The Signal (10 page)

Read The Signal Online

Authors: Ron Carlson

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Married people, #Literary, #Western Stories, #Westerns, #Marriage, #Ranchers, #Wyoming, #Ranchers' spouses

BOOK: The Signal
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“You’re all nuts.”
“Come on, James. We’re swimming.”
Mack and Vonnie moved low over the hill, carrying their fish, and descended; they could still hear the voices, distorted and amplified by the water. “That’s too bad,” Mack said. “You caught a beautiful fish.”
“It’s okay. These two are giants. We don’t want another. What are four college kids doing in the Winds in September? Don’t they have class?”
“They’re after their merit badges.”
She looked down the slope to where the trees began. “Which way is it?”
They descended steeply down rock to rock, their knees working and warming. “Is it easier to climb up than go down?” Vonnie asked.
“I’ve heard people say it.”
“I’m saying it.” The forest was thick here, undergrowth, and Mack led them through the brush, holding branches, going wide around the deadfall. The trees grew bigger as they dropped down and the brush more sparse, and the walking became walking as he followed the drainage, ridge to ridge. They walked an hour as the shade gathered. They were out of the wind, but it was cooling, and they moved without talking. They stopped above a meadow full of elk, all cows, the bulls out of sight, and ate an apple.
“You hungry?” he asked her.
“Not really.”
“We’ll eat these fish tonight, if we find our camp.” They rose and walked around and then across a marshy wood through a rockfall, boulders big as rooms, the ground patterned with elk track.
“You know where we are, don’t you?” she asked him.
“I do,” he said.
“You’ve got direction in the woods like no one I know,” she said. “I’ve always loved that about you.”
“Thank you very much,” he said, “but let’s go down here first.” They stepped carefully down a broad screefall and into a vale of short pines walking among the trees, no trail. They ascended the far side and out into the scrub meadow, the last clumps of lupine and high mountain sage. Mack looked at where the sun now met the mountain and he checked his watch.
“It got late,” Vonnie said.
“We didn’t have a lunch,” Mack said. “I’m sorry.”
“We had one of Hagen’s bars and tea by the glacier,” she told him. “Who gets that?”
The shadows had thickened even as they stood and talked. The angle of light grew fragile; it made him want to hurry. It had always called to him, and now it hurt. You always felt time as a tangible heartbeat in the mountains. The days were short.
On one fishing trip when he was a boy, his father had talked about it, about how when you slept at eleven thousand feet, you were going so much faster than all the folks sleeping way below you back in the village.
“Faster, sir?” Mack had said.
“That’s it. We all go around as the earth turns,” he said. He circled a finger. “One day, sunrise to sunrise.” He went on. “But sunrise to sunrise in that one rotation, we’re way up here and we travel a whole lot further.”
“How much?”
“That’s for calculus to know,” his father had said.
Mack lifted his first finger to make a point. “You’re smiling.”
His father did smile now. “Okay, right you are, but it’s still true. Look around, son. You can feel it. Time up here is precious. You with me?”
“Yes, sir. I am.”
Now the mountain air felt rare again, the day lapsing. Vonnie put her hands out suddenly in recognition. “I know where we’re going,” she said. They stopped as they joined the highline game trail, and she knelt and picked up a large rock from a fall there. “Get your rock.”
“Right you are,” he said. And he picked up a stone as big as a football. They walked up the faint switchback trail, which Mack himself had made for the first time six years before, and they topped a hillock with three ruined ponderosas standing dead. They’d hauled a lot of stones that year.
The grave was as they’d left it, an oval of stones level in the grassy hilltop. The place was run with faded lupine. He could see Vonnie was affected by the spot and she stood with her stone and looked around at the great circle of the world. “Prettiest gravesite on earth,” she said. The air lifted her hair. She walked around and fitted her stone into the pile, saying, “Hey Scout,” and Mack laid his there too. The old plank he’d cut at home lay in the rocks, weathered. It said: SCOUT. A DOG.
“You want to say something?” she said.
“I’m glad we’re here. He was a good dog who loved to fish.”
Vonnie sat on the ground and drank some water from her water bottle. “We haven’t been up here.”
“Three years,” he said. “No, four.”
“You should get another dog,” she said.
“He had trouble not chasing a cast,” Mack said.
“I know all about it,” Vonnie said. “He could swim.” She handed Mack the bottle and he drank. “We’re making it quite a trip.”
“Well, we brought two more rocks,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“What was that?”
“What.”
She pointed: “A deer? No.” She laughed. “I thought I saw somebody.”
“Hiram,” he said.
“I’m tired,” she said. “That’s all.” She stood up.
They left the trail from the gravesite, crossing south off the hill and in half a mile they dropped onto a path and climbed three hundred yards of hard long uphill strides. Here it was very dark, the periphery run with narrow spears of sky. Then the trail veered off level under some pines, and they were standing in their perfect campsite, quiet and waiting above the blue blanket of Valentine Lake in the burnished late day. “That’s why I hang a clothesline,” he said.
“To welcome you home,” she said.
“So I can find the way,” he said. “But welcome home.”
Vonnie shook her sleeping bag and lay down on it, unlacing her boots. “You want me to cook?”
“No, I’ll do it,” he said. She lay and watched the sky, and Mack saw her eyes close. The sun was down behind the western slope.
He cut the heads from the trout and they were still too big for the pan, so he left the tails on and stuffed them with lemon wedges and pepper and butter and double-wrapped them in foil and set them aside. He knelt and fingered together a mound of tinder, moss, and hairy duff and lit it and fed it up, and the fire rose quiet and straight. When he looked up from his work, the day was gone, the mountain sky a bowl of glowing grainy dark. He snugged the fish into the coals burying them carefully by using a forked stick. Away from the fire it was chilly and he could hear her napping. He put his hand on her shoulder and she woke without a word, her eyes a sleepy kindness, and she crawled into her bag and napped again. Mack made a tour of the perimeter and gathered an armload of branches, using half now to stoke the fire. He broke and sorted the rest into piles close at hand. He shook up a water bottle with powdered lime punch and set it back on the rock shelf.
There you are, he thought. No trucks, no horses, no buildings big or small, just the fish and the fire and the sleeping woman. He wanted the math right, but the sleeping woman was not his sleeping woman and he could do things carefully from this night far into the unseen days, and it would all still seem borrowed.
When the darkness visited him, he tried to look it in the face. But it was darkness, so much of it opaque. He would have been the worst witness for the months behind. He’d had a headache or so it seemed for five years, always scraping by, eking out, scratching, and the disappointment yawned and wore at him, something he never honored by calling it a name. He just let it burrow in and work him, chasing him from job to job. When Vonnie would try to talk to him, he left the room and got a beer. She suggested he open the ranch again and that had him into the whiskey. She stopped, but he didn’t.
One night he ran into Weston Canby at the Silver Saddle after Mack had stood two weeks at a temporary flagman job at the entrance to the national park and he was parched and pissed off. They knew each other because Mack’s father had fired Canby years before. Mack had been thirteen or fourteen and Canby had been stealing firewood by unloading his trucks to the bed sill and then driving off with the balance. This was after he’d been asked to show his permit for taking firewood, and he’d fumbled, saying it was lost. Mack’s father let it go once and then stopped the truck exiting the gate the next week. Mack was there where he’d thrown a saddle on the fence bar to rig the stirrup.
“You forgot to unload,” his father said to Canby.
“Oh shit,” Canby said. “I’m sleeping.”
“No, you’re not. You’re fired. You’re stealing this deadwood from public lands and then stealing half from me. Let me add that up: two wrongs, Weston. You can’t go up and take things that aren’t yours. You’re making a bad start in business in this county.”
Mack had been startled by Canby’s coarse insult and he turned to see the man’s face burning as he tromped on the accelerator and roared out of the ranch in a blooming train of dust. For some years Mack remembered the look and avoided places in town where he saw Canby’s truck.
In the bar Weston Canby pointed at Mack’s face and said, “I got you a drink, flagman. I got you two.” Mack couldn’t work his knees, and he realized with all the workday dirt on the corners of his forehead that he had no position in which to stand, high horse or low horse.
Mack’s father, when offered a free drink in such places, would always answer, “No, thank you kindly. But the time and occasion may give me no chance to reciprocate.” Mack had no idea what that meant, but he knew, when he threw back the first of Canby’s tequila, that he had crossed the line. Canby folded a hundred-dollar bill under Mack’s palm and said, “Enough with the sun-drenched state highway work. I’ve got a special mission for you, my boy.” The feel of Canby’s hand on his shoulder was like a claw.
And so it began. He fought with Vonnie and thought such fighting was about being a man, insisting on doing it alone, his way, when in fact he was fighting himself and spoiling his house.
A week later he got a call from Canby and he picked up a rusty yellow Chevy Super Sport in Rawlins, certainly full of meth, and drove it to Gillette and a payoff of seven hundred dollars and a bus ticket home.
Vonnie was gone. He stashed the cash in his dictionary and took the next job. He’d been out driving this way for a month, and people had begun to call him for it. The fourth or fifth run he met Canby outside of Cody, and they talked the way they did standing outside a bar toeing the gravel, and Canby said, “I brought the boy a present.” He pointed to a brown hatchback parked there in the dark. “Go ahead now and have fun.” Canby’s throaty laugh.
There was a person in the car, Trisha. She was twenty-five, pretty and ruined, a full-out addict brittle and electric and she ran him for the next three months which astonished him now; he was a marvel of weakness to himself, and now he shook his head over the high mountain campfire.
Hooked up
was her phrase right off. “Now we’ve hooked up,” the term as ugly as he felt about it. “He’s done and now it’s you. What’s your name?”
Again he felt hollow, nothing in there to check him, put a foot down, stand up. And so he saw it was shame and went for it, caving utterly, crazy on the road then with this woman who never slept but quivered in her seat, her eyes half closed, and when she was awake, she was climbing him as they crossed the state with cars full and recrossed it, or she was sitting there staring, always with a tallboy can of beer between her legs. It didn’t take two weeks of such a life to have him drunk, the hole in him unfillable or so it felt, and he started throwing empties out the window, reaching for another beer.
Sometimes she’d climb on his lap while he drove and take his face in her hands and kiss him while he angled and squirmed to watch the ninety-mile-an-hour highway. Her eyes were too personal to look at, glassy and wrecked, but she could see him, he felt. She could see in. “Do you know who wins this kissing contest?” she’d say, going for his mouth again. “Do you? Do you know?”
“You win,” he’d say. “You win.” And he’d shake her off back into her own seat where she’d lift her tallboy in a toast. “I know,” she’d say. “I am the winner in that department.”
One night as they sped heedless through the oil fields, the flickering silhouettes of antelope on the shoulder for the highway salt and bunch grass there, she woke from being passed out on his shoulder and she said, “I know you have another girlfriend.”
It sucked the air from his throat, but he said back, “You’re not my girlfriend.”
She sat up and found another beer. It was always night in Wyoming then. “I don’t care. I’m just your hookup,” she said and her voice got tiny. “And this is the end of the world.”
He stuffed all the cash in the dictionary but knew as the season continued that even that would be no recompense. He’d lost himself.
In Cheyenne one night all they had to do was trade one small U-Haul trailer for another down at the rail yard and hitch it up, a job for which the hourly pay would have been nineteen dollars and he was getting five hundred for the risk. When he freed the delivery trailer, it dropped suddenly and pinned the back of his hand to the oily ground. He recoiled with the adrenaline and was able to bump it off with his shoulder, the whole trailer. There on his knees he took the first deep breath in six months and his eyes burned over with tears. His goddamned hand. He rolled over and sat back against the side of the trailer, his hand pressed tight in his armpit, and here came Trisha with a bottle of Wild Turkey swinging by the neck, medicine. “Oh, baby,” she said, kneeling on him, her bones sharp on the tops of his thighs, and he closed his eyes and saw it. These were addicts and drug dealers and they couldn’t even secure a trailer. Not one thing was done square. He took a slug from the bottle and felt it bite, and he pushed Trisha off as gently as he could and he held his hand up, meaty and swollen, a blue C stamped into the back. These were drug dealers. There wasn’t going to be fresh oil in the engines or good tires or a tight lug nut or any single thing done right. This was a
free fall at the shiterie.
His father said that at times when things ran careless. He said it at the rodeo anytime there was a problem with anybody’s tack or rope. You coil your rope in a hurry, you won’t have a chance.

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