The Signal: A Novel Part 1

The Signal.

Ron Carlson.

For Elaine.

Day One.

He drove the smooth winding two-track up through the high aspen grove and crossed the open meadow to the edge of the pines at the Cold Creek trailhead and parked his father's old blue Chevrolet pickup by the ruined sign in the September twilight. He had been right: there were no other vehicles. There had been no fresh tire tracks on the ten-mile ascent from the old highway except for the set of duals that had come almost halfway and turned around. That would have been Bluebride's horse trailer seeing to his cattle the week before. Mack had seen two dozen head scattered in the low sage all along the way. He got out of the truck and reached back for the coffee he'd picked up at the Crowheart general store an hour ago; it was cold. He walked back and opened the tailgate and sat, finally lifting his eyes to look east across the tiers of Wyoming spread beneath him in the vast echelons of brown and gray. It was dark here against the forest, but light gathered across the planet and he could see the golden horizon at a hundred and fifty miles. He wanted to see headlights, but there were none. He wanted to see headlights b.u.mping up the old road to meet him here, at the appointed hour.

He could tell that it had already snowed once, sometime last week, but there was no sign of it now, no patches in the deep shade, no mud in the tracks, but the country was blonder, the gra.s.ses still standing but bleached once, paler, as if slapped by the first weather of the season. Mack sipped the cold coffee thick with cream and looked for her car. She would come or she wouldn't come, and he would still have his mission. He said it aloud. "She'll come or she won't, but you're still going in."

He stood down and retrieved the brown fleece vest she'd given him five years ago, and he moved to the toolbox and got out his stove and set it up on the tailgate and filled his old pan half full of water and put it on the blue ring of flame. He pulled his pack off the front seat and knelt in the gra.s.s against the wall of trees and set up his old two-man, a blue and gray throwback twenty years old; he'd replaced many of the wands twice, but the zippers still worked. He threw his pad and sleeping bag into the tent and then laid the little raggy carpet sample on the ground at the entry. He'd been barefoot on it a hundred times in the mountains. Some things you carried in because they made sense. It was dark working there, but again behind the truck the light of the world fell on his shoulders. To the north he could see one corner of the highway so far below and those cars now had their lights on. He checked his pack for the electronics that Yarnell had given him: the military BlackBerry; he had it in foil in a small Velveeta box. He double-checked all his side pockets and then he unrolled his fishing vest and checked the nine pockets in it for all his fishing gear. He repacked and clipped his rod segments along the back, and then laid it all on the front seat. He was ready.

He took his bonus cooler, the old green metal Coleman from their dating days and knelt and pushed it under the truck behind the cab. They always did it, left a cooler full of goodies for the day out. He could hear the water roiling on his stove now and he walked back there and put in a finger loop of angel hair and then another. If she doesn't come, I'll eat double and sleep like a bear. He walked off and p.i.s.sed in the open meadow and lit one of his cheap wood-tipped cigarillos with his father's lighter, a Zippo that had been around the world twice in the old man's pocket on troop-ships. Mack was not scared. He had been uneasy and worried and scared and empty and sort of ruined, and he knew this, but now he had his ways of doing one thing and then the next and it kept the ruin off him. If she left Jackson by four, she'd be along in a while. If she hadn't left Jackson; well then.

She'd come down to the county jail a month ago where there wasn't a visiting room, and Zeff Minatas had brought him out to the coffee room and let them talk for twenty minutes. He could not look at her and after a full minute she said softly, "Well."

It took him three attempts to break through the whisper and say, "You bet. Now I'm in the ashes." Each tear cost him, but he could not with his breath prevent them. He hadn't been in a room with her all year and now the quiet in his heart burned again.

"You're going to climb out of this."

"Somehow," he said. He was talking straight down, to the table.

"You look rough," she said. "You lost some weight."

"Yeah, well. I'm about broke down actually." That was all he could master and he sat still.

Zeff came in and set out two Styrofoam cups and filled each from his own Stanley thermos, steaming coffee. "There's cream already in there," he pointed.

When he capped the thermos and stepped out, Vonnie said, "Am I worried?"

Her voice cracked him, every word. He could shake his head and he did.

"Yes," she said. "I am. Look, Mack. You'll be all right. Things will get better."

"Disgrace," he said.

"What?"

"I am a disgrace," he said.

Now she read him accurately. "You been this low?"

He could not speak.

"When you get out Wednesday, can you get yourself together? What do you need for gear? Do you have a ride?"

Her solicitous questions broke over him. He could hold steady against his own withering self-regard, but he could not hold against her sympathy. When she put her hand on his wrist, the shock ran through him.

"Chester will come get me."

"He's a good friend," she said. "Go fishing for a week. This will pa.s.s."

"No can do."

Then she leaned toward him and spoke against the top of his head. "Mack, don't let this beat you. You're a good man inside."

Now the tears tripled dripping onto the shirtsleeve of his jail shirt.

She pushed his coffee until the cup touched his interleaved hands. "Here," she said, "drink this. Remember your coffee policy." It was an old bit of theirs, but he could not respond.

"Meet me," she said. "You can do that, right? We'll make our last trip next month. Meet me, and we'll fish Clark Lake for the last time."

Somehow air came into his chest with that and he said quietly, "Deal." He looked up into her face, the seriousness and the concern. He opened his hand and closed it around the little white cup. "I will be there. Cold Creek trailhead."

He'd been here ten times; this was the tenth time. Every year on the same day, the Ides of September, nine fifteen. The promise had been made that first time and they'd kept it nine times. We'll do this every year. They weren't married the first time, and then they had been married eight times, and now they weren't married again. As far as he knew. The lawyer letters, five of them, were filed unopened in a cubby of his father's rolltop in the bunkhouse where Mack lived on the home place south of Woodrow, golden envelopes with return addresses pretty as wedding invitations.

He felt better tonight, strong for some reason, but he'd been getting better since walking out of jail twenty days ago. It could have been so much worse. He'd been running in low-rent behavior for almost a year, scrambling for money, crossing the line when it worked for him, drinking too much because it didn't matter and the company he kept drank. He had trouble with the mortgage at the ranch, and he'd driven cars to Cheyenne and Rock Springs more than once not asking what was in the trunk, just taking the thousand bucks and walking away. He'd been an idiot and he'd rusted like an old post when the weather turned. Now he shook his head at it in dark wonder. It was like the old song. He once was lost and now he was found, though there wasn't much left. He knew this trip was the right thing and he'd even gotten well enough to call her and let her off the hook. Last week he'd left a message saying it was okay if she couldn't make it and that he appreciated the help. He knew where there were some fish. He didn't want the sympathy vote, didn't need it, but, he told her, he was going fishing at the appointed hour.

He'd met Vonnie when they were both seventeen, and he didn't like her immediately, because it was his personal policy to dislike all the people who came to the ranch, the families from Grosse Pointe and Greenwich and Manhattan and Princeton and from the ten other platinum republics in their beautiful flannel shirts and new Levi's. He treated them well and saw to their safety around the horses, and he taught them what he could about the ranch and securing knots and fire safety and the birds and the snakes and the occasional bears. He took them to Big Springs and Rocktree trailheads, but he didn't bring them here. He envied their gear, their bright boots, their gorgeous bone pocketknives, but he never stole one. He was quiet and known as being quiet and it was not an act; he had learned that it was the way he kept any power at all. After his mother died of the cancer and his father and the ranch manager, Sawyer Day, saw the money story, they had started taking ten weeks of guests in the summers. They needed the money. They hired a great cook, a woman named Amarantha out of Logan, Utah, and she laid a table like he had never seen. For that time the ranch paid its bills. The reputation of Box Creek grew, and they were booked steady all those years: twenty-four people every week, and Mack grew up with them from when he was ten, answering the same questions about horseshoes and hay and can I feed this horse an apple without him biting me. A horse on a dude ranch eats a lot of apples. Vonnie's family came out from Chapel Hill where her mother was a professor of political science, and he gave her the same horse every year, Rusty, a benevolent roan who was golden once a day if the sun was right. Vonnie was a strong athlete and played soccer in college, but Mack avoided her (as he did all the guests) easily. Many weeks the guests had romances with the other guests, intrigues afoot, and Mack had plenty of work grooming horses when the day ended while everyone showered in the big house and in the two cottages and then lined up for Amarantha's astounding buffet.

Plus, his father had spoken to him after the third summer. It was obvious the way the kids hung out by the rail fence when Mack was shoeing a horse or working the tack. They'd follow him around, the boys and the girls, and they wanted to know about him.

His father called him into the big house and they sat in the small front office that Sawyer Day used the two days a week he came out to do books, and his father swiveled the oak chair to Mack and they talked. The room was cloistered by the varnished pine shelves full of books, his father's collection of Zane Grey and Jack London and western history and a beaten tin umbrella stand full of rolled maps.

"These kids look up to you," his father said.

"I don't know," Mack said. He sat on the dark leather ha.s.sock, orphaned from its long-lost chair.

"Yes you do. They should look up to you. You're a good hand; they're not used to this. All they've got is their car and the junior prom. You're an exotic item, Mack."

"Okay," the boy said.

"But what we are to these people is a sort of cliche. They come out here to taste this and it's good for all of us. But these girls, some of them, are going to fall for you, you big strong cowboy." His father tapped Mack's knee with his two fingers. "Come on, you can look at me. I know you're a good kid. Some of these gals from New York even come after your old man, a little fling out west for a week. You want to be a cliche?"

"No sir," Mack said. "I don't."

"You need me to recount the history of Sheridan the race-horse?"

"No sir, please."

His father smiled. "Have you recovered from that lesson?" He'd taken the boy to witness their only Thoroughbred, Sheridan, at stud when Mack was nine years old.

"No sir," Mack said truly. "No one could." Mack went on and repeated what his father had said that day, "That's enough of the birds and bees for one boy."

"Well, good," his father said. "We won't be cliches then. That's all. I expect you know what to do. Talk the day with these kids and riding and horses and weather, and then send them back to supper. Don't walk with them or have them out near the bunkhouse. My eyes are right here. I know you know what to do. I don't want this business venture we're in to hurt you, boy. I love you and I love this place. Do you know it?"

"Yes sir, I do."

"Show me your hands." Mack leaned and held his hands out and then turned them over. They'd always done this: a show of hands. His father looked him over: nails, cuticles, knuckles, palms. You could tell a good ranch hand by the number of nicks-the fewer, the better the ranch hand, and as the years pa.s.sed, Mack's hands cleared up. His father squeezed his hands now and said, "That's enough of that. Quite a talk for the old homestead. You go, get to work."

And he did the work on the long day ranch schedule. On Thursday nights he ran the one late-night campfire, all those chocolate crackers and then the spooky story. He had started it when he was thirteen, the story he'd heard part of from his own dad about Hiram, brokenhearted and half mad, who still roamed the woods near here, living in rotten logs and following campers in his search for a beating heart. At night when the fishermen's campfires would shrink down to wavering coals, Hiram would sneak into the camps and reach into the tents and put his head against the campers' chests to try to hear again the thumping of a heart. His own had stopped so long ago. Mack would let the big ranch fire dwindle and collapse and lower his voice as he told the episodes. Hiram's heart had been broken by his own true love when one night he came calling and saw her through the lighted window in the arms of another man.

"A fisherman?" some kid would ask.

"Not much of one," Mack would say, "but maybe. And Hiram turned and fled that place and went into the woods, these woods, forever."

Half of the kids would already be in their pajamas and robes, sitting legs up and arms folded in the canvas camp chairs, listening. They'd all heard of Hiram from last week or from last summer, and his legend was part of the Box Creek Ranch lore now. Mack would hold out his hand like a claw and say how Hiram only wanted human contact. "His loneliness was larger than Wyoming. He only wanted then to hear a beating heart. But he was misunderstood and called a cannibal, though there was never any proof of that."

"I think he was a cannibal," some boy would say. "He ate the campers and cooked them over the fire. They never came back."

Mack would let this remark hang in the air. "He's out there," Mack would say, indicating the circle of darkness around them all. "And now we know for sure he's misunderstood."

If the children got too frightened, which was why they came every week, Mack would back up and tell about Hiram's younger days working with wild geese and his travels in the cities which did not agree with him. Then as the hour turned, Mack would stand and stir the fire pit and as the cinders schooled up red, he would say, "Hiram listens for a beating heart. Can you hear your beating heart?" The night would glow with silence and the popping of the fire. "Now scoot. We're going to ride horses tomorrow, and I don't want you falling asleep."

It was a favorite time for him, watching the young people scurry back to the cabins' lit porches. They tried not to run, but they sometimes ran. It was his first love, the ranch, and he loved it night and day.

Then came his second.

The year he was seventeen, Mack took the weekly ridge ride with all the kids, nine riders winding up the line shack trail to the aspen draws that led to the mountaintop. He rode his horse Copper Bob, the captain. There were two old log cabins along the way, slumped and fallen in, new trees thrusting through the collapsed roof beams. They always stopped and took stagey pictures with the young people pretending to knock at the doorway or looking out the ancient window frames. Sometimes they dug around for old cans or bottles, and they made up stories about the lonely men who lived here, how they had a dog or played cards all winter. One of the young riders would always say, Maybe this is where Hiram lived, and Mack would explain that he never slept in the same place twice. He was always wandering and without a home.

The cabins always sobered Mack, because he knew how hard such lives would have been. Over the years he'd found and kept purple medicine bottles and boot buckles from the old places. Vonnie was a good rider and Rusty knew her, and they liked to lead the train through the gloomy treeshade. The horses stepped quietly up the gra.s.sy slopes, past the wildflowers, along the faint trail they'd walked a hundred times, their tails swishing silently timed to the gait. Mack watched the girl float in her saddle at the top of the easy parade. This was the golden center of Mack's life, all these fine animals geared right and taking the bobbing children up every step farther from home than they had ever been.

Mack saw a shadow in the hillside and knew what it was in a second; he sat up and snugged his reins from where he rode behind the children. When the bear sat up in the tall June gra.s.s at the top of the draw, Mack thought he saw him rub his eyes like a man might in disbelief. It was a luxurious black bear and he didn't stand or look alarmed. He sat and looked into the face of the first horse. Mack had known moments like this and usually something happened very fast as the surprises doubled. Rusty stopped short without rearing, but Vonnie went over the front of her saddle and fell. Mack felt something open in him. All the horses stopped, veterans. Mack knew that when Rusty turned riderless, all the horses would turn and start stepping down. He loved it that they knew not to run. They never ran even on the last flat stretch near the ranch yard, even when the tourists urged them with their heels or reins or any cowboy moves they had seen in films for years on end.

Mack was moving; he clucked and Copper Bob eyed the bear and still approached. Vonnie was down and Mack had to get down and lift her with an arm and lead the horse to turn away. The bear hadn't moved, watching the performance. At twenty paces Mack boosted the girl up into his saddle and walked surely down behind the children's cavalcade which was now headed inexorably toward the ranch, two miles below. Those who had been at the rear and hadn't seen the bear would be astonished and envious as they heard the story, but by supper they would have their own tales of the close call and the huge beast. As they pa.s.sed below the cabin shambles and onto the open hillside, Mack whistled and Rusty stopped and the line of riders stopped.

"Are you okay?" Mack said.

"It was a bear," Vonnie said. She was lit. They reached her horse and Mack helped her down.

"Let's see." She had skinned her wrist, and she pulled out her shirt and showed him where her waist was bruised, her belt full of dirt and gra.s.s.

"I'm okay. Can we go back and get a picture?" Everybody had a camera.

"Not today," he said. "That bear doesn't want his picture taken today." He still had her arm and turned her in examination.

"Did he attack?" one of the kids said.

"No," Mack said. "He was sleeping and we woke him up."

"Hibernating," one of the kids said.

"Not yet," Mack said. "Let's go down." He held Rusty while Vonnie mounted. She was turned looking back up at the hill.

"That bear was hibernating. Bears hibernate," the expert offered again.

"Go go," Mack called and the line of horses and riders began the walk home.

It was the next morning that Mack had a problem. He woke to a face in his window: Copper Bob, and he pulled on his Levi's and boots and stepped onto the porch to find the dozen ranch horses all standing in the bunkhouse dooryard. Above, he could see the corral gate open. With his boots unlaced and his shirt unb.u.t.toned, he walked up there clucking for Copper Bob who led the others back into the enclosure. By the time he closed the rail gate, Mack knew that Rusty was gone. He saddled Copper Bob and rode over to the main house. Amarantha was in the kitchen and the whole place smelled like batter, her blueberry pancakes.

"Can you do the Dutch oven today?" he asked her. "I've got to go find a horse."

"We can do that, Mack." She had six cast-iron ovens and cooked with the young people a day or two every week over the fire pit behind the house.

"Save me some pancakes," he said.

He knew what it was and trotted Copper Bob up the ranching road and into the trees, past the cabins. The dew was disturbed all the way, and he slowed in the aspen draw and saw where she had ridden up through and over the top. A bear chaser.

Above, he came out of the trees and ascended the ridgeline. There was a game trail that traced the spine of the broad hill and led to the mountains ahead. "G.o.dd.a.m.nit," he said and followed it up. He could see Rusty's shoeprints in the clay trail periodically and horse manure as the trail dipped and rose again now into the pines. He was also looking for bear sign and there was none.

In the old days this was where the first ranchers had baited bear with horse carca.s.ses, walking an old horse up to the top and then shooting it right at the wall of trees, someplace they could watch from across the canyon. Eighty years ago these pioneers had picnicked and waited with their rifles. There were still old constellations of horse skeletons drifting down a slope here and there. All the way to the horizon west and south was federal land and always had been, open to hunting in season. At the end of every summer Mack took four or five of the experienced riders out through the federal land and into the national forest, deadheading sometimes, learning the country. He liked being out beyond what he knew. Every year they came across butchered elk, chainsawed by poachers, the head and hindquarters taken months before the season. He hated these things, and he banked his hatred for such characters. He marked their trails when he could, but nothing came of his research.

One year his father had gone off two days with four rangers and the civil patrol raiding a poacher's camp, and when his father returned, he unloaded his horse from the trailer and put away the tack without speaking. Mack wanted to know what had happened, but his father's face told him not to ask. He later found out one of the men, a teamster from Hammond, had tried for his rifle and been shot dead.

Now Mack was in the pines, the trail narrow at points and moist, and still he saw where Rusty had tracked. He spent an hour like that in and out of the trees, breaking into the sage day, the hundred-mile vistas and then again into the green dark. "G.o.dd.a.m.n girl," he said. At the saddle near the summit, he stopped and whistled three times, the way he could, the sharpest loudest noise a human can make. Nothing. A little ahead he saw where Rusty had left the trail and begun to descend the far slope. Oh s.h.i.t s.h.i.t s.h.i.t. It was noon, the day was gone. He should have brought the walkie-talkies, his rifle, a lunch. "Girl," he called. "Rusty," he called. She was off the trail now, sidehilling the sage to who knew where. The way was steep and there were shale outcroppings. At least it was clear and sunny, but the day was gone. They'd never lost a girl before. They'd had blisters and splinters and hangovers and one broken arm when a boy fell off the corral fence, but no one had been lost. No one had perished. On the shady side of the mountain fourteen bighorn sheep ascended in bursts up the sandy mountainside, tame as barngoats, and obliterated the girl's trail. He rode out looking for the tracks and could not find them. She either went up or down and now it was three o'clock. To h.e.l.l with you. Mack knew that Rusty would know when the sun hit four to head for home. If she was still aboard. To h.e.l.l with you and your camera, lady. This far from the ranch there were three or four ways back, and Mack climbed up and over the summit and then just guessed the stream trail and struck for that, a mile and a half east. It was warm in the sun and fresh in the shadows, climbing down. He was deadheading it, but he had been gifted with directional skill that even his father remarked on. He hit the Box Creek and watered Copper Bob and then led him by the reins up to the log bridge he had built with his father ten years before, when he was seven. His father taught him the chainsaw and let him run it, bucking the thin logs into five-foot lengths for the flooring. All that green wood was now dried slate gray and appeared an artifact of the frontier.

Before he saw the bridge, he heard Copper Bob snuffle and there was Rusty tied to a tree. The girl was lying on the bridge, her arms out as if she had fallen from a great height. She was bare-legged and her new brown corduroy jeans lay jumbled by her head. Mack and Copper Bob walked up.

"You asleep?"

She looked at him without moving her head, her face upside down to him. "I'm okay." She pulled her shirttail down over her underwear. "I guess I'm lost," she said.

He stood silent; the two horses nosed each other. Mack held the horse. He could see the angry red chafe on her thighs.

"What's your name again?" she said.

"I guess your bear got away." He stepped up and checked Rusty's saddle which was secure and the bridle. "You did a good job with this gear."

"I can't ride anymore," she said. "I can't touch my legs."

"We just need to get back and then you can soak," he told her. "We have to go though."

She sat up and looked at her inflamed legs. She stood and pulled her pants on, tenderly. "Oh G.o.d, I can't even walk."

"You're about skinned," he said, "but I've seen worse. Move through it," he said. "We'll get you to the ranch road and I can bring the truck."

"How far is that?"

"Up over there and down: two miles, a little more."