Among the pilots, the question of whether or not she’d been loving Lefty on the sly seemed settled by this one determined act. By the fine spray of blood frozen into the grass like a pointillistic rendering of some hot, exotic flower and the shroud of snow she was wearing when found. There was a lovely storybook finality to it. An ordered progression of grief that, in its way, was comforting to those being fucked around by uncontrollable circumstance.
Diane was not so sure. True, Shun Le had been sleeping with Lefty Berthold. They lived together, the two women. It wasn’t something Diane could not know. But sitting on her bed, in their tent, beginning the process of going through Shun Le’s things and stealing anything she thought might be useful or valuable, Diane told herself that because she knew Shun Le, she knew Lefty wasn’t the reason.
Diane had a theory that those who listen—controllers, radio ops, relay specialists—began like empty vessels of varying size, some large, some small. Over time, they began to fill up with the terrible things they had to hear. Last words. Final breaths. Bad orders. Fear. Worse, joyous slaughter. Eventually, everyone reached their maximum volume and the terrible things began to spill over. Some controllers went crazy. Some turned to drinking or drugs or began fucking everything that moved or started killing people. Diane had seen many variations. All of them were, to her eyes, attempts by those afflicted to either enlarge their internal vessel or to drain off some of the horror it contained. The trick of it was, it couldn’t ever work. The vessel was the vessel and the voices were the voices. They never went away. Both the size of the vessel and the things it contained were immutable. Permanent.
So the way Diane saw it, Shun Le had simply reached her maximum volume. And because she was the way she was—so quiet and proper—she’d killed herself before she did anything embarassing or untoward. She’d done it because it was the quiet, polite thing, and she’d done it away from everything and everyone so as not to leave an uncomfortable mess. It was the overfull-vessel thing, for sure.
Johnny All-Around had tried to kill Ted. Ted, for most of the night, was suspiciously absent. Porter Vaughn was found, stunned, silently weeping in the cockpit of his Camel when the crews had come to wheel it into the longhouse; the floor awash with congealing blood and a hole in his foot big enough to stick a thumb into. Davey Rice had been missing most of the day and part of the night. When he’d come walking back into camp hours later minus one biplane, no one saw him but Emile Hardman, who, thinking he was a ghost or, worse, a hallucination, had almost shot him.
Emile went weird after that. And later, when asked what’d happened, Davey said he’d been forced down by ground fire that’d holed his tail, shattered the tip of one wing like bone, damaged his engine, and destroyed his radio. When no one came for him, he’d walked home—miles over the ground that’d so long been his enemy. He said there was nothing like it. Nothing ever. And then he’d popped the clip out of his pistol, ejected three rounds from it with his thumb, and dropped everything in the mud. He’d lifted that day with his sidearm and forty rounds. Those three bullets were all he had left. He didn’t want to talk about where the other thirty-seven had gone.
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.