A Private Little War (40 page)

He closed his eyes and tried to think of something specific. A concrete moment. He remembered a night that his mother, who was not a drinker at all, had come home from a party a little bit drunk and the way she had kicked her shoes off, each attended by a little whoop of joy that was so unlike her that it’d made him burn with a childish kind of happiness for her. She’d been wearing a dress made of something sparkly that looked like lightning made flat.

He thought of Jacob hunched over his drafting table, drawing pictures of airplanes and rockets, pink tongue poking out of one corner of his mouth. He tried to think of himself and Mark crouched in the
short hallway just outside their shared room, peeking around the corner of the door, watching Jacob, and biting their lips to keep from laughing.

Kevin was twelve, maybe thirteen; Mark and Jacob both older. He and Mark had taken pages from Jacob’s drawing tablet and replaced them with pictures of penises, testicles; of naked men sprawled clumsily on beds and smiling into invisible cameras. It’d been a joke—boys being boys, pranks passing endlessly between the brothers almost like a form of currency. And Kevin and Mark waited, breathing shallowly, watching Jacob and knowing that, sooner or later, he would have to turn the page, and then…

It ended up being the day he and Mark had realized Jacob was same-sex. For the longest time, Kevin had felt guilty—as though he’d somehow
turned
his brother this way, having flipped a switch in him somehow with a few scraps of paper torn from bound medical journals and porn downloaded from their home terminal. But he hadn’t understood that it just didn’t work that way. Watching Jacob from the doorway, seeing him reach out so gently to touch the pictures, as if they were electrified and he expected a shock; watching him look around furtively, slowly slip them free from his tablet, and carefully fold them into one of his pockets—Mark and Kevin had stared at each other open-mouthed, wide-eyed with revelation.

The next day they’d caught Jacob in the room alone and beaten him for not telling them earlier—smiling and laughing and offering their congratulations, only slightly tinged with jealousy. His life was going to be so much easier than theirs, they knew. So much less complicated, even if he became a carrier for the next generation.

And then, just like that, Carter had them again—his mother in her party dress, his brothers’ faces. It was that moment that’d triggered the recall: the memory of him and Mark grabbing Jacob by the arms and shaking him, pounding him on the back, and Jacob’s bewildered expression at the sudden, violent attention. He smiled in the perfumed quiet of Vic’s tent, Vic’s bed. He started to laugh, remembering Jacob’s sputtering denials being subsumed by giggles, his fluttering hands, his finally bouncing up and down in place like he was dancing. He’d been happy, too. He’d refused to give back the pictures.

Carter’s eyes teared. He squeezed his lips together. He finally had to pull one of the crumpled pillows from behind his head and press it over his face, at which point he was washed in the scent of Vic’s hair, Vic’s skin, and, like changing gears, his brain suddenly went in a completely different direction.

Raised voices outside, on the flight line, interrupted him. He got dressed quickly and went to see what the clamor was all about.

It was nothing. Or anyway, not much. Lefty Berthold and Lambert rolling around on the ground in front of an audience, planes scattered on the apron. Everyone was getting a little hinky from the stress, the drink, the lack of sleep. It manifested itself in strange ways. Carter watched while Emile Hardman flicked a cigarette at the two men knotted on the ground. Someone else slapped Lambert on the ass. No one moved to break the two men up until Ted was sighted striding in the direction of the flight line and then, all of a sudden, everyone did.

No one was hurt. No one could even remember what it’d been about. Carter had seen Vic from across the field and she had seen him, too. Their eyes had met and there was a jolt as from a low-grade electric shock—not as powerful as last night, but still there. They’d spent some of their charge on each other, and what they’d gotten back was less than what they’d put out.

That’d been the point, Carter thought. But he wasn’t sure.

Carter flew. Carter landed. Carter flew again. Roadrunner was released from the shop after a complete overhaul and refit. Roadrunner was put back into the shop under specific orders from Ted that one of the new engines be put in her. A massive fifteen-cylinder monstrosity with turbochargers like corded muscle. Without even laying a hand on the stick, without even
seeing
her, Carter knew what the results would be. Slow to climb, hard to lift, wicked through the turns and screaming hell in a dive. Also, he thought, it would probably kill him. It was an
experimental engine, and though the Flyboy engineers were good, “experimental” often meant recalcitrant, temperamental, explosive, or worse. The airframe had originally been designed for a few hundred horsepower, stabilized somewhat against the pull of the rotary. This new monstrosity would put out almost a thousand and torque enough to twist the entire plane into a giant’s corkscrew.

In his off hours, Carter would try to sleep. He would read. He and Fenn would talk about nothing or just lie, in silence, and stare at the fluttering canvas, though the two of them seeing each other was rare now, one or the other of them always being up with their squadron. He’d tried once to tell Fenn about what he’d heard outside Ted’s tent that night—about Ted and Eddie, the nerve gas, the conversation he’d overheard in the tent and how Ted was still fighting, still in it, counting the seconds on that clock of his like he was just waiting for Eddie to be out of his hair. It’d sounded to him like Eddie was ready to chuck it all and pull out. To run like a coward now, just when things were getting interesting. Carter’d tried to bring it up, but the moment was just never right.

He would see Vic or he wouldn’t, depending on variables too complex to calculate. One day they had coffee together like two normal people, sitting across from each other at a steel mess table, holding tin cups in their hands, and smiling like they were somewhere else. Carter told her the story about him and Mark and Jacob and the penises, and she’d laughed—the sound of it seeming to push outward and form a bubble around them where nothing could go wrong. Later, they’d carried that bubble with them to bed and rolled around in it, on musty sheets in need of laundering. Vic lay with her head buried in a pillow to muffle the rough noises she made, her dark hair spread like a fan across the pale skin of her back. Carter had shoved a crate against the door so they wouldn’t be interrupted. They weren’t fooling anyone, but it didn’t matter. They kept it up until the warmth of the two of them together beat back the cold and the damp and the war, and then they lay side by side, faceup and facedown, one of his legs thrown across one of hers, and listened to the sounds of things falling apart.

In the strange moment between dark and dawn, they were awakened by a dull, hollow booming that seemed to rattle the sky.

“Artillery?” Vic asked, rising up against the heaviness of Carter’s arms and struggling free of his attempt to hold her.

“No,” he said.

“You’re sure?”

Carter nodded sleepily. “Orbital insertion. Supply drop, or a decelerating dropship. They’re sonic booms.”

“How do you know?”

“Just do.”

“But you’re sure?”

“I’m sure. It’s not something you forget.”

She settled down against him again, but stiffly. When Carter moved to spread her legs, she wouldn’t be budged.

“No,” she said. “Not now. Just…”

“Don’t say it.”

“Okay.”

They lay with their eyes open, staring at nothing, while around them the stars fell.

Eight days had passed since Ted’s new orders had gone into effect. Or nine. Or ten. Carter could no longer keep track and no longer cared to. He came home guns-hot or guns-cold, heavy or light. Rumors careened down the tent line like ball lightning. All talk became hard talk, and every shooting star in the night sky became an orbital drop coming in, rock-solid proof of a landing-in-force by whatever organization encompassed one’s worst nightmare scenario.

One evening just on the sweet side of dusk, passing between his tent and Vic’s, or maybe the flight line and the field house, Carter had stopped to watch the scything course of a ship making orbital translation. It was low to the horizon, fifteen degrees above the plane maybe, and traveling in a retrograde arc that made it appear to be fishhooking in the sky.

He caught himself counting off the cadence of insertion in his head, the sequence he’d learned from NRI and practiced a thousand-thousand times. Angle lock, deorbit burn, reaction engines prime, lock surfaces,
go-for-react, primary roll… His hands twitched as though wanting to find again the controls to which he’d first trusted his life.

The ship on the horizon was a fast-insertion boat going through its first or second roll, one of the long S curves that would bleed off the fantastic speed it’d built up during translation. Standing there in the frozen mud, Carter tilted his head, catching a sudden phantom whiff of superheated plastics and vomit—the hundred kids in the back of his dropship all losing their lunches simultaneously as he rolled her over to eighty degrees, dropped flaps, and executed a deceleration turn at six g’s, burning like an impossible comet across the sky of Oizys, Sparta, Ananke, Gliese.

Carter did a little fast math in his head to estimate a landing point and guessed at something like eighty statute miles from its current point of incidence. Close. He spit into the dirt and, silently, almost guiltily, wished the kid behind the stick a little luck.

“Don’t die, you fucker,” he whispered. “There’s so much worse to come.”

And while he spoke to the night and the sky, he saw a second bright slash mimicking the course of the first. Then a third.

Once he’d counted ten, he closed his eyes, turned, and walked away. Behind him, unseen, he could feel the lights popping like tiny fireworks all along the horizon.

Ted had begun to flake like flint—every glancing contact on the ground splintering off sharp and razor-edged pieces. Fenn grew quiet. When Roadrunner made her second trip to the shop, Carter’d joined her briefly, thinking to help, but Vic eventually chased him out. That was her world again, alone, so he’d waited. After a certain point, Carter could barely speak without growling, something feral and wanting in his chest rising into his throat and finding no words with which to express itself. Eventually, his plane was done, and Carter found Vic again that night and wrapped himself in her, falling into a place where no words were necessary.