The Signal (7 page)

Read The Signal Online

Authors: Ron Carlson

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Married people, #Literary, #Western Stories, #Westerns, #Marriage, #Ranchers, #Wyoming, #Ranchers' spouses

Now he stood up. “You want to fish? There’s still some light.”
“It’s cold and I’m tired,” she said, “but yeah.”
“Okay, let’s go down.” They geared up in camp and walked down fifty feet to the lake. Three boulders protruded into the water, each as big as a bus, and they stood downwind and cast into the mirrored sections along the shore.
“How’s your fly selection,” she asked, an old joke. There was no selection. He only had one size of big woolly caddis, but he had twenty of the things.
“Perfect,” he said. “They like these bugs.” He had clipped on a red bobber and threw it thirty yards straight out, the wind ballooning his line as it fell.
“A bobber?” she said.
“I like to use it once and put it away.” The light failed imperceptibly. A mote across the lake became an eagle, a crescent that looped and landed alongside another in the top branches of the skeleton of a massive dead piñon. Vonnie glassed them with her binoculars.
“Somebody’s been to REI.”
“These are good,” she said, handing them to him.
He was surprised at the lensing. He could see the throat feathers ripple. “It’s mother and daughter.”
“You don’t know that.”
“They’re women,” he said. “See how calm they are.” He gave her back the new glasses. “I’ll be back,” he said, clipping his rod with a stone. Mack walked back up to camp and looked down on Vonnie lifting her line for another set. He powered the BlackBerry and dialed the window. He’d have to get within a mile to catch any signal from the missing part, and he didn’t know if that was sightline. The odds were crazy. He typed in: 10.5K Valentine. Send. He turned it off and looked at the device and put it back in his pocket. It was an uncomfortable lump, just like the whole deal.
He’d been out of jail two weeks when Yarnell called. They had stayed in touch through the years with Mack doing short spot contract jobs, softcore hacking, for Yarnell for cash from time to time. It was a weird call, but they were all weird; whenever Mack was with Yarnell, he felt it in his gut. It was going to be trouble, but Mack felt he 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, “How’s that place, cowboy?”
“Rented out for now,” Mack said.
“It’s a tough country on ranches,” Chester said. “You ought to get back out there and run it.” Yarnell stepped over and Chester handed him the control unit.
“I might. And now you’re a pilot?”
“Yes sir. I went to airplane school,” Chester said. “You’d like flying.”
“There’s too many mountains in my life to put an airplane in it.”
Yarnell handed Mack the control to examine and took the T-bar from Chester and straightened out the little plane, handing the bar back to Chester without looking.
“This gentleman has some airplanes. Some don’t need a pilot; that right there tells you how hard flying is.”
A bright blue six-wheel tank truck entered the far yard. Chester stepped up and took Mack’s hand again. “I’m glad to see you. I’m going to get over and take delivery on some fuel. Say hey to Vonnie and get back with your horses, you cowboy.”
“Will do, Chester.”
Yarnell showed Mack the hand controller for the aircraft and then led him over to four white Adirondack chairs in the shade of the hangar. He had Mack press the switch and then hold the red button which ignited the jet, more of a hiss than a roar. Yarnell took the controller back and used the simple joystick to send the plane forward in a sudden rush, like a thrown thing, instantly in the sky and a moment later out of sight. They had coffee for twenty minutes there and Mack scanned the bulbous cumulus cloudbank running along the blue-sky horizon like a hedgerow for the craft the whole time. Yarnell had made a show of putting the controller on the ground.
“There,” the man said, pointing.
Mack saw the gray dot again, remarkably small, now descending slowly like a toy and banking at the end of the strip for a turn, coming in for a landing in soft bumps with the engine off. “Hands off,” Charley said.
“Where’d it go?”
Yarnell looked at him. “You tell me. I loan these to the government.”
“Don’t they have their own?” Mack had asked.
“That there is a mystery,” Charley had said. “I wanted you to see what we’re doing is all.” Mack looked across at Chester atop the fuel truck with his wrench and he did feel a little better about the whole deal.
In Yarnell’s Rover in the parking lot of the Tropical, Mack asked, “What’s the job?”
“We lost part of something. It fell from a plane. It’s about the size of a book.”
“In the mountains?”
“In the Winds.”
“Some kind of secret?” Mack said.
“Some kind.”
“Is it radioactive?”
“No. It’s too hard to explain,” Yarnell said. “But it’s like a trigger, a fingerprint. And they need it. It’s the linchpin, the prototype.”
“There’s a new drone.”
“There is.”
Mack asked, “This trigger. Whose is it?”
“Ours,” Yarnell said.
“
Ours
as in
us,
” Mack said. “Who?”
“It’s worth ten thousand dollars to you, if you can hand it to me.” Mack watched the big bowling pin tumble through its stations. Behind it the night was lit by the bar lights of Jackson, and the outline of the two-story town was cut against the mountain. Looking over the buildings had always confounded Mack. It wasn’t just Jackson; it was any town. There was something wrongheaded and sad about the venture to him, something that didn’t fit. He could abide it, but the clock was ticking.
“What if it’s all broke apart? It’s going to be broken up.”
“If I knew that for certain, that too would be worth some money.”
“Who else wants it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know who knows about this.”
“I mean like the Chinese? Are they going to be crawling around the hills?”
“I can’t imagine,” Yarnell said.
“Who else have you hired?”
“No one.”
“And you can’t say one thing.”
“That would not be safe,” he said.
“Who else in this part of the country knows about it?”
“I don’t know.”
Mack was thinking as fast as he could. “When did they drop it?”
“Two days ago.”
“Is there a signal, a GPS?”
“No. Yes, but weak. A mile max. I know the flight line and the hour it went missing. This is a private experimental aircraft and they don’t want to lose that piece or leave it out there. It’s bigger, much bigger than the stuff I showed you.” He unfolded the USGS map. There was a red oval that covered the entire diagonal. “We may not find it, any trace, and that’s worth five grand, but you’ve got to look. We need this.” Yarnell opened his face in the sincere way that great liars can and Mack knew that face.
“I don’t know where it is,” he said. “I need you. It’s a long shot, but you know the country.”
“Some,” Mack said. After a minute he added, “I’m taking Vonnie.”
“I thought . . .”
“You thought what about Vonnie, Mr. Yarnell? She’s a friend of mine. Is it at all dangerous or just a walk in the big woods?”
“A walk,” Yarnell said. He opened the glove box and pulled out a packet of hundreds. Mack saw his own hand go out and take the money. Twenty bills. “A start. Good luck. Go bowling and have a sandwich. You know how the BlackBerry works. It should be a walk in the woods.”
With the money in his pocket, Mack had no position from which to speak. He pushed open the door with some effort and slid to the ground. In the last year every time somebody had handed Mack a sheaf of money, it had been freighted with shame and this was no different. He could taste it. Mack heard the vehicle back and drive out through the gravel. He walked up under the humming sign and entered the carpeted auditorium which smelled of beer and echoed with muffled crashing.
Now the wind came up as if charged by the great shadows, and with the sun gone, the cold gathered. Vonnie always fished until he called it; she wouldn’t quit first. His bobber was bright in the lake, something as out of place as it could be. “They’re in here,” he said, “but let’s leave them tonight. It’s chilly.” The far hill had collapsed into darkness and the birds were gone.

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