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 assembling 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 buttery 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 piñon 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
scrape?”
“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. “Hello the camp!” she called. “Hello 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 grass.
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 glass 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.
“Nobody 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
assemblage, 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 pass.
“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.”
He had always carried
her across, from the first year when it had been a surprise to both
of them. He had suddenly picked her over his shoulder in a
fireman’s carry, his hands clasped under her butt, and as he
splashed through, she had laughed.
“Then you carry me,”
he said now. She walked upstream to the place where the
stepping-stones were set and she walked carefully across and
continued up the trail. He watched her for a moment. Then he knelt
and washed his face in the cold water. He stood and took a deep
breath and blew it out, and he followed her, keeping his old boots
dry for the first time as he crossed Cold Creek.
They had married in
the dooryard of the home place, before fifty friends and Vonnie’s
family and the three horses standing witness at the corral fence. A
half hour before the ceremony his buddy Chester Hance had carried
Vonnie off as the bridesmaids were having their pictures taken on
hay bales in the barn. He’d lifted her sidesaddle onto Rusty as if
for a photo, and then he’d mounted behind her and trotted up the
famous horse trail into the aspens, waving his hat and hollering,
“This lady has been abducted! She is too good for this horrid
fate.”
The young women
hurried out of the barn, and they could hear Vonnie’s laughter as
she struggled to say help and just
laughed. Chester was a good rider. His colorful ransom note was
discovered nailed to the barn door on a shirt cardboard. Half the
letters were backward, and it occasioned another round of drinks.
The entire scenario required Mack to ride up the trail backward on
Copper Bob singing “Home on the Range.” The horse knew what to do
even with the man on wrong. The wedding party stood below as he
disappeared still facing them, singing and happy into the trees. A
moment later Chester hollered again and galloped into view. “I
don’t care if that gal is from the East Coast, she’s more bobcat
than any of the locals I know.”
Someone called out,
“As if you know any!” and the wedding party turned to see Mack and
Vonnie ride down the trail together.
Sawyer Day, who was a
justice, presided in his string bow tie, and they had a barbecue in
the fragrant May day. Amarantha’s husband Brett ran the pit, and
she had set a fabulous buffet on sawhorse tables just off the
porch. The fifty guests danced on the plank floor of the barn until
midnight and then one o’clock; the band was jazz-bluegrass from
Cheyenne, led by a guy who had been at school with Vonnie. They
played the extra hour gratis as a wedding gift. As the trucks filed
out the ranch road in the dark, full of friends calling back their
jokes and good wishes, Vonnie and Mack sat on the old porch swing
and it grew silent, except for the sounds of the house settling
which hadn’t felt such traffic for two or three years.
It was the moment
between the old and the new worlds. His father would have sat up
with them a minute like this on the porch; he liked the still
night, the sleeping ranch. And then he would have stood, pivoting
with his hand on Mack’s shoulder, and Mack that night felt the hand
there, a blessing. His father would have stepped down into the
dooryard on his way to the bunkhouse for this night, and still
walking away, he would have touched his hat and raised his
glass.
The horses looked at
the couple from across the way. After half an hour in the night,
Vonnie said, “I’m home.”
“We’ll keep this
place,” he said.
“Somehow,” she
said.
“There isn’t much in
making funky websites for the citizens of Jackson,” he said. “We’ll
be land poor.” For Mack the night yard was full of ghosts, and he
knew he wasn’t up to running a guest ranch. He could never greet
the guests with the equanimity and grace—and real friendliness—his
father mustered. He would feel a fraud.
“There’s stuff,” she
said. “I’ll teach.”
“You married a ranch
hand,” he said.
“I did. I love that
you’re a hand.”
“And you’re a heart,”
he said.
“Now we’re really
talking,” she said. “Let’s kiss.” The three horses stood in the
dark, their eyes unmoving. She whispered, “I didn’t marry you for
that horse. Let’s go inside.”
Now it was the warm
high center of the day, and Mack and Vonnie ten feet apart moved up
the trail, the sun on their necks. She stopped when they stepped
into the beginnings of the rock field between the two verdant
mountains. It was a mile of slumped talus through which the pack
trail wound, a white line in the gray rock, struck there by
horseshoes for uncountable years. The wind now blew north
unimpeded, cuffing every loose sleeve. “Let’s go up to the cairns
and eat some lunch,” he said.
“This has always been
a weird place,” she said, falling in behind him. For a while the
world was rock and sky pressed by the wind. This was where the
earth ended and the sky began, and the sky worked steadily for
more. The trail was rippled and craggy and every step asked a
balance, and Mack and Vonnie kept their arms out as if skiing.
Mack’s knees burned as they stepped over the top and found shelter
from the sharp air. They sat at the crest against a sunny wall of
the granite and looked ahead at the pitched green pine slopes of
the massive upper valleys of the Wind River Range. South were the
rocky towers of a grand cirque, Armitage, Bellow, and Craig,
mountains that were in a score of picture calendars in Europe every
year, mountains that had claimed a hundred lives, mountains with a
dozen saucy nicknames each, the nicknames climbers give to
dangerous places, wicked names and apt. North were the blankets of
evergreens that ran aground at 11,500 feet and showed the round
rocky promontories of the oldest mountains in Wyoming, striations
of silver rock run and capped most of the year with snow at the
summits.
“You get up here and
you can see the planet again,” she said.
“Our planet,” he
said.
“It’s not
ours.”
“You don’t know that.
It looks like ours.”
“You got any Vienna
sausages?” she asked.
“I might,” he said.
“I’ve got this for you now.” He handed her a round of fresh pita
bread and then a thick slice of yellow cheddar. He peeled the lid
from a tin of sardines in olive oil and lifted half of them onto
her open bread with his pocketknife.
“All the food groups,
thank you very much.” They ate in silence. It was strange and
pleasant out of the wind, and they could now both feel the high
chill of being sunburned.
Then the trail was
packed dirt winding down the first western slope, sage and
berried-scrub and willows until they entered the trees again at a
place they called the Gateway because of the great dead skeleton of
a ponderosa standing over the trail, and high in it on a huge
branch strung an old withered pair of hiking boots that had hung
there through the years. Every time they saw someone barefoot in
Jackson, one of them would say, I know where
her shoes are, or I know where that guy
could get a pair of boots. The descent leveled off and they
crossed a tributary of the river, a stream that needed just a long
step, and then the trail followed it gradually downhill. This
became a valley that twisted north and south, the creek bubbling as
they went and they moved apace. It was in this place that Mack
always began to feel finally a long way from his truck, from town,
from all of it. He could breathe; they were almost in.
From here Mack could
see the switchbacks of the western trail that led over the rim to
Jackpine Lake, which was really three lakes, where his father had
taken him when he was ten. It had been a great trip and a lesson,
his father talking on the drive out from town, saying, “What have
we got now?”
“Sir?”
“How many
horses?”
“Eleven.” Mack knew
them all by heart.
“Here,” his father
said, “right now?”
“None. No
horses.”
“And how many acres
and ranches and buildings big and small, including tractors and
saddles and tables and chairs and ladders and fences all
totaled?”
Mack looked at his
father’s face as he drove. The faint smile. “None?”
“That’s right, Mack.
Just us and the truck and our gear, as I see it. You with
me?”
“Yes, sir, I
am.”
At the trailhead
they’d packed up and when they had climbed over the first hill,
he’d said, “And how many trucks?”
“No trucks,” Mack had
said.
They’d camped at
Jackpine, between the lakes, and the next day they’d walked around
Larger Jackpine, and his father had said, “And now no tents, no
pans, no stove.”
“Daypacks and gear,”
Mack had said.
At the far end there
was a rock spill onto which they walked. First they’d stashed their
packs and stepped out carefully to fish.
Mack already knew the
answers. “Our poles and some gear.”
“That’s about right,”
his father had said. “You got your knife, Mack?”
“My knife and some
matches. Four flies.”
“Well, this is very
fine indeed,” his father had said. “We’re just about ourselves now.
This is working perfectly. Three lakes and three days. We’re
getting down to some very fine mathematics.” He swung his line free
and gathered it back to cast. “Let’s fish.”
Mack had looked at
the man, sleeves rolled, lifting a cast out onto the blue-brown
mystery of the lake surface, and that line marked the known world
from the unknown, and Mack wondered how he understood the depth of
this little bay, how he knew where the fish were, how he knew
everything he knew. The wondering seemed to hurt Mack’s heart which
he understood simply to be love, the aching desire to measure up,
to master the mathematics.
The stream joined the
Wind River in a muddy open glade criss crossed with game trails,
deer, elk, and moose tracks, a party. Mack walked the perimeter of
the area and toed a small fist of bear scat. “This guy got into the
gum,” he said. “There’s a bear full of tinfoil in these
woods.”
The sun was way west
now and the shadows had changed, the day turned. They walked up
along the Wind River to the two fallen logs, a bridge they’d used
all the times, and they walked across the mountain river and sat
down.
“Can you feel the
altitude?”
“I think so. Let’s
have some water.” Three deer came upstream and saw them and turned
around and walked down.
“That’s a nice pack
Kent got you.”
“I got
it.”
“For this
trip?”
“For my
trips.”
“Kent
backpacks?”
“He
might.”
“At two hundred
seventy-five dollars an hour, it would be expensive hiking for that
guy.”
Vonnie rose and
hefted her pack back into place high on her shoulders, cinching the
waist strap. She led them away from the river on the old trail
through the pines. A mile later she stopped at the rim of the upper
bowl. Mack joined her and they looked down into the wilderness.
“Where are we going to camp?”
“We always camped at
Valentine.” This was their neighborhood.
“Where are we camping
today?”
Mack lifted his chin.
“Let’s go over there,” he said. “I know where there’s a ring of
stones and some firewood.”
Valentine Lake was a
twenty-acre heart of silver blue rimmed to the edge by pines and
red sandstone. They came over the low ridge and saw it set out as
if invented this morning. Circling west they stepped up the stony
terrace to the rock porch where they’d been before. It had the
advantage of a level place for the tent and the boulders made a
kind of room, good for sitting and leaning the packs. The fire ring
was still in place, remarkable in that it was unused; this wasn’t
on any trail. They had gathered the six rocks, each the size of an
unabridged dictionary, ten years before and set them here on earth
above the lake. Mack shrugged off his pack and leaned it against
one of the boulders. He marched off into the trees, counting them
to ten and finding the steel wire oven rack where he’d hung it.
Over three stones it made a perfect cook stove.
“We are golden,” he
said, returning.
Vonnie hadn’t moved,
her pack still on. Now she walked to the perimeter of the campsite,
her hands clasped behind her, a strange look on her face. “This is
such a bad idea.”
He had seen this face
before, almost a year ago. He said, “Let’s get some firewood.” The
day had broken on the evening’s clouds, and the surface of the lake
was a million coins in the breeze. She looked at Mack and he
stopped.
“How’s
Trixie?”
He folded his
arms.
“No, how is
she.”
He knew to stand and
face it, but it was against the grain. “Her name was
Trisha.”
“Trixie.”
Mack waited, but he
knew to be silent was to lie and he was done with that. “And she’s
gone. You know that.”
“Oh, what happened,
big boy? Did you lie to her?”
“Don’t, Vonnie. I
mean, you don’t need to.”
“Don’t.”
He had resolved in
his bitter extremity to say things as they were, not to duck or
feint. It was one of the hardest things he had ever done, and it
hurt every time before the relief descended. He hated to have this
conversation here, above the lake in their camp, but he would do
it. “Trisha is gone. I made a mistake. A series of
them.”
“Just one series of
mistakes?”
“Vonnie.”
“Did you just lie to
her?”
“Don’t.”
“No, I won’t. It’s a
stupid question, no? To ask a liar if he lied.”
“Vonnie. Let’s get
some wood.”
“Liar. A lying
liaristic lie-maker.”
“I stopped
lying.”
“Oh, when, ten
minutes ago? How does a liar stop lying?”
“Vonnie.”
“Do they remove
something?”
“Vonnie.”
“Yvonne. And let’s
not get wood. No fire. Let’s just go up to Clark Lake.” She was
crying now and her pack was shaking a little as she stood. “And
catch a fish and get out of these fucking mountains.”
“You love these
mountains.”
“I used to.” Her pack
trembled. “But they’re full of liars now. You even ruined the
mountains.”
“Do you want to camp
someplace else?” She didn’t answer but turned and stood looking at
the corrugated lake in the mountain twilight. “I’m sorry, Vonnie.”
He now too felt it a mistake, all the mistakes. “This was the wrong
spot, all wrong. I’m sorry.”
“Valentine Lake,” she
said. “Go get some wood.”
The wind was steady,
but the small fire bent and flourished, and he cooked the tomato
soup as always and burned the bread on his long fork so they could
dip strips into their bowls. The fire helped. Vonnie took off her
boots and wore her camp moccasins, sitting by the fire. They’d
unpacked and Mack had set his tent. Vonnie was reading, holding the
book flat to catch the light.
“How’s the school?”
he asked.
“It’s going well;
every time they cut the music program some rich parent steps up.
Somebody gave us a grand piano, but we don’t have a room for it, so
now they’re building a room. There’s a lot of money in that town,
but it only comes out in certain ways.”
“A grand
piano.”
“Yeah, and Kent
started a board that does fund-raising.”
“He’s got to be good
at that. And he gave the school a car.”
“He
did.”
Mack had wiped out
the bowls and wrapped them in the dishtowel. “Did he not want you
to do this?”
“Of course he didn’t.
He hates you. You should have never fucked with his
car.”
“I shouldn’t have
done anything I did this past year, Vonnie, but breaking the most
expensive windshield in Jackson was as pure an act as ever I
did.”
“You were
drunk?”
“I was drunk for,
let’s see, just about five months.” Mack turned to her and held
open his hands. “I’m sorry, Vonnie. Sorry. But more, I’m done with
it. I’m done with desperation. I was as lost as you
get.”
“How was
jail?”
“That is a great
question. You always said I was in my own way with my pride,
remember that?”
“You
were.”
“I was. Jail fixed
that. I’m not proud anymore. Jail is jail and I had weeks of it and
those weeks were the same as a lot of weeks last year. I’m all even
all over town, except for two more apologies and the bills. Bills
and three more apologies, but I’ll get them.”
“Who’s on the
ranch?”
“Jessups. He was
going to get sheep, but as far as I can see they’re just living
there.”
“Do you get a decent
rent?”
“Decent minus the
horses, the upkeep. I’m a little negative, but I’m working on some
projects.”
“Did Yarnell come
through?”
“Sort of.” Mack set
sticks into the small fire. The last daylight was trading around
from the rocky towers, and the gloaming would last half an hour. It
took the darkness a long time to fill.
“Kent says you’re
tight with Yarnell and that Yarnell is the enemy, a
crook.”
“He’d
know.”
“He’d know before
you’d know.”
“Well, I’ve got some
projects is all.”
“You could sell it
all and just go.”
“I could and where
would I go? Where do people go, Vonnie? San Diego? My knees are too
bony. This is where I go.”
“You’re fighting the
whole county.”
“I just want to keep
the place. Stay straight and do what I can to keep the
place.”
“The
bank?”
“The bank is the
bank. They were with me and now they’re deciding. You want me to
sell so you can get that money?”
“Mack, did you look
at the letters?” He had the five ivory envelopes unopened in his
father’s rolltop.
“Not yet. I’m sure
they explain your position. They are beautiful envelopes, Vonnie.
That guy has some bona-fide stationery. My theory is that beautiful
envelopes are full of terrible news. I can wait if you
can.”
“You are still proud.
And you are dumb as a stone.”
“Don’t let the stones
hear you talking that way.”
There had been a
dozen ups and downs before Mack really went down. He had lived
forever at the edge of his money and he was tired of it. After they
were first married, he had to rent the place out and he and Vonnie
took a place in Driggs, across the border, an old refurbished
trailer at the end of a road for the grayest year of his life. At
first it was right. He could feel the money they were saving,
positive four hundred dollars a month, almost, working the mortgage
along, but the stupid place was built into the hillside and cold at
all times and actually not even level, but they were in love and
poor and so fine, but then they wore out poor and they did some
damage to love. Her parents offered help and they took some, and it
stung Mack and he took the stinging as a weakness, but he could not
turn it into anything good.
He remembered one day
when she came out of the little tin bath in just her shirttails
holding up a pair of her underwear to the light and he could see
them worn thin and she was laughing, saying, “This is us in the
glory days, my ass a millimeter from the world. If I have to go to
the hospital, change my drawers first, please. Promise me. Go to
Woolworth’s and get me a highwaist pair of whities before they
operate.”
She was laughing and
laughing, and so he swallowed it all and laughed too, the poor
ranch owner a millimeter away from losing the deed. But it hit him
and was a seed of his desperation. He was working odd jobs, one in
a bookstore drugstore/drive-thru liquor in Driggs, and she was
teaching piano out at the ranchsteads. In the spring, when they
moved to Jackson and took a two-bedroom townhouse a hundred dollars
over their budget, the farmer they had rented from hauled their
terrible trailer out to his summer house and buried it for a septic
tank. They had laughed about that too. Seven years ago or six, he
forgot.
Now he stood up. “You
want to fish? There’s still some light.”
“It’s cold and I’m
tired,” she said, “but yeah.”
“Okay, let’s go
down.” They geared up in camp and walked down fifty feet to the
lake. Three boulders protruded into the water, each as big as a
bus, and they stood downwind and cast into the mirrored sections
along the shore.
“How’s your fly
selection,” she asked, an old joke. There was no selection. He only
had one size of big woolly caddis, but he had twenty of the
things.
“Perfect,” he said.
“They like these bugs.” He had clipped on a red bobber and threw it
thirty yards straight out, the wind ballooning his line as it
fell.
“A bobber?” she
said.
“I like to use it
once and put it away.” The light failed imperceptibly. A mote
across the lake became an eagle, a crescent that looped and landed
alongside another in the top branches of the skeleton of a massive
dead piñon. Vonnie glassed them with her binoculars.
“Somebody’s been to
REI.”
“These are good,” she
said, handing them to him.
He was surprised at
the lensing. He could see the throat feathers ripple. “It’s mother
and daughter.”
“You don’t know
that.”
“They’re women,” he
said. “See how calm they are.” He gave her back the new glasses.
“I’ll be back,” he said, clipping his rod with a stone. Mack walked
back up to camp and looked down on Vonnie lifting her line for
another set. He powered the BlackBerry and dialed the window. He’d
have to get within a mile to catch any signal from the missing
part, and he didn’t know if that was sightline. The odds were
crazy. He typed in: 10.5K Valentine. Send. He turned it off and
looked at the device and put it back in his pocket. It was an
uncomfortable lump, just like the whole deal.
He’d been out of jail
two weeks when Yarnell called. They had stayed in touch through the
years with Mack doing short spot contract jobs, softcore hacking,
for Yarnell for cash from time to time. It was a weird call, but
they were all weird; whenever Mack was with Yarnell, he felt it in
his gut. It was going to be trouble, but Mack felt he deserved it.
And there was always money. Yarnell said to meet at the Tropical,
the funky bowling alley in Jackson. Walking over there in the dark,
Mack thought, this has got to be the low, meeting a crook in the
bowling alley. He knew it was his father talking, and Mack
straightened up. He’d lost weight in jail and he cinched his tooled
belt to the old notch. You’re not fit to choose your company, he
reminded himself. You’ve got to make something work. He’s going to
say something and you’re going to do it, good or bad. Then in the
summer night he spoke aloud, “Just who are you,
cowboy?”
The bowling alley had
been at the thin tail end of its heyday when Mack was in high
school, and then it slid into sleazy ruin and now it had been
washed twice and was half smart and half tony, a place for the
slumming realtors and tourists from Germany and Japan. The sign was
a beauty: the big white neon bowling pin lit three times in a spin,
rotating in jerks: up, over, upside down; up, over, upside down. It
hummed as Mack walked under.
Yarnell signaled him
from the gravel parking lot, and Mack walked over and climbed into
the black Land Rover. Mack had resolved to let the older man speak
first.
“You had some
trouble,” Yarnell said. “Sorry.”
“Yeah,” Mack said. It
was an effort now. “Did you hear it from Chester?”
“He didn’t say much,
but yeah.”
“I’m
out.”
As always, Charley
Yarnell looked polished, his gold wire glasses and his broad
forehead. He was wearing a two-hundred-dollar pink-checked shirt
with a silver pen in the embroidered pocket. Mack had seen such
shirts at the ranch. You saw a dozen any Saturday night in Jackson.
Brokers wore them on western holidays.
“Anything I can help
with?”
“The place is still
not for sale.”
“I know, son, but it
won’t need to be if the mortgage folds. I’ll just step up and claim
the pretty place.”
Mack had his hand out
almost to Yarnell’s chest. “No son,
Charley. Let’s just talk.”
“What happened to
you?”
“Too much to say. But
recently I got myself arrested breaking a windshield right over
there about six streets. I was drunk and thought I had a reason.
There was worse stuff that they didn’t catch me for.” It always
cleared his head to admit this. “Look, I can get out of your car
right now.” He turned to Yarnell and saw he was being studied.
There was something about him that Yarnell liked, and Mack
understood it to be the weak places.
“I got a job for you,
if you want. Some money, which you need.”
“I’m open. I expect
it’s not computers.”
“It’s an airplane.
Remember the drones from my place?”
“I do.” A few summers
before Mack had driven out to Yarnell’s place sixty miles west. It
looked like a ranch from the road, but behind the house and the
barn and the toolshed were twenty acres of winter wheat and then a
narrow asphalt landing strip and four small hangars. You had to
duck your head in two of them. Charley Yarnell had two Cessnas, one
a blue twin engine, and a two-man grasshopper helicopter under a
canvas awning. But he took some time showing Mack his set of a
dozen drones, little gray things with single jet engines with air
intakes the size of liter bottles. “This is the future,” he said.
“This is the money.” He could get them to take off in sixty feet, a
ninety-pound aircraft, and he ran them from handhelds and from the
computers in one of the buildings. “They’re hardwired for this
strip,” he said. “Latitude, longitude, and elevation.” He pointed
to the control panel along the fuselage. “All I put in is the time
to touchdown and the wind speed.”
Yarnell had Mack’s
old friend Chester working for him and the whole little spread was
squared away nicely. Chester had been in high school with Mack and
he waved from the small hangar and pushed one of the little planes
out onto the paved lane with a long T-bar. When he came over, he
took Mack’s hand and asked, “How’s that place,
cowboy?”
“Rented out for now,”
Mack said.
“It’s a tough country
on ranches,” Chester said. “You ought to get back out there and run
it.” Yarnell stepped over and Chester handed him the control
unit.
“I might. And now
you’re a pilot?”
“Yes sir. I went to
airplane school,” Chester said. “You’d like flying.”
“There’s too many
mountains in my life to put an airplane in it.”
Yarnell handed Mack
the control to examine and took the T-bar from Chester and
straightened out the little plane, handing the bar back to Chester
without looking.
“This gentleman has
some airplanes. Some don’t need a pilot; that right there tells you
how hard flying is.”
A bright blue
six-wheel tank truck entered the far yard. Chester stepped up and
took Mack’s hand again. “I’m glad to see you. I’m going to get over
and take delivery on some fuel. Say hey to Vonnie and get back with
your horses, you cowboy.”
“Will do,
Chester.”
Yarnell showed Mack
the hand controller for the aircraft and then led him over to four
white Adirondack chairs in the shade of the hangar. He had Mack
press the switch and then hold the red button which ignited the
jet, more of a hiss than a roar. Yarnell took the controller back
and used the simple joystick to send the plane forward in a sudden
rush, like a thrown thing, instantly in the sky and a moment later
out of sight. They had coffee for twenty minutes there and Mack
scanned the bulbous cumulus cloudbank running along the blue-sky
horizon like a hedgerow for the craft the whole time. Yarnell had
made a show of putting the controller on the ground.
“There,” the man
said, pointing.
Mack saw the gray dot
again, remarkably small, now descending slowly like a toy and
banking at the end of the strip for a turn, coming in for a landing
in soft bumps with the engine off. “Hands off,” Charley
said.
“Where’d it
go?”
Yarnell looked at
him. “You tell me. I loan these to the government.”
“Don’t they have
their own?” Mack had asked.
“That there is a
mystery,” Charley had said. “I wanted you to see what we’re doing
is all.” Mack looked across at Chester atop the fuel truck with his
wrench and he did feel a little better about the whole
deal.
In Yarnell’s Rover in
the parking lot of the Tropical, Mack asked, “What’s the
job?”
“We lost part of
something. It fell from a plane. It’s about the size of a
book.”
“In the
mountains?”
“In the
Winds.”
“Some kind of
secret?” Mack said.
“Some
kind.”
“Is it
radioactive?”
“No. It’s too hard to
explain,” Yarnell said. “But it’s like a trigger, a fingerprint.
And they need it. It’s the linchpin, the prototype.”
“There’s a new
drone.”
“There
is.”
Mack asked, “This
trigger. Whose is it?”
“Ours,” Yarnell
said.
“Ours as in us,” Mack
said. “Who?”
“It’s worth ten
thousand dollars to you, if you can hand it to me.” Mack watched
the big bowling pin tumble through its stations. Behind it the
night was lit by the bar lights of Jackson, and the outline of the
two-story town was cut against the mountain. Looking over the
buildings had always confounded Mack. It wasn’t just Jackson; it
was any town. There was something wrongheaded and sad about the
venture to him, something that didn’t fit. He could abide it, but
the clock was ticking.
“What if it’s all
broke apart? It’s going to be broken up.”
“If I knew that for
certain, that too would be worth some money.”
“Who else wants
it?”
“I don’t know. I
don’t know who knows about this.”
“I mean like the
Chinese? Are they going to be crawling around the
hills?”
“I can’t imagine,”
Yarnell said.
“Who else have you
hired?”
“No
one.”
“And you can’t say
one thing.”
“That would not be
safe,” he said.
“Who else in this
part of the country knows about it?”
“I don’t
know.”
Mack was thinking as
fast as he could. “When did they drop it?”
“Two days
ago.”
“Is there a signal, a
GPS?”
“No. Yes, but weak. A
mile max. I know the flight line and the hour it went missing. This
is a private experimental aircraft and they don’t want to lose that
piece or leave it out there. It’s bigger, much bigger than the
stuff I showed you.” He unfolded the USGS map. There was a red oval
that covered the entire diagonal. “We may not find it, any trace,
and that’s worth five grand, but you’ve got to look. We need this.”
Yarnell opened his face in the sincere way that great liars can and
Mack knew that face.
“I don’t know where
it is,” he said. “I need you. It’s a long shot, but you know the
country.”
“Some,” Mack said.
After a minute he added, “I’m taking Vonnie.”
“I thought . .
.”
“You thought what
about Vonnie, Mr. Yarnell? She’s a friend of mine. Is it at all
dangerous or just a walk in the big woods?”
“A walk,” Yarnell
said. He opened the glove box and pulled out a packet of hundreds.
Mack saw his own hand go out and take the money. Twenty bills. “A
start. Good luck. Go bowling and have a sandwich. You know how the
BlackBerry works. It should be a walk in the woods.”
With the money in his
pocket, Mack had no position from which to speak. He pushed open
the door with some effort and slid to the ground. In the last year
every time somebody had handed Mack a sheaf of money, it had been
freighted with shame and this was no different. He could taste it.
Mack heard the vehicle back and drive out through the gravel. He
walked up under the humming sign and entered the carpeted
auditorium which smelled of beer and echoed with muffled
crashing.
Now the wind came up
as if charged by the great shadows, and with the sun gone, the cold
gathered. Vonnie always fished until he called it; she wouldn’t
quit first. His bobber was bright in the lake, something as out of
place as it could be. “They’re in here,” he said, “but let’s leave
them tonight. It’s chilly.” The far hill had collapsed into
darkness and the birds were gone.
“One more,” she said,
drawing an elegant arc with her flyline and tipping the fly in the
lee of the rocky bank forty feet farther. She reeled in and turned
to him. There was a smile on her face, and he saw it. Fishing
worked. It was something that still worked.
In their campsite
Mack fed up the fire and banked it with a little log windward in
case they got up in the middle of the night and needed to refire
for tea or cocoa, and he sat in the tent and pulled on his
sweatpants. He felt like a man washed up on the beach after trying
to drown himself. His shoulders hurt. How could he have made such
mistakes? Ten years and here he was in a tent alone. He groaned, a
habit he disliked in himself, but it was better than the swearing
that had taken him months to stop. Somewhere getting in his car and
he’d say, Fuck me, and look around and have to silently take it
back. He drew a deep breath. He could feel the altitude headache
like a tight hat. He heard noises but they were nothing; the first
night way up like this and it always seemed the woods were full of
traffic. He climbed out of the tent again and erected his
clothesline in the dark and clipped the blue and green towel to it
with a wooden clothespin. He always had clothespins. Vonnie had
bedded against the windward rock in the pine needles. “You want in
the tent?”
“I’m good,” she said,
crawling in her bag. “This goes to twenty below.”
“That’s plenty,” he
said. “You won’t need a hot stone.” She gave him a look. He’d
burned his sleeping bag with a rock plucked from the campfire on
their third trip. “You want a story?”
“Oh Mack, not
tonight.”
“Those were fine
eagles,” he said. “I wonder if we’ll see our owl.”
“It’s not ours,” she
said.
“It’s ours,” he
said.