A Private Little War (57 page)

When all was said and done, the planes would all be pulled in, the blackout curtains hung. No lights would be lit but under cover, no fires, for even the smoke, in this terrible, wasting moment, might’ve been enough—the giveaway that would bring down the bombs, the shells. If the clocks could’ve been stopped, they would’ve stopped them. Every whisper came muffled. There was the thought that not even breath could come to any good.

In the night, there was a terror of artillery. Of cannon arranging themselves in the darkness, the green oculi of off-world range-finders registering their precise positions by the glow of cigarette ends or some fingernail sliver of light revealed in the gap of a curtain.

This was ridiculous, of course. Range finders, spotting scopes, night vision apparatus—it could all see just as well in perfect darkness as anyone could in the day and needed no special clues. No giveaways. But the fear of showing light was primal. It was the animal’s fear of giving itself away to the unseen predator. And anyway, it was thought that concealment certainly couldn’t hurt, so some men had run around, extinguishing all the lights and wetting all the fires and hanging the heavy curtains. Doing something felt better than doing nothing, and in the sudden fear of the dark was something preternatural that none of them had felt for a long time.

In the night there was also the fear of gas—completely unfounded, as it turned out. In the rich, full dark, Carter would be woken briefly
by the sound of someone running through the camp shouting it: “Gas! Gas! Gas!” And then this other sound, unmistakable, of a body hitting a body with force, the solid, dull smack and grunt of a well-executed tackle, then quiet.

Carter would turn to Vic at that moment as though to make some small joke or reassuring touch. He would never remember whether she’d been there or not.

This was the night after the day. The sun would set as though it’d been taken to pieces and stowed, and the Flyboy camp was a well of darkness in a place where, come the night, darkness still ruled.

VIC WAS THE ONE WHO’D HELPED POOR RAOUL OFF THE FLIGHT LINE
when the flames had whipped him and lashed at the delicate skin of his face. She’d been the one who’d put him out—who’d hit him with her shoulder at a dead sprint to knock him down when he went off like a chicken, flapping his burning arm and doing nothing but spreading the fire, then smothered the flames first with her jacket and then an engine blanket when one was handed to her. She’d been the one who, once the flames were gone, had dragged Raoul to his feet and walked him blindly to the mess tent before the shock set in, because she knew that, once it did, she wouldn’t have the strength to carry him to the place he’d probably die.

Vic was the one who’d hosed out Billy’s fighter. Who’d scraped pieces of George Stork off the throttle handle and seat and flight electronics—wondering at the power of the bullets that’d caught him to be able to spread the bits of him so far and so wide. When they’d all started counting bullet holes in the longhouse, Vic had been there. She’d been the one with the idea to turn it into a drinking game, and then had left, headed back toward the tent line under cover of perfect darkness, had the misfortune of crossing paths with Fenn, then found Carter limping
around outside in the cold like some sick, broken thing; cursing at mud puddles and damning tent stakes.

“What are you doing, Kevin?” she asked.

He answered without looking at her, his words soft and slurred. “Cat,” he said. “Looking for Cat. I think it ran away and I can’t find the poor thing.”

“Cat?”

“I promised the stupid thing we could go home, but now I can’t find it.”

There was, she knew, this fallacy of men at war as being these hard, cold, impenetrable animals, unwilling or unable to feel or to give voice to the agonies that come of making a life of ending lives. And she knew it was untrue. Killing and death didn’t make them hard or coarse. They were that way when they arrived—each of them, to a greater or lesser degree. What killing did was turn them into boys again: mindless, cruel, joyous, and insane. They were creatures now without compasses. Without wisdom. Each life they took extracted something from them—a draw of minutes or years which, in the end, offered them a perpetual, terrible youth of pain and confusion that all of them were too exhausted to bother hiding anymore.

Vic hadn’t heard Lefty Berthold die. She’d been spared that peculiar window onto death. She’d seen the fireball of him going down. The brief, bright comet of his passing. But that was distant. She’d loaded planes with death, but that was remote, too.

She’d walked Raoul to the mess tent, though. Had half carried him as he shuffled and swore and began to shake; had borne his weight until her leathers smelled of his meat and blood and bits of his flaking, wet, charred skin clung to her hands and her face. That was close. Intimate. She’d held dying close to her. She’d carried it. And when, after setting Raoul down on a bench and backing away from him, she’d absently dragged the back of her hand across her mouth and tasted the salty, smoky, oily wounds of the fire and flesh on her lips? Well, that was close, too. She’d walked purposefully back to the longhouse. She’d vomited in the short grass. With a hand pump and water, she’d sluiced the worst of Raoul off herself. And then she’d gone back to work—patching planes,
throwing herself at wounded machines to stop their leaks and mend their tears and get them up and fighting once more.

Now, later, she could still smell Raoul on her. In the darkness, she seemed to move in a cloud of it. And when she came close to Carter, she found that he, too, stank of fuel and oil and cordite and sweat and smoke and fear, so she took him by the hand and led him down to the shower tent. She turned on the blast heaters that she’d designed and built out of spare parts, and helped Carter out of his clothes while the water warmed. When there was enough heat, she stripped off her own gear and pulled Carter to her under the dribbling water, letting it run down over them and wash away the day, the bloody, awful day.

Carter did not speak much. He seemed not entirely sure where he was. When Vic reached up to rub a bar of soap into the tangles of his hair, he tilted his head up into the falling water and let it run in rivers across his face. When she bent, then kneeled, to wash his feet, he at first shuffled away, grunting from somewhere in the back of his throat.

“Shut up,” she said. “Let me.” And he acquiesced, standing still as stone and staring out at nothing as though embarassed by the intimacy of it, which was ridiculous. The boy had learned nothing, Vic thought. There was no kindness, no acceptance in him. Until she looked up and saw that he was crying.

Vic dried Carter. She dried herself. She helped him to dress and, by the hand, led him back to his tent. Together, they lay in his bed, fully dressed, clinging to each other like survivors to wreckage bobbing in a dark sea. Carter lost his mind for a time, then found it again, then lost it. The fear and the sadness seemed to come over him in waves. The rage. He cursed Lefty and he cursed the company and he cursed Iaxo over and over and over again. He lay, curled up, and held on to her legs, crashing his head into her in frustration until it started to hurt and she’d driven hard, knuckled punches into his neck and back that he seemed not to feel at all. He grew calm and she stroked his head. He talked like she wasn’t there, and she listened in silence.

Eventually, Carter faded into sleep. Vic wormed her way free of him. She covered him with a blanket and walked away. Outside the door, she saw Cat sitting, watching her from the dark with its big eyes.

“He was looking for you,” she said to the little monster. “Just thought you should know.” And then she went back to her tent to mourn her own friend, Raoul, who’d died while she was washing the memory of him off her skin, tracing her fingertips over Carter’s hot, wet flesh. He’d breathed in too much fire when the flames had climbed him, thrashing around his face. In panic and shouting, he’d sucked the licking tongues into his own body and, later, he’d strangled in a white bed with his blind eyes bandaged and Doc Edison sitting beside him, waiting to record the precise time of death.

Vic added Raoul to the long list of known dead in her head, but she crossed Carter’s name off. She’d thought for sure she was going to lose him today, but she had brought him back somehow. Rationally, she knew it had nothing to do with her. She’d done nothing to allow him to survive this. But she knew what the men called her, how they thought of her. She was the Angel of Death. To gain her attentions was to wear an invisible bull’s-eye forever and to have one’s forever reduced to a short, finite, but unknowable number of hours. None of that was true. She knew that. She repaired machines. That was all she did. She gave her tenderest affections to those most in need. And if those who were already damaged almost to the point of death failed while under her care? Well, again, that was just math. It was bound to happen. But she gave them time, didn’t take it away. Sometimes, rarely, she was even able to make them new again.

In her mind, Raoul felt almost like a sacrifice.

Hours later, Fenn almost killed Willy McElroy when Willy tried to stop him from leaving the longhouse, catching him just outside one of the small doors as Fenn had tried to slink away into the dark.

“Orders,” Willy said. “Ted said no one leaves.”

And then, suddenly, Fenn was standing, legs spread, still in most of his gear, holding Willy McElroy off the ground, his hands bunched in the fabric of Willy’s filthy jumpsuit, his face nose to nose with Willy’s. Willy’s head was craning back, pressed against the wood and corrugated ribs of the outside of the longhouse as he twisted to get away from
Fenn’s face like he feared being bitten. Fenn was shouting in Willy’s face, breathing the fumes of liquor and gun oil onto him. He was going to kill Willy, but he was stymied by the question of how to. With both hands twisted into Willy’s armpits, how could he get to his sidearm?

If he’d had a third arm, Willy would’ve been dead. He didn’t, so Willy remained alive. Strange, the vicissitudes of fate. Fenn dropped him instead, turned his back, and walked off.

After that, it’d been Fenn who’d tackled Ted as he ran through the camp, shouting, “Gas! Gas! Gas!” He’d hit him without knowing it was Ted. When he rolled off, Ted had said, “Told him that’s what we needed. Gas.”

“Told who?”

“Get the fuck off me, Captain. I’m still in charge here.”

Fenn had slept in the mess, amid the mess. The bodies and pieces of bodies had all been moved out. The wounded were convalescing elsewhere. He’d tried the field house first, but it was locked. No one was inside. From outside the door, he could hear the radios hissing static. No one to listen through the long reaches of the night.

He’d tried to make coffee, but all the generators were off. The pantry was well-stocked, but there was nowhere to cook anything. He wondered how long it’d been since he’d eaten, and it was long enough that the very thought of food made his stomach turn. There were crackers. Survival biscuits of compressed meal, vitamins, protein powder. He gnawed one of those like it was a bone, and he sat with his head down, cradled in the crook of one arm, waiting for dawn.

It is a terrible thing to know, well in advance of it, how your story is going to end. To harbor no illusions. To have no faith in the miraculous or trust in your own essential cosmic goodness and importance to see you through. Most men, Fenn had decided, believed in something right up until the end. And he’d seen enough endings to have worked up what he felt was a fairly robust sample.

They believed in fate, some of them, or, at least, fatality. They believed in God or some higher organizing principle. Failing that, they believed in the mission or the men or
their
men or the nobility of their exercise. But in almost all of them, buried deeply near the core of whatever
else
it was they believed, was the belief that they were somehow
special. That the universe had plans for them that predicated any mean or pointless death before they’d done what it was that they, in their specialness, were meant to do.

And while most men could be merely talked out of their larger faiths, be betrayed by them, broken of them by mere age or experience or hard eureka moments, it would often take some massive shock to the system to jar that one little last nugget of belief loose. To shatter it and show it for the nakedly ridiculous conceit it truly was. Death, Fenn knew, leveled all men. Death removed all illusions.