The two teenage boys at the counter in their white paper hats were waiting for us. There wasn’t a line. It was so great. I wanted to get a bag of this fine food and get back to the ball game. One kid wrote it all down: two Wally Burgers with everything, two cones of fries. When I ordered I said, “fresh-cut fries,” and there was pleasure in it. In the old days I would have asked if Wally was around and Nick would have ducked in embarrassment at his old man, but I stopped that years ago. I turned and saw there were fringes of condensation frozen in the corners of the big front window, but it was warm in Wally Burger and I loosened my scarf.
The bag was hot and we hustled it across the dark highway and into the motel parking lot. The cold was over everything, the great arctic cold which had slid over Wyoming. In the warm motel room, we each sat on a bed picking at the greasy brown fries which were heavy and salty and delicious. The Wally Burger took some skill so that the onion and tomato didn’t slide out. It was like food from the fifties and we ate without talking while the game unfolded. This was the game in St. Louis in which Albert Pujols hit a home run and then he came up again and hit a home run. Nick was lying on his bed watching the game and I put on my pajamas and was watching the game. After a while Nick said, “Why do they keep pitching to him?”
I was tired and full of fresh-cut fries, so I turned out the lights so just the game was on and I washed my face with great satisfaction and started sorting my pillows. They had been a terrific help while I was sitting up, but now there were too many. I didn’t like putting pillows on the floor. Nick’s pillows were all on the floor. Nick was sleeping in his clothes and I reached across to his bed and put my hand on his shoulder. I didn’t need to say anything; he turned and undressed in one minute and crawled into bed.
I’d been at home in Southern California that morning and Nick had been in Phoenix with his mother. There wasn’t a fall in my little beach town. The ocean layer thickened and the air grew damp and the days short. I’d met Nick in the Salt Lake City airport and we’d motored northeast to Evanston, Wyoming, for the first night of our fishing trip. I grew up in this part of the west, Utah and Wyoming, and I’d loved walking across that old highway in the dark. I found the remote control in the covers of my bed and watched the television for another minute. Nick was lost in sleep. They pitched to Albert Pujols and he hit a third home run.
—
We got up early and even so all of the trucks in the motel parking lot were gone. The sun was clear and sharp, shooting across the sides of things and catching in the yellow leaves in the bottom of the trees and on the street. There was frost in the shadows.
The interstate highway was full of trucks and Nick drove us east among them toward the Continental Divide. The bright sunlight was on the sage hills and the day was opening. At the great valley of Bar Hat Road, we came over the crest to see the highway descend in a straight line and rise up the far side, and Nick said, “Seven point two miles,” which is just the distance. I’ve known it since this big road was just two lanes sixty years ago and my father used to ask how far I thought it was and I’d say twenty miles.
A little farther on we came to the big green fireworks sign in the high desert and the abandoned Fireworks shop where we’d stopped so many times. There was only one building at the exit, and Nick’s mother called me the Mayor of Fireworks because I let the kids buy all sorts of armaments in the bright-colored packages. We drove past that summit, both of us now feeling the trip had really begun; we were far from home and would be at the cabin in three hours.
Twenty miles east, we left the interstate and drove into the Bridger Valley and stopped at Fort Bridger, the frontier garrison. The parking lot for the old territorial military base was empty, banked with leaves against the low fences. Nick had his camera and went ahead of me taking his long steps out onto the grounds by the old wooden schoolhouse and the grave of the famous dog who saved the barracks from the midnight fire. Across the lawn I could see the ancient steel bear trap and the antique buckboard; the museum was down the lane. We’d been in it a few times and I remembered they had a Hotchkiss machine gun. Today there was a wind and it was tricky to decide in the fragile sunlight if it was warm or cold. This little town always thrilled me, isolated as it was in the broad valley, and now watching my son drift among the old white-board buildings in the sharp fall day, it was as lovely as it could ever be. I went back and climbed in the rental car and was pleased at the sun warm on the seats.
At the four-way stop in Lyman, where there used to be two buffalo behind the Thunderbird station, we turned south. The buffalo, which Nick’s mother and I saw the day after we were married forty years ago, are gone and the Thunderbird station is gone.
The mountains you can see from the town of Mountain View are the great Uinta Range running there along the northern edge of Utah, a thin and magnificent white line along the horizon, all the distant peaks covered in snow. It was a lot to look at and I was excited. You try not to hurry on such trips to the real mountains, but it is hard not to hurry, and as you get out of your car in the parking lot of the Benedict’s Market in Mountain View, you walk toward the store with the measured steps of someone who is not hurrying and it is a kind of happiness in the sunny October day. We filled two carts with supplies: rib-eye steaks and big cans of stew and two bags of sourdough bread and big deep-green cucumbers and a block of sharp cheddar cheese and milk and half-and-half and a box of fresh chocolate chip cookies from their bakery and candy and a bag of potatoes and four onions and tomatoes and two kinds of apples and some soda and beer and bottled water and English muffins and salted butter and paper plates and coffee and hot chocolate and tea and a tub of coleslaw the guy spooned up for us and a bag of green beans and two pages of bacon and four of sliced ham and little cans of green chiles and two dozen eggs and a butternut squash. We checked out and I couldn’t help myself and I told her we were going fishing and she said, “Good luck. You’ve got the day for it.” Above the front windows of the big supermarket were fine examples of taxidermy, an antelope and a coyote, and above the woman and our groceries was a mountain lion rearing to reach for a pheasant. The big yellow cat’s claw was just touching the bird’s tail feathers, frozen in the air. The whole story.
—
We drove south out of town and then east into the badlands above Lonetree. It was on some of these lonely roads in this barren place where we’d set off plenty of fireworks twenty years before. There was an amazing kind of mortar box you could buy at Fireworks and it had six sleeves and six small balls each with a fuse. It was big stuff for our two boys. You light the fuse, drop the ball in the sleeve, and run back. The running back was everything.
From the badlands, Nick and I drove into the low willow meadows outside of Lonetree, the creeks full and amber, the real streams you see on such a drive. The old Lonetree general store closed twenty years ago, but I was in it as a child. It is where we stopped to use the outhouses behind the old school and to buy a lime pop out of the cooler in the wooden-floored store. The last time I was there was with my father and he admired the old clock on the back wall, a clock made in Winsted, Connecticut. The thing everyone remembers about Lonetree is that there is a parking meter in front of the store by the wooden hitching post. Every time I saw that meter in my lifetime, I was with someone I loved.
Now we were up along the northern slope of the Uinta Mountains, a mile from the Utah state line, and we drove along the beautiful hayfields of the last farms parallel to the state line and below the state and federal land. To our right we could see the great white peaks getting closer behind the foothills.
Yesterday, we had met at the airport and we’d rented this Subaru and the October light in my old hometown wanted to break my heart. We drove up past the university and along Foothill Drive and there at Parley’s Way Nick pointed and I said, “Yeah. It’s the church where I married your mother.”
Now the fields were tall with grass and we passed the old ruined trailer and the neat log-cabin house and tiny aband
oned cabin as old as anything in the region, and then we rounded a shoulder on the hillside and crossed back into Utah, though nothing changed.
A minute later the town of Manila, Utah, came into view, the scattered buildings and the blue of the lake behind it. We would fish tomorrow on the far shore.
The entire trip in a straight drive takes just four hours, Salt Lake to the cabin, and every town, every turn has a story: the flat tire and the crushed fishing pole, the herd of deer jumping the wire fence in the moonlight, the mountain sheep, the flood, the bear and her two cubs, the moose, the elk. Going through Manila, Nick had tried to find the Mexican restaurant we’d eaten at after coming out of the mountains on the backpacking trip when he was sixteen. It had been a double-wide trailer and the combination platters were killer, so good, but that place was long gone. Now we drove through the afternoon sunlight without talking. After the last hayfield in Manila, we turned in at the tipped stone canyons and there were two Fish and Game vehicles in the turnout with their orange traffic cones. There was a big black Ford pickup parked there and the hunters were showing the officers the buck. We could see the pink tag on the antlers. I had long ago told Nick of the times that I had deer hunted, all of them three-part stories, pretty good, especially the time when I was a kid and my dad and I woke to a snowstorm and decided to break camp and drive home a day early, but ran into a guy who had shot his hand and my father helped him fix a proper bandage. It wasn’t a terrible wound, but I remember blood on the man’s canvas trousers and my father working quietly with his first aid kit and the medical tape on the man’s hand. My father hated accidents and was angry. When he came back to our truck, I asked him what had happened and all he said was, “There are two ends of a gun, always.” I never heard him tell the story again.
On the radio, the football game came and went. Nick and I drove up the sage switchbacks above the massive blue lake and stopped at the rest area which was abandoned this late in the year. The big loneliness of the planet was part of it now, and even in the nourishing sunlight I felt the wind tucking at us; it was fall. Farther, the canyon walls that plunged into the water were red and yellow and gave the whole reservoir its name.
After the promontory we crossed into the real mountains and the pines, past the road to Spirit Lake, the place I learned to fish when I was seven. The forest along the back of the mountains is still thick and green, not ruined yet by the bark beetle. It is like a vast garden, a million pine trees, fir and ponderosa and piñon growing down to the road. This time of day and after three weeks of elk and deer hunting there would be no danger of game on the road. The first feeling in this place is always also the last: We’re here. Everything else is gravy.
Nick could sense it too. “Where do you think Colin and Regan are?”
“North of Moab,” I said, thinking of desolate Highway 191 as it cuts through the wasteland. I could imagine the connector to Interstate 70 and the fifty miles of that before the Loma turnoff. “No, they’re farther. They’ll cross into Colorado any time now and then climb over the summit.” My son Colin and my brother Regan were driving today from Arizona and would meet us tonight at the cabin. “I hope we can get everything working,” I said. “If the water is frozen, it will be a tough night.”
I hadn’t been to the cabin for a year and a half, and nothing was certain. Now driving with the sunlight holding, everything was still rinsed with optimism, but the bright edge of the short day was crumbling and the shadows of the thick tall pines cut at the roadway in a dizzying serrated shadow that wanted to put me to sleep. When we came to the junction for the lake and the lodge, Nick asked, “Are you hungry?”
“Sort of.” We were both thinking of the Flaming Gorge Burger with bacon and cheese which had grown bigger in memory; it had been a while. It was always stunning to eat at the lodge, to sit in a chair and have the salty chili fries set before us on a plate. “But let’s go set up and make a pot of spaghetti. They’ll arrive sometime about eight.”
“Root beer float,” Nick said as we passed the turnoff.
“I’m going to get one tomorrow.”
Now we drove up the long hill which was the eastern shoulder of the Uinta Mountains and at the top we followed the old highway south through the forest and felt the light change. This was a section of road I sometimes imagined when I could not sleep: each frost heave, turnout, campground, the old corral fence. Nick eased the rental car down to the steel-pipe gate and I stood out in the shadow of the mountain. The sun was golden on the green hills behind us and the brook was talking where it crossed under the road. There has never been in my life a feeling of homecoming like this: unlocking the gate, swinging it wide for the car. When I’d secured the gate again, Nick drove us slowly along the gravel lane. We could see our little cabin from across the loop and it looked like a cabin in a story, a house a child would draw, the window, the door, the chimney. It was sweet not to hurry and Nick drove slowly so that he could point again to each place he’d had a bike accident, and the slash field, and how big the one hill had seemed twenty years ago and so small now. Our entry was marked with the sign my father cut out of stainless steel, the outline of a little moose along with the number 15, our number, set on the cedar post I’d dug in fifteen years ago. The long tree-lined driveway was grown with tall grass, which you want to see in a place, a thing which makes a house look abandoned and full of ghosts, and after driving on the gravel, our approach became very silent as Nick rolled down into the dooryard. The long woodpile lined one side of the grassy driveway, and I had to say again, “I’ve had every stick in that stack in my hand.”
“I know,” Nick said.
“Your kids will burn that wood.” When I used to say that, Nick would come back, “I don’t think so,” or “Who are you talking about.” But now we stood out of the car and he looked at the wall of stove-length logs and he said, “They probably will. I’ll be sure to tell them what you did.”
The cabin stood before us shuttered and silent like a big puzzle box we were about to open. There was work to do. Nick opened the front door and we went in and found the old good smell of firewood and burned coffee and the dry smell of the books. Nick opened all the blinds, copper Levelors. I remember the summer they came. Then we carried outdoor stuff: the ladder, the bicycles, the mower, the barbecue, the picnic table and the two butterfly chairs onto the tall grass behind the cabin. I turned on the electricity and the lights came on in the gloom and the radio roared with static and the fridge chugged and began to grind forward. It was forty years old.
Outside against the cabin wall I opened the small wooden lid over the waterworks and removed the insulating carpet and Nick and I looked at the blue valve that held our success. It was all as I had left it two years ago. I knelt and said, “Listen for it,” and opened the valve turn by turn.
Nick ran inside and I called, “Anything?” I could not hear water running.
He appeared a minute later. “I can hear it filling the water heater, but no leaks under the sinks.” I looked at the old blue valve and the piping in the ground. It was all working.
“Man,” was all I could say, standing up. The feeling now was like being airborne. The meadow in front of the cabin was all yellow sage grass in shadow and the high friction of the air moving in the trees sounded like water over a spillway. The sun was still flat gold against the hills to the east and every time I looked up, walking back and forth from the car to the cabin, the line of shade had advanced. When you know your brother and your other son are on their way, it gives you great reason to assess your groceries again and plan out the spaghetti with thick tomato sauce and hot Italian sausage and big wedges of lettuce with stripes of blue cheese and burned toast and ginger ale. They would have now passed through Rangely, Colorado, through the oil field and the antelope, and they’d be driving into the last low angle of sunlight, the shadow of Regan’s Blazer sixty yards behind them.
Nick went out and turned the car around, parking it nose-out in the dooryard, and then he came back
in the cabin and found me sitting on the couch. I could feel the altitude a little. It was pleasant looking over the meadow though we knew there would be no deer tonight; they were all in the high country. In the summers, there were deer every night and one summer a moose had tried to head-butt our dear dog Max. Max’s tags were in an antique mason jar on the bookshelf.
“How soon will they get here?” Nick said.
“Just after eight, if I know Regan,” I said. “We’ll go down and meet them.”
“Do we need to cook now?”
“Not for an hour.”
Nick took the kindling bucket and stood in the doorway. “I’m going to get some sticks and start a fire.” We could feel the chill now that the sun was gone. He opened the closet and drew out a pillow from the shelf. “Why don’t you lie down there?”
The pillow was perfect. I remembered the old pillowcase pattern from early in my marriage, and I laid out on the long couch and felt the blood beat in my knees while I listened to Nick break sticks and open the stove door and start the fire. I’d napped here a hundred times. Max would find me and lay his chin on my stomach for a minute before curling on the rag rug beside the old couch under the wagon-wheel ceiling light.
One November night twenty-five years ago my father and I put the woodburning stove in the fireplace. It was a great stove with a big glass door and the draft vents made lighting a fire easy and then, when engaged, it heated the whole room. Many times during storms when we’d lost power, Nick’s mother would move all the pans to the woodstove top and make a pot of a soup she called slumgullion with knots of sausage and thick carrot coins and tomatoes, and she’d set the teakettle there for hot chocolate or tea. The cabin would fill with steam and sweet smells, and there’d come a moment late in the middle of the night in the dark with everyone asleep when the fridge would suddenly chug and the radio spit static and it was always an odd disappointment: the power was back on. We’d made soup and had an evening of card games in candlelight.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016 Page 31