The Signal

by Ron Carlson

  At twenty yards the man jerked his pistol free and almost threw it with the effort, but he was new to guns and had to pull it before his face with both hands the way a person studies a cell-phone, and then evidently he mastered it and set it forward in the air, aiming the revolver, a long-barreled Colt, Mack could now see, at Mack. The gun was waving, but the man was getting closer and it would be hard to miss very soon. Mack heard something on the wind then, a cry, a sharp short cry, which sounded like Vonnie screaming the word no, and it was enough to cause Mack to swing his own rifle up in an arc and catch the barrel stock in his left palm and then as he started moving it all became natural, his lifting the gun up around toward the oncoming rider who was stepping with his pistol through the splintered sunlight, and then Mack heard two shots and then a third shot from below, two different guns, and then he heard his own rifle explode as he pulled the trigger and the big man jumped back in his saddle, his head following his bloody shoulder in a terrific fall to the ground. Mack had seen men fall from horses, and he always hated it. It was never a stunt. This was a big man to fall so far, wheeling off the horse’s rump, and he struck his head and shoulder on the rocky trail and lay there unmoving.

  Mack was surprised at how calm the horses were, stepping sharply with the report and then standing to wait. They’d been around guns. He pulled Buddy around and leaned on it and nudged the black horse into a gallop through the sage, four, five great leaping strides, and then he thought better of it and held the horse back. He could go down two ways: through the meadow openly or behind on the ridge trail, which was how Canby had gone. He had to make a decision now and considered walking down the edgeof the meadow out of sight which would take longer but would ensure surprise. Then he heard one more shot and a scream and another scream, Vonnie this time, and another scream. He sat up and then bent again into the neck of the black horse and kicked him up into a gallop. There was care and then there was this. It didn’t matter which way. He had to go. It didn’t matter if he came off the horse, thrown; and because it no longer mattered, he knew he would not fall.

  Before he came in sight of the tent, riding easily the black horse that ran fluidly and without fuss, Mack heard another shot, and he started to ease up, straightening from where he’d been against the horse’s neck, the rifle clipped under his leg against the horse. Now he realized he had heard the bullet pass over his head, a whispering snap, a sound he’d never heard, and he noted it: That’s how it is. It either hits you or misses you. He now could see the tent and out from it a ways the rider Canby reset his rifle for another shot. The man’s beautiful red horse seemed confounded stepping in circles and Canby was focused on his efforts to square the rifle and shoot Mack who was riding still right into it. Mack had closed to thirty yards. Mack’s mind went out. Everything jumped to two dimensions and lost order; was this wrong? Each second opened like the page of a crazy book. Behind the rider he could see the two women bent in the shadow of the tent, and Mack knew that Clay was down. Mack hauled Buddy up sharp with the reins and dropped a leg off the back of the horse and stood on the ground, swatting the horse away from the trail to be free from harm. Go go. As he landed, Mack felt his rifle bite into the dirt, the barrel; he felt it like doom. But it was good to be aground. Here he was. Now the page turned: the approaching horse in a half run at him; the horse was reluctant to run at a man, and there was something openly insane in these minutes, that phrase came through his head and he nearly said it. Canby’s horse was odd, the reins dangled, and the man still had not righted his rifle. He was so close Mack could smell the horse. Canby kicked Mack in the chest as he went by and Mack went down hard in the dry sage and he could smell and feel it hard, and he woke and he knew he was stupid again.

  Mack stood and knocked his rifle barrel against the side of his boot while he turned and looked up the meadow where Canby wheeled around on the red horse. Your barrel is fouled, big boy. You’re naked in the wind. Mack knocked it again and then lifted and cocked the rifle and the shell flew out; it was already cocked. He wanted to take a minute to blow in the breech, but an explosion in the dirt at his feet stopped him and he fumbled a bullet from his pocket, lodged it in the chamber and closed the trigger guard. He stood in the trail and the horse saw him and came walking down.

  “You dumb fuck,” Canby said. He pointed at Mack and a smile creased his face. “It’s time you gave me the trigger. All the shit you took from the plane.” Without choice Mack took a knee. His vision rolled, and he felt his heart rinse. He stood up immediately and felt the blood pound his neck.

  Mack heard the chamber of Canby’s rifle snick charged. It would be a repeater of some kind. He hated rifles. “But,” the young man said, “you stole a horse.” He laughed and the laugh was all wrong, forced and hurting. “And you’re a mile into the Wyoming wilderness. State land. Starts. A mile below.” He raised an arm to point the way, and he almost fell off the horse. “You dumb fuck climbed around for Yarnell and then stole a horse in Wyoming—which is bad news. You’re mine.”

  Mack felt the rock of his stomach, sick with fear, but he’d been sick a long time today about how all this kept growing, how he hadn’t been in the right place, not even once, how he’d let it all happen.

  The young rider, walking his horse toward Mack, brought his rifle up to his shoulder.

  Mack had planned to say his name, issue some kind of threat, but his mind was white. The old rifle felt perfect now but as he swung it, he knew it might still be clogged and blow up in his face, but regardless he aimed for exactly one second and pulled the trigger. The shot was a flat crack as loud as anything a person gets to hear, and Canby went back off his horse as if he’d been hit with a shovel. Mack closed his eyes tight and when he opened them, the pages were gone, the rush of scattered light. His horse stood the ground, unmoving. These horses, Mack thought. Stand still in trouble.

  Mack’s horse walked out through the tall sage and joined the red bay, touching faces. Mack knelt and picked up the bullet he’d dropped and put it in his pocket. He knelt and laid the rifle across his knees and vomited. Twice. Breathing deeply and blowing hard, he strode up to where the man lay on his back in the fall flora. The bullet had hit his sternum dead center and ruined his body completely and he was dead. There was another bullet wound up under his right arm that had bled heavily through his shirt and into his pants. Mack didn’t touch him. He mounted Buddy bareback rather than get in the other saddle and he led the red horse slowly down the meadow.

  “Mack,” he heard Vonnie call his name before he saw her. She and the girl were cutting the leg off Clay’s pants. He was gray, his face a grimace, and he lay in the grass outside the tent. Clay pointed. “Just the leg,” he said.

  “Twice,” Vonnie said.

  “Did you radio?” Mack asked.

  “Vonnie did.”

  Mack pulled the pantleg free and sliced it into two strips. He used his kerchief to wipe Clay’s leg and noted that the wounded man did not recoil. The two wounds were welling, the one above the knee more than the other in the calf. They were angry red and dark and not really bleeding very much. Vonnie had taken the girl into the tent.

  “I shot him,” Clay said calmly.

  Mack tied off the tourniquet mid-thigh, and the blood ebbed. “Move your foot up and down,” Mack told his friend. He watched the foot rock back and forth. “Amazing. You still work.” He examined the wounds again and saw that the bullets had not gone deep. “You’re just plugged, Clay, but I’m not going to dig them out. Where were you?”

  “In the tent. I saw him riding out back in the trees and went in and he shot through the goddamned tent. How crude is that.”

  “Miserable,” Mack said. “But it sure slowed those slugs.”

  “Fucking tent shooter,” Clay said.

  “I shot him,” Mack said.

  “I shot,” Clay said.

  “You winged him, Clay. I shot him dead.”

  Clay studied Mack’s face.

  Vonnie came out of the tent wit
h two blankets. She put the rolled one under Clay’s head and opened the other over him. “I’ll get some water,” Mack said. He went into the canvas lodge and retrieved the med kit and returned and padded both wounds with compresses and surgical tape. He cut off the tourniquet.

  When Vonnie had gone back inside, Mack held the canteen to Clay and said, “I shot both of them. I shot the big guy and he’s laying right up there at the top of the park. I think he’s just hurt. I shot the other guy dead. His name is Wes Canby, and he was holed up in Rawlings mostly; I knew him from my crimes driving drugs. He’s dead.”

  Vonnie came out with both hands around a mug of milky coffee and handed it to Mack.

  “Thank you kindly,” he said.

  “None for you,” she said to Clay, “until after your airplane ride.” Mack could see she had washed her face and combed her hair back. Vonnie looked at him and looked away. “You’re pale.” She waited and then smiled and said, “Now you say, ‘You’re pale.’ ”

  “You’re okay, Vonnie.”

  “You’re okay, Mack.”

  “Trouble,” he said. “But you’re safe.” It was two miles to the car in the last daylight, so he just said, “You guys go. You’ll make the car by dark. I’ll see you.”

  Amy came out of the tent tying her sweater around her waist. “Thank you,” Amy said. She wouldn’t look at them. “For coming to get us.”

  Mack only nodded.

  “You want in the tent, Clay? Mack, should we help you move him in?”

  “I’m good right here,” Clay said. “Somebody has gone ahead and ruined my pants good, but the copter should be along in fifty minutes. Last year we had a compound leg and it was forty-one minutes from Jackson which was a record they wanted to put in the papers.”

  Vonnie knelt and kissed his cheek and she and the girl turned and walked out to the meadow path.

  Mack’s father had had guns at the ranch, a dozen fine shot-guns some a hundred years old, including his beautiful double-barrel Ithaca with a pheasant carved into the stock and hung above the mantel. Only one rifle was kept in the rafters of the bunkhouse, and to Mack’s knowledge it had never been used. He tried to remember if it was still there, some 30-30 from Sears. There was one handgun, a little .22 in the kitchen drawer for snakes and the like. It was hard to find for the egg beaters and scotch tape. Mack himself had shot a lot of pheasants and waterfowl but never a swan, though there was a season. He’d never shot a deer and his father thought that phenomenon was no rite of passage in country where whitetail were tame as dogs. Now kneeling by his wounded friend, he held his great cup of Clay’s great coffee and he wasn’t sure it was going to go down.

  “You want more cream in that coffee.”

  “It’s perfect.”

  Clay said. “I shot a man once.”

  “You did not.”

  “Mack, I did.” Clay closed his eyes while he talked. He had folded his arms over his chest.

  “And when was this.”

  “At the home place in Sudman.”

  “Your dad’s place.”

  “Right.”

  “Who’d you shoot?”

  “A thief, some guy named Curlbeaker. He and his brother worked the whole area we found out; they had a state road trailer and they were stealing tractors and ATVs, anything left out in the yard.”

  “You blasted him with buckshot one night.”

  “I did. Three in the morning or so, four, and when I came out of the house, he climbed down from our old John Deere and ran for the road where the truck was waiting and I shot once at about thirty yards and he went down and rolled and started screaming and his brother took off trailer and all. They caught him south of Rock Springs; he’d run out of gas.”

  “What happened to the one you shot?”

  “He was blood from knee to shoulder, completely peppered and the ass shot out of his pants. He was a week in the hospital and then he sued us.” Clay opened his eyes and laughed. “But then he and all of the Curlbeakers disappeared, off to warmer country is my bet. But there’s still number-six pheasant shot in that guy’s backside.”

  “How’d you feel about it?”

  “I felt I should have felt better. Everybody said, good deal, like that, but I didn’t care for it. I’d do it again in the middle of the night on my own place or for my people, but I don’t care for it, Mack. It’s the way we’re made.” Clay looked hard at Mack. “This guy of yours up here, he did some things to the women for which he’s answered. I heard them talking while you were gone, and that’s why I was out there with my gun. You did the right thing, but it isn’t going to be easy, none of it. Right, but not easy. I’ll stand witness if it comes to that.”

  “I’ve got one more thing,” Mack told Clay, and he rose and retrieved his daypack with the material he’d taken from the crash site. He mounted Buddy once again and trotted up to Canby’s body. The day was done. He dropped to the ground and tied the pack to Canby’s belt and then he covered the body with his yellow poncho weighing down the corners with round rocks. He stood directly and marched up to the trees at the upper end of the meadow and up the trail and there he saw that the other man was gone. He would have reclaimed his horse and crossed back into the mountains by now. Okay. Mack felt his heart pounding and he dropped his head. Everything was gone.

  On the way down the meadow, he heard the medical helicopter chuffing and just the faint and strange flutter hurt his chest. He walked Buddy around the back of the hunters’ tent and clipped both horses to the rope line back in the trees and then Mack walked out into the meadow and waved his hat, pointing at the flat spot and then backing up as the machine descended. The helicopter settled and changed the whole place. Even as it idled, the noise was terrific. There were two medics aboard; one was the pilot.

  “I’m going to hike out tonight.” Mack knelt by Clay. He had to speak loudly.

  “You still look a little cooked.”

  “No, I’m okay. I want to say goodbye to Vonnie; I’ve got to.” He stood up. “I don’t know when I’ll see her again.”

  “You’re going to want your pack,” Clay said, pointing.

  “Right. We left two sleeping bags in the trees there above the west point of Valentine too.”

  “I’ll arrange with Bluebride to have them picked up before the end of the month.”

  “Thanks.” Mack shook the young man’s hand. “You’re a good friend, Clay.”

  “Okay then.”

  One medic with his big gray box knelt by Clay and started to scissor off the temporary bandages. The other came to Mack and yelled in his ear, “Who’s shooting?”

  “The shooting’s done,” Mack said. “One dead above here and one injured off on his own.” He pointed. “Just get Clay to town.” The man nodded and turned to Clay.

  Mack crossed the grassy open, his shadow reaching ten feet as it led him through the wildflowers and sage in the last light of the afternoon. The sun was weak light, and the chill was general headed for a real freeze. The watery yellow day wanted to break his heart. The season had foundered and each day was now a brave imitation of the day before. In September the year fell away and in the car you’d get a late baseball game on the radio as you drove to town sounding like it was coming from another planet, the static and the crowd noise and the announcers trying to fend off the fall shadows. He found the trail and went down to the timber fence that marked the wilderness, and he crawled up the step-stile there, hands and feet, standing for a moment on the top, and then he eased down and was out of the woods. Now it was the three long gentle hills around through the state forest. He was run with thoughts. When they’d hiked in, he anticipated this walk in a different way. It was always delicious coming out, dirty and tired and they were always talking, going over the fish they’d caught, the whole trip. On such days his father always said, “Being dirty, like being hungry, are fine things that need earning. We did that, so let’s go wash up and eat.” He taught Mack never to waste being hungry but to use it like an instrument, and
they’d eaten many fine steaks in the big roadhouses at the edge of the western towns when they’d come down from the hills. “Let’s use this right”—Mack had said that every year to Vonnie; they both knew that they’d have steaks and cold drinks from the day-out cooler, a celebration and one last night camped near the cars above the world. One year he’d brought champagne which had been a mistake, their heads keeping them slow until noon the next day, and he had said first, “I am flat out allergic to that beverage.”

  Now he didn’t know. He guessed Vonnie would take Amy to the clinic in Dubois or Lander or all the way to Jackson for the big doctors. Walking felt good to him now, but he still felt like he was going to lose it, cough up Clay’s coffee. It wasn’t the sight of the dead man but the fear as he’d lifted the rifle that was still working in him. He bent to his knees again and waited, and then he saw something up off the trail and it moved. A moose, and then he looked again and it was one of Bluebride’s red steers, eyeing him from the trees. “Oh boy,” he said. “You’ve done it now. Come on. Let’s go down. Whup whup. There’s nothing to eat up here.” The steer regarded Mack without moving. “Come come,” he said. The beast stood. Mack backtracked the trail and stepped up to the animal from behind and even then the steer wouldn’t move. He could see Bluebride’s brand, the B with three bulbs, there on his side. “Go go go,” Mack said, finally putting his hand on the flank and the animal started and pushed reluctantly down toward the dirt path. “Whup, whup,” he said, “I’m not going to push you all the way.” He flat-handed the steer’s rump softly, and finally the beast trotted ahead as if he’d suddenly figured out the game. Mack smiled and it was funny how a big animal helped. His stomach would be okay. He’d get down and do the next thing. The woods were dark through the last level section with the trail here broad as a sidewalk.