Nights were when the pilots feared the most about the least. Nights were really starting to fuck them up.
On the seventh day, it rained. A mist at first that was close to freezing so that walking in it felt like brushing up against snow and even a fast jog between, say, one’s tent and the mess for hot coffee and the thin pleasure of dull company—of, at least, hearing one’s own language spoken in this alien place—left a man feeling as though he’d just fallen into a bathtub full of icy water.
Ted ordered up regular patrols but kept them near to home in case the weather worsened. And when it did—the rain, at first, falling like little silver needles from a sky that was dark, close, and bruised with sickly light—no one went anywhere. All flights were grounded and the men mostly sat in gray silences, watching the drops of rain grow fat and begin to pour down with a kind of vengeance, to shatter themselves against the cold, hard ground until it seemed to be raining upward as well as down.
“If it keeps up,” Carter heard Ernie O’Day say, “he’ll have to cancel the night flights. No one would fly in the dark and freezing rain.”
“Ted might,” said George Stork.
“And the indigs might march in it,” added Wolfe, from first squadron, holding a white mug of hot coffee between his palms and rolling it slowly back and forth. “How much ground do you figure they could cover in twelve or fourteen hours, unmolested by airplanes?”
“A lot,” said Ernie.
“A lot,” said Stork.
“Damn right, a lot. This rain would be good for them. Good for their business.”
“Monkey business,” said Stork.
“Motherfucking monkey business.”
And all three of them laughed, the conversation trailing off into the awkward realization that there really wasn’t much else to say. Ted would or he wouldn’t. The pilots would or they wouldn’t. And the indigs, the same. There was no figuring it.
“Motherfucking monkey business.”
Later, the mess grew crowded and all the talk was pretty much the same. They discussed the rain and the cold, compared it to other rains and other colds. Johnny All-Around cooked freeze-dried steaks that he rubbed with some purple leaf that tasted a little bit like garlic, but not completely. Everyone sat down to dinner, but Emile Hardman refused to eat his steak, saying he wasn’t going to eat anything that’d been touched by some monkey plant.
“A patriot!” Fenn shouted from some corner of the mess. Carter hadn’t even known he was there. “I’ll eat his.”
The pilots laughed. Emile ate six cans of pears in syrup stamped with Earthside expiration dates that’d passed a year ago, and everyone drank cold beers pulled from the well of the ice machine and scotch by the bucket. They talked about fucking an indig lady and how much they’d have to be paid to do it. A hundred thousand dollars was the going rate. Fifty if they could do it from behind.
And yet still, there was no letup, no stopping. In the night, the rain turned to sleet and everyone cowered from it, hunkering down wherever they were, and the mess became like some big slumber party with everyone huddled up close and intimate and the ovens all turned on to heat the place. Around dawn the next day, the rain finally pissed itself out and the ground all froze. At the first glimmer of light in the sky, Ted came through the doors looking frozen into his uniform and ordered the planes up. They flew missions. They landed. They hopped out of their cockpits into ankle-deep, waxy mud as everything started to thaw, helped the ground crews slog their machines into the longhouse, helped them roll a new plane out onto the apron, ran to the mess for a cup of coffee, to the field house for a couple benzos from Doc Edison’s medical locker, a cigarette, then were back out on the strip again, agitating for clearance to go up, unscheduled, for kicks or for cover.
The day went on, and then the night, and then another day. And Ted, haunting the comms tent now like some kind of unquiet spirit, pacing the length of the longhouse or the aprons of the airstrips all day and all night, acting as unofficial flight coordinator whenever he wasn’t on the board as official flight controller, always said yes.
“Up!” he’d yell, jerking two thumbs to the sky. “Gas it and go!” And then a string of map coordinates, a sector to advance, some mystical schedule of ground coverage that existed, organized, in the scrambled-egg mush of his sleep-deprived mind alone. On one day, Lefty Berthold from Carter’s second squadron saw what he swore was an entire copse of trees moving across the horizon. Ted scrambled a bomb run (he’d had to fly one of the DH9s himself, being short on pilots) and blew it to matchsticks. It was nothing. Just trees. They’d only been moving in Lefty’s overheated imagination.