Day Three
At dawn the bowl of
mountain sky grew from gray to gold in one minute like a sail
filling with wind, and when Mack looked up from where his first
flames bit the tinder pile he was working, vertigo crossed his
vision like a cloud. It was strange to have moments like these
erase his worries, but they were only moments. The little fire
grew, pure and smokeless and he fed it twigs and now bigger
branches that he had broken last night. His frying pan sat on the
duff beside him already greased with a finger of butter, and he
shook the quart jar of pancake mix with his left hand. The old tin
coffeepot stood full of water on a rock. The air was sharp in the
mountain shade and only the far western rock-tops were silver in
the sun. The frost was furry on his tent and Vonnie’s form was
printed on the top of her sleeping bag in brilliant ice crystals.
She was still sleeping. Mack laid two small logs on the blaze and
crossed them with two, set down the jar in the dirt, and walked
through the trees fifty yards and leaned against a dead tree there
with his BlackBerry. No signal, it read. The cold collared him.
Valentine Lake below was now one single sheet of gray glass. In the
far coves he could see the white line of the ice fringe growing a
foot and sometimes two out from the bank.
He watched rings
begin to appear around the perimeter, ten, then a hundred, as fish
tested the world. He’d seen the surface flies yesterday, almost
invisible tiny white gnats that trout preferred to his ungainly
homemade fuzzballs. He’d never operated at the keen center of
fly-fishing, the way the guides and dandies did in Jackson. He’d
seen their product, so precise and elegant it seemed like
watchmaking, and the flies themselves looked like a fabulous
meeting of jewelry and semiconductors. He had always tied one fly,
brown and coarse and big as a whisk broom, his father used to say.
Grab a couple and sweep the barn. But, and this made his father
smile too, they worked. He didn’t get the little ones or the smart
ones or any fish in a reserve river that had seen worldly equipment
thrown his way night and day all season, but Mack caught keepers
who laid out in the hungry places. That was the whole secret: fish
where they haven’t seen you before. He tried again: no signal. The
sun now was crawling down the hills toward them, and the sky was
what his father called toothache blue, unreal and shocking, which
would last for twenty minutes and then blond out with the sun.
Vonnie still hadn’t moved, so Mack laid more wood on the fire and
set the grill on the stones and the black iron pan on that until
the butter started to skate. He lifted the warm pan and poured in
four dollops of his pancake mix and they spread into pretty circles
and fixed.
“I’m cooking,” he
said to the blue sleeping bag. He saw her squirm and roll around
and her face appeared.
“Morning,” she
said.
“Hi,
Vonnie.”
“Here, wait,” she
said and she disappeared again into the sleeping bag. “I brought
something.” She threw him a foil pouch of ground Hagen’s coffee. It
was warm.
“How’s Mrs. Hagen?”
he asked.
“She’s okay. Her son
came back from Portland and he’s doing the baking now; they’re
going to run Starbucks out of the county. I brought some of their
bear claws too, for later.”
“Oh, that’s
good.”
“I saw you at the
funeral.”
“I saw you at the
funeral with Kent. He didn’t represent Mr. Hagen too, did
he?”
“No, just friends.
Now look the other way.”
“What?” He looked at
her, the recognizable sleep face, his favorite face.
“Look
away.”
“You sleeping
naked?”
“How I sleep is not
your beeswax.”
Beeswax. He packed
the coffee basket with coffee and assembled it again and set it on
the grill.
“You found the
coffeepot.”
“Yeah, I finally
looked for it. You want it?” he said. “It’s half
yours.”
“No, I just want some
coffee. Those your buttermilk pancakes?”
“They
are.”
“Things are looking
up,” she said. “Now look away.”
“I am, goddamnit. I
don’t need provocation.”
“What?”
“I can’t use
provocation.”
“Is that what your
doctor said?”
He turned back to
where she lay in the sleeping bag, her face on him. He could see
her pants rolled for a pillow. “My doctor’s remarks are none of
your beeswax, to use the technical term. At this fucked-up point in
my life I don’t need to see a naked woman in the
woods.”
“You’ve already seen
it,” she said. “Now turn away. It’s not all that
provocative.”
“Vonnie, goddamn, run
off and pee and get dressed and stop provoking me.” He could hear
her rustling and stepping away, and he looked fixedly at the steam
as it emerged from the coffeepot and the bubbles rising at the
edges of the pancakes, and he reached around in his galley sack for
the powdered cream and the jar of honey so he could warm it a
little on one of the square stones in the old fire ring. There was
a small plastic bottle of maple syrup. Vonnie came back in a blue
plaid Pendleton and Levi’s, buckling her belt. She was barefoot and
sat on one of the red sandstones at the perimeter and brushed off
the bottom of her feet and pulled each sock on carefully and tied
her boots double.
“It’s warming up,”
she said. “Do you like your doctor?”
“Here’s some coffee,
dear,” he said, handing her one of the old mugs. She bent and
dropped a spoon of honey into the steaming coffee, stirring it. “I
like everybody now,” Mack said. “It’s the new me.” He turned the
cakes one by one in the pan, showing them browned perfectly. “Let’s
eat all this and decide where we’re fishing.” The sun clipped their
campsite and continued revealing the valley, rising over the
now-blue lake. The lake would change all day. “Those Pendleton
wools are ninety dollars,” he said. She looked at him as a
challenge. “Nothing,” he said. “It looks good on you and they make
a good shirt. I hear.”
“How far is Clark?”
she said. “Not five miles, right?”
“Come on, Vonnie.
We’ll get there. This is a trip; this is the last trip. Let’s fish.
Let’s not rush this.”
“Three miles?” she
said.
He pointed northwest.
“Three miles.” He slid the flapjacks from the pan onto paper plates
and handed her a fork.
“Smells
good.”
“Use that
syrup.”
“Got any cheese?” He
reached and carved out a slice of the cheddar onto her breakfast,
and he watched her sandwich it up and stripe an X of syrup over it
all. Her mouth was full and she said to him: “It’s good. Let’s go
up to the meadow and fish the Wind by the old bridge. It will be
warm there and it will make a good day, right?”
He watched her eat
and then he ate as well. They walked out from Valentine and joined
the trail again, climbing up and down through the trees until they
reached the main mountain valley. From there half a mile in an easy
ascent, they stepped into a place simply called Deer Park on the
maps, a long twenty-acre meadow through which ran the stream.
Meadow willows lined the river and made it difficult to get down to
fish, but there were spots. It was hard not to fish the first
place; it was always hard not to fish the first place. The oldest
story. The water was clear, the brown rocky bottom vivid and
mesmerizing, amber and a magnified gold. Vonnie led them on the
trail through the grass and wildflowers to where their trail met
the township trail which ascended from near Dubois. There was a log
bridge here and on the far side three big logs had been drawn
together as benches. They crossed and sat on the warm worn wood.
They were going to prepare their tackle. Mack’s heart was up,
working the way it did when he felt he was fully in the woods. They
had the whole world now, east west north south, and the river was
singing. There was always stuff at this crossroads, an ammo box of
broken fishing gear, swivels, rod tips, sometimes a pocketknife,
but today there was a new spill of gum wrappers and six or seven
beer cans that hadn’t been there two days, cigarette butts, still
white, tobacco crumbs, footprints of running shoes.
“Let’s not stay
here,” Mack said. “That bear is going to want his
litter.”
“Okay.
What?”
He toured the lakes
in his head: Double, Native, White, Chester, others. “Let’s go up
to Spearpoint. You can fish from the glacier. Two
miles.”
“No trail,” she
said.
“Right, but we can
find it; we did before.”
“Wasn’t that an
accident, though?”
“I can find
it.”
It was sunny and
early in the day, and Vonnie said, “Lead on.”
They continued down
the Wind trail, paralleling the stream where it rushed, crossing
the tributaries that fed in from the west. At each one Mack stopped
and surveyed the hill. There was no trail to Spearpoint, but a
creek flowed out of it and came down this way. They hadn’t been up
there for five years, and all he remembered was that the outflow
was subterranean, flowing under a broken rock sheet most of the way
down. At the third feeder Mack turned and led them uphill through
the small pines and the scree, back and forth, crossing and
recrossing the rivulet until it vanished into the hillside, and he
knew they were going the right way. They came out of the trees onto
a hill of rock lined with lichen above the treeline, the rocks
looking smashed and fitted, and they ascended this shoulder for
half a mile until they came to a barren plain before a rocky cirque
that like the entire series along the mountain crest could have
been called the Throne. The hidden stream still clucked below them,
sounding like a muted conversation. They could see the glacier at
the far end of the field and then walking up ten more feet, the
blue sheet of Spearpoint Lake appeared like a forbidden secret,
like it had been trying to hide. The whole world now was only sky,
rock, and water. Small lichens grew like coral here and there
between the rocks, but there wasn’t a tree or a bush bigger than a
hand. Mack and Vonnie stood on the flat sandstone and listened to
the creek gurgle through the rocks beneath their feet. They were
both arrested by the place and they stood side by side, breathing.
Vonnie stepped forward carefully onto the plates of rock, each one
set like a puzzle piece in the mountain. There was no bank. Water
lipped rocks in one seamless field.
“I remember this,”
she said. “We caught fish here and you said it felt funny taking
them because you didn’t know how they got here.”
“Look around,” he
said, grinning at the remarkable place. “Do you?”
She pointed down into
the gray brown depths which were run with corridors of sunlight,
and two brown trout went by at a depth they couldn’t
measure.
“This is good,” she
said. “I do love these mountains.” She skirted the lake on the
south side stepping easily onto the flattened rocky hillside. Mack
turned his back to her and lifted the BlackBerry. He dialed
Yarnell’s code and the screen opened: 2pm Wed Overflt. Will
send.
“What are you doing?”
Vonnie called back.
“Counting my
cigarettes,” he said.
“You don’t
smoke.”
“I smoke,” he said.
“Dr. Diver said I could smoke. I just haven’t started.” He put the
BlackBerry in his pocket and followed her toward the glacier. They
had to walk up and around the huge ice block to get atop and from
the rocky crest at the western edge Vonnie stopped again and looked
into the newly revealed vista. It was impossible to say how far
they could see, and so much of it was lost in layers of
haze.
“Where’s Jackson?”
she said. “Can you feel the earth turning?”
The wind in the
saddle was steady, the heated air from its ascent up the sunny
slopes suddenly at the summit and spilling into the high mountain
valley, and the sun was warm on their shoulders. They walked up the
ridge and onto the dirty glacier which was banked in the eastern
lap of the rocky peak and curved an easy crescent like a half-moon
from the rock face out in a frozen cantilever over the lake. From
here they could see why it was called Spearpoint, the tip at the
other end where the outflow departed. The glacier was riddled with
soot and the walking was sure-footed, the surface neither slush nor
ice. “This is all airliners,” she said, kicking at the
dirt.
“Probably,” he said.
Smog, coal fire, airliners. They stepped down to the lake edge of
the glacier, now twenty feet above the surface of the lake, and the
curtains of sunlight ran into the water a hundred feet. They could
see fish moving at every level.
“If you can see them,
you can’t catch them,” she said. His old saw.
“You can catch them,”
he said. “Don’t let them see you.”
She took his arm
above the elbow. “Mack, thanks. I’m glad I came.”
He stood on the small
glacier on Spearpoint Lake. “You know, I am too.”
They sat on their
jackets, cross-legged, and Vonnie unfolded her flies, which were
wrapped in a pocketed fleece case. “My god,” Mack said, looking at
the array. “We’re rich.” There were forty flies, some the size of
capital letters in the Bible and some as big as dimes, all of them
four-color, three-material masterpieces.
“He puts the eyes
in.” Vonnie pointed to the red dots and the gold dots on the tiny
flies.
“I am admiring his
handiwork,” Mack said. “Kent’s got a touch.” He pointed to a
dun-feathered fellow with a red stripe. “Use this guy, I think.” He
looked out over Spearpoint, a dozen moving shadows therein. “Try
him. He will speak to the lonely fish below us. And I am going to
throw this until they respond.” He pulled one of his linty caddis
from his jacket pocket. They sat in the coarse snow and tied up,
cinching and clipping for ten minutes. When they looked up again
into the larger world, they mar veled again at the stony bowl of
mountains, five peaks purely above the treeline, and they took
great breaths of the unlimited air. Vonnie stood and measured, arm
back and then forward, arcing her line in a full billow out like a
compass so that it snaked down and kissed the surface and ran out
slowly, pulling the airborne fly on its invisible leader fifty feet
from shore where it landed in a silver dot which became a ring and
then two on the mystery of the water. Mack stepped down the glacier
thirty feet and drew his cast shorter, the big fly almost splashing
where it hit. Then they both saw something remarkable. Three fish
darted from the dark, zig ging left and right, urgently ascending
through the lighted panes of water, unmistakable in their intent,
two racing toward Vonnie’s fly, a wonder, and both splashing there,
the first sound in the cirque of the mountains that wasn’t the wind
or the faint harmonics of intercontinental planes. As they struck,
the other trout took Mack’s fly, smacking his tail like a shovel,
racing away with his prize.
“Holy shit,” Vonnie
said. Their rods bent and bobbed, both reels giving line in these
first moments. They had been taken by the place, the desperate
beauty of fishing from the glacier so far above the water, and they
hadn’t considered this part. They’d made a mistake, and it was
apparent in that first second. The glacial ledge was still fifteen
feet above the lake, too far for landing anything.
Mack gave line and
walked the edge quickly marching, his rod aloft around the edge of
the snowfield to where, when it tapered to ten feet, he could slide
off onto the rocky bank in a small cascade of the old snow. Now he
adjusted his drag and reeled it tight again, the fish fighting and
the rod flexing as if alive. He was good now, but the fish was out
sixty yards. Vonnie had trouble though, her fish had plunged and
she was stuck up in the snow. “I can’t get around there,” she
said.
“Wear him out,” Mack
said. “I’ll come back when I get this guy.” For every three turns
he could take, the fish took one back. “Wish I had some lemon
drops,” Mack said. His father always had a pocket of the hard candy
and told Mack that a good fish would last as long as the candy did
in the boy’s mouth—and no chewing. Mack held the rod in one hand
and rolled one shirtsleeve and then changed hands and rolled the
other. His father would stand back when a fish was on, never beside
him as if to take the rod; Mack was on his own. He’d give him a
lemon drop and back away, saying a couple of times, “Nice work,
son.”
The sun was hot now.
He could see Vonnie’s line angled out into the lake where the big
fish did what he wanted. Eventually he worked his fish in, horsing
him more than he’d like, always it seemed at the edge of snapping
the line. Back and forth in the red shallows the big brown trout
swam, frantic when he saw the man. Mack let him go each way five
times and then lowered his pole almost to the water and reeled in,
lifting and taking the line in his hand and backing straight away,
dragging the trout onto the wet rock shelf and then farther onto
the dry sandstone, where it twisted and jumped in a tangle of line.
Mack got his fingers in the gills, dropped the fish, grabbed him
again and lifted him into the air. It was an eighteen-inch brown,
heavy as a single muscle. Holding him between his knee and the
rock, Mack tapped him sharply on the head twice with the handle of
his knife and the fish shuddered and stopped. Mack carried his
tackle and the fish, still hooked, back into the rocky lichen and
laid it all there. He had to circle again away from the lake to the
rocky summit to mount the glacier and he joined Vonnie where she
stood as if her line were seized by the lake itself. “Let’s try to
get down,” he said.
“He’s too tight.”
Every step she took bent her pole further.
“Let’s wait, just
wait.”
There would be some
slack and she’d take it and then give it back. Slack, reel,
yield.
“Maybe they both took
it,” he said. “It looks like two fish.”
“Mack,” Vonnie said.
“Just one, but he’s worthy.”
“You want a granola
bar?” he asked her.
“Not
really.”
“It’s from
Hagen’s.”
“You went there
too?”
“I’m not as dumb as I
look.”
“Yes you are.” He
opened the homemade biscuit and held it before her mouth. She took
a bite and said through the chewing, “Did you get bear claws
too?”
“I did.”
“We’re at capacity
with baked goods.” He took a bite of the bar and then held the
canteen so Vonnie could drink.
“You got a
headache?”
“Very small, but
we’re up here.” There was some slack and she took it and more and
she reeled in.
“He’s coming in. He’s
swimming under the shelf.”
Vonnie reeled
steadily. “Can you see him?”
“No.” Then Mack saw
something and it was the fish’s shadow in the water and then the
trout near the surface. “He’s too close.” Vonnie snugged the line
and the fish responded, leaping and in that second seeing the
world, the two people in the white snow, it twisted with every
ounce of itself, and the fish swam away, the fine broken leader
trailing from its mouth. They could see him race down, diving
through the bladed sunlight of the lake water, and then stall and
settle again as if nothing had happened.
Vonnie looked at
Mack, her face blank and then he saw the old smile
emerge.
“Fish,” she
said.
They were at the wild
rough top of the world.
She reeled in and
they gathered their jackets and walked back as they had come to
step off the glacier and go around to the lake.
“How long will our
footprints be in that thing?” she asked.
“Eons,” he said.
“It’s going to confuse the anthropologists in the distant future.
‘It looks like one of them had real expensive boots,’ ” Mack said,
“ ‘but what were they doing up here?’ ” She reached into his shirt
pocket and withdrew the rest of the Hagen granola bar.
When they got to the
lakeside, she admired Mack’s fish. “You want to get yours?” he
said.
“I better,” she said.
They walked out the rock shelf and looked into the water. The fish
held and their shadows held. She lifted her binoculars and sighted
and said finally, “There he is with a foot of my
leader.”
“Let’s hope he’s
still pissed off and hungry and can beat these other guys to the
punch,” Mack said, pointing, “Set your fly out here so it’s between
him and the sun. You want a cup of tea?”
“Yeah, make some tea
and I’ll see what I can do about my fish.” Mack scooped the little
stove tin full of water and walked back to the hillside out of the
wind and made a rock corner and set up his tiny propane stove.
Vonnie stood, her rod against her side and tied on another
fly.
The BlackBerry said
now: Not east; W slope. Two mile line. Mack smiled. Needle in a
two-mile haystack.
Vonnie slowly walked
the rocks, small steps, her binoculars at her eyes, and then she
stopped. Mack watched her: a motionless figure on a silver plate.
She knelt, still looking out where the fish held, and placed the
field glasses on the rock shore. She worked her arm back and forth
twice and then looped a slow cast that ran out onto the sunny lake
surface. Mack’s stove hissed; the simmering water had begun to
bubble in the two-cup tin.
He heard a crack and
the sky echoed it. A rifle shot somewhere below. Vonnie turned, a
question mark on her face, and Mack saw her rod start and then bend
double.
“Here he is,” she
said. Mack started to stand but saw that Vonnie wasn’t going to be
delicate about it this time. She hauled and reeled once, and then,
her rod in a horseshoe, she backed away from the lake. The trout
slid onto the land, twisting like a dervish, a blur, and still
Vonnie backed until he was well away from water. She knelt and
secured him and tapped his skull quickly and then again. She lifted
the big fish like a bouquet and grabbed her rod and joined Mack in
the rocky lee.
“What was that, a
shot?”
“Somebody sighting in
a rifle.”
“Or poachers,” she
said. “You can’t sight in up here. You can’t be
shooting.”
“You’re not supposed
to. Is that the same fish?” he said.
“Check it,” she said,
lifting the two-foot brown so Mack could see the two leaders coming
from his noble jaw.
Mack smiled. “The
same fish twice. I’ve never seen it.”
Out of the wind it
was warm and Mack retrieved two paper cups from his daypack and
poured the tea. Vonnie sat a minute and then quickly knelt and drew
her knife, making the vent cut and the gill cross in each fish and
then pulling out the guts in a single pull, expertly, and thumbing
out the blood. She walked to the lake and rinsed them and washed
her hands.
When she returned
with the big browns on a gill cord, she said, “How close was that
shot?”
Mack looked up and
made a circle with his hand. “Up here, in the valley. A mile, two.
Not three.”
“Let’s see your
hands.”
She held them out.
“What do you see; I’m not nicked up.”
“Some ring,” he said.
She took her hands away and picked up the tea. “You and Kent going
to have kids?”
“He doesn’t want
them. We’re not married.”
“You’re
engaged.”
“I’m not
engaged.”
“He gave you a silver
ring with those three stones that look a lot to me like
diamonds.”
“It’s a
ring.”
“Didn’t that lawyer
get down on a knee and say, ‘Yvonne, please marry
me’?”
“He gave me a
ring.”
“I don’t feel as if
I’m getting full disclosure here, but it’s a nice ring. You moved
in with him.”
“I did.”
“That’s a big house.
Is it called a house?” She sipped her tea and looked out over
Spearpoint. “Did you take your books out of that dairy crate?” She
looked at him over her tea. For a moment it was as quiet as the
sky, quiet as it should have been with all of the world far below
them. He said, “You want some sugar cubes? Sugar cubes are very
fine when drinking tea in the big mountains. I forgot.” He pulled
out a paper sleeve and unwrapped the sugar cubes. “Take two. I
don’t have enough sugar cubes in my own life.”
There was a new noise
now, a squeal and then another. “What the hell?” They listened. “It
sounds like wild turkeys.” Then there was a bass whoop and the
unmistakable cadence of voices. “Sit still,” Mack
said.
It was periodic but
ascending and two minutes later the clear words could be heard:
“See, see, see!” A person climbed into view at the spearpoint, and
then another and two more, young people in sweatshirts and hiking
shorts. Two girls and two boys.
“See! My god,” a
female voice said. “What a weird place!” One of the young men lay
down flat on his back on the rocks there, and the three others
stood with their hands on their knees catching their breath. “Is
that snow?”
“What do you want to
do?” Mack said.
“Nothing,” Vonnie
said. “Wait. Hope they turn around. Finish this tea. They won’t see
us if we don’t move.”
“No way!” one of the
girls cried.
“Way way,” the other
said, pulling her shirt off. They were throwing their clothing onto
the boy on the ground who was lying inert in the
laundry.
“Now what do you want
to do?” Mack said. “Drink up. We can hide and watch this carnival
or we can make ourselves known.”
“That was never your
way,” Vonnie said to him. She slowly lifted her cup to her mouth in
two long sips.
“Or we can quietly
slip up over this hill and deadhead back.”
Now one of the naked
girls had picked her way barefoot to the edge and she jumped in the
lake and came up sputtering and swearing and scrambling for her
footing. “Oh my god! It’s ice!”
Mack had packed the
stove and gathered his gear.
“One’s a redhead, if
you want to know,” Vonnie said. She had her binoculars on the
group. “Or do you need this provocation?” The boy had jumped in now
and then the other girl, grabbing him, and one said, “It’s not cold
like this.” The boy on the ground was lying there, his hands behind
his head.
“You’re all
nuts.”
“Come on, James.
We’re swimming.”
Mack and Vonnie moved
low over the hill, carrying their fish, and descended; they could
still hear the voices, distorted and amplified by the water.
“That’s too bad,” Mack said. “You caught a beautiful
fish.”
“It’s okay. These two
are giants. We don’t want another. What are four college kids doing
in the Winds in September? Don’t they have class?”
“They’re after their
merit badges.”
She looked down the
slope to where the trees began. “Which way is it?”
They descended
steeply down rock to rock, their knees working and warming. “Is it
easier to climb up than go down?” Vonnie asked.
“I’ve heard people
say it.”
“I’m saying it.” The
forest was thick here, undergrowth, and Mack led them through the
brush, holding branches, going wide around the deadfall. The trees
grew bigger as they dropped down and the brush more sparse, and the
walking became walking as he followed the drainage, ridge to ridge.
They walked an hour as the shade gathered. They were out of the
wind, but it was cooling, and they moved without talking. They
stopped above a meadow full of elk, all cows, the bulls out of
sight, and ate an apple.
“You hungry?” he
asked her.
“Not
really.”
“We’ll eat these fish
tonight, if we find our camp.” They rose and walked around and then
across a marshy wood through a rockfall, boulders big as rooms, the
ground patterned with elk track.
“You know where we
are, don’t you?” she asked him.
“I do,” he
said.
“You’ve got direction
in the woods like no one I know,” she said. “I’ve always loved that
about you.”
“Thank you very
much,” he said, “but let’s go down here first.” They stepped
carefully down a broad screefall and into a vale of short pines
walking among the trees, no trail. They ascended the far side and
out into the scrub meadow, the last clumps of lupine and high
mountain sage. Mack looked at where the sun now met the mountain
and he checked his watch.
“It got late,” Vonnie
said.
“We didn’t have a
lunch,” Mack said. “I’m sorry.”
“We had one of
Hagen’s bars and tea by the glacier,” she told him. “Who gets
that?”
The shadows had
thickened even as they stood and talked. The angle of light grew
fragile; it made him want to hurry. It had always called to him,
and now it hurt. You always felt time as a tangible heartbeat in
the mountains. The days were short.
On one fishing trip
when he was a boy, his father had talked about it, about how when
you slept at eleven thousand feet, you were going so much faster
than all the folks sleeping way below you back in the
village.
“Faster, sir?” Mack
had said.
“That’s it. We all go
around as the earth turns,” he said. He circled a finger. “One day,
sunrise to sunrise.” He went on. “But sunrise to sunrise in that
one rotation, we’re way up here and we travel a whole lot
further.”
“How
much?”
“That’s for calculus
to know,” his father had said.
Mack lifted his first
finger to make a point. “You’re smiling.”
His father did smile
now. “Okay, right you are, but it’s still true. Look around, son.
You can feel it. Time up here is precious. You with
me?”
“Yes, sir. I
am.”
Now the mountain air
felt rare again, the day lapsing. Vonnie put her hands out suddenly
in recognition. “I know where we’re going,” she said. They stopped
as they joined the highline game trail, and she knelt and picked up
a large rock from a fall there. “Get your rock.”
“Right you are,” he
said. And he picked up a stone as big as a football. They walked up
the faint switchback trail, which Mack himself had made for the
first time six years before, and they topped a hillock with three
ruined ponderosas standing dead. They’d hauled a lot of stones that
year.
The grave was as
they’d left it, an oval of stones level in the grassy hilltop. The
place was run with faded lupine. He could see Vonnie was affected
by the spot and she stood with her stone and looked around at the
great circle of the world. “Prettiest gravesite on earth,” she
said. The air lifted her hair. She walked around and fitted her
stone into the pile, saying, “Hey Scout,” and Mack laid his there
too. The old plank he’d cut at home lay in the rocks, weathered. It
said: SCOUT. A DOG.
“You want to say
something?” she said.
“I’m glad we’re here.
He was a good dog who loved to fish.”
Vonnie sat on the
ground and drank some water from her water bottle. “We haven’t been
up here.”
“Three years,” he
said. “No, four.”
“You should get
another dog,” she said.
“He had trouble not
chasing a cast,” Mack said.
“I know all about
it,” Vonnie said. “He could swim.” She handed Mack the bottle and
he drank. “We’re making it quite a trip.”
“Well, we brought two
more rocks,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“What was
that?”
“What.”
She pointed: “A deer?
No.” She laughed. “I thought I saw somebody.”
“Hiram,” he
said.
“I’m tired,” she
said. “That’s all.” She stood up.
They left the trail
from the gravesite, crossing south off the hill and in half a mile
they dropped onto a path and climbed three hundred yards of hard
long uphill strides. Here it was very dark, the periphery run with
narrow spears of sky. Then the trail veered off level under some
pines, and they were standing in their perfect campsite, quiet and
waiting above the blue blanket of Valentine Lake in the burnished
late day. “That’s why I hang a clothesline,” he said.
“To welcome you
home,” she said.
“So I can find the
way,” he said. “But welcome home.”
Vonnie shook her
sleeping bag and lay down on it, unlacing her boots. “You want me
to cook?”
“No, I’ll do it,” he
said. She lay and watched the sky, and Mack saw her eyes close. The
sun was down behind the western slope.
He cut the heads from
the trout and they were still too big for the pan, so he left the
tails on and stuffed them with lemon wedges and pepper and butter
and double-wrapped them in foil and set them aside. He knelt and
fingered together a mound of tinder, moss, and hairy duff and lit
it and fed it up, and the fire rose quiet and straight. When he
looked up from his work, the day was gone, the mountain sky a bowl
of glowing grainy dark. He snugged the fish into the coals burying
them carefully by using a forked stick. Away from the fire it was
chilly and he could hear her napping. He put his hand on her
shoulder and she woke without a word, her eyes a sleepy kindness,
and she crawled into her bag and napped again. Mack made a tour of
the perimeter and gathered an armload of branches, using half now
to stoke the fire. He broke and sorted the rest into piles close at
hand. He shook up a water bottle with powdered lime punch and set
it back on the rock shelf.
There you are, he
thought. No trucks, no horses, no buildings big or small, just the
fish and the fire and the sleeping woman. He wanted the math right,
but the sleeping woman was not his sleeping woman and he could do
things carefully from this night far into the unseen days, and it
would all still seem borrowed.
When the darkness
visited him, he tried to look it in the face. But it was darkness,
so much of it opaque. He would have been the worst witness for the
months behind. He’d had a headache or so it seemed for five years,
always scraping by, eking out, scratching, and the disappointment
yawned and wore at him, something he never honored by calling it a
name. He just let it burrow in and work him, chasing him from job
to job. When Vonnie would try to talk to him, he left the room and
got a beer. She suggested he open the ranch again and that had him
into the whiskey. She stopped, but he didn’t.
One night he ran into
Weston Canby at the Silver Saddle after Mack had stood two weeks at
a temporary flagman job at the entrance to the national park and he
was parched and pissed off. They knew each other because Mack’s
father had fired Canby years before. Mack had been thirteen or
fourteen and Canby had been stealing firewood by unloading his
trucks to the bed sill and then driving off with the balance. This
was after he’d been asked to show his permit for taking firewood,
and he’d fumbled, saying it was lost. Mack’s father let it go once
and then stopped the truck exiting the gate the next week. Mack was
there where he’d thrown a saddle on the fence bar to rig the
stirrup.
“You forgot to
unload,” his father said to Canby.
“Oh shit,” Canby
said. “I’m sleeping.”
“No, you’re not.
You’re fired. You’re stealing this deadwood from public lands and
then stealing half from me. Let me add that up: two wrongs, Weston.
You can’t go up and take things that aren’t yours. You’re making a
bad start in business in this county.”
Mack had been
startled by Canby’s coarse insult and he turned to see the man’s
face burning as he tromped on the accelerator and roared out of the
ranch in a blooming train of dust. For some years Mack remembered
the look and avoided places in town where he saw Canby’s
truck.
In the bar Weston
Canby pointed at Mack’s face and said, “I got you a drink, flagman.
I got you two.” Mack couldn’t work his knees, and he realized with
all the workday dirt on the corners of his forehead that he had no
position in which to stand, high horse or low horse.
Mack’s father, when
offered a free drink in such places, would always answer, “No,
thank you kindly. But the time and occasion may give me no chance
to reciprocate.” Mack had no idea what that meant, but he knew,
when he threw back the first of Canby’s tequila, that he had
crossed the line. Canby folded a hundred-dollar bill under Mack’s
palm and said, “Enough with the sun-drenched state highway work.
I’ve got a special mission for you, my boy.” The feel of Canby’s
hand on his shoulder was like a claw.
And so it began. He
fought with Vonnie and thought such fighting was about being a man,
insisting on doing it alone, his way, when in fact he was fighting
himself and spoiling his house.
A week later he got a
call from Canby and he picked up a rusty yellow Chevy Super Sport
in Rawlins, certainly full of meth, and drove it to Gillette and a
payoff of seven hundred dollars and a bus ticket home.
Vonnie was gone. He
stashed the cash in his dictionary and took the next job. He’d been
out driving this way for a month, and people had begun to call him
for it. The fourth or fifth run he met Canby outside of Cody, and
they talked the way they did standing outside a bar toeing the
gravel, and Canby said, “I brought the boy a present.” He pointed
to a brown hatchback parked there in the dark. “Go ahead now and
have fun.” Canby’s throaty laugh.
There was a person in
the car, Trisha. She was twenty-five, pretty and ruined, a full-out
addict brittle and electric and she ran him for the next three
months which astonished him now; he was a marvel of weakness to
himself, and now he shook his head over the high mountain campfire.
Hooked up was her phrase right off.
“Now we’ve hooked up,” the term as ugly as he felt about it. “He’s
done and now it’s you. What’s your name?”
Again he felt hollow,
nothing in there to check him, put a foot down, stand up. And so he
saw it was shame and went for it, caving utterly, crazy on the road
then with this woman who never slept but quivered in her seat, her
eyes half closed, and when she was awake, she was climbing him as
they crossed the state with cars full and recrossed it, or she was
sitting there staring, always with a tallboy can of beer between
her legs. It didn’t take two weeks of such a life to have him
drunk, the hole in him unfillable or so it felt, and he started
throwing empties out the window, reaching for another
beer.
Sometimes she’d climb
on his lap while he drove and take his face in her hands and kiss
him while he angled and squirmed to watch the ninety-mile-an-hour
highway. Her eyes were too personal to look at, glassy and wrecked,
but she could see him, he felt. She could see in. “Do you know who
wins this kissing contest?” she’d say, going for his mouth again.
“Do you? Do you know?”
“You win,” he’d say.
“You win.” And he’d shake her off back into her own seat where
she’d lift her tallboy in a toast. “I know,” she’d say. “I am the
winner in that department.”
One night as they
sped heedless through the oil fields, the flickering silhouettes of
antelope on the shoulder for the highway salt and bunch grass
there, she woke from being passed out on his shoulder and she said,
“I know you have another girlfriend.”
It sucked the air
from his throat, but he said back, “You’re not my
girlfriend.”
She sat up and found
another beer. It was always night in Wyoming then. “I don’t care.
I’m just your hookup,” she said and her voice got tiny. “And this
is the end of the world.”
He stuffed all the
cash in the dictionary but knew as the season continued that even
that would be no recompense. He’d lost himself.
In Cheyenne one night
all they had to do was trade one small U-Haul trailer for another
down at the rail yard and hitch it up, a job for which the hourly
pay would have been nineteen dollars and he was getting five
hundred for the risk. When he freed the delivery trailer, it
dropped suddenly and pinned the back of his hand to the oily
ground. He recoiled with the adrenaline and was able to bump it off
with his shoulder, the whole trailer. There on his knees he took
the first deep breath in six months and his eyes burned over with
tears. His goddamned hand. He rolled over and sat back against the
side of the trailer, his hand pressed tight in his armpit, and here
came Trisha with a bottle of Wild Turkey swinging by the neck,
medicine. “Oh, baby,” she said, kneeling on him, her bones sharp on
the tops of his thighs, and he closed his eyes and saw it. These
were addicts and drug dealers and they couldn’t even secure a
trailer. Not one thing was done square. He took a slug from the
bottle and felt it bite, and he pushed Trisha off as gently as he
could and he held his hand up, meaty and swollen, a blue C stamped
into the back. These were drug dealers. There wasn’t going to be
fresh oil in the engines or good tires or a tight lug nut or any
single thing done right. This was a free fall
at the shiterie. His father said that at times when things
ran careless. He said it at the rodeo anytime there was a problem
with anybody’s tack or rope. You coil your rope in a hurry, you
won’t have a chance.
An hour later in
their miserable motel, he watched himself bandage the hand and it
was the same deal, such imprecision. Trisha ran tape in loops
around it until he stopped her. She wanted to go out and so they
went, ending up at a biker bar called the Silver Trail. Mack kept
his hand in his jacket and he could feel his heartbeat there as the
flights of drinks arrived. Trisha was pissed that he wouldn’t dance
and went out and leaped around, purposely bumping into the big men
in their Levi vests. She was drunk, but she was always drunk, and
Mack could see it was going to be one of their all-nighters. He’d
stayed up with her plenty, because going to bed was bad. He
couldn’t lie there and wait for sleep because everything else came
up for him and he had been shown he was a coward in those times.
But then an hour later in the Silver Trail she was in a kissing
contest hauling with some other woman at two or three men at a side
table. “Don’t your old man care that you’re over here on top of
me?” one of the men called out. “You’ve got more tongue than the
devil’s sister.”
Mack held up his hand
from across the room. “No problem.” He knew that was always a lie,
but he repeated it. When Trisha saw his hand up that way, she went
crazy. She turned back to the man as if to deepen their kiss and
then she swung, raking his face with her nails and screaming. She
started flailing her skinny arms, but the man threw her out onto
the floor. Mack didn’t move, and he knew everything and saw it all
at that moment when he didn’t stop the man, who got up and kicked
Trisha and then walked around to where she had squirmed on the
floor and he kicked her again. Mack himself was drunk, but he knew
he couldn’t carry any of this. He had five hundred dollars folded
in his pocket and it felt like poison and he had ruined his hand
and he had not helped the girl who never once in the four months he
knew her had helped herself. When he stood, he did it so that the
man could come and hit him too, but the moment had passed and the
bar-tender’s wife had hauled Trisha to a booth and was holding a
towel to her mouth. He showed Trisha the wad of cash money and slid
it into the front pocket of her jeans, and he was going to say
goodbye, but seeing her eyes, he could not say
anything.
It was his worst
moment.
Ten days later Wes
Canby found him outside a steakhouse in Jackson and they had a talk
in Canby’s black Toyota pickup. “You can’t quit,” he told
Mack.
“Yeah, I can,” Mack
said. “I do. I quit. I’m no good for it.”
Then Canby did
something that Mack had been waiting for. He reached and pulled a
blue velour from under the seat and unwrapped a pistol. It was a
little black automatic of some kind. The gun, as Canby took hold of
it, did nothing to him. He opened the door of the vehicle. “A gun,”
Mack said. “Not much to shoot here, but you can shoot if you want.”
He was standing on the ground with his back to Canby.
“You did a job on
Trisha,” the man said.
“I know it.” Mack
turned. “We both did.”
“She’s
dead.”
“She is not.” Mack
said it without thinking.
“In her cell in
Cheyenne.”
Mack put his hands on
the truck seat and looked up at Canby. “If I see you again,” he
said, “I will kill you. Daylight, town square, I don’t
care.”
Weston Canby smiled.
“You’re a waste of time, sonny. You should take a minute and
consider how things really work. You’re tied to me ten
ways.”
He gave in to the
shadows in his memory and followed them, thinking this moment was
worst, no this, and finally knowing it was when he realized that
Vonnie had left, found shelter and more with her old friend Kent.
Mack stood with his sickening dictionary and it was the worst
moment. The truth was that his worst moments made a long string,
and when he finally hit the wall drunk in Jackson, he’d come to
long enough to find Kent’s car and break the windshield with a tire
iron, which seemed a lot more work than it should have been and
gave Mack the thought right in the middle of it, I’m out of shape here, mister—breathing like a lumberjack
while I break a glass window? He was a ruin and when taken
to jail, he had vomited in the tank all night, the dry spasms
finally cramping his back, feeling in the aftermath a bruise warm
like the hand of his lost father. Mack lay in the foul dark place
and his hands were scarred and grimy, the cuticles bloody and the
scratches a black scribble.
Night came in purple
layers. Mack had walked out to the promontory over the black lake
so he could look back at the campsite, the tent, the little fire,
the spot of his dishtowel. He tried for a star but knew they would
only come out all at once and when he looked away. Above a dark
lake at night in such a place, it is hard not to think of all the
thousand years before and those to come a thousand thousand,
regardless of your troubles. Is that it? he thought. Is that what
this place does for me?
The fire was a
pulsing mound of coals now and Mack fed it up again for the
light.
He buttered two
slices of pita bread in the frying pan and warmed
them.
“I’m cooking here,”
he whispered.
Her face appeared and
she said, “Perfect.”
“Are you
cold?”
“Not really.” She
came by the fire and sat on the flat stone. “I fell
asleep.”
“You want some
wine?”
“No, I’m a little
dizzy already and I’ve got the headache.”
“Drink this,” he
said, handing her the green punch.
“Bug juice,” she
said. “A cure-all.”
Mack tugged the
foil-wrapped fish from the fire and opened each package gingerly on
paper plates. The fish fell apart under their fingers bite by bite
and they ate the burned bread and drank the whole quart and then
another of the green-flavored punch.
“Were there rocks in
the Garden of Eden?” he asked.
“Is that where we
were?” They were pinching the trout in the dark and eating
it.
“Did that girl really
have red hair?”
“She did. A big girl
with red hair.”
“That’s enough
information. I’m tired.”
“I ate that fish,”
she said, lifting the skeleton up over the fire and dropping it
there.
The night was still
and clear and the stars had now all appeared and tripled. They
seemed to be stepping closer. “Clear and cold,” he said. “You want
in the tent?”
“I’m good,” she said.
She set her paper plate and its tangle of remaining fishbones in
the yellow fire and their faces were lit again. “But I’m all
in.”
“We’ll have bear
claws for breakfast.”
“And your coffee.”
Vonnie got into her sleeping bag and he saw her squirm out of her
clothes and her face disappeared. He burned his plate and caught
the ashes.
The screen of the
BlackBerry said: Logan Peak E or N. Check. He typed back: Will do
am. And then he crawled into the old tent.
Hours later he felt
her, the sleeping bag first and then her in it, bumping him knees
and back.
“Who is it?” he said.
Then he said, “You okay?”
“Yes, it’s just
cold.”
“Oh my, you came into
the tent,” he said.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Shut up. Kent knows me.”
“He’s lucky,” Mack
said. “Did you wipe your feet?” She shifted and settled against his
back and was quiet. “You want me to tell you a story?”
“The cannibal
story?”
“No. He wasn’t a
cannibal. He ate baked fish and bear claws and was very lonely. He
was looking for something.”
Vonnie was
quiet.
“Is that your heart
or footsteps?”
“Mack.”
“Listen.”
“No story,” she
said.
“He lived in these
same woods,” he said. “As sad and wrong as you get to
be.”
“You listen, you
shit. He wants you. Those are his
footsteps coming for you.”
Then her breath was
the breath of the sleeping, and he moved back so she was there, and
he closed his eyes and started to say a prayer that also became
sleep.