A Dangerous Age (13 page)

“Which I’ve done most of my adult life,” she said out loud as she pulled the sheets up on the bed and tossed the pillows against the headboard and headed out to run a newspaper, when there was no news to report except who had been invited to accompany the president to Rome to the funeral of the pope, and who had not been invited, and which women had perhaps chosen not to go because the pope represented everything women in the contemporary world were fighting to leave behind. “Family values,” Olivia muttered to herself as she drove into the parking lot behind the newspaper office. “Now I’m talking to myself. That’s nice. Maybe I ought to go see my old psychiatrist. I wonder what she’s up to lately.”

It was 7 a.m. when Olivia sat down at her desk and began to attack the papers in front of her. It was 11 a.m. before she started reading the e-mails. It was after lunch before she started sorting out the letters to the editor that had already been screened by one of her favorite junior editors, a recent graduate of Oklahoma State whom Olivia was grooming to be the living-section editor.

“Dear Editor,” one letter began. “What in the shit do those people in Washington think they’re doing? They don’t do a goddamn thing all day but think about how to get elected again. This Terri Schiavo thing is the last goddamn straw. I pay taxes to pay the salaries of these whores and I mean both Democrat and Republican. I’ve had it. The only government I like is
The
West Wing
and I’m not sure about what will happen when President Bartlet is gone. The ones coming up there are as bad as the ones we really have. April fool. Your cousin Tallulah, lost in Nashville in the rain. I have decided to become a writer like you. I’m starting out with letters to editors signed with pseudonyms. What do you think?”

“Dear Tallulah,” Olivia e-mailed her back. “Letters to editors are the perfect place for you to start. You’ll have to watch the hard language, however. What will your pseudonym be?”

“‘Lost in Nashville’ is a possibility,” Tallulah e-mailed back. “‘Tired of Whores’ is a contender. ‘Keeping My Eye on the Ball’ is another. I’m not finished deciding this yet. I only decided on my new career this morning. It was raining and the indoor courts are leaking.”

“It’s an imperfect world,” Olivia e-mailed her back. “Roofs leak and machines break. Love, Busy in Tulsa. Ten four.”

O
N
A
PRIL
8, 2005, at 9:45 a.m., Bobby Tree sat down at a simulated cockpit and dropped the first bomb on a village. At 9:57 he launched a rocket that described an arc that landed on a bunker, took aerial photographs of a ten-mile section of land to the north of Baghdad, and flew back to a landing strip in the desert near Syria.

When he stopped for lunch, he was drenched with sweat. “Goddamn,” he told a friend. “This is work.”

O
LIVIA WAS SITTING
in her office, eating rye crackers and soy cheese and vegetable chips. She was drinking ginger tea from a Yoga Studio cup so old it had begun to look like raku pottery. She studied the lines on the cup, the beautiful cracks that led everywhere and nowhere, and she thought about the years she had spent doing yoga with the woman who had given her the cup, who had died seven months ago from an aggressive lung cancer that had attacked and spread thirteen years after she quit smoking. Yin and yang, Olivia decided. And what in the hell am I doing this far away from Bobby when the United States of America is at war and all my writing and yelling couldn’t get 1 percent more citizens of the state of Oklahoma to cast a vote in a presidential election. There are bigger fish to fry than selling advertising for Jim’s newspaper.

Olivia was in a slump because the publishers had refused to print an editorial about the war, saying the editorial was too biased in favor of the administration.

I quit, Olivia decided. I used to like this job. Now I hate it. I don’t know why I ever took this job, and I don’t like to sit behind this desk on the first really beautiful sunny spring day in a week. It’s unhealthy for my baby to breathe this air. I need to get out where the air is better than this. I want to go to Tahlequah and see Granddaddy and Grandmother.

She picked up some notes on a yellow legal pad and studied them. Then she began to type on the old-fashioned typewriter she kept on a stand in her office. It had belonged to her aunt Anna. It was the last typewriter Anna had used before she died.
It was the typewriter Anna used to write
Prime Numbers
and
Binding Energy
.

The Tulsa World
315 South Boulder Avenue
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Office of the Editor in Chief

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am the editor of the
Tulsa World
and I have been a supporter of President Bush since 2001. My editorials for the last three years will attest to that support.

My husband is a staff sergeant in the marine reserves. He is Bobby Tree, a member of Twenty-fifth Marines, Fourth Marine Division, Oklahoma.

His company was called to active duty in December 2004, and he reported for duty to Camp Pendleton on January 30, 2005.

He has been assigned to duty in a pilot training program at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, effective April 5, 2005.

My résumé is enclosed. I would like to volunteer for duty in any post near Nellis Air Force Base for the duration of the campaign in Iraq. I speak French and Spanish well, if not fluently, and am a quick study in languages. My real skills, however, would be as a publicist or lobbyist for the Predator and other drone aircraft systems.

I understand engineering concepts and mechanical devises and can explain such things in clear, cogent English.

I would be willing to take a prolonged leave of absence from my job as editor of this newspaper to be available for whatever work you could find for me. I would be glad to go to Washington, D.C., to do lobbying there, or to fly anywhere to talk to senators or representatives or groups of concerned or interested citizens.

I am three months pregnant, but my aunt, a full blooded Cherokee Indian, who speaks six Indian dialects, including Navajo, and whose résumé I also include, will come to live with me as long as my husband is on active duty. She will help me care for my child, should I be fortunate enough to get to work for you.

My main aim, of course, is to live nearer to my husband during this time in our lives, but I am also committed to helping the cause that he serves and in which we both believe.

Yours most sincerely,

Olivia de Havilland Hand Tree

I should have used the computer, Olivia decided as she got up from the desk and began to search around for a box of envelopes.

“Callie,” she called to her secretary, “I need you.”

“What?” The girl stood in the door grinning. “I heard you in here typing. What do you need? A stamp?”

“Copy this on the computer and send it to the Pentagon in Washington, would you?”

“Sure thing, boss.” The girl took the letter and read it. “You can’t mean this?”

“I’ve already told Jim I’m doing it. Send a copy to my husband, while you’re at it. Well, I have to get to work.”

Olivia left the typewriter and began pulling up her e-mails. There were forty messages. She read and answered a few, then switched to a program that had ticker tape news from Iraq. “Thirteen men killed, many wounded, in attack on training base for Iraqi police. Six Americans among the dead. All members of Cherokee Company.”

She knew about the deaths hours before Bobby knew. He was at a console, practicing liftoffs for a fourteen-foot reconnaissance drone called the Pioneer. He had lifted off the imaginary plane nineteen times and reread the manual twice, then gotten up and decided to walk up and down the hallway outside the console cluster to stretch his legs. Most of the pilots exercised in the early morning and again at night. The most ambitious ones also did stretches and fast walks or quick runs during their breaks.

He walked out into the hall and read the streaming news banner that ran 24-7 across the far hall doorways. There it was, the fate he had escaped by being in Nevada. He was crying when he came back to the console, tears of guilt and rage. This
is war, he kept thinking. What in the hell did I think I was doing? How old am I? Who were they? There’s no way I’ll have names until late tonight. I can’t call the battalion. I have to sit here at this desk and play with this toy airplane and that’s that. That’s what’s going on. Olivia knows by now. She might know who it is.

“I need to make a telephone call,” he told the captain in charge of the console cluster. “Six members of my company were killed in Iraq this morning. I need to know who they are, sir. May I make the call, sir?”

“Let me help you, Sergeant. Come in my office.” The tall captain led the way into an office and closed the door.

“Let’s turn on my computer,” he said. “Sit down. That’s tough, soldier. That’s tough.”

I
T WAS ONE
of the twins from Tennessee. It was a close friend of Bobby’s named Trent and an older man named John Little and two men from Tulsa and two from Tahlequah.

“I’m married to the newspaper editor in Tulsa, Oklahoma,” Bobby said. “Sir, may I call and find out what she knows?”

“Go ahead. Then go back to work, Sergeant.”

“Thank you, sir. I will, sir. I won’t talk long.”

“S
HE ISN’T HERE
,” Olivia’s secretary told him. “You can try her cell, but I think she left it here. Yeah, it’s on the desk. She went out with a reporter to talk to the parents of the men from Tulsa. She ought to be back soon. Can she call you?”

“I don’t think so. Tell her I know. I’ll talk to her tonight. Tell her I’m okay. It’s war, Callie. I had forgotten this was a war.”

“We all had,” Callie said. “Only now I won’t. The town will be in mourning. The town cares. Tulsa cares.”

“I have to go to work.”

“Do a good job. I’ll find her and let her know.”

Callie Mayfield looked down at her fingernails. It had been three weeks since she had last bitten them, and they were beginning to look normal. She started to raise her right hand to her mouth; then she stuck it behind her and marched to her desk and got out the bottle of thick black liquid and painted it all over both sets of fingernails. I hate being a baby biting my nails, she thought, when all I have to do all day is get up and get dressed and come in here and work for the best boss I ever had. If she leaves, I’m going with her. I’m going wherever she goes. Maybe I’ll enlist. I could fly those planes too. I used to be real good at video games, real, real good. I used to beat my brothers; well, not often, but sometimes I did.

O
LIVIA WAS SITTING
on the sofa in a small, clean room, holding the hand of a mother who had just learned her twenty-nine-year-old only son had died and was not coming back to Tulsa, Oklahoma, ever. He had never married and had no children. There would be no one to fix things for her when they were broken, no one to call her on Mother’s Day or love her when she was old or be there in the world or hold her hand when she died. Gone. Gone forever, never, never, never to return.

“Your sister’s on her way from Broken Arrow,” Olivia was saying. “She’ll be here soon.”

“Okay,” the woman said. “Thank you for finding her. Okay. Thank you for coming here.”

The reporter who had accompanied Olivia walked across the room from where he had been interviewing a neighbor who had come to help. “Your husband called from Nevada,” he told Olivia. “He said he knew about it. Callie said you can’t call back.”

The woman tightened her grip on Olivia’s hand. She was breathing so slowly that Olivia wasn’t sure she was breathing at all. “Get a doctor over here,” Olivia said to the reporter. “Call Roger Montrose and ask him if he can come by after work. He’s Cherokee. He’ll come.”

“Okay,” the reporter said.

“Okay,” the woman on the sofa said, and loosened her grip on Olivia’s hand a small bit. She seemed to actually take a breath of air.

“Open the front door,” Olivia said. “Get some air in here.”

It was several more hours before Olivia and the reporter got to the second house. This one was better. There was a large family and they were gathering. There was food, a long table laden with things the neighbors had brought to eat: sliced turkey and ham, rice casserole, a platter of broiled peppers and asparagus and kale, potato salad with scallions and homemade mayonnaise. When she saw the table, Olivia realized she hadn’t eaten in hours. She fixed herself a plate of food and sat on a
chair at a card table and ate the food slowly and carefully, with thankfulness for the kindness that had brought it there. She was joined at the table by a middle-aged couple, and she talked to them without interviewing them or thinking of using anything they told her in an editorial or a story.

The reporter who had accompanied her came and stood by the table and asked Olivia if there was anything she needed. She borrowed his telephone and called her office and talked to her secretary. “What did he say?”

“That he’d try to call you tonight. He said it is a war. That he’d just realized this was a war.”

“Stay until I get back. You’re going to have to stay late tonight.”