This Given Sky

by James Grady

  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 wa
r 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.

  The highway led past a gigantic sphere of pale light:

  Prison—a for-profit prison of a corporation invested in by a law-writing U.S. Senator. From its Main Street dotted by vacant stores, Shelby’s politicians wooed the crime pays corporation with tax incentives vindicated when the facility opened the last year of the twentieth century and fostered marginal wage jobs for guards who walked into work each morning past a sign proclaiming Wall Street’s current stock price for the company that profited from keeping men locked up. As he drove past the glowing sphere, Jake glanced through the chain-link electrified fence at the half-dozen concrete buildings the size of high schools. Saw no ghosts of cowboys.

  He knew if he stayed on the interstate that ran thirty miles beyond Shelby to Canada, he’d drive past dozens of pre-fabricated houses erected near the airport after 9/11 for the massive re-enforcement of what had been a carload of Border Patrolmen by the new Department of Homeland Security and its Report All Suspicious Activity signs.

  But he couldn’t remember more of a Springsteen lyric about runaway American dream as he took the Shelby exit, followed the plan, and drove past Thel’s closed-for-the-night co-op, past their bulldozed elementary school and the boarded-up old high school, parked in the alley behind the Tap Room.

  Shut off his car.

  Saw no one in the other parked vehicles.

  Saw no one anywhere in the darkness.

  Jake walked through the graveled alley, eased through the bar’s back door into the glow of fluorescent signs for beer.

  Locked the back door behind him.

  The thirty-something couple at the bar by the Main Street door witnessed Jake’s entrance, but he didn’t think they knew him. The old woman in a mustard sweatshirt and tan pants perched at a poker machine kept her back to Jake and her face glued to the computer screen.

  The jukebox played Hank Williams’ “Hey, Good Lookin’.”

  Steve stood alone behind the bar.

  He chin-pointed Jake to a stool near the locked back door.

  Turned to the thirty-something couple who were looking for their second marriage. Said: “That’s gonna do it for you guys, right?”

  The man seized that chance to lead her somewhere else in the night.

  Steve brought a glass of water to Jake.

  Who said: “Anybody show up?”

  Steve shook his head. Put the envelope of cash Jake passed him next to another envelope tucked amidst the bottles in front of the bar mirror. Put a plastic-wrapped roast beef sandwich in front of Jake.

  “Fuel.”

  The sandwich tasted as metallic as pre-mission meals in Saudi.

  Steve wore a short-sleeve blue Hawaiian shirt over black jeans. He emptied a Red Bull energy drink down the sink. Rinsed the bottle. Popped the tab on a golden can branded Diet Coke—Decaffeinated, poured enough of that syrupy fluid to fill three-quarters of the Red Bull bottle, topped it off with cream from the bar refrigerator. He glanced at the closed front door, at the night beyond the window’s red neon Tap Room sign. Made sure the old lady had her eyes mesmerized by the poker machine.

  On the shelf below the bar, Steve put two white pills on an orange flyer for a band called Russ Nasset & the Revelators, ground the pills to a white powder with an empty beer bottle. Steve tapped that white powder into his liquid concoction, screwed on the cap, shook the Red Bull bottle.

  Set that home brew out of sight under the bar.

  Came down to Jake. Said: “Can’t really talk.”

  Jake said: “Not much to say.”

  Knew the old lady didn’t see them grasp hands across the bar.

  She told the soulless machine: “You’re bluffing!”

  Punched a button—got a beep!

  “See!” she proclaimed.

  Jake checked his watch: 8:17.

  So it went. The old lady swearing at or sassing the beeping poker machine—8:32. The juke box ran out of paid-for songs—8:47. Jake sat on the bar stool near the locked back door. Steve stood behind the bar—8:51. Maneuvered three drink-buying customers who strolled in back out to the night faster than they’d figured—9:24.

  The Main Street door flew open to the neon darkness.

  And then, though he’d never seen those three men before, Jake knew that the wary-eyed weasel scout who came through the door first didn’t much matter. Neither did the last man to enter as a rear guard, a stubby-bodied and stubble-faced slouch.

  Who mattered was the guy in the brown leather sports jacket. He was thin, a face like pale ivory. His buzz cut made him look bald. He smiled by dropping his lower jaw, like one of those plastic skulls sold for Halloween.

  The skull said: “What’s happening, Steve?”

  “Figured to see you after ten like you promised, Burdett.”

  “Well, I figured I’d catch you figuring before you thought I would.”

  The stubby-bodied, stubble-faced slouch snickered.

  The weasel scout drifted down the length of the bar past the machine-mesmerized old woman. Let his eyes burn Jake who didn’t turn his head to track him walking past the pool table and the jukebox. Jake heard a door open, figured it was the Mares bathroom, heard heels clunk on the tiles toward the Mustangs bathroom, then to the storage room. Jake heard someone rattle the back door he’d locked. Weasel-eyes walked back the way he came to stand somewhere behind where Jake sat on a barstool.

  “Where’s your lovely wife?” said Burdett. “You’d think a concerned mother like Thel would be here tonight.”

  “She’s waiting for a phone call she better get.”

  Beep! went the poker machine.

  “Son of a bitch,” muttered the woman trapped by a glowing screen.

  Burdett grinned. Leaned closer to the bar and in a sotto voice that everyone knew the only woman in the bar ignored, said: “Life’s a gamble. And it’s a bitch when you don’t hold the right cards.”

  Steve said: “Where is she?”

  Burdett turned to the only customer sitting at the bar. “You must be ‘just Jake.’ I’ve heard so many . . . things about you.”

  Jake said: “I hope so.”

  “And you must have heard how I’ve been helping out poor Steve here,” said Burdett. “His daughter—or is it your daughter?
In the end, does it matter? Somebody’s daughter. A fully legal adult woman, know what I mean? Congratulations to . . . well, I guess to both of you. She’s real fine.

  “That’s why I’m glad to help,” said Burdett. “Why my guys here and I, we’re all just happy—hungry even—to, ah, help with Sara.”

  Jake saw Steve’s fists tighten down below the bar.

  As if he saw those closed fists, too, Burdett smiled, gave his back to the father standing behind the bar, turned his pale skull to Jake.

  Said: “So when I was at the grocery store and found a cell phone lying in the Cheerios aisle, I had them loudspeaker lost phone—which is what any honest, decent citizen would do. Nobody claimed it, so I checked the phone’s Contacts, found Home, discovered Thel on the answering machine. Got a great voice, doesn’t she? Love to go home to that. But I didn’t want to drive to the co-op and bother her. Not there. Not then. Besides, Steve’s always here cleaning toilets or taking dimes off of drunks, so I brought it to him. Seemed like the right thing to do.

  “Come to find out the phone is Sara’s and she’s gone in the wind. Knowing her like I do—like the whole town knows her—I bet she was on a run, bingeing meth where and . . . how she could get it. Sad, really.”

  “Try not to cry,” said Jake.

  “Why not?” said Burdett. “Maybe that’ll help.”

  Laughter came from behind Jake.

  Grady

  Burdett said: “But you’re right. What Steve figured out is that meth freaks run up big tabs. Sara’d been gone by then, what?—four days? Four nights? Long time, lots of dollars, and her nowhere to be found because the weird thing is, in a wide open place like this, even beyond all the never know what’s in ’em houses in town, it’s surprising how many farmhouses and shacks, barns and garages and trailers in coulees there are that not even the sheriff will ever find. Can’t even spot all of them from a plane.

  “Wait a minute!” said Burdett. “That reminds me. You’re a . . . a pilot, aren’t you just Jake? Fly cargo planes all over the west. Take who knows what to who knows where, mostly in the night when nobody sees.”

  “I work for a living,” said Jake.

  “Good for you, man.” Burdett shook his head. “I’m sad to say that in these hard-dollar days, me and the boys here pick up what we can, but we have yet to find a personally fulfilling and financially lucrative career.”