A Private Little War(8)
They’d been in the machine shop together, were blacked to the elbows and smudged about the face with engine oil and grease. Carter looked and Vic was there, standing in her rumpled jumpsuit and tattered leathers, smiling, eyes the color of new leaves, black hair tied back and spilling over her collar. He looked again and she was gone, having ducked out a different door, her brief passage leaving a burn on Carter’s retinas like his gaze passing across the hot light of a distant sun. Willy, too, stood confused as if wondering where she’d gone. Shrugging, he went to scrub up. Carter stood and made for his tent, consciously choosing a different door than Vic.
“Fastest disengage I’ve seen in a year,” he heard someone behind him say as he stepped out, then a cloudburst of laughter.
THE NIGHT PASSED AND THEN IT WAS DAY. Carter was off the roster, so he slept mostly, woke, flipped through an electronic copy of Rickenbacker’s book. He was looking for the good parts, the killing parts, as he thumbed through the page tabs out of habit, eyes gliding across the words like grease until there were no more and then switching to a manual on air-to-ground combat maneuvers, nicely illustrated. He told himself that he wasn’t going to get out of his bed all day, but then he did because there was no reason to stay in it. Less reason to get up, but he was bored and, somewhere, he smelled the greasy smell of hot food cooking. Meat.
It wasn’t food. The camp indigs were seeing to the mortal remains of the one that Stork had killed. They were burning him in some ooga-booga ceremony up on a hill, and the smell blowing down across the field was like hot fat and barbecue, which immediately made Carter lose his appetite. He went looking for a drink instead, and found one. Then another. Planes went up and planes came down. He saw Fenn moving between the flight line and the tents, walking like his gear weighed a wet ton, but only because he thought no one was looking. The camp indigs rattled around the rutted paths between tents in ones and twos, not seeming to be doing anything useful, not talking, just shuffling across the land like hairy ghosts, stinking like wet carpets and touching tent pegs, marking posts and the metal of generator bodies with their twitching fingers. Everything was sodden and cold, and Carter felt like he was rotting from the outside in.
Ted spent the day down on the flight line making a nuisance of himself—tapping the fuel tanks and counting bullets and bombs and guns and trigger fingers. He asked for maintenance reports, then refused to read them—slapping the folded sheafs of hard copy against his leg and walking around each plane individually, running his fingers over joints and plucking at stays like guitar strings, opening engine compartments, and looking for signs of wear that he wouldn’t have recognized had they been labeled. When he was done, Vic, Willy McElroy, and Manny had to go over everything again just to make sure Ted hadn’t fucked anything up with his fussing.
In the back rooms of the mess, Ted counted the scant supplies remaining while Johnny Roberts, the quartermaster, cook, and part-time mechanic who everyone called Johnny All-Around, watched over his shoulder and tried not to act nervous. Ted scratched down numbers on a fold of paper he kept pulling out of his pocket and then putting back in. He counted beans and he counted bags of egg powder. He sniffed at the purified water tanks. He counted rolls of shit-paper. Nothing seemed to please him. It’d been a long time since they’d last been resupplied, and they were short on just about everything, which, if nothing else, made the counting go quicker.
Around lunchtime, Ted drank instant coffee in the mess and no one came to his table to join him. Something in him burned, slow and smoky, and the smell was enough to make people change their path when they got close to him. For amusement, Ted counted tent poles and panels of canvas. He counted mugs and plates and silverware. The silverware reminded him of the hammers, and he made a note on his piece of paper to go back and count the hammers again—to see if any were still missing.
Mostly, Ted counted time: days and hours; minutes like pebbles held in the palm; seconds like grains of sand. The call he’d gotten was eating at him. He’d tried to place a couple more of his own in the time since—quietly, in the slack hours, pretending that the maddening lack of connection was precisely what he’d expected, for the benefit of anyone who might be taking notice. The calls were like smoke signals in the night. Either the other Indians were all looking in the wrong direction, or they were willfully ignoring him. Privately, he suspected that it was the latter. Was almost sure of it.
After lunch, he stepped outside. The abos were up on Signal Hill—the only rise of land in the area, a pimple on an otherwise flat plain—and they were burning something. They stood clustered in a tight circle around the fire and when Ted squinted, he thought he could see them swaying together.