This Given Sky Read Online Free Page A

wrong? What’s going on?”
    “I . . . I moved in with Steve. Together. We’re together now.”
    Why couldn’t it be silent on his end of the phone? she thought. Why couldn’t I hear him breathe instead of background roar of planes?
    “Like a woman,” Jake finally said. “A . . . a man and a woman.”
    “Like that.”
    The noise of war came through her phone live , not TV.
    Until he said: “You’re the luckiest people in the world.”
    She closed her eyes.
    “Makes sense,” she heard Jake say. “Seems so right and . . . logical.”
    “Logical.” Call it a laugh, then she said: “I guess so.”
    “What I mean is . . . congratulations.”
    Her eyes opened. Saw nothing. “Thanks.”
    “Look, tell my folks not to worry. Tell Steve . . . tell him great.”
    “We love you,” said Thel.
    “Gotta go.”
    Her connection went dead.
    She listened to the buzz. Hung up the phone.
    TV colors shimmered in her glass wall.
    Thel grabbed her coat, stalked out of the building, got in her car and roared north on the interstate. Found herself exiting to Shelby International Airport with its aluminum hangars, green blockhouse, a lone blacktop runway vacant beneath empty sky. Thel stopped the car on the airport’s gravel road. Stared at where she’d once ridden with Jake.
    And left him.
    Winter wind rocked her old car under a gray steel sky. Patches of snow dotted the prairie. Miles off to her left, she saw houses dotting the west side of Shelby, houses on Knob Hill but not the one she’d signed her name to lease. The heater scent faded from the car, let her smell frozen dust, the cold plastic of her steering wheel. She stared at the lonely plateau airport, watched the windsock flapping like some lunatic finger.
    Driving back took a fifteen-minute forever, past the street leading to the giant pink high school built two years before JFK was assassinated when the town wise men absolutely knew that Shelby was destined to become a major city. She took the long route through town, crossed over the bumpy railroad tracks, drove down Main Street like she had with Steve and Jake before there’d been now-gone stores and whitewashed windows, then she was on the sunset side of town, parking outside the co-op, walking inside, hanging up her coat, sitting behind her desk.
    Her boss knocked on her door, came in: “Hi, where you been?”
    “Getting here,” said Thel.
    As he walked out, she said: “Would you leave my door open?”
    Went back to work.
    Gave it the smile she had.
    Jake hung up the phone at the Saudi Arabian airfield America and its allies had taken over after Iraq invaded neighboring oil-rich Kuwait and upset the way the world worked. Roaring jets vibrated the walls of the air-conditioned call center. The Air Police sergeant in charge saw some kind of smile on the young pilot’s formerly anxious face, figured he’d been right to violate SOP, let the guy make a call before a mission.
    “Was the communications test successful, sir?” asked the sergeant.
    “Outstanding. Thanks.”
    They exchanged salutes and not one wink.
    Great , Jake told himself as he rode through the night heat on the shuttle bus to the runway where his A-10 Warthog fighter plane waited beside his mission commander’s matching machine. Great news .

    U.S. Air Force
    The Warthog is an ugly warbird good for nothing but raining missiles, bombs, and bullets down on enemy tanks or armored personnel carriers (APCs). As Jake walked from the bus to his bird, he realized that with its gray tube body and two rear engines that resembled giant aluminum cans, the Warthog looked like another science project he and Steve had helped Thel with sophomore—no—junior year. He couldn’t remember what they were supposed to be building by gluing two hollow cans to a broomstick.
    His crew chief eased him into the Warthog’s titanium bathtub cockpit. Jake scanned dials and gauges, weapons and radar screens, the joystick he’d steer with and its pickle button that