The Signal Read Online Free PDF Page B

last trip.”
    “You came,” he said. He forked the pasta up in a test. “You kept your word.”
    She looked at him, “Mack,” she said. “It’s been a hideous year and you hideous in it, but it’s my word.”

Day Two
     
    In the morning they walked in. The trailhead was dry and the slope gentle and ticketed with yellow aspen leaves, and the vast fresh silence sounded in the sky. They walked as they had always walked on their backpacking trips, she then he, slow and steady up the path. They’d spoken only a little the night before, primarily because he had made himself one of his stone-cold promises that he would keep it light and tight and not get riled or ripped up. Every day since he had walked away from the jail had been a lesson in assembling himself, and he did not want to lose that. She was here; it was enough. They were no longer married. She was doing him a favor. He wouldn’t get his hopes up; he had no hopes in this regard to get up. You are hopeless, boy. He whispered it. Just go. It was a fishing trip in September with a friend—a promise they’d made. All of this, sort of. He walked. He did not feel hopeless.
    The first year, when she met him and was thrilled at the huge wild world they had captured at even the trailhead, she had hugged her arms in the evening chill and asked him why they went in September and not a warmer month.
    “The summer must be splendid.”
    “It is, but there’s nothing ruins a trip like a Boy Scout troop, all those little men with their merit badges. September is perfect. Frost in the morning, but perfect.”
    That first year she had kissed him as he cooked the pasta, and they slept in the tent together in separate sleeping bags, awake and aware in the small shelter. She’d brought a book, the poet Keats, and read him “Ode to Autumn” by her little flashlight.
    “That’s about got it,” he said. “Did you put that to music?”
    “I did.”
    “Was it for your boyfriend?”
    “No. There was a boy who worked with a lot of Keats.”
    “Was he your boyfriend?”
    “He was,” Vonnie said, “but he had issues.”
    “Does that mean other girls?”
    “He had us all,” she said, and then she added what he wanted to hear. “But you’ve got me now.”
    “I won’t be reading the Keats,” Mack said. “But I know some stories.”
    “About the cannibal?”
    “He wasn’t a cannibal,” Mack said. “But yeah.”
    The next day was a delirious hike up through the ancient trees, an entire mountain range made for two people. They were certainly the first people to hike these trails or so it seemed, even to Mack, who had never seen it this way before, and they invented each bend and turning and fallen log and rivulet, and they invented the air and the hours along with the day, ripe and yellow, something to walk through so they could camp early and make a small campfire for soup and a crust of bread. They took their time. He put up his cotton rope clothesline and hung his blue-and-green-striped dishtowel from it, a touch, and as she dunked her bread into the buttery tomato soup, she pointed and said, “Those sleeping bags zip together.” Later, in the tent, every touch was a shock as they invented the embrace, and he put his hand on the inside of her thigh, polished and warm, and asked, “Are your legs okay?”
    She held him and a minute later said, “This is the purpose of my legs, mister.”
    Now in the September sunlight they quietly walked the rocky trail that had been made wide by the horses of the summer outfitters and washed by rain and dried into an easy walk. Still they knew enough to watch their footing as the aspens gave way to the piñon pine and the spotty shade as they traversed the steep hillside and emerged into the first real mountain meadow, a hundred-acre field of sage and lupine and alpine daisies. The great splash of daylight after moving in the undulating tree shadows made them shield their eyes. Vonnie stopped at the edge of the park and he