The Signal: A Novel Part 7

"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 b.u.t.ter 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 sc.r.a.ping 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 p.i.s.sed 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 s.h.i.t," 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 coa.r.s.e 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, gla.s.sy 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 gra.s.s there, she woke from being pa.s.sed 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 b.u.mp 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned 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 s.h.i.terie. 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.

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 p.i.s.sed that he wouldn't dance and went out and leaped around, purposely b.u.mping 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 pa.s.sed 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 gla.s.s 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 b.u.t.tered 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, b.u.mping 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 s.h.i.t. He wants 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 b.u.t.ter 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?"