside the trailer sank stiffly beneath Wes’s feet. He rapped twice on the door, waited. Heard footsteps approach. He looked right at the peephole, but said nothing. Wasn’t gonna beg the kid to open up.

  Scott opened the door but left the screen shut. He hadn’t made his hair stick up the way it usually did, and it fell in a soft spray across his forehead. He looked hard at Wes, but didn’t seem able to muster the energy needed for the glare Wes guessed he was trying for. “What do you want?”

  “You skip school today?”

  Scott snorted. “Are you a truant officer now or something? Would that be a step up from prison guard, or a step down?”

  “I was looking for you in town is all. Didn’t see you.” Wes took a step toward the screen door, and Scott closed his hand over the inside handle.

  “Yeah, well,” he said. “That’s ’cause I was here. Being delinquent.”

  Wes sighed. “Let’s start over, all right? I didn’t come to fight.”

  “What the hell did you come for?”

  “I want to teach you that song. The one you like. The one I wrote.”

  It shut the kid up, anyway. He blinked a couple times, took his hand off the door handle. “You said I wasn’t ready.�
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  “You’re not. I ain’t gonna teach you the whole thing yet. And you gotta promise not to try to play more than I teach you, got that?” He waited for Scott to offer the barest hint of a nod. “All right, then. Go get that fiddle.”

  “Don’t you want to come in?”

  Wes shook his head. “Bring it out here.”

  Scott looked like he thought Wes was nuts, but he disappeared down the hall. Wes stepped back onto the crisp grass. Breathed deeply of the sharpening air, scanned the overlapping swells of the mountains. Maybe he was nuts. Maybe what he could offer Scott wasn’t enough, maybe it was pathetic next to the darker elements of the kid’s life. But the music had always been there for him. It had always called him back to himself. Every afternoon, walking out that gate feeling like everything good in him had been drained away, or wound up tight inside, too deep to reach. During the darkest days of his own adolescence, after his father’s suicide. Music had been his saving grace: that fiddle, perfect and polished, waiting in the workshop, waiting on the mantel. Could be the fiddle and its music held that sort of power only for Wes. But maybe he could share a little of it.

  Scott kicked the screen door open and came into the yard, fiddle in one hand, bow in the other. There were two lawn chairs set up around the side of the trailer, and Wes nodded to them. “Ready to do this?”

  Scott started toward the chairs, stopped. He turned halfway, so Wes saw his profile. “Did you already hear about my dad?”

  Wes put his hands in his pockets, took one small step toward Scott, almost sideways, the way he might approach a skittish animal. “Your momma told me.”

  “You know they might add like a whole year to his sentence?”

  “I’m sorry,” Wes said, and it was only half a lie. He wasn’t sorry Connor Bannon’s release was being revoked, not if he’d hurt an officer. But Wes knew it’d be hard on Scott, and he was sorry for that. The boy already rode pretty close to desperation.

  “I can’t stay here another year. I cannot.” Scott looked away, at the mountains that loomed high over his home, and Wes tried to remember what it was to feel that a single year was so very long. “I told my mom I wanted to leave anyway. Go back to Miles City.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She says I can’t go on my own. That I’m too young.”

  “I know it ain’t what you want to hear, but she’s probably not wrong.”

  “Dennis was on his own when he was my age,” Scott said, and it sounded like an accusation.

  “Dennis got a good chunk of my pension in the mail every month,” Wes said. “He didn’t have to pay rent on no apartment, either. And it was still hard on him. Dropped out of school in the end.”

  Wes expected Scott to argue, but he didn’t. “I told my mom that if I can’t go back alone, we should go together. She doesn’t like it here, either.”

  “And?”

  “She won’t do it.” Scott was clenching the neck of the fiddle so hard Wes wanted to reach out and take it from him, but he forced himself still. “She thinks my dad needs us here.” Scott laughed bitterly, and the sound was choked off as if he were crying, though what Wes could see of his face was dry. “He needs us. What bull. He doesn’t care. If he cared, he wouldn’t have gotten in a fight a month before his fucking release. If he cared, he’d think about what it might be like for me to spend every single day with kids who think they can shit all over me because their dads guard my dad.” He spun on his heel, stared right at Wes—there was that glare—and swung the bow toward him like a weapon. “Hell, if he actually gave a rat’s ass about me, he wouldn’t have gotten arrested in the first place, would he? Would he?”

  Wes felt reflexive anger trying to rise, but he forced it down, kept his hands in his pockets, his gaze level. Carved the edges off his voice so it was steady and low. “What do you want me to say, Scott? You want me to tell you life always works the way it ought to? That hard things never happen to folks who don’t deserve them? That fathers always look after their sons the way they should?” He honed his voice, let it come a bit sharper. “I will, if you want. I can lie with the best of ’em. But you’d know it ain’t true. And I can’t fix that stuff. Wish I could, but I can’t. What I can do is teach you the tune that fiddle knows best. It ain’t much, I know that, but it’s all I got.”

  Scott stayed quiet for a minute, but his white-knuckled grip on the fiddle loosened a little. A train whistle sounded through the canyon, fading even as it reached Wes’s ears. A name for that sound. High lonesome. “I want to learn it,” Scott said finally.

  Wes nodded. “Good.”

  “We can go inside,” Scott said, jerking his thumb toward the trailer. “My mom won’t care.”

  “You ever tried playing that out here?” Wes asked, lifting his chin toward the fiddle.

  “No.”

  Wes turned a slow circle on one heel, gave himself a panorama of the risen earth, the abbreviated sky. “I kinda hate these mountains,” he said. “Make me claustrophobic, I guess. Feels like there ain’t no way out.” He stopped, facing Scott, saw that the kid felt it, too. “But that fiddle don’t sound half so good outside this canyon.”

  “Because of the acoustics or whatever?” Scott sounded doubtful.

  “Could be,” Wes said. “Could be something else. All I know is I’ve played all over Montana, indoors and out, and it sings best here.” He stopped, suddenly embarrassed. Sometimes his yearning for his lost music came out this way, without his intending to share it. Mostly it used to happen only in front of Claire, who always understood and never judged. But Scott didn’t seem to share his embarrassment, appeared to take his words at face value.

  “Okay,” he said, “but I’m freezing my ass off. If we’re gonna play out here, I have to go get a sweatshirt.”

  Wes took the fiddle and bow from him, and Scott disappeared around the front of the trailer. Wes walked to the lawn chairs, settled himself into one. It sank and creaked beneath his weight. He held the fiddle upright on his knee, the way he used to during breaks in practice, let the bow lie across his thighs. It was so tempting to put it beneath his chin, to bring bow to string. It was tuned now; he could draw open-string notes from it, maybe even one or two stopped notes before his fingers gave up. Might be able to coax the first couple notes of “Black River” out of it. Might be able to pretend for a few seconds he could still do what he’d always loved best. But Wes kept the fiddle where it was, waited for the eager readiness to dissipate from his hands and body.

  The kid must’ve been trying on half his wardrobe. How long could it take to pick one black sweatshirt from half a dozen others? Wes tried not to feel the fiddle beneath his fingers. He listened to the train rumble past. He could see it through the trees lining the road: dulled blocks of color flashing by steadily, one after another. Wes found his foot tapping to the rhythm of metal grinding over metal. Lots of songs about trains.

  Scott came half jogging back from the trailer. “Sorry,” he said, tugging the sweatshirt over his head. “I guess my mom washed it, and I couldn’t find it.” He held out his hands, and Wes wasn’t sure whether he was glad or sorry to hand the fiddle over.

  “You know this tune pretty good?”

  “Pretty good, yeah.” A little color in his cheeks. Been listening to it a lot, then. Wes felt a hint of that same prideful pleasure he used to feel when people below a stage called for the tune by name.

  “All right,” he said. “Today I just want to go through the first melody line, okay? Just like this.” He sang the first part of the tune softly, wordlessly, the first gentle rise and fall of notes. “Key of G. Start on open D.”

  Scott was eager—and he wasn’t fibbing; he knew every note—but he attacked “Black River” the way he did the old-time dance tunes Wes had been teaching him, all rhythm and no elasticity. It was a beginner’s way of playing—a talented beginner, yes, but still a novice—and Wes wondered if this had been a mistake, if it was simply too soon. The fiddle sang dutifully, and it rang nicely in th
e open air, but Wes knew it was capable of so much more than nice.

  “Gently,” he told Scott. “You want to draw the note like you’re spinning it out of thin air.” He rose from his chair and knelt beside Scott’s. Carefully he rested his right hand on the back of Scott’s, helped him guide the bow across the strings. And there they were. The first of his notes. He felt them resonate through horsehair and wood, as surely as if his hand had been the one touching the bow.

  “Whoa,” Scott said.

  Reluctantly, Wes let go, sat back in his own chair. “Again.”

  Slowly it came to him. Slowly the sound Wes remembered returned, the fiddle’s true voice filling the canyon, building and rising with the mountains, inhabiting the air. Sometimes Scott got frustrated—“Don’t you get that most folks playing as long as you are still mucking their way through ‘Oh! Susanna’?” Wes asked him at one point—but more often he got it right, or close to right. Didn’t sound quite the way it did in Wes’s head, of course. “Black River” had been, and always would be, Wes’s tune first and foremost, his almost masterpiece, the song he heard in his head every day of his life, the notes he felt waiting in his fingertips every hour of the day. But Scott was going to have his own way of playing it, and it would be worthy. They played together for almost two hours—two hours for a single melody line, not even a quarter of the whole tune—and Wes thought about stopping only when he realized the winter-white sun had already sunk below the high horizon of the mountains. He let Scott play it through once more, and he watched his face and saw the way the music transformed this boy, saw that he had been right in coming here with nothing more than a song, that it was enough for Scott as it had been enough for him. Saw that he had done something good.