A Private Little War (41 page)

Stork got shot. He was wearing his gear, so it turned out okay. Later, on the ground, he picked the crumpled slugs out of his silk and arranged them on a shelf beside his bed with what Ernie O’Day, his roommate, described as way too much care. He stared at them for hours. The gun that’d tagged him got away—first failure of many to come.

Ted and Eddie fought like they were married. They fought like they wanted to kill each other and, Carter thought, they probably did.

It was all over supplies, contingencies, plans for the future. They tried to fight in private (like parents hiding dire news from the children who couldn’t ever understand), but the Flyboy camp was a small place and word got around. It actually got so rough that some of the pilots started feeling bad for Eddie. Not Carter, necessarily. He’d chosen his side and on some level appreciated the viciousness with which Ted pursued his chosen enemy. But there were some who felt otherwise.

One night Fenn invited Eddie over to the tent for drinks just to get him out of Ted’s gun sights for a couple of hours. Carter was out on a flight—he and Jack sortieing; just play-fighting, turning barrels, and climbing rolls to stay awake and keep the blood flowing in unusual directions while Tommy Hill clattered and clunked along above them in one of the horrible DH.9s. They found nothing in six hours, having done a grid-pattern search of twenty square miles above the river, then turning (against orders) toward the walls of Riverbend just before the sun went down. They’d wanted a peek was all, so took one—almost daring each other to drift closer and closer at the apex of lazy, slipping turns.

Even then, there was nothing much other than stone. In the failing light the shadows played tricks. Riverbend could’ve been sheltering an entire armored division and they wouldn’t have been able to see it. And even if it wasn’t, the quietness of it and its forbidden essence frayed their nerve until, boasting and saying how they hadn’t really wanted to get any closer anyway, the three of them started for home. Below them, there was nothing but dirt, bare deciduous trees looking like skeletons
reaching up for them with clacking, bony fingers, and slick patches of ice where the murky groundwater was beginning to freeze. The pilots had all started greasing up their faces against the chill slipstreams, caking on petroleum jelly along their cheekbones, their foreheads, and under their eyes. ChapStick was becoming as valuable as gold. Doc Edison had given an impromptu lecture on the dangers of frostbite one morning in the mess—a word-perfect recitation of one he’d given last year at the same time. And when it’d become plain to him that no one was listening, he’d broken off midsentence, retired to the medical tent, and etherized himself into a long slumber just for fun. He’d used starting fluid to do it—priming spray borrowed from the mechanics. He certainly had personal access to more advanced narcotics, but Edison had always had a streak of the romantic in him.

On the ground, it was brisk. Chilly. Freezing only occasionally. Up in the air, it was bone-breaking cold all the time, miserable and painful and dull, which Carter knew was the way most wars were most of the time, everywhere but in war stories.

When he came down again, Ted debriefed him.

“Anything?”

“No.”

“Map grid?”

Carter rattled it off. Ted nodded.

“Sleep. You’re up again in six hours.”

And that was that. Carter wanted nothing more than a hot bath, a couple of large drinks, and a quick lie-down before his next turn in the rotation. He had a couple screamers in his jacket pocket—little orange pills cadged from the medical box in the field house—and he knew those would get him up and keep him that way for the duration of the six-hour dawn patrol, but he was tired now and could feel the need for sleep prickling his skin and tying weights to the nerves behind his eyes. Even the walk from the flight line to the tent line seemed impossibly long, his legs heavy and numb, his head aching. And when he finally made it, he found a lawyer in his bed, sharing a bottle with his best friend.

“Negotiating our divorce, Fenn?” he asked, pushing through the door and then shutting it tight against drafts behind him. “After all our years together?”

“Yes, Kev. I’m sorry. Your feet stink, the house is a mess, and you haven’t cooked me a warm meal in months. Eddie and I were just discussing who gets custody of this bottle.” He raised a half-empty jug of the local delight and shook it at Carter.

“Wait a minute,” Carter said. “How’d I end up the woman here? You’re lying around, sitting on your pilot’s license, and drinking with Eddie while I’m out there, slaving over a hot machine gun, trying to make the galaxy safe for human exploitation. Fuck you. You’re the woman. Give me that bottle.”

He tossed his helmet on the bed next to Eddie. Everyone had started wearing them again. Most of the time, anyway. And he wasn’t trying to hit Eddie with it, but he wasn’t exactly
not
trying to either. In any event, it bounced off his back and Carter didn’t feel bad about it. The lawyer wriggled over a few inches and Carter sat down hard beside him. He pushed his shoulder and Eddie moved a few more inches, until he was pressing his hip against the bed’s foot rail. Carter felt like pushing him again but didn’t—only because what he really wanted was something else to hit him with but could find neither the appropriate object nor the energy.

Eddie just grinned—charmed, Carter thought, by all this authentic, careless, vaguely homoerotic pilots’ banter. Or maybe he was just drunk. Carter also didn’t have the energy to care. The talk was all crap anyhow—variations on a theme, a riff he and Fenn had kept going for as long as Carter could remember, the thing they did with their mouths when there was nothing else worth saying. It was easier to talk than not, better than lapsing into resentful silences or just complaining all the time. It was a show. A put-on for an audience of none. Reality was nothing more than a sore back, dead legs, numb hands, aching eyes and a wicked headache that no amount of bitching would ever cure.

“Machine guns?” Fenn asked. “You and Jacky find something?”

Carter waved a hand dismissively. “Figure of speech.” He hung his head and pinched the greasy bridge of his nose between his fingers. “Six hours over target and we didn’t see shit. Tommy was falling asleep at the stick when we landed.” He cracked his neck and saw spots exploding in the darkness. Then he started patting down his pockets for cigarettes. “Why aren’t you up right now? Didn’t you have a two/one this afternoon?”

“Scrubbed.” Fenn shrugged. “Ted’s orders.”

Carter snorted. “How long you have to spend on your knees each day to get favors like that?”

“Less than you’d think, darling.” He passed the bottle across the gap between their beds. “Drink. You’ll feel better.”

Carter took it, drank, didn’t. Twisting against the bed rail, Eddie held out a pack of cigarettes, and Carter extracted one dubiously. “You don’t smoke,” he said to the lawyer.

Eddie smiled wanly, something lost and sick about it. “I started. I don’t think I have to worry about them killing me at least.”

Carter turned, raised an eyebrow at Fenn, then turned back around and snatched the rest of the pack out of Eddie’s soft hand. “You don’t get to talk that way,” he snapped. Then he threw the pack back at him hard, bouncing it off his chin, scattering perfect, white, manufactured cigarettes in the dirt.

Eddie flinched back, wide-eyed. Carter looked back at Fenn. “He doesn’t get to talk that way. Tell him. Not in this house.”

“Throttle back, Captain,” Fenn said calmly. He lifted his chin in the direction of the bottle. “Take your medicine.”

Eddie started collecting cigarettes off the ground.

Carter had another drink, set the bottle in the dirt. “Fucking desk pilot,” he said to the top of Eddie’s head. “I heard you, you know. The other night. In Ted’s tent.”

“What other night?” Eddie asked.

For a hanging second, Carter had to think how to answer that question, then shook his head and snapped, “Don’t try to fucking confuse me! The other night. You were in there crying about finding a way off this rock. Trying to run. Trying to talk Ted into letting us catch a ride with some smuggler.” He lit his cigarette with Fenn’s lighter. “Whining little pussy.”

“That isn’t the way it happened at all,” Fenn said.

“It was. I was listening. I was going to tell you about it, Fenn, but…”

“That’s not the way it’s happening,” Eddie seconded.

Carter whirled on the lawyer. “Fuck you, Eddie. I heard you. I saw you. I saw Ted. We have a job to do here and he’s trying to do it, and you’re trying to run? You’re a fucking chickenshit coward.” Carter
slapped at the pack of cigarettes in Eddie’s hand again but failed to connect, so shoved him instead. “A fucking lawyer!”

“Shut up, Kev.” Fenn was fiddling with the bottle’s cork, absently picking it apart with his fingers. Eddie had his head down.

“You defending him now?” Carter asked, turning back to Fenn.

“No. I’m just telling you to shut up or leave.”

“So you’re throwing me out now?” It was no longer a joke. “Because of him?”

“I invited him, Kevin. Be nice.”

Carter took a deep breath. He and Fenn had fought only once the whole time they’d lived together, which was really saying something, considering the closeness of the quarters and the amount of time they’d both spent in them. Regardless, Fenn had beaten Carter pretty completely. They didn’t talk about it, but it was there—a solid truth of their relationship. It’d taken Carter a week to recover. And right before, Fenn had had a look on his face like he had now, watching Carter from his rack. Not anger, but just the absence of his usual levity. A look with some real cold, dead weight behind it.

That first fight had been about good manners among houseguests, too, if Carter remembered correctly—a particular pet peeve of Fenn’s. And for a moment, Carter thought about making a go at his friend again, on principle, because he didn’t like that look much at all and didn’t like how Fenn leveled it at him like a gun across Fast Eddie’s back.

He decided against it, though. He was too tired, and fighting over Eddie seemed like a ridiculous thing to do anyhow. But he let Fenn know that he
had
been considering it before he looked away. Maybe he would’ve had a go had the hour been earlier, had he not already been hurting enough.

“Sorry,” he said. “Long day is all.”

Fenn nodded. Eddie popped back up between them and clapped a hand on Carter’s shoulder. “It’s been a long day for everyone, Carter. That’s okay.”

And friends or no friends, manners or no manners, Carter could’ve choked him just then. So priggish. So terribly, terribly stupid. He was already bringing his hands up to do it.

But Fenn was on the verge of laughing as he reached over and removed Eddie’s hand from Carter as quickly and delicately as if he were picking up someone else’s underwear, and Carter had never been able to not laugh when Fenn did.

“Oh, I don’t think you want to do that, Eddie,” Fenn said, fighting down a smile he couldn’t quite bury.

And Carter’s anger fizzled like a fuse pinched off. “Yeah, you really don’t,” he said, smothering a grin of his own behind his hand as he took a long drag off Eddie’s cigarette.

“Sorry,” said Eddie. “I just—”

“Yeah, don’t.” Carter edged back a little on the bed and took another drag. He looked away from Eddie. He bit his lip.

“So,” asked Fenn. “Nothing from nothing then, Kev? No action?”

“None,” he said. “Quiet as anything. We were thinking about bombing Connelly just to get some fun started.”

“Oh, Connelly’s not out there right now,” Eddie said brightly. All of a sudden, Carter wondered how old he was. So expertly preserved, he could’ve been anything from twenty to sixty, easy. His skin was smooth as a girl’s, mouth a perfect little bow. Eddie motioned to the bottle at Carter’s feet and Carter handed it to him warily. Eddie took it with both hands like a baby, had a good swallow, passed it along to Fenn, who gave Carter a little nod in Eddie’s direction as if to say,
Listen close.

“He’s in here,” Eddie continued, dabbing at the corners of his mouth with his fingertips. “At the field house with Ted, I think. That’s what we were talking about before you came in.”

“Not possible,” Carter said. “Saw Ted when I landed. Did a debrief.”

“Full debrief?” Eddie asked.

“Full as they ever get now. Twenty words maybe.”

“In the field house?”

“On the apron.”

Eddie nodded. “Connelly’s there. Ted was stopping you before you came in. Diverting you.”

Carter looked at Fenn, who just shrugged and lifted the bottle to his lips. It was red wine they were drinking, though only by the loosest of definitions. Locally made, it was closer to fruity, red liqueur with a sweetness like rotting mangoes and a kick like a mule. It’d been a
favorite of the indig officers before they all left, an acquired taste for sure. Carter knew that you had to be careful with it and either drink it slow so you didn’t go out of your head or fast so you didn’t care.

He took the bottle from Fenn again. “He serious?” he asked, meaning Eddie.

“No. Eddie’s too short to be taken seriously. But he is correct. Connelly is here. I saw him walking across the field myself, six of his natives with him, all decked out like he was late for a costume ball.” Fenn gestured grandly at all the wrack and clutter of the tent and present company. “Hence this little garden party. I figured Eddie could use a break from getting screamed at.”