A Private Little War (2 page)

The contact fuses in the bombs corroded. The cords that held the tents up would grow a white fur that looked like frost but wasn’t. Shortly after, they’d snap, and a tent would come down or sag like a drunk punched in the stomach and, for ten minutes or an hour, the men would all have something to laugh about. Especially if it happened in the middle of the night or in the rain. And even though no one was dying (or anyway, no one who mattered), it was a bad time for the war. Everyone thought so. And it made a lot of the men sick just thinking about it. They were fighting the weather as much as they were fighting the enemy and, slowly, they were losing. They all knew that something was going to have to change, and soon. There was just that kind of feeling in the air.

Two nights ago, the company had gotten word that Connelly’s 4
^th
had moved into position across the river. They’d been turned back at the
bridge, again near Riverbend, but had finally made their crossing at a heretofore undiscovered ford two miles downriver and were digging in by dawn. They were exhausted, but nearly at full strength due, in large part, to the overwhelming cowardice of Connelly himself. He was afraid of the dark, was the word. Doubly afraid of fighting in it. Triply afraid of dying in it. It was rumored that the downriver ford was found accidentally by some of his pikemen who’d stumbled onto it while retreating.

It was dark so, obviously, the company’s planes couldn’t fly.

The next night, Durba’s riflemen were put in place to secure the ford. On paper, they were the First Indigenous Rifle Company—the First IRC, attached as the fifth company, supernumerary to Connelly’s four-company native battalion of foot-sloggers and local militia—but called themselves just Durba’s Rifles or, sometimes, the Left Hand of God, because Antoinne Durba (who’d claimed on many raving, red-faced occasions as a drunken guest at the Flyboy encampment, to once have been a missionary before finding another calling more suited to his disposition) was a man of vociferous, if rather selective, Christian faith. He seemed only to like those bits of scripture where God, in his infinite wisdom, was smiting something or someone, and had a disturbing tendency to insert his own name into these verses in place of the Almighty, referring to himself always in the third person—Durba smasheth this, Durba fucketh that all up and back again.

As a stand-in for the Lord Jesus was Durba’s only daughter, Marie, who’d once been his first sergeant and second-in-command. What made this proxy arrangement disconcerting (even more so than Durba’s own self-promotion within the spiritual hierarchy) was the fact that Marie had been killed more than six months ago—pierced through by a cavalryman’s lance on the Sispetain moors during a disastrous attempt by Connelly’s indigs to hold the last of the region’s high ground against an onslaught by overwhelming numbers of someone else’s. Marie’d been in the dirt now for some time, but that never stopped Durba from speaking of her as though she’d just gone ’round the other side of some tree for a piss. It got to a point where it began to bother some of the
pilots and, one night, Carter asked him if he, Durba, still thought Marie sang the Lord’s praises so prettily with half a foot of native hardwood through her lungs.

“All souls live eternally in the light of God’s righteous fury,” said Durba.

“That count for the monkeys, too?” Carter asked.

“The natives here are abominations in his eyes,” said Durba. “Heathens who worship trees and clouds.”

“Well, if Marie loved Jesus and is dead and the monkeys pray to sticks and dirt but are still alive, whose fucking god does the math say is winning?”

At that point, the theological discussion devolved into punching, and the two of them had to be pulled apart and hustled out opposite doors. It was Fennimore Teague, Carter’s friend, who’d dragged him outside, shoved him backward, and held him off with one hand flat on Carter’s chest while Carter spit part of a broken tooth into the dirt.

“Baby, that was somewhat less than hospitable,” Fenn said, smiling while watching Carter close. “What do we say? No talking about politics, sex, or religion at the dinner table.”

Carter said that Durba had started it. That all he’d done was ask a question. That everyone was just as tired of hearing about Durba’s dead cunt of a daughter as he was and that no amount of
talking
was going to bring her back.

“Talking is what the man has left, Kev,” Fenn said. “To keep her close. Though I grant you, at this point, odds on her resurrection are running very long indeed.”

They laughed. What else was there to do? Everyone knew Durba was too sensitive. Eventually, Carter apologized and showed Durba the tooth he’d broken and showed him how he could spit whiskey through the hole like a sniper. The war went on and on.

Durba took position across the ford without firing a shot, though it was again rumored that Connelly, in a panic, had nearly ordered his 4
^th
company to retreat once more when he’d heard the riflemen moving up in the night behind him.

The men—the pilots—laughed about this. “Connelly…,” said Tommy Hill. “Fought every battle he ever saw walking backward.” They shook their heads, rattled their drinks, and said Connelly’s name over and over again the way one might speak of a younger brother or favorite pet, forever mixed up in something complicated beyond their years or wit.

“Connelly… Going to outlive us all.”

“Connelly… Fucking Connelly.”

“Connelly…,” said Albert Wolfe. “That man is going to chickenshit himself right through this war. Afraid of the dark. Whoever heard of such a thing?”

Again, it was dark, so the planes couldn’t fly.

WHEN TED PRINZI SLEPT, HE DREAMED OF SLEEPING
. Of clean white sheets and clean white spaces. Of cool plastic curves, aquiline cambers that existed nowhere in nature, and the competence of institutional design. He dreamed of a space among a thousand spaces. A million. More. And of a deprivation of the senses as pure as summer sunlight filtered through a sheet.

It wasn’t a lot, but it was his: Ted Prinzi’s clean and aired-out place. Dry, warm, bright, and completely artificial. Manufactured. In the moments before sleep would come to him—if he was having difficulty letting it overtake him—he would imagine this room. Furnish it. Add small fillips of detail, shave down a curve here, soften the glow of a hidden light there. It was no place that he knew, but it was close to several. A station berth he’d kept for some time once. Acceleration stasis aboard the
Swift
. Any one of a half-dozen hospital rooms, each as sterile and generic as a uniform.

He dreamed of nothing but interstices: The moment of slipping, for the first time, between those stiff, cool, white sheets, toenails hissing against the cloth. The moment of waking to a white purity of artificial light and artificial heat and artificial air, all so perfect and formless and affectless that it was itself like a kind of blind, deaf and brainless
dispossession of the senses. Nothing ever happened in his dreams. Nothing ever had to. It was enough to be warm and clean and bathed in light, to reach out and touch a soft, plastic curve and know that it had never been any natural or dirt-bound thing.

Ted was sleeping when Diane came for him. Asleep and dreaming of cool whiteness in his tent that smelled of must and mold and smoke, under canvas the color of rot, of sickness, on his straight iron cot that squeaked when he moved, beneath piles of blankets that scratched like steel wool and stank of sweat, skin, hair, breath, feet and him.

She must’ve knocked on the wood frame of the door, but Ted hadn’t heard her. She must’ve called his name. She was polite like that, if politeness was the right word.

When Ted swam up out of whiteness, she was standing over him, reaching out a hand that she drew back quickly when she saw his eyes pop open, terror-bright. She pulled the hand back and held it pressed between her small, boyish breasts, cupped by her other hand as if Ted had bitten her.

“Call for you,” she said.

“What?”

“Call.”

Ted was wearing his jumpsuit. Two pairs of socks. He dug his hands into a pocket of warmth beneath the curve of his back and closed his eyes again. He could hear voices outside, the buzz of engines. It was day, barely, and still the cold chewed at his face, smelling vaguely of ammonia.

“Ted.”

“Don’t, Diane,” Ted said. He thought that maybe he could recapture the dream if he tried. He could feel the wisps of it still trailing through his mind.

“The call…”

“Get Eddie. Take it yourself. I don’t care.”

“It’s the company.”

Ted coughed. He squeezed his eyes tighter shut, until whiteness exploded behind his lids, willing himself to sleep, ordering himself to dream. “Who else would it be?”

“No, I mean the
company
company. Direct from the offices.”

Ted opened his eyes. The engine sounds were cycling, getting louder and softer. There was shouting.

“Personal for you,” she said.

“Get out.”

“But—”

“Go. I’ll be there in one minute.”

It took him less. As soon as Diane left, Ted hurled himself out of bed and to his feet, splashed icy water on his face from a pan that was capped with a thin skin of ice that he’d had to crack with a fist. He pulled on a clean uniform shirt, pants that he pressed carefully every night between gun cases, his boots and belt and sidearm. He scratched furiously at his scalp, took three seconds to clear his lungs (hands balled into fists, knuckles digging into his knees as he bent double), then squared himself behind the closed door of his tent before charging out into the graying dawn like a man who knew what was going on.