A Dangerous Age (12 page)

“I will,” Callie said. “I’ll say one every day.”

B
OBBY
T
REE’S BATTALION
had been chosen six months earlier to take an aptitude test for training to help drone pilots and sensor operators at a desert base forty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada. The air force could not recruit
enough technicians for the work, and the Pentagon was lending them men from the marines.

Bobby and two other men from his company had scored high grades on the preliminary tests, and as soon as the company was at its training base, the three men were called in and asked to take a second series of tests. One man was an accountant from Skiatook, Oklahoma. The second man had spent his youth playing computer games at a mall in Tulsa. The third was Bobby Tree, with his innate three-dimensional sense and his fine near vision and the touch that made him Olivia’s lifetime greatest lover.

A week after the second round of tests, the three men were called into the office of the base commandant and told where they were going.

“This may not sound like exciting work,” the colonel told them. “But every day you will save more lives than you can imagine. Every time a drone does the work of a manned flight, Americans live. There aren’t enough pilots, and the air force needs every one they can find. It’s a complicated procedure and involves very long hours. Any questions?”

“When do we start?” the accountant asked. His eyes were shining. He was a quiet man who had read adventure novels all his life. Now, at last, a real adventure was being offered to him. A hush-hush, state-of-the-art sort of adventure, out in the desert, where all good secret operations should be carried on.

Bobby said, “I have a wife who’s going to have a baby in six months. Will I be able to go home on leave and see her?”

“Not right away,” the colonel answered. “No one can know exactly where you are. No e-mails for a while once you’re there, although you can write letters that will be read by censors before being mailed. Partly the reason you have been picked is your mental stability. If I were young, I’d give anything to be in on this. I think you’re pretty lucky.”

“I’m a marine, sir. I go where I’m told. I was just wondering if it meant I might get to be there for the birth.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“D
EAR
O
LIVIA
,” Bobby e-mailed Olivia that night. “I can’t tell you much except something good has happened that you would be glad to know. I will not be in danger. So quit worrying about that and tell my dad, and if you don’t hear from me for a while, don’t worry about anything. Take care of yourself and him or her. I can’t help thinking it’s a boy, he’s a boy, or she’s a boy. Okay, I love you. Bobby. I hope you get this.”

L
ITTLE
S
UN WAS
in the pasture, sitting cross-legged on a ceremonial blanket. It was seven in the morning and the sun was just beginning to warm up the edges of the world. He had eaten breakfast at five and gone out to say his prayers to the earth and think of his strong grandson-in-law in a barracks
with other men, waiting to know his future and his fate. Little Sun thought also of his great-grandchild in Olivia’s womb and of what a strong and brave child it would be, and how it would carry his heart into another hundred years of happenings in the world and perhaps be a great leader for their people or a healer or a dreamer or a man who could talk to horses, as Bobby sometimes seemed able to do and as he knew for sure his friend Kayo could do.

W
HEN
O
LIVIA RECEIVED
Bobby’s e-mail, she read it, printed it, deleted it from her computer, folded the piece of paper, and put it in her shirt pocket. Then she went out of the building to sit on the steps in the sunshine and watch the smokers clustered together under a couple of scraggly-looking pin oak trees growing up through round circles in the thirty-year-old concrete. Above the city of Tulsa the winter skies were gray and blue and full of long white cirrus clouds, more like spring than winter.

I’ll figure it out, she decided. I’ll call Jack Reed in Oklahoma City and ask him what he thinks. He’ll know who to call.

She got up from the steps and walked down the street to a newsstand and bought copies of six newspapers, including the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
and the
Wall Street Journal
. She could have pulled up the papers’ content on her computer, but she wanted to read it the old-fashioned way.

It took her a couple of days to figure out what Bobby was doing. By the time she did, her house was a sea of unwashed
dishes, clothes were thrown on the floor, and piles of newspapers were everywhere.

At her office her desk was piled high with more newspapers, her computer was full of unanswered e-mails, and her last three editorials had been boring rehashes of the pope’s illness, a school shooting at a reservation in Montana, and a diatribe about secondary school education in Tulsa.

But she had figured it out. There was only one thing going on in the United States armed services that would require that much secrecy and that much intuitive reasoning and mechanical skills: Bobby was being trained to fly drones. He had a commercial pilot’s license he had picked up when he worked in Montana as a young man. He understood electronics and machinery.

“If I’m right, they’ll be sending him to Nevada,” she told her old friend Jack Reed on the telephone. Jack had been calling people he knew in the Defense Department and picking their brains.

“Bingo,” Jack said. “If it’s true, he’s a lucky man and not just because he won’t have to go over there and eat sand. That’s exciting work.”

“Pray for him, Jack,” Olivia said. “I need all the help I can get this year.”

“We’ve started praying?”

“We always did. We just didn’t call it that.”

Dearest Olivia,

I probably won’t be able to send this to you, so I’ll keep a copy and give it to you when I am able. It’s final
and I’m excited about this. Not as much as I am about Robert Little Sun Daniel Tree being born or Summer Rivers Tree or whatever we end up naming him, but still I’m plenty excited.

Here’s the deal. I leave for Nellis Air Force Base on March 15. They are going to teach me to fly Pioneers and Dragon Eyes. These are drones. If I’m really good at it, they may let me fly Predators and Global Hawks.

I scored a 100 on the aptitude deal they made me take. Arvest Iron Hawk scored better than I did and he’s going too. He scored the same as I did, but he did it in a lot less time, the paper part where you draw things. I guess he was good at geometry. Anyway, it looks like the Cherokees are going to have to win them another war. Hell, baby, I’m really happy about this. I wanted to be a pilot the first time around, and Tom McAlphin was always trying to get me to do that, but I was too heartbroken about breaking up with you to be a good enough soldier. I flew Tom’s plane all over Montana, with him as a passenger. One time we even took it to Alaska. Well, anyway, now I have this chance, and it might not be the same thing as getting in a fighter jet and pulling nine g’s, but what the hell, it’s a chance to do something really interesting to help with the war. If they let you have this letter, call Tom and tell him what I’m doing, will you? We should have invited him and Sharrene to the wedding, but I was too busy to remember to do it.

Be happy for me, baby, and for us, because I don’t think I’m going to get killed at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, but I might be in the middle of some scrabbling between the marines and the air force. The commander of the squadron told me I’d be serving two masters for a while and just to be cool and do the best I could.

Here’s some data. I don’t think they mind if I tell you this because it’s been in the
New York Times
and all those papers up there.

There are three existing Predator squadrons in the air force and they are adding fifteen more. There are also squadrons in the marines and the army, but they are in such a pinch for pilots that they are just training everyone at the same place for the next six months to a year. I might end up at a marine base teaching other people. Anything can happen this year, I guess, and I hate to say it, but this war is making opportunities for men and women too. Although I haven’t seen any women doing it yet, I heard they were.

I guess it would be good work for queers when they let them back in. I know you don’t like to hear that, but hell, I like queers. I like your queer friends in Tulsa a lot, and one of your cousins in North Carolina is a queer and I can’t believe none of you know it. He’s a great guy. He was my favorite of all the ones who went hunting with your dad and me.

So I guess you’re thinking, What is Bobby smoking?
Well, you’ve made me so happy, and now this. I need to go run three miles and get this out of me. I love you, baby. I think I’ll get to see you for a day or two before I head out for Nevada. Maybe you can meet me there.

Love again,

Love always,

Bobby

The letter arrived on March 20, by which time Bobby had told her most of it on the phone and by which time the sonogram had confirmed that the baby was a boy.

“Bobby’s coming on Thursday,” Olivia told her friends at the newspaper. “I want everything for the paper to be set before he gets here. All we have to do is make sure we have the pope’s sickness covered and make sure my editorials will fit and then you guys have to take over here for two days. You can’t take this away from me.”

“We got it covered,” her secretary and the assistant editors assured her. “Unless there’s a terrorist attack, we can do the rest.”

“What did he say when he found out it was a boy?” her arts editor asked. “I’ve been waiting to hear about that.”

“I haven’t told him. I want to tell him to his face.”

“T
O HIS FACE
” happened on March 31 at two in the afternoon when Bobby got off a Northwest Airlines flight and
walked into the lobby of the Tulsa Airport, wearing his uniform and looking like all the goodness and holiness of the world, and Olivia took him in her arms and told him her news as soon as she kissed him.

“I know you wanted a son,” she said. “And I’ve got you one.”

“Don’t be mad at me for wanting one,” he said. “I have to fix up all that bad stuff with my dad.”

“S
O WHAT EXACTLY
will you do?” she asked him in the car on the way home from the airport. He was driving. She was sitting as close to him as she could, touching the sleeve of his jacket.

“I sit in a simulated cockpit sort of thing and fly the drone, and in Iraq there are soldiers on the ground telling me what they need it to do. The things can see like eagles. They can corner. They can get into tight places—at least the small ones can. They can launch missiles or small bombs or large bombs, and they can watch the back of a building or scope out warm spaces in pavement. The insurgents set asphalt on fire so they can dig it up quickly to put bombs or explosives under it. It stays warm for quite a while. Sensors on the drones can sense the differences in temperature of pavement or even the newness of pieces of pavement. There’s a lot of chemistry I have to learn. It’s not just playing with the controls, although that’s the main thing. It’s touch, baby, just like making love.” He put his hand on her leg and ran it up her thigh to her crotch. “Goddamn,
I’m horny. Is it going to hurt him if we screw? I’ve been worrying about that.”

“Well, you can’t get kinky.”

“When did we ever need that?”

“Never. I was just kidding. I’m too happy to be serious right now. I’ve got enough of that going on at work. I’m thinking about quitting my job. I mean it. It’s too much shit going on while I’m worrying about you and making this baby. What if the baby finds out all the shit I have to know to run the paper?”

“Then he’ll know the world and won’t have to find out the hard way.”

T
HE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON
they decided on the spur of the moment to go to Tahlequah. They arrived at three, and Little Sun took Bobby off with him to the meadow. “I don’t matter to Granddaddy anymore,” Olivia said. “He doesn’t even try to talk to me. I think all he wanted me for was to get Bobby back into the family.”

“I am making you some blankets,” Mary Lily said. “Come in your old room and look at what I’m weaving for the baby.”

B
OBBY
T
REE AND
Little Sun were sitting cross-legged in front of the earth island, watching the sun go down. They had not spoken in many minutes.

“So you attack the enemy from ambush,” Little Sun said at
last. “I do not think there is any shame in that. If he is the enemy of your people.”

“It’s hard work,” Bobby answered. “Many hours a day. We don’t have enough men to do it. Every time we use one of these unmanned planes, we save the lives of American soldiers.”

“Then do a good job of it. Be the best of the ones who do it. Then you will be proud.”

“I never was a coward. I’ve never been afraid.”

“Stop worrying about it and do the job they give you. Olivia is very happy that you will be in Nevada.”

“Will you bless me then, Grandfather?”

“I will.” Little Sun got up and went to the earth island. He took a handful of dirt and broke it up in his hand and came back to Bobby and said prayers of blessing and then put the earth onto his cheeks and arms and gave him some to hold in his hand.

Little Sun sat back down on his blanket, and the two men watched the sun until it was far down below the horizon and the red and purple and golden light had faded into the dark cold blue of evening.

Later that night Olivia and Bobby drove back to Tulsa.

T
HEN IT WAS
Sunday and then it was Monday, and on Tuesday morning at 4 a.m., Bobby got up from their bed and put on his uniform and left. “I won’t be far away,” he said. “Stay warm. Take care of my son.” Then he was gone and the long spring and summer lay ahead of Olivia, and although she didn’t
have to think every minute of every day that he would be killed, she had to soldier on without his presence.