Christopher Buckley - Wet Work

"No!"

"Good. Here. I'm gonna take her in a little lower this time."

Charley tugged on another pin and eased forward on the stick. Treetops skimmed by underneath.

He slapped in another banana clip and planted his feet and covered the tree line with the barrel of the AK, just as his father had taught him to do when shooting from the number eight position at a low bird.

The chopper came out of the woods. He swung the barrel as he fired. Then saw the tiny specks tumbling out. He stopped firing and threw himself to the ground. The explosions were close this time. When he lifted his head, it was to see the girl's leg in front of him, she peering down at him with that remote stare of curiosity. "I love you."

The inside of the chopper filled with smoke; alarms buzzed on the instrument panel.

"What does that mean?" Hot Stick coughed.

"Means we're on fire."

"Jesus, we're on fire! We're on fire!"

"Here." He tossed Hot Stick another grenade. Charley pulled the pin, pushed down on the stick and began his last charge. For if he like a madman lived / At least he like a wise one died. More the reverse in his case, but the line came to him all the same.

He didn't lead it as much this time. He saw an arm reaching out of the starboard window and emptied his clip at it, saw sparks, smoke. He lowered the rifle and in the next instant heard the explosion and looked in the direction of the chemical shed in time to see five thousand gallons of ether and acetone igniting.

Charley felt something sharp in the vicinity of his right leg. The chopper kept wanting to turn in circles and he had to work the controls hard. He'd lost half his RPMs in his tail rotor, the oil pressure was down to nothing, loud knocking sounds were coming from the undercarriage and when he looked down to see what it was he noticed his pants leg was torn and wet.

"You okay?" he shouted over at Hot Stick. He couldn't see with all the smoke. He pulled the emergency-door release and instantly the air cleared inside. Hot Stick was slumped forward over his controls, held by his harness, hands limp by his sides. The left side of his helmet was holed where the bullet had exited.

He had almost no control by the time he saw the ship. He set down so hard on the deck that it bounced and the tail spun around and chopped up the antennae and part of the smokestack. Charley was knocked out from the impact. He dreamed it very clearly: saw the chopper drop into the water and sink bathyspherically, bub-bub-bubbling down into the silty murk of the Huallaga; then there were dolphins, pink dolphins like the kind you'd expect to meet only in a hangover, making faces at him through the Plexiglas bubble. He heard Felix's voice saying, "Boss, boss," but what was Felix doing, swimming with pink dolphins?

The fire burned into the afternoon. The heat was so intense the men kept dropping from exhaustion and dehydration. It began to spread toward the number four pozo , where an acre of coca leaves lay macerating in kerosene and sulfuric acid. If that caught, the Andes themselves would go up in smoke. He ran to the shed and started up the bulldozer and drove it out, stripping gears as he went and plowed a shallow trench between the advancing flames and the edge of the combustible pit. The handles were hot by the time the firebreak was complete.

He walked back to the field in front of the house. His beautiful field, which he used for croquet. Scarred, scorched. Soledad was crouched over something in the distance. She was wearing only white panties that emphasized the lack of any other article. He'd told her not to go naked in front of the men. It was not an easy concept to explain to Soledad, especially with his limited command of her language, until one day Eladio had told him of a saying among the men of the tribe: "Your eyes have gone bad from staring at the privates of too many women." He'd put it to her that way: don't ruin the eyes of my men, please, I depend on their eyes. He'd given her a brassiere, a very sexy one with lace; she fashioned it into a slingshot. For a moment he forgot about the fire and watched her. His eyes wandered across the field and fastened on something that resisted recognition. He approached and stared at it.

The markings on the fuselage said NAVY. It had gone in straight, skewering his croquet field with its Pitot tube. He stared.

"Samin," he shouted. "Give me your rifle." He raised Samin's AK and fired a burst into the repellent object, which obliged by exploding into small pieces that scattered themselves, like flaming leaves, over the already harrowed field. The girl, hunched over whatever it was, raised her head only briefly.

The needlelike Pitot tube was still stuck in the grass; the rest had blown up. He stormed over and gave the needle a good kick. It tumbled like a thrown knife and landed some feet away.

"Toy planes," he shouted. "He comes for me with toy planes! "

"Soledad!" he shouted. The girl made no answer. "What are you doing?"

Virgilio came running to say that they'd found Beni-or what was left of him. Virgilio thought he'd been shot before the fire did the rest.

"Good," said El Niño. "It saves me from having to shoot him myself."

Virgilio looked at Samin, Samin at Virgilio. Each decided it would be best to be somewhere else, and ran off, declaring a remembered emergency.

El Niño walked to where the girl was. "What are you-"

It was a howler monkey that had been blasted out of the trees by the force of the explosion when the chemical shed ignited. The monkeys had lost their fear of man over the years and clambered in the trees close to the compound to scavenge. Its fur was smoking.

She smiled at him and handed him a piece of torn-off flesh. Such bounty. Food from the sky-already cooked!

He wheeled away and staggered off. He took deep breaths, telling himself that his reaction was irrational, that she was Indian, to her it was just-food; then he leaned over and threw up.

Charley came to propped up on a pillow on the settee underneath the Gainsborough.

The pain was in his head, in the center of his forehead. He reached up and felt something sharp protruding. Felix was sitting beside him.

"What is this?" Charley said, fingering the object.

"It's a piece of glass. I'm going to get it out."

Charley tugged. His fingers were wet with blood; they kept slipping. Charley watched the blood course in rivulets down onto his chest and onto the Naugahyde settee. Margaret had chosen the neutral gray color because Tasha was always spilling things. He felt the blood puddle under his elbows. He blinked. A silvery jet of liquid flew through the air over his head. Felix had a hypodermic.

"What is that?"

"Morphine."

"No. Need a clear head." Felix tried to pull the glass out with tweezers. They kept slipping.

"Use pliers," said Charley. "Whiskey. Bring the bottle."

Charley stared up at Augustus John, third Earl of Bristol. He had never studied it from this angle, looking right up the earl's nose.

Felix returned with a pair of needle-nose pliers and a bottle of Jack Daniel's. Charley took a long pull. Felix went to work. The piece of glass was in there. Charley groaned.

"Gimme that needle." He took the hypodermic and squirted the morphine into the whiskey, shook it up and took another long pull.

"I don't think you're supposed to drink it," said Felix.

"They do in England. Ain't that right, Augustus? It's called a Brompton cocktail-heroin and vodka. They give it to terminal folks." Felix went back to work.

"You know… Gainsborough hated to paint portraits?"

"Yeah," said Felix, getting a grip on the glass shard.

"What he really loved was landscapes. He married a woman with rich tastes and… he had two girls and they inherited their mama's tastes, so… he… had to spend all his time painting pictures of rich folks… to pay the bills."