Black River by S. M. Hulse Read Free Book Online Page A

sharply, and Wes was afraid he’d frightened her. But Madeline wasn’t fragile, and her expression was bitter. “He’s gone. After it happened, our father went looking for Shane with his shotgun over his shoulder. He left town. Probably the state.”
    But Wes never quit searching for the name on the inmate rosters, never quit studying faces for one that looked like Dennis. A man who would force himself on a woman once would do it again.
    If Claire knew Wes had talked to Madeline, she didn’t say so. Wes tried to bring the subject up a few times, but she had a quiet way of refusing to answer his questions, of redirecting the conversation with a delicate absoluteness. At some point, around the time Dennis quit being a child and started being a teenager, Wes became gradually aware that the boy knew the truth about his father. Wes certainly hadn’t told him, but maybe Dennis had picked up on the same things Wes had. If he had gone to his mother, Wes knew, she would have told him the truth. She held things back from Wes sometimes, even lied to him on occasion—always lightly, always gently—but she had never seemed able or willing to do the same to her son. There was a bond between them as mother and child that allowed, or demanded, the frank discussion that he as husband wasn’t entitled to. There were other things over the thirty years of their marriage that Wes and Claire didn’t talk much about, that they avoided: the riot; that last night at the house; the decision to leave Black River. But Shane and what he had done was a forbidden subject the way nothing else was. There were just those few words, just that once:
His name was Shane. And for a while, when I was sixteen, I thought I was in love with him.
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    During the riot, Bobby Williams took his wedding ring. Slid it off Wes’s blood-slicked finger, raised it to the light, squinted one eye shut. “Is your wife pretty?” he asked. The ring palmed, gone. “I bet she is.” His breath hot and moist on Wes’s ear. “I bet she’s real pretty.” The words parceled out slow: “I wish she were here.”
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    Most of the folks in Black River who owned land ignored it. Maybe they kept a few chickens or goats, or grew a little hay, but most just let the land go to seed or used it as a repository for rusted, beaten cars and appliances that had long since stopped working. Wes had expected to see more of the same at Dennis’s, but if anything, his stepson had bettered the place. He’d replaced the siding on the house, painted the porch swing, graded the road, expanded the workshop, improved the pasture. When Wes went back to the house a few hours after his argument with Dennis, he found the other man on one knee beside a fencepost near the pasture gate, toolbox open at his side. He looked up when Wes pulled his truck into view, but turned his eyes straight back to his work. An Indian summer was beating down on the canyon, and Dennis worked bare-chested, yellow work gloves with dirt-blacked palms on his hands. He had the same body he’d had as a teenager, small but strong, all lean muscle, skin that looked tanned even in winter. Wes noticed a couple of tattoos: a ring of barbed wire around his biceps—the Montana special—and some kind of bird on his shoulder blade, a barn swallow, maybe. Wes tried not to judge. Lots of folks had tattoos these days. More did than didn’t, he’d read somewhere.
    Wes walked to the fence and waited, waving away a hardy late-season fly that buzzed around his head. Dennis had replaced the old barbed wire with three lines of braided white rope shot through with coppery threads, studded at each post with yellow plastic insulators. The red horse and the mule were at the far end of the pasture, heads down to the grass, but the black horse who had watched Wes so closely this morning stood easily a few feet beyond Dennis’s crouched figure, one