The Signal Read Online Free PDF

the rectitude, politeness, and posture. Mack could read it from across the yard, watching his father keeping every moment square and measured as if reading from the big book. “Manners are not frosting on the cake, Mack,” his father had told him. “Manners, chapter and verse, are protection. They can be better than muscle in the slippery places. A strong man is strong enough to hold himself back.” The other part he taught him very young was that “a man can do more at a rough or tricky dinner with a napkin than he can with a fork.”
    Mack began relaying coded pages two or three times a month, and the checks, enough to keep him afloat, arrived by courier every month as well. He could tell from the formats that half the stuff was going to embassies and military bases. He didn’t care. He banked the money and wondered if he was doing the right thing for a few minutes every week; what was it when you could do something well, but you didn’t know what you were doing? He just went on automatic pilot and looked the other way. It wasn’t his father’s way, but his father was gone.
    The girl was out there somewhere, and he steeled his heart to the fact that she’d met someone and he’d get a clipping from one of the papers with her wedding announcement. He’d been busy and worried, but it hadn’t masked the other thing, a feeling he had for her.
    She called in September from a school outside of Minneapolis where she was teaching music theory. “Who’s calling?” he said.
    “You don’t know my name,” she said, “but we’ve met.”
    “Give me your address,” he said, “I’ve got a proposal for you.”
    “Careful with your language.”
    “I’m careful with everything.”
    He then sent her a hand-drawn map on the back of a paper placemat that indicated the Crowheart general store and how many miles it was to the unmarked turnoff to the trailhead and then a dotted line up the dirt road to the Cold Creek trailhead where he drew an X and noted: September 15. 5:00 P.M.
    A month later he stood where he was tonight under earth’s sky as the twilight thickened in gradations across the vastness. That first night he had brought all the gear for both of them, and when her old Volvo bounced up into the trailhead flat, he knew what he knew. That was ten years ago.
     
     
     
    Tonight it was now the grainy dark of dreams, and he stirred the pasta, slicing in the Italian sausage from Hershmeyer’s in Jackson. Homemade sausage. He set out the straw-bound bottle of Chianti. Dinner for one. He’d open the wine for her if she came. His own drinking days were over and he knew it. You make yourself sick enough, you don’t go back. He had his father’s spine in the matter. He was on the other side of it now, and he didn’t know what the days would bring him except none of that. The Wind River Range lay behind him in the new night, a place he loved and would never know fully from all the years behind and all the years ahead. No one could take it. Now he could feel the altitude in his heartbeat.
    Then there was a sound like a river rock walking down a stream bottom, a muted concussion that slowly grew and became the sound of a car working up the dirt trail road. It was a silver Lexus with the lights out in the gloaming and it came across the space and eased in next to his truck. The tinted window went down and there was her face.
    “Hey, mister,” she said. “This road is full of cattle tonight.”
    He found his voice. “Those are Bluebride’s. He hasn’t gotten them down yet. How have you been?” he asked her. “Nice car.”
    “Yeah, well.”
    “Kent got it for you?”
    “He helped. It belongs to the school.”
    “He gave it to the school.”
    She got out. “What are you cooking, the pasta?”
    “Yes, ma’am, as always.”
    Vonnie rubbed her face and took it all in. Each minute now the darkness doubled in the mountain night. “Oh, this place.”
    “Ten years,” he said.
    “Ten years,” she said. “The