A Dangerous Age (14 page)

“Okay. That’s okay.”

C
ALLIE LOOKED DOWN
at her nails. The stuff was wearing off. She pulled open her desk drawer and took out the bottle and angrily painted all the nails again. Then she sat down at her desk and started going through the e-mails.

A
T FOUR THAT AFTERNOON
, Olivia got back to her office and went to work. She had a meeting with her editorial staff and arranged more meetings for the morning. Then she went to work on an editorial for the morning’s paper. It wasn’t everything she wanted to say or thought needed saying, but it was a beginning.
A CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM
was the headline, although
KNOWING I DON’T KNOW WHAT WE SHOULD DO NEXT
would have been even more honest.

“And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

And clash and clash and clash and have clashed and will clash.

I am a pregnant woman whose husband has been called up to active duty but has not yet been sent into the war, where three days ago six men of Cherokee Company of the United States Marine Corps were killed in action, leaving broken hearts and grieving families all over our part of the United States of America.

“And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his
Hath turn’d his [tennis] balls to gun-stones, and his soul

Shall stand sore charged for the wasteful vengeance
That shall fly with them; for many a thousand widows

Shall this his mock mock out of their dear husbands;
Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down;
And some are yet ungotten and unborn
That shall have cause to curse the Dauphin’s scorn.
But this lies all within the will of God,
To whom I do appeal, and in whose name
Tell you the Dauphin I am coming on
To venge me as I may, and to put forth
My rightful hand in a well-hallow’d cause.
So get you hence in peace; and tell the Dauphin
His jest will savor but of shallow wit,
When thousands weep more than did laugh at it.—
Convey them with safe conduct.—Fare you well.”
—William Shakespeare

“A wasteful vengeance,” is that what we are doing here? I do not think so. I believe we were attacked and are now mounting a long and costly counterattack that will not end for many years, maybe for my lifetime.

I am proud that my husband has gone to serve his country. I grieve for the families of the fallen. I pray to God that we find ways to protect ourselves that do not require the lives and limbs of our sons and daughters.

Here at the
Tulsa World
we are opening our letters columns to all of you. I don’t believe our readers are sitting quietly out there, speechless and undetermined, or worse, uncaring. I think you are as confused as I am by all of this. Talking about it and writing about it and sharing our opinions will help us to think clearly.

We will print letters with the names withheld if you do not want to sign your letters.

Tell us what you think.

Also, we are going to devote one column every day
to detailed explanations of which troops are in Iraq and Afghanistan, what weapons they are using, where the weapons are being manufactured, within the limits of national security, and we are going to conduct several public hearings about the war.

We are at war. The deaths this week have brought this home to us. Pray for the families of the lost, and for all of us everywhere.

When she had finished the editorial, she stood up and patted her stomach. The ungotten and unborn, she decided. The future.

She walked out of her office and down a hall to the office of her old friend Big Jim Walters and handed him the editorial. “I’m going outside to walk a few blocks and then I’ll be back. I won’t be gone long. Can you read it now?”

“Don’t go out on the street by yourself this time of day. Take someone with you.”

“I need to think. Sam will be back with the stories about the families soon. I want to go over all that before I leave tonight. I don’t think we can get it ready for tomorrow. Let’s do it the day after.”

“Fine with me. Well, let me read.”

Olivia left the building and stepped out onto the wide sidewalks that surrounded the building. She breathed in a long, deep breath of city air and began to walk. I need to think about this baby. I need to take better care of myself and I will, starting now. I’ll get to bed by ten or eleven. I’m fine. Nothing’s wrong.
I’m strong as a horse except I worry all the time. Oh, God, I forgot: Bobby might call back.

She checked to make sure her cell phone was in the side pocket of her beige Banana Republic carpenter pants, which still fit if she left the waistband undone. Then she started walking fast, trying to remember to breathe like a yogi. The real world is tough as nails, she decided. Tough as hell, tough the way nature is tough, relentless, coming at you below the knees just when you think you’re safe. You’re never safe. But at least I mostly think I’m safe. I have a gift for thinking things will turn out okay, only that’s not enough anymore. I’ve got to start thinking like a warrior. We aren’t safe, but we can fight for our children and for one another; we can protect our tribe, whatever we perceive that to be. And I don’t get to quit the newspaper or quit a damn thing. Hell, maybe I ought to get Mary Lily to come live with me for a while, although she’d go crazy locked up in a house in Tulsa.

She had gone three blocks, circumnavigating the one on which the newspaper building sat, when the phone rang. She leaned against a wall and took the call.

“What can we do?” Bobby said. “They’re gone, and if I’d been there I’d be dead too. It was a convoy with all hands. I’d have been with them.”

“How does that make you feel?”

“Like I don’t know what to feel. I’m glad I’m not there, and I’m glad I’m not dead, and I don’t feel like I want to kill everyone over there to get revenge. I thought I would feel that way,
but I don’t. What I’m doing is very precise, Olivia. Precise information, precise attacks—that’s what I like about it. You wouldn’t believe how sensitive these drones are, even the big ones, but I’m only working on a small one that belongs to the marines. They said I’m going to get to learn to fly the Predators too before I leave. It’s so precise. It’s like an operation. Everyone who’s here—the teachers, the older pilots—is very businesslike. It’s a long way from what our ancestors thought of as war.”

“Is that good?”

“The end result is still blown-up buildings and dead people. But fewer dead innocents, I guess. I hope and pray.”

“Okay. When are they going to let me see you?”

“Maybe in six weeks. They won’t say. Everything is a secret. Where are you?”

“Walking around the block. It’s nice here. Beautiful low clouds, a great sunset; the storms last week cleaned up the place, so the pollen isn’t bad. Lots of fat people. People starting to say bad things about the pope after two weeks of sucking up. It’s Oklahoma in the spring. What can I say?”

“How’s my son? Is he moving around yet?”

“No, but he’s in there. I’m going home soon. I’m going to bed early. We went to see the families of the men from Tulsa. It was bad.”

“You want to tell me about it?”

“No. I have to get back to the office. I love you, Bobby. I’ll call you later if I can.”

“You can’t, but I’ll try to call you. Over and out.”

“Hanging up.”

Olivia finished the block she was on, then speeded up and walked back to the entrance to the building and went inside. She took the elevator to her floor and went into her office, where she got to work putting out the newspaper.

Jim handed the editorial back to her with three changes. “We don’t print anonymous letters,” he said.

“I know it,” she answered. “I was just floating that.”

“We can’t do it.”

“I know it. I got carried away.”

L
ITTLE
S
UN HAD
gone to the earth island to think and smoke. Crow knew he still smoked and sometimes even let him do it in the house, but he didn’t like to do it around her because it made him feel bad.

He sat down cross-legged on his blanket and lit his pipe and inhaled deeply; then he watched the sun go down. He knew about the deaths in Iraq. He knew how bad it would make Bobby feel. He put it out of his mind and thought about good things that were happening. His son Roper was going to be a grandfather again. His son Creek had bought another piece of land on the river and was planning on building a house there. His daughter Xanthe was going to marry the man she had been living with for seven months. She was forty-six years old and wanted to have a baby. If she was crazy enough to have a baby when she was old enough to be its grandmother, it was okay
with Little Sun. He had been watching the world for seventy-five years. Nothing surprised him anymore and nothing bothered him as much as it used to.

T
UESDAY
, A
PRIL
12, 2005. Dawn came with the sound of mockingbirds in the oak trees above Olivia’s bedroom windows. A nest of baby birds were learning to fly in the high branches. The racket they made had begun to wake her every morning at five thirty. Above the trees a brightening sky stood out against the new leaves, and everything in the world was charged with life and procreative power and hunger and flight.

The world is full of hunger, Olivia thought. And I am part of all the world, of trees and plants and birds and song and flight and hunger and the hunt, of war and the surcease of war.

U.S. COMMANDERS SEE A REDUCTION OF TROOPS IN IRAQ
, was the headline for the morning’s paper. Olivia had heard the carrier land a paper on her front doorstep about the time the birds had woken her.

I cannot leave the newspaper, she decided. I am in a place to influence more people in more ways than any job I could do in Washington. I can go to Nevada and write a story without having to get permission from some general at the Pentagon. The same people will decide what’s classified one way or the other.

Oh, God, could you please let me wake one morning thinking of something but the goddamn war. I think we had to fight this war, and if I’m wrong, at least I have skin in the game.

I am thirty-six years old, almost thirty-seven, and I am pregnant. Think of that, for Christ’s sake. Half the people my age can’t have a baby because they waited too long and took too many birth control pills and fucked up their eggs with all the shit we have pumped into the water and food and earth and air in order to make a more perfect union and a place to live forever with arthritis. That’s good, Olivia, she told herself, now you’re cooking, now you’re thinking like a journalist. Always look for the darkest cloud, find someone to blame, something to mindfuck about.

She got out of bed, took some vitamins, ate breakfast, threw on some clothes, got into the Nissan, and drove down to the paper. She parked in her parking space, locked the car, went into the building, and got to work.

It’s my personality, she decided. To hell with it. I can’t get a brain transplant.

T
HERE WAS AN
e-mail from Bobby.

“Today I am going to learn to launch small missiles from a plane the size of your granddaddy’s living room. Tomorrow I learn to launch them from one the size of our house. In the late afternoons I’ve volunteered to teach riding to kids at the base. They have some killer horses in this part of the country, but they aren’t very well trained. It’s good to see horses again. I was out there yesterday from four until seven and the kids are great. I might start wanting to give our son a real Indian name, Sequoyah maybe. What do you think?”

Dear Bobby,

I think I’m the luckiest woman in the world to have you. Get the war over and get your ass on home and into my bed. I dreamed about fucking you all night. It was so weird because our kid was sleeping in a bed in the same room and the only time we could fuck was when he was taking a bath, but when he finally got in the tub, you fell asleep and then some of my aunts came into the room and sat on the bed and started talking. Then I realized I had on this leather strap that covered up my pussy and I had to take it off under the covers so they wouldn’t see what we were doing, and in the end I woke up and we still hadn’t fucked each other.

What do you think this dream means?

Love,

Olivia

Dear Olivia,

I hope your computer is more secure than the one we have here.

Love,

Bobby

At eight o’clock that night, Little Sun called Olivia on the telephone. “Mary Lily wants to come stay with you for a while,” he said. “She wants to visit the museums there and see if they will lend things to our museum for the powwow next fall.”

“No, she doesn’t. She’s a mind reader and she knows I was thinking about her yesterday and thinking I could get her to come stay with me and calm me down.”

“We will be there tomorrow afternoon at five o’clock. Your grandmother and I will drive her there.”

“You can’t drive at night. Does that mean you will spend the night away from home?”

“If we do not drive her, Kayo’s nephew might bring her in his truck. He may deliver a horse to a man there. I said, ‘We have to call Olivia before you leave for her house.’”

“Tell her I want her here very much. Send me some of grandmother’s Wagoner stew if she has any made.”

“I will tell her. I think you will be strong in these adversities, Granddaughter.”

“I’ll be strong and smart, Granddaddy. Smart makes me strong.”

“Chaz’s wife, Rose Little Thunder, will have a baby a month after you have one. We are rich with children now.”

“I’m happy for that. Thank you for calling me with all this good news.”

“Hang up now and go to bed.”

“I will.”

O
LIVIA WANDERED INTO
her bedroom and put on her old flannel pajamas and got into her bed and sat propped up against the headboard, writing on a yellow legal pad, putting together a plan.

Stop worrying, she wrote. Breathe deep yogi breaths for five minutes, morning and night. Take yoga for expectant mothers if I can find time. Get room ready for Mary Lily. Ask Jim if I can do a piece on Nellis Air Force Base. Keep all appointments at the doctor no matter what happens. Be a good person. Think about my fellow men and fellow women. Expand my universe of sympathy if possible. Don’t be a perfectionist. Wear light colors to cheer people up. Don’t let Mary Lily stay too long—it will make her sick and drive me crazy.