by James Grady
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.
Diane sent him photos even though he’d told her the war was why there were no promises between them. Photos of her at work “so you can be part of my day.” And two smiling portraits suitable for a wall or his jet’s cockpit. Plus four color self-portraits taken from a tripod: naked Diane sprawled on her bed; her naked, standing facing her bedroom’s full length mirror as she looked over her shoulder and grinned; her facing the camera wearing only one of his blue shirts unbuttoned and open to her heavy breasts, narrow waist and beckoning come here with a curled finger; her crouched naked on the bed, smiling at the camera with parted lips.
Don’t think about that! The bullet-resistant canopy sealed Jake in the Warthog cockpit. He ran the pre-flight sequence, fired up the engines, radio-checked with his commander on this two-plane mission. Lucky Steve.
“Luger 7, this is Luger 5,” radioed his C.O. from the Warthog taxing down the runway in front of Jake’s bird. “We are Go. Launching!”
Jake’s plane rocked with the desert air swirl from the C.O.’s takeoff and he remembered being home on leave, seeing Thel with hair swaying down to her shoulders.
“Luger 7—launching!” Jake rocketed up into darkness.
Twenty-one minutes to Bad Guy Land.
To that night’s twenty-mile-by-twenty-mile Kill Box.
They flew over a desert flatter and emptier than the prairie back home. Radio chatter filled the helmet encasing his head like a turtle shell. Oxygenated air flowed into his face mask as he settled into the familiar home of his air-conditioned cockpit. His right hand wrestled with the joystick between his legs. Warthog jocks joke that between steering the A-10 and jerking off, their right wrists double in size. Jake felt the plane soar through the ocean of night air.
“Luger 7, we are in the zone.”
“Roger that,” radioed Jake.
She told Steve yes. Great guy, nobody better, better than me. Bet Thel’s yes smile crinkled her blue eyes with a curl of soft lips.
“Luger 7, do you read possibles?”
Jake checked all his detection screens—radar, infrared, heat. Scanned the black flatness below the indigo skyline. “Negative.”
Changed the direction he flew every eight to ten seconds.
Man, could Thel make a science project out of this! She could have gone that way, been a star. Or the poetry. She’d look at this night full of flying cans and have the perfect killer line.
They want to kill me with anti-aircraft fire.
With those damn surface-to-air missiles.
Mounted on trucks. Dug into the sand. Won’t read them until they turn their radar on and, if they’re fast, if my warning buzzer is two seconds slow . . . .
His C.O. radioed: “Luger 7, contact two miles out, APC maybe.”
The bad guys on the ground don’t know we’re here.
“Luger 7 cover. Luger 5, initiating attack run.”
147 seconds later, Jake’s radio crackled: “Rifle!”
The C.O. announcing he’d fired a Maverick missile.
Jake checked the missile track on radar, looked out the cockpit.
Orange flame mushroomed on the faraway ground.
“Hit confirmed!” radioed Jake. “Great . . .”
Beep.
The burning APC messing with infrared and heat detectors, but . . .
“Luger 7 to Luger 5,” radioed Jake. “Contact near your hit. Going in.”
Jake rolled the Warthog onto its back, rolled out into a fifty-degree dive. The mushroom fire rushed closer, closer. Altitude 11,000 feet. 10,500. 10,000. Radar confirmed motion on ground, lock on, arm a Maverick. 9,000 feet. The half moon lit the ghostly desert floor. Altitude 7,500 feet, heart pounding, confirmed target. Time distortion slowed the universe. Closing in. Don’t die not gonna die gonna fly away home safe home Thel, Steve and Thel 7,000 feet—Visual: burning vehicle like a flame for a moth come here! Radar locked on new target . . .
Thumb the pickle button/plane shudders.
Jake looked right: the missile launched off its rail on the wing.
“Rifle!”
But then . . .
Jake held his course instead of Obeying Procedure, pulling out to evade the effects of his attack and any return fire from the ground. He chased his Maverick missile. Flew renegade. Watched his missile hit a second Iraqi Republican Guard APC rumbling across the desert floor. The APC exploded in a ball of flame. Pull up! Pull up! Stall alarms screaming. G-forces crushing him. He fought the joystick: plane shaking, won’t—shudder/wobbles to a flat trajectory flying straight and safe, back to base.
Where his C.O. chewed him out on the runway.
Where the Squadron Commander reamed him out in the Ready Room. Wrote him up and sent him to the base psychologist, who asked: “Why did you endanger yourself and your aircraft? Follow your missile?”
“I guess that was just the direction I was heading.”
The shrink shook his head. “Try again, Jake.”
Jake shrugged. “That’s all the answer I’ve got.”
Watched the shrink note something on his pad that Jake was pretty sure would not bode well for a career in the Air Force.
But they didn’t ground him: wars need warriors.
Nor did they send him back to the shrink after he sat with his squadron watching the movie recorded by his aircraft that showed the first APC burning on the ground. As Jake, his plane, his missile, and the camera rushed ever closer, the film showed men on the ground running—running toward the first burning APC.
They gotta know we’re still out there, thought Jake as he watched the movie he’d made. They’re not running away. Not taking cover, ditching their vehicle they know is probably locked in our sensors. They’re running toward Luger 5’s blasted and burning target to try and help their buddies.
They’re doing their job. More.
Then somebody drops out of the sky and blows them all to hell.
Lights came on in the briefing room.
The other pilots let their eyes find Jake.
He sat steady on his metal folding chair.
These are my buddies. This is my job.
Jake flew the rest of his missions in the war and never hesitated about pushing the pickle or piloting exactly as he’d been trained and ordered.
Still, when the war ended with more than 100,000 people killed and all the rulers back in charge of their countries just as they had been before, Jake took advantage of a Reduction In Force, got an early honorable discharge, flew home to civilian life. His parents risked breaking their routine to fly to Florida to see their son. They told their friends they left after a long weekend “so as not to get in the way of Jake & Diane.”
Who ravaged each other for almost a month before separation’s urgency burned away leaving only everyday obligation. They broke up.
Jake’s apartment lease ran out. His only friends in Florida wore blue uniforms and he didn’t. He had no job, no plans, a chunk of back pay, and a vintage Ford Mustang. He had time. He’d fought for oil, so why not burn some to go home to Shelby. To his folks. To Steve & Thel. Sure, why not.
Jake rolled into his hometown with sunset in his mirror sunglasses. Drove to his family home, put his suitcase on his old bed. Ate dinner with his folks. They ta
lked about the weather. After dessert, as he walked back into the kitchen from the bathroom, he heard his parents whisper “. . . not for us to say.” He guessed they were talking about Diane, loudly proclaimed that he was ready to help with the dishes.
Grady
After they turned on the dishwasher, Jake and his mother stood in the kitchen, looked not at each other or at his father sitting in the living room thumbing the remote as he pretended to care about surfing the TV channels.
“I think I’ll go out,” said Jake. Natural, my voice sounds natural.
Jake parked on the quiet Main Street. Walked into the Tap Room. No customers. Steve stood behind the bar. The jukebox played old Springsteen.
Something besides relief and joy lit Steve’s face: “There he is!”
Jake met him behind the bar and grabbed him for a hug. He’s holding on like I’m leaving, not come home. On the shelf in front of the bar mirror waited a shot glass full of amber whiskey.
Jake said: “Looks like you started without me.”
“Won’t drink that one,” said Steve. “Pour it, leave it on the dare. But I won’t drink it, not going to be a blues drunk.”
He nodded for puzzled Jake to walk back around the bar, take a stool.
“But I do drink for happy,” said Steve. “I’ll drink to celebrate.”
He poured them two fresh whiskeys, clinked his glass to Jake’s: “Here’s to you. Glad you made it back, great to see you, good . . .”
He trailed off. Swallowed his words with whiskey.
“What’s wrong?”
“Thel left me.” Steve shook his head. “Or I guess I left her. She’s in the house; I’m back on Len’s couch.”
“But I thought you two . . .”
Steve frowned. “You thought so too. I wondered about that.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“I don’t get to make sense, I just get what I can.” Steve shrugged. “When the war ends, she starts walking around our new house like she was looking for a door. Told her I’d move out, give her space or walk away if that’s what she wants. She says she doesn’t know what she wants. When I asked if I should stay, she said nothing, which is the same as saying go.”
Behind Steve, Jake saw his own reflection in the bar mirror.
Steve said: “Figure you’re my brother. What we got, our posse . . . Nobody’s fault. Whatever happens, there’s always you and me.”
The jukebox fell silent.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Jake.
“Sure you do.” Steve splayed his hands on the bar to lean close. “If you don’t, it’s ’cause you don’t want to. You gotta be braver than that.”
Steve stood straight. “Me, too.”
He angled his head toward the rear wall, dumped a clatter of coins from the tip jar on the bar into his hand. “I gotta go play the music.”
Steve walked to the back of the bar and kept his back to Jake.
Jake walked out to the street.
Don’t look back.
Driving from Main Street to Knob Hill took five minutes. These are the streets that sent me into life. Still the same, completely different, never knew them like I thought I did. He flowed past houses full of secrets no one would ever tell him, strangers he’d never meet. He’d walked this way to grade school, that way to the swimming pool. Jake drove past the mouth of the alley he’d run out of with Steve to get to Thel’s that first day in 1975, at the end of the 10,000 day war in Vietnam. Drive on by tonight, 1991, when he fought a whole war in forty-four days. Drive on. Get to where you’re going.
But he stopped half a block away in the silent street light darkness. Smelled the sweaty mustiness of his road-tripped Mustang. Whiskey singed the dry taste in his mouth. He felt the weight of the stars.
That house: basement plus one story of white walls under a dark roof with a picture window glow from the inside light hinting somebody’s home.
Just looking at that house like: this changes everything.
Jake climbed the three steps of the concrete front porch, knocked on the dark wood slab door. Knocked again. Raised his fist . . .
She opened the door, gravity tumbling him into her blue eyes.
Thel struggled to find only one smile. Long hair floated on her sweatshirt. Faded jeans sheathed her legs down to bare feet.
“You’re home,” said Thel.
“If you say so.”
Her face of tears pressed against his shirt. His palms and fingers flowed up the silk of her back under the sweatshirt, her hair like water to his touch as he cupped her skull and she raised her hungry mouth to his. He never forgot her burning lips, swollen nipples and salty wetness, their triumph over years of waiting on that living room floor.
Jake woke in his childhood bed before dawn. Showered and shaved. Told his breakfasting parents that he was going for a drive but not where, west of town around a curve of low hills that hid from all of Shelby where he parked in a cluster of deserted Quonset huts to share kisses and coffee Thel brought in her old car on her way to work.
Because of his family necessity for dinner precisely at six, by seven-thirty he’d checked into a lonesome roadside motel seventeen miles east of town near grain elevators and across the two-lane highway from the roadhouse that sold beer to Shelby’s teenagers for three generations. He parked behind the motel. Hid outside along its west wall, eyes on the highway, his back toward the railroad tracks and the windswept prairie rolling to Canada. Spotted Thel driving toward him, waved her around back where she parked beside his car to stay as the stars shone down on Montana, then slip away before dawn.
“We can’t use that house,” she told him as they lay naked on the motel’s lumpy bed. Moonlight poured through the smudged window.
“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.
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.”