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another, trouble tying his work boots in the first place. Some rule had been expunged and he felt off-step and wrongheaded. The daylight of the dear place had changed.
    And not just the ranch; when he was back at school Boise felt like it was underwater. He stopped going to class and started cutting corners with his computer work. His life, which had seemed a logical series of clear choices, blurred for a moment and then blurred for real. Without his father’s expectations, he found himself without a rudder and he knew it, and he drew a sharp breath when he saw that there was some part of him that was glad for it.
    Mack’s father was buried in the family yard atop the northern hill beside Mack’s mother. The black wrought-iron fence had been welded in the toolshed below. Years ago Mack’s mother had planted the dozen golden juniper pfitzers that struggled in the wind but survived. Sawyer helped Mack. They closed the guest ranch and battened down the hatches. Sawyer showed him all the numbers; they were negative always six hundred and fifty dollars a month. They sold acreage so they had two years. Sawyer waived his fee and stepped away, shaking Mack’s hand. “I hope you can keep the place.”
    There were still 375 acres of range and hill and mountain, down from over a thousand fifty years before. He had twenty offers on the place, enough to retire on. He sold the two cute log cabin cottages and they were hauled off on flatbeds. He sold all the horses but three. Amarantha drove out from town one day and gave him a notebook with her recipes and kissed him on the cheeks. The printing was beautiful and large, but he knew he’d never make a one. He wired up his computers and went from grant to grant, now working in codes for this agency and then that. People in town thought him a hermit. He was twenty years old.
    In June a black Range Rover pulled into the ranch dooryard and a man that Mack recognized got out. His name was Charley Yarnell, and he’d been a guest several summers at the ranch.
    “I liked your father,” he told Mack, “and I wanted to talk to you.”
    “The place is not for sale,” Mack said. “We’re flush.”
    “You’re not flush,” Charley said, “but I don’t care. I want you to do some work for us. From out here. Consulting.” They sat in the front parlor, a room dominated by his mother’s bright rag rug, an oval of orange and red and blue and green that looked like the bottom of a trout stream. “This is good work,” Charley said. “Money, and somebody’s got to do it. You’d be an outpost, like a transfer station.”
    “This country is full of retired military,” Mack told him. “People with clearance.”
    “That right there says it all. I don’t need people with clearance. I need somebody at the end of the road.”
    “Is it the CIA?” Mack asked.
    “Nothing is the CIA,” Charley said. “It’s just an agency and it’s just a job. The only people who would talk about it would be you and me.”
    “This is a favor?” Mack asked him.
    “No, it’s work. I saw you with your dad; you’re my man.”
    “I’m not my dad,” Mack said. It hurt to say and was a relief. “You want some tea?”
    “No,” Charley said. “I want you to put in a satellite dish for TV, any company you want, and I want to give you this card.” There was a twelve-digit number on the card. Charley stood, and the two men shook hands. “This is good for you,” Charley said. “I’m sure of that. But hear me: this is good for me. I’ll be talking to you.”
    When Yarnell drove out of the ranch yard, Mack felt doubt sweep over like cover. He knew the man was marginal. His father had said something, but he couldn’t remember it. He did recall the way his father dealt with slippery characters, and he called them slippery, many times CEOs at the ranch who would rather talk business than go hiking, asking about the numbers and lifestyle. His father always put on his old world manners with such people,