by Ron Carlson
“Let’s go,” he said, and the lone steer stepped heavily down and out into the meadow of the trailhead as if carrying the night and all the stars on its old back. In the changed light of the open field, the steer trotted ahead, a hundred yards and then two, as if it’d seen the four tiny distant lights of the Crowheart store, as Mack had, and knew exactly where it should go.
Vonnie’s car was still there by his, all the doors open and Amy was lying in the backseat under the plaid car blanket. Vonnie had the trunk open and was changing clothes there, buttoning a clean shirt when he came up. He went by her, not speaking, and opened his old blue truck wishing he had a dog now, somebody to jump up in and be happy to be there. He threw his pack on the passenger floor. Out across the eastern prairie lights were coming on at the various ranch outposts, the planet under transition. Mack knelt on the ground and pulled his cooler from under the truck and lifted it onto the tailgate. It was always like opening a treasure chest, but not tonight.
“You want a beer,” he said to Vonnie.
“I don’t know,” she said. “When Amy feels better, we’re going out.” She came over to where he stood looking in at the wrapped steaks, the cold beer and root beer, the tomatoes in the tray. His lump of dry ice was just about gone. “Same old,” she said. “Except for the root beer.”
“It’s awful good. There’s no compromise in root beer,” he said. “I’m going to start a fire and stay up. I’ve got no reason to hurry down to that town.”
“Gimme one,” she said. He extracted a tall Pacifico from the cooler and opened it with his knife. He went up to the edge of the trees and found a pile of branches from the last guys and he started a small fire and fed it up. Vonnie went and checked the girl and then walked over.
“Do you need my kit?” he asked. “The first aid.”
“No, we’ll go to the hospital.”
“See the cops.”
“Yes, the cops.”
“I shot that guy at five minutes to five, if they want to know. I’ll be here and then to my apartment by noon tomorrow. It’s going to freeze up here, so they can get him tomorrow. It’s my yellow poncho just below the creek.”
“I’m sorry, Mack.”
“Oh shit,” he said. “I’m sorry he hurt you. Sorry for the trip. Just sorry.”
She stood above him, arms folded, holding her beer with her shirtsleeve. “Don’t,” she said.
“I’m going to get a dog,” he said.
“You should. Can you have one in that apartment?”
“There’s twenty,” he said. “Besides I’m going to move back onto the ranch. If I’m broke, I should be broke in the right place anyhow.”
“That’s a good idea. What will you get?”
“An Aussie, probably. Somebody who can read Keats. I may take a few guests next spring, summer.”
“Really.”
“I know how to do it.”
“I know you do. You know some stories.”
“I was thinking of having a week or two only kids.”
She looked at him funny and said, “Goddamn cold beer.” Vonnie started to cry standing there, and he moved and held her.
“Goddamned last trip,” he said. “I’m sorry.” She put her arms around him in the firelight, sobbing, and he felt her mouth on his neck saying something he could barely hear.
There was a noise he couldn’t place which then became the sound of a vehicle approaching from below.
“Somebody’s coming. It might be the sheriff now,” he said.
“That would be good.”
His fire was right and he stood and ran a finger into his coin pocket. “Here’s your ring,” he said.
Suddenly they were in the high beams as the big truck mounted the trailhead and drove up. It looked like the sheriff a minute but became a big red Hummer with chrome wheels and a rack of lamps like a freight train.
“It’s Kent,” Mack said, letting Vonnie go. “He’s got some cars.” The wake of dust rose up when the truck stopped and came over them as Kent climbed down. He hadn’t turned off his headlights. He came forward in big strides in another million-dollar shirt, crosshatched with blue and green.
“Yvonne,” he said. “Where the hell have you been?”
“I’m right here,” she said. “The phone went dead and we’ve had some trouble.”
“God damn you, Mack,” Kent said. “You pissant.”
“You’re starting right in,” Mack said.
“I’ve had two hours to think about it.”
“I’ve had a year,” Mack said.
“Did you get Yarnell’s treasure?” Kent said.
Mack eyed the man in the deep twilight. It was a city face, layered with shallow intrigues, business, profit. It was without question a notable and beautiful shirt. He wondered what made Kent work. He’d only now understood what worked for himself. Mack shook his head.
“I think you did,” Kent said.
“There’s my pack,” Mack told the man. “Just take it.”
“We will,” he said, and he retrieved Mack’s pack. “Charley outsmarted the agency and he outsmarted you, but that’s not really very hard.”
Kent was smiling. Now he pointed to where Amy sat in Vonnie’s dark car. “Who’s that?” Kent said.
“We’ve had some trouble,” Vonnie said again.
“It’s okay now,” Mack told him. “We’re all safe. You’re here.”
Then Kent went back to the big vehicle and reached under the seat and came back with a beautiful silver handgun, a .44 with an eight-inch barrel and he walked past Vonnie and Mack and lifted the pistol with both hands and shot the door of Mack’s truck dead center.
Amy screamed.
“Fuck!” Mack said. The explosion was still in the air. “Fuck! Are you fucking crazy?”
“Let’s go, Yvonne.”
“I’ve got to see to the girl.”
“Bring her. We’ll get your car on the weekend.” Kent was back at the Hummer.
“You goddamn idiot,” Mack said. “You fucking”—he lost a word—“solicitor.” He hung his head a moment and then walked over to where Kent sat up in the driver’s seat. His tinted window was up. “This is state land. I didn’t shoot your car. I broke the windshield with a tire iron and I was drunk and I paid for it and spent some weeks in jail. This doesn’t make us even. This doesn’t do anything except fuck my truck up. I’ll have rust till Sunday with that hole.”
“Get in!” Kent yelled at Vonnie. “Get over here!” She was helping Amy.
“We can’t, Kent. I’ll drive down. We’re okay now.”
Mack went to Vonnie at her car. “It was the ranch, that money. That’s why I took Yarnell’s gig.” He walked past her to the fire and tended it. Her beer bottle stood there in the dirt. He’d pulled himself in as far as he could. “Go to the hospital,” he said to her across the space.
Kent had backed the giant car around and his high beams shot out into space. Then Mack snapped. He felt it as a snap under his breastbone and the day rose up in him and he saw the young rider explode backward off that horse, and Mack’s throat closed. He ran at Kent’s red vehicle.
“Mack,” Vonnie said. “Oh God.”
Now he had a river rock in his hand, big as a grapefruit, and still running he raised it and swung it with all his force against Kent’s window. It bounced off, ricocheting back to the ground, stinging Mack’s hand. “Shit!”
Kent jolted forward, the beast roaring down the rocky two-track fifty yards and stopping again, ten red lights in the teeming dust.
“He’s got that gun,” Vonnie said. But Mack had the rock again and was running down. “Mack!” The Hummer gunned and bounced away, too fast, and over the hill, only a glow now in the frigid night. Mack dropped the rock and still ran. From the ridge he saw the dotted lights descend the trailhead road. At one point the brakelights flared, and Mack saw Kent swerve to avoid the steer. He stood, his breath baggy plumes shooting into the air. He hated to run and he had to do it. The stars were
out complete and in the open sky he saw the smoky run of the Milky Way all the way to Canada. Back at the trailhead both women sat in Vonnie’s closed car. It was running and she rolled the window down.
Vonnie’s face was funny, drained. “I can’t drive,” she said. “I thought I could. Just take us down.” He went to the creek with the bucket from the bed of his truck and extinguished the coals of his fire. Mack grabbed his pack, closed up his vehicle. He had the women sit in the back of Vonnie’s Lexus under the blanket, and carefully backed the new car and started down to the highway.
They went south to Lander. The passed the Crowheart store, the yard light and the porch light. “They’ve got Dreamsicles in the front freezer,” he said. “I like a Dreamsicle. They’re hard to find.” The expanse of the Indian reservation was dark. From time to time they passed a ranch yard with a light showing the two trucks and the basketball pole.
“You knew I was looking for Yarnell’s plane or whatever?” Mack said.
“Let’s not talk, Mack. You don’t know what you’re doing half the time. Let’s not talk.”
Ten minutes later Vonnie said. “You got a story? The one about Hiram and Amateur?”
“I do,” he began. “Now there was a man who was misunderstood.” They seemed far away from the mountains in the night now and he told the story on the deserted highway.
In the story tonight Mack said that Hiram Corazon worked with the wild geese while guarding the love he felt in his heart for Lucinda Amateur. Mack drove and talked in the quiet car, as if speaking to the fields and the dark ranches. There was an evil plot at the sewing works, he said, and the evil plot was to use less goose down in the comforters. It was a kind of pleasure for Mack to say words as the story opened. Very soon in his story the greedy assistant director of the comforter institute got involved in an involved plot, a plot with seven layers and all of them secret, the whispers of which were overheard by the geese themselves, who had no end of trouble making their story clear to Hiram because of the language barrier. They called and whispered but they spoke as geese and he could only understand a part at a time. Slowly, this took miles in the driving, Hiram began to understand what the geese were saying, and once he saw what was going on, he told the townsfolk, but then was not believed, at all, and was shunned from the village and considered crazy and dangerous and he wandered in the forest listening for a beating heart.
Vonnie interrupted here and said, “We found his canoe one time.”
“It’s still in the mountains, the only canoe in the Winds.” Mack could hear in his voice how tired he was. He talked and he felt himself slip away from the story as he spoke, the words still falling, and he thought of Chester and the angle of the man’s neck in the sharp mountain sunlight. He remembered his friend saying once, “Mack, you got to cowboy longer than most of us. You’re the only guy who has a shot at going back to it. ”
He had stopped telling the story and they drove in silence until Amy said, “What about Lucinda?”
“That’s it,” Mack said. And he told of Hiram trying to figure out a way to tell his own true love of the evil plot, and he finally clarified the entire intrigue to Lucinda in secret code that he embedded in the songs he sang outside her window after her guardians had gone to sleep in their thick down comforters.
“Like what?” Vonnie asked.
“Like secret code embedded in a musical number,” he said. “You’re a music major. You understand. Anyway, Hiram had learned to play the guitar and he stood below her window in the proper manner. Every night was serenade. He sang the songs a phrase at a time, some of the phrases drawn from Shelley and some from Keats.”
Mack knew the dark country through which he drove the women. He knew they were asleep, but still he talked, telling the story to himself. Hiram Corazon played the guitar though he had never studied music. The story had sharp and telling comparisons between the pure comforters and the adulterated blankets that were not only not warm but itched mercilessly. “They were itch-i-genic,” Mack said.
“That’s not a word,” Vonnie said. It had been almost an hour, and they were entering the western town.
“It’s a word and a condition. Those comforters were used for rhinoceros saddles. They didn’t itch those animals.”
Amy had been asleep and said, “Rhinoceros saddles.”
“The end,” Mack said. “There’s a good story.”
At the ER in Lander, he got a wheelchair and helped Amy inside. Vonnie went to the counter. The nurse called the doctor and the police. It was very strange to be indoors, for all of them, and Mack said, as they waited, “They’ve got this place about lighted up.” The magazines lay about on the plastic tables and for some reason they looked evil to him. Mack went to the men’s and washed his hands twice with the powerful soap and then his face and up into his hair, drying himself with the coarse paper towels and then mopping up the sink. He sat down to wait. It was ten-thirty.
It took all night. Mack talked to the police for an hour in a borrowed office and then he went over to the station with the deputy, a guy named Bradham, and he was there drinking terrible coffee and sorting it all out for two hours. He filled out the report and signed four papers, one of which promised he wouldn’t leave the state. There were examinations and tests, and they found a deep plum bruise below Mack’s elbow that he could not remember receiving, and a nurse swabbed his ears and put a drop of something in each one so they sizzled a minute and then she gave him a little white tube of the stuff. Mack brought in the clothes kit from Vonnie’s trunk and she came back eventually in her moccasins and an orange plaid pair of dorm pants that he remembered and a UNC sweatshirt with an old red scarf she’d had forever, and she folded a set of clothes in Amy’s room. They were keeping her a day, and her parents were coming from Missoula. She was awake and looking good, sort of happy in fact, when they went in to see her.
“I’m okay,” she said, “but I’m tired. I can get through this. Your name is Mack,” she said.
“Howdy.”
“So the guy only listened to people’s hearts trying to find his own?”
“That’s it.”
“And they thought he was a cannibal for it?”
“He scared them in their campsites,” Mack said. “He’s still up there in the Winds searching.”
“Jeez,” she said. “It’s a good story.”
“Just so your parents know,” Mack said. “You went in at Dubois and came out at Cold Creek trailhead and here’s this, my phone number if they want to talk to me.” Mack left the room a minute so Vonnie could speak to the young woman. He went out and scraped her windshield, the first time he’d done such a thing this season. It was the first stroke of winter. He brought the car up under the ER entry a minute later and Vonnie got in.
“I thought they’d keep you,” he said. He put her hand on his shoulder.
“We got beat up. It was the worst thing I’ve ever had, but they were spaced out and I tricked them both.” Her jaw was set hard, and her eyes were clear and cold. “I’m tired, but okay. You tracked me down, right?”
“I found your fly rod, your ring.”
“Needle in a haystack.”
“Our haystack.”
She let it pass and said, “You want to drive back and get your truck?”
“Yeah, we can do that. We better before it gets snowed in. But I want to get a big fry first since we’re in town.”
“Some eggs,” she said.
“A spinach omelette,” he said, “with rye toast and potatoes and maybe a little piece of steak. Something that uses the whole plate.”
“I know a place,” she said.
“Show the way,” he said. “I’ve got the money with me.”
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