Read Online The Signal by Ron Carlson - Free Book Online Page B

gold in one minute like a sail filling with wind, and when Mack looked up from where his first flames bit the tinder pile he was working, vertigo crossed his vision like a cloud. It was strange to have moments like these erase his worries, but they were only moments. The little fire grew, pure and smokeless and he fed it twigs and now bigger branches that he had broken last night. His frying pan sat on the duff beside him already greased with a finger of butter, and he shook the quart jar of pancake mix with his left hand. The old tin coffeepot stood full of water on a rock. The air was sharp in the mountain shade and only the far western rock-tops were silver in the sun. The frost was furry on his tent and Vonnie’s form was printed on the top of her sleeping bag in brilliant ice crystals. She was still sleeping. Mack laid two small logs on the blaze and crossed them with two, set down the jar in the dirt, and walked through the trees fifty yards and leaned against a dead tree there with his BlackBerry. No signal, it read. The cold collared him. Valentine Lake below was now one single sheet of gray glass. In the far coves he could see the white line of the ice fringe growing a foot and sometimes two out from the bank.
    He watched rings begin to appear around the perimeter, ten, then a hundred, as fish tested the world. He’d seen the surface flies yesterday, almost invisible tiny white gnats that trout preferred to his ungainly homemade fuzzballs. He’d never operated at the keen center of fly-fishing, the way the guides and dandies did in Jackson. He’d seen their product, so precise and elegant it seemed like watchmaking, and the flies themselves looked like a fabulous meeting of jewelry and semiconductors. He had always tied one fly, brown and coarse and big as a whisk broom, his father used to say. Grab a couple and sweep the barn. But, and this made his father smile too, they worked. He didn’t get the little ones or the smart ones or any fish in a reserve river that had seen worldly equipment thrown his way night and day all season, but Mack caught keepers who laid out in the hungry places. That was the whole secret: fish where they haven’t seen you before. He tried again: no signal. The sun now was crawling down the hills toward them, and the sky was what his father called toothache blue, unreal and shocking, which would last for twenty minutes and then blond out with the sun. Vonnie still hadn’t moved, so Mack laid more wood on the fire and set the grill on the stones and the black iron pan on that until the butter started to skate. He lifted the warm pan and poured in four dollops of his pancake mix and they spread into pretty circles and fixed.
    “I’m cooking,” he said to the blue sleeping bag. He saw her squirm and roll around and her face appeared.
    “Morning,” she said.
    “Hi, Vonnie.”
    “Here, wait,” she said and she disappeared again into the sleeping bag. “I brought something.” She threw him a foil pouch of ground Hagen’s coffee. It was warm.
    “How’s Mrs. Hagen?” he asked.
    “She’s okay. Her son came back from Portland and he’s doing the baking now; they’re going to run Starbucks out of the county. I brought some of their bear claws too, for later.”
    “Oh, that’s good.”
    “I saw you at the funeral.”
    “I saw you at the funeral with Kent. He didn’t represent Mr. Hagen too, did he?”
    “No, just friends. Now look the other way.”
    “What?” He looked at her, the recognizable sleep face, his favorite face.
    “Look away.”
    “You sleeping naked?”
    “How I sleep is not your beeswax.”
    Beeswax. He packed the coffee basket with coffee and assembled it again and set it on the grill.
    “You found the coffeepot.”
    “Yeah, I finally looked for it. You want it?” he said. “It’s half yours.”
    “No, I just want some coffee. Those your buttermilk pancakes?”
    “They are.”
    “Things are looking up,” she said. “Now look away.”
    “I am,