The Signal by Ron Carlson

and he closed his eyes and saw it. These were addicts and drug dealers and they couldn’t even secure a trailer. Not one thing was done square. He took a slug from the bottle and felt it bite, and he pushed Trisha off as gently as he could and he held his hand up, meaty and swollen, a blue C stamped into the back. These were drug dealers. There wasn’t going to be fresh oil in the engines or good tires or a tight lug nut or any single thing done right. This was a free fall at the shiterie. His father said that at times when things ran careless. He said it at the rodeo anytime there was a problem with anybody’s tack or rope. You coil your rope in a hurry, you won’t have a chance.
    An hour later in their miserable motel, he watched himself bandage the hand and it was the same deal, such imprecision. Trisha ran tape in loops around it until he stopped her. She wanted to go out and so they went, ending up at a biker bar called the Silver Trail. Mack kept his hand in his jacket and he could feel his heartbeat there as the flights of drinks arrived. Trisha was pissed that he wouldn’t dance and went out and leaped around, purposely bumping into the big men in their Levi vests. She was drunk, but she was always drunk, and Mack could see it was going to be one of their all-nighters. He’d stayed up with her plenty, because going to bed was bad. He couldn’t lie there and wait for sleep because everything else came up for him and he had been shown he was a coward in those times. But then an hour later in the Silver Trail she was in a kissing contest hauling with some other woman at two or three men at a side table. “Don’t your old man care that you’re over here on top of me?” one of the men called out. “You’ve got more tongue than the devil’s sister.”
    Mack held up his hand from across the room. “No problem.” He knew that was always a lie, but he repeated it. When Trisha saw his hand up that way, she went crazy. She turned back to the man as if to deepen their kiss and then she swung, raking his face with her nails and screaming. She started flailing her skinny arms, but the man threw her out onto the floor. Mack didn’t move, and he knew everything and saw it all at that moment when he didn’t stop the man, who got up and kicked Trisha and then walked around to where she had squirmed on the floor and he kicked her again. Mack himself was drunk, but he knew he couldn’t carry any of this. He had five hundred dollars folded in his pocket and it felt like poison and he had ruined his hand and he had not helped the girl who never once in the four months he knew her had helped herself. When he stood, he did it so that the man could come and hit him too, but the moment had passed and the bar-tender’s wife had hauled Trisha to a booth and was holding a towel to her mouth. He showed Trisha the wad of cash money and slid it into the front pocket of her jeans, and he was going to say goodbye, but seeing her eyes, he could not say anything.
    It was his worst moment.
    Ten days later Wes Canby found him outside a steakhouse in Jackson and they had a talk in Canby’s black Toyota pickup. “You can’t quit,” he told Mack.
    “Yeah, I can,” Mack said. “I do. I quit. I’m no good for it.”
    Then Canby did something that Mack had been waiting for. He reached and pulled a blue velour from under the seat and unwrapped a pistol. It was a little black automatic of some kind. The gun, as Canby took hold of it, did nothing to him. He opened the door of the vehicle. “A gun,” Mack said. “Not much to shoot here, but you can shoot if you want.” He was standing on the ground with his back to Canby.
    “You did a job on Trisha,” the man said.
    “I know it.” Mack turned. “We both did.”
    “She’s dead.”
    “She is not.” Mack said it without thinking.
    “In her cell in Cheyenne.”
    Mack put his hands on the truck seat and looked up at Canby. “If I see you again,” he said, “I will kill you.