by Ron Carlson
He woke in a dry bake, wonderful, face down, drooling a little onto the deep green liner of Vonnie’s sleeping bag. There was a distant crack, the rifle, and a second later the ruined hollow echo broke against the mountain. He swallowed and turned over on his back, his arches taking a stretch he hadn’t planned. The sun was a silver star in his eyes. His head hummed now fainter. Sometimes being warm was just the cure. He sat up and was alone with the quick air on his bare chest, the sky now a solid serious winter blue.
“Vonnie,” he said. Across Valentine Lake the mountain had given up its last morning shadow and stood like a great amphithe ater, a million gray seats, the ghosted shushing descending the cascade. It was grand here, larger than a person could understand, except to be challenged by it, made real and temporal and quiet and humble the way a prayer sometimes worked near the heart, not always but sometimes. The vault of air between the man and the mountain called to Mack, but he couldn’t tell to what, the old feeling that something was going to happen next. “Vonnie,” he said again.
His blue chambray shirt was on the rock, dry where the sun hit it, and his underwear. Standing up he found his socks and boots. He walked to the perimeter of the sunny rock circle. Vonnie sat cross-legged out of the wind below him.
“How far was that shot?”
“Hard to tell, a mile up there, not two,” he said.
“Good.” She looked up at him. “You’re in with Yarnell.”
“Hand me my pants. I’m not in with anybody.” She threw the Levi’s in his direction and he put them on.
“You lie.” She shook her head. She held up his BlackBerry. “What’s this?” Mack sat and cleaned his socks and carefully put them on and then his boots, tying them double. “You know he’s a fucking crook.”
“I don’t know. I know he’s slippery.”
“Slippery? He is more of a mercenary than anyone we’ve ever known. Kent knows all about him and his little loaner air force.”
“He should; they were partners.”
“A long time ago. God, Mack! What the fuck are we doing up here? I’m making you a nap and you’re on a fucking treasure hunt. Did you even want me to come?”
“Vonnie.”
“Fuck you, mister man. Fuck you twice.” She hauled back and threw the BlackBerry out and it fell into the lake ten feet from shore.
“Vonnie.”
She turned to him. “No, fuck you. Why am I even saying? Good luck, you fucking patriot.” He saw she had charged her vest with some of the food, granola bars, an apple. “I’m gone, Mack. If you see me in the post office, don’t even say hello.”
“Vonnie, don’t do this.”
“My phone’s dead. Those guys were half a mile from Clark, right?”
“Right, straight west of Clark in the timber.”
“I’ll call from Crowheart. Don’t follow me. I’m hiking out. Use the bag; I don’t want it now. I only waited the hour to see you lie again.” Vonnie picked up her fly rod. She started to drop down the rocks but caught herself, her sore leg, and turned to pass him and cut to the trail.
“How’s your leg?” he said. She walked into the trees and was gone.
He stood in his boots. He knew what he had to do. He crossed quickly to the campsite and gathered what gear there was, caching the cookware between two large rocks and hanging his old coffeepot in a branch in the third tree back. He rolled her sleeping bag and tied it tight and lodged it well up in the fourth tree. He looked down at his tent, but no way. Now he descended to the shore of Valentine Lake and skirted to where he saw the BlackBerry in the pellucid depths. He cut the leader off his fishing line and tied on a swivel and clipped on the biggest treble hook he had, along with a lead drop sinker. He tried it five times bumping the thing. When he reeled in the last time, it was to measure the depth. Sixteen feet. He stripped and folded his clothing high and dry on a rock the size of a desk by the water. The BlackBerry looked like it was four feet away in the shimmering curtain of sunlight. He took a breath and dropped into the water which was so cold he felt he was being crushed. Mack was never a good swimmer. He pushed down, feet first, and his ears hurt and still he went down, striking the thing with the sole of his foot and squeezing it there with the other until he could reach quickly, his ears snapping again, and grab it in his hand. He blew out and ascended and sputtered onto the rocks. His skin burned in the raw air and his head was full of water. He shook the BlackBerry and set it in the sun while he danced foot to foot. He knew it was waterproof, but he didn’t know about sixteen feet in a lake at eleven thousand.
“Cold again,” he said. “Wet again.” He waved his arms and tried to dry his legs with his hands, gasping, and finally he just stood, back to the sun, his arms on the rock as if he were about to give a sermon naked to the massive sandstone scree while the chills ran up and down his skin. I am not an admirable man. What am I doing with a treble hook anyway? And that’s just the start of it.
He dressed still wet and went above and the BlackBerry opened for him and read now: W. 39 degrees. The time was half an hour before. The blue dot was still flashing. The thing could receive underwater. He measured it out, put his hand up west thirty-nine degrees. He could get over there and look in two hours, turn and with no pack he could hike hard, fast and light, and reach the cars at the trailhead by nine P.M. It was the ranch; he had this one chance. If he hurried, he could still catch her. Or he could cut now and catch her before the valley rim and tell Yarnell he had looked. “Here you go,” he said, and he turned west and started fast toward the big mountain.
All the way he stayed in the trees when possible and he watched for smoke. He wanted to see those kids’ fire, but the sky was clear. It warmed to about fifty and he was sweating as he came to the first shoulder of Gannett Peak. He’d never climbed it, but he knew the maps: two shoulders then a rock saddle on the south side. He hated descending the first hill to get to the second, but the highline did not go where he was going. He was right on with the time.
At two hours he was startled by a shadow and stepped back to see an owl drift overhead motionless, a four-foot wingspan, looking for rock rabbits at the edge of the talus, onto which Mack now clambered. He stood and scanned the rocks, a trillion tons. If anything dropped here, it broke. Needle in a goddamn haystack. He had half an hour before he absolutely had to turn and go. He drank the rest of his canteen. He saw that he needed to go another quarter mile west so he could look back with the sun behind him. There was mica throughout and the field glinted at him in rolling rays as he walked. He had to watch his feet the whole way, but it was easy going and fast. When he reached the high point of the shoulder, he saw what he already knew: this wasn’t the high point; it was still another horizon away. He struck for that and there was another. The curve of the planet. It was one bright world here, gray and silver and white and there were no cairns; he was well away from any traveled path. The air on his neck was cold and the sun on his face hot. If he stopped, he chilled and he sweated as he walked up the rocky platform.
He was as far from roads as you could get in this country and he had the old rare feeling of being the first person walking here and, a few minutes later, first person here. From the beginning of time. This tipped stone plateau was stark and indifferent; sometimes places revealed their indifference. They had been here eons and would be here eons. The rocks didn’t care what happened to the man and they hadn’t cared a thousand years ago and they wouldn’t care in a thousand thousand. Everywhere around him now he saw rocks that didn’t care and wouldn’t care. It was exhilarating and Mack knew it was melodramatic. The sunlight here was ageless and indifferent too. Mack smiled.
He had to hurry. Vonnie was picking her way along the trail down. He felt certain she would stop and see Clay; they always checked out on the way. He could still scramble and catch her. And then? He couldn’t make anything happen. He’d either shown her or not by now. Hope refused to die but it got real thin sometimes.
He was thinking of what he would say to Yarnell
. I walked the shoulder and in good light there was nothing east to west. I went over three quarters of a mile until I could see the western valleys. Nobody’s going to find your trigger. It’s lost. Can I see the money? I ran across the last slope under the winter sun and it was nevermore.
“That thing is lost,” he said aloud. Mack picked up his loping strides and jogged along in the open day. Three, four, five minutes slowing on the broken plates and standing again, now hands on his knees, breathing heavily, while the blood snapped in his forehead. Looking out behind him, he could see the thickly treed slopes over one valley and below at Upper Divide. He’d been there last night or was it early this morning? Line of sight, he thought. That’s where his BlackBerry had started the signal. The water registered in his ears and he tapped his head each way to try to get any of it out. It was painful and then the device in his pocket vibrated and he started as if he’d been shocked and with it in his hand, he saw the flashing blue dot.
It was here.
He stood still and scanned the rock mountain. It appeared a wrinkled blank page. Then he saw something in the brilliant massive slope. He stood and folded his arms and squinted up, his heart still hammering. Here, looking east so the shine was dulled, he saw a splash of soot three hundred yards up, as if someone had struck a giant match. He checked again and it was still strange, so he started hiking, slowly this time, each step a knee burn. Well below the black marks, there were glassine shards and small curls of wire. The thing had blown. He gathered a handful of the stuff and put it in a baggie. The black smears were hardened like tar and at the upper side he found the impact point and there in the rock crevasse were shorn spearpoints of chrome. He lay on the rocks and could hear the mountain gurgling where the underground water ran. It was constant there. He pulled the steel petals up and put them on the rock beside him. The place confused him, the huge black mar, and only this debris? He stood again on the strange angled table of rock.
There were so many times way out in the wild when Mack’s eyes made human features or intricate and intentional designs out of a tangled wall of deadfall trees or urban scenes or houses from a slate slope of granite talus, and now he scanned the edge of the plateau at the twenty dwarf piñons growing in a knot sheltered by a rocky overhang and guarding their cache of snow, and he saw the silver plate of a tail fin. It was cut perfectly in the yellow day, but it didn’t resolve into rock but grew into the girdered fuselage of the accident, so strange and dire that Mack took a step backward and put his hands on his knees, focusing for five seconds on his hiking boots and then back up at the bizarre picture.
Mack stepped rapidly up to the site and put his hand on the aluminum tail fin, and with the touch all of his confusion vanished. For some reason when he felt it in his hand, he called, “Hello!” And he knew immediately this was worse than he’d thought. There had been no fire. The silver craft was tucked into the slot of rocks and trees and cornice of the season’s first snow as if parked there. It was much bigger than Mack had supposed, and he saw two things at once: the single triangular wing was made of light-gauge material and was some kind of liquid crystal display. He pressed his finger, and the material bled out, paled. They were screens of some kind; this was the invisible ultralight. The fuselage was a skeleton of girders. Mack pulled himself along the side, knowing what he would find in the tiny cockpit. The plane had somehow stalled and pancaked onto the mountain and the bottom was smashed. There was no canopy and the pilot, still wearing the oxygen mask, was crushed and bent over, so that Mack could easily press his knuckles into the neck where there was no pulse, just cold flesh. It was Chester Hance; Mack didn’t even have to look twice.
Mack sat in the stones and leaned against the plane, breathing. No. He put his head in his hands and said, “Oh no.” This was Yarnell’s secret. He’d killed somebody with an airplane and now he wanted the airplane. Mack would help them find his friend and then he would tell everyone. He felt the moment now settle into his stomach like a stack of bricks. He fished the BlackBerry GPS out of his pocket and checked to see it was on. He slid it into the cockpit and saw that the console was broken into two pieces the size of decks of cards and he took those and stuffed them into his pack. Evidence. He put his hand on the pilot’s shoulder and then took it back.
His father had taught him not to make two troubles into three by hurrying, but Mack stood and now he moved briskly down the pressed rock runway, careful of his footing, and then he said, “Don’t run,” and then he was running, telling himself it was okay, this was downhill and open and smooth. It hurt his thighs to govern his speed and he couldn’t tell if he was running or simply trying to stop. Long strides. His ears were roaring and through that racket he heard a sound larger than his own eardrums and the underground stream, a gurgling that grew louder as if something were rolling down the hill toward him, a hollow ball knocking louder and then louder. He stopped himself with both arms against the first tree in the grove that bordered the granite highland, and he stood stock still, unable to place the sound as it became a loud vibrato and then the distinct clatter of a helicopter.
Mack stepped back into the shade and witnessed a glass ball rise over the rock horizon in the white sunlight, and he knew immediately it was the helicopter from Yarnell’s field. A little glass two-man. It came up low over the western ridge and turned to the upper slope without mistake. For a minute he was glad to see it, and he thought his troubles were over. He could get down to Clay’s in fifteen minutes. A two-man helicopter unmarked, low, faster now, right in the sun. He wished again for Vonnie’s binoculars, but even so he could see Yarnell in the copilot’s seat, no question because he was wearing his beautiful pink-checked shirt again. That was the trouble with those gold coast shirts; they were easy to remember. Mack could see Yarnell had a rifle across his lap. The little craft made a generous loop assessing the rock slope and then settled over the soot mark, as if they’d been there before. The wonders of GPS. Mack’s head cleared: they’d received the signal hours before and raced over here and missed him by a minute. Mack had now backed farther into the copse. He hoped they couldn’t land up there and would have to find a level and then hike up, because he needed time to escape, but he saw the helicopter set one strut on the ground and hold there, and after a moment Yarnell dropped a leg out and was going to descend.
Mack stood and dodged down through the growth, under the deadfall and onward, stopping against the first big tree with a full canopy. He wanted to make sure he wasn’t hiding like a horse—as his father called it. Standing with their heads in the brush, the horses think they’re hidden. And oddly, because they didn’t move, they were hard to see, especially at twilight. He tried to still his breath and listen as the helicopter hovered. Yarnell would find the BlackBerry and know he was too late.
And then they would come looking for him.
Mack would have to wait. He couldn’t cross open ground until they left. He looked at his watch: twelve-thirty. You knew he was going to do this, Mack thought, and still you left the BlackBerry. He pulled out his treasure, all the blasted bits of Yarnell’s pieces, and put them into two baggies and zipped them into his pack’s side pocket.
The machine’s motors were steady for five or six minutes and then Mack heard it whine and the harmonics changed. He looked up through the branches as it grew fainter and fainter and he wished it to recede to nothing, but then he filled with terror as he heard it returning. It flew right over him and he needed to run now, but he made himself sit. The helicopter again orbited above his thicket and Mack sat still. He was surely out of sight in the deep trunk well of the old pine. It was so close and so loud. Yarnell was trying to scare him out. They cannot see you, he whispered. He was snugged against the trunk in the small space, and he put his pack on his lap and went through it. He had a light poncho and inside the cover he found a pouch of chocolate-covered coffee beans a year old and perfect. He ate them one at a time as the helicopter worked up and down the mountain valley. Twice the sound dissolved and then eme
rged. Then the noise was gone. He stood up and listened: nothing. The air moving across the sun-warmed sheet of rock made a white hum that also was indifferent to his life. Vonnie. She would have stayed on the trail. He’d deadhead cross-country and without a disaster, he could get to Clay in the elk hunters’ tent a half hour ahead of her. Here you go.
Mack picked his way off the trail through the thick deadfall timber until he came to the lower edge of the field of trees. He wanted to run now, run and catch Vonnie and tell her the whole story, and he was clambering over the last big deadfall log about to step into the daylight when he heard something, a voice, Yarnell hollering. The light aircraft was standing stopped on the level rockface of the mountain saddle a hundred and fifty yards away.