Black River (20 page)

He took it inside the house. Laid an old dishtowel on the kitchen table. Found Dennis's gun-cleaning kit where he'd always kept his own, on top of the safe in the living room. Sat at the table and set to work. The revolver didn't really need the attention; Wes always cleaned it after he'd fired it. Claire helped him most times, sat silently at the table and completed the fine, precise work he couldn't manage. She pursed her lips while she did it, held her head cocked a bit too far to one side. She'd never voiced her displeasure at those moments, but she hadn't needed to. He knew.

Slow work for his hands. Hard work. Wes wasn't even halfway done, still feeding a cleaning patch through the barrel, when Dennis and Scott came through the door. Dennis glanced at the revolver, the supplies arrayed across the table, but all he said was “Church good?”

“Fine,” Wes said. Scott stood beside Dennis. He stared a little, but not much. A Montana kid, his father's son. Hardly the first gun he'd seen. “You going straight home, Scott?”

The kid shrugged. “Mom's working.”

“You're welcome to the fiddle, if you want to play.”

Scott nodded, went to the mantel. Dennis disappeared down the hall, and a moment later Wes heard water running. He traded the cleaning rod for a nylon brush, set to polishing up the rear cylinder opening. The ache already starting to drive in his hands. Scott had the fiddle out now, was warming up with “Cripple Creek.” He was struggling a bit with the string crossings, but Wes held his tongue. Kid needed to work some of it out on his own.

Dennis returned to the living room, took a chair. He sat silently for a moment, watching Wes. Finally he asked, “Is that it?”

“The very same,” Wes said. Same gun Dennis had aimed at him. Same gun he'd aimed at Dennis. (He'd wondered, from time to time, why Dennis had used the revolver that night. Wes thought he could have forgiven a punch, maybe even a steak knife impulsively taken up in a fist. But not the revolver.)

“Let me help you?”

Wes's first instinct was to refuse. But the ache in his hands was a mere harbinger of what was in store later, so Wes laid the gun on the towel and let Dennis slide it across the table toward himself.

Scott was on to “Angelina Baker” now, making a disastrous attempt at playing with drones. Wes waited until he quit in the midst of the B part, a frustrated skittering of the bow over the strings. “Try arching your fingers up a bit more,” he said. He touched his left fingers to his right palm to show the angle. “Land more on the tips, not the pads. Won't catch the second string so much that way.”

Scott put the fiddle back up on his collarbone, tried to follow Wes's advice, with moderate success. But Wes had made him self-conscious, and he soon left “Angelina Baker” behind for simple scales.

“Good ride?” Wes asked.

Dennis rolled the revolver's cylinder against his palm, squinted down each chamber. “Yeah,” he said. “Chilly, though. Wind's starting to get winter-sharp up in those hills.”

“Think it'll be a bad one this year?” Almost a month he'd been here, and still the weather seemed the only safe topic.

“We're overdue.” Dennis fed the cleaning rod down the first of the chambers. “Pretty light winters the last couple years.”

Scott eased off the scales. A few seconds' silence before he drew the bow again. Somehow, Wes knew what he was playing before the first note had finished ringing. Heard it in the pull of the hair, the way Scott tried to ease off the string toward the end. It took Dennis a few moments more, but by the third note he'd put the revolver down, met Wes's eyes. He found his voice before Wes did. “Scott . . .”

That song. His song. Uneven, the timing a little off, the intonation imperfect, all too tentative, but oh, his song.

“Don't play that.” It came out a whisper, and Wes said it again, louder. “Don't. Don't play that.”

Scott stopped, but kept the fiddle in place, the bow on the string. He didn't look angry, or indignant, only mildly confused. “What's wrong?”

He must have waited too long to answer, because Dennis jumped in. “Nothing, Scott. It's just, that song's got some meaning to our family.”

“Where did you hear that?” Wes asked.

Scott brought the fiddle down from his collarbone, settled it on his knee. “It was on one of those tapes you gave me,” he said. “I thought it was pretty.”

“I wrote that,” Wes said, and he heard his own voice like it was someone else's. Heard the words come gently, like the annunciation of a discovery.

“Really?”

Wes opened his mouth to answer, found no words. It surprised him. His fiddle had been mere wood and varnish, steel and silk, for years now. Decades.

Dennis watched Wes warily and Scott stared like a chastised child. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I didn't mean to make you upset.”

“It's all right,” Wes said. He moved to the chair opposite Scott. He held his hands out for the fiddle, and Scott immediately handed it over. Such a fragile thing. So small for its sound. Wes moved his hands over its body: the head, the neck, the shoulders, the waist, belly and back. He knew this fiddle like he knew his own body, like he'd known Claire's. That intimate. That much a part of him. “It's called ‘Black River,'” Wes said, “and someday I'll teach it to you. But you ain't ready to play it yet.”
And I ain't ready to hear it.

“Okay,” Scott whispered. “I'm sorry.”

“You don't got to apologize,” Wes said. “I'm just stating a fact.”

He handed the fiddle back, and then he taught Scott two new tunes. One was an old Scottish air, the other a hymn, and both had been on his mind when he'd first started putting together the melody that would become “Black River.” Scott seemed satisfied with the new tunes, and Wes hummed them for him, over and over, till the kid had the melodies in his own head.

Afterward, while Scott packed up the fiddle, Dennis handed Wes his revolver. “All polished up,” he said. Wes nodded his thanks. “I could pick something up for dinner after I drop Scott off,” Dennis offered. “You got a preference?”

“I'll take him home,” Wes said. “I could stand to get out of the house again.”

Dennis shrugged. “Fine by me.”

Wes tugged his coat on and put the revolver in the pocket. Liked the heft of it there. “Bring that fiddle with you,” he told Scott. “I got something to show you.”

Outside, Wes got in the truck and returned the revolver to the glove compartment, double-checked the lock before he let Scott into the cab. The kid sat with the fiddle case between his knees, the bottom of it resting on the tops of his boots rather than the floor.

“Things go okay when you saw your father on Friday?” Wes asked, as he steered the truck down the long drive. He weighed the fading sunlight, flicked the headlights on.

“If by ‘okay' you mean we had our usual fight and my mom cried her usual tears, then yeah. It went okay.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Sure.”

“Don't take that tone,” Wes said. He pulled onto the frontage road. Passed Farmer coming the other way, raised his hand off the steering wheel in greeting. “I think you got your reasons for feeling like you do.”

“Yeah, it sucks.” Scott thought for a minute. “But at least after next month I'll be back in a town where not everyone hates my guts.”

Wes supposed that was as close to philosophical as the kid could manage. Not bad for a teenager, really. Main Street was quiet, the sidewalks all rolled up. Good to see that Sundays were still like that some places. The bars would be busy later, of course—the rotating shift schedule at the prison meant every night was someone's Friday night—but the streets were empty, most of the shops dark, the signs on the doors flipped to
Sorry, We're Closed.

The windows of the trailer Scott shared with his mother were dark. “When's your momma get home?” Wes asked. He pulled up behind a silver hatchback parked in the driveway, killed the ignition.

“By six, probably.”

Wes nodded toward the hatchback. “Yours?”

“Yeah. My mom got it from a guy she works with. Said it was real cheap, but I know we can't really afford it.”

“School going okay, then?”

Scott sighed. Wes counted it a favor that he didn't do worse. “Mr. Carver, I know you're trying to look out for me or whatever. But the stuff that sucks is gonna suck, and you can't do anything about it.”

Wes thought about arguing the point, but the kid was right, wasn't he, so Wes just said, “All right,” and nodded to the fiddle, still resting beneath Scott's hands. “You take that with you.”

Scott glanced down, took his hands off the fiddle case. “It's yours.”

“You need something to play,” Wes said. “You're talented, no doubt about it. But you've still got to practice, and a few minutes here and there when you're at the house ain't gonna do it.”

“I can't.”

“I don't know if this is gonna make sense to you or not,” Wes said after a minute, “but that fiddle's got a particular voice I don't hear from it all the time. It sounded a certain way when I played it . . . before . . . and it doesn't ever seem to sound that way when other folks try it. Not bad, understand? But not the way I remember it.” Scott was watching him closely, but Wes couldn't tell what the kid thought of what he was saying. He looked away, squinted through the pocked windshield. Those damned mountains blocking out everything else. “When you started to play . . . my tune . . .” Wes closed his eyes, couldn't keep the notes from his mind, couldn't stop them from prickling in his fingertips. “I heard its voice today,” he said finally. “I heard it when you played.” He looked back at Scott, and he felt so weary. No energy left to hide what he felt. No effort to guard his features.

Scott looked back for a long moment—a brightness in his eyes Wes had seen only in flashes before, a dark and thoughtful sort of intelligence—and then he put his hands back on top of the fiddle case, one over the other. “I'll take very good care of it,” he said.

Wes nodded, felt an ease over his shoulders. “I know you will.”

 

He was having nightmares again. Didn't much remember them after he woke, but Wes knew he'd spent his slumbering hours back in that control room with Williams. What else could jolt him awake this way, pulse running away with itself, T-shirt clinging to his back and chest? By midweek, he was the sort of tired that made itself known in muscle and bone. He doubled up on coffee in the mornings and rode the caffeine as long as he could. Truth was, he didn't entirely mind the exhaustion. Made everything seem just a little less real. A little less immediate. Didn't change the fact that the hearing was less than two weeks away. Didn't change the fact that Wes had no idea what he would say, how he'd face down Williams. But it did make it harder to think about those things.

Wednesday morning was his appointment at the donation clinic, and he didn't want to go. The chair was too like the one in the dreams he didn't remember, too like the one in his memory. But Wes got in the truck and drove, because this was something he was good at. Keeping his word. Following through. Doing what needed to be done. He felt a bit better when he got to Elk Fork and the mountains backed off. The light was different here than in the canyon. Found its way to earth more easily. Wes thought, not for the first time, that maybe he should've moved the family here when he was still working at the prison, found a little house on one of the oak-lined streets, something with a wide porch for summer evenings, and flowerbeds for Claire. Would've meant a fair commute, of course—that much harder come winter, especially in those predawn hours before day watch, or the postdusk ones after evening watch—but he could've managed. Maybe such a simple decision—live here, not there—would've changed something.

Wes sat in the truck in the hospital parking lot for a long time. He'd arrived ten minutes early, and he sat in the cab for fifteen. Thought about not going inside. Might've done it—started the engine, driven away—had it not been Molly waiting for him. Molly, who he'd looked in the eye, who had invited him into her home. No. A comb through his hair, a tug on his collar. Then he was outside, across the parking lot, through the doors that drew themselves wide for him. He took the stairs to the second floor. (He couldn't remember what floor he'd stayed on those days after the riot. Third? Fifth?) In the donation center, he had to wait despite his tardiness, and he ignored the chairs, paced the perimeter of the reception area. He slowed when he passed the door. Still time to walk out. Probably wouldn't be the first time someone had done it.

Molly smiled broadly when she came into the waiting room. “Good morning, Mr. Carver.”

“Wes,” he corrected, doing his best to match her expression.

“Wes,” she agreed. Pink scrubs today. Nametag still had that glittery sticker on it. Molly led him back to one of the donation chairs and drew the curtain around the cubicle without his having to ask. “Sun still shining out there?”

“Yeah.” He perched uneasily on the edge of the chair, didn't yield to its curves and angles. “Plenty bright.”

“Good,” she said. “I get so edgy this time of year knowing winter's on its way, and when it comes I won't see the sun for ages. That little flurry the other day gave me a scare.” She stepped toward him, and Wes felt his breath catch in his lungs. Only the blood pressure cuff. He let her position it on his arm, tried not to notice it tightening. Wes half hoped this might be one of those days they told him,
Thanks, but not today. Come back some other time.
“Perfect,” Molly announced, pulling the cuff off.

He forced another smile.

“Can I give you a hand with those buttons?”

His very words from that first visit, back at him. “I got it today, if you give me a minute.”