The Signal (3 page)
Authors: Ron Carlson
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Married people, #Literary, #Western Stories, #Westerns, #Marriage, #Ranchers, #Wyoming, #Ranchers' spouses
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 god, 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.”
She stepped stiffly to the horse and Mack helped her up. She moaned and said, “Where’s that bear?”
“Montana,” he told her. “You scared that bear a good one jumping on him that way.”
She laughed and cried out softly as Rusty followed Copper Bob across the old wooden bridge and into the glade. “What’s your name,” she had said.
In the glowing mountain dark Mack walked across the dirt path of the trailhead to the old Forest Service sign hanging now by one rusty bolt. The post was still grounded firmly. He went back to his toolbox in the truck and retrieved the two six-inch steel bolts and the nuts and wide lock washers as well as his closed wrench and hacksaw. The old bolt fell away with five strokes of the saw and the sign dropped. Mack held it in both hands. The paint in the routed letters was all gone, and he had actually thought of bringing paint, but it would have been overdoing it and bright lettering always invited vandalism. He fitted it up and placed it square and took pleasure in cinching the nuts on tight as they bit into the old stained pine.
Cold Creek Trailhead.
The first time he’d come here, his father had sent him across to the sign and there was a small plastic envelope wedged behind, between the sign and the post. He withdrew it and found a dollar bill and a Royal Coachman fly and a small card that said, “Let’s fish, Mack. Love, Dad.” He still had the scrap in his wallet. Now he folded the baggie he’d brought and hid it in the back, against the old splintered post, securing it with a silver pushpin. If she comes, she’ll surely check the mail.
Cold Creek Trailhead.
The first time he’d come here, his father had sent him across to the sign and there was a small plastic envelope wedged behind, between the sign and the post. He withdrew it and found a dollar bill and a Royal Coachman fly and a small card that said, “Let’s fish, Mack. Love, Dad.” He still had the scrap in his wallet. Now he folded the baggie he’d brought and hid it in the back, against the old splintered post, securing it with a silver pushpin. If she comes, she’ll surely check the mail.
He went back across and put his tools away and opened the hood and checked the oil. It was dark there, and he used his flashlight. Small actions kept the worry off. If he hadn’t just done it, he would have tucked his shirt in again. He washed his hands. Oh September, you beauty. Show me something.
That winter after he’d shown her the bears, she wrote him one letter from Brown that told him her family was coming the second week in August. They had wanted to go to Martha’s Vineyard, but she had held out. She told them she had an appointment with a bear and signed it:
Vonnie, Music Major, Bearhunter.
Vonnie, Music Major, Bearhunter.
He spent July scouting the western hills and found them one at a time: six black bears, two cubs, one still cinnamon. The next month when her family arrived, he stayed busy, and the two young people ignored each other. There was a lot to do. The third day at dawn, the day Amarantha was going to get out the Dutch ovens and make biscuits and omelettes with the kids, he came to the porch rail of the bunkhouse and he could see the girl on the porch of her little cottage. She stood and followed him to the corral. They rode two hours out the trail he had marked until they were in a hollow above the valley of the bears. They hadn’t spoken.
“How are your legs?”
“Good,” she said. “You’ve seen worse.”
“You bring your camera?” he asked her.
“I’ve got it.”
“Do you want to see these bears?”
“Yes, I do. I came to see a bear, one will do.”
“I’m not sure I should let you at them,” he said.
“And why is that?”
“Because once you get your bear, you’ll be done with me.”
She turned in her saddle, one hand on the back of it, and said, “I haven’t even started with you.”
“You don’t know my name.”
“I know your name.”
“Don’t say it.”
“Don’t you say my name.”
Mack said: “Do you keep your word?”
“Yes, mister, I do.”
“Come along then.” He led her up through the trees to the overlook. Below, the vale was meadow and aspen that gave way to the pines. They wended down a rocky trail, staying above the open area. They sat and the horses knew to be still.
This was his life, riding out two hours from a ranch that itself was an hour from town and still knowing there were unknown hours ahead. The ridges of the next valley were distinct and thrilling in the clear summer air. He’d been there once or twice maybe; he remembered a swale with two reedy moose pots against a granite hill, but it was trackless and like so much up here, it was still waiting. Someone had told him that there were only a few places left in the country where a person could get five miles from the road, and it remained the worst news he’d ever heard. He wasn’t himself in town, and though he liked school, the energy, and could bear a semester, he didn’t really trust that world, or himself in it, and at the end of every term his car was packed before the last exam and then he fled home, fled to the hills. Two hawks swung out into the blue-sky sunshine and traded treetops in the valley below them.
“Music?” he said.
“There’s no money in it, but I’m a music major.”
“You play the piano?”
“That and the clarinet.” She scanned the treetops and the meadow greenery below and said, “They’re close, aren’t they?”
“They are,” he said. “It’s about bear time.” Then he added, “I can’t even play a guitar.”
“That’s good. You’d be the whole package as a cowboy who played guitar.”
A black bear on all fours walked out into the sunlight.
“Is it the same bear?” she whispered. A smaller bear appeared at the edge of the trees.
“They’re all the same bear.”
She lifted her lensed Nikon out of its case and began to take pictures. As the camera sneezed, the bears lifted their heads to look up. “Yes, it’s him, my same bear.” She turned and took Mack’s picture. When she had packed her camera away and lifted it behind her back, she said to him, “Thanks for this.” He reined Copper Bob around on the narrow trail and started back.
His father came out to the tack room that afternoon and stood in the sunlit doorway. “You’re doing something?”
“Yes, sir, I am. Not much, but I am.”
“Do you know what you’re doing?”
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“Are you going by your gut?”
“By something.”
“Do you think you can get a girl by showing her a bear?”
“No idea,” Mack said.
His father folded his arms and leaned on the doorframe. “Me neither. How many were there?”
“Seven or eight. Three cubs.”
“There’s good news.”
Mack waited. He knew his father had something else. “I showed your mother two hundred elk in an aspen grove high above the reservoir at Cody.”
“Sir?”
“And two years later I was a married man.”
“Who got whom?” Mack said, a gambit.
“We’re still not sure,” his father said. “Just that it was a good deal.” He stood and held his hands out lightly at his waist. “A girl who goes for a bear is superior to one who would go for a car. I’ll say that. You just be careful of yourself. Remember Jude?” Jude had been their first hand, a drunk, always cutting himself or losing things with bad knots. He finally fell from a horse and put an eye out on a fence post.
“I’ll be careful,” Mack said.
“Oh, I know it,” his father said. “You’re not the least like Jude, but your old man wants to worry. You know?” His father stepped and put his hand on the boy’s neck and embraced him just a moment.
“Don’t I know it,” Mack said to the man. Then he stood and faced his father. “This isn’t a cliché and it won’t be. It’s either nothing or something, but don’t worry.”
The next January he got the pictures, the bears, and himself on Copper Bob, his face half shaded by his hat. The letter said she’d be in Europe all the next summer and for him not to show those bears to any other person. He was at Boise State studying history and everything else, lots of computer stuff. He liked everything but accounting.
Without her, the ranch that summer was different and he used the energy he felt when she was around to work at learning the money of it, their never-ending hard stretch. Sawyer Day and his father sold sections; there was pressure for houses, mansions really, and with each sale they bought a year or two, but the taxes and the mortgage were still significant. He applied to have the tax status changed to ranching and the county changed it to modified-use estate range residential. They had some terms. He applied again. With his father in trouble like that it was hard to concentrate on his studies the next fall, but they advanced, and he pursued computer science, encryption as it developed, and modern history.
Then two things happened in one day the next winter. He’d taken a house across downtown, a gerrymandered brick bungalow where he lived alone and had his computers lined up serially in the front room. He wanted a set of components and objectives he could control. He was consulting for the university and on a State Department grant. There were two phone calls in one day. One was the girl calling from Prague. She would finish her degree in May and was coming west.
She said, “This is a job interview: I want to work at the Box Creek and buy that horse. And I need to tell you a secret.” The long-distance line was a steady friction.
“I can’t stop you,” he said.
Then he heard her whisper: “I said your name.”
His heart clogged his throat. A minute later he said, “Come west. Bring your diploma and get out here.”
Before he had sat on the ratty couch he’d covered with a bed-sheet, Sawyer Day called and asked him if he was sitting down.
His father’s death changed it all. At the ranch everything was tilted, weird; it was more than something missing. Gravity had changed. Mack saw to the horses and painted the small barn, but there was no center for him without his father there. He made an effort to focus and failed; he felt there was no reason to brush the horses, no reason to feed himself. His grief was tangled by the enormity of the place and the fact that he felt he didn’t deserve it. When he came into the house, the feeling of emptiness rocked him. He hadn’t seen his father every day, but he knew his father was there, out at the ranch or in the other room or coming back from town and his presence in the world was like order itself. It was impossible to fathom and for the whole season he had trouble pushing one foot in front of another, trouble tying his work boots in the first place. Some rule had been expunged and he felt off-step and wrongheaded. The daylight of the dear place had changed.
And not just the ranch; when he was back at school Boise felt like it was underwater. He stopped going to class and started cutting corners with his computer work. His life, which had seemed a logical series of clear choices, blurred for a moment and then blurred for real. Without his father’s expectations, he found himself without a rudder and he knew it, and he drew a sharp breath when he saw that there was some part of him that was glad for it.
Mack’s father was buried in the family yard atop the northern hill beside Mack’s mother. The black wrought-iron fence had been welded in the toolshed below. Years ago Mack’s mother had planted the dozen golden juniper pfitzers that struggled in the wind but survived. Sawyer helped Mack. They closed the guest ranch and battened down the hatches. Sawyer showed him all the numbers; they were negative always six hundred and fifty dollars a month. They sold acreage so they had two years. Sawyer waived his fee and stepped away, shaking Mack’s hand. “I hope you can keep the place.”
There were still 375 acres of range and hill and mountain, down from over a thousand fifty years before. He had twenty offers on the place, enough to retire on. He sold the two cute log cabin cottages and they were hauled off on flatbeds. He sold all the horses but three. Amarantha drove out from town one day and gave him a notebook with her recipes and kissed him on the cheeks. The printing was beautiful and large, but he knew he’d never make a one. He wired up his computers and went from grant to grant, now working in codes for this agency and then that. People in town thought him a hermit. He was twenty years old.
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