by William Boyd
Marguerite was very quiet. Eric reached into his pocket and withdrew two ten-franc notes. ‘Here,’ he held them out. ‘Merci,’ he added feeling foolish. But she just curled his fingers back round them and pushed his hand away. For a moment his hand with the notes seemed to hover disconnectedly between them. Suddenly Eric wished she had taken the money. It would have been better.
‘Well, good-bye,’ he said. ‘Au revoir.’
Outside the air felt washed and fragrant. Eric took deep breaths and tried to lift the mood he sensed was descending on him as inevitably as night . . .
The afternoon sun beat down on him. It was that curious pause in the year: high summer slipping into autumn. Things started to decay then; wars began, dogs went mad. The green of the trees and the grass looked tired, old, and tramped on.
‘How was it?’ Pierre-Etienne asked when Eric caught up with them.
‘Fantastic,’ Eric lied automatically.
‘You were a long time,’ Momo said.
‘Was I? Oh well, you know how it is.’
‘Did you . . . really?’ Pierre-Etienne asked.
Eric looked at him curiously. ‘Yes. It went just like you said.’ He shivered. ‘She’s big. Huge . . . you know.’ He weighed two mammoth breasts in front of him.
Pierre-Etienne and Momo looked on with ill-concealed amazement. Eric said, ‘Elle pue,’ and they both laughed uneasily. He touched his back pocket and heard the crinkle of notes. He turned and walked away from the abattoir back towards the market place. Pierre-Etienne and Momo followed behind deep in conversation.
‘Come on,’ Eric shouted, ‘I’ll buy you a Diabolo-menthe.’
* * *
Marcel looked up in surprise when Marguerite said good-bye. Normally they parted without a word. She went to the café and ordered a drink. The late afternoon sun cast long shadows across the street, a slight breeze shifted a scrap of paper on the pavement, amber light flashed momentarily from a chrome bumper. Some of the butchers from the day shift came into the café but she paid them no attention. She was thinking about clean shiny hair, smoothness, a touch.
She called for another calva. She would go home late tonight, maybe see a film or just sit on here in the café for a while. It was a pleasant evening; there was something solid and achieved about the depth of the shadows, it seemed to her; the kindness of the yellowy sun patches on the table tops pleased her obscurely. She took the last sip of calva. The English boy had been gentle and she had made him happy.
The waiter brought her new drink over. As he put it down he whispered his request in her ear. She looked round. The man leant confidentially over the table. She saw his oily hair, his silver tooth, his shiny watch.
‘Well?’ he asked, smiling, his eyebrows raised.
‘No,’ said Marguerite abruptly, before she had really even thought about it. ‘No. Tomorrow perhaps, we’ll see. But not today. Not today.’
On the Yankee Station
When Lt Larry Pfitz lost his Phantom on his first mission he decided, quite spontaneously and irrationally, to blame the Vietnamese people and Arthur Lydecker, a member of his ground crew.
Pfitz was a new pilot and his face was taut as he ran through the cockpit checks before being catapulted off the heaving deck of the USS Chester B. Halsey. The Phantom was heavy with four clusters of 500lb bombs and extra poundage of pressure was demanded from the old steam catapults. Pfitz was third in line and as the Chester B. heeled round into the wind the deck crew noticed the way his eyes continuously flicked from left to right at the rescue helicopters hovering alongside.
There had been a ragged jeer as Pfitz’s plane dipped alarmingly on being hurled off the deck before the straining engines thrust him up in a steep climb to join the other two members of his flight. The fourth jet was ready on the second catapult when one of the fire guards shouted and pointed up. There, in the pale grey sky, Pfitz hung beneath his orange parachute. His plane flew on straight for a brief few seconds before tilting on one wing and curving elegantly down into the sea.
It was as well for Pfitz that, just before it smashed into the water, there was a muffled crack of explosion and a puff of smoke from the jets, otherwise the court of inquiry might have peremptorily dismissed his claim of a serious engine malfunction. Still, it left an uneasy aroma of doubt in the air. The Phantom had been new, flown over from Guam three days prior to Pfitz’s arrival, and the loss of several million dollars of expensive equipment for no real and pressing reason was regarded – even in this most extravagantly wasteful of wars – as a fairly serious matter. Pfitz was reprimanded for over-hasty reactions, and as a measure of the Captain’s disapproval was assigned to fly an old Ling-Temco-Vaught Crusader that was stored in the back of the below-deck hangar until a replacement Phantom arrived.
Pfitz’s considerable self-esteem never recovered from this blow and his fellow pilots ribbed him unmercifully. He came to the conclusion that the loss of his Phantom was somehow symbolic of the animosity of the Vietnamese people to the American presence, and, more particularly, the direct result of some gross act of carelessness on the part of his ground crew. And it was Lydecker on whom his venom alighted.
Pfitz’s maintenance crew consisted of five people. There was Dawson, a huge taciturn black; two Puerto Ricans called Pasquale and Huq; Lee Otis Cooper who came, like Pfitz, from Fayette County, Alabama; and there was Lydecker. There were good and sensible reasons for selecting Lydecker as scapegoat; Dawson was too big, Pasquale and Huq too united, and Cooper, well, he was a white man. So was Lydecker, for that matter, but of a particularly inferior, Yankee city-scum sort. Lydecker came from Sturgis, New Jersey; a mean smog-mantled town that seemed to have stamped its own harsh landscape on Lydecker’s body and visage. He was small, dark and thin, with pale skin and permanently red-rimmed eyes. His face looked as if it had been compressed vertically in a vice, pursing his mouth and forcing his eyes close together.
Pfitz’s resolute persecution came as no surprise to Lydecker: persecution of one form or another, whether from drunken father, bored teachers or cruel playmates, was the abiding feature of his memories. Questions of justice or injustice, of blame rightly apportioned had never carried much weight in his world. He never really stopped to consider how unfair it was, even though he had a good idea of who in fact was responsible. Lee Otis had been checking the engine casings of the Phantom’s port jet the morning before Pfitz’s doomed flight, and had borrowed Lydecker’s own small monkey wrench to adjust what he thought was a loose faring deep in the complex mechanism. A mock fire drill had interrupted work on that shift, Lydecker remembered, and he recalled Lee Otis bolting down the inspection hatch immediately it was resumed. He never returned the monkey wrench either, and, when requested for it a few days after the accident, Lee Otis flushed momentarily before informing Lydecker that he ‘Fuckn gave it you back, turdbird, so beat it, heah?’
Lydecker shrugged. Maybe he was wrong, so who gave a shit anyway? He merely tried to keep out of Pfitz’s way as much as possible and on occasions when he was chewed out or put on a charge accepted the screaming flow of abuse with the practised, hang-dog, foot-shuffling resentment that he knew Pfitz’s injured pride demanded. Lydecker never thought about trying to change things; experience had taught him to adapt to the world’s crazy logic. It was a hostile alien terrain of unrelieved frustration and disappointment out there, and this was the only method of survival he had found. But at those times when its harsh realities inescapably obtruded into his consciousness he responded with a sullen, silent hatred. It was a comfort to him, his hatred; comforting because he came to realize that no matter what the world or people did to him they couldn’t regulate his emotions, couldn’t stop him hating, however they tried. After particularly bad days he would exult in his hatred at night, allowing the waves of his disdain and contempt to wash through his body with the potency of some magic serum, numbing and restoring, and letting him, when the sun rose, face once again whatever the world had to offer. Recipients of his hatred h
ad in the past included his father, and Werbel, the manager of the filling station where he had worked before he was drafted. And now there was Pfitz.
Lydecker had expected the insults, the dirty jobs and the regular appearance on charge sheets to die down after Pfitz had flown a few more missions, but if anything they intensified. Soon Lydecker came to see that the old Crusader was acting as a catalyst; a regular reminder of Pfitz’s shame. Every time the Crusader was towed out amongst the Phantoms and the Skyhawks Pfitz remembered all the details of that day: watching his new plane scythe cleanly into the waves, the hours of subjective time as he gently floated down into the sea, the rows of incredulous grinning faces as the rescue helicopter deposited him back on board, the sly jibes and quips of his fellow officers in the mess-rooms. And each time he climbed into the cockpit, saw the unfamiliar instrument layout and the dated mechanisms, the shame returned. And as he pulled away from the ship on a mission he imagined it brazenly echoing to the crews’ gleeful laughter. And every time he took the Crusader up and landed Lydecker was there, the man who’d caused the foul-up, weaselly shit-face Lydecker, draining the fuel tanks or fitting the chocks to the wheels. And then Pfitz would claim his cannon misfired or the fuel-flow was imbalanced and he’d put him on a charge for slipshod work, or kick his narrow butt the length of the repair bay, or assign him to descale the afterburner all night.
For Lydecker the one benefit of the whole thing was the Crusader. His first posting had been to a 6th fleet carrier in the Mediterranean that still had a squadron of Crusaders in operation. He had grown familiar with the planes and had an affection for them that he did not bestow on the lean Phantoms or the dainty Sky hawks. The Crusader was a hefty rectangular machine, large for a single seater, with the crude geometry of a bus. Its single intake was set in the nose, like a gaping mouth beneath the matt black cone that housed the radar. It was like greeting an old friend when Pfitz’s was wheeled out from storage and hoisted up to the deck. Its strong unambiguous profile seemed to render the other planes less significant and somehow pretentious. Pfitz was loudly derogatory, complaining that she was a pig to fly and sluggish to manoeuvre. But then he soon discovered in it other qualities which he employed in wreaking his revenge on the population of Vietnam.
The payload of the Crusader was prodigious; its sturdy frame could carry an anthology of destructive weaponry beneath its wings. Pfitz was highly satisfied with this aspect, soon indifferent to the absence of computer technology that precluded him from carrying laser or guided bombs like the Phantoms. And he was never happier than when he supervised his crew as they bolted the finless cigar-shaped canisters of napalm to the underwing pylons. Pasquale overheard him talking about a request he’d made to be excused the carrying of all other bomb loads and how he’d voluntarily restricted himself to napalm. He started to refer to his aircraft as the ‘Rose Train’ and had Huq, who was something of an artist, paint this below his cockpit.
‘It’s like roses in the jungle, man,’ he would crow on returning from a mission. ‘You see them cans tumblin’ and whoomph, it’s like a fuckin great flower bloomin in the trees – wham, pink an’ orange roses. Beautiful man, just beautiful.’ He made Huq keep a tally of missions by painting a red rose beneath the cockpit sill.
Lydecker thought he had gone mad, and so did many of the other pilots. Napalm had to be delivered from low level making the plane vulnerable to ground fire. With half-a-dozen canisters wobbling like overripe fruit beneath your wings you could be transformed into a comet of blazing petroleum jelly with one lucky shot. Lydecker sometimes thought about this as he patched bullet holes in the wings and tail.
Often at night Lydecker would leave the brightly lit crew quarters, where the air was thick with smoke, and bored sailors played cards or told obscene stories, and wander up to the dark cavern of the main hangar below the deck where the atmosphere had a tranquil metallic chill and the smell of oil and engine coolant clung to the air. He would go over to the Crusader, ponderously low-slung on its curious trolley undercarriage that jutted like spavined legs from the fuselage belly, and run his hands over the scarred and chipped aluminium, his fingers tracing and caressing the lines of rivet heads. Like the hated bullied schoolchild who tinkers with his bike all day Lydecker enjoyed the mute presence of his plane. It was like some gigantic familiar toy, stored in a cupboard with its wings folded and canopy up. He knew every square centimetre of the plane, from its gaping intake to the scorched jet at the rear. He had clambered all over its body, fuelling and rearming it, riveting patches of aluminium alloy over the puckered ulcers caused by random bullets. He had climbed into the dark ventral recesses of the undercarriage bay checking the hydraulic system, and had inched along its ribbed length replacing frayed control wires and realigning the armour plate. And he found himself, like an anxious mother, fretting for its return after long missions to Laos or Haiphong.
The war was a distant affair to the men on the ‘Yankee Station’ in the South China Sea. Just a green haze on the horizon sometimes. Even for the pilots who flew above it, dumping tons of high explosive on the jungle, the war and the enemy remained abstract and remote. To them it was a dangerous demanding job and only Pfitz openly expressed the requisite warlike antagonism; only he seemed to be exulted by the regular missions and the crop of red roses that grew on the side of the plane.
Then one late afternoon a seabird was sucked into the intake as the Crusader came in to land. The thump made Pfitz veer up and away and make his approach again. This caused a lot of hilarity amongst the deck crew and when Pfitz had landed safely someone shouted, ‘Hey! Why din’t ya eject Pfitz?’ There was no real danger as, set about a metre and a half down the intake vent, was a fine wire mesh that protected the delicate compressor fans of the engine from such incidents.
Lydecker wheeled the light ladder against the fuselage as soon as the plane was towed to its bay on the deck. Pfitz took off his helmet, sweat shining in his crew-cut hair, his beefy face red with anger. As he climbed down Lydecker stepped back from the ladder and looked away, but Pfitz grabbed him by the arm, fingers biting cruelly into his bicep.
‘Fuckin bumpy landing again, you fuckin shithead creep. How many times I told you to get those tyre pressures reduced? You’re on a fuckin charge.’
That night Lydecker abandoned the letter he was trying to write to a cinema usherette he had known in Sturgis and made his way up to the hangar. He roved around the familiar contours of the plane noting, with a surge of anger, the bulge of the fat soft tyres on the steel floor. His brain hummed with an almost palpable hatred for Pfitz. His hands were raw and astringent from an evening spent cleaning latrines with coarse scouring powder as a result of the charge he’d been placed under. He leant up against the side of the Crusader and rested his hot cheeks on the cool metal, his eyes blank and tearless yet his mouth uncontrollably twisted in a rictus of sadness and utter frustration with his life. He forced himself to think of something else. He thought of the plane and the bird it had engulfed, how his heart had leapt in panic as it had jerked from its approach run. Without thinking he peered into the maw of the intake. In the gloom he could make out the detritus of feathers and expressed flesh stuck to the fine grille. He climbed into the intake, easily adapting the posture of his body to the narrowing curves of the interior, and began to pick the feathers and bones away from the wire mesh. He felt his spine moulded against the curve of polished metal and sensed all about him the complex terminals of controls and cables running from the cockpit above his head. The only sound was the noise of his breathing and the quiet pinging of his nails on the wires as he plucked the trapped feathers away.
When he heard the voices he suddenly realized he did not know how long he’d been hunched in the throat of the plane. With a chill of alarm he recognized Pfitz’s oddly high laugh among them and hastily clambered out of the intake. He saw three officers sauntering towards the Crusader down the aisle of parked aircraft. Momentarily distracted he tried to slip round the plane out of sight
but Pfitz had seen him and ran forward.
‘Ho! You there, sailor, stop!’
Lydecker stood at attention, his face red with embarrassment, as if his mother had discovered him having sex or masturbating. As Pfitz approached the shame dissipated and fear suddenly gripped like a hand at his heart.
‘Lydecker! This is off limits to you, man.’ Pfitz was enraged, he clutched a beer can in his fist. ‘What’re you fuckin doing here, jerk-off?’
The other two officers stood back grinning. Pfitz was aware of their amused observation.
Lydecker held out his hand showing the ball of fluff and feathers by way of explanation.
‘Uh, I was just clearing the intake, sir. The bird? You know, when you landed this afternoon . . .?’
The two officers snorted with laughter. Pfitz’s eyes widened in fury. He cuffed at the feathers and the bundle exploded into a cloud of swooping fluff.
‘Hey Larry,’ one of the officers guffawed, ‘it’s a fuckin souvenir, man.’
Pfitz struck out blindly at Lydecker, punching him in the chest. Lydecker staggered backwards. Pfitz’s voice rose to a shriek.
‘You’re fuckin finished you fuckin dipshit asshole! Get outa here an’ don’t come back or I’m gonna dump a giant shit on you, boy!’
Pfitz held the beer can up threateningly. Lydecker backed down the row of planes. Helpless with laughter the two officers tried to restrain Pfitz.
‘You’re getting transferred off of my crew. You ain’t gonna mess around with me any more you bastard. Now git out!’ His face rigid with fury Pfitz hurled the half-full beer can at the retreating Lydecker. It glanced off his forehead and went ringing along the steel deck. Lydecker turned and fled only to slip on a patch of oil. He skidded to the ground careening into the nose wheel of a Skyhawk. The beer can rested against the tyre. All Lydecker could hear was laughter, Pfitz’s harsh triumphant laughter. He picked up the beer can, paused for an instant, then got to his feet and limped off, the can clutched to his chest with both hands.