The Signal

by Ron Carlson

  “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.

  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 walke
d 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.