Ron Carlson - The Signal

Table of Contents

Other Works by Ron Carlson

Stories
News of the World
Plan B for the Middle Class
The Hotel Eden
At the Jim Bridger
A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories

Novels
Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Truants
Five Skies

For Young Readers
The Speed of Light

This is a work of fiction. No events or persons are real. Some of the place names, mountains, and fish are real, but I have moved them around in writing the story. Also Ive made the fish a little bigger than they actually are. This is hope at work, an elemental feature of storytelling.

I wish to thank Roger Day who showed me his marked copy of Finis Mitchells fine book, Wind River Trails, and then the mountains themselves. A note: if I was going to go into the Wind Rivers today, I would use the Bears Ears trailhead and I would go before September 10.

I wrote this book in October at Ucross and I am grateful to the Ucross Foundation, especially Sharon Dynak and all of the staff. My thanks also to my friend Michelle Latiolais.

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group, Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson
Penguin Canada Inc.)
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright Ron Carlson, 2009

All rights reserved

Publishers Note

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Carlson, Ron.
The signal : a novel / Ron Carlson.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-05242-6

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.

For Elaine

Day One

He drove the smooth winding two-track up through the high aspen grove and crossed the open meadow to the edge of the pines at the Cold Creek trailhead and parked his fathers old blue Chevrolet pickup by the ruined sign in the September twilight. He had been right: there were no other vehicles. There had been no fresh tire tracks on the ten-mile ascent from the old highway except for the set of duals that had come almost halfway and turned around. That would have been Bluebrides horse trailer seeing to his cattle the week before. Mack had seen two dozen head scattered in the low sage all along the way. He got out of the truck and reached back for the coffee hed picked up at the Crowheart general store an hour ago; it was cold. He walked back and opened the tailgate and sat, finally lifting his eyes to look east across the tiers of Wyoming spread beneath him in the vast echelons of brown and gray. It was dark here against the forest, but light gathered across the planet and he could see the golden horizon at a hundred and fifty miles. He wanted to see headlights, but there were none. He wanted to see headlights bumping up the old road to meet him here, at the appointed hour.

He could tell that it had already snowed once, sometime last week, but there was no sign of it now, no patches in the deep shade, no mud in the tracks, but the country was blonder, the grasses still standing but bleached once, paler, as if slapped by the first weather of the season. Mack sipped the cold coffee thick with cream and looked for her car. She would come or she wouldnt come, and he would still have his mission. He said it aloud. Shell come or she wont, but youre still going in.

He stood down and retrieved the brown fleece vest shed given him five years ago, and he moved to the toolbox and got out his stove and set it up on the tailgate and filled his old pan half full of water and put it on the blue ring of flame. He pulled his pack off the front seat and knelt in the grass against the wall of trees and set up his old two-man, a blue and gray throwback twenty years old; hed replaced many of the wands twice, but the zippers still worked. He threw his pad and sleeping bag into the tent and then laid the little raggy carpet sample on the ground at the entry. Hed been barefoot on it a hundred times in the mountains. Some things you carried in because they made sense. It was dark working there, but again behind the truck the light of the world fell on his shoulders. To the north he could see one corner of the highway so far below and those cars now had their lights on. He checked his pack for the electronics that Yarnell had given him: the military BlackBerry; he had it in foil in a small Velveeta box. He double-checked all his side pockets and then he unrolled his fishing vest and checked the nine pockets in it for all his fishing gear. He repacked and clipped his rod segments along the back, and then laid it all on the front seat. He was ready.

He took his bonus cooler, the old green metal Coleman from their dating days and knelt and pushed it under the truck behind the cab. They always did it, left a cooler full of goodies for the day out. He could hear the water roiling on his stove now and he walked back there and put in a finger loop of angel hair and then another. If she doesnt come, Ill eat double and sleep like a bear. He walked off and pissed in the open meadow and lit one of his cheap wood-tipped cigarillos with his fathers lighter, a Zippo that had been around the world twice in the old mans pocket on troop-ships. Mack was not scared. He had been uneasy and worried and scared and empty and sort of ruined, and he knew this, but now he had his ways of doing one thing and then the next and it kept the ruin off him. If she left Jackson by four, shed be along in a while. If she hadnt left Jackson; well then.

Shed come down to the county jail a month ago where there wasnt a visiting room, and Zeff Minatas had brought him out to the coffee room and let them talk for twenty minutes. He could not look at her and after a full minute she said softly, Well.

It took him three attempts to break through the whisper and say, You bet. Now Im in the ashes. Each tear cost him, but he could not with his breath prevent them. He hadnt been in a room with her all year and now the quiet in his heart burned again.