The Signal: A Novel Part 2

"Ten years," she said. "The last trip."

"You came," he said. He forked the pasta up in a test. "You kept your word."

She looked at him, "Mack," she said. "It's been a hideous year and you hideous in it, but it's my word."

Day Two.

In the morning they walked in. The trailhead was dry and the slope gentle and ticketed with yellow aspen leaves, and the vast fresh silence sounded in the sky. They walked as they had always walked on their backpacking trips, she then he, slow and steady up the path. They'd spoken only a little the night before, primarily because he had made himself one of his stone-cold promises that he would keep it light and tight and not get riled or ripped up. Every day since he had walked away from the jail had been a lesson in a.s.sembling himself, and he did not want to lose that. She was here; it was enough. They were no longer married. She was doing him a favor. He wouldn't get his hopes up; he had no hopes in this regard to get up. You are hopeless, boy. He whispered it. Just go. It was a fishing trip in September with a friend-a promise they'd made. All of this, sort of. He walked. He did not feel hopeless.

The first year, when she met him and was thrilled at the huge wild world they had captured at even the trailhead, she had hugged her arms in the evening chill and asked him why they went in September and not a warmer month.

"The summer must be splendid."

"It is, but there's nothing ruins a trip like a Boy Scout troop, all those little men with their merit badges. September is perfect. Frost in the morning, but perfect."

That first year she had kissed him as he cooked the pasta, and they slept in the tent together in separate sleeping bags, awake and aware in the small shelter. She'd brought a book, the poet Keats, and read him "Ode to Autumn" by her little flashlight.

"That's about got it," he said. "Did you put that to music?"

"I did."

"Was it for your boyfriend?"

"No. There was a boy who worked with a lot of Keats."

"Was he your boyfriend?"

"He was," Vonnie said, "but he had issues."

"Does that mean other girls?"

"He had us all," she said, and then she added what he wanted to hear. "But you've got me now."

"I won't be reading the Keats," Mack said. "But I know some stories."

"About the cannibal?"

"He wasn't a cannibal," Mack said. "But yeah."

The next day was a delirious hike up through the ancient trees, an entire mountain range made for two people. They were certainly the first people to hike these trails or so it seemed, even to Mack, who had never seen it this way before, and they invented each bend and turning and fallen log and rivulet, and they invented the air and the hours along with the day, ripe and yellow, something to walk through so they could camp early and make a small campfire for soup and a crust of bread. They took their time. He put up his cotton rope clothesline and hung his blue-and-green-striped dishtowel from it, a touch, and as she dunked her bread into the b.u.t.tery tomato soup, she pointed and said, "Those sleeping bags zip together." Later, in the tent, every touch was a shock as they invented the embrace, and he put his hand on the inside of her thigh, polished and warm, and asked, "Are your legs okay?"

She held him and a minute later said, "This is the purpose of my legs, mister."

Now in the September sunlight they quietly walked the rocky trail that had been made wide by the horses of the summer outfitters and washed by rain and dried into an easy walk. Still they knew enough to watch their footing as the aspens gave way to the pinon pine and the spotty shade as they traversed the steep hillside and emerged into the first real mountain meadow, a hundred-acre field of sage and lupine and alpine daisies. The great splash of daylight after moving in the undulating tree shadows made them shield their eyes. Vonnie stopped at the edge of the park and he stepped up to her. They could see three dozen elk at the far edge, grand animals deep brown and small as dogs in the distance. Vonnie was breathing and he was breathing, two campers.

"Are you okay?"

"I haven't been out in a while; it's good." She put her hand on her sternum. "But I can feel it."

Now the elk were gone. "Let's go up and see if Clay has set up."

After dinner the night before, she had laid her pad and sleeping bag under the pines at the Cold Creek trailhead, and he asked her if she wanted in the tent.

"I'm good," she said. "I'm traveling light, but I've got a bivy sack if it gets cold."

"You want a hot rock?"

"I'm good."

"That's a great sleeping bag you've got there, lady," he said to her. "Kent get it for you?"

"He did."

"And the jacket?"

"Yes."

"He knows what he's doing with that gear. How is he?"

"You mean since your sc.r.a.pe?"

"Yes, I do. I apologized and paid for that."

"Kent is fine. Jackson's a good town for a lawyer."

"That's a terrible thing to say about a town, but it's deserved in the case of Jackson Hole."

"Mack, don't start. At all."

"Just tell me. Did he change your name?"

"He calls me Yvonne." He had planned on saying something to that, but when he heard it, he could not. He sat and pulled his boots off. Before he had crawled into his tent, he saw Vonnie go over and look under his truck, checking to see that he'd slid his familiar cooler there and then she stood in the luminescent dark and walked quietly over to the trailhead sign and retrieved her mail.

By the time they reached the top of the meadow, the last bees were out working the field, and Vonnie had rolled her sleeves in the sunshine. She walked to the primitive plank step-stile in the Forest Service fence and leaned there on the old weathered logs. It was a cross-timber fence built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, so huge and simple it would be there forever. Across the green lea they could see the large white lodge tent where the trail reentered the pines. Mack pointed. "He's in the same place." He could see that the familiar sight made Vonnie happy. "You want to do it?" Mack asked her.

"No, you like to."

"No, you-you don't get out much."

"Okay," she said, stepping up past him. "h.e.l.lo the camp!" she called. "h.e.l.lo the camp!" She smiled and made a megaphone of her two hands and called again, "May we! Approach! The camp!"

They saw Clay come out the canvas flap in his blue Utah State sweatshirt and wave. He hollered, "You better, Vonnie. Bring that rancher with you!"

"You better tell him it's Yvonne," Mack said.

"Leave it," she said, not looking back, her punctuation. "Let's go have some coffee and get the weather report." They helped each other step up and over the stile, and Mack followed Vonnie across to Clay's encampment. They leaned their packs against a big pine and went in the warm tent. Half the floor was pallet planking and half was green gra.s.s. Clay had two cots and a small woodstove. They all shook hands.

"Home sweet home," Vonnie said. She pointed at Clay's coffee cup, pen, open journal.

"And welcome to it," Clay said. "Sit down. Tell me what to write in the book; my journal suffers from a bit of the same old." He gathered his papers and set them on the one shelf.

"We didn't know if they'd hired a new kid."

"No, it's this old kid. Six years now. The money's good and I do love these hills."

"I forgot," Vonnie said and she went out and came back with a loaf of bread in a paper sleeve. "I brought you some sourdough from Lucy's in town."

"I'll take it," Clay said, "if you'll trade for coffee."

"With cream," she said. He lifted the blue enamel coffeepot from the steel stove surface and poured three tin cups, and he lifted a gla.s.s jar of half-and-half from his big igloo. "Who's coming this year?"

"It's all doctors from Chicago. Some of them from last year. Bluebride's bringing them four at a time."

"Where will they hunt?"

"We'll go south of here in the deep draws below Bellows and the three bald peaks. It's thick timber and makes a great outing. I've been this week clearing trails."

They sat at the wooden picnic table inside the tent.

"Anybody else above?" Mack asked.

"n.o.body has come by here from Cold Springs. It's already snowed once. You guys going to Clark again? What is it? Ten years?"

"It's ten years," Mack said. "There's still fish in that lake. How's Deb?"

"She's good. That real estate license has made a difference for us, but who wants their wife dressing up every day showing strange men empty mansions? Who wants mansions anyway? But she's good."

"And Dougie?"

"Dougie thinks school is heaven on earth. We've got some bona-fide artwork on the fridge."

"And those," Mack pointed. There were sheets of crayoned squares and faces pinned to the tent wall.

"Those," Clay said.

"He's got the philosophy," Mack said. "People and houses. Have you heard any helicopters?" Mack asked him.

"No, sir. Are you thinking the vice president has gone fishing?"

"I'm just asking," Mack said. "I hope he isn't."

"That's the best coffee in Wyoming," Vonnie said. "I'm glad you're here."

"Stop by on the way down," Clay told them. "There'll be more. If I'm out with these guys, just come in and fire up some coffee. Stay the night if you need to."

Mack nodded at Clay's book. "Put us in the journal as two optimists," he said.

"I did already," Clay said. "Have fun."

The two hikers stepped out into the high-atmosphere sunshine and reclaimed the trail. Now it grew steep up the first hill, a series of long switchbacks. There were yellow blazes cut into the trees every thirty yards. One year on their fishing trip, it had snowed and they used the markings to pick their way down, tree by tree, arriving at the truck with the "coldest, wettest feet of all time," according to Vonnie, and when Mack handed her the warm ball of thick wool socks from the glove compartment, she came into his arms so fully that socks became their joke for foreplay. The blazes now were shiny yellow, coated with sap at summer's end.

An hour later, at the top, they discharged their packs and sat against them, legs out, breathing. From the promontory they could see south now, over the hills they'd climbed, seven ridge-lines into the haze.

"One second," Vonnie said. "I'm going to pee." She went off into the trees.

Mack fished his BlackBerry from his pack pocket and dialed Yarnell's code. He entered: 9200 feet, W. of Crowheart 14 mi. Send reading. He had told the older man that it was a needle in a field of haystacks, and Yarnell had given him the device and said: "Yes, and this is how it will find you. If you get within a mile, the blue dot will light." Now Mack put it in his front pocket and stretched.

A minute later Vonnie came back, and they stood stiffly and packed up. They walked the ridgeline for half an hour, pacing carefully, and then descended in four long narrow switchbacks to Cross Creek, a rivulet that they could step over and where the trail ascended sharply, the first place a person would be happy to have a horse. Slow and even was their way. They'd known sprinters, friends who rocketed ahead, marching in a race, then stopping for five minutes at each turn, blowing, and it had been proven to all parties that slow and steady, slower and steady, was best and most workable through a long day. At the top of this ridge they sat again and ate apples, not talking, eating them all down to the seeds. Behind them two pikas began to call from the rock spill, piping their hopes for any dropped candy, apple cores.

"They remember us," Mack said.

"We're invaders," Vonnie said. "They're scared. Are they pikas?"

Mack piped back at the rocks, squeaking an imitation of their call.

"I thought they only lived in Utah," Vonnie said, picking up the old argument about the creatures.

"These two are following us, hope in their hearts," Mack said. "I'll leave them some trail mix."

"Leave them your knife and your flashlight, you woodsman."

They drank from their canteens and started walking again. This hill gave onto a gradual rise, and the forest grew thicker and darker.

Half an hour later in the deep shade, breathing, Vonnie stopped on the clay stairway of the trail and said, "This is your ptarmigan farm."

He looked up and knew the place. "It is. I'll get them someday. They'll be delicious."

"Don't go through it again."

One year they had come upon a dozen of the big white mountain birds walking up the trail ahead of them, almost tame it seemed, and Mack had tried to kill one by throwing shale. He could get ten feet and throw, missing by inches. The birds didn't panic but walked ahead. Dodos he called them, throwing and missing.

"There is a dodo here," she had said. As he hurled the stones at the unhurried a.s.semblage, he described how he would cook the bird, how good it would be to have this savory fowl turning on a spit over a campfire. Then he described how he would fashion the elaborate spit out of green willows. Then after half an hour he gave up and the birds dispersed into the woods and let them pa.s.s.

"I'm grateful their extinction won't be pinned to me," he had said. "But I would have so happily made that spit."

Now they came to Broad Meadow, a huge open circle through which ran Cold Creek, a jewel. They could see snow in patches in the far shade. The trail went right to the creek, which was a pretty amber flow as wide as a road, a foot or two deep and glistening in the rocky sunlight.

"Don't even think about it, Mack."

"It's our trip," he said.

"It's a trip, but we're not doing any of that stuff. We're going to fish Clark and hike out, like we said. I'm glad you're feeling better," she said. "But no way."