A Private Little War(132)

“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.