Black River (21 page)

Molly turned her attention to her tray of instruments. Courteous as ever. “Wes,” Molly said, and her tone was different this time, not unfriendly, but not overlaid with that professional cheer. “I can't say how much I appreciate your giving Scott your fiddle to use, but—”

“I don't want to hear the ‘but,'” Wes said. The button on his right cuff came free. Two round scars showing in the sudden gap. “He can't get all the practice he needs during lessons.” The left button always so much harder. No grip at all with his right hand. “My father built that fiddle,” he said. “I ain't gonna try to convince you it don't mean a lot to me. It does. But it deserves to be played. And Scott deserves to play it.”

Molly glanced back at him like she might argue, but something she saw in his face changed her mind. He checked himself immediately, tried to soften his eyes, relax his jaw. “He's been playing one song I really like,” she said after a moment, and hummed the first few phrases, tentative and quiet. The notes came out lower than Wes would've guessed from her speaking voice.

“‘Weaving Way,'” Wes said. He gave up on his fingers, brought his cuff to his mouth and tugged the button free with his teeth. Molly came to his side, drawing the cart close. She took his right wrist in her hand, and Wes couldn't stop himself pulling back for a second. She didn't seem to notice, just turned his wrist until his arm was positioned the way she liked. Wes hadn't realized till this moment how much he'd been counting on Molly to see through his veil of false composure to the unease beneath. How much he'd been counting on her to suggest—maybe even insist—that he go on home today, try again another time. But now she was swabbing his elbow with the alcohol, and he let the slightest flinch show itself, and still she said nothing.
You done this a hundred times,
Wes told himself.
You can do it again.

“I got a call this morning.” Molly was beside him now, tourniquet in one hand, needle in the other, but she stood very still and cast her eyes down. “There was a fight at the prison,” she said. “I don't know exactly what happened. But Connor—my husband—was involved. A guard was hurt.” She glanced at his face, quick, down at his bared arm, at the floor. “Minor injuries, they said.” Footsteps on the linoleum beyond the curtain. Molly lowered her voice. “He's in segregation now,” she said. “There's no chance they'll release him next month.”

“You're not leaving, then,” Wes said, barely aware of the words as they left his lips. He couldn't concentrate on this, could think only of how easily violence sprang into being in that place, how quickly an ordinary situation could turn bad. How it had come to him in a single moment when the riot began, a sudden awareness that what he had first thought to be a minor scuffle—nearly routine—was something else entirely, something it was too late to extricate himself from, something that was about to engulf him totally.

“No,” Molly said. The word like a sigh. “We're going to have to stay. And I know how hard that's going to be on Scott. So I'm glad—so glad—that he can spend time with you, and with Dennis. With men who are . . . better . . . than his father.”

It cost Molly something deep to say that. Wes knew that in some part of himself, knew he ought to offer her gratitude or reassurance or condolences, but he hesitated, and now she was asking him if he was ready and he lied and said yes, and there was a needle in his arm, seeking his vein. And he knew he'd granted permission, knew that in a moment the needle would be in place and the small pain would end, and it would be fine, it would all be fine. But something else inside him knew only that he did not want to be sitting here, did not want his skin exposed this way, did not want to feel any more pain than he already did, and that something was stronger, that visceral response sharper than the rational one, and then he was standing, the needle on the floor, the tourniquet limp beside it, and Wes was stammering what he meant to be an apology, but all that came out was “I can't.” He looked at Molly, saw confusion cede to compassion in her eyes—he didn't
need
her pity—and he pushed his sleeves down, saw the right one bloom red where it touched the single drop of blood sliding toward his wrist, and then he was past the curtain and out the door.

 

He woke again that night. He lay on the narrow bed, listening to Dennis's light snore across the hall, to the absence of Claire's gentle breaths beside him. Sometimes she had woken with him when he'd had a nightmare, but more often she didn't. He'd found that comforting, somehow. Proof that what troubled him was in the past. That it was safe again.

No more sleep tonight. Wes rose slowly, easing out of bed so the creaking springs wouldn't disturb Dennis. He pulled on his jeans and padded barefoot down the hall. He fumbled blindly on the kitchen table for Dennis's cigarettes and lighter, then let himself out onto the porch. Cold outside, too cold for just a T-shirt, but Wes sat down on the steps anyway. There was smoke in the air again, not from wildfire but from fireplaces and woodstoves. It would gather and linger in the canyon over the next weeks and months, the scent growing sharper and heavier until the air became chill enough to sear the nostrils. Until all a person could smell was the cold itself.

Autumn had been Claire's favorite season. His, too, once. He'd never quite got over the schoolboy way of thinking of fall as the start of a new year. For a long time that was a good thing, the thought of an entire year stretched out before him, waiting to be lived. When Wes's life was easy, it meant the promise of more good things to come. When it wasn't, it meant hope that the new seasons would be better than the last. But now, without Claire, he couldn't muster the optimism.

He hadn't thought of her today, at the clinic. Not once, not even there. Spent the better part of the past two years in one hospital or another, at her side, and today he'd been so full of memory and fear, so full of goddamned Bobby Williams, that he hadn't thought of her until he was in his truck, halfway back to Black River. Wes just wanted this over, wanted Williams out of his life. He wanted to get back to grieving, because hard as it was to bear, there was something pure in his grief for Claire. What he felt in those days after her death so filled him, so commanded every moment, he knew it was just a hairsbreadth from love itself. Like the same note played an octave apart, at the same time, ringing and resonating together.

Wes watched his breath appear faintly before him with each exhalation. He squinted into the dark but couldn't see the horses. He could hear them, though, beyond the circle of light cast by the security lamp mounted on the side of the workshop. A shifting of weight over frosting grass, a clink of steel shoe against hoof sole, a long, trembling sigh.

He tapped the cigarette pack against his thigh, set one between his lips and managed the lighter in only a few tries. A greater plume of breath into the air now. He had to decide what to say at the hearing. He had to have a plan. Otherwise he might end up in that room with Williams and freeze up. Stammer. Bolt the way he did at the clinic today. Worse. But what to say . . . The parole board would have the files, the records. They'd know what Williams had done in that farmhouse out on the eastern plains, and they'd know what he'd done in that control room during the riot. Those things alone wouldn't stop them from letting him out. There had to be more, something he could say, something he could make them see.

The security lamp lent a greenish cast to his skin. Wes held his right hand out before him, turned it palm-up. He liked the way the light made the skin seem not quite his own, the scars a little less real. The one in the middle of his forearm, third from his palm, that had come first. He remembered the smoke blown in his face, the laughter in his ear, the first touch of burning ash to flesh. But he wasn't sure he remembered the pain. Not well enough to put it into words that might let someone else think they could understand it.

Williams had found Wes's cigarettes in the desk drawer almost immediately, tossed his own aside in favor of the more expensive brand. Wes remembered watching from the corner of his eye, afraid to look directly at Williams. Seemed like looking a wild animal in the eye, better avoided. He hadn't hurt much yet. The crack over his head, the boot to his ribs, a fist to his face when he hadn't immediately responded to the sole question Williams had asked so far. (Why had he finally answered “Wesley” rather than “Wes”? Why the name Claire used?) Williams had a reckless way of moving, entirely without caution, and he smoked the cigarette with a certain brashness. He wore Wes's uniform shirt over his own T-shirt, and it was too big for him, the cuffs falling over his knuckles, close to the cigarette's lit tip. He seemed to be paying attention mostly to what was going on outside the control room—to the shouts and occasional screams, the ringing of metal on metal, the sickly scent of something burning—and Wes was glad. He was relieved that electric attention wasn't on him, hopeful he might be simply warehoused here, bound and uncomfortable but otherwise more or less unharmed.

“You must think I'm awful rude,” Williams had said suddenly. Hadn't looked at Wes when he spoke, and Wes seized that, pretended—childishly, pointlessly—that he didn't realize Williams was talking to him. Williams had walked slowly around the small room, to what would come to be his customary place behind Wes. Knelt behind the chair, leaned around to speak into Wes's ear. “I smoke this in front of you and don't share.” Blew a lungful of smoke across Wes's face. The cigarette appeared in front of him, still one or two drags left before the filter, tip smoldering gently. “Finish it off?” Williams pushed it toward his face, and Wes had tilted his head away, eyes on the far wall, lips pressed shut. Not yet knowing what was coming, exactly, not with certainty, but it was there, pushing at the edges of his consciousness, refusing to be kept at bay. He couldn't look, couldn't respond, because his eyes would betray his fear, and even his voice, ever trustworthy, might not protect him.

That laugh. That laugh he had never forgotten, low and languid. “Better put it out, then.”

Wes held his cigarette out in front of him now. It glowed hard in the dark, brighter for the absence of strong light nearby. He remembered the heat just before the cigarette had touched his skin. The moment before the pain. He remembered the scent of it, the smaller, closer acrid burn twinning with the stench outside the control room. He remembered the sound, the breathy hiss and crackle. But he didn't remember the pain itself. Not in his waking hours, anyway. There was a haziness cast over the memory of the worst pains, the details surrounding them sharp enough that the missing core went almost unnoticed. Maybe that was some gift of God, a gentle hand shielding the eyes of his memory from the harshest moments. But he
needed
those moments. Needed the worst of it, bright and present.

Claire didn't believe in an afterlife. Didn't believe she would be somewhere out there in the blackness, above in the stars, watching over him.

Wes pressed the tip of the cigarette to the unmarked flesh above his right elbow. Oh, yes. Yes. Now he remembered. The searing he'd tried to jerk away from even before feeling the brunt of the pain, the way Williams had followed his movements so smoothly, the strain of muscle against steel, the way the burning built and heightened and still Williams didn't lift the cigarette from his skin. Now he remembered the bracing, the way it had taken every physical effort, all the strength and discipline he could muster, just to stay silent. God, that such a small scrap of fire could cause such pain!

“Jesus, Wes!” A hand on his wrist, the cigarette no longer pressed to flesh, the glowing embers tumbling to the ground. Dennis was barefoot, too, and remembered it just as he went to grind the butt out, kicked gravel over it instead and buried the orange flame. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Now he remembered. Now he might put this into words. Now he had found the clarity he had sought. The man who had done this to him had done it not once, but six times. And when he tired of that, he'd tried a different sort of pain, and then another. Over and over and over. Laughing and laughing and laughing. The man who had done this to him was not deserving of parole. He was not deserving of forgiveness, or God's grace. He had not become someone else. The man who had done this to him could not have become anyone else.

“What the fuck, Wes?” Dennis's voice too loud in the night air. “What's wrong with you?”

“I couldn't remember what it felt like.”

Dennis knelt in front of him, looked into his eyes a long time. He'd sounded angry, but Wes saw now that he was scared. Sorry for that. Hadn't meant anyone else to know. Dennis took Wes's hand in his, turned it so the greenish light hit the new wound. Bare arms. T-shirt. Wes realized it at once, tried to stand, to pull his hand back, but Dennis held his wrist, then both his wrists. “Jesus,” he whispered.

“Give me back my hands,” Wes growled. Enough himself to make it sound like the order it was, to drive enough authority into the words to command obedience. Dennis dropped his own hands to his sides, took a step back, gravel grinding beneath his feet. Wes stood, crossed his arms over his chest. Scraped his knuckles against the fresh burn, but hid the grimace.

“I had no idea,” Dennis said.

“You know what he did,” Wes said. “I know you do.”

“Yeah, but I've never seen . . .”

“You were a kid,” Wes said. “I didn't want you to have to see that stuff.”

Dennis turned a slow circle, hands over his face. When he came around to face Wes again, he lowered his hands and dropped to a crouch in front of the porch. The gravel must've been sharp beneath his feet, but he didn't show it. “Don't hurt yourself anymore, Wes.” He looked up. “Okay? Please.”

Wes glanced down, finally nodded, so slightly. Dennis sighed, and Wes reluctantly sat again. Starting to feel the cold now. After a minute Dennis came to sit next to him. Easier that way. Didn't have to look right at each other. They stared together into the dark, listening to the horses, to the occasional crescendoing rumble of a tractor-trailer on the interstate.