A Private Little War (55 page)

Roadrunner had been one of the last planes down. Carter had fought as well and viciously as anyone, and when he’d come down out of his plane, he’d collapsed, his legs giving way as if they were made of paper the minute he’d stepped to the lower wing edge, the rest of him following after; falling into the cold, rutted muck outside the longhouse and barely feeling it because if there was a piece of him that wasn’t dead from sitting or numb from the cold, then it already had hurts of its own that took precedence. Willy had seen Carter fall. He’d come and helped him to his feet.

“S’okay,” Willy’d said. “We’re taking bets, you know? Every one of you’s fallen but one.”

“Which one?” Carter’d asked.

It’d been Fenn, of course.

FENN HAD WATCHED LEFTY BERTHOLD DIE
. He’d heard it, same as everyone, but he’d also seen it. Lefty’d barely managed to make it ten miles clear. Fenn had seen the fire. The distant spark of it against the dark, patterned ground. He’d known just where to look. Then he’d ordered the bombers in.

The bombers hit the guns that’d maneuvered, under cover of the slaughter, into advantageous positions in the tree line along the river. At the time, he’d wondered whether they were NRI gunners or native gunners, but it didn’t really matter because, shortly, they were only dead gunners, which, all things considered, was better than any of the other options.

The fresh fighters arrived. They all flew around for a bit and did what they did. Fenn went home to rearm, went up again, went home to rearm, went up again. Each time, different men followed him. As they started to be shot down and die, there were fewer, but that was only math. Somehow, the equations and odds kept missing him, so, when he became tired and bored, he shot himself.

His plane, actually. Jackrabbit, who’d been so good to him for so long. He knew every inch of her skin, the simplicities of her insides,
and exactly what went where, so he knew just where to put the bullets from his sidearm.

Fourteen rounds through the floor, between the rudder pedals, being careful not to shoot his own feet and not to aim too low where he would catch the edge of the protective bathtub that made up the cockpit. This, he thought, would probably sever the rudder linkage, but it didn’t. It would probably cut the fuel lines, which it might have. It would almost certainly clip some of the bundles of oil and hydraulic hoses that ran in tangles around the base of Jackrabbit’s big engine like the descending aortas of her many-chambered heart, which it did.

His gauges had skittered crazily for a moment, then went limp. He lost oil pressure like air going out of a balloon. The stick went heavy. He holstered his pistol and began looking around for a nice place to crash, but there were no good places. Some survival instinct made him fight the dying airplane. Adrenaline made him curse her for falling so quickly, for turning too slow, so that rather than whispering good night to her and sending her spinning into the ground (as had been his plan), he found himself screaming at her in frustration and calling her names as she died. He felt bad about this later, but not in the moment.

He landed the plane alongside a copse of trees, in a harrowed patch of blood and bodies and brains. His plane did not weigh a lot, but it weighed enough to pop the heads of the corpses he rolled over, to break the broken bodies further and desecrate them worse than had the bullets and the bombs that’d ended their pointless little lives. He hadn’t meant to do that.

Later, he felt bad about this as well, and the bad feelings would nearly make him shoot Willy McElroy, which would’ve only made him feel worse.

When the plane had crunched to a stop, Fenn climbed out. He reloaded his pistol. There were wounded in the area, calling out in voices that sounded like echoes of Lefty Berthold’s, even if the words were different. Or maybe they were the same. Pain and dying seem to give everyone a common language of anguish, he thought. For the first time, he felt as though he truly understood the indigs. Then he went around and put a bullet into the head of each of the wounded. This, he didn’t feel badly about at all.

When that was done, he sat down and he waited. His friends would come or his friends wouldn’t come. He had no stake in the matter except for a small amount of frustration at the tenacity of a living thing to remain so, a disappointment in his own lack of convictions, and a dull ache of tiredness that made him want even for the terrible bed he’d slept in, alone, for the past two years.

Fenn thought about his son, Andre, who’d lately been much on his mind. About his blond hair, dry and thin like straw, and the way his head had smelled right out of the bath. About him lying on the floor, surrounded by papers and crayons, drawing pictures of monsters and maps of lands that existed only in his head. Of squatting beside him inside the dome that was the newest and last home he knew and pointing out the stars at night, naming them because they were so new there that none of the constellations had been claimed yet, no pole stars chosen. They’d been like explorers that night. The whole of the universe, seen from original angles, became new all over again.

“That one,” Fenn had said.

“The dog.”

“And that one?”

“The duck.”

“And those way out there?”

“Octopus.”

“Good.”

“Those are good names?”

“Yes.”

“Are they right?”

“It doesn’t matter. Right now, the stars are what we say they are.”

And Andre had nodded as though that pleased him, furrowing his small forehead and the nearly invisible featherings of his brows. He’d scanned the sky with what, to Fenn, had seemed like a sudden panic, then settled.

“There,” he’d said, and pointed in toward the old neighborhood, Sol and the Centauris, Ross, Groombridge, and Barnard’s—all of them invisible at this distance but, somehow, sketched into the boy’s DNA until he was like a good compass that always knew true north. “That’s where home is, right?”

“Yeah, baby. You’re right. That’s the way home.”

“I found it?”

“You found it,” Fenn had said. “You can be my navigator any day.”

And now, very far from that place, that moment, Fenn knew that if the indigs came, he would wedge the front sight blade of his pistol into the notch of his lower jaw, aim for the horizon behind himself, and pull the trigger. He also knew that if the indigs didn’t come, he wouldn’t. He didn’t know why, and with no good explanations forthcoming, he simply sat and waited to see what came next.

Billy Stitches had come. Billy in his Bristol and Davey Rice flying cover low over their heads. Fenn had looked up at the sound of their engines. He’d even waved. He’d done it with his gun hand.

Billy had brought the two-seater in and landed it a couple hundred feet away, on a nice stretch of grass on the other side of the trees. Fenn had waited for him. The last moments had been the worst. The smell—a terrible, soupy, shitty, meaty stink of violent death—was all over him like he’d rolled in it. Like he’d swum in it with all his clothes on. The final poses of the dead, like terminal contortionists, like fatal lovers locked in shameless, public embraces, had overreached his capacity for metaphor and appeared to him now as only accusatory. When he heard Billy’s footsteps, he’d raised the gun.

“Hey now, Captain. Why don’t you holster that Python, all right? It’s only me.”

“Apologies, Billy. Never can be too careful.”

“Uh-huh. You think I was sneaking up somewhere the other side of your neck?”

“Scratching my chin was all.”

Fenn had smiled. He’d put the safety on. He’d holstered his sidearm and stood on legs that almost didn’t hold him and walked on pins and needles away from his resting place while Billy stripped the guns and ammunition off Jackrabbit, put a bullet through her navigation computer, opened her engine panel, yanked her plug wires, and then delicately balanced a primed hand grenade between the base of the engine
block and the firewall, its weight holding down the activator button so that the littlest disturbance would set it off.

“Sad, I know,” Billy had said when Fenn ambled back. “She was a good girl, though. Did you proud.” He laid a gentle hand on her nose. Fenn distractedly stroked a splintered blade of her prop. In the distance, they could hear the tectonic rumblings of impacts, the soft, almost delicate pop of machine guns firing. No way to tell anymore whose was whose. The moons were breaching the distant horizon, the day nearly done. How things had changed in so short a time.

Together, the two of them carried the salvaged guns and ammunition to the Bristol, loaded it all into the spotter’s seat, and then Fenn squeezed in among them. The smell of them was crisp and bitter and mechanical after the savory stink of the dead. All the way home, he rode stroking the warm, oiled body of a .303, rubbing the gun oil between his fingers, touching it softly to his face.

They set down. Fenn sprang nimbly from the spotter’s seat, scrambling down across the lower wing even as Billy was turning the Bristol for a taxi past the longhouse where he would take on a splash of fuel, then get up in the air again. Everywhere he looked, there was such delightful motion. Men running. Machinery moving. The cargo container that Connelly’s drop had come in was sitting like something beached in the middle of the field, the ground around it churned and beaten into a sluggish mud that, overnight, would freeze harder than cement. He saw Emile Hardman walking like a zombie from the longhouse to the mess, which had become a medical tent. He saw David Rice—Davey who was always happy as a puppy to do anything, leaping into planes, panting with excitement; always joking and saying inappropriate things because he still had the Teflon soul of youth, the stored energy of a long life stretching out before him to infinity, untarnished by mortality. Davey stood off by himself, feet rooted, all motion drained from him but for his repeated, frustrated attempts to light a cigarette. He was drooling. The cigarettes kept slipping out of his mouth and falling into the dusting of waxy snow at his feet. Fenn didn’t know it, but Charlie Voss had just died. Exploded out of the air as if by mean wishes. And Ernie, too—Fenn’s faithful wingman. Davey had just heard about it. Every cigarette he stabbed between his numb lips, he would slobber out or drop. Fenn
watched him go through five of them before he walked over and lit one for him, placing it carefully in his mouth.

Davey dropped it almost immediately. Fenn had given up then, smiled sweetly at the boy, and left him to gravity. He’d gone to the longhouse and Ted had caught him there to ask him what he’d been thinking, switching off his radio in combat, ordering the bombers in to hit the guns that’d killed Lefty. Ted’s eyes were sick and glossy with the madness of failure.

“Wasn’t your call to make, Captain,” he said.

“Yes it was, Commander,” Fenn replied, curling the fingers of one hand against his palm and examining the ragged crescent moons of his nails, his own madness kept well in check now, bitten back, bound, smothered under a muffling layer of practiced cool ten feet thick.

They were standing in a corner of the longhouse, near the machine shop, and the smell of wounded airplanes was so thick that the air seemed almost chewy. And Fenn would quote to Ted directly from the Flyboy Inc. employee handbook and pilot’s manual: a document almost mythic in its very mention because everyone had one, had been issued one—an actual physical object, words on paper—on the day they signed their contracts with the company, but no one had ever actually read it. In its mystery, powers beyond imagining were sometimes ascribed to it. Promises of vacation time, legal explanations of the sexual harassment policy and payout schedules, details of deployment intervals and the dental plan. Every secretary, every cargo specialist, controller, supply clerk, pilot, mechanic, and junior counselor had been handed a copy on his or her first day. That much they could remember. Some could even describe the logo stamped on the front cover: a swoosh, rampant, over a field of stars, picked out in a very nice silver that would smudge the moment it was brushed against. But everyone, in the hot thrill of new and unusual employment, overawed perhaps by the slick glamour of a steel-and-mahogany boardroom or disappointed by some far-flung cubicle office out in the deep nowheres, had tucked it in among their things and then immediately forgot about it. The Flyboy Inc. employee handbook had never been read by anyone.