He smiled and said, “It was pretty cool to fly halfway across the world and get paid to fly drones. It made me feel like everything was going to turn out fine after all. The drones in some ways were like the Predators I used to fly, but that’s just the way it is. Everyone is stealing from us. Everyone wants a drone program. Anyway, that’s what happened last night. That’s where that text came from, but I’m not suicidal. No bullshit, Grale. I don’t have those thoughts anymore. Hey, you must be on your way to the party. Sorry about the text, and I owe you for stopping by. Have fun tonight.”
That was my cue to leave for my sister and brother-in-law’s Fourth of July party. I was ready to kick back and have a cold beer and hang with my sister, Melissa, and brother-in-law, Jim, but I wasn’t leaving yet. Black plastic was taped over the windows of Beatty’s trailer. A militaresque BLDG J was stenciled in red paint to the right of the front door. The plastic could be about blocking sunlight. The BLDG J was troubling. Beatty saw me looking at it.
“I’ll clean it off today,” he said. “I was drunk.”
“What’s it about?”
“Honestly, I don’t even fucking remember.”
Jim and Melissa were my connection to Beatty. Jim is an air force drone pilot stationed at Creech and an old friend of mine. He married my sister twenty years ago and went from a B-52 squadron in Idaho to the drone flight trailers at Creech. Melissa, Jim, and their two kids, Nate and Julia, are all I have left for family. We’re close. Melissa and I laugh a lot. We try to get together once a week, and every year Melissa and Jim throw a Fourth of July party for Creech drone pilots and friends. That list of friends includes Jeremy Beatty. Always will, Jim says. It was Jim who’d asked me to help Beatty when he was spiraling down after his discharge. Jim knew how I’d fought my way back to active duty at the FBI.
“Hey, I might have gone to the party tonight,” Beatty said. “But I can’t, because I’ve got a new job starting tomorrow. I’m moving out to the airfield tonight. I’d just finished packing when you knocked.”
“Good about the job. Where is it?”
“In bumfuck nowhere, dude. Way out in the desert, north of Indian Wells and off to the west on Bureau of Land Management land leased from the government. I’ll text you directions. The company that hired us does mining-assay work and is switching over to drones. They put an airfield out there and some trailers. I’ll be teaching drone pilots, probably guys good at Xbox who’ve never flown a plane. If it goes well, it could become a long-term thing. I’m hoping for that.”
He drifted back toward his door and again waited for me to say good-bye. Instead, I asked, “Got anything cold to drink inside?”
“I drank all the beer last night, so no, unless you count Diet Coke.”
“Coke is fine.”
“Naw, dude, take off, go have fun.”
“I’m here. I haven’t seen you in a while. Let’s talk some more.”
“Okay, come on in, but don’t go all FBI on me.”
“Meaning what?”
“I did some remodeling.”
I followed him into the shadowed cool and looked around at the gutted interior of the trailer. I didn’t get it. The trailer was leased. It would cost some serious money to restore.
“I was trying to get the feel of a Creech flight trailer. I want to be in that space in my head as I teach.”
“You ripped out your kitchen and half of everything else to make a flight trailer?”
He didn’t answer, and I let it be. Whatever it cost him in repairs was his problem. I looked at a small drone in the corner. Quadrocopter. Like the thing the Florida mailman landed on the White House lawn.
“What do you do with that drone?”
“Lately I’m taking videos. I’m under surveillance. They’ve got four people on me, maybe more. I thought it was the CIA watching me before the OSI officers showed up last night.”
“The CIA here in Wunderland Trailer Park?”
“I know it sounds batshit crazy.”
It did.
“It’s about a drone strike we made before they booted me out. Talk to Jim, he’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.” He looked over. “Our orders were to never talk about it.”
His face fell as he said that. It was emotional for him and discouraging for me. I felt a weary sadness that after all his struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder and getting a new career and life going again, Beatty imagined the CIA watching him. The intensity and focus in his face conjured memories of him after his fiancée, Laura, finally gave up. At that time, he wasn’t getting any help from the VA either. His first Veterans Administration appointment had still been nine months away when his fellow pilots stepped in. But by then he was down to where he was questioning even his close friends. He was restless, angry, and drinking hard, his thoughts twisted by paranoia. No, it was worse than that. He’d lost interest in the future. He didn’t care anymore.
That’s when Jim had approached me and said, “He might listen to you, Paul. His friends are burned out on his relapses.”