This Given Sky (5 page)

“I know. I don’t want to . . .”

“To hurt him. Neither of us does.”

“Ever.”

She pressed her forehead against the ribs over his heart.

Whispered: “We’re more than this.”

“Yes,” he said.

They talked about what they’d never said in all the
before
days, found a way to tell stories about Steve without flinching, laughed and teased each other, made love every way that came to them and were careful never to drive Shelby’s streets together. They avoided streets where the city crew was working. Went to none of Shelby’s bars or cafés. Saturday, they parked her car thirty-two miles south of Shelby in the even more disappearing town of Conrad, then drove his car the rest of the fifty-five miles to big city Great Falls. They went to dinner in a restaurant, to a movie in a mall where a future Republican governor of California starred as a cyborg sent from a different future to save mankind, browsed through a just-opened giant franchised book and music store, wondered whether they’d need to buy one of the new machines that played things called compact discs.
Do you know we’re talking about more than technology?
wondered Thel. She didn’t ask. They spent an entire night together, got back to Shelby after moonrise Sunday.

Wednesday, Thel “took a late lunch.” Jake’s parents were at work. The garage beside his house waited empty for her car. She came in through his back door. In less than a hundred heartbeats, they were in “his” bedroom laughing and pulling off each other’s clothes, her looming above him while he lay on his back in his boyhood bed of dreams.

Afterward, she’d dressed while Jake restored his bedroom to its squared-away condition so as not to leave visual evidence disturbing the continuum of his parents’ construction. Thel picked up her red sweater from his parents’ living room floor. Saw a stack of mail on a lamp table. Spotted an unfolded letter boasting the logo of an airline that flew to Rome and Hong Kong and, best of all, Paris. The red sweater crinkled as Thel pulled it over her long brown hair.
That’s not a form letter
. Her shoes were in his bedroom.
Oh, my God, we did it in his bed in his parents’ house!
She needed to walk past the stack of mail to get them,
glanced
at the letter.

Grabbed it and raced into the bedroom.

“Jake!” He stopped fixing the bed his mother had insisted on making
the right way
. “This says you turned down a job with the airlines!”

He stared at the letter caught in her hand.

“An Air Force buddy recruited me.” He shrugged. “Wasn’t right.”

“But I know you! You love to fly! Live to fly! All those places, even just around America, someplace,
any
place, besides here!”

He brushed her cheek, felt sternness; felt hunger for his touch. Told her: “More blue uniforms, last in line, third chair for years, plus if I wanted to play corporate politics, I’d have stayed in the Air Force.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Kill time until I see you tonight.”

“No, I mean . . .”

“I know what you mean.” He shrugged again. “Beats me.”

“No,” she said. “Nothing beats you.”

“Thanks, Hon.”

“I’m not sure that’s a compliment.”

But then he kissed her and all they could think about was that night.

Friday morning, as Jake considered painting his parents’ yellow kitchen to do
something
while waiting to see Thel, the house phone rang.

She said: “How quickly can you meet me at the airport?”

Thel beat him to that prairie plateau, stood beside her car parked next to the runway. The wind flapped her brown hair.

Out in the open, thought Jake as he parked beside her. In public.

“How did you get away?” he said, as, wary of eyes, he took her hand.

“I just said I was going,” she told him.

Kissed him. Right there and then. For the world to see.

“My boss patted my shoulder,” said Thel. “Told me to be careful.”

“Does he know?”

“Everybody knows.”

She grinned and he gave her a smile.

“But,” she said, “that’s no surprise. The surprise—
my surprise
—is that I heard a woman at work say her cousin is coming to town around noon.”

Jake’s brow wrinkled.

“That plane,” said Thel. “Your first airplane ride. The old fighter. It’s coming back any minute now and I want you to get to see it again.”

Buzzing like a distant bee. A vibrating black dot in the southern blue. Thel gazed along Jake’s pointing arm to find that speck as it grew into a tiny airplane. She held Jake close: excitement coursed through him.
Like we’re making love
. The plane banked from an airport approach to circle over Shelby as if its pilot wanted to be sure that town was still there. Jake floated from her arms to better track the silver plane.

“That’s the best place to be,” said Jake, eyes full of where he wasn’t.

“In some rich man’s plane?” said Thel. “
You
being the rich man?”

“Rich has nothing to do with it.” Jake watched the P-51 circle their hometown. “Just you and the sky. Nobody to kill. No passengers’ lives you could lose. Nobody to be responsible for but you, and you . . . soar.”

“What about me?” Thel’s voice pulled his eyes to where she stood on the runway, wind whipping her long brown hair. “Where am I in all that?”

Jake’s smile was genuinely puzzled as he said: “I’m with you.”

The buzz of the warplane grew louder.

“No, you aren’t,” Thel whispered after she found her voice. “You want to be with me. You love me more than you’ll ever love any other woman.
I’m so sorry for you, Jake!
And I love you,
oh, God, do I love you
. I always have. And you’d stay with me until the day you die. But you can’t love me
first
like I love you
first
, because you love
flying alone
more.”

She stood there with the wind whipping her hair. Listened for him to convince her she was wrong. Heard only the whining roar of a silver warplane coming in to land.

She walked to Jake. Kissed his mouth then pulled herself back.

Said: “When I make love with you, it’s like I’m in church. For you, it’s like going to the movies. I can’t live my life as somebody else’s movie.”

He heard her crying as she ran to her car. Heard rubber squeal on asphalt as the P-51 landed. Heard it taxi on the runway while Thel drove away. Heard the pilot cut the engine, knew if he were closer, he’d have heard the cockpit open, but didn’t know until he turned around that climbing out with the pilot was his beautiful blond wife.

Jake walked to the runway. Introduced himself even though the boxer/pilot said he remembered who he was, asked
how’s it going
.

“I’ve got no idea,” said Jake. “But I need somewhere else to go.”

The P-51 pilot saw Thel’s dust cloud on the gravel road from the airport. His wife unloaded bags from the P-51’s cargo hold. He told Jake: “Give us a ride to the motel, then you can buy me coffee.”

Two mornings later, nine
A.M
. on a November Monday, Jake said good-bye to his parents, packed his suitcase in the trunk of the Mustang, pulled out of their driveway to cruise the streets of his hometown.

He found a city crew working a busted water main. Jake parked, stood nearby until Steve climbed out of the trench and came over to him.

“I’m leaving,” said Jake.

“I heard. You gonna like flying mail planes?”

“Sounds like me.” He told Steve: “I’m not the right man for Thel.” Said: “It was her call.”

He meant to shake Steve’s hand but got swept up in their hug.

Jake said: “I hope for your sake you’re good enough for her.”

Steve nodded. “When do I get to see you again?’

“When we can,” said Jake.

Five weeks later the phone rang in the Denver corporate housing room he rented while cruising through his civilian pilot’s training and certification. He answered, heard Thel say: “Meet us in Las Vegas Saturday.”

As he sat across a white round table from Steve and Thel at the outside swimming pool of a casino once controlled by the Mafia, she told him: “Steve and I are getting married today.”

“We want you there,” Steve told Jake’s stunned expression.

Jake spoke the absolute truth: “That’s where I belong.”

Thel said: “I’m pregnant.”

Breathe, just breathe . . .

“Jake,” she said, “it’s your baby. But not. It’s mine, and I choose to have it, not be some mom who leaves. I’m so lucky, because Steve’s gonna be the dad. Wants to be. That’s the way it is, but you . . . you’re . . .”

“I’m who we need me to be,” said Jake.

At the first chapel they found, Steve paid $110 for a white-haired man in a black suit to
put some law on us
. They had dinner, then Jake caught the night flight back to Denver and years as a mail pilot, basing there, basing in Boise and Salt Lake, flying millions of miles, checking in with his best friends in Shelby every few days, agreeing with Steve that
Bess
was a great name for the baby who Thel decided to call
Sara
.

Thel made sure Sara understood she had two daddies, though Steve was
real daddy
, changing diapers, two-
A.M
. feedings, horrible school recitals. Sara called her other daddy
just Jake
. Sent him crayon drawings he stuck on whatever refrigerator he was using and explained whatever was necessary to whatever woman in whichever town shared his bed.

Jake came to Shelby maybe five times a year, stayed with his folks who cautiously let themselves be grandparents until they died within months of each other when Sara was seven and Sara’s little brother Gary was starting kindergarten. Thel took over the co-op. Steve struck a deal to buy into eventual sole ownership of the Tap Room and worked there full time.

Sara loved it when Jake came to Shelby. He was careful to pay attention to her brother Gary, careful to not mess up “our whole thing,” as Steve called it, but
hell
, Jake had spent his whole life gliding amidst rules of destruction. And even as Shelby citizens increasingly spat clichéd anger loosed by TV and the infallible Internet, the town accepted this
posse
outside the picture frame of
a real American family
sold by politicians and preachers because “this is just us,” not some outsiders’
them
.

Those were blue sky days
, Jake told himself that dark night in 2010 as his white rental car drove down into the river valley seven miles south of Shelby. His cell phone rode silently in his shirt pocket behind a fat envelope and three plane tickets back to Denver.
Nothing a phone call could change now
.

September 11, 2001.
Where Jake was
is asleep in a Boise motel room after a long night flight, 9:23
A.M
. Rocky Mountain time when he jerked awake because of the ringing phone.

Sara started yelling as he grumbled
Hello
, something about planes coming to kill us and you’re not flying, are you,
you’re not you’re not!

He flicked on the TV and saw the smoking twin towers.

Sara’s voice told him: “It’s on every channel. Except cartoons.”

Jake couldn’t pull his eyes off the TV images.

“Dad says don’t worry, nobody wants to kill anybody in Shelby. He says even if someday they might get us, we do what we gotta.”

Sara whispered: “But if they might get you, you’re as good as gone.”

Jake’s eyes reflected the TV broadcasting the towers burning in New York and the walls, curtained window and chained door of another rented room in a city that was no more than a dot on a route.

He said: “You’ll be OK, kid. You’ve got people who love you.”

“Won’t stop a plane from crashing.”

They hung up and the world went on.

Sara’s middle school teachers said she could do better. Jake smiled:
Been there
. She tried out for basketball, didn’t make it, obeyed Thel’s push and got on the volleyball team. Jake treasured a photo of pony-tailed Sara lunging for a two-fisted hit. He started a savings account for her college.

Jake took Sara driving around Shelby during his third
trouble visit
.

“How dare you lecture me about drugs?” yelled Sara. “You guys invented getting high when you were my age! Mom and dad still get high if they get a chance, I know they do, I can fucking smell it.”

“Good,” said Jake: “What stinks in here now?”

She
hmphed
. Stared out the car window.

“Besides,” said Jake, “it wasn’t us who invented getting high outside the law. America’s war on drugs started when we were babies.”

“If you’re so smart, you’d have grown up and made it legal.”

“You’re right,” said Jake, “but we’re here about what you’re doing.”

She sliced him with razor blades: “Like father like daughter.”

“Got me,” said Jake. “I smoked grass and I loved it. Still would except for the FAA tests—and don’t hit me
again
with how it’s hypocritical because I can drink like a fish as long as I show up sober for the pilot test. But I—
we
—smoked to get high for fun, not to get up in the morning.

“Besides, we’re not talking weed. We know you’ve been popping pills. Maybe other stuff.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“I’m forty-three and can’t always be sure what I’m doing. You’re only sixteen.”

“Clear eyes,” she said.

Cut off his next brilliant argument with: “Why didn’t you marry Thel after you knocked her up?”

“
First
, if you ever talk about your mom or dad or us like that again . . .”

“You’ll what?” She glared out the windshield. “You’re
just Jake
.”

Anything he had to say crumbled as those words hit that glass.

On 2010’s night highway two years later, Jake stared out the rental car searching for the answer to
What could I have said?

The road machine-gunned white slashes at his windshield.

In the sky on the left: winks of red lights, warning beacons atop hundred-foot tall
made in China
wind turbine towers, Montana air spinning their sixty-foot white blades for Spanish corporate owners who sold the electricity to Canada, not to the local co-op run by Thel. Nearly a hundred such windmills loomed on the prairie west of Shelby like an army of conquering robots.