Black River

by S. M. Hulse

  Claire stays on top of the pass for a long time, looking first one way and then the other, trying to keep both places, both men, in sight at once. To keep them together. It is not quite possible. But Claire knows that even this land—the cradle of canyon, these seemingly immovable mountains, this etched horizon—has not always been this way, and will not always be this way. What she looks upon now is a moment in history, and it will pass. Claire will not be here to see it, and she cannot say how things will be different, but she is certain: given enough time, even this will change.

  There was just one motel in Black River, the sort mostly found on lonely highways in lonely towns that had been long since bypassed by interstates. This one had hung in there thanks to the prison; when Wes pulled into the gravel lot after midnight, he saw that the other vehicles all bore license plates stamped with county codes from the eastern part of the state. Folks wanting to visit inmates couldn’t always make the trip in one day. The experienced ones flocked to the anonymity of the Motel 6 in Elk Fork; the rest came here and holed up in their rooms till it was time to go home again. The place was called the Sapphire Lodge, though there was nothing especially lodge-like about it, unless you counted the lone buck mounted over the registration desk, who’d had the misfortune to be stuffed by a taxidermist who seemed to believe animals ought to look surprised to find themselves dead. Wes talked the bleary-eyed owner into a discount; even so, it left him with a thinner stack of bills in his envelope than he’d have liked.

  His room was clean and bland, little different from the half-dozen motel rooms he’d stayed in during Claire’s transplant in Seattle. Unlike those, though, this one stood apart, its own small building separated by eight or nine feet from the units on either side. Quieter. He found himself wishing he were sharing walls. He’d have welcomed the mild irritation of others’ voices, the murmurs that rose and fell but never coalesced into distinct words and sentences, the rattles and knocks of movements that weren’t his own. In Seattle, he’d found that those things served as a promise that the larger world still existed, that there was something waiting beyond the fear and grief that had so totally absorbed him then, that he might someday get back to that safer and easier place.

  He could think now, in this oppressive quiet, of all the things he should have said to Dennis, all the things he couldn’t put voice to. That this was the second time in his life he’d been stunned by a suicide he should’ve seen coming. That he was angry at Scott, yes, that he couldn’t explain the horror of knowing Scott had terrorized those people, absolutely, but more than that, he couldn’t bear the thought of going to Scott’s funeral and seeing his lips shut, his hands idle, forever. It’d be a closed casket—the train, the train, the train—but Wes would know. He’d see it anyway. Still hands. Silent lips.

  He felt a familiar rending starting in his chest, small now, slight, as though his heart were tearing slowly, fiber by fiber. God, he missed her. Wes hadn’t always been good about sharing his burdens with Claire. Held back too much. He wished he had all those opportunities back now, all those times he’d known she was yearning to help. Claire wouldn’t have been able to make this new loss better, but she’d have known how to help him bear it.

  He turned to his Bible instead and flipped through the pages, a book or two at a time. Couldn’t find what he was looking for—didn’t even know what that was—and he wondered what Williams looked for in these same pages. What he found. In the end, Wes read aloud from Psalms, and Ecclesiastes, and the Gospel of John. Then he read the story of the Fall, because that seemed important somehow, and about Lot’s wife turning to salt, because no matter how the preachers tried to explain that one, it’d never seemed just to Wes. And finally he read the first verses of the forty-third chapter of Isaiah, over and over, because he had always understood that these were supposed to be comforting words. When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee . . . But though the words were familiar on his lips and gentle on his ears, they taunted him with the promise of a peace and solace beyond his faithless grasp, and they brought no comfort.

  The week passed slowly. Wes kept the Do Not Disturb hangtag on the outside doorknob, and he left the curtains drawn. They didn’t close all the way, and during the day he sat on the bed and watched the slim shard of sunlight slowly cross the carpet. He tried not to think of Scott, or Dennis, or Williams, or Claire. He tried not to think about suicides and hearings and mortgage payments he couldn’t pay and how much his hands ached. He tried not to think.

  Each day he went to the IGA, late, fifteen minutes before closing—the place empty, the teenage clerk glaring at him as he walked up and down the aisles—and then he went back to the dark motel and ate cold chicken or macaroni salad. There was a No Smoking placard on the bedside table where the ashtray would’ve been a few years back; Wes tapped his ash into a drinking glass from the bathroom. He sat and smoked, and he watched the light from the streetlamps. It was yellower than the sunlight, but duller, and it did not move.

  Saturday morning Wes rose early. He showered and shaved painstakingly, then dressed in his best shirt, his suit, his oxfords, his tie. Took him more than an hour, but he’d given himself time. When he was ready, he sat in the chair beside the television and waited until the red numbers on the bedside clock showed him that he’d have to leave now, and then that he’d have to speed, and finally that it was too late to make Scott’s service no matter how fast he drove.

  The knock came several hours later. It was light, a woman’s knock, and Wes knew he was paid up and had left the Do Not Disturb sign on the knob, so he wasn’t entirely surprised when he opened the door and found Molly Bannon outside. She wore a navy-blue dress and no coat, though Wes had to brace against the cold. Her hair was loose and the wind snapped it into and then away from her face. She was pale, but her eyes were clear, the skin below them smooth and tight, and Wes wondered if maybe she was too deep into grief to cry yet. She held his fiddle case in one hand. “Dennis told me you would probably be here.”

  “Come in,” Wes said, and he brought the door wide. The sun was already below the mountains, and it had snowed without his noticing. The white dusting came halfway down the slopes, an encroaching threat above the town.

  Molly shook her head. “I just came to give you this.” She nodded to the fiddle case, but made no move to hand it to him. “Scott left a note on it.” Wes saw it now, a square of white paper attached to the lid with a piece of tape. When Molly didn’t say anything else, Wes leaned down and took the note off the case. The tape lifted the top black layer of the chipboard with it, leaving a pale brown patch behind. He looked down at the paper. A single line in the middle of the sheet. Cursive. He hadn’t known they still taught cursive. Please give this back to Mr. Carver. It is his. Wes flipped the paper over. Blank.

  “It’s the only note he left.” Molly’s voice was strong, strangely normal, but she was looking somewhere over Wes’s shoulder, not really at him. “The only thing that . . . shows he meant to do what he did.”

  Did she know the gun was his? Wes wondered if this was some kind of test, if he was supposed to say it first. But maybe she didn’t know. Maybe all she’d been told was “stolen handgun.” He held the note out to Molly, but she looked at it like she didn’t know what it was, and the wind tried to cheat it from his hand, so after a minute he took it back and put it in his pocket. “You sure you don’t want to come in? There’s a coffeepot. Probably ain’t any good, but I could make you a cup.”

  “I just came to give you this,” she said again, and this time she moved the fiddle case toward him. Their fingers touched when he took it from her.

  Wes adjusted his grip on the handle, glanced down. “I meant for him to keep it.”

  “I know,” Molly said, and met his eyes. “I’m not sure he’d figured that out yet, but I did.”

  Another sustained gust—arctic air, bearing winter down—and Wes felt gooseflesh rise on his arms beneath his clothes.
He set the fiddle case at his feet, took off his suit coat. “If you won’t come in, put that on at least.”

  She took the coat and held it by its collar for a long moment before draping it over her shoulders. Looked him up and down, and seemed to notice his clothes for the first time. “He tried once before,” she told him after a minute. “A month after we moved here. I found him sitting in the shower with his wrists cut. It wasn’t a ‘cry for help,’ either. He cut the long way. Deep.” She drew one index finger up the inside of her opposite wrist. “If I hadn’t come home early . . .” Wes thought about the long sleeves, the knitted arm warmers, the ubiquitous hooded sweatshirts. The things he of all people ought to have noticed. “I should have taken him home to Miles City then,” Molly said. “I never should have brought him here in the first place. I wanted him to be close to his dad was all.”

  “You were just trying to do right.”

  “Maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I came here because I was afraid to be alone with my son. Maybe I came here because I was trying too fucking hard to prove that I still loved my husband.” Wes didn’t have anything to say to that. He knew what this was. This was Molly saying things she couldn’t say to anyone who mattered, Molly saying things to him because she was never going to see him again, because she already knew his secrets. “I should have taken him home before,” she said, “but I’m taking him home now. I don’t want him buried here.”

  “You gonna stay with him?” Wes asked. “In Miles City?”

  Molly looked down at her shoes. Pretty shoes, open toes, wrong for this weather. Finally she nodded, slow, like she was making the decision right this minute. “Connor doesn’t know yet. They didn’t let him come to the funeral.” She looked directly at Wes again. “What do you think of that?”

  “It’s a hard thing,” he said.

  “He’s been crazy since they told him about Scott,” Molly said softly.

  Wes remembered walking inmates down to the warden’s office. Sometimes they knew, if they had someone who’d been sick awhile, or old, but mostly they didn’t. Wes remembered standing there, retreating behind his stone face, while the warden told the inmate he was so sorry to inform . . . And then the walk back to the cellblock. Always took longer, the walk back.

  “I’m sorry,” Wes said.

  Sorry they didn’t let your husband come to your son’s funeral.

  Sorry I didn’t go, either.

  Sorry it was my revolver.

  Sorry I can do nothing for you but say sorry, sorry, sorry.

  Molly took Wes’s coat off her shoulders, folded it once the way Claire would have before holding it between them. Wes wanted so much to leave her with something. To offer something she could take with her. But the fiddle would bring no comfort, and Wes had nothing else. He took his coat back and understood that any chance he’d had to give was gone.

  He dozed, and when he woke it was dark. Wes changed out of his funeral clothes and put his jeans and flannel shirt and boots back on. He was out of food and cigarettes. Twenty minutes till the IGA closed.

  When he went outside, Wes found Arthur Farmer’s truck parked in front of his room. Farmer was huddled inside the cab, hat tipped a little over his face. The engine was idling, a white plume of exhaust rising from below the tailgate, and Wes could hear the higher registers of a song playing on the radio. Farmer stepped out of the truck when he saw him. Wes tried to read his expression, but Farmer knew at least as much as he did about controlling one’s features. Wes flipped his collar up against the wind—it’d died down a touch since Molly was here, but gone colder to make up for it—and pushed his hands deep into his pockets. “How long you been out here?” he asked.

  “Hour or so.”

  “You didn’t knock.”

  “You wouldn’t have answered if I did,” Farmer said, and it was just a statement, not an accusation.

  Wes leaned against the side of the truck. He, Farmer and Lane had driven all over the state in a truck like this one, all night most of the time, chain-smoking and stopping on the side of the road to take a piss and twisting the radio dial trying to find something other than hellfire-and-brimstone preaching. They’d gone west to east and west again, from county fair to rodeo to honky-tonk to dive bar, hardly ever getting paid enough to cover their gas. Wes glanced into the bed now, half expecting to see instrument cases. Bags of horse feed, a couple battered buckets, a single frayed rope.

  “So how was it?” he asked.

  Farmer had let his eyes drift, but he brought them around. “What?”

  “The service.”

  “It was hard,” Farmer said, “but good. The preacher had a nice way with words, and the choir sang some. I didn’t know Scott all that well, but I think he’d have liked that. The music.”

  Wes nodded a few too many times. “Many folks there?”

  “Not many.”

  “Any kids?”

  “None that I saw.”

  Wes looked at the gravel beneath his feet, forced his eyes back up to meet Farmer’s. “It wasn’t because of the suicide,” he said.

  Farmer smoothed a hand over his mustache but didn’t say anything.

  “That’s not the reason I didn’t go to Scott’s funeral. It wasn’t because it was a suicide, and it didn’t have nothing to do with my father.”

  “I guess I hadn’t thought about that part of it,” Farmer said. “I just figured you had your reasons.”

  “Don’t tell me you hadn’t thought about it. You wouldn’t be sitting outside my goddamned motel room for an hour if you didn’t believe I was maybe spending too much time thinking about people killing themselves.”

  “If I was that worried, I wouldn’t have waited around outside.” He forged ahead. “But I was thinking. You shouldn’t be wasting your money on this motel. Come stay at the house.”

  Wes wanted to say No, hell no. The days when such an invitation could be considered casual by either one of them were long gone. Fact was, though, Wes couldn’t afford to say no right out. Literally couldn’t afford it. He had just enough left in the envelope to get him to the hearing, sure, and probably enough gas to get back to Spokane. No more.

  “There’s the room upstairs,” Farmer said. “I don’t hardly ever go up there. I wouldn’t be in your business all the time, that’s what’s worrying you.”

  Wes blinked hard against the sting of the wind. “It’ll get you in hot water with Dennis.”

  “Dennis doesn’t get to decide who my houseguests are.”

  Wes swallowed. Thought about the money. And the revolver, waiting. “Well, I tell you, Farmer, it’d be a help. Strapped with the medical bills and all.”

  Farmer waved off the gratitude, like he didn’t know exactly how much it cost Wes to accept his offer. “Be good to have a little company,” he said.

  After church the next day, Wes left a twenty for the maid—Claire had done that work once, before they met—and drove over to Farmer’s place. Almost missed the turn, the way to his own house—Dennis’s house—was so ingrained. He left his fiddle downstairs in the living room, in the corner beside Farmer’s guitar and Lane’s banjo. The room upstairs had a single bed with whitewashed wrought iron at the head and foot. A small dressing table next to it, a lamp and Bible resting on a lace doily. A rocking chair beside the window, with a knitted afghan folded neatly over the back. The room was painted a sunny yellow, with white rabbits chasing each other around the perimeter, up near the ceiling. Repurposed as a guest room, Wes realized, but intended as a nursery. He looked again at the rabbits. Each had a green bow painted around its neck.

  “You settle in,” Farmer said, lingering in the hall. “I was thinking we’d eat at seven-thirty—that all right?”

  “Sounds good.”

  The window faced west. Wes had been hoping it wouldn’t, that he’d be in the room across the hall instead, but it was crowded with boxes and loose furniture. He heard Farmer moving downstairs, and he went to the window and looked. The arena was on the far side of the yard, the b
roodmare pastures beyond that. A half-dozen mares grazing, their coats gone dull and fluffy with the coarse winter hair growing in. And past them was a fence, and three more animals. They were far enough off that Wes could pick out the mule only by color; the long ears and sparse tail were details lost to distance. He could see the back of the workshop, and a bit of the house, a patch of white through the trees. He’d see Dennis if he caught him walking to his truck or checking on the horses.

  Dinner was hamburgers—Farmer was careful; no more steaks—and afterward they went to the living room. Farmer switched on the television, and they watched a cop show set somewhere sunny and colorful. The characters all had lengthy backstories, and Farmer dutifully explained them all to Wes. It satisfied Wes to know that Farmer watched television often enough to know all these details. Seemed a little bit of a flaw in his character, and it made him easier to like. When the show was over, the local news came on; they were still talking about Scott. No new developments, the anchorwoman said.

  “What ‘new developments’ they expect?” Wes asked. “The kid’s dead.”

  Farmer turned the television off. “It’s just a slow news time,” he said. “They’ll be on to something else soon enough.”

  The riot had dominated the news for weeks. So many reporters called the house that Claire had started leaving the phone off the hook.

  “You can play your guitar if you want,” Wes said. “I’m guessing that’s what you usually do about this time.”

  Farmer watched him closely for a minute, but didn’t ask was he sure, and Wes was grateful. Wasn’t sure how convincing he could sound if he had to insist. The old Martin was already out of its case, resting on a guitar stand within reach of Farmer’s easy chair. He took it up and tuned it, and even that was devastatingly familiar, the sequence and timing of the plucks, the little ten-note melody Farmer played once he thought he’d tuned right.