by Ron Carlson
“Sir?”
“And two years later I was a married man.”
“Who got whom?” Mack said, a gambit.
“We’re still not sure,” his father said. “Just that it was a good deal.” He stood and held his hands out lightly at his waist. “A girl who goes for a bear is superior to one who would go for a car. I’ll say that. You just be careful of yourself. Remember Jude?” Jude had been their first hand, a drunk, always cutting himself or losing things with bad knots. He finally fell from a horse and put an eye out on a fence post.
“I’ll be careful,” Mack said.
“Oh, I know it,” his father said. “You’re not the least like Jude, but your old man wants to worry. You know?” His father stepped and put his hand on the boy’s neck and embraced him just a moment.
“Don’t I know it,” Mack said to the man. Then he stood and faced his father. “This isn’t a cliché and it won’t be. It’s either nothing or something, but don’t worry.”
The next January he got the pictures, the bears, and himself on Copper Bob, his face half shaded by his hat. The letter said she’d be in Europe all the next summer and for him not to show those bears to any other person. He was at Boise State studying history and everything else, lots of computer stuff. He liked everything but accounting.
Without her, the ranch that summer was different and he used the energy he felt when she was around to work at learning the money of it, their never-ending hard stretch. Sawyer Day and his father sold sections; there was pressure for houses, mansions really, and with each sale they bought a year or two, but the taxes and the mortgage were still significant. He applied to have the tax status changed to ranching and the county changed it to modified-use estate range residential. They had some terms. He applied again. With his father in trouble like that it was hard to concentrate on his studies the next fall, but they advanced, and he pursued computer science, encryption as it developed, and modern history.
Then two things happened in one day the next winter. He’d taken a house across downtown, a gerrymandered brick bungalow where he lived alone and had his computers lined up serially in the front room. He wanted a set of components and objectives he could control. He was consulting for the university and on a State Department grant. There were two phone calls in one day. One was the girl calling from Prague. She would finish her degree in May and was coming west.
She said, “This is a job interview: I want to work at the Box Creek and buy that horse. And I need to tell you a secret.” The long-distance line was a steady friction.
“I can’t stop you,” he said.
Then he heard her whisper: “I said your name.”
His heart clogged his throat. A minute later he said, “Come west. Bring your diploma and get out here.”
Before he had sat on the ratty couch he’d covered with a bed-sheet, Sawyer Day called and asked him if he was sitting down.
His father’s death changed it all. At the ranch everything was tilted, weird; it was more than something missing. Gravity had changed. Mack saw to the horses and painted the small barn, but there was no center for him without his father there. He made an effort to focus and failed; he felt there was no reason to brush the horses, no reason to feed himself. His grief was tangled by the enormity of the place and the fact that he felt he didn’t deserve it. When he came into the house, the feeling of emptiness rocked him. He hadn’t seen his father every day, but he knew his father was there, out at the ranch or in the other room or coming back from town and his presence in the world was like order itself. It was impossible to fathom and for the whole season he had trouble pushing one foot in front of another, trouble tying his work boots in the first place. Some rule had been expunged and he felt off-step and wrongheaded. The daylight of the dear place had changed.
And not just the ranch; when he was back at school Boise felt like it was underwater. He stopped going to class and started cutting corners with his computer work. His life, which had seemed a logical series of clear choices, blurred for a moment and then blurred for real. Without his father’s expectations, he found himself without a rudder and he knew it, and he drew a sharp breath when he saw that there was some part of him that was glad for it.
Mack’s father was buried in the family yard atop the northern hill beside Mack’s mother. The black wrought-iron fence had been welded in the toolshed below. Years ago Mack’s mother had planted the dozen golden juniper pfitzers that struggled in the wind but survived. Sawyer helped Mack. They closed the guest ranch and battened down the hatches. Sawyer showed him all the numbers; they were negative always six hundred and fifty dollars a month. They sold acreage so they had two years. Sawyer waived his fee and stepped away, shaking Mack’s hand. “I hope you can keep the place.”
There were still 375 acres of range and hill and mountain, down from over a thousand fifty years before. He had twenty offers on the place, enough to retire on. He sold the two cute log cabin cottages and they were hauled off on flatbeds. He sold all the horses but three. Amarantha drove out from town one day and gave him a notebook with her recipes and kissed him on the cheeks. The printing was beautiful and large, but he knew he’d never make a one. He wired up his computers and went from grant to grant, now working in codes for this agency and then that. People in town thought him a hermit. He was twenty years old.
In June a black Range Rover pulled into the ranch dooryard and a man that Mack recognized got out. His name was Charley Yarnell, and he’d been a guest several summers at the ranch.
“I liked your father,” he told Mack, “and I wanted to talk to you.”
“The place is not for sale,” Mack said. “We’re flush.”
“You’re not flush,” Charley said, “but I don’t care. I want you to do some work for us. From out here. Consulting.” They sat in the front parlor, a room dominated by his mother’s bright rag rug, an oval of orange and red and blue and green that looked like the bottom of a trout stream. “This is good work,” Charley said. “Money, and somebody’s got to do it. You’d be an outpost, like a transfer station.”
“This country is full of retired military,” Mack told him. “People with clearance.”
“That right there says it all. I don’t need people with clearance. I need somebody at the end of the road.”
“Is it the CIA?” Mack asked.
“Nothing is the CIA,” Charley said. “It’s just an agency and it’s just a job. The only people who would talk about it would be you and me.”
“This is a favor?” Mack asked him.
“No, it’s work. I saw you with your dad; you’re my man.”
“I’m not my dad,” Mack said. It hurt to say and was a relief. “You want some tea?”
“No,” Charley said. “I want you to put in a satellite dish for TV, any company you want, and I want to give you this card.” There was a twelve-digit number on the card. Charley stood, and the two men shook hands. “This is good for you,” Charley said. “I’m sure of that. But hear me: this is good for me. I’ll be talking to you.”
When Yarnell drove out of the ranch yard, Mack felt doubt sweep over like cover. He knew the man was marginal. His father had said something, but he couldn’t remember it. He did recall the way his father dealt with slippery characters, and he called them slippery, many times CEOs at the ranch who would rather talk business than go hiking, asking about the numbers and lifestyle. His father always put on his old world manners with such people, the rectitude, politeness, and posture. Mack could read it from across the yard, watching his father keeping every moment square and measured as if reading from the big book. “Manners are not frosting on the cake, Mack,” his father had told him. “Manners, chapter and verse, are protection. They can be better than muscle in the slippery places. A strong man is strong enough to hold himself back.” The other part he taught him very young was that “a man can do more at a rough or tricky dinner with a napkin than he can with a fork.”
Mack began relaying coded pages two or
three times a month, and the checks, enough to keep him afloat, arrived by courier every month as well. He could tell from the formats that half the stuff was going to embassies and military bases. He didn’t care. He banked the money and wondered if he was doing the right thing for a few minutes every week; what was it when you could do something well, but you didn’t know what you were doing? He just went on automatic pilot and looked the other way. It wasn’t his father’s way, but his father was gone.
The girl was out there somewhere, and he steeled his heart to the fact that she’d met someone and he’d get a clipping from one of the papers with her wedding announcement. He’d been busy and worried, but it hadn’t masked the other thing, a feeling he had for her.
She called in September from a school outside of Minneapolis where she was teaching music theory. “Who’s calling?” he said.
“You don’t know my name,” she said, “but we’ve met.”
“Give me your address,” he said, “I’ve got a proposal for you.”
“Careful with your language.”
“I’m careful with everything.”
He then sent her a hand-drawn map on the back of a paper placemat that indicated the Crowheart general store and how many miles it was to the unmarked turnoff to the trailhead and then a dotted line up the dirt road to the Cold Creek trailhead where he drew an X and noted: September 15. 5:00 P.M.
A month later he stood where he was tonight under earth’s sky as the twilight thickened in gradations across the vastness. That first night he had brought all the gear for both of them, and when her old Volvo bounced up into the trailhead flat, he knew what he knew. That was ten years ago.
Tonight it was now the grainy dark of dreams, and he stirred the pasta, slicing in the Italian sausage from Hershmeyer’s in Jackson. Homemade sausage. He set out the straw-bound bottle of Chianti. Dinner for one. He’d open the wine for her if she came. His own drinking days were over and he knew it. You make yourself sick enough, you don’t go back. He had his father’s spine in the matter. He was on the other side of it now, and he didn’t know what the days would bring him except none of that. The Wind River Range lay behind him in the new night, a place he loved and would never know fully from all the years behind and all the years ahead. No one could take it. Now he could feel the altitude in his heartbeat.
Then there was a sound like a river rock walking down a stream bottom, a muted concussion that slowly grew and became the sound of a car working up the dirt trail road. It was a silver Lexus with the lights out in the gloaming and it came across the space and eased in next to his truck. The tinted window went down and there was her face.
“Hey, mister,” she said. “This road is full of cattle tonight.”
He found his voice. “Those are Bluebride’s. He hasn’t gotten them down yet. How have you been?” he asked her. “Nice car.”
“Yeah, well.”
“Kent got it for you?”
“He helped. It belongs to the school.”
“He gave it to the school.”
She got out. “What are you cooking, the pasta?”
“Yes, ma’am, as always.”
Vonnie rubbed her face and took it all in. Each minute now the darkness doubled in the mountain night. “Oh, this place.”
“Ten years,” he said.
“Ten years,” she said. “The last trip.”
“You came,” he said. He forked the pasta up in a test. “You kept your word.”
She looked at him, “Mack,” she said. “It’s been a hideous year and you hideous in it, but it’s my word.”
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.”
“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!”