The Signal: A Novel Part 13

Amy screamed.

"f.u.c.k!" Mack said. The explosion was still in the air. "f.u.c.k! Are you f.u.c.king crazy?"

"Let's go, Yvonne."

"I've got to see to the girl."

"Bring her. We'll get your car on the weekend." Kent was back at the Hummer.

"You G.o.dd.a.m.n idiot," Mack said. "You f.u.c.king"-he lost a word-"solicitor." He hung his head a moment and then walked over to where Kent sat up in the driver's seat. His tinted window was up. "This is state land. I didn't shoot your car. I broke the windshield with a tire iron and I was drunk and I paid for it and spent some weeks in jail. This doesn't make us even. This doesn't do anything except f.u.c.k my truck up. I'll have rust till Sunday with that hole."

"Get in!" Kent yelled at Vonnie. "Get over here!" She was helping Amy.

"We can't, Kent. I'll drive down. We're okay now."

Mack went to Vonnie at her car. "It was the ranch, that money. That's why I took Yarnell's gig." He walked past her to the fire and tended it. Her beer bottle stood there in the dirt. He'd pulled himself in as far as he could. "Go to the hospital," he said to her across the s.p.a.ce.

Kent had backed the giant car around and his high beams shot out into s.p.a.ce. Then Mack snapped. He felt it as a snap under his breastbone and the day rose up in him and he saw the young rider explode backward off that horse, and Mack's throat closed. He ran at Kent's red vehicle.

"Mack," Vonnie said. "Oh G.o.d."

Now he had a river rock in his hand, big as a grapefruit, and still running he raised it and swung it with all his force against Kent's window. It bounced off, ricocheting back to the ground, stinging Mack's hand. "s.h.i.t!"

Kent jolted forward, the beast roaring down the rocky two-track fifty yards and stopping again, ten red lights in the teeming dust.

"He's got that gun," Vonnie said. But Mack had the rock again and was running down. "Mack!" The Hummer gunned and bounced away, too fast, and over the hill, only a glow now in the frigid night. Mack dropped the rock and still ran. From the ridge he saw the dotted lights descend the trailhead road. At one point the brakelights flared, and Mack saw Kent swerve to avoid the steer. He stood, his breath baggy plumes shooting into the air. He hated to run and he had to do it. The stars were out complete and in the open sky he saw the smoky run of the Milky Way all the way to Canada. Back at the trailhead both women sat in Vonnie's closed car. It was running and she rolled the window down.

Vonnie's face was funny, drained. "I can't drive," she said. "I thought I could. Just take us down." He went to the creek with the bucket from the bed of his truck and extinguished the coals of his fire. Mack grabbed his pack, closed up his vehicle. He had the women sit in the back of Vonnie's Lexus under the blanket, and carefully backed the new car and started down to the highway.

They went south to Lander. The pa.s.sed the Crowheart store, the yard light and the porch light. "They've got Dreamsicles in the front freezer," he said. "I like a Dreamsicle. They're hard to find." The expanse of the Indian reservation was dark. From time to time they pa.s.sed a ranch yard with a light showing the two trucks and the basketball pole.

"You knew I was looking for Yarnell's plane or whatever?" Mack said.

"Let's not talk, Mack. You don't know what you're doing half the time. Let's not talk."

Ten minutes later Vonnie said. "You got a story? The one about Hiram and Amateur?"

"I do," he began. "Now there was a man who was misunderstood." They seemed far away from the mountains in the night now and he told the story on the deserted highway.

In the story tonight Mack said that Hiram Corazon worked with the wild geese while guarding the love he felt in his heart for Lucinda Amateur. Mack drove and talked in the quiet car, as if speaking to the fields and the dark ranches. There was an evil plot at the sewing works, he said, and the evil plot was to use less goose down in the comforters. It was a kind of pleasure for Mack to say words as the story opened. Very soon in his story the greedy a.s.sistant director of the comforter inst.i.tute got involved in an involved plot, a plot with seven layers and all of them secret, the whispers of which were overheard by the geese themselves, who had no end of trouble making their story clear to Hiram because of the language barrier. They called and whispered but they spoke as geese and he could only understand a part at a time. Slowly, this took miles in the driving, Hiram began to understand what the geese were saying, and once he saw what was going on, he told the townsfolk, but then was not believed, at all, and was shunned from the village and considered crazy and dangerous and he wandered in the forest listening for a beating heart.

Vonnie interrupted here and said, "We found his canoe one time."

"It's still in the mountains, the only canoe in the Winds." Mack could hear in his voice how tired he was. He talked and he felt himself slip away from the story as he spoke, the words still falling, and he thought of Chester and the angle of the man's neck in the sharp mountain sunlight. He remembered his friend saying once, "Mack, you got to cowboy longer than most of us. You're the only guy who has a shot at going back to it. "

He had stopped telling the story and they drove in silence until Amy said, "What about Lucinda?"

"That's it," Mack said. And he told of Hiram trying to figure out a way to tell his own true love of the evil plot, and he finally clarified the entire intrigue to Lucinda in secret code that he embedded in the songs he sang outside her window after her guardians had gone to sleep in their thick down comforters.

"Like what?" Vonnie asked.

"Like secret code embedded in a musical number," he said. "You're a music major. You understand. Anyway, Hiram had learned to play the guitar and he stood below her window in the proper manner. Every night was serenade. He sang the songs a phrase at a time, some of the phrases drawn from Sh.e.l.ley and some from Keats."

Mack knew the dark country through which he drove the women. He knew they were asleep, but still he talked, telling the story to himself. Hiram Corazon played the guitar though he had never studied music. The story had sharp and telling comparisons between the pure comforters and the adulterated blankets that were not only not warm but itched mercilessly. "They were itch-i-genic," Mack said.

"That's not a word," Vonnie said. It had been almost an hour, and they were entering the western town.

"It's a word and a condition. Those comforters were used for rhinoceros saddles. They didn't itch those animals."

Amy had been asleep and said, "Rhinoceros saddles."

"The end," Mack said. "There's a good story."

At the ER in Lander, he got a wheelchair and helped Amy inside. Vonnie went to the counter. The nurse called the doctor and the police. It was very strange to be indoors, for all of them, and Mack said, as they waited, "They've got this place about lighted up." The magazines lay about on the plastic tables and for some reason they looked evil to him. Mack went to the men's and washed his hands twice with the powerful soap and then his face and up into his hair, drying himself with the coa.r.s.e paper towels and then mopping up the sink. He sat down to wait. It was ten-thirty.

It took all night. Mack talked to the police for an hour in a borrowed office and then he went over to the station with the deputy, a guy named Bradham, and he was there drinking terrible coffee and sorting it all out for two hours. He filled out the report and signed four papers, one of which promised he wouldn't leave the state. There were examinations and tests, and they found a deep plum bruise below Mack's elbow that he could not remember receiving, and a nurse swabbed his ears and put a drop of something in each one so they sizzled a minute and then she gave him a little white tube of the stuff. Mack brought in the clothes kit from Vonnie's trunk and she came back eventually in her moccasins and an orange plaid pair of dorm pants that he remembered and a UNC sweatshirt with an old red scarf she'd had forever, and she folded a set of clothes in Amy's room. They were keeping her a day, and her parents were coming from Missoula. She was awake and looking good, sort of happy in fact, when they went in to see her.

"I'm okay," she said, "but I'm tired. I can get through this. Your name is Mack," she said.

"Howdy."

"So the guy only listened to people's hearts trying to find his own?"

"That's it."

"And they thought he was a cannibal for it?"

"He scared them in their campsites," Mack said. "He's still up there in the Winds searching."

"Jeez," she said. "It's a good story."

"Just so your parents know," Mack said. "You went in at Dubois and came out at Cold Creek trailhead and here's this, my phone number if they want to talk to me." Mack left the room a minute so Vonnie could speak to the young woman. He went out and sc.r.a.ped her windshield, the first time he'd done such a thing this season. It was the first stroke of winter. He brought the car up under the ER entry a minute later and Vonnie got in.

"I thought they'd keep you," he said. He put her hand on his shoulder.

"We got beat up. It was the worst thing I've ever had, but they were s.p.a.ced out and I tricked them both." Her jaw was set hard, and her eyes were clear and cold. "I'm tired, but okay. You tracked me down, right?"

"I found your fly rod, your ring."

"Needle in a haystack."

"Our haystack."

She let it pa.s.s and said, "You want to drive back and get your truck?"

"Yeah, we can do that. We better before it gets snowed in. But I want to get a big fry first since we're in town."

"Some eggs," she said.

"A spinach omelette," he said, "with rye toast and potatoes and maybe a little piece of steak. Something that uses the whole plate."

"I know a place," she said.

"Show the way," he said. "I've got the money with me."

Other Works by Ron Carlson.

Stories.

News of the World.

Plan B for the Middle Cla.s.s.

The Hotel Eden.

At the Jim Bridger.

A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories.

Novels.

Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Truants.

Five Skies.