Life During Wartime

trace of wistfulness at leaving them behind. He wondered what would happen after the boy had done with Gracela. He was not concerned, only curious. The way you feel when you think you may have to leave a movie before the big finish. Will our heroine survive? Will justice prevail? Will survival and justice bring happiness in their wake? Soon the end of the bridge came to be bathed in the golden rays of the sunburst; the children seemed to be blackening and dissolving in heavenly fire. That was a sufficient resolution for Mingolla. He tossed Gracela’s knife into the river and went down from the bridge in whose magic he no longer believed, walking toward the war whose mystery he had accepted as his own.

CHAPTER FIVE

At the airbase Mingolla took a stand beside the Sikorsky that had brought him to San Francisco de Juticlan; he had recognized it by the painted flaming letters of the words Whispering Death. He rested his head against the letter g and recalled how Baylor had recoiled from the letters, worried that they might transmit some deadly essence. Mingolla didn’t mind the contact. The painted flames seemed to be warming the inside of his head, stirring up thoughts as slow and indefinite as smoke. Comforting thoughts that embodied no images or ideas. Just a gentle buzz of mental activity, like the idling of an engine. The base was coming to life around him. Jeeps pulling away from barracks; a couple of officers inspecting the belly of a cargo plane; some guy repairing a forklift. Peaceful, homey. Mingolla closed his eyes, lulled into a half-sleep, letting the sun and the painted flames bracket him with heat, real and imagined.

Sometime later—how much later, he could not be sure—a voice said, ‘Fucked up your hand pretty good, didn’tcha?’

The two pilots were standing by the cockpit door. In their black flight suits and helmets they looked neither weird nor whimsical, but creatures of functional menace. Masters of the Machine. ‘Yeah,’ said Mingolla. ‘Fucked it up.’

‘How’d ya do it?’ asked the pilot on the left.

‘Hit a tree.’

‘Musta been goddamn crocked to hit a tree,’ said the pilot on the right ‘Tree ain’t goin’ nowhere if you hit it.’

Mingolla made a noncommittal noise. ‘You guys going up to the Farm?’

‘You bet! What’s the matter, man? Had enough of them wild women?’ Pilot on the right.

‘Guess so. Wanna gimme a ride?’

‘Sure thing,’ said the pilot on the left. ‘Whyn’t you climb on in front. You can sit back of us.’

‘Where your buddies?’ asked the pilot on the right.

‘Gone,’ said Mingolla as he climbed into the cockpit.

One of the pilots said, ‘Didn’t think we’d be seein’ them boys again.’

Mingolla strapped into the observer’s seat behind the copilot’s position. He had assumed there would be a lengthy instrument check, but as soon as the engines had been warmed, the Sikorsky lurched up and veered northward. With the exception of the weapons systems, none of the defenses had been activated. The radar, the thermal imager, and terrain display all showed blank screens. A nervous thrill ran across the muscles of Mingolla’s stomach as he considered the varieties of danger to which the pilots’ reliance upon their miraculous helmets had laid them open; but his nervousness was subsumed by the whispery rhythms of the rotors and his sense of the Sikorsky’s power. He recalled having a similar feeling of secure potency while sitting at the controls of his gun. He had never let that feeling grow, never let it empower him. He had been a fool.

They followed the northeasterly course of the river, which coiled like a length of blue steel razor wire between jungled hills. The pilots laughed and joked, and the flight came to have the air of a ride with a couple of good ol’ boys going nowhere fast and full of free beer. At one point the copilot piped his voice through the onboard speakers and launched into a dolorous country song:

‘Whenever we kiss, dear, our two lips meet,
And whenever you’re not with me, we’re apart.
When you sawed my dog in half, that was depressin’,
But when you shot me in the chest, you broke my heart.’

As the copilot sang, the pilot rocked the Sikorsky back and forth in a drunken accompaniment, and after the song ended, he called back to Mingolla, You believe this here son of a bitch wrote that? He did! Picks a guitar, too! Boy’s a genius!’

‘It’s a great song,’ said Mingolla, and he meant it. The song had made him happy, and that was no small thing.

They went rocking through the skies, singing the first verse over and over. But then, as they left the river behind, still maintaining a northeasterly course, the copilot pointed to a section of the jungle ahead and shouted, ‘Beaners! Quadrant four! You got ’em?’

‘Got ’em!’ said the pilot. The Sikorsky swerved down toward the jungle, shuddered, and flame veered from beneath them. An instant later, a huge swath of jungle erupted into a gout of marbled smoke and fire. ‘Whee-oo!’ the copilot sang out, jubilant. ‘Whisperin’ Death strikes again!’ With guns blazing, they went swooping through blowing veils of dark smoke. Acres of trees were burning, and still they kept up the attack. Mingolla gritted his teeth against the noise, and when at last the firing stopped, dismayed by this insanity, he sat slumped, his head down. He suddenly doubted his ability to cope with the insanity of the Ant Farm and remembered all his reasons for fear.

The copilot turned back to him. ‘You ain’t got no call to look so gloomy, man,’ he said. ‘You’re a lucky son of a bitch, y’know that?’

The pilot began a bank toward the east, toward the Ant Farm. ‘How you figure that?’

‘I gotta clear sight of you, man,’ said the copilot. ‘I can tell you for true you ain’t gonna be at the Ant Farm much longer. It ain’t clear why or nothin’. But I ’spect you gonna be wounded. Not bad, though. Just a goin’ home wound.’

As the pilot completed the bank, a ray of sun slanted into the cockpit, illuminating the copilot’s visor, and for a split second Mingolla could make out the vague shadow of the face beneath. It seemed lumpy and malformed. His imagination added details. Bizarre growths, cracked cheeks, an eye webbed shut. Like a face out of a movie about nuclear mutants. He was tempted to believe that he had really seen this; the copilot’s deformities would validate his prediction of a secure future. But Mingolla rejected the temptation. He was afraid of dying, afraid of the terrors held by life at the Ant Farm, yet he wanted no more to do with magic… unless there was magic involved in being a good soldier. In obeying the disciplines, in the practice of fierceness.

‘Could be his hand’ll get him home,’ said the pilot. ‘That hand looks pretty fucked up to me. Looks like a million-dollar wound, that hand.’

‘Naw, I don’t get it’s his hand,’ said the copilot. ‘Somethin’ else. Whatever, it’s gonna do the trick.’

Mingolla could see his own face floating in the black plastic of the copilot’s visor; he looked warped and pale, so thoroughly unfamiliar that for a moment he thought the face might be a bad dream the copilot was having.

‘What the hell’s with you, man?’ the copilot asked. ‘You don’t believe me?’

Mingolla wanted to explain that his attitude had nothing to do with belief or disbelief, that it signaled his intent to obtain a safe future by means of securing his present; but he couldn’t think how to put it into words the copilot would accept. The copilot would merely refer again to his visor as testimony to a magical reality or perhaps would point up ahead where—because the cockpit plastic had gone opaque under the impact of direct sunlight—the sun now appeared to hover in a smoky darkness: a distinct fiery sphere with a steaming corona, like one of those cabalistic emblems embossed on ancient seals. It was an evil, fearsome-looking thing, and though Mingolla was unmoved by it, he knew the pilot would see in it a powerful sign.

‘You think I’m lyin’?’ said the copilot angrily. You think I’d be bullshittin’ you ’bout somethin’ like this? Man, I