They climbed through the belly hatch of the B-25 and into the cockpit. Miguel slipped into the left-hand seat and Tom into the right.
“Okay,” Miguel said. “Let’s go with the check list.”
Tom held the plastic-coated sheet in his hand and read off the items in a flat, hard voice. Miguel could lose himself in the ritual of flying, and he did so now, touching or setting each control as Tom read from the list.
“Battery cart?”
Miguel glanced outside to see if the cart was connected and the line chief gave him a four-oh.
“Cart connected.”
“Master switch?”
“On.”
“Cross feed and gas?”
“On. Reserve tank.”
“Mixtures?”
“Idle cutoff.”
“Prop pitch?”
“High RPM.”
“Cowl flaps?”
“Open.”
It was a litany as natural in question and response as breathing. “Superchargers?”
“Low blower.”
“Hydraulic pressure?”
Miguel checked the wobble pump. The pressure indicators came to life. “Check.”
“Trim?”
“Set for take-off.”
“Generators?”
“Off.”
“Autopilot?”
“Off.”
“Gyros caged?”
“Check.”
“That’s it.”
Miguel opened the cockpit window and shouted to the crewman standing on the ramp with the firebottle. “Clear left!”
He engaged the starter and the big propeller blades rotated jerkily until the engine caught with a puff of blue oil smoke from the exhaust. He moved the mixture control to Auto-rich and set the idle. He motioned to Tom to watch his side and started the starboard engine.
“Call the tower,” he said.
Tom got the take-off clearance and they taxied the Mitchell out to the end of the concrete mat. Miguel swung the ship to a forty-five-degree angle with the take-off line and set the parking brake. He began the engine run-up and Tom checked the magnetos without being told.
“Okay,” Miguel said. “Get the list again.”
Tom held the check list. His knuckles were white and there was a set tenseness around his mouth. Miguel said impatiently, “Come on, read it out.”
“Flaps?”
“Set for take-off.”
“Cylinder head temperature?”
“Check.”
“Hydraulic pressure, fuel pressure?”
“Normal.”
“Gyros?”
“Uncaged and set. That does it,” Miguel said. “You want the take-off?”
Tom looked away and shook his head.
“Go on,” Miguel said. “Ill check you.”
Tom’s eyes were flinty. “I said I didn’t want it!”
Miguel said, “What’s browned you off this morning?”
Tom said nothing. He turned his face to the cockpit window. The tower was telling them to clear the runway for a pair of B-24s in the landing pattern. Miguel squared the Mitchell away and opened the throttles.
He couldn’t worry about Tom right now. The problems of flight were his only concern.
As the bomber became airborne, he signaled Tom to raise the gear. Tom did nothing. Miguel shot him a look and raised the wheels himself.
He milked up the flaps alone, too, and banked the Mitchell out of the pattern and into a long, shallow climb to the east.
The sun sparkled on the water of San Pablo Bay. Oil storage tanks, like silver pillboxes, dotted the Richmond shore. Ahead and below lay the intricate, mechano-set cantilever span of the Carquinez Bridge. To the left lay the orderly confusion of gray ships at Mare Island. Luis had been into Mare Island only last week, but Miguel had missed him because he had been on a flight to Dallas. He had called home to see if Becky or Raoul had seen him, but Luis hadn’t gone home at all. And now he was out again with a new ship somewhere. He was a full commander now. His shipmates thought him an iron-ass. There was talk that he had turned down the post of assistant naval attaché in Madrid. If it was true, Miguel thought, it was because Luis thought Raoul had something to do with it.
At 5,000 feet, Miguel shook Tom’s shoulder and said, “You take it now.”
Tom knocked Miguel’s hand away.
Miguel was conscious of a tiny bead, cold and hurtful, solidifying in his belly. Tom had heard the talk. There could be no other explanation for his action. For a moment, Miguel considered turning back to the field. But what reason could he give Colonel Holman for wanting to leave Tom on the ground?
“Tom,” Miguel said.
“Fly the goddam airplane and shut up,” Tom said. His face was gray, his lips bloodless.
They flew in silence. The bomber climbed into the still, blue air. Miguel sat mute, his hands on the control wheel, his feet on the rudder pedals. Surely there was something that needed to be said—some apology to lessen the tension.
There was nothing. He knew himself to be hopelessly enmeshed in a situation beyond his control now. He remembered the days on the river, the years at Roslyn, the times and places he had shared with Tom. I had a friend, he thought. I had one. Period. Past tense. Stupid, stupid son of a bitch. Was any woman worth this? He thought of Nora, of her little cries of passion, the way she arched herself against you, the thrust of her hips against you with those pelvic bones like satin-covered blades—
Tom’s hands lay in his lap, clenching and unclenching. Miguel could see a muscle twitching in his cheek. What would I be thinking right now? Miguel wondered. I’d want to kill someone.
Miguel pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes and blinked at the spears of glaring sunlight reflecting from the polished aluminum skin of the nose section.
Anson said, he was thinking, if you want to be a writer, kid, you have to really live—God, is that what he had been doing for so long? Then Brutus, Absalom and Judas must have been pretty damned good and how come they didn’t ever write anything?
When David wanted Bathsheba he at least had the decency to send Uriah out to be killed. I’ve made him my co-pilot, Miguel thought. What the goddam hell am I thinking about anyway, Tom’s just in a mood—he doesn’t know anything—
The valley below was dappled with scattered clouds. The twisting delta of the Sacramento River gave way to ordered farmlands, speckled with shadows. The city of Sacramento itself lay hidden under a solid stratus deck that gave way to tumbled cumulus over the foothills and then soared high to join the picket line of cumulo-nimbus over the high crests. The thunder-heads reached almost to thirty thousand; their anvilheads flaking off into mare’s tails of ice in the dark blue of the tropopause.
Miguel tuned in the Sacramento Range and asked for the Donner Summit weather. A woman’s voice came back through the headphones.
“Army 3209, this is Sacramento Radio—“ Miguel could picture her sitting before her microphone in a striped white-and-orange shack planted on the dark soil of the central valley and the four tall antennae pointing like bayonets at the lowering skies. “Donner Summit reports two hundred feet and two miles intermittent in snow flurries. Wind west two one miles with gusts to three oh. Altimeter two nine nine nine. What is your position, 3209?”
“Army 3209 one five miles south of your station on top at angels one one. We will not be able to remain in contact, Sacramento. Please notify Air Traffic Control and Army Airways we are changing to instrument flight rules. Over.”
“Wilco, 3209. Sacramento Radio out.”
Ahead of them the undercast was rising swiftly to meet their track. Miguel pulled the Mitchell’s nose into a climb again. The weather was building up heavily ahead. Miguel decided to try to pick his way through the thunderheads, avoiding them when he could, and bulling it through when evasion was impossible. It was safe enough in a good airplane, but it would be rough. He could see the swirls of dirty gray as they flew into the shadow of the clouds.
&n
bsp; Miguel turned to Tom. “You all right?”
“Don’t worry about me. Worry about yourself.”
Miguel studied Toms face and it was the fight at the river all over again. “All right,” he said. “We’ll go ahead.”
The bomber plunged into the wall of storm at two hundred and sixty miles an horn:.
There came that familiar rustle of rain and hail on the metal skin of the airplane. St. Elmo’s Fire glowed on the propeller tips. The turbulence of the air grew severe and Miguel heard Tom gasp as they banged through some sharp vertical gusts. The horizons disappeared and the world went dark gray. Moisture streaked the windscreen and began to freeze there.
A brilliant electric-blue lightning flash burned the sky, leaving black and red afterimages in the eyes.
A downdraft caught them and they dropped four hundred feet in the space of a heartbeat. Almost immediately, they flew into the compensating updraft with the port wing. The airplane pitched up to a fifty-degree bank before Miguel could fight it level again. Miguel could feel protest in every rivet as the massive forces of the thundercloud ripped at the airframe.
His hands were sweaty under his flying gloves and his back and shoulders ached. The flight instruments were gyrating and the storm sizzled and crackled in his headphones.
He called over to Tom, “Put some of your muscle on this wheel and give me a hand till we get through.”
Tom shook his head slowly. Miguel looked at him and made a sudden decision. There was a glazed look in Tom’s eyes. He wasn’t right. They had to go back. It had been idiotic to come this far. He should have known Tom was ready to break wide open.
Tom said something Miguel couldn’t hear.
“What? What did you say?”
“Why did it have to be you?” Tom yelled suddenly. “Why did it have to be you, you son of a bitch?”
“Shut up, Tom,” Miguel said sharply, his eyes on the instrument turn to get them out of the storm and into calmer air. He’d make some excuse for landing at Sacramento. Tom’s frame of mind was a danger to them both.
Suddenly, Tom sensed his decision and unfastened his safety belt. Before Miguel realized what he was doing he had reached up and pressed both feathering buttons. It was as though the airplane had slammed into a brick wall. The engine RPM dropped sharply, the engines detonated fiercely as they labored against the coarsening pitch of the propeller blades.
The bomber lost speed, mushed sickeningly. Miguel banged the nose down hard to prevent a sudden stall. They dove out of the overcast into a narrow valley. Miguel caught a glimpse of a narrow strip of highway, of snow-dusted conifers. He heard himself yelling, “You crazy bastard, what do you think you’re doing—” Tom was slack-faced, all the fight gone out of him. Miguel slammed the throttles and pitch controls against the stops. There was a lurching roar from the motors. Clouds closed in around them momentarily and then Miguel saw a flash of gray rocks. Something banged against the underside of the fuselage. He thought: This is absurd my God we’re going to smash into the goddam mountain—
He slapped at the switches and tried to get the flaps down. Tips of trees began scraping along the belly with a hollow, tearing noise. Miguel heaved his weight against the wheel, trying to lift the airplane over the mass of green to reach a snowy firebreak ahead.
All he could think of was Sandy, Sandy blazing like a torch and screaming—
There was a series of sharp cracks, distinct as pistol shots as the airplane angled down through the treetops, snapping them off like matchsticks. The white earth rushed at them. Miguel felt the belly strike. The propellers bent crazily back over the nacelles. There was an oscillating, rolling movement and visibility was gone in a shower of flying snow and ice. There was a thunderous boom as a heavier tree tore a wing from the fuselage. Icy air rushed through the ruptured cockpit. Miguel felt a knife-blade slice across his abdomen and he pitched forward against the control wheel and the instrument panel met his forehead. There was a flash outside and a crackling, tearing noise followed by an oily flame-orange explosion and he felt himself spinning and then smashed to pieces against a chill wetness and then at last there was silence.
He awoke in an icy gray light, pain throbbing in his head and across his groin.
Nearby, a blackened motor sprouted twisted, curled propeller blades like some ugly, pale flower.
He looked around him with swollen, bruised eyes. He could see the shallow, descending path of the bomber’s descent through the trees.
The fuselage had broken in two. The rear half and the stub of a wing still burned with an oily, smoky flame.
He realized that he had been thrown clear somehow. He couldn’t think quite straight. Everything seemed distorted and confused. He had been flying with Tom—that much he could remember.
He tried to move to ease the pain in his groin and he found that the seat had been thrown from the cockpit and he was still strapped to it, half crouching, half sitting in the snow.
The wreckage ticked and creaked. Several fires were burning fitfully in the forest, and there were bits of twisted dural everywhere.
He unfastened the seat belt and rolled onto his knees. The pain in his head made him dizzy. His face was sticky and as he moved, a warmth flowed over his forehead and into his eves.
He had the brand of the crashed pilot, he thought vaguely. The torn scalp.
He looked around for Tom. His chest ached and his groin throbbed, too. The belt had tried to cut him in two at the impact.
He stumbled to his feet and stood for a moment, legs apart, head hanging, as the waves of pain cleared his head. He started toward the unburned section of the airplane calling Tom. There was no answer.
Now he remembered a little more. Tom had done something crazy. He had wanted to die. He had tried to kill them both by doing something crazy. Anger knotted in his throat. He grew furious with Tom and he muttered obscenities as he staggered through the soft snow.
He fell and the pain in his middle doubled him up and he lost track of time. The distance to the wreck seemed a million miles. He crawled toward it until he had the courage to brave the pain again and then he stood up and called Tom.
He found him in the shattered cockpit, wedged between the control yoke and the instrument panel. His face was white with shock, but he was conscious. Miguel heard him mutter something about leaving him alone goddam it, but he was too stunned himself to pay any attention. One thought only was dominating his mind right now and that was to block Tom’s wish for death. It didn’t make sense and he refused to have it. He worked to free Tom from the twisted control column, steadily cursing him.
He pulled Tom free and dragged him out into the snow. Tom screamed with pain and then Miguel saw his legs. They were a mangled bloodiness from the knees down. Bits of bone showed whitely through the flesh. Blood pumped from them in great arterial spurts.
Tom’s voice sounded shrill and unreal. There was hate mixed with the pain on his face. He twisted his body away as though he despised the thought of Miguel touching him.
Miguel stripped off his own belt and Tom’s too and put tourniquets on the pulpy legs. The flowing of blood into the snow slackened. Tom’s eyes rolled back in his head and he said faintly but with infinite venom, “You bastard. You bloody goddam bastard.”
“Shut up, Tom, shut up.” Miguel worked feverishly on him trying to stop the blood. He broke open the kit on his chute harness and found the morphine Syrette. He thrust the needle into Tom’s arm and squeezed the ampoule.
Everything seemed to be spinning around him. The trees, the smoldering wreckage. The snow had begun to fall. He tried to think. The highway. He had seen it just before the crash. It couldn’t be far away.
“Why don’t you just leave me here you lousy bastard,” Tom mumbled. “Leave me and then you’ll have her all the time—“ He struck out at Miguel, trying to push him away. “You really deserve each other you lousy lousy bastard—“ The morphine was hitting him, and the shock, and the pain.
He wanted to die
but he wasn’t going to, no damn it, he wasn’t going to get his way and just die because Miguel wouldn’t let it happen that way. Miguel, kneeling in the snow beside him, said drunkenly, “You son of a bitch I’m not going to let you get away—did you hear me—“ His voice had risen to a shrill, angry protest. “Damn you I won’t let you die!”
Tom turned his face into the wet snow. His breath sighed and his eyes rolled back in his head and stayed that way. His complexion was pasty yellow-gray.
Miguel slipped his arms under Tom and lifted, moaning with the pain it caused him. He could see one leg dangling by a shred of tendon and flesh. It fell off. The horror of it made no impression at all on Miguel. Tom’s head hung back, his mouth open.
They’ll be looking for us, Miguel thought, they won’t get our position report and they’ll be looking for us. But he knew that he would have to get Tom to the highway quickly. The tourniquets couldn’t completely stop the blood and Tom would die and he wasn’t going to let Tom die. He kept muttering to himself about Tom not dying. The idea was his single obsessive thought. He used it to hold back his own pain, and to find the strength to carry Tom through the deep snowdrifts when every step was a floundering agony.
Time became meaningless. Feet became yards and yards miles. Miguel drove himself to his limit and then far beyond. The world shrank to the tiny confines of his wavering circle of vision. Each step he counted as a defiance of Tom’s will to stop living and he raved and cursed and stumbled on. He imagined he saw Mr. Haushoffer in white apron and grocer’s cap standing in the drifts and shaking his bony finger at them and saying that they shouldn’t fight and there was Sandy running alongside, not dead at all, but a child of eleven again with a dime in his hand extended to Tom. Then Essie appeared and she was whipping Miguel across the groin with a steel rod so that every step was a stripe of pain and she kept saying filthy dirty you re filthy and dirty and—
The sound of a truck engine laboring up a grade brought a semblance of sanity. Miguel called out hoarsely but the sound died away in the distance. He fell to his knees and rose again and then topped a rise to see the black, shiny-wet ribbon of asphalt below him and he let Tom down into a drift gently and began to cry because there was nothing more he could do except beg him not to die.
Night of Fire and Snow Page 31