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

More road. A silence more awkward than the last.
    This time Scott broke it. “Did Dennis tell you why my mom and I moved here?”
    â€œMight’ve mentioned it.”
    â€œThat’s good he told you, ’cause you were probably the only person in the whole town who didn’t know.”
    Wes glanced sideways. The kid was staring right at him, arms crossed over his chest. “You get to see your father much?”
    â€œMy mom makes me visit him every week. I wouldn’t call it a ‘get to’ kind of thing.”
    Wes could believe that. They’d tried, in a halfhearted sort of way, to make the visiting room at the old prison somewhat welcoming. There was a mural on one wall—a flat, childlike painting of the landscape that lay outside the gate—and a soda machine that dispensed off-brand cola. But no two ways about it, the place had been depressing as hell, and he doubted the new prison was any better. Wes never could decide what was worse: the visits where the inmate and his visitor sat stiffly, barely talking, or the ones where they held hands across the table and stared into each other’s eyes until you had to just about drag one or the other of them out. Scott, Wes guessed, was one of the former. The barely-talkers. But you could never tell.
    â€œSo what do you do?” Scott asked. “For a job.”
    â€œI’m retired.”
    â€œFrom what?”
    Wes steered around a flattened, sodden piece of cardboard in the road. “I was a musician,” he said. Sounded like a lie.
    The kid raised his metallic eyebrows. “Seriously?”
    â€œYeah.” He could feel Scott’s eyes on him and felt oddly nervous. Wondered if the kid could tell he’d been a CO, if it was apparent somehow in the way he moved, the way he talked. Sometimes it seemed that criminals could sense a cop a long way off; maybe it was hereditary.
    Scott leaned forward—for a moment Wes thought he was going for the glove compartment; he remembered the revolver and his heart seized—and punched the power button on the radio. Music filled the cab, accompanied by grating static. Never could get a clear signal in the canyon. “Country, huh?”
    â€œNot your cup of tea, I’d guess.”
    The kid surprised him. “A lot of it sucks. But some of it’s all right. The older stuff.”
    â€œI played the fiddle.”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œOld-time, mostly. Some bluegrass.”
    â€œI hear strings are hard.”
    â€œHard to do right,” Wes agreed.
    â€œI’m a singer.”
    Wes thought about that. Maybe the kid was a singer the way every kid thought he was a singer. They all wanted to be famous, stand at center stage with folks screaming their name and begging for autographs. Thought they could do it, too, with all the shows on TV now promising instant celebrity. Most of them had no idea how talentless they were. But something in the way Scott said it—plain, confident, no mitigating “kind of” or “pretty good” or even “want to be”—made Wes think there might be something to it.
    They came around a curve, and Black River spilled along the canyon before them. Not raining quite as hard here. The sun occupied a horizontal gap between cloud and mountain over the south slopes, and light glared off the wet asphalt. “I always thought if I was going to learn to play something it would be the guitar,” Scott said. “But maybe fiddle would be cool, too.”
    Wes didn’t say anything.
    â€œCan you still play?”
    He looked at Scott. The kid rubbed a thumb over his nose, across his freckles, and looked about five years younger than he had when he got into the truck. His eyes were on Wes’s hands, hooked over the yoke of the steering wheel.
    Wes didn’t answer him.
    Â 
    He and Dennis shared dinner that night, the first time they’d sat down together rather than stood over the