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 bumping 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 grasses 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 grass 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
pissed 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 pass.”
“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 hassock, 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 cliché. 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 cliché?”
“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 clichés 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 passed, 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 grassy 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 grass 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 passed 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
grass.
“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 unbuttoned, 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.
“Goddamnit,” 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 carcasses,
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. “Goddamn 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 shit shit shit. 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 hell with you. Mack knew that Rusty would
know when the sun hit four to head for home. If she was still
aboard. To hell 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 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.
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.
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.
In June a black Range
Rover pulled into the ranch dooryard and a man that Mack recognized
got out. His name was Charley Yarnell, and he’d been a guest
several summers at the ranch.
“I liked your
father,” he told Mack, “and I wanted to talk to you.”
“The place is not for
sale,” Mack said. “We’re flush.”
“You’re not flush,”
Charley said, “but I don’t care. I want you to do some work for us.
From out here. Consulting.” They sat in the front parlor, a room
dominated by his mother’s bright rag rug, an oval of orange and red
and blue and green that looked like the bottom of a trout stream.
“This is good work,” Charley said. “Money, and somebody’s got to do
it. You’d be an outpost, like a transfer station.”
“This country is full
of retired military,” Mack told him. “People with
clearance.”
“That right there
says it all. I don’t need people with clearance. I need somebody at
the end of the road.”
“Is it the CIA?” Mack
asked.
“Nothing is the CIA,”
Charley said. “It’s just an agency and it’s just a job. The only
people who would talk about it would be you and me.”
“This is a favor?”
Mack asked him.
“No, it’s work. I saw
you with your dad; you’re my man.”
“I’m not my dad,”
Mack said. It hurt to say and was a relief. “You want some
tea?”
“No,” Charley said.
“I want you to put in a satellite dish for TV, any company you
want, and I want to give you this card.” There was a twelve-digit
number on the card. Charley stood, and the two men shook hands.
“This is good for you,” Charley said. “I’m sure of that. But hear
me: this is good for me. I’ll be talking to you.”
When Yarnell drove
out of the ranch yard, Mack felt doubt sweep over like cover. He
knew the man was marginal. His father had said something, but he
couldn’t remember it. He did recall the way his father dealt with
slippery characters, and he called them slippery, many times CEOs
at the ranch who would rather talk business than go hiking, asking
about the numbers and lifestyle. His father always put on his old
world manners with such people, the rectitude, politeness, and
posture. Mack could read it from across the yard, watching his
father keeping every moment square and measured as if reading from
the big book. “Manners are not frosting on the cake, Mack,” his
father had told him. “Manners, chapter and verse, are protection.
They can be better than muscle in the slippery places. A strong man
is strong enough to hold himself back.” The other part he taught
him very young was that “a man can do more at a rough or tricky
dinner with a napkin than he can with a fork.”
Mack began relaying
coded pages two or three times a month, and the checks, enough to
keep him afloat, arrived by courier every month as well. He could
tell from the formats that half the stuff was going to embassies
and military bases. He didn’t care. He banked the money and
wondered if he was doing the right thing for a few minutes every
week; what was it when you could do something well, but you didn’t
know what you were doing? He just went on automatic pilot and
looked the other way. It wasn’t his father’s way, but his father
was gone.
The girl was out
there somewhere, and he steeled his heart to the fact that she’d
met someone and he’d get a clipping from one of the papers with her
wedding announcement. He’d been busy and worried, but it hadn’t
masked the other thing, a feeling he had for her.
She called in
September from a school outside of Minneapolis where she was
teaching music theory. “Who’s calling?” he said.
“You don’t know my
name,” she said, “but we’ve met.”
“Give me your
address,” he said, “I’ve got a proposal for you.”
“Careful with your
language.”
“I’m careful with
everything.”
He then sent her a
hand-drawn map on the back of a paper placemat that indicated the
Crowheart general store and how many miles it was to the unmarked
turnoff to the trailhead and then a dotted line up the dirt road to
the Cold Creek trailhead where he drew an X and noted: September
15. 5:00 P.M.
A month later he
stood where he was tonight under earth’s sky as the twilight
thickened in gradations across the vastness. That first night he
had brought all the gear for both of them, and when her old Volvo
bounced up into the trailhead flat, he knew what he knew. That was
ten years ago.
Tonight it was now
the grainy dark of dreams, and he stirred the pasta, slicing in the
Italian sausage from Hershmeyer’s in Jackson. Homemade sausage. He
set out the straw-bound bottle of Chianti. Dinner for one. He’d
open the wine for her if she came. His own drinking days were over
and he knew it. You make yourself sick enough, you don’t go back.
He had his father’s spine in the matter. He was on the other side
of it now, and he didn’t know what the days would bring him except
none of that. The Wind River Range lay behind him in the new night,
a place he loved and would never know fully from all the years
behind and all the years ahead. No one could take it. Now he could
feel the altitude in his heartbeat.
Then there was a
sound like a river rock walking down a stream bottom, a muted
concussion that slowly grew and became the sound of a car working
up the dirt trail road. It was a silver Lexus with the lights out
in the gloaming and it came across the space and eased in next to
his truck. The tinted window went down and there was her
face.
“Hey, mister,” she
said. “This road is full of cattle tonight.”
He found his voice.
“Those are Bluebride’s. He hasn’t gotten them down yet. How have
you been?” he asked her. “Nice car.”
“Yeah,
well.”
“Kent got it for
you?”
“He helped. It
belongs to the school.”
“He gave it to the
school.”
She got out. “What
are you cooking, the pasta?”
“Yes, ma’am, as
always.”
Vonnie rubbed her
face and took it all in. Each minute now the darkness doubled in
the mountain night. “Oh, this place.”
“Ten years,” he
said.
“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.”