The Signal by Ron Carlson Page B

deserved it. And there was always money. Yarnell said to meet at the Tropical, the funky bowling alley in Jackson. Walking over there in the dark, Mack thought, this has got to be the low, meeting a crook in the bowling alley. He knew it was his father talking, and Mack straightened up. He’d lost weight in jail and he cinched his tooled belt to the old notch. You’re not fit to choose your company, he reminded himself. You’ve got to make something work. He’s going to say something and you’re going to do it, good or bad. Then in the summer night he spoke aloud, “Just who are you, cowboy?”
    The bowling alley had been at the thin tail end of its heyday when Mack was in high school, and then it slid into sleazy ruin and now it had been washed twice and was half smart and half tony, a place for the slumming realtors and tourists from Germany and Japan. The sign was a beauty: the big white neon bowling pin lit three times in a spin, rotating in jerks: up, over, upside down; up, over, upside down. It hummed as Mack walked under.
    Yarnell signaled him from the gravel parking lot, and Mack walked over and climbed into the black Land Rover. Mack had resolved to let the older man speak first.
    “You had some trouble,” Yarnell said. “Sorry.”
    “Yeah,” Mack said. It was an effort now. “Did you hear it from Chester?”
    “He didn’t say much, but yeah.”
    “I’m out.”
    As always, Charley Yarnell looked polished, his gold wire glasses and his broad forehead. He was wearing a two-hundred-dollar pink-checked shirt with a silver pen in the embroidered pocket. Mack had seen such shirts at the ranch. You saw a dozen any Saturday night in Jackson. Brokers wore them on western holidays.
    “Anything I can help with?”
    “The place is still not for sale.”
    “I know, son, but it won’t need to be if the mortgage folds. I’ll just step up and claim the pretty place.”
    Mack had his hand out almost to Yarnell’s chest. “No son, Charley. Let’s just talk.”
    “What happened to you?”
    “Too much to say. But recently I got myself arrested breaking a windshield right over there about six streets. I was drunk and thought I had a reason. There was worse stuff that they didn’t catch me for.” It always cleared his head to admit this. “Look, I can get out of your car right now.” He turned to Yarnell and saw he was being studied. There was something about him that Yarnell liked, and Mack understood it to be the weak places.
    “I got a job for you, if you want. Some money, which you need.”
    “I’m open. I expect it’s not computers.”
    “It’s an airplane. Remember the drones from my place?”
    “I do.” A few summers before Mack had driven out to Yarnell’s place sixty miles west. It looked like a ranch from the road, but behind the house and the barn and the toolshed were twenty acres of winter wheat and then a narrow asphalt landing strip and four small hangars. You had to duck your head in two of them. Charley Yarnell had two Cessnas, one a blue twin engine, and a two-man grasshopper helicopter under a canvas awning. But he took some time showing Mack his set of a dozen drones, little gray things with single jet engines with air intakes the size of liter bottles. “This is the future,” he said. “This is the money.” He could get them to take off in sixty feet, a ninety-pound aircraft, and he ran them from handhelds and from the computers in one of the buildings. “They’re hardwired for this strip,” he said. “Latitude, longitude, and elevation.” He pointed to the control panel along the fuselage. “All I put in is the time to touchdown and the wind speed.”
    Yarnell had Mack’s old friend Chester working for him and the whole little spread was squared away nicely. Chester had been in high school with Mack and he waved from the small hangar and pushed one of the little planes out onto the paved lane with a long T-bar. When he came over, he took Mack’s hand and asked,