A Private Little War(22)
It was cold. Even in all his gear, it was cold. What he wanted was another cigarette, but there were none. He’d smoked the last of his allotment weeks ago, had won a few more gambling, then smoked those, too. The indigs all smoked stubby pipes filled with a thick, mossy black flora cut with wood shavings for flavor. It made them weird if they smoked enough of it. Weirder than normal. And lit, the mixture smelled like cedar and tasted of burning hair. Carter had tried it, of course. Everyone had. It did nothing but make him sick.
Ted apparently had a stash of cigarettes, and Carter considered trying to find them, steal them, blame it on the natives. He contented himself by stoking the inner furnace with another pull from Fenn’s bottle instead and turning up his collar around his ears. He thought about how much of a man’s life is determined by what terrible things he chooses not to do.
He walked south through darkness, making for the dim glow of the mess and the close-cut grass of the airfield, stepping finally off the quarter line and onto the clipped fringe of A strip. He crossed at a run out of habit, reflexively glancing skyward and listening for the grumble of a descending engine cycling down. There were lights burning in the longhouse. In the infield, generators were chugging. Once he was clear of the strip and onto the opposite apron, he slowed again, childishly kicking his toes at the frozen ground with each step, stalling as best he could while still, technically, making his way to where his presence was required.
On the field, Fenn was organizing the unloading of the drop as best as such a thing could be organized. He’d made sure no one had been crushed by the containers coming in, had stood amid the close-pressed mass of men while they’d watched the big boxes steaming, throwing off residual heat and warming them like an invisible fire. When they were cool enough to be cracked, he’d prepared an expedition to the machine shop to fetch generators and lights and pry bars and mallets—making sure that the men were supplied with enough drink to make it there and back safely. They had, but it’d taken them almost a half hour to stagger a couple hundred yards and come back again. And they’d lost at least two men in the process who wouldn’t be found again until morning because war was hell even in the quietest of moments.
Back in the field house, the boys had all been drinking party liquor made from dried alien fruit and antifreeze, boiled, condensed, and dripped through gas mask filters. Before Carter had left them to go and try to sleep, before Ted had come and screwed up all the fun, they’d been playing poker under the spectral glow of a halo lamp, betting with corks and shell casings or gambling away their days off and roster positions. Vic had been there for a minute. Tommy Hill and Lefty from Carter’s squadron. Ernie O’Day from Fenn’s 3rd. Billy Stitches and Morris Ross and Wolfe and Stork and Johnny and some of the mechanics and ground crew as well. Everyone was having trouble sleeping these days. No one liked the mornings, but the nights were becoming unbearable.
Fenn had been talking to someone and so had missed most of Carter’s departure, catching only the end of it, which had involved an overturned chair and hard words and the men all jeering him as he’d left—laughing and making jokes about missing his beauty sleep. Someone had bounced a cork off the back of Carter’s head. More laughter. Carter’d given the lot of them the one-finger salute, pushed through the door, and made for his tent without saying a word to Fenn.
This was the way the men spent their days and their nights—in jest and sinning and leisure, secretly half hoping for something, anything, bad to happen to someone else just so the rest of them would have something to talk about for a while that wasn’t the boredom, the shitty weather, their lice, misery or home. It was cheap and it was awful, but it made the time go. And as they all well knew, when there wasn’t drink or poker or laughing or games or just simply staring up at the sky and pretending they weren’t calculating the distance back to more friendly suns, there was always the slaughter.
It hadn’t been an hour later that Ted had come in, counting heads, gathering up his work crew to break down the drop, and looking for someone to fly. Fenn had argued with Billy because Billy wanted to go night flying and wasn’t a man who took kindly to being told no anymore. Then he’d sold out Carter to Ted in exchange for staying safe on the ground himself. All things considered, it hadn’t been his best night. But one had to take these things philosophically. Although he’d certainly done much worse in the past year, Santa Claus had come regardless. The man’s standards for who was naughty and who was nice must really be slipping, Fenn thought, and he wondered how much more killing he would’ve had to do to tip the scales.