A Private Little War(92)
The next day they’d caught Jacob in the room alone and beaten him for not telling them earlier—smiling and laughing and offering their congratulations, only slightly tinged with jealousy. His life was going to be so much easier than theirs, they knew. So much less complicated, even if he became a carrier for the next generation.
And then, just like that, Carter had them again—his mother in her party dress, his brothers’ faces. It was that moment that’d triggered the recall: the memory of him and Mark grabbing Jacob by the arms and shaking him, pounding him on the back, and Jacob’s bewildered expression at the sudden, violent attention. He smiled in the perfumed quiet of Vic’s tent, Vic’s bed. He started to laugh, remembering Jacob’s sputtering denials being subsumed by giggles, his fluttering hands, his finally bouncing up and down in place like he was dancing. He’d been happy, too. He’d refused to give back the pictures.
Carter’s eyes teared. He squeezed his lips together. He finally had to pull one of the crumpled pillows from behind his head and press it over his face, at which point he was washed in the scent of Vic’s hair, Vic’s skin, and, like changing gears, his brain suddenly went in a completely different direction.
Raised voices outside, on the flight line, interrupted him. He got dressed quickly and went to see what the clamor was all about.
It was nothing. Or anyway, not much. Lefty Berthold and Lambert rolling around on the ground in front of an audience, planes scattered on the apron. Everyone was getting a little hinky from the stress, the drink, the lack of sleep. It manifested itself in strange ways. Carter watched while Emile Hardman flicked a cigarette at the two men knotted on the ground. Someone else slapped Lambert on the ass. No one moved to break the two men up until Ted was sighted striding in the direction of the flight line and then, all of a sudden, everyone did.
No one was hurt. No one could even remember what it’d been about. Carter had seen Vic from across the field and she had seen him, too. Their eyes had met and there was a jolt as from a low-grade electric shock—not as powerful as last night, but still there. They’d spent some of their charge on each other, and what they’d gotten back was less than what they’d put out.
That’d been the point, Carter thought. But he wasn’t sure.
Carter flew. Carter landed. Carter flew again. Roadrunner was released from the shop after a complete overhaul and refit. Roadrunner was put back into the shop under specific orders from Ted that one of the new engines be put in her. A massive fifteen-cylinder monstrosity with turbochargers like corded muscle. Without even laying a hand on the stick, without even seeing her, Carter knew what the results would be. Slow to climb, hard to lift, wicked through the turns and screaming hell in a dive. Also, he thought, it would probably kill him. It was an experimental engine, and though the Flyboy engineers were good, “experimental” often meant recalcitrant, temperamental, explosive, or worse. The airframe had originally been designed for a few hundred horsepower, stabilized somewhat against the pull of the rotary. This new monstrosity would put out almost a thousand and torque enough to twist the entire plane into a giant’s corkscrew.
In his off hours, Carter would try to sleep. He would read. He and Fenn would talk about nothing or just lie, in silence, and stare at the fluttering canvas, though the two of them seeing each other was rare now, one or the other of them always being up with their squadron. He’d tried once to tell Fenn about what he’d heard outside Ted’s tent that night—about Ted and Eddie, the nerve gas, the conversation he’d overheard in the tent and how Ted was still fighting, still in it, counting the seconds on that clock of his like he was just waiting for Eddie to be out of his hair. It’d sounded to him like Eddie was ready to chuck it all and pull out. To run like a coward now, just when things were getting interesting. Carter’d tried to bring it up, but the moment was just never right.
He would see Vic or he wouldn’t, depending on variables too complex to calculate. One day they had coffee together like two normal people, sitting across from each other at a steel mess table, holding tin cups in their hands, and smiling like they were somewhere else. Carter told her the story about him and Mark and Jacob and the penises, and she’d laughed—the sound of it seeming to push outward and form a bubble around them where nothing could go wrong. Later, they’d carried that bubble with them to bed and rolled around in it, on musty sheets in need of laundering. Vic lay with her head buried in a pillow to muffle the rough noises she made, her dark hair spread like a fan across the pale skin of her back. Carter had shoved a crate against the door so they wouldn’t be interrupted. They weren’t fooling anyone, but it didn’t matter. They kept it up until the warmth of the two of them together beat back the cold and the damp and the war, and then they lay side by side, faceup and facedown, one of his legs thrown across one of hers, and listened to the sounds of things falling apart.