And West Is West (3 page)

Ethan pulls onto the gravel shoulder.

“My mother doesn't know me,” Zoe says to the windshield. “She kept calling me Suzie.”

Ethan studies the side of Zoe's face, her forward stare. He fears that she will break down and sob. But what can he say to make her feel better? Perhaps that Suzie and Zoe are names easily confused. “Your mother just slipped up,” he says. “It's nothing serious.”

“Alzheimer's is not serious?”

Ethan sees that he has been dismissive. He keeps quiet.

“It's bigger than that,” Zoe says. “My mother thinks I'm someone else.”

“This
Suzie
?” Ethan is on firmer ground here. As a mathematician he is quick in logical deduction. “Your mother must have known a Suzie. Isn't that how memory works? Your older experiences are the last to fade. You must resemble her Suzie.”

Now Zoe looks at him. The car's headlights, reflected by the mist, light the vehicle's interior and reveal Zoe's glistening eyes. “Someone I resemble? That wouldn't be anyone on her side of the family. I look more like my father.”

“Then what about, I don't know . . . another daughter maybe?”

“Another daughter my parents never told me about?”

Such family discipline in the Lestons would not shock Ethan, not after his encounter with the doctor. “Something bad might have happened to her. Something they wanted to forget,” he says, realizing too late that his words were thoughtless.

“Take me home,” Zoe says.

“Okay,” says Ethan, relieved. He puts the car in drive.

“No,” Zoe says before they have gone twenty feet. “I mean
my
home. My parents'.”

Ethan drops her off without going inside. Then he sits in the dark car watching Zoe and her father through a kitchen window. Dr. Leston, his sleeves rolled up, is at the sink. He has his back to his daughter as he speaks.

CHAPTER 3

New York City

Ethan,

Well, here's your key so I guess this makes it final. Sorry about standing you up for lunch. For me it's better we part like this—with a lonely legal pad note left on your Jellystone countertop. Hey Yogi, did I get the name right this time? Never mind, I know it's Giallo granite. Really I'm not putting you down for having nice things, for having a job that allows you to buy them, but it's all too seductive for a little bear like me. I won't respect myself if I get sucked into a materialistic life so soon after college. This could be naive but I still dream the world might be a better place if I help.

Anyway, hope you don't think I've been using you for the past six months just for a place to live in the city. Joke! That's the problem with pen and paper. You can't really backspace out the thoughts you put down. But what I guess I'm avoiding saying is that I really am fond of you even if we are so different. So different I don't think we'd have gotten together if not for Alex. He really does love you. With him it's always Ethan this or Ethan that. Your friendship is deeper than anything we ever developed. But, I mean, how could we, with you always at work and me finishing my degree and then being crazy busy at the UN. About all that stays with me of our time together are the glum espresso breakfasts when we stared at the Freedom Tower going up.

So I've packed up my last things from your apartment and will be on the train to DC before you read this. (Wow! I'm on page 2 of your legal pad already. Fergive the lack of sppelchek but doing this by text or email would have been sucky.) Anyway, don't you think my simply disappearing will be the easiest goodbye? Except for a few loose ends maybe. If we'd have had our lunch today and I was brave enough, here's what I might have tied up.

About that dinner at my parents, I apologize for taking you. It wasn't right.
The thing is I'd been getting madder and madder at you for a while, maybe to make my leaving easier. Now I see that I'd decided to torture you a little. I knew my dad would go after the man who “defiled” his little girl. Sorry. But at least your coming wasn't for nothing. He might not have told me about his other daughter. Not that he told me much more than Suzie died in a car crash around when I was born. It's all very strange. He couldn't even show me a picture of her. As stony as he acts I know it's still traumatic to him. It's frustrating that he won't tell me more.

Not that this makes any better of an excuse for standing you up today. You're probably waiting in the Blue Planet right now if the text chime in my bag is you. But learning that I had a sister I never knew has been too much. So it's not just from you I'm breaking clean. I'm starting a new life. I need to think about just me for a while.

Damn, Ethan. You confuse me because we did have nice moments. And the night you came to my parents you were at your best. You held your ground with my dad without getting mean. Best of all you were kind to my mom. A kiss for that. Many kisses. But please don't call me. Don't text. Don't email. Especially don't write. I couldn't take reading a messy letter like this. Everything has changed for me now and hearing from you would only hold me back. I've got so much to do.

Goodbye,

Zoe

CHAPTER 4

Nevada

Pancho's—a cinderblock warehouse with a bar and three pool tables on a dirt road off Route 95 between Indian Springs and Vegas. Inside Pancho's, Jessica stares into a vending machine mirror. Then she remembers what she is doing.

She pulls a pinball-style lever and a hard pack of Marlboros drops down the chute like she's won a prize. She could have bought a Twix from the adjoining machine, but start that and soon she'd be an elephant, sitting for work as she does. The term c
hair force
is becoming truer every day.

Nearby, a spinning slot machine makes the airman attached to it moan. For the past hour Jessica has been watching him, a sensor operator from her squadron. His eyes are glassy but she's not seen him being served, so drink is not the cause. The likely culprit is a drone monitor stared at for too many hours. There aren't enough drivers or sensors for all the flights being guided out of Reeger and crashes are on the rise. But with unmanned aerial vehicles—UAVs, RPAs, drones, eyes in the sky—whatever you want to call them, no one gets hurt but the taxpayers at twelve million a pop. So up they keep going.

“Your shot, von Richthofen,” Bob Sanders calls from a pool table. She puts the Marlboros on the rail and takes a cue.

“Don't call me that,” Jessica says. Bob has left her a split with the eight ball. She makes it. Game over.

“Technical Sergeant Aldridge,” Bob salutes.

Recently Jessica took a promotion. Pilot shortages have compelled the Air Force to experiment with using enlisted personnel to fly UAVs. Three months ago she was a sensor operator, like Bob, feeding flight and target data to the ex-F-16 commander beside her. Then her commander, Colonel Voigt, sent her to UAV pilot school. When she was done she had both stripes and wings. The next thing she knew, she was firing a missile at al-Yarisi—and those girls.

She taps up a Marlboro for Bob that he declines.

“Killing yourself,” he says.

“Like you're not,” she says. Bob's gut hangs over his belt and is holding up his promotion, though it's not as if he'd have to squeeze into a cockpit to fly a drone. Jessica changes the subject by nodding toward the airman feeding nickels into the one-armed bandit. “Last thing I'd want to do after a shift is bond with another machine,” she says to Bob. The man at the slot is intense, committed, addicted. At least he's only losing nickels.

The war on terror, what was once known as Operation Enduring Freedom, has lost its official name. On the base they call it Operation Expanding Waistline, partly because covert snacking is the main pastime during shifts at a drone monitor. What she and the members of her squadron do, all day and night, is a high-tech version of a detective stakeout. They watch. They wait. They don't sit in unmarked cars or vans but in single- wide trailers. Yet unlike a stakeout, there is no scenery, only images on monitors. The same desert or mountain for hours. At first being an eye in the sky thrills. But a cop gets to pound on a door and make a bust. For UAV drivers, the rare instance of firing a missile, what Jessica's squadron calls an angel, makes the adrenaline flow to no purpose. She's just pulling a switch. And this is why Colonel Voigt has pinned sergeant stripes and his hopes on her: he's decided that women are more adaptable to this type of mission. He thinks they have patience. He thinks they will be the ones to save the drone program because they won't go nickel-slot-machine crazy like the men.

“Hey, killer,” a familiar voice calls to Jessica. Lieutenant Dunbar, entering with his crew, is dark, handsome, cocky—a real top-gun wannabe. He had logged two hundred hours in his father's Piper before enlisting to be a jet pilot and astigmatism shot him down. But you don't need much depth perception to drive a drone.

Jessica absorbs Dunbar's mandatory rib. Word is spreading about the al-Yarisi kill because someone in Washington decided to let the world know another terrorist has died in a drone strike. If the triggers on these operations were not anonymous, Jessica might have become famous for taking out Al Qaeda's number three. This makes her Dunbar's competition. The lieutenant has let it be known, discreetly since what they do is even internally classified, that he has been the trigger in a dozen operations where angels flew or demons dropped—a demon being a laser-guided five-hundred-pound bomb. Dunbar is the base's unofficial drone ace, if there can be such a thing.

“Don't call her that,” Bob says to Dunbar.

“I know he's your man, but I didn't know you two were married.” Dunbar says to Jessica, and Bob's face goes red. Bob
is
her partner, her sensor operator, but that's as far as it goes.

“The fuck we're married, sir,” she tells the lieutenant.

Now Dunbar really notices her. Jessica imagines what he is studying and to her it is not impressive—a pale face, wispy brown hair trimmed short, insubstantial nose, eyes naively large. In warning, Dunbar points a finger at her. Then he snatches back his hand and heads for the bar.

“You're going to lose those new stripes,” Bob says.

Jessica shrugs.

Pancho's serves Pabst, peanuts, pretzels—apparently whatever starts with a
p
. The owner is actually not a Pancho but a Phyllis, the ex-wife of an ex-airman named Frank who ran off to Cuernavaca in the eighties. Phyl could serve as a standing advertisement for the American Cancer Society. Her voice is an infrequent rasp and her skin a roadmap folded too many times. She is huffing through what might be anywhere from her forty- seventh to her seventy-seventh year. But everyone knows not to suggest she give up her Lucky Strikes—that would lead to immediate ejection.

Dunbar's mouth is curved in a way that Jessica likes. In fact, she likes his whole silhouette. She is watching Phyl fix a shot glass for him from a bottle of wormy tequila kept under the bar. She stares as Dunbar knocks it back. Then he speaks some quiet words to his buddies, a pair of second lieutenants, who snort at his comment. Jessica thinks Dunbar is mocking her. But none of the trio gives her a glance. When finally Dunbar looks her way he may as well be looking through Pancho's walls and into the desert beyond. She lowers her eyes, noticing as she does how her uniform makes her chest seem even flatter than it is.

“You okay?” Bob asks.

She lights a cigarette and exhales the smoke away from his face. “Let's get out of here before you catch cancer,” she says.

What is it about overconfident jerks that makes them attractive? Dunbar should not be on her sexual radar. But damn the Force's fraternization policies, he is. Jessica doesn't look toward the bar again but heads for the front door, passing the airman at the nickel slot. A dead cigarette sits between his knuckles where a burn blister has emerged.

“Are you all right, Airman?” Jessica asks. As a new NCO this is her first official act over a subordinate.

The airman drops a nickel into the machine. He cranks the lever and Jessica waits until the reels stop: two cherries and a bell. Coins rattle down the machine's throat, but this doesn't stop the airman from playing.

“Why don't we drive you back to base?” Jessica suggests. At his lack of response she puts a hand in front of the airman's eyes. But he knows how to play the machine by feel and he does so again.

“There a problem here, Sergeant?” Unseen, Dunbar has come upon them.

“No problem, sir,” Jessica responds, protective of her fellow enlistee. She does not want whatever is up with him to go on his record. Despite manpower shortages, and perhaps the cause of them, it is easy for an ordinary airman to get bounced from drone duty if his psychological profile slips. The Air Force has the lowest accidental civilian kill ratio of all the services and wants to keep it that way.

“How much have you been drinking, Airman?” Dunbar asks the man, but there's not a bottle around and the airman's breath smells dry.

His eyes are blank from screen fatigue not alcohol
, Jessica wants to say. What is more, off-duty bingeing is not what pilots and navigators, even stationary ones, do. The steadying vice is nicotine, taken via gum when indoors on base or through the standard cancer sticks while enjoying a break under the desert sky. One might imagine there is no battlefield stress an ocean away from the front, but this is the problem: lack of physical danger in operations that take lives—even enemy lives—never feels quite right. Jessica knows how the silent guilt builds. You learn to deal with it or crack. In other words, you smoke. Maybe, she thinks, risking their lungs is some atonement for being beyond the line of fire. God bless Philip Morris. She and Bob leave Pancho's without the airman.

A week later the airman is booted from the drone program. His next stop will be guard duty at a Kyrgyzstan airbase. Though this is Dunbar's doing, Jessica feels rotten for not adequately watching the man's tail, like any good wingman would. But she cannot discuss her unhappiness, not even with Bob. She would be putting her own psych profile out there to be picked over. The only person safe enough to talk to, to write to, about this is two thousand miles away. Is it common DNA that makes a father understand his daughter so well? What else could it be; Jessica has not seen Don in fourteen years. Yet from his letters she feels that he understands what she is going through like no one else could. Maybe because he's a prisoner.