A Private Little War (56 page)

Except Fennimore Teague. He’d read every word. Some of it, he’d even memorized.

“Control protocol,” he said to Ted, looking now at some indistinct space above his commander’s head like a schoolboy reciting, like a bad actor squinting at distant cue cards. “‘When engaged in combat operations, the designated wing commander or so-acting officer or pilot has ultimate discretion over tactical orders when a rapidly developing situation in-theater requires his orders to supersede those of any command and control elements operating outside the area of combat operations. Said acting officer or pilot will, when the situation requires it, then assume the duties and responsibilities of the command-level officer or controller until such a time as the situation permits a return of command to out-of-theater command and control.’”

Fenn knew that passage. Fenn loved that passage. It was like poetry to him. Bread and meat. He smiled when it was done, savoring the ridiculous, rolling repetitions of the last line.

Ted was ruffled. More than he had been a few moments ago. “Yeah, well, this wasn’t—”

“No. It was. I’m sorry, Ted. It was.”

“Say that all to me again.”

And Fenn would, word for word. Giving it life this time. Speaking it directly into Ted’s eyes. It truly was a miraculous passage. It formed, in a way, the backbone of all the very little that Flyboy Inc. actually stood for, enumerating the difference between it and an actual military outfit. Armies fought to win. Mercenaries fought to get paid. Armies fought because they were told to. Mercenaries fought because they chose to. A soldier or marine might be told to go stand on a rock and die there rather than leave it. A mercenary might be told to go stand on the same rock and then, when his position appeared to become untenable, step off it and live (maybe) to stand on some other rock, some other day. When things on the rock got hairy, the mercenary might become, even if just for a moment, his own commander and the author of his very immediate fate. He could step the fuck off the stupid rock and go home.

After this second recitation, Ted would push back, half a step, twisting his head on his neck as though to get a better angle on Fenn, appraising him like somehow he’d become dangerous because he’d read a book once. Pulling down sharply at the hips of his jumpsuit to straighten its hopelessly muddled lines and then running a thumb distractedly down
one of its wrinkled seams, he would ask, “What was it you said to me right before?”

“Before what?”

“Before Lefty went in.”

“I don’t recall.”

“Before you decided to start giving orders.”

Fenn said nothing.

“Don’t be coy now, Fenn.”

“I said, ‘Fuck you, Ted.’ Just before.”

“Right.”

“Fuck you, Ted.”

“Anger. Spite, maybe.”

“Frustration, call it.”

“That’ll look bad for you, don’t you think? When this comes under investigation?”

Fenn would smile then. Gently. Not patronizingly, but still. “It’s not like you or I will ever see that investigation, Commander.”

“You might be right.”

“You know what’s coming in?”

“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.