Black River (6 page)

After a few pointedly silent minutes, during the last of which it looked to Wes like Dennis wasn't doing anything but running thoughts through his head, Dennis stood, shut his fencing pliers into the battered toolbox and started toward Wes with a careless, loose-jointed stride. On the other side of the fence, the black horse followed at a pace's distance. There was something awkward in the way the animal moved, a deliberateness to each step that Wes recognized.

“Wait here,” Dennis said, walking past Wes without even glancing at him. About enough to make Wes turn around and leave.
You're here for Claire,
he reminded himself.

Dennis headed for the outbuilding near the house, where Wes's father used to have his workshop. The black horse raised his head over the fence and swiveled his ears toward Wes. It was an old horse, he saw now. A smattering of colorless wiry strands tarnished his black mane, and short white hairs edged the long angles of his face. The hollows over his eyes were deep enough for a man to sink his thumbs into.

“You hear that fence now?” Dennis called from inside the shed.

Abruptly the horse stepped back from the rope, lifting his head high, and a short ticking noise sounded every couple seconds, regular as a metronome. “It's going.”

Dennis ambled back, pulling a T-shirt over his head. Wes felt Dennis's eyes on his long sleeves, on the sheen of sweat Wes knew must show on his face. He pushed his hands into his pockets. “Listen,” Dennis said. “Sorry about all that shit I said earlier. Should've kept my mouth shut.” He forced the words out like a nauseated man who just wanted to vomit already and be done with it.

Wes accepted the apology with a short nod. “These your animals?”

“This one is,” Dennis said, reaching a hand over the fence to gently slap the side of the black horse's neck. The horse turned, and Wes saw that while the near eye was normal, a deep syrupy brown, the far one had a white around it, like a human eye. It was unnerving, robbed him of the vaguely benevolent gaze most horses had. “His name's Rio.”

“You get him from Farmer?”

“Years back. That sorrel and the mule are his.”

Wes watched Dennis rub Rio's face, and thought it was a small miracle that a man who'd loved something so much as a child still loved that same thing so many years later. Most folks were mercurial in their passions, changing quick from one to the next, or they cultivated a whole slew of interests, parceling out a little time and energy to each in turn. Maybe to really love something you had to be born with it, had it pressed into your soul before you even took a breath, so that it was something you could neither explain nor deny. The fiddle was like that for Wes. For Dennis it was horses. When he was a kid he'd spend entire afternoons watching the broodmares slowly meander around Farmer's pastures, and his favorite toys were his plastic horses. He'd had dozens of them, and increased his herd every Christmas and birthday. All of them, Wes remembered, had names and complicated made-up histories that Dennis could recite on the spot and never varied. Once, he dropped one on the floor and its front leg snapped in two. Cried so hard you would've thought they'd had to shoot the thing in the head. Wes spent the night in his father's workshop, measuring and drilling tiny holes into each half of the broken leg and setting it with a pin and glue. Took three tries to get right, and he finished four hours before he had to go back to the prison. Put an end to the tears, though.

Wes wondered if Dennis remembered that. It had been a gray horse. Dappled gray. “We didn't talk about your momma yet,” he said instead.

“Right.” Dennis started walking back toward the house, didn't check to see if Wes followed. “Didn't take us long to revert back to form this morning, did it?”

“Guess not.”

Dennis reached the porch and turned. One corner of his mouth tugged into an ironic smile. “At least I didn't pull a gun on you this time.”

“Don't think I'm ready to joke about that, Dennis.”

His stepson sighed, a short exhalation like a bull's snort. He sat on one end of the top step, and Wes took the other. Yeah, the place looked good. Not much to criticize. It still felt like his house, though. Still felt like it belonged to him, like he might hear the creak of the screen door any moment now, like Claire might step out onto the porch and smile down at them, call them
my boys.
Like that last night and the gun and the eighteen years since hadn't happened at all.

“Got a cigarette?”

Dennis glanced sideways.

“You got nicotine stains on your fingers,” Wes said. “Probably ought to cut back, you're smoking that much.”

Dennis frowned, but he pulled a pack of cigarettes from his toolbox—Wes's old brand—and shook one out. He held it out to Wes without looking at him, like he'd just as soon let it drop into the dirt. “Mom said you quit.”

“I did.” Wes had to use both hands on the lighter.

“Want me to get that?”

“No,” he said around the cigarette, “I don't.” And finally the flame did catch and he pulled the smoke into his lungs. Didn't bring him the same easing of tension it used to. “I went to the cemetery this morning.”

“You said.”

“They can't bury her near Madeline. Full up or something.”

“They got spaces in the rest of the place, right?”

“It ain't nice enough.” Wes's fingers twisted over one another when he closed them—the doctors had a fancy name for that—so he held his cigarette with an open hand. Gave him a showy style that didn't suit him. “I thought instead we might scatter her ashes somewhere pretty.”

Dennis didn't say anything right off, and Wes took that for acceptance. He was glad of it. Didn't know if he could argue about this and keep his head.

The end of Dennis's cigarette glowed as he drew on it. He spoke without exhaling, so a bit of smoke escaped between his lips with each word. “There's a good spot up in the mountains,” he said. “It'll be best if we go up in the evening. Around this time.”

“Tomorrow, then.”

 

It rained hard during the night, though, and was still pouring the next morning. A good twenty degrees cooler than it had been, too. Happened like that sometimes. Summer one day, autumn the next. Winter not too far off. Dennis and Wes drank their coffee standing silent in the kitchen, and Dennis left for his first shoeing appointment.

After Dennis was gone, Wes made the drive to Elk Fork. They'd remodeled the hospital since he'd been there last—new tile on the floors, prettier colors on the walls—but it still assaulted the senses like any other medical facility. The disinfectant smell everyone liked to complain about didn't bother Wes much, but the sounds did: the rattle of metal casters as carts were pushed across tile; the dispassionate voices of the doctors and nurses; the breath-holding silences between the electronic beeps of monitors. Wes scanned the wide felt readerboard mounted near the elevator bank. Found “Oncology” out of habit, though Claire had never been admitted here. Fourth floor in this hospital. “Donation Center” was on the second.

He'd called ahead, and the staff seemed pleased to see him. In Spokane they knew him by name, but here he had to go through the full screening again. The paperwork took him a long while, and by the time he finished his joints were aching. They weighed him, took his temperature, gauged his blood pressure, pricked his finger and finally guided him back to the donation area, where a woman in pale violet scrubs appeared at his side.

“How are you this morning, Mr. Carver?”

“Just fine,” he told her, because that's what you said.

She sat on a padded stool beside him, and he watched her eyes move back and forth over the sheet on her clipboard. Two years ago he would have called her a nurse, but he knew better now, knew she was a phlebotomist or a medical assistant. She was half his age, with curly black hair she'd piled on top of her head and fixed in place with a slew of bobby pins. The tag pinned to her scrub top said her name was Molly. She'd stuck a glittery sunflower sticker in the corner; it covered part of the
y.
“So,” she said, “it looks like you're a regular platelet donor over in Spokane.”

“Yes, ma'am.” He shifted, couldn't get comfortable. The chair was too like those in the infusion suite where Claire had taken her chemotherapy. In Spokane, Oncology was way up on the seventh floor, and he and Claire would sit facing the wide windows and watch the city journey through its day below, and she would hold one of his hands between both of her own as though he were the one who was sick. “You do single-needle apheresis here?”

The phlebotomist—Molly—looked up from her clipboard. Tried and failed to hide her alarm. “No. But—”

“It's all right,” Wes told her. “Just curious.”

“I'll be very quick with the needles,” she promised. “I'm gentle.”

Wes nodded. Let her think a phobia was the reason he'd rather not have a needle in each arm.

“It's wonderful you're here,” Molly was saying. She'd forced an incredible amount of enthusiasm into her voice, apparently still concerned he might bolt. “We always need platelets.”

“My wife had leukemia,” Wes said, without meaning to.

Molly stopped fussing with her tray of equipment and found his eyes for the first time. “I'm sorry to hear that.”

“She passed last week.”

Molly sat back down on the stool and touched his hand. “I'm so sorry,” she said. He could tell she meant it, and felt the sudden horror of tears forming in his eyes. Molly turned away, and Wes hated her for that small kindness, because in granting it she betrayed the fact that she'd seen his grief.

“She had a transplant, but she relapsed,” he said, forcing himself to talk through it, waiting for the constriction in his throat to ease. “We couldn't get her in remission again. She needed a lot of transfusions. I wasn't her blood type, but I figured if she was gonna be dependent on strangers, then I ought to do my part for someone else.”

“It's a wonderful gift,” Molly said, and Wes was relieved she'd retreated back to the usual banalities. She was ready, so he raised his right arm a few inches.

“Could use a little help with the buttons,” he said. “My hands ain't what they used to be.”

She seemed thankful to be faced with a concrete task, a physical task, and Wes watched her unfasten the small plastic buttons at his wrists. Nurses and other medical types were the only people he didn't much mind asking for help. They weren't squeamish about disability or deformity, and most of them knew what was their business and what wasn't. “I got it from here,” he said, once the buttons were free. “Mind getting the curtain?”

Wes waited until the green cloth was drawn around them. He hoped Molly might turn away to prep lines or needles, but she didn't, so while she watched he pushed his right sleeve up over his elbow and revealed the scars on the underside of his forearm. Six of them, spaced evenly from wrist to elbow, and impossible to mistake for anything but the cigarette burns they were. The left arm was worse, and Wes was careful not to look at Molly when he rolled up his other sleeve. Five letters carved into the flesh from elbow to wrist, each line thick and raised, lighter in color than the surrounding skin. The name still legible despite a crosshatching of newer scars defacing the letters. Impossible to see the muscle, the bone, the structure made strong and lean by a lifetime of fiddling. Impossible to see anything but that fucking mess of scar tissue.

To her credit, Molly didn't say anything. They usually didn't. Wes was long used to his scars, but he always felt an odd guilt for exposing them to the donation center employees, as though he were foisting knowledge upon them they hadn't asked for and would rather have done without. He waited in silence while Molly tied the tourniquet around his right arm and ran her fingertips over the skin at the inside of his elbow. He held his breath at the rough, cool touch of the alcohol swab. Acknowledged the warning of “Here comes the poke” with a brief nod. Waited while she repeated it all on the left arm.

It was hard for him. The riot had done a number on his body, but Wes liked to think he'd come through it with his mind relatively intact. He hadn't had a breakdown. Hadn't been reduced to a nervous wreck. Hell, he'd even gone back to work at the prison for two more years. But there were things. Small things, mostly, almost embarrassing in their predictability. He liked his back to the wall, always. He'd taken to carrying his father's old pocketwatch because he could no longer tolerate the feel of anything tight around his wrists. And sitting in a chair and letting people lay their hands on him—that was damned near impossible. He'd never minded the dentist before the riot, but afterward he'd dreaded each appointment and finally quit going altogether. Asked Claire to cut his hair so he could avoid the barber. Even these platelet donations, strictly voluntary, were difficult; sometimes he was turned away for the day, his blood pressure having rocketed the moment he sat in the chair. He'd hoped, at first, that forcing himself to face this particular fear so often would ease its hold on him, but so far it hadn't happened. His palms still sweated. His stomach still churned. His heart still raced.

Molly arranged the lines and started up the machine. She offered him magazines and movies, which he declined, and she left him alone with promises to check on him frequently. Wes listened to the mechanical rhythm of the machine and looked where the reclining chair pointed his eyes, at the join between the green curtain and the ceiling. The fabric was pale, a sickly sea green, the same color as the U.S. Forest Service trucks that barreled down Montana's back roads, the same color as the corridors leading to the warden's office in the old prison.

Almost two hours he sat there, while the machine beside him whirred and clunked, spinning his blood into different components and giving some of them back to his body. The gentle weight of the plastic tubing on his skin reminded him his arms were bare, but he didn't look. He tried to be still. He tried not to think. Should've gotten easier, but it got harder, so by the time Molly sat back down on her stool Wes was just barely holding back from tearing the needles out of his arms. But he nodded, and thanked her when she buttoned his shirt cuffs, and made another appointment.