And West Is West

by Ron Childress

  “You’ve lovely eyes, Mr. Winter. So pleased to meet you.” Mrs. Leston’s clutching hand feels cold to Ethan, or perhaps his is warm from baking in front of the doctor’s unseasonable blaze. In the living room, between floral wingchairs, glows another gas fireplace. This is where Mrs. Leston is leading him, very slowly. Or is he leading her? He grips her arm, suddenly fearful she might trip over one of the many tapestry footstools. “Suzie, dear, you didn’t tell me your young man was such a charmer. So clingy.”

  Passing out of his study, Dr. Leston jerks to a halt. “That’s Zoe, Liz,” he says tersely.

  Zoe, standing behind one of the wing chairs, examines her mother and then shoots a worried look at her father.

  “I lied,” he says quietly to Zoe. “Your mother puts on a good front, but she’s not any better. Tonight I hoped she would be all right for you.”

  Mrs. Leston smiles, oblivious to the discussion about her. “We were so worried about our Suzie,” she says to Ethan. “I’m glad it was only a fever. Walter thought it was meningitis, but what does he know. He’s a surgeon. What did you say your name was, Doctor?”

  “Ethan. But I don’t have a PhD. Still working on it.”

  “Ethan? Ethan who?”

  “Winter.”

  “No. I’m afraid I don’t know any Winters who are physicians.”

  In the car coming up from the city, Zoe had explained to Ethan that her parents’ extended cruise had been therapeutic. Her mother was recovering from a stroke. Ethan has no medical background, but to his mind Elizabeth does not display the paralysis or slurred speech he’d imagine that affliction would cause. Rather she appears to be suffering from dementia.

  “Daddy. Who’s Suzie?” Zoe asks.

  Her father approaches the chair that Zoe is standing behind and he sits down. He has shrunken considerably. “Just a name.”

  It is becoming clear to Ethan that the Lestons’ recent travels were not for recuperation but a last hurrah.

  Suddenly, Mrs. Leston begins to speak loudly. “Now wait a minute. I believe we did know an Archbishop Winter. But that was in Hartford. You’re not from the Hartford diocese, are you, Father?” Even in her confusion Mrs. Leston still manages to play the hostess.

  “My family is from New Jersey,” Ethan says.

  “No. I’m afraid that’s not right. I believe it was a Bishop Snow.”

  Ethan gently shakes his head.

  “Lessard,” Dr. Leston says to his wife, rescuing Ethan from her imprecise gaze. “You’re thinking of a blizzard, Liz. It was Bishop Lessard.”

  “Yes. Bishop Blizzard. That’s it,” Elizabeth says, grasping Ethan’s hands. “Welcome, Bishop.” The poor woman, Ethan sees, is trying to keep herself together through pretense.

  “Oh, Mom,” Zoe says and goes to her by the fireplace. “You’ve spilled your drink. Come upstairs with me. We’ll get you cleaned up.”

  Mrs. Leston lowers her gaze, as does Ethan, to the liquid accumulating around her high heels and the back of her dress. “Oh dear,” she says. She releases Ethan’s arm and looks at her daughter. Her voice goes small. “Please, Suzie, help me.”

  As Zoe leads her mother from the room, Ethan’s face feels scalded. He fears he might appear eager to bolt from the house, a coward.

  “Oh hell,” says Dr. Leston. Then he refocuses the distress on his face into a coldness aimed at Ethan. “Stay, would you? You’re our only guest tonight. We won’t embarrass you in front of company.”

  ETHAN’S EXPERTISE IS the Monte Carlo simulation, a mathematical model that tries to account for all likely outcomes of a given scenario. His bank, UIB, has been using the Monte Carlo to exploit currency movements during particular events: a merger, a national disaster, and the more exotic events on which he works. For the past two years his specialty has been algorithms based on terrorist incidents. When word of the bomb blasts in Stockholm hit the newswires a year and a half before, his programming triggered UIB’s high-frequency trading mainframes to sell what kronas it owned or managed for clients. As the market caught up, his algo measured the krona’s volatility and, microsecond by microsecond, began to repurchase and sell that currency with the dollar, renminbi, or euro—whatever was momentarily most favorable—as the currency seesawed down to a lower valuation. And then when the algorithm sensed the krona’s bottom, it pulled out of it completely. Ethan was glowing by the end of that day, and not just because of the bonus he would earn. His work has kept him enthralled ever since.

  His latest algorithms have shown such good results that yesterday, after the Pentagon announced that Jabir al-Yarisi had been eliminated, UIB’s director of liquidity, Dwayne Hoke, rushed to Ethan’s office to watch the currency prices gyrate. Now Dwayne is hot over Ethan’s new concept, the subprogram that focuses on antiterrorism—in particular, on drone strikes against Al Qaeda leaders. Lately the military has been touting the strikes as a means of keeping America safe, boasting of successful kills as if the Middle East weren’t its next Vietnam. Following each strike, Ethan had noted a volatility in South Asian currencies against the dollar and he began to see what should have been obvious, that antiterrorism to one country was terrorism to another—say, an American drone strike on a Pakistani madrassa. As such, with minor tweaks, his current terrorist-incident algo spawned an antiterrorist algo.

  “Beautiful,” Hoke had said. “We’ll not only kill the bastards but make money from them twice over.”

  The comment made Ethan blink, until he recalled that one of UIB’s vast array of investments included military drone technology.

  Ethan knows that his work is not the work of a genius, though it can give him this impression when he watches UIB’s arbitrage profits mount. What he does—thanks to the speed of the bank’s globally located mainframes and the short transmission routes through which they place orders—is a little like scalping tickets for a Lady Gaga concert. The show’s going to be a sellout so the real trick is to buy as many tickets as you can before the true concert-goers have a chance. Dwayne, however, has assured him that what they do is useful and good: it is helping a currency establish its true value.

  Zoe, however, operates outside his technology. Having used the Monte Carlo on her he has concluded that their relationship can have several likely outcomes: that they will marry, that they will live together a number of years before marrying, that she will leave him for another man, that he will leave her for another woman, and most recently added, that she will leave him for an out-of-town job. What his mathematics cannot account for is what is happening now.

  “Stop,” Zoe says as their Mini Cooper glides through the misty Ulster County countryside.

  “What?” Ethan asks. “Here?”

  “Just pull over. I need to think.”

  Two minutes earlier they had said their goodnights to her parents. Mrs. Leston had managed to complete the dinner without further incident except for a few name slips, calling Ethan “Bishop,” and Zoe “Suzie.” She had, apparently, completely forgotten wetting her dress and changing into fresh clothes. There are aspects of dementia that are not cruel.

  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 chair 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 Washingt
on 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.