The Signal (11 page)
Authors: Ron Carlson
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Married people, #Literary, #Western Stories, #Westerns, #Marriage, #Ranchers, #Wyoming, #Ranchers' spouses
An hour later in their miserable motel, he watched himself bandage the hand and it was the same deal, such imprecision. Trisha ran tape in loops around it until he stopped her. She wanted to go out and so they went, ending up at a biker bar called the Silver Trail. Mack kept his hand in his jacket and he could feel his heartbeat there as the flights of drinks arrived. Trisha was pissed that he wouldn’t dance and went out and leaped around, purposely bumping into the big men in their Levi vests. She was drunk, but she was always drunk, and Mack could see it was going to be one of their all-nighters. He’d stayed up with her plenty, because going to bed was bad. He couldn’t lie there and wait for sleep because everything else came up for him and he had been shown he was a coward in those times. But then an hour later in the Silver Trail she was in a kissing contest hauling with some other woman at two or three men at a side table. “Don’t your old man care that you’re over here on top of me?” one of the men called out. “You’ve got more tongue than the devil’s sister.”
Mack held up his hand from across the room. “No problem.” He knew that was always a lie, but he repeated it. When Trisha saw his hand up that way, she went crazy. She turned back to the man as if to deepen their kiss and then she swung, raking his face with her nails and screaming. She started flailing her skinny arms, but the man threw her out onto the floor. Mack didn’t move, and he knew everything and saw it all at that moment when he didn’t stop the man, who got up and kicked Trisha and then walked around to where she had squirmed on the floor and he kicked her again. Mack himself was drunk, but he knew he couldn’t carry any of this. He had five hundred dollars folded in his pocket and it felt like poison and he had ruined his hand and he had not helped the girl who never once in the four months he knew her had helped herself. When he stood, he did it so that the man could come and hit him too, but the moment had passed and the bar-tender’s wife had hauled Trisha to a booth and was holding a towel to her mouth. He showed Trisha the wad of cash money and slid it into the front pocket of her jeans, and he was going to say goodbye, but seeing her eyes, he could not say anything.
It was his worst moment.
Ten days later Wes Canby found him outside a steakhouse in Jackson and they had a talk in Canby’s black Toyota pickup. “You can’t quit,” he told Mack.
“Yeah, I can,” Mack said. “I do. I quit. I’m no good for it.”
Then Canby did something that Mack had been waiting for. He reached and pulled a blue velour from under the seat and unwrapped a pistol. It was a little black automatic of some kind. The gun, as Canby took hold of it, did nothing to him. He opened the door of the vehicle. “A gun,” Mack said. “Not much to shoot here, but you can shoot if you want.” He was standing on the ground with his back to Canby.
“You did a job on Trisha,” the man said.
“I know it.” Mack turned. “We both did.”
“She’s dead.”
“She is not.” Mack said it without thinking.
“In her cell in Cheyenne.”
Mack put his hands on the truck seat and looked up at Canby. “If I see you again,” he said, “I will kill you. Daylight, town square, I don’t care.”
Weston Canby smiled. “You’re a waste of time, sonny. You should take a minute and consider how things really work. You’re tied to me ten ways.”
He gave in to the shadows in his memory and followed them, thinking this moment was worst, no this, and finally knowing it was when he realized that Vonnie had left, found shelter and more with her old friend Kent. Mack stood with his sickening dictionary and it was the worst moment. The truth was that his worst moments made a long string, and when he finally hit the wall drunk in Jackson, he’d come to long enough to find Kent’s car and break the windshield with a tire iron, which seemed a lot more work than it should have been and gave Mack the thought right in the middle of it,
I’m out of shape here, mister—breathing like a lumberjack while I break a glass window?
He was a ruin and when taken to jail, he had vomited in the tank all night, the dry spasms finally cramping his back, feeling in the aftermath a bruise warm like the hand of his lost father. Mack lay in the foul dark place and his hands were scarred and grimy, the cuticles bloody and the scratches a black scribble.
I’m out of shape here, mister—breathing like a lumberjack while I break a glass window?
He was a ruin and when taken to jail, he had vomited in the tank all night, the dry spasms finally cramping his back, feeling in the aftermath a bruise warm like the hand of his lost father. Mack lay in the foul dark place and his hands were scarred and grimy, the cuticles bloody and the scratches a black scribble.
Night came in purple layers. Mack had walked out to the promontory over the black lake so he could look back at the campsite, the tent, the little fire, the spot of his dishtowel. He tried for a star but knew they would only come out all at once and when he looked away. Above a dark lake at night in such a place, it is hard not to think of all the thousand years before and those to come a thousand thousand, regardless of your troubles. Is that it? he thought. Is that what this place does for me?
The fire was a pulsing mound of coals now and Mack fed it up again for the light.
He buttered two slices of pita bread in the frying pan and warmed them.
“I’m cooking here,” he whispered.
Her face appeared and she said, “Perfect.”
“Are you cold?”
“Not really.” She came by the fire and sat on the flat stone. “I fell asleep.”
“You want some wine?”
“No, I’m a little dizzy already and I’ve got the headache.”
“Drink this,” he said, handing her the green punch.
“Bug juice,” she said. “A cure-all.”
Mack tugged the foil-wrapped fish from the fire and opened each package gingerly on paper plates. The fish fell apart under their fingers bite by bite and they ate the burned bread and drank the whole quart and then another of the green-flavored punch.
“Were there rocks in the Garden of Eden?” he asked.
“Is that where we were?” They were pinching the trout in the dark and eating it.
“Did that girl really have red hair?”
“She did. A big girl with red hair.”
“That’s enough information. I’m tired.”
“I ate that fish,” she said, lifting the skeleton up over the fire and dropping it there.
The night was still and clear and the stars had now all appeared and tripled. They seemed to be stepping closer. “Clear and cold,” he said. “You want in the tent?”
“I’m good,” she said. She set her paper plate and its tangle of remaining fishbones in the yellow fire and their faces were lit again. “But I’m all in.”
“We’ll have bear claws for breakfast.”
“And your coffee.” Vonnie got into her sleeping bag and he saw her squirm out of her clothes and her face disappeared. He burned his plate and caught the ashes.
The screen of the BlackBerry said: Logan Peak E or N. Check. He typed back: Will do am. And then he crawled into the old tent.
Hours later he felt her, the sleeping bag first and then her in it, bumping him knees and back.
“Who is it?” he said. Then he said, “You okay?”
“Yes, it’s just cold.”
“Oh my, you came into the tent,” he said.
“Nothing,” she said. “Shut up. Kent knows me.”
“He’s lucky,” Mack said. “Did you wipe your feet?” She shifted and settled against his back and was quiet. “You want me to tell you a story?”
“The cannibal story?”
“No. He wasn’t a cannibal. He ate baked fish and bear claws and was very lonely. He was looking for something.”
Vonnie was quiet.
“Is that your heart or footsteps?”
“Mack.”
“Listen.”
“No story,” she said.
“He lived in these same woods,” he said. “As sad and wrong as you get to be.”
“You listen, you shit. He wants
you.
Those are his footsteps coming for
you.
”
you.
Those are his footsteps coming for
you.
”
Then her breath was the breath of the sleeping, and he moved back so she was there, and he closed his eyes and started to say a prayer that also became sleep.
Day Four
Dawn wouldn’t come and finally Mack crawled out and saw why: the sky was a solid bank of cover, the gray clouds stuffed tight wall to wall. They’d been loading the sky all night. Because of the overcast the early day was warm and he walked out in his boxers and his unlaced boots to pee. There was no frost and he could smell the pines and the lake. He would check Yarnell’s reading when they were up at Clark. It was his last full day with Vonnie and it was at him, his heart, the way he knew it would be. He’d had a bad ten months and now he was better. He could almost accept it; he could get through a day. He went back and knelt, working his tinder fire.
“Get dressed,” Vonnie said from her sleeping bag in the tent.
“I’m starting the fire,” he said. “You want to eat, no?”
“Put your pants on.”
He pulled his clothing from the tent and looked at her. “You warm enough?”
“Perfect,” she said. “Thanks for the shelter.”
Seeing her in the old tent in the gray day required him to turn and open the cooking kit. He’d been surprised about how all of it operated in his body, sharp moments everywhere, primarily in his stomach, but also his upper back and forehead. He’d cried most of a month and that place was still weak. Mack built the fire up into a smokeless orange torch, two feet, and let it shrink so he could place the wire rack over it on the rocks. He set the coffeepot on the grill and a pan of water and when the black frying pan was warm, and the butter started to wander, he laid in the two golden bear claws and cracked his six eggs around them.
“You’re cooking,” she said. He took the warm water over to her in the tent and handed her the clean dishtowel. She sat up in her sleeping bag and covered her lap with the bundle of her jacket and jeans and she washed her face in the gray morning. “I’m stiff,” she said. “Aren’t you?”
“Gimme,” he said, drawing her blue wool shirt from her hands and holding it before the fire, front and back and front again. When the inside was warm he took it to her and she put it on.
“Thank you, sir,” she said. “That’s nice.”
“We can stop at Mowram’s tomorrow on the way to town,” he said.
“They’re closed.”
“I’ll call him.”
“I’m not getting in a hot pool with you.”
“Vonnie, you can trust me. Look, you’re in my tent.”
“Mack, I came up here. And I’m glad I did. I trust you. I guess. But this trip is it. You know that.” She rubbed her ears hard and handed him the towel and smiled, all clean. “I’ll see you in town.”
He said, “From time to time. Maybe at the post office. I’ll carry your packages.”
“No you won’t.”
“This mess is ready,” he said, showing her the fry pan. “Let’s eat.”
She dressed and came out into the dark day. “Rain,” she said. He doubled the paper plates and handed her one with a fork. “One stop shopping,” she said, looking at the pastry and eggs. “I’m not set up for rain, but maybe it will hold off.”
“Maybe it will snow,” he said. “We’ll have to camp in, have you trust me all winter.”
The sky was a gray pillowed gridlock. They ate the eggs and tore the warm bear claws into sections which they dunked in the strong milky coffee. Mack wiped out his pans and handed Vonnie his plates. “Here, you do the dishes.” She slid the egg-smeared paper plates into the fire. He stood up and looked out over the sullen sheet of Valentine Lake. “Well,” he said. “Let’s get ourselves up to Clark and close this party down.”
They packed daypacks and rejoined the main trail, walking a mile and a half to the wooden bridge over the Wind in the long meadow. Sitting on the logs, they shook out their boots and retied them. “Oh my,” Mack said. He pointed to a thick line of white smoke above them in the river valley, rising and knotted and turgid in the overcast. “The undergraduates are having a big breakfast.”
“They need a lesson from you in campfires.”
He stood. “Let’s go around. We can go up to Lower Divide Lake and over from there.” The smoke drifted now along a distinct ceiling through the mountain valley. They turned and followed the main trail east past the Forest Service sign for Little Joseph Lake and on to the unmarked foot trail to Upper Divide. This side of the mountain cirque was open, tall brush, grass and willows ascending through a broad marshy drainage. There were plank and log bridges in the low places and in the warm close day they could smell the sweet marsh grass and pine. It felt good again to walk and they didn’t talk. About halfway up Vonnie stopped him with her open hand on his chest. He’d been watching his feet and he looked up to see the moose, a cow right next to the trail. She lifted her head and looked over her shoulder at them, chewing. Her coat was lush this late in the season, deep brown, and her eyes were calm. She chewed and held the stare. After a full minute Vonnie pushed him back and they retreated to a place where they could go up and around. They didn’t speak even regaining the trail on the other side of the meadow, climbing now through the switchbacks on the last hill below the lake.
“A lot of detours on a day,” she said.
Upper Divide was a ten-acre lake lined on the upper side by the rock slope. Mack and Vonnie followed the overgrown trail along the lake’s edge to where the trees gave onto the talus. She sat on a block of granite and pulled out her canteen. Mack sat.
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