Black River

by S. M. Hulse

  The door’s magnetic lock sounded, and Lowell came back into the room. The young officer at the desk fell silent, and Wes looked up. Lowell knew how to guard his expressions as surely as Wes did, so there was no way to read the decision on his features, but Wes heard it again inside his own head: denied. Then Lowell’s Adam’s apple bobbed, and the word was coming up in his throat, but his lips were still pressed together and there was no glint of teeth, and the word vanished from Wes’s mind and Lowell spoke.

  “Paroled.”

  That night Wes tipped a handful of bullets from his box of ammunition and loaded the revolver. Went downstairs carrying his boots under one arm. Waited till he was on the porch before tugging them on and shrugging his chore coat over his shoulders, the revolver heavy in one pocket. He walked briskly through Farmer’s yard, skirting the silent tractor and the empty arena. A horse whickered from the darkness as Wes passed the shuttered barns. Autumn was still hanging on during the day, but night had given itself over to winter, and the air burned cold in Wes’s nostrils and lungs. A waning moon idled high in the sky, veiled in cloud, and it cast just enough light for him to see the immediate exhalation of his breath before it dissipated into the dark. He heard the Wounded Elk before he saw it, a gentle sound for an entity of such power. The moonlight dipped into the hollows between the rises and swells of the water, but save for those slight flashes of silver, it was the blackest of rivers.

  The bank eased into the shallows here, and Wes stood at the edge of the rocks and let the water lick at the toes of his boots. He couldn’t see across the river, but he knew this to be one of the narrow places, no more than twenty yards from one side to the other. There was no bank opposite, no beach. Just the straight jut of the mountain, the land rising right from the water.

  Wes took the revolver from his pocket and shaped his left hand around it, maneuvering his index finger into place inside the trigger guard. He knew his own frailty well; even with this much pain, he’d be able to manage a single shot. He turned the revolver so the tip of its barrel rested against his breast; moonlight glinted once off the bluing. He stood unmoving, feeling the trigger beneath his finger, the gentle press of metal against his chest. He thought his heart ought to be racing, but he felt no rush in his veins, no rise of his pulse against the revolver’s steel, as though he’d stilled his heart already. Made sense, maybe. Hard for a man to fight his own blood, he always said, and whatever else this was—cowardly, selfish, desperate—whatever else, this was in his blood.

  Wes could think of no reason not to do it. None. But his hand remained steady, his trigger finger still. This was a moment for prayer, but Wes knew too well that any words he dared speak would wisp away into the night air, unheard, unanswered. So instead he swung the revolver away from his heart, set his feet the way his father had taught him, and fired at the great rising earth across the river. Two rounds, one-two, and the pain ripped a growl from his throat and he let his hand drop. No way to know where the bullets had homed to, and for a moment Wes felt a flash of his old self and thought of the rules he’d broken by firing into the dark, the safeties and cautions he’d ignored. Then the mountains behind him sounded a mimicry of his shots, and their brothers across the river echoed more gently, and finally he stood alone in the deep silence, breathing cordite and cold.

  The next day Farmer stayed close. Still had to take care of his horses, though, and when he went out to the barn for the evening feeding, Wes found Farmer’s address book and turned the pages until he found Jamie Lowell’s name.

  “I don’t know if I ought to talk about that with you,” Lowell said, when Wes had asked his question.

  Wes leaned back against the kitchen counter, moved a ceramic saltshaker along the edge of the sink. “Bus station’s right down on Main, Jamie. Can’t really avoid it if I go into town.” The saltshaker nearly tipped over; Wes caught it in a loose fist. “Look,” he said, “I ain’t exactly proud of feeling anxious as I do, but I figured you’d understand. You really gonna make me explain why I don’t want to chance running into Williams?”

  Lowell was silent for a long moment, and Wes knew he’d get his answer. He squinted through the window, didn’t see Farmer. He could hear Dennis hammering across the pasture, the slightest of sounds at this distance, slight enough Wes ought to’ve been able to ignore it. “Friday,” Lowell said finally. “He’ll be released late morning. The bus comes at two.”

  “Appreciate it,” Wes said. He hung up the phone, put the address book back just where he’d found it.

  “You seem like a good man,” Williams had said. No more than an hour before rescue. “Do you believe in God? You must. Most good men do.” Williams crouched behind him, a faceless voice. “Are you praying now, Wesley? Right now?” The shank at his throat, suddenly. The flat of the blade sticky against his flesh, warmed with his own blood. “I think you should.”

  “God.” A word wrenched from between clenched teeth, a word spoken through the grimace of pain and terror. Prayer or worse. “God.” Better. Say it right. Make it worthy. “Help me,” Wes had whispered, “survive this.” The blade pulled tight below his jaw, arching his face up. He closed his eyes. “And if I can’t—” he said “—survive—” the words coming faster, without thought, coming without his calling them, the way his music always had and never would again “—then ease my way home to You.” Eyes open now, sight blurred by tears that wouldn’t fall. “And please, God, above all else, watch over my wife and my son. Shelter them in Your love.” No more. The blade was still there at his throat, his life moments—millimeters—from ending. If there were ever a moment in which to find faith, to be struck with the certainty of God’s presence, Wes was enduring it, but he felt no comfort, no peace.

  And then long seconds in which death did not come, in which no new pain was visited upon him. His breath, Williams’s breath, audible, steady, matched. Finally: “You finished?” A nod—the slightest—even that minute movement a risk with the blade at his throat, but Wes wanted to say nothing else, wanted no lesser words to come between his prayer—even if unheard—and his death, if that was what came next. But then the shank was gone. Reprieve. Williams’s lips beside his ear. “You’re supposed to say ‘Amen’ when you’re done.”

  What Wes needed was to speak to Bobby Williams. To hear Williams—the real Williams—speak to him. Society’s justice had failed, far as Wes was concerned, and there was nothing he could do to stop Williams walking through that gate today. But he might still have the chance to find the truth, to know for certain what lay in the heart of this man about to be loosed upon the world, if only he could really speak to him. The parole hearing had been all wrong, and Wes ought to have known it would be. The hearing was a production, a performance, every man playing his part, Wes included. Hadn’t he dressed for it? The suit coat, the polished shoes, the part in his hair. Done himself up the way he thought they’d expect him to. So Friday Wes dressed as he did on any other day. He chose his darkest jeans, his green chamois shirt, his square-toed roper boots with the leather soles scuffed almost through. He combed his wet hair with his fingers and let it dry fanned over his forehead. His father’s pocketwatch was hard against his hipbone in his right front jeans pocket, and his wedding ring—the replacement he’d bought after the riot, the one Williams stole missing to this day—was on his finger, below a joint so swollen Wes didn’t know that he could’ve taken the ring off if he’d wanted to.

  Farmer watched him closely all morning, something untrusting in his eyes, but Wes looked as he did any other day, behaved—he was careful of this—as he did any other day. He sat at the kitchen table and drank his coffee and read the local section of the Elk Fork paper. (There’d been a fatal car wreck up on the Flathead reservation yesterday. A hunter from Ovando had bagged a record-setting elk. The animal shelter was waiving adoption fees for cats through the end of the month.) Wes read and Farmer, who’d had his own breakfast hours before, turned the pages of the sports section and watched Wes.

 
“You’re worrying me a little here,” Farmer said after a while.

  Wes flipped a sheet over. (One of the newly elected city councilmen had vowed to increase funding for snowplowing.) “You worry a lot,” he said. “Ain’t good for your blood pressure.”

  Farmer rapped the fingers of his right hand on the tabletop—ring-middle-index, ring-middle-index—and then stopped abruptly. Sensitive even in his nervous habits. “Jamie called for you yesterday,” he said. “Wanted you to know he double-checked the bus schedule and it comes at one, not two.”

  Wes didn’t stop his eyes going to the clock, and Farmer saw him look.

  “He explained that you wanted to know so you could be elsewhere.” Farmer waited, having offered the challenge, but Wes looked at him and locked down anything dangerous behind his eyes, and soon enough it became clear to both of them that Farmer didn’t have it in him to call Wes a liar.

  Wes took his mug to the sink, rinsed it and went back upstairs. He was careful of his hands as he loaded the revolver, taking light hold of the weapon and its bullets, reserving what strength he could. He sat for a time in the rocking chair beside the window, watching the mountains and sky. It was thickly overcast, the space above the peaks clotted with heavy white clouds. Claire had once told him that white clouds piled atop one another like these meant snow.

  At a quarter past noon, Wes stood up. His coat was downstairs on the rack beside the front door, so he put the revolver inside the waistband of his jeans, against the small of his back, and untucked his shirt so it hid the grip. Felt a little like a two-bit gangster in a movie, but Farmer was still waiting downstairs. Wes descended the staircase as quickly as he could without seeming to hurry, and when Farmer looked up from the kitchen table and asked where he was going, Wes said, “Out.” Like he was Dennis as a teenager, sullenly monosyllabic. Dennis or Scott.

  It was cold enough the truck didn’t want to start, and Wes had to turn the key three times before the engine turned over. He rubbed his right hand with his left while he waited for the rumbling to steady and for the defroster to make headway against the lattice of ice hugging the windshield. As the ice began its retreat, he saw Farmer’s truck parked ahead, and Wes stepped out of his own truck and went to Farmer’s and sank the blade of his pocketknife deep into both driver’s side tires. It hurt him, but he used his right hand and spared the left. He spotted the telephone line snaking from beneath the eave of the house down the clapboard to the foundation, and he ran his blade through that, too.

  He got back in his truck and put it into gear and was almost to the woods when Farmer slapped the hood and put himself in front of the truck. Wes shifted into neutral but didn’t kill the engine. He began to roll down the window, but it was stiff with ice and stopped after a few inches, so when Farmer came up beside it he couldn’t put his elbows on the sill and lean into the cab the way Wes knew he wanted to.

  “Wesley,” Farmer said, and his breath was a little weak. “Don’t do this.”

  The air from outside was the sharp sort of cold, and Wes felt it on one side of his face while the other was hot with the air blowing from the dash vents. “How far are you gonna go to keep me here, Farmer? You willing to lay hands on me and use whatever strength you got to stop me? ’Cause I’m warning you now, it won’t take no less.”

  Farmer hesitated only a moment, and then he hauled open the driver’s side door and moved toward Wes and then he stopped because he saw the revolver. It was resting on Wes’s thigh, almost casual-like, except Wes had gone to the trouble of working his finger through the trigger guard and the end of the barrel was staring right out at Farmer. Wes said nothing and Farmer said nothing and after a minute Farmer took one step back and hooked his arm over the open door. Something shifted in his face, and Wes couldn’t have said what changed, exactly, the eyes or the mouth or something else, but his expression closed. “Well,” Farmer said, “I guess now we know where we both stand.”

  Wes waited, but Farmer said nothing else. After a minute Wes took his hand off the steering wheel and reached for the door handle, and Farmer stepped back and took his arm off the door, and Wes pulled it shut and shifted gears and drove into the woods, and he didn’t look in the rearview, not even once.

  The bus station was just a single wooden bench, thickly coated with blue paint and set against the outside wall of the gas station, and the empty gravel lot beside the pumps, bare save for a scattering of hardy weeds and, for ten minutes twice a day, a lumbering Greyhound bus that didn’t even stop long enough to halt its engines’ shuddering. The old prison occupied the opposite side of the street, the top of the red cellblock just visible above the gray wall. Bobby Williams was looking at it when Wes pulled into the lot at a quarter to one. He sat alone on the bench, a large paper bag beside him, its top rolled shut. He wore a new blue shirt and dark dungarees, the fabric so stiff it looked liable to crease and split like cardboard if he moved.

  Wes had the revolver back in his coat pocket, and he put his hand in with it, settled the grip against his palm and found the trigger guard with his crooked index finger. It was a heavy coat, the canvas rough even after years of washing, and no one would be able to say for sure whether there was anything but his hands in the pockets. He glanced outside. One truck at the pumps. Its owner inside, talking to the kid behind the register. Wes set his face and held it, then got out of his truck before he could decide it wasn’t a good idea. He took three steps toward the gas station and stopped. Waited.

  Williams watched him for several seconds before rising. He left the paper bag on the bench and crossed the gravel slow, walking like someone still learning how, each step a hair shorter or longer than the one before. He stopped a couple yards away, hooked his thumbs into his belt loops. “I been inside so long I don’t hardly know what to do without lines on the floor and COs telling me what to do,” he said. “I don’t even know how close I ought to stand to you.”

  “You’re plenty close,” Wes said, and Williams looked over Wes’s shoulder and let one side of his mouth pull into a brief smile. Wes saw now that Williams wasn’t really bigger than he remembered, as he’d thought at the hearing, but merely filled out, healthy flesh gentling bones that had been more pronounced twenty years ago. He still exhibited hints of the nerviness and restlessness Wes remembered, looked at Wes only in flickering glances: a few seconds on his face, away; a moment meeting his eyes, away.

  “I guess all inmates think about the day they get out,” Williams said. The first snowflakes had begun to fall between them, singly, each somehow shameful in its solitude, like a note mistakenly played before the beat. “I always thought it’d be sunny when my day came.”

  “Things don’t always turn out the way we think they ought.”

  Williams turned his gaze on him outright then, and inside his pocket Wes let his finger slide inside the trigger guard. “I didn’t know you were a fiddler,” Williams told him. “When we were in the control room.”

  “Would it’ve made a difference if you had?”

  Williams didn’t hesitate. “I’d have skipped the cigarettes and the shank and gone for your hands right off.”

  Wes held his features where he’d put them. “That’s about how I figured it,” he said. He thought Williams might try to tell him it’d be different now, that he was real sorry for what he’d done, but he didn’t. Just let his eyes drift away from Wes’s face and into the air, following one flake and then another in its descent toward the ground.

  The man with the truck came out of the gas station and put the pump back in its cradle but forgot to close the gas door before getting back into the cab. He drove away with the gas door standing open, the flap of metal jouncing with each jolt of the tires over the potholed gravel.

  “I should say it was you that led me to Christ.” It seemed to Wes that Williams was standing closer now, but he hadn’t heard him move, and he’d taken his eyes off him for only an instant. “You said this gorgeous prayer during the riot, you remember that? I guess I didn’t th
ink much of it at the time, but I kept hearing it in my head afterward. Those things you said. The way you said them. I don’t expect you to be much concerned by the fact, but I didn’t know any kind of churching or, or, spiritual sort of matters in my upbringing. Your prayer was the first time I ever been witness to faith of that kind. And it changed my life; it truly did. So I thank you for that.”

  For a long moment Wes stood silent, heart warring between incredulity and fury, and finally he had to do something and that revolver was ready in his hand but he kept it still and laughed instead. A bitter sound even to his ears. “Lord,” he said, “if that ain’t a load of bull you just spouted off, you got it so wrong I don’t hardly know where to start. Yeah, I remember what I said; I remember every second of that riot and will till the day I die. And what you heard wasn’t faith, Williams. You heard terror. Desperation. Maybe a little bit of yearning. But you didn’t hear faith.” A snowflake alighted on Wes’s eye, and he blinked it away. Williams watched him impassively, only the slightest, almost imperceptible shake of his head suggesting he’d even heard Wes’s words. “Hell, you say you remember this so well,” Wes said, his voice rising more than he meant to let it. “You remember the part where the only reason I was praying at all was you put a goddamned blade to my throat and told me you thought I should?”