A Dangerous Age (21 page)

“Well, I’m about ready. Come in and sit down and I’ll get my suitcase.” She had decided to stop looking at him. Enough was enough in the sentimental department, especially at their age. “You want to go upstairs and talk to my niece?”

“I think we need to get going. It’s going to rain soon. I’d like to get back before it starts.”

“All right, then.” Mary Lily walked back upstairs, told Olivia good-bye, collected her small suitcase, and walked back down the stairs. Philip took the suitcase from her and they walked together down the path to the driveway and got into the truck without talking anymore.

Olivia watched them from the side of the window so they couldn’t see her. She was laughing so hard she couldn’t stop. She was laughing harder than she had laughed in months. It was May 24, 2005, and for once she was thinking about something besides people being shot and killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and children living without their parents because of AIDS or the tsunami.

As soon as she could quit laughing, she walked out of the bedroom, went into her office, opened her computer, and began to write a column for Tuesday’s newspaper.

“It is late spring,” the column began. “Time to count our
blessings and read poetry, time to go to graduations and think about the future. Time for mind opening and reevaluation.

“Here is a poem I have been meaning to print in the paper for several years. It is by the great American poet Robert Frost.

Spring Pools

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect

The total sky almost without defect,

And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,

Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,

And yet not out by any brook or river,

But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.

The trees that have it in their pent-up buds

To darken nature and be summer woods—

Let them think twice before they use their powers

To blot out and drink up and sweep away

These flowery waters and these watery flowers

From snow that melted only yesterday.

“A poet is a painter,” Olivia wrote, “giving us images so beautifully worded that they have the power to become engraved upon our hearts.

“When I was in school, my English teachers gave us poetry to read and memorize. Teachers don’t have time for that sort of thing anymore. So if you want your children to have this sort of richness in their lives, it’s going to be up to you to teach it to them.”

B
OBBY
T
REE GOT OFF WORK
at 10 p.m., Mountain time. He had been at the console cluster since five that morning. Missiles he had fired and bombs he had dropped had killed seventeen insurgents and destroyed four buildings.

He closed up his books for the day, refused a friend’s offer to go out for a beer, drove to his quarters, took off most of his clothes, sat on the floor in what he hoped was a position of prayer, and tried to align himself with the forces of good in the world. He prayed, in some imitation of prayer he had learned from twenty years’ devotion to
Star Wars
movies.

He was hungry but didn’t feel like eating. He was elated and hated the elation. He was tired but didn’t want to sleep.

It was too late to call Olivia. He was afraid he might wake her.

At eleven thirty his cell phone rang. He found it in his pants pocket and answered it.

“Are you all right?” Olivia asked. “I was watching the news. Were you part of this?”

“Yes.”

“Congratulations, then.”

“For what?” he answered. “I’m tired, honey. It’s weird; this whole deal is weird. I’m glad you called.”

“I’m coming in a few weeks,” she said. “To stay for a while. We need to find an apartment. I’m not staying here when you’re there doing what you are doing.”

“I’m glad,” he answered. “I need you here.”

B
OBBY WOKE AT FIVE
the next morning, got up, made coffee, and lay his uniform out on the unmade bed. He didn’t have to clock in until six and it was only a ten-minute drive from his off-base two-bedroom apartment to his post.

He poured a cup of coffee and walked out the front door to look at the skies. There were dark clouds above the mountains, with lightning running through them like the paintings the Pueblo Indians made on their arms and foreheads. It never meant rain. Bobby had learned that weeks before. You could expect rain for days in the desert and it would never fall. Prick teasers, the natives called the lightning-filled clouds in the distance. Bobby often wished Little Sun Wagoner would come out here to visit. He’d find something to say about this landscape. He’d know why men would choose to live here instead of moving where there was water.

Bobby went back into his house, opened a cabinet, took out a breakfast bar and opened it, and began to eat. He opened the
refrigerator and took out milk and orange juice and poured both into glasses and drank part of each, then put half of the breakfast bar on the table and hurried into his bedroom and dressed. He put on his boots and tied the laces, brushed his teeth and combed his short hair, and then left the house in a hurry.

His ten-year-old Land Rover was parked by the side of the apartment, and he got into it and drove off with all the windows rolled down and a Waylon Jennings CD belting out cowboy songs.

The old Land Rover was undependable in the radiator department, but Bobby rode the machine the way he would a skittish mare. He watched the gauges and he carried a plastic can of antifreeze in the front seat. So far, he had made it to work every day. It was five 5:45 when he arrived at the gate of the base and stuck his card into the slot before driving through. At 5:55 he was sliding into his console beside an officer who had been there all night.

“What’s happening?” he asked.

“We flattened a house full of people,” the man said. “At least two hundred insurgents got away and we’re looking for them. I’m glad you’re here. I’m leaving as soon as your copilot comes. I left all the data in the file.” The man stood up, stretched his legs, and went to stand at the door to the console cluster. Bobby’s copilot came in and took his place. They went to work guiding a very small drone over a six-mile square of desert in the dark.

In Baghdad a man whose family was being held hostage in a small village walked into a checkpoint and blew himself up,
killing two American soldiers and wounding thirty-four Iraqi policemen.

In Tikrit the third cousin of one of the men Bobby had shot from the unmanned helicopter set to work threading a long, thin hose filled with plastic explosives into a tunnel leading to a group of abandoned houses near the highway that runs from the police headquarters into the town. He had been at his job for three days. It would take him three more. Then he would be transported to the Baghdad area, where he would begin work on the airport highway there. He was thirty-six years old and had been born in Saudi Arabia but had lived in Syria most of his life. Twenty-six of his male relatives had died fighting for various groups who opposed the governments of three countries. It was a way of life for his family. It was their business. At thirty-six he was one of the oldest living men in his family, but he never thought about such things. He would have had a hard time saying with assurance the year in which he was born, and he had long since forgotten the day. What he loved to do, and was good at, was figuring out ways to introduce plastic explosives into places where they could be set off so as to kill the largest number of people at the most unexpected moments. Every time the enemy figured out one of his devices, he went to work to invent another one. He had no money and no women, and he wanted none. He had his work and he loved to do it and he did it. He had not heard about his cousin’s death in Tikrit and would not have mourned if he had known.

I
N
A
USTIN
, T
EXAS
, the Lady Commodores tennis team from Vanderbilt University had the Lady Longhorns from the University of Texas tied 6–6 in singles and were battling it out in doubles. A young woman from Memphis whom Tallulah Hand had recruited the year before was leading the charge. She had won two of the singles matches and was about to win her second doubles match. She was on fire. She had come into her own. A dressing-down Tallulah had given her on the airplane ride to Austin had sunk in, grown tentacles, and taken over her psyche. She was playing the doubles match with blisters on her feet and a shoulder problem that would keep her from serving a tennis ball for six months after the match, but she was playing through the pain. She was in love with Tallulah for inspiring her to these heights. It was the first time since she had been at Vanderbilt that she was happy. In fact, she was more than happy. She was ecstatic. Every now and then she would glance up into the Lady Commodores box and see Tallulah watching her, and she would tighten her grip on her racket and serve another perfectly placed ace or race to the net to smash a return at the feet of her opponent.

When the score was 5–1 in the second set, Tallulah took out her cell phone and called Olivia. “My girls are playing tennis,” she said. “We’re about to beat Texas for the first time in three years. This will get me a raise, if not the crown I deserve. So I can’t come to see you. You doing all right?”

“Hooray,” Olivia answered. “Yeah, I’m fine. I called some people to clean the house because I thought you were coming,
and I got rid of my aunt for a few days, so you helped me whether you show up or not. Of course, Dad’s still here, but he’s staying at a hotel.”

“I got to hang up. Sorry. Love you. See you soon, I hope.”

Tallulah hung up the telephone and started concentrating on watching the faces of her old coaches as they watched her team defeat their team. Today I like my job, Tallulah decided. Tomorrow I might hate it. Who gives a damn in a finite world. Next semester I’ll take geology or astrophysics. It’s nice at Vanderbilt. I think I’ll stay.

M
ore than 620 people, including 58 U.S. troops, have been killed since April 28, when insurgents launched a bloody campaign
. . . .

During the same period, there have been at least 89 car bombs killing at least 355 people, according to the AP count.—Paul Garwood, Associated Press, May 25, 2005

A
T THE END OF
M
AY
, four thousand Iraqi troops mounted an offensive against the foreign fighters who had been blowing up people and infrastructure for the past ten months with little to stop them.

In the battles, five different kinds of unmanned aircraft assisted in the destruction of insurgent strongholds.

“We have to train their soldiers to call in the drones,” Bobby’s superior officer told him. “I’m sending four people from here to help train them. You’re one of them. You’ll be second in command of the group.”

“When do we leave, sir?” Bobby answered.

“Next week. Maybe Wednesday, if we can get transport. We’ll have meetings and briefings every day until then. I’m going with you for a few days; then I’ll come back. You may be over for a year.”

“Y
OU SOUND FUNNY
,” Olivia said when she talked to him that night on the telephone. “What’s going on?”

“Something I can’t talk about.”

“You’re going there,” she said.

“I wish you could come out here, baby,” he answered. “But you can’t. So is your dad still there?”

“Yeah. But he’s staying at a hotel. It makes him nervous to stay around here long. He doesn’t have anything to do.”

“Don’t start worrying,” Bobby said. “I’ll call you as soon as I know what I can say.”

“I’ll figure it out by then. I bet you a hundred dollars I can figure it out before you call.”

“I wouldn’t want to bet money against you. How about letting me name the baby if I win?”

“I wouldn’t win anything betting that. The mother always gets to say what the baby is named.”

“I want him to have a Cherokee name and a regular name like Max or Sam or Will or maybe Daniel after your dad.”

“Okay, then bet me.”

“Okay, I will.”