A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

“I know.”

  “It’s not like any of us will ever see an investigation.”

  Out of some pile of himself, Ted somehow found the pieces necessary to straighten up. He stuck out his chin. For a minute, he regained the air of command that Fenn had seen broken out of him by the death of Morris Ross and that bitter instant of surprise when Ted Prinzi’s war had gone all to hell.

  “You don’t know everything yet, Captain. Don’t let ten minutes of command go to your head.”

  And then Ted turned smartly on his heel and stalked back out onto the field. Fenn made a bet with himself: ten dollars that he’d look back, unable to resist some last rejoinder. But he didn’t, and Fenn never bothered paying up because it was a sucker’s bet anyhow. Ted was a man who either would not, or could not, stop fighting. Missing some vital chromosome or neural connection, he didn’t know how to quit. That was what Fenn thought, anyway. And it was something he liked about Ted, but did not envy.

  Fenn watched the last of the planes coming in as night fell on Iaxo. He saw Carter fall from his plane and wondered if he was wounded—feeling the electric shock in the pit of his stomach telling him to run. To go see his friend. He tamped it down, swallowed the fire, and walked. Carter was okay. He was standing by the time Fenn made it to him.

  “Fenn!” he said.

  “Kev. Charming dismount you made there. You’re going to start a new fashion if you’re not careful.”

  “Fenn…”

  Fenn laid a hand on Carter’s shoulder and shook him a little. Carter leaned his head down and touched his cold cheek to Fenn’s cold hand.

  “I heard you went down,” he said.

  “Did.” Fenn took his hand away. “Then I got back up again.”

  “But you’re okay.”

  No. No, I am not.

  “I appear to be, yes. Right as rain.”

  “You’re okay.”

  “You appear to be as well.”

  “Not everyone else.”

  Fenn shook his head. “No. Not everyone else.”

  “But you’re okay.” Carter reached out for him, touched him, ate at him with his eyes.

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  Fenn told him, more or less. He left out the more sticky personal details but transmitted the facts. Bullets, oil pressure, compression, crash. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “I don’t know if I waited five minutes or an hour for Billy. I don’t even recall the actual landing.”

  “Crashing.”

  “Crashing, yes. I don’t remember it. All I remember is the smell.”

  “Dead indig.”

  “Dead everything.”

  Together, they went to their tent. They had a drink. They closed the door and banked the stove and then had another drink. There were deep, bruised circles beneath Carter’s eyes. His hands shook for a long time. Neither of them would look out the window. They did not tell war stories.

  “I can still smell it, you know?”

  “I can smell it, too. It’s on you. In your clothes, I think.”

  “There were brains on my tires, Kev. There was no ground to land on that wasn’t full of them.”

  Carter was tired. He smoked an entire pack of cigarettes, one after another. Outside, they heard shouts. At least one gunshot, possibly two. Occasionally, faces appeared in the tent’s window, fingertips parting the canvas flaps. They could never agree on whose face it was because no one looked like themselves anymore and neither of them knew for sure who was dead and who was not, and neither wanted to admit to the visitation of ghosts. When their door was knocked on, neither man rose to open it.

  “You should get cleaned up,” Carter said. “We both should.”

  Fenn was taking off his gear, stripping down to his jumpsuit, putting his belt back on. His sidearm. He paused when Carter spoke, then started stripping out of the jumpsuit as well. His skin beneath was pasty and pale, puckered and lined with dirt like spiderwebs wherever his flesh wrinkled. His windburned cheeks, his neck, hands, were all a different shade. Beneath his armor, he was pink like a baby. Fenn stood, naked for a moment, and then went into his footlocker for a sweater. He put on his knickers and his boots. He put his gun belt back on. He kicked the jumpsuit with his toe, then kicked it again until it lay in a pile of spidersilk near the blazing stove.

  “I’m not cleaning it. Burn it. Burn the whole fucking thing.”

  He left the tent and made for the longhouse. On his way, he saw Vic. She asked him about Carter.

  “Is he okay?”

  “He is. Alive and whole. Walking and talking and dancing around like a real boy.”

  Vic gave him a look. Fenn didn’t much like it.

  “I’m not his mother, Victoria,” Fenn continued. “Go see him for yourself. Ask how he is.”

  She dug her hands into the pockets of her oxblood leathers and stood, blocking Fenn’s path. Fenn felt his lack of armor, his essential nakedness, in the gun sights of her gaze—cool and clear and unwavering. “Never liked me much, have you?” she asked.

  “Never had much of an opinion one way or the other,” he said, jinking clear of her, guns-D, and rolling, briefly, out of her field of fire.

  “Because I’m taking your boy away from you? Because when I’m around, you’ve got no one to play soldier with?”

  “Take him wherever you like. I don’t see as it’s any of my business where the boy chooses to put his dick.”

  “The boy,” she said, yo-yoing the word, coming down hard on Fenn, and from a high, blind angle.

  “Kevin.”

  “And that’s all I am? Someplace for your boy to warm his dick?”

  He could taste her on his six, feel the gentle brushes of her viciousness screaming past his undercarriage. “You’d have to ask him that, I think.”

  Vic seemed to consider this a moment, to hang back and prime her guns. She never took her eyes off Fenn. There were maneuvers going on in her gaze that Fenn could not understand or predict, a deft, probing wildness. “I’m sorry about Lefty,” she said.

  Fenn just shrugged.

  “Charlie, too. Ernie. He was your friend, wasn’t he? And George. They took his leg off. Did you hear?”

  “It happens,” Fenn said, keeping to his line, giving himself a little lag, and waiting for the moment he’d need to displace and roll. “It’s a war. Anyway, he’s got another.”

  “What happened to Jackrabbit, Captain?”

  He’d missed his moment. She’d been toying with him, waiting to pounce and, in a panic as he felt her rounds strike true, Fenn went into a hysterical split S, desperate, suddenly, to disengage. “She died on me,” he said, his chin sinking to his chest, eyes finding pebbles and snowflakes and the gray, indistinct horizon suddenly fascinating. “Very sad.”

  She was on him still, harrying him to the ground.

  “Seems like you’re running out of friends,” she said.

  “All of us are.”

  The earth rose to eat them both. One last lethal dive.

  But then Vic’s eyes softened. Suddenly breaking off the pursuit, she broke clear, closed her eyes a moment, then opened them again to clear blue sky. She bit at her chapped lips, white teeth raking over plum. “He loves you, you know. Kevin. You and that fucking rat of his.”

  “But not you?”

  She laughed, sharply, explosively, but just once, carrying her over the perihelion of one of those sweet arcs that, to a pilot, seemed like reaching up to stroke the fringes of the sun. “Not what I’ve ever asked him for. I’m there for him for something else. The one thing you can’t give him.”

  “I’ll say. Seems to be fond of it, too. At least this week.”

  “No, dummy. He’d fuck you, too, I’m sure. If he was wired that way. His brother was. Did you know that? That something you ever talk about, the two of you? Something before… this?”

  Fenn said nothing. He lay close to the earth, belly down, and prayed for cloud.

  “He just can’t talk to you. You can’t talk to him.
That is what I’m there for. And as for the fucking, that’s only what he is to me. Gets cold here, you know? I’m warm when I’m with him.”

  “Well,” Fenn said.

  Vic watched him. From a great height. There was mercy in her altitude, her god-like view, and in her choosing not to fall.

  “Well. There’s a nice fire going at the homestead. Very warm. Kev’s waiting for you, I’m sure.”

  Fenn stepped aside and swept a regal arm out to wave her past, the irony of his arrogance a shell around him, thin as a dream. Vic hesitated a moment, still watching him, considering, then shook her head, hunched it down into her shoulders, and rolled past, disengaging, walking on. Fenn went to the longhouse where the survivors of the day were counting bullet holes in the returned planes, making bets on the number. The whole thing had turned into a drinking game. When full dark came on, they put all the lights out from fear. Mostly, by shooting at them until Max reminded everyone about all the aviation fuel, bullets, bombs, acetylene, and other blow-uppable things that were around and how most of them were taking ten or twelve shots to hit an electric light ten feet away.

  “Killing yourselves don’t seem wise when they’s so many other things out there wants to kill you right now.”

  It’d been Ted who’d started the shooting. Ted, sober and red-faced, sweating, who’d barged into the longhouse, shouted, “All lights out!” and then just started banging away. It was also Ted who’d stopped it.

  “Okay,” he said. “That was dumb. Fun, though. Everyone stay inside. No idea what’s out there in the dark right now. Stay put. That’s an order.” Then he’d walked out.

  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.