Black River

by S. M. Hulse

  Enough indulgence. Enough of letting Bobby Williams drive him from sleep. Enough surrendering to the queasy memory of fear. Morning came and Wes was up with Dennis, the sun still closer to the east end of the canyon than the west. He drank his coffee, added a glass of orange juice to spike his blood sugar and got into his truck. It was just late enough he missed most of the commuters heading toward Elk Fork, and he had the interstate mostly to himself. Near Milltown a slew of police cars and ambulances flew past in the eastbound lanes, lights spiraling but sirens silent. Montana had its share of bad wrecks—the roadsides all littered with tiny white crosses—and Wes guessed they were headed to another. Even so, he drove as fast as he thought he could get away with—he missed the days when the official posted speed limit was simply “reasonable and prudent”—and cranked the radio louder than he usually liked it. Anything to keep up his resolve all the way to town.

  Lord, it made him angry. The riot was twenty years gone. It had lasted just thirty-nine hours. Thirty-nine of the worst hours of his life, yeah, but still less than two full days. Didn’t seem right that a few hours, however miserable, should still have such an effect on him so many years later. Plenty of folks had endured worse; he knew that. In some ways—not many, but some—he’d even been lucky. He’d heard rumors at the academy of what inmates sometimes did to COs during riots. Williams, twisted as he was, at least hadn’t been interested in that. And all a man had to do was read the paper—any paper, any day—to realize that there was no shortage of people doing terrible things to other people. You picked up. You moved on. Wasn’t quite that simple, maybe, but there was nothing stopping Wes from going to the hospital and asking for Molly and sitting quietly for a couple hours so he could do some good for another person.

  Except when he got to the donation center, the receptionist told him Molly wasn’t there. “She came in this morning,” she said, “but she went home sick. You just missed her.”

  Wes set his palms flat on her desk. It was moments like this that made him a little glad he had so much trouble believing in God; he didn’t like to think a higher power would toy with him this way. “She won’t be back?”

  The receptionist took a second look at him. Something came down behind her eyes, but he couldn’t tell if it was guardedness or pity. “I don’t think so, sir.” She glanced behind her, toward the donation area. “Emma could help you, though?” It came out a question, and the receptionist seemed relieved when, after several seconds, Wes nodded.

  Emma was younger than Molly, and a little skittish. Wes didn’t mind. Made him feel like he ought to take care of her, and that made it easier not to think about himself. She helped him with his buttons, and Wes rolled his sleeves himself, careful to keep the fresh burn on his right arm hidden. His scars startled Emma, and she hid it badly. Her voice jumped an octave, and her smile broadened into a rictus. Twice she dropped needles on the floor, and when she had the lines in place and asked if he’d like a magazine, Wes took pity on her and said yes, he sure would. She brought him half a dozen, Field & Stream and Popular Mechanics and People. He spent the next two hours dutifully flipping through them, reading about deer rifles and glossy cars and celebrities he’d never heard of, half afraid that Emma, in her nervous enthusiasm, might quiz him later.

  Wasn’t easy. Oh, he wanted to bolt. But he didn’t, and when Emma came back for the final time and pulled the needles and taped cotton over each elbow, he was glad he’d stayed. It wasn’t any sort of victory over Williams, not really, but it felt a little like one. The trial of it must’ve shown on his face, though, because Emma decided he looked too pale, and despite her jumpiness and his protests, she insisted that he stay another ten minutes and eat a pair of off-brand cookies.

  He left the hospital feeling almost good. Maybe after school let out, he’d track down Scott again and try to teach him the next part of “Black River.” Might be a little too soon, a little too challenging for his skill level at this point, but the kid had surprised him before.

  He was almost to Milltown when the ambulance passed him in the opposite lanes. No lights, no siren. No reason to notice. Just that he’d come from the hospital. Just that he’d seen another ambulance going the other way this morning.

  It was gonna be a pretty evening later. Cold, but in that clear, crisp autumn way that seemed like a last gift before winter hit. Maybe he should swing by the IGA before going back to the house, grill up some burgers for him and Dennis tonight.

  The police cars came from behind, when he was a few miles from Black River. The first hit its siren to alert him, an abbreviated whoop, and he slowed and pulled half into the breakdown lane. The next came a few minutes later, the third another minute after that. He’d been going almost eighty; they were going faster. Wes felt familiar tension settling back over his shoulders, tried to shrug it off. No reason to worry about a few cop cars. Wrecks all the time on the roads here. Hunting season. Folks starting up their woodstoves after the summer off. All kinds of calamity in the world; it wasn’t all coming for him. But each time one of the police cars passed and Wes slowed, he held his weaker speed when he pulled back into the travel lane.

  Slower.

  Slower.

  Slower.

  He didn’t drive through town. Didn’t continue through the canyon to see what it might show him. When he got back to the house, the wind was blowing from the east, and it brought with it the high wail of a single siren, fractured against the mountain slopes. Dennis was sitting on the porch steps, and Wes wished he didn’t have to go to him. He was still in his horseshoeing clothes: the heavy boots, the plaid flannel shirt with its tattered, turned-up cuffs. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped between them, and he looked like he was both waiting and not waiting. If Wes hadn’t known better, he’d have thought Dennis was praying.

  Dennis didn’t look up when he approached, though Wes walked slow, the way Farmer had on that first day back in Black River. His stepson’s face was still, so still. Eyes downcast but seeing something other than gravel and dirt. Wes wanted to leave. He feared this knowledge he didn’t yet have. Maybe if sharing its burden could help Dennis, if it could soften the hard, weighty mask of misery that had taken hold of his features, Wes would have been more eager to ask. Since Claire’s death, though, he often felt dangerously fragile, just a hairsbreadth from losing control.

  The siren died abruptly, the echo lingering a few seconds more before succumbing to silence. “What is it?” His voice was too loud, compensating for his dread. “Is it the prison again?”

  Dennis looked up sharply, like a hawk that had spotted prey. “The prison,” he repeated. He stood, a slow unfolding of his body. Walked toward Wes, stopped, moved a few steps left, a few steps right. “It’s not always about the fucking prison, Wes. Not every goddamned thing that happens in this town is about the fucking prison.” Both hands to his forehead, pushing back through his hair. “Or maybe it is. Maybe it is. I don’t know.”

  Wes felt his protective instincts evaporate. The pacing, the hard glint in the eyes, these things belonged to the Dennis he had known years ago, the Dennis he didn’t trust and didn’t like. “What’s happened?” he asked.

  Dennis tapped a cigarette from a nearly empty pack and cupped his hands to light it. He held the smoke in his lungs for a long time, exhaled in Wes’s direction; the wind carried it away before Wes caught the scent. “Tell me something,” Dennis said, turning his hand so he could see the tip of the cigarette. “When Williams burned you, did you scream?”

  “What did you say to me?” Wes’s voice low, the dangerous kind of low Dennis ought to have recognized.

  His stepson moved close to him, too close, his face just inches from Wes’s. “Did you scream,” he repeated, “when Williams burned you?”

  He’d clenched his jaw so tightly he’d cracked a molar. He’d pulled so fiercely against the handcuffs the metal sawed through his skin. He’d damn near passed out, his exhalations were so hard and his inhalations so shallow. But the
control room was open to the tiers, and all the inmates would have heard, and Williams would have heard, and Wes knew his own voice was the last thing—the only thing—he still controlled, so the one thing he did not do was scream.

  He shook his head, just slightly.

  “No?” Dennis raised an eyebrow, though the eye beneath stayed cold. “Five cigarettes and you didn’t scream?”

  “Six,” Wes said softly.

  “Six,” Dennis repeated, nodding to himself. “Right.” He gestured toward Wes’s left arm. A casual movement, one he had no right to. Shouldn’t even know what was under that sleeve. “And what about when he cut you?”

  It had been a different pain, easier to take in its way. Hurt more in the minutes and hours after than during, though the makeshift blade was dull enough it did plenty of damage on its way through flesh. The knife had frightened him more than the cigarettes. Williams sliced deep, and as he’d worked his way down Wes’s arm toward the wrist, all Wes had been able to think was how close his arteries and veins ran to the surface. The blood slicked his arm—some dripped off the knob of his wrist, the rest curved beneath the cuff and into the cradle of his palm before slipping between his fingers and onto the floor, with a sound that was subtly not like water. He’d been too afraid of that blade to move. Too afraid to scream.

  “No,” he said.

  Dennis’s eyes were starting to take on that wild, desperate edge Wes remembered from when he was a kid. From that night at the dinner table. “So you stayed quiet through all that,” he said. “Can’t say I’m surprised, Wes. Guess I expected nothing less.” He nodded to Wes’s hands. “What about the fingers?”

  Williams had given him time to dread. Wrapped Wes’s right pinkie in his fist, coiled and uncoiled his own fingers around it like a man getting a better grip on a golf club or a baseball bat. Bent Wes’s finger back slowly until Wes felt the warning pains shoot all the way to his elbow. So he expected—but was not prepared for—what came next: the sudden wrenching, the pop and crack of bone and cartilage and tendon, the explosion of pain. He hadn’t been able to hold it behind his teeth that time, so he channeled it into words, into the longest string of profanity he’d ever let pass his lips, all of it directed at Williams, who had hardly seemed to hear. It took him hours to break the rest of Wes’s fingers; he’d snap one or two at a time, take hold of another but then let it go, whole, twist another he’d already ruined hours before. Wes’s eyes crusted with unspilled tears, and later, when they came too fast to hold in, they streaked his face. When Williams broke his thumb, the pain so seized Wes he leaned over and retched onto the floor. He lost what little control he still had during those hours, witnessed the unwavering command he’d always held over his voice abandon him. He gasped. He swore. He begged. And yes, after Williams started in on his left hand—the hand that had always danced so easily up and down the neck of his fiddle—he screamed.

  “Well?” Dennis asked, the word almost an accusation.

  Wes reached out and grabbed Dennis’s wrist in his left hand, closed his right around his stepson’s index finger and forced it back far enough to hurt. He saw the brief flash of pain and surprise rise behind Dennis’s mask before the other man forced them off his face. It didn’t shame him. “You’d have screamed, too,” he whispered.

  Dennis snatched his hand away from Wes—he did it easily, Wes’s hands no match for Dennis’s strength—and shook out his fingers once. “I’ve got no doubt of that,” he said. “Hell, I’d have been hollering before the bastard ever touched me.” He took a step back, and suddenly Wes felt he could breathe again. Let out a shuddering lungful of air. He could still feel the ghost of Dennis’s finger in his fist, the landscape of calluses and half-healed nicks against his own skin. “I know better than to question your strength, Wes. Whatever’s between us, I ain’t ever been stupid enough to think I could stand up to half of what you’ve been through. But not all of us are you.” He was pacing again, a few steps one way, a few steps the other. Arms crossed over his chest, eyes back on the ground. “Not all of us can hold it all in the way you can, Wes. We just can’t. And you’ve never understood that. Never seen how hard it is for the rest of us, how we can only dream of that kind of self-control . . .” He was crying, Wes realized. Wet tracks through the dust on his face, a cracking voice losing the battle to conceal the sobs waiting to break through.

  “Dennis,” Wes said, as gently as he could, “tell me what happened.”

  His stepson stopped pacing. Looked up bleakly. “Scott took a gun to school.”

  Wes felt his gut contract, but he kept his features still. Better, maybe, if he hadn’t, if he instead showed Dennis what he felt, but he didn’t know how. Didn’t know how to let that stuff show, and didn’t know how to rein it in once he had. He swallowed, licked his lips. Held his voice steady. “Did he use it?”

  Dennis shook his head. Sniffed hard and cleared his throat. “He pulled it out in one of his classes,” he said. “Threatened a couple kids with it. A teacher. I don’t know what happened exactly. They’re still piecing it together.”

  Wes wished Dennis would sit, so he could sit, too. Felt a little lightheaded. “Where is he now?”

  Dennis looked at him. No expression.

  “Scott,” Wes prompted. “Is he still at the school?”

  “He left,” Dennis said. “I guess he only stayed five, ten minutes after he pulled the gun. They were looking for him everywhere. The sheriff found me out at Jim Filmore’s place. Thought Scott might be with me, or maybe came back here.” He looked around the property, as though Scott might be waiting by the workshop or leaning against the hood of the truck.

  Wes didn’t prompt Dennis again. He waited and listened to the wind blow through the heights of the pines. So quiet. Wished it could stay this quiet always.

  “I heard the whistle,” Dennis said at last. “Don’t think I’ve ever heard it so long or loud.”

  “No,” Wes said. “No. I don’t want to hear it.”

  “It was the crossing on that forestry road out past the new prison.” Dennis’s words reduced to a monotone now, the way people’s voices got when they weren’t sure they could say what needed to be said. “No one thought to look there. That road doesn’t go anywhere.”

  Wes went down on one knee, put a hand to his face. Curled it into a fist, once, twice, three times.

  “Those freight trains don’t run on a schedule,” Dennis said, as though making conversation. “They’d have looked out there eventually. On a different day they might have found him in time.”

  The tears surprised Wes. He hadn’t cried for his father. Hadn’t even cried for Claire. Come close, yeah, real close, but he’d always held it in. Only the physical pain Williams had inflicted upon him during the riot had made him spill tears, and that was reflex, nothing more. But now there were two glistening dark spots on the gravel beside his boot, and when he passed his hand over his face his fingers came away wet.

  “I think it would have been instant,” Dennis said. The words delicate on his tongue, like they might be easily damaged or torn. “Don’t you? I don’t think he felt anything.”

  Wes stood slowly. It was as though the pain and stiffness he always felt in his hands had spread throughout his body. Dennis was watching him, his arms still crossed, his shoulders hunched as though he were chilled. Those deep-set eyes Wes had never been able to trust were watching him, pleading. “Come on,” Wes said, and put his hand on Dennis’s back, between his shoulder blades. He guided him to the porch, and they sat together on the steps.

  “I don’t think he felt anything, do you?” Dennis asked again. He sounded like the child Wes barely remembered, the boy he had been back when Wes was a different man. “I think it was easy,” Dennis said. “Don’t you think so, Wes? That it was easy?”

  Wes so wanted to take his hand back, but he moved it around Dennis’s back to his far shoulder, and his stepson accepted the touch, leaned his whole body into Wes’s, the way he had when he was very young
, too young, probably, to remember. “Yes,” Wes said. “I think it was easy.”

  After the riot, a makeshift memorial for Lane and Bill had sprung up outside the prison. Flowers and candles, letters and cards, photographs, the odd cross or whiskey bottle. Wes had never gone close enough to see any of it in detail, though it’d stayed there for months, long after he’d taken his first shaky walk back through the gate, the sutures from his second surgery still pulling at the skin of his right hand.

  There was no memorial beside the railroad crossing on the forestry road. No flowers, no notes. It was the right place, though. A wide twist of metal in the tall grass beside the gravel track bed. A yellow tatter of police tape knotted to the pole of a crossing sign. Too many tire tracks in the mud. Wes parked at the edge of the road, half on the dirt, half in the long dying grass. He stepped out and flipped his collar up against the wind, jammed his hands into his pockets. He’d left Dennis at the kitchen table, a cooling cup of coffee at one elbow, the newspaper—still rolled—at his other. Half the headline visible: Black River Student Threatens.

  The train had come from the east. Wes stood on a tie, squinted down the track. It didn’t disappear behind the curve of the mountains for a good quarter mile. Scott would’ve seen it coming. Had to sit there in that little run-down car and see that light bearing down and hear the whistle and desperate braking. He’d have had time to embrace, or regret. Wes turned back to the west, walked toward his truck. The spaces between the railroad ties glittered with hundreds of tiny pebbles of safety glass, strewn over the gravel like diamonds. Wes had a sudden vision of those bits of glass, bright against Scott’s dyed black hair. Hard not to think of the mechanics of it all. The collision, the force, the folding of careless metal around fragile flesh. Through flesh.

  He got back in his truck and turned the heat up high, but didn’t put it into gear. He’d had to come out here this morning. Not so much to see the place, though Wes believed there was something that forever marked a place where someone had died. He’d felt it up on the trestle where his father had met his own train all those years ago, and he’d felt it walking past the spot on Two South where Lane had been killed, and he knew he would always, always feel it in the house in Spokane, if he went back there. And he felt it, as he’d known he would, here at this lonely railroad crossing. But that wasn’t why he’d come. He was starting to know something he didn’t want to know, had been starting to know it ever since Dennis first told him about Scott. He’d kept it at bay all through yesterday afternoon and all night, but he wasn’t going to be able to fight it off much longer, and he knew he’d better not come to know it for certain while he was with Dennis.