The Wailing

The four green pilots were holding formation like men afraid to spill something, and Kovacs had throttled back to two hundred knots to let them.

He had not decided to do it. He noticed it the way you notice your own hand has already moved. The throttle eased back under his glove, the manifold pressure settled, the Slot slowed down under the nose. Wide, throttled back, sitting a little high and a little to the side where he could see all four of them at once. That was how DiMaggio had flown the day he brought Kovacs up from Turtle Bay three months ago. DiMaggio, who had left pencil notes in the margins of a pilot's manual and was not coming back to explain them.

Kovacs, you are doing the DiMaggio thing, he thought. Okay. Do the DiMaggio thing.

Below and ahead the Slot ran two colors. Indigo where the channel went deep, a blue so dark it looked solid, and then a shelf of turquoise over the reefs so bright it hurt to hold. Cloud shadow slid across all of it. The islands stood up green on either side, Russell somewhere off the nose under a stack of morning cumulus, and the whole thing was so beautiful and so large that a man could forget it was also a chart with a fuel problem printed on it.

He did the recap for himself in his head the way he checked a fuel gauge, out of habit, because the numbers held the world still. Last tour: eleven names by the end of it, and the war had rotated the rest back to Espiritu Santo, new orders and new men, and now the field was new and the pilots were new and the war was crawling north toward a strip called Munda that nobody in this formation owned yet.

His notebook rode in his breast pocket against his heart, the way it had ridden since the second of March. He could feel the corner of it through the flight suit when he breathed in. Eleven cents in San Diego. Soft at the corners now. He knew without looking what the last page said.

"Two, you are sliding out." He kept his voice flat and easy on the radio, the way Tully kept his. "Bring it in. You are not going to break it. Just bring it in."

Number Two brought it in. Overcorrected, drifted, settled. The kid's Corsair rocked once and steadied and Kovacs watched the wingtip find its place off his own and thought, there, that is it, that is exactly it, and did not say the second part out loud because saying it out loud embarrassed everybody.

They were good. That was the thing about them that turned his stomach a little. They were young and rested and their aircraft were clean and their goggles were not scratched yet, and they flew like men who believed the sky was a place you could learn. He remembered believing that. He could not put his hand on the day he had stopped.

The smell in the cockpit was the smell it always was. Avgas sweet through the firewall, hot oil, and under both of them the wet rubber of the oxygen mask hanging unclipped at his throat, warm from his own breath. Familiar as his uncle's meat locker in Braddock. He breathed it and it steadied him and he hated a little that it steadied him.

They crossed a reef line and the water went from turquoise to a green with light in the bottom of it.

The radio keyed. A green voice, Number Three, young and trying to sound like it was not asking a real question.

"Hey, Banshee lead." A breath. "What is it actually like? Combat. Nobody back at Santo would say. They just, they change the subject. What is it actually like?"

On an open channel. In front of all four of them, and anyone else on the frequency, and the water, and God.

Kovacs put his thumb on the transmit key.

He had a hundred answers and every one of them was a lie in a different direction. The true answer would ground the kid before Munda ever got the chance. The kind answer would get him killed believing it. And somewhere under the two of them, rising the way it had risen the very first time he took a Corsair up and wrote sounds like screaming in a new notebook, the wing-root whistle came up thin and high into the base of his skull, into his back teeth, into the small bones of his hand on the key.

He held the key down. One second. Two.

He let it go without saying anything.

At oh-six-forty on the ninth of June the coral was already too bright to stand on without the eyes going to water, and Corrigan walked the length of it anyway because a man learned a runway with his boots.

Four thousand seven hundred feet. The Seabees had finished it this month and the grader marks were still in the surface, long parallel scars the rollers had pressed flat and the rain had not yet found. It took his weight like poured concrete. Nothing gave. On Guadalcanal the Marston mat had breathed under a man, flexed and clicked, a live thing that told you where it was tired. This told him nothing. It was so new it had no opinion of him yet, and he did not trust anything that had no opinion of him yet.

The coral dust was already in his teeth. A chalk taste, dry, faintly of the sea it had been a reef in. He worked his jaw and it stayed.

He carried the tasking folded in his breast pocket against the crucifix, and he had read it enough times on the flight up that he carried it whole, without taking it out. VMF-333 to Munda. Stage through the Russells at the discretion of the squadron commander. Effective on receipt. He turned the sentence over the way he turned everything over, looking for the part that would cost him men, and the part that would cost him men was the whole of it. Munda was the objective. Munda was also, this morning, an enemy field, and every Zero that would rise off it to meet his squadron was already sitting in a revetment two hundred miles north with a full tank and a pilot who had slept. At the discretion of the squadron commander. They gave him the discretion and kept the timetable. That was how it always worked. The men who wrote at your discretion were never the men who flew.

He reached the north end and stood in the glare and let the weight of it settle on him, which was a thing he did on purpose. Then he took out the notebook.

Not the official form. The official form was tan and had a serial number and lived in the adjutant's box, and when a man died it was where the Marine Corps wrote him down. The notebook was canvas-covered and the width of his hand and it was his. He had bought it in a stationer's in Quincy the week before he shipped, and his grandmother, had she lived to see it, would have known the hand he kept it in, the slanted parochial-school hand she had beaten into his mother, who had beaten it into him.

He wrote the date. He wrote the ten names of the men who had come up from Santo, the ones who had lived through the last tour, and he knew the order without having to reach for it, the way he knew the stations of the cross. Then he wrote the six replacements under a rule he drew across the page, the six he had brought north to be made into something or spent, he did not yet know which. He never knew which. He was not permitted to know which. That was the discipline and the discipline was the only mercy the job allowed: you counted them all the same until the count told you otherwise.

The counting is the job, he thought. The record is mine.

A jeep came up the taxiway and stopped and the base operations officer got out with a clipboard and the particular briskness of a man who had a form to fill. He wanted a launch date. He wanted a strength figure by noon for the daily.

"You will have both," Corrigan said, "when I have walked every aircraft."

"Sir, the daily closes at—"

"When I have walked every aircraft."

The lieutenant looked at the notebook in Corrigan's hand and decided against whatever he had been going to say, and got back in the jeep.

Corrigan wrote one more line at the foot of the page, under the sixteen names, in the hand his grandmother would have known.

Ten and six. Munda is theirs. We are told it will be ours.

He read it back.

He did not underline anything. The counting is the job.

Six green men put up a tent badly and Kovacs let them.

He knew how to pitch a ready tent in eleven minutes. He had learned it the hard way at Turtle Bay, from a corporal named Reyes who slowed down for nobody, and he could have had this one square and drum-tight in the time it took the six of them to argue about which way the ridge pole went. But he stood back in the coral glare with his hands in his pockets and let them do it wrong, because doing it wrong was how you learned the tent, and the tent was the least of what they had to learn.

They were doing the thing. He watched them do the thing and something in his chest went sideways.

They were memorizing each other. That was what it looked like from outside. Six men learning six faces and six names in a hurry, the way you did in the first hour, before you knew which ones you would want and which ones you would avoid. Coker had appointed himself foreman and nobody had voted. Sutton, who was small and quick, had already found the funny angle on everything and was working it. A tall Minnesota kid named Lindqvist said almost nothing and did most of the actual work. Kovacs catalogued them without meaning to. Kovacs, he told himself, do not do that. You know how this goes.

Somebody tacked the map to the center pole. The Northern Solomons, hand-drawn, the islands not quite the right shape, Munda a pencil circle up in the corner with the name printed too small. They gathered at it the way men gather at a map, close, quiet, as if the paper were an authority. He remembered doing exactly that. He remembered believing the map.

One of them found the geckos in the ridge pole and made the geckos a joke, and the others laughed too hard, and Kovacs understood that too, the laughing too hard. It was the same laugh he had laughed. You laughed at the geckos so you had a reason for your face to be doing something.

The tent smelled of hot new canvas and, under it, the citronella they had already slathered on against the flies, and the two smells together were so much like the loading dock behind his uncle Imre's shop in Braddock, creosote and something sweet gone off, that for a second he was nine years old and holding a crate too big for him and pretending it was not too big.

He sat down on the warm Coca-Cola crate and took out the notebook.

He wrote the date. He wrote the field, Banika, Russell Islands, and he noticed, writing it, that his letters had gotten smaller. Not neater. Smaller. Tighter on the line, less air around them, the way a man writes when he has learned that ink runs out and paper does not come up the harbor road as often as men do. Three months ago he had written big and open and underlined things twice. He did not underline things twice anymore.

He wrote the six names. Coker. Sutton. Lindqvist. The other three.

He did not write come home. He had written come home on the second of March, in the sharp block print, and underlined it, and he was not going to write it again, because writing it had not made it true for the eleven it was written about, and a man who kept writing a thing the war kept breaking was a man asking the notebook to lie to him. That was the whole distance between the kid who came up to Turtle Bay and the man sitting on the Coke crate. He kept the true details now. He left the wishes off the page.

From over by the tent line a harmonica started.

Lindqvist. He had pulled it out of his flight suit without looking to see if anyone was near, the way you do a thing that is only for yourself, and he played four bars of something slow, a hymn or a hymn's country cousin, and stopped, embarrassed, as if the tent had caught him praying.

Kovacs looked at the six names.

He put his pencil to the paper and wrote one word beside Lindqvist's, because it was a true detail and the notebook was where the true details went.

Harmonica.

He had the word down before he understood what he had just started to do.