A Private Little War(127)

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.”