Black River Part 12

"Dennis got a good chunk of my pension in the mail every month," Wes said. "He didn't have to pay rent on no apartment, either. And it was still hard on him. Dropped out of school in the end."

Wes expected Scott to argue, but he didn't. "I told my mom that if I can't go back alone, we should go together. She doesn't like it here, either."

"And?"

"She won't do it." Scott was clenching the neck of the fiddle so hard Wes wanted to reach out and take it from him, but he forced himself still. "She thinks my dad needs us here." Scott laughed bitterly, and the sound was choked off as if he were crying, though what Wes could see of his face was dry. "He needs us. What bull. He doesn't care. If he cared, he wouldn't have gotten in a fight a month before his f.u.c.king release. If he cared, he'd think about what it might be like for me to spend every single day with kids who think they can s.h.i.+t all over me because their dads guard my dad." He spun on his heel, stared right at Wes-there was that glare-and swung the bow toward him like a weapon. "h.e.l.l, if he actually gave a rat's a.s.s about me, he wouldn't have gotten arrested in the first place, would he? Would he?"

Wes felt reflexive anger trying to rise, but he forced it down, kept his hands in his pockets, his gaze level. Carved the edges off his voice so it was steady and low. "What do you want me to say, Scott? You want me to tell you life always works the way it ought to? That hard things never happen to folks who don't deserve them? That fathers always look after their sons the way they should?" He honed his voice, let it come a bit sharper. "I will, if you want. I can lie with the best of 'em. But you'd know it ain't true. And I can't fix that stuff. Wish I could, but I can't. What I can do is teach you the tune that fiddle knows best. It ain't much, I know that, but it's all I got."

Scott stayed quiet for a minute, but his white-knuckled grip on the fiddle loosened a little. A train whistle sounded through the canyon, fading even as it reached Wes's ears. A name for that sound. High lonesome. "I want to learn it," Scott said finally.

Wes nodded. "Good."

"We can go inside," Scott said, jerking his thumb toward the trailer. "My mom won't care."

"You ever tried playing that out here?" Wes asked, lifting his chin toward the fiddle.

"No."

Wes turned a slow circle on one heel, gave himself a panorama of the risen earth, the abbreviated sky. "I kinda hate these mountains," he said. "Make me claustrophobic, I guess. Feels like there ain't no way out." He stopped, facing Scott, saw that the kid felt it, too. "But that fiddle don't sound half so good outside this canyon."

"Because of the acoustics or whatever?" Scott sounded doubtful.

"Could be," Wes said. "Could be something else. All I know is I've played all over Montana, indoors and out, and it sings best here." He stopped, suddenly embarra.s.sed. Sometimes his yearning for his lost music came out this way, without his intending to share it. Mostly it used to happen only in front of Claire, who always understood and never judged. But Scott didn't seem to share his embarra.s.sment, appeared to take his words at face value.

"Okay," he said, "but I'm freezing my a.s.s off. If we're gonna play out here, I have to go get a sweats.h.i.+rt."

Wes took the fiddle and bow from him, and Scott disappeared around the front of the trailer. Wes walked to the lawn chairs, settled himself into one. It sank and creaked beneath his weight. He held the fiddle upright on his knee, the way he used to during breaks in practice, let the bow lie across his thighs. It was so tempting to put it beneath his chin, to bring bow to string. It was tuned now; he could draw open-string notes from it, maybe even one or two stopped notes before his fingers gave up. Might be able to coax the first couple notes of "Black River" out of it. Might be able to pretend for a few seconds he could still do what he'd always loved best. But Wes kept the fiddle where it was, waited for the eager readiness to dissipate from his hands and body.

The kid must've been trying on half his wardrobe. How long could it take to pick one black sweats.h.i.+rt from half a dozen others? Wes tried not to feel the fiddle beneath his fingers. He listened to the train rumble past. He could see it through the trees lining the road: dulled blocks of color flas.h.i.+ng by steadily, one after another. Wes found his foot tapping to the rhythm of metal grinding over metal. Lots of songs about trains.

Scott came half jogging back from the trailer. "Sorry," he said, tugging the sweats.h.i.+rt over his head. "I guess my mom washed it, and I couldn't find it." He held out his hands, and Wes wasn't sure whether he was glad or sorry to hand the fiddle over.

"You know this tune pretty good?"

"Pretty good, yeah." A little color in his cheeks. Been listening to it a lot, then. Wes felt a hint of that same prideful pleasure he used to feel when people below a stage called for the tune by name.

"All right," he said. "Today I just want to go through the first melody line, okay? Just like this." He sang the first part of the tune softly, wordlessly, the first gentle rise and fall of notes. "Key of G. Start on open D."

Scott was eager-and he wasn't fibbing; he knew every note-but he attacked "Black River" the way he did the old-time dance tunes Wes had been teaching him, all rhythm and no elasticity. It was a beginner's way of playing-a talented beginner, yes, but still a novice-and Wes wondered if this had been a mistake, if it was simply too soon. The fiddle sang dutifully, and it rang nicely in the open air, but Wes knew it was capable of so much more than nice.

"Gently," he told Scott. "You want to draw the note like you're spinning it out of thin air." He rose from his chair and knelt beside Scott's. Carefully he rested his right hand on the back of Scott's, helped him guide the bow across the strings. And there they were. The first of his notes. He felt them resonate through horsehair and wood, as surely as if his hand had been the one touching the bow.

"Whoa," Scott said.

Reluctantly, Wes let go, sat back in his own chair. "Again."

Slowly it came to him. Slowly the sound Wes remembered returned, the fiddle's true voice filling the canyon, building and rising with the mountains, inhabiting the air. Sometimes Scott got frustrated-"Don't you get that most folks playing as long as you are still mucking their way through 'Oh! Susanna'?" Wes asked him at one point-but more often he got it right, or close to right. Didn't sound quite the way it did in Wes's head, of course. "Black River" had been, and always would be, Wes's tune first and foremost, his almost masterpiece, the song he heard in his head every day of his life, the notes he felt waiting in his fingertips every hour of the day. But Scott was going to have his own way of playing it, and it would be worthy. They played together for almost two hours-two hours for a single melody line, not even a quarter of the whole tune-and Wes thought about stopping only when he realized the winter-white sun had already sunk below the high horizon of the mountains. He let Scott play it through once more, and he watched his face and saw the way the music transformed this boy, saw that he had been right in coming here with nothing more than a song, that it was enough for Scott as it had been enough for him. Saw that he had done something good.

Enough indulgence. Enough of letting Bobby Williams drive him from sleep. Enough surrendering to the queasy memory of fear. Morning came and Wes was up with Dennis, the sun still closer to the east end of the canyon than the west. He drank his coffee, added a gla.s.s of orange juice to spike his blood sugar and got into his truck. It was just late enough he missed most of the commuters heading toward Elk Fork, and he had the interstate mostly to himself. Near Milltown a slew of police cars and ambulances flew past in the eastbound lanes, lights spiraling but sirens silent. Montana had its share of bad wrecks-the roadsides all littered with tiny white crosses-and Wes guessed they were headed to another. Even so, he drove as fast as he thought he could get away with-he missed the days when the official posted speed limit was simply "reasonable and prudent"-and cranked the radio louder than he usually liked it. Anything to keep up his resolve all the way to town.

Lord, it made him angry. The riot was twenty years gone. It had lasted just thirty-nine hours. Thirty-nine of the worst hours of his life, yeah, but still less than two full days. Didn't seem right that a few hours, however miserable, should still have such an effect on him so many years later. Plenty of folks had endured worse; he knew that. In some ways-not many, but some-he'd even been lucky. He'd heard rumors at the academy of what inmates sometimes did to COs during riots. Williams, twisted as he was, at least hadn't been interested in that. And all a man had to do was read the paper-any paper, any day-to realize that there was no shortage of people doing terrible things to other people. You picked up. You moved on. Wasn't quite that simple, maybe, but there was nothing stopping Wes from going to the hospital and asking for Molly and sitting quietly for a couple hours so he could do some good for another person.

Except when he got to the donation center, the receptionist told him Molly wasn't there. "She came in this morning," she said, "but she went home sick. You just missed her."

Wes set his palms flat on her desk. It was moments like this that made him a little glad he had so much trouble believing in G.o.d; he didn't like to think a higher power would toy with him this way. "She won't be back?"

The receptionist took a second look at him. Something came down behind her eyes, but he couldn't tell if it was guardedness or pity. "I don't think so, sir." She glanced behind her, toward the donation area. "Emma could help you, though?" It came out a question, and the receptionist seemed relieved when, after several seconds, Wes nodded.

Emma was younger than Molly, and a little skittish. Wes didn't mind. Made him feel like he ought to take care of her, and that made it easier not to think about himself. She helped him with his b.u.t.tons, and Wes rolled his sleeves himself, careful to keep the fresh burn on his right arm hidden. His scars startled Emma, and she hid it badly. Her voice jumped an octave, and her smile broadened into a rictus. Twice she dropped needles on the floor, and when she had the lines in place and asked if he'd like a magazine, Wes took pity on her and said yes, he sure would. She brought him half a dozen, Field & Stream and Popular Mechanics and People. He spent the next two hours dutifully flipping through them, reading about deer rifles and glossy cars and celebrities he'd never heard of, half afraid that Emma, in her nervous enthusiasm, might quiz him later.

Wasn't easy. Oh, he wanted to bolt. But he didn't, and when Emma came back for the final time and pulled the needles and taped cotton over each elbow, he was glad he'd stayed. It wasn't any sort of victory over Williams, not really, but it felt a little like one. The trial of it must've shown on his face, though, because Emma decided he looked too pale, and despite her jumpiness and his protests, she insisted that he stay another ten minutes and eat a pair of off-brand cookies.

He left the hospital feeling almost good. Maybe after school let out, he'd track down Scott again and try to teach him the next part of "Black River." Might be a little too soon, a little too challenging for his skill level at this point, but the kid had surprised him before.

He was almost to Milltown when the ambulance pa.s.sed him in the opposite lanes. No lights, no siren. No reason to notice. Just that he'd come from the hospital. Just that he'd seen another ambulance going the other way this morning.

It was gonna be a pretty evening later. Cold, but in that clear, crisp autumn way that seemed like a last gift before winter hit. Maybe he should swing by the IGA before going back to the house, grill up some burgers for him and Dennis tonight.

The police cars came from behind, when he was a few miles from Black River. The first hit its siren to alert him, an abbreviated whoop, and he slowed and pulled half into the breakdown lane. The next came a few minutes later, the third another minute after that. He'd been going almost eighty; they were going faster. Wes felt familiar tension settling back over his shoulders, tried to shrug it off. No reason to worry about a few cop cars. Wrecks all the time on the roads here. Hunting season. Folks starting up their woodstoves after the summer off. All kinds of calamity in the world; it wasn't all coming for him. But each time one of the police cars pa.s.sed and Wes slowed, he held his weaker speed when he pulled back into the travel lane.

Slower.

Slower.

Slower.

He didn't drive through town. Didn't continue through the canyon to see what it might show him. When he got back to the house, the wind was blowing from the east, and it brought with it the high wail of a single siren, fractured against the mountain slopes. Dennis was sitting on the porch steps, and Wes wished he didn't have to go to him. He was still in his horseshoeing clothes: the heavy boots, the plaid flannel s.h.i.+rt with its tattered, turned-up cuffs. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped between them, and he looked like he was both waiting and not waiting. If Wes hadn't known better, he'd have thought Dennis was praying.

Dennis didn't look up when he approached, though Wes walked slow, the way Farmer had on that first day back in Black River. His stepson's face was still, so still. Eyes downcast but seeing something other than gravel and dirt. Wes wanted to leave. He feared this knowledge he didn't yet have. Maybe if sharing its burden could help Dennis, if it could soften the hard, weighty mask of misery that had taken hold of his features, Wes would have been more eager to ask. Since Claire's death, though, he often felt dangerously fragile, just a hairsbreadth from losing control.

The siren died abruptly, the echo lingering a few seconds more before succ.u.mbing to silence. "What is it?" His voice was too loud, compensating for his dread. "Is it the prison again?"

Dennis looked up sharply, like a hawk that had spotted prey. "The prison," he repeated. He stood, a slow unfolding of his body. Walked toward Wes, stopped, moved a few steps left, a few steps right. "It's not always about the f.u.c.king prison, Wes. Not every G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing that happens in this town is about the f.u.c.king prison." Both hands to his forehead, pus.h.i.+ng back through his hair. "Or maybe it is. Maybe it is. I don't know."

Wes felt his protective instincts evaporate. The pacing, the hard glint in the eyes, these things belonged to the Dennis he had known years ago, the Dennis he didn't trust and didn't like. "What's happened?" he asked.

Dennis tapped a cigarette from a nearly empty pack and cupped his hands to light it. He held the smoke in his lungs for a long time, exhaled in Wes's direction; the wind carried it away before Wes caught the scent. "Tell me something," Dennis said, turning his hand so he could see the tip of the cigarette. "When Williams burned you, did you scream?"

"What did you say to me?" Wes's voice low, the dangerous kind of low Dennis ought to have recognized.

His stepson moved close to him, too close, his face just inches from Wes's. "Did you scream," he repeated, "when Williams burned you?"

He'd clenched his jaw so tightly he'd cracked a molar. He'd pulled so fiercely against the handcuffs the metal sawed through his skin. He'd d.a.m.n near pa.s.sed out, his exhalations were so hard and his inhalations so shallow. But the control room was open to the tiers, and all the inmates would have heard, and Williams would have heard, and Wes knew his own voice was the last thing-the only thing-he still controlled, so the one thing he did not do was scream.

He shook his head, just slightly.

"No?" Dennis raised an eyebrow, though the eye beneath stayed cold. "Five cigarettes and you didn't scream?"

"Six," Wes said softly.

"Six," Dennis repeated, nodding to himself. "Right." He gestured toward Wes's left arm. A casual movement, one he had no right to. Shouldn't even know what was under that sleeve. "And what about when he cut you?"

It had been a different pain, easier to take in its way. Hurt more in the minutes and hours after than during, though the makes.h.i.+ft blade was dull enough it did plenty of damage on its way through flesh. The knife had frightened him more than the cigarettes. Williams sliced deep, and as he'd worked his way down Wes's arm toward the wrist, all Wes had been able to think was how close his arteries and veins ran to the surface. The blood slicked his arm-some dripped off the k.n.o.b of his wrist, the rest curved beneath the cuff and into the cradle of his palm before slipping between his fingers and onto the floor, with a sound that was subtly not like water. He'd been too afraid of that blade to move. Too afraid to scream.

"No," he said.

Dennis's eyes were starting to take on that wild, desperate edge Wes remembered from when he was a kid. From that night at the dinner table. "So you stayed quiet through all that," he said. "Can't say I'm surprised, Wes. Guess I expected nothing less." He nodded to Wes's hands. "What about the fingers?"

Williams had given him time to dread. Wrapped Wes's right pinkie in his fist, coiled and uncoiled his own fingers around it like a man getting a better grip on a golf club or a baseball bat. Bent Wes's finger back slowly until Wes felt the warning pains shoot all the way to his elbow. So he expected-but was not prepared for-what came next: the sudden wrenching, the pop and crack of bone and cartilage and tendon, the explosion of pain. He hadn't been able to hold it behind his teeth that time, so he channeled it into words, into the longest string of profanity he'd ever let pa.s.s his lips, all of it directed at Williams, who had hardly seemed to hear. It took him hours to break the rest of Wes's fingers; he'd snap one or two at a time, take hold of another but then let it go, whole, twist another he'd already ruined hours before. Wes's eyes crusted with unspilled tears, and later, when they came too fast to hold in, they streaked his face. When Williams broke his thumb, the pain so seized Wes he leaned over and retched onto the floor. He lost what little control he still had during those hours, witnessed the unwavering command he'd always held over his voice abandon him. He gasped. He swore. He begged. And yes, after Williams started in on his left hand-the hand that had always danced so easily up and down the neck of his fiddle-he screamed.

"Well?" Dennis asked, the word almost an accusation.

Wes reached out and grabbed Dennis's wrist in his left hand, closed his right around his stepson's index finger and forced it back far enough to hurt. He saw the brief flash of pain and surprise rise behind Dennis's mask before the other man forced them off his face. It didn't shame him. "You'd have screamed, too," he whispered.

Dennis s.n.a.t.c.hed his hand away from Wes-he did it easily, Wes's hands no match for Dennis's strength-and shook out his fingers once. "I've got no doubt of that," he said. "h.e.l.l, I'd have been hollering before the b.a.s.t.a.r.d ever touched me." He took a step back, and suddenly Wes felt he could breathe again. Let out a shuddering lungful of air. He could still feel the ghost of Dennis's finger in his fist, the landscape of calluses and half-healed nicks against his own skin. "I know better than to question your strength, Wes. Whatever's between us, I ain't ever been stupid enough to think I could stand up to half of what you've been through. But not all of us are you." He was pacing again, a few steps one way, a few steps the other. Arms crossed over his chest, eyes back on the ground. "Not all of us can hold it all in the way you can, Wes. We just can't. And you've never understood that. Never seen how hard it is for the rest of us, how we can only dream of that kind of self-control . . ." He was crying, Wes realized. Wet tracks through the dust on his face, a cracking voice losing the battle to conceal the sobs waiting to break through.

"Dennis," Wes said, as gently as he could, "tell me what happened."

His stepson stopped pacing. Looked up bleakly. "Scott took a gun to school."

Wes felt his gut contract, but he kept his features still. Better, maybe, if he hadn't, if he instead showed Dennis what he felt, but he didn't know how. Didn't know how to let that stuff show, and didn't know how to rein it in once he had. He swallowed, licked his lips. Held his voice steady. "Did he use it?"

Dennis shook his head. Sniffed hard and cleared his throat. "He pulled it out in one of his cla.s.ses," he said. "Threatened a couple kids with it. A teacher. I don't know what happened exactly. They're still piecing it together."

Wes wished Dennis would sit, so he could sit, too. Felt a little lightheaded. "Where is he now?"

Dennis looked at him. No expression.

"Scott," Wes prompted. "Is he still at the school?"

"He left," Dennis said. "I guess he only stayed five, ten minutes after he pulled the gun. They were looking for him everywhere. The sheriff found me out at Jim Filmore's place. Thought Scott might be with me, or maybe came back here." He looked around the property, as though Scott might be waiting by the workshop or leaning against the hood of the truck.

Wes didn't prompt Dennis again. He waited and listened to the wind blow through the heights of the pines. So quiet. Wished it could stay this quiet always.

"I heard the whistle," Dennis said at last. "Don't think I've ever heard it so long or loud."

"No," Wes said. "No. I don't want to hear it."

"It was the crossing on that forestry road out past the new prison." Dennis's words reduced to a monotone now, the way people's voices got when they weren't sure they could say what needed to be said. "No one thought to look there. That road doesn't go anywhere."

Wes went down on one knee, put a hand to his face. Curled it into a fist, once, twice, three times.

"Those freight trains don't run on a schedule," Dennis said, as though making conversation. "They'd have looked out there eventually. On a different day they might have found him in time."

The tears surprised Wes. He hadn't cried for his father. Hadn't even cried for Claire. Come close, yeah, real close, but he'd always held it in. Only the physical pain Williams had inflicted upon him during the riot had made him spill tears, and that was reflex, nothing more. But now there were two glistening dark spots on the gravel beside his boot, and when he pa.s.sed his hand over his face his fingers came away wet.

"I think it would have been instant," Dennis said. The words delicate on his tongue, like they might be easily damaged or torn. "Don't you? I don't think he felt anything."

Wes stood slowly. It was as though the pain and stiffness he always felt in his hands had spread throughout his body. Dennis was watching him, his arms still crossed, his shoulders hunched as though he were chilled. Those deep-set eyes Wes had never been able to trust were watching him, pleading. "Come on," Wes said, and put his hand on Dennis's back, between his shoulder blades. He guided him to the porch, and they sat together on the steps.

"I don't think he felt anything, do you?" Dennis asked again. He sounded like the child Wes barely remembered, the boy he had been back when Wes was a different man. "I think it was easy," Dennis said. "Don't you think so, Wes? That it was easy?"

Wes so wanted to take his hand back, but he moved it around Dennis's back to his far shoulder, and his stepson accepted the touch, leaned his whole body into Wes's, the way he had when he was very young, too young, probably, to remember. "Yes," Wes said. "I think it was easy."

After the riot, a makes.h.i.+ft memorial for Lane and Bill had sprung up outside the prison. Flowers and candles, letters and cards, photographs, the odd cross or whiskey bottle. Wes had never gone close enough to see any of it in detail, though it'd stayed there for months, long after he'd taken his first shaky walk back through the gate, the sutures from his second surgery still pulling at the skin of his right hand.

There was no memorial beside the railroad crossing on the forestry road. No flowers, no notes. It was the right place, though. A wide twist of metal in the tall gra.s.s beside the gravel track bed. A yellow tatter of police tape knotted to the pole of a crossing sign. Too many tire tracks in the mud. Wes parked at the edge of the road, half on the dirt, half in the long dying gra.s.s. He stepped out and flipped his collar up against the wind, jammed his hands into his pockets. He'd left Dennis at the kitchen table, a cooling cup of coffee at one elbow, the newspaper-still rolled-at his other. Half the headline visible: Black River Student Threatens.

The train had come from the east. Wes stood on a tie, squinted down the track. It didn't disappear behind the curve of the mountains for a good quarter mile. Scott would've seen it coming. Had to sit there in that little run-down car and see that light bearing down and hear the whistle and desperate braking. He'd have had time to embrace, or regret. Wes turned back to the west, walked toward his truck. The s.p.a.ces between the railroad ties glittered with hundreds of tiny pebbles of safety gla.s.s, strewn over the gravel like diamonds. Wes had a sudden vision of those bits of gla.s.s, bright against Scott's dyed black hair. Hard not to think of the mechanics of it all. The collision, the force, the folding of careless metal around fragile flesh. Through flesh.

He got back in his truck and turned the heat up high, but didn't put it into gear. He'd had to come out here this morning. Not so much to see the place, though Wes believed there was something that forever marked a place where someone had died. He'd felt it up on the trestle where his father had met his own train all those years ago, and he'd felt it walking past the spot on Two South where Lane had been killed, and he knew he would always, always feel it in the house in Spokane, if he went back there. And he felt it, as he'd known he would, here at this lonely railroad crossing. But that wasn't why he'd come. He was starting to know something he didn't want to know, had been starting to know it ever since Dennis first told him about Scott. He'd kept it at bay all through yesterday afternoon and all night, but he wasn't going to be able to fight it off much longer, and he knew he'd better not come to know it for certain while he was with Dennis.

Wes took his hands from his pockets, held them in front of the dash vent. He thought about the last fiddle lesson. The way the instrument had started to sing again, the way "Black River" began to take shape in the canyon for which it had been named. That long trip for the sweats.h.i.+rt.

He reached across the cab and lifted the latch of the glove compartment. It fell open easily. He took in the contents in an instant, looked again before letting knowledge root itself in his heart. Maps. A flashlight. Napkins left over from a fast-food restaurant. Registration papers, owner's manual, tire gauge.

No gun.

Dennis was gone when Wes got back to the house-his heavy horseshoeing boots and ch.o.r.e coat missing from the front closet-and he was still gone when the sheriff's deputy pulled up outside the house a few hours later. The dark green pickup coasted to a stop beside Wes's own truck; the weak afternoon sun reflected hard off the dark rack of lights atop the cab, and Wes squinted when he stepped onto the porch. The deputy was close to retirement age, his thick mustache and the short hair showing beneath his broad hat gone white. He walked stiffly toward the house, carrying a rumpled paper bag with a rolled-down top. He looked somehow uneasy in his uniform, though he must have worn it most of his life. "Mr. Carver," he said, and it didn't sound like a question.

Wes nodded.

The deputy reached the porch, extended a hand. "Deputy Randall Morrow," he said. "With the Elk Fork County Sheriff." The handshake was mercifully brief.

"I guess you're here about Scott."

Morrow s.h.i.+fted his weight onto his heels, put his hands on his heavy belt. The bag rested against his holster. "I understand you were close to him," he said. "I'm sorry."

"He stole the revolver."

Morrow looked relieved not to be the one to bring it up, but he frowned a little and said, "You should've called when you learned it was missing."

"Just realized this morning," Wes said. "Figured you boys would put it together in short order."

"Where did you keep it?"

"Glove compartment," Wes said. "Locked. Ain't exactly a gun safe, I know, but I never guessed he'd bust into it." That was true, Wes realized. He hadn't thought twice about letting Scott see where he kept the revolver.

"You really ought to keep your weapons better secured," Morrow said. His voice lacked conviction.

"Guess I know that now," Wes said evenly. He took a step back onto the porch stairs, so he was a couple inches higher than Morrow. Cheap trick. The deputy could've followed if he'd wanted to, but he stayed on the gravel.

After a minute, Morrow pulled the revolver out of the bag, handed it to Wes b.u.t.t-first. "That yours?"

Wes took the grip in his hand, turned it so the barrel shone in the light. He thought of this gun in Scott's hand, aimed at other people, other children. He wondered how the weight of it-the weapon, what it could do-had felt to him. Whether he had liked it. He wondered, too, whether Scott had taken the time to put the revolver inside the trailer before coming back to sit beside Wes and take up his fiddle for that final lesson. Maybe he'd instead kept it tucked into the oversized pocket of his sweats.h.i.+rt; maybe it had been there the whole time, that whole afternoon, waiting there while Wes deluded himself into thinking he was making a difference in Scott's life. Had it been that close, this secret?

"Mr. Carver."