This Given Sky (3 page)

Said: “I guess I’ve been wanting to do that for forever.”

“I guess now’s the time,” she whispered.

Leaned in to their next kiss.

Steve wanted to tell Jake. Hell, Steve wanted to tell the world.

Thel said it was too soon after the funeral to be official. Too important to just blurt out on Main Street.

“But why not Jake?” said Steve.

“Let’s wait until we make it solid before we tell him.”

“I love you,” said Steve. “Doesn’t get more solid.”

“I know,” said Thel. “But trust me on this.”

“Trust you on everything,” said Steve.

Two weeks later, Steve’s apartment building caught fire. Except for smelling like smoke, his possessions were fine, but he needed a new home. Thel had to admit that her moving out of the rented place she’d always called
home
and them moving in together,
living together
, made all kinds of sense. But she stalled, told Steve she dreaded offending her Very Churchy boss even though
yes
, he couldn’t and wouldn’t fire her for living in sin.

But she came to the Tap Room nine nights later while Steve still “officially” lived on the couch of Len, a Vietnam vet with a 100 percent mental disability pension who’d known Steve’s KIA’d biological father before they both became ghosts of that jungle war. Thel claimed a barstool under a pine wreath Christmas decoration. Steve poured her Diet Coke, but Thel asked for a beer instead that he brought her with a puzzled smile.

“I told him,” said Thel. “My boss. Didn’t mean to, I just . . . said it.”

“What did he say? asked Steve.

“
God moves in mysterious ways
. Then he smiled. Went back to work.” Thel shook her head. “
God moves in mysterious ways
.”

“Your moves are mysterious enough.”

She had to smile.

Steve said: “So now I can tell Jake.”

“No!” said Thel: “I should be the one to tell him. Better that way.”

“
Mysterious ways
.” Steve grinned as he walked down to a customer signaling for a refill at the other end of the bar.

Thel swallowed cold beer.

She spent three days
not
writing a letter to Jake at his air base in Saudi Arabia where thousands of Americans were staging to rescue Iraq-invaded Kuwait. In that time, Steve cut a lease-to-buy deal for them for a three-bedroom home on Knob Hill.

It’s just a lease
, thought Thel as she signed the papers.

That night she lay beside a sleeping Steve in the house where she’d grown up. Felt a cosmic pull from the ink drying on her new lease signature as surely as she felt the drying of the sticky damp between her thighs. She slid from the bed, wrapped her nakedness in that old blue robe, bare-footed away from her sleeping lover to sit at the kitchen table where she’d had her meals for most of her life. She settled in the silent pale cone falling from the overhead light. In front of her waited a stack of office supply paper.

She clicked a gas station logo giveaway pen from her purse.

Not good enough
.

Like a shadow she glided to the dark living room with its stacks of packed boxes, slid open the middle drawer of the desk she and her father used for store work, the desk where she’d done homework. Junior year, she’d written a poem about a stone tossed into a pond making ripples to shape unseen shores. Won third place in a state high school literary contest. Her father had been so proud he bought her a fountain pen “for all the rest of your poems.” That black-with-gold-trim pen lay never used in its box with ink cartridges in that desk drawer, but her hand reaching through the darkness found it straightaway, carried it back to the kitchen.

She screwed a dark tube cartridge into the poetry pen.

Maybe the ink has all dried up
.

Scratching the pen’s gold tip on a sheet of paper ripped the silence.

Black lines scarred the white paper.

Now I gotta do it
.

Thel lost count of the inked sheets of paper she crumpled and tossed into the trash she’d take out the next morning without Steve noticing. Her heart beat harder with every sweep of the black hand on the kitchen clock.

Can’t do it this way
.

That epiphany bought her time. Sure it did. So she wrote:

Jake,

     Please be safe and OK.

Everyone worries for you. I worry for you, want you home . It’s so empty here. Your folks and us are OK, but I need you to call me—JUST ME—as soon as you can—daytime in Montana, at my work like you did that one time. Don’t worry, but call, please call.

Then she wrote: Thel

Hid the letter in her purse.

Snuck back into winter’s bed and lay there in warm wool darkness. Listened to Steve sleep. Listened to him dream.

In the morning light, Thel kissed Steve good-bye, took the letter to the post office and mailed it to Jake the fastest way the Air Force had created, then drove to the co-op where her promotion meant she had an office with a glass front and door she could close, so no matter what the women sitting at desks “on the floor” thought they saw, no way could they hear her speak.

If any of them wondered why she now started working with that door closed, they chose not to ask. You cut people slack because if you don’t, you’re tied tight to their troubles.

One day. Two days. Three.

Snow fell and drifted away.

Four days. Five.

Wednesday, January 16, 1991.

Even though the clock on the office wall said it was quitting time, Thel sat at her desk behind the closed door, staring past columns typed on a piece of paper about rates vs. usage linked to service costs, trying to imagine how to structure the report’s next draft to make more sense, to . . .

BAM-BAM vibrated her glass door. Her boss wore his usual Wednesday yellow shirt and tan blazer, but she’d never seen that look on his face as he said: “Did you hear we’re finally at war?”

Thel’s heart bombarded her chest.

“Bombing and shelling,” he said. “It’s all on TV.”

She heard herself say
Oh
.

“I thought you should know—Steve, too. We got Jake over there.”

“Yes.”

“Gordon Proudfoot’s youngest is there with the Corps,” said her boss, who’d come of age after Vietnam and served with the Marines because that was the right thing to do. “I don’t know about the Curtis boy, he’s Army.”

He shook his head. “Right by the Holy Lands.”

“Not about that,” whispered Thel.

“It’s always about that,” said her boss. “Even if it’s about oil.”

He nodded at the world outside her office. “Martha’s got the TV on in the conference room.”

“I don’t want to watch.”

“I know what you mean.” He cleared his throat. “I know you’re not . . . but in about five minutes we’re going to join in prayer.”

Thel whispered: “I’ll do that in here.”

He nodded, left her alone behind glass.

Screaming silence filled her car when she left work and drove home where, through the windshield, she saw Steve standing at the curb, waiting for her. They took her car, drove through their dinner-hour hometown. Thel saw windows flickering with TV colors, knew what everyone was watching. They parked in front of Jake’s parents’ house, went in to be with the suddenly old couple, where they all talked about how Jake was going to come home safe and sound.

Grew up around them, but I don’t know his parents
, thought Thel as they all sat in the living room colored by the TV’s flowing terror. Jake’s dad worked an office job for a trucking company and his mom had some job up at the county courthouse: identity by paycheck, by offspring, by luck.
Would it have helped if I knew who you people really are?
she thought as they all smiled and nodded their heads to hammer together a certainty where everything would be just fine.

War and TV merged over the next six days. Flickers haunted her office’s glass wall. War TV played in the Tap Room where Steve worked, and whether she was home alone or with him as they packed their lives for the big move, the TV demanded to be turned on.

Tuesday morning—9:17—her office phone rang.

“Hello?” she said. Like the word meant
nothing
.

“It’s Jake! Jesus, Thel, are you OK?” She heard jets roar in the background of Jake’s voice. “Steve, is he hurt? Your letter scared . . . .”

“We’re fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“Good, because I’m who’s supposed to be in danger, not you.”

“Is that who you are?”

Jake said: “What’s wrong? What’s going on?”

“I . . . I moved in with Steve. Together. We’re together now.”

Why couldn’t it be silent on his end of the phone?
she thought.
Why couldn’t I hear him breathe instead of background roar of planes?

“Like a woman,” Jake finally said. “A . . . a man and a woman.”

“Like that.”

The noise of war came through her phone
live
, not TV.

Until he said: “You’re the luckiest people in the world.”

She closed her eyes.

“Makes sense,” she heard Jake say. “Seems so right and . . . logical.”

“Logical.” Call it a laugh, then she said: “I guess so.”

“What I mean is . . . congratulations.”

Her eyes opened. Saw nothing. “Thanks.”

“Look, tell my folks not to worry. Tell Steve . . . tell him great.”

“We love you,” said Thel.

“Gotta go.”

Her connection went dead.

She listened to the buzz. Hung up the phone.

TV colors shimmered in her glass wall.

Thel grabbed her coat, stalked out of the building, got in her car and roared north on the interstate. Found herself exiting to Shelby International Airport with its aluminum hangars, green blockhouse, a lone blacktop runway vacant beneath empty sky. Thel stopped the car on the airport’s gravel road. Stared at where she’d once ridden with Jake.

And left him.

Winter wind rocked her old car under a gray steel sky. Patches of snow dotted the prairie. Miles off to her left, she saw houses dotting the west side of Shelby, houses on Knob Hill but not the one she’d signed her name to lease. The heater scent faded from the car, let her smell frozen dust, the cold plastic of her steering wheel. She stared at the lonely plateau airport, watched the windsock flapping like some lunatic finger.

Driving back took a fifteen-minute forever, past the street leading to the giant pink high school built two years before JFK was assassinated when the town wise men
absolutely knew
that Shelby was destined to become a major city. She took the long route through town, crossed over the bumpy railroad tracks, drove down Main Street like she had with Steve and Jake before there’d been now-gone stores and whitewashed windows, then she was on the sunset side of town, parking outside the co-op, walking inside, hanging up her coat, sitting behind her desk.

Her boss knocked on her door, came in: “Hi, where you been?”

“Getting here,” said Thel.

As he walked out, she said: “Would you leave my door open?”

Went back to work.

Gave it the smile she had.

Jake hung up the phone at the Saudi Arabian airfield America and its allies had taken over after Iraq invaded neighboring oil-rich Kuwait and upset the way the world worked. Roaring jets vibrated the walls of the air-conditioned call center. The Air Police sergeant in charge saw some kind of smile on the young pilot’s formerly anxious face, figured he’d been right to violate SOP, let the guy make a call before a mission.

“Was the communications test successful, sir?” asked the sergeant.

“Outstanding. Thanks.”

They exchanged salutes and not one wink.

Great
, Jake told himself as he rode through the night heat on the shuttle bus to the runway where his A-10 Warthog fighter plane waited beside his mission commander’s matching machine.
Great news
.

U.S. Air Force

The Warthog is an ugly warbird good for nothing but raining missiles, bombs, and bullets down on enemy tanks or armored personnel carriers (APCs). As Jake walked from the bus to his bird, he realized that with its gray tube body and two rear engines that resembled giant aluminum cans, the Warthog looked like another science project he and Steve had helped Thel with sophomore—no—junior year. He couldn’t remember what they were supposed to be building by gluing two hollow cans to a broomstick.

His crew chief eased him into the Warthog’s titanium bathtub cockpit. Jake scanned dials and gauges, weapons and radar screens, the joystick he’d steer with and its pickle button that he’d thumb to loose death and destruction.

He flashed on the lone photograph taped above his bunk in the cramped trailer he shared with three other pilots, a picture Thel’s dad shot that high school graduation summer when they were walking across the grass outside her house, Steve on Jake’s right, Thel on his left:
the posse
. She’d cut her hair. He’d wanted to ask
why
, tell her she looked
great
with long hair. But he never had.

In that photo taped above his bunk, Thel’s brown hair cupped her face almost like the haircut worn by Diane, a real estate agent from his squadron’s home base in Myrtle Beach, Florida. Jake kept photos of Diane locked in an aluminum box under his bunk, along with pictures of his folks, photos of flight school buddies, pictures he took while flying his Warthog over Kuwait’s tan desert dotted with burning oil wells.