“I asked you once for your promise, and you would not give it,” McGregor said. “I’m going to ask you again.” He folded his arms across his chest and waited to hear what his son would say. If Alexander said no…He didn’t know what he would do if Alexander said no.
His son let out a long, deep sigh, the sigh not of a boy but of a man facing up to the fact that the world doesn’t work the way he wished it would. It was the most grown-up noise McGregor had ever heard from him. At last, voice full of regret, he said, “All right, Pa. I promise.”
“Promise what, Alexander?” That was Mary, coming out of the kitchen, where she’d been putting away the plates her mother had washed and her big sister dried.
“Promise to tickle you till you scream like there’s American soldiers coming down the chimney instead of Santa Claus,” Alexander said, and made as if to grab her. That could be dangerous; she fought as ferociously as a half-tame farm cat.
But now she hopped back, laughing. She turned to Arthur McGregor. “What did he promise, Pa?”
“To be a good boy,” McGregor said. Mary snorted. That sort of promise meant nothing to her. McGregor had to hope it meant something to her brother.
IV
Jonathan Moss peered down at his whiskey, then up toward the ceiling of the officers’ club; the rafters were blurry not from the effects of drink-though he’d had a good deal-but because of the haze of tobacco smoke. He knocked back the whiskey, then signaled the colored steward behind the bar for another one.
“Yes, sir,” the fellow said, and passed him a fresh glass full of the magical amber fluid that inflamed and numbed at the same time.
His tentmates sat around the table: Daniel Dudley, who usually went by “Dud,” the flight leader; Tom Innis, fierce as a wolf; and Zach Whitby, new in the tent, replacing a casualty, and still a little hesitant on the ground because of that. None of the four lieutenants was far past twenty. All of them wore twin-winged pilot’s badges on the left breast pockets of their uniform tunics.
Tom Innis got a villainous pipe going. Its fumes added to those already crowding the air. Moss flapped a hand in his direction. “Here,” he said, “don’t start shooting poison gas at us.”
“You should talk, those cheroots you smoke,” Innis retorted, running a hand over his brown, peltlike Kaiser Bill mustache. “They smell like burning canvas painted with aeroplane dope.”
Since that was at least half true, Moss didn’t argue with it. He leaned back in his chair, almost overbalancing. Dud Dudley spotted that, as he might have spotted a Canuck aeroplane with engine trouble trying to limp back toward Toronto. “How are you supposed to handle a fighting scout when you can’t even fly a chair?” he demanded.
“Well, hell.” Moss landed awkwardly. “When I’m up in a fighting scout, I’ll be sober. It does make a difference.”
That struck all four men as very funny, probably because none of them was sober. The weather had been too thick to fly for several days now, leaving the pilots with nothing to do but fiddle with their aeroplanes and gather in the officers’ club to drink. As Moss had found the year before, winter in Ontario sometimes shut down operations for weeks at a time.
He sipped his fresh whiskey and looked around the club. Other groups of pilots and observers had their own circles, most of them raucous enough that they paid little attention to the racket he and his friends were making. On the walls were pictures of the fliers who had served at the aerodrome: some posed portraits, some snapshots of groups of them or of them sitting jauntily in the cockpits of their aeroplanes, a few with their arms around pretty girls. Moss hadn’t had much luck along those lines; most Canadian girls wanted little to do with the Americans who occupied their country.
A lot of the pilots in the photographs were men he’d never known, men killed before he’d joined the squadron as a replacement, new as Zach Whitby. Others had died after Moss came here: Luther Carlsen, for instance, whose place Whitby was taking. The rest were survivors…up till now. The quick and the dead, he thought.
Also on the walls were souvenirs of the aerial action that had accompanied the grinding, slogging American advance through southern Ontario toward-but, all plans aside, not yet to-Toronto: blue, white, and red roundels cut from the canvas of destroyed enemy machines. Some were from British aeroplanes, with all three colors being circles, others from native Canadian aircraft, where the red in the center was painted in the shape of a maple leaf.
Along with the roundels were a couple of two-bladed wooden propellers, also spoils of war. Seeing the souvenirs-or rather, noticing them-made Jonathan Moss proud for a moment. But his mood swung with whiskey-driven speed. “I wonder how many canvas eagles the Canucks and the limeys have in their officers’ clubs,” he said.
“Too damn many,” Zach Whitby said. “Even one would be too damn many.”
“We might as well enjoy ourselves,” Dud Dudley said, “because we aren’t going to live through the damned war any which way.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Innis said, and did.
The quick and the dead, Moss thought again. The hell of it was, Dudley was right, or the odds said he was, which amounted to the same thing. Moss looked again at those photographs of vanished fliers. Back in the observers’ unit from which he’d transferred after his photographer was wounded, they’d had a similar display. One of these days, would Zach be explaining to some newcomer still wet behind the ears who he’d been and what he’d done? Contemplating things like that was plenty to make you want to crawl into a whiskey bottle and pull the cork in after you.
The door to the officers’ club opened. Captain Shelby Pruitt, the squadron commander, walked in. With him came a blast of cold Ontario air. Some of the smoke in the big room escaped, though not enough to do much good.
“I want to tell you miserable drunks something,” Pruitt said loudly, and waited till he got something approaching quiet before going on, “Word from the weathermen in Manitoba is that they’ve had a couple of days of clear weather, and it’s heading our way. We may be flying tomorrow. You don’t want to drink yourselves altogether blind.”
“Who says we don’t?” Tom Innis demanded.
“I say so,” Pruitt answered mildly, and Innis nodded, all at once meek as a child. The squadron commander hadn’t earned his nickname of “Hardshell” by breathing fire every chance he found, but he expected obedience-and got it. Like Moss’ previous CO, he not only commanded the squadron but also flew with it, and he’d knocked down four enemy aeroplanes on his own, even if he was, by the standards of the men who flew fighting scouts, somewhere between middle-aged and downright doddering.
Zach Whitby waved to the bartender. “Coffee!” he called. “I got to sober me up. We run into any limeys up there, I don’t want to do anything stupid.”
“Hell with coffee,” Innis said. “Hell with sobering up too much, too. I’d rather fly with a hangover-it makes me mean.”
“I’ll have my coffee in the morning, and some aspirin to go with it,” Moss said. “If I load up on java now, I won’t sleep for beans tonight. We go up there, we ought to be in the best shape we can.” Dudley nodded. Moss had noticed that he and his flight leader often thought alike.
Under Hardshell Pruitt’s inexorable stare, the officers’ lounge emptied. Fliers scrawled their names on bar chits and strode, or sometimes lurched, off to their cots. Pruitt sped them to their rest with a suggestion that struck Moss as downright sadistic: “Here’s hoping Canuck bombing planes don’t come over tonight.”
His was not the only groan rising into the chilly night. The thought of enduring a bombing raid while hung over was not one to inspire delight. As things were…“The groundcrew will be cleaning puke off somebody’s control panel tomorrow,” he predicted.