The Signal by Ron Carlson Read Free Book Online

moment later Chester hollered again and galloped into view. “I don’t care if that gal is from the East Coast, she’s more bobcat than any of the locals I know.”
    Someone called out, “As if you know any!” and the wedding party turned to see Mack and Vonnie ride down the trail together.
    Sawyer Day, who was a justice, presided in his string bow tie, and they had a barbecue in the fragrant May day. Amarantha’s husband Brett ran the pit, and she had set a fabulous buffet on sawhorse tables just off the porch. The fifty guests danced on the plank floor of the barn until midnight and then one o’clock; the band was jazz-bluegrass from Cheyenne, led by a guy who had been at school with Vonnie. They played the extra hour gratis as a wedding gift. As the trucks filed out the ranch road in the dark, full of friends calling back their jokes and good wishes, Vonnie and Mack sat on the old porch swing and it grew silent, except for the sounds of the house settling which hadn’t felt such traffic for two or three years.
    It was the moment between the old and the new worlds. His father would have sat up with them a minute like this on the porch; he liked the still night, the sleeping ranch. And then he would have stood, pivoting with his hand on Mack’s shoulder, and Mack that night felt the hand there, a blessing. His father would have stepped down into the dooryard on his way to the bunkhouse for this night, and still walking away, he would have touched his hat and raised his glass.
    The horses looked at the couple from across the way. After half an hour in the night, Vonnie said, “I’m home.”
    “We’ll keep this place,” he said.
    “Somehow,” she said.
    “There isn’t much in making funky websites for the citizens of Jackson,” he said. “We’ll be land poor.” For Mack the night yard was full of ghosts, and he knew he wasn’t up to running a guest ranch. He could never greet the guests with the equanimity and grace—and real friendliness—his father mustered. He would feel a fraud.
    “There’s stuff,” she said. “I’ll teach.”
    “You married a ranch hand,” he said.
    “I did. I love that you’re a hand.”
    “And you’re a heart,” he said.
    “Now we’re really talking,” she said. “Let’s kiss.” The three horses stood in the dark, their eyes unmoving. She whispered, “I didn’t marry you for that horse. Let’s go inside.”
     
     
     
    Now it was the warm high center of the day, and Mack and Vonnie ten feet apart moved up the trail, the sun on their necks. She stopped when they stepped into the beginnings of the rock field between the two verdant mountains. It was a mile of slumped talus through which the pack trail wound, a white line in the gray rock, struck there by horseshoes for uncountable years. The wind now blew north unimpeded, cuffing every loose sleeve. “Let’s go up to the cairns and eat some lunch,” he said.
    “This has always been a weird place,” she said, falling in behind him. For a while the world was rock and sky pressed by the wind. This was where the earth ended and the sky began, and the sky worked steadily for more. The trail was rippled and craggy and every step asked a balance, and Mack and Vonnie kept their arms out as if skiing. Mack’s knees burned as they stepped over the top and found shelter from the sharp air. They sat at the crest against a sunny wall of the granite and looked ahead at the pitched green pine slopes of the massive upper valleys of the Wind River Range. South were the rocky towers of a grand cirque, Armitage, Bellow, and Craig, mountains that were in a score of picture calendars in Europe every year, mountains that had claimed a hundred lives, mountains with a dozen saucy nicknames each, the nicknames climbers give to dangerous places, wicked names and apt. North were the blankets of evergreens that ran aground at 11,500 feet and showed the round rocky promontories of the oldest mountains in Wyoming, striations of