by James Salter
“A hundred and fifty,” Godchaux said.
The sun had come out and was shining off the snow. The room bloomed with light.
“Looks like it’s melting,” Godchaux remarked. “Did you hear what Cassada said at lunch?”
“No, what?”
“He said he wanted to pack some up and send it home to his mother in a box.”
Cassada had never seen snow.
“Oh, yeah? Where’s he from? Alabama?”
“No, he’s from Puerto Rico.”
“Puerto Rico? You’d never know that from looking at him. Was he born there?”
“I think so. His father died or they got divorced. He lived with his mother.”
“Puerto Rico,” Harlan said. “Well, how’d he get in the American Air Force?”
“Puerto Rico’s part of the United States.”
“Since when?”
“I don’t know. A long time.”
“I must of missed hearing about it.”
Harlan continued to pick his teeth. He had figured out Cassada. It was written all over him. He followed Grace through a couple of rolls on that first ride and got the idea he could fly. You could tell what he was thinking about just by looking in his eye, like a bull.
When Cassada was assigned to Wickenden’s flight, Harlan had thought: perfect. Sometimes they show a little sense.
In with Wickenden and them was where he belonged. They could sit around when the ceiling went below a thousand feet and go over questions from the handbook. He’d fit in fine.
“What time is it?” Godchaux asked.
“Five to one.”
“Come on, I’ll give you a ride. We’d better be getting on back.”
The phone was ringing. From the bedroom Isbell called, “Can you get that? I’m busy.”
“I’m sure it’s for you,” his wife said. She got up, keeping her place with a finger, and went over to the phone. “Marian Isbell.” She had never learned and refused to say, “Captain Isbell’s quarters.”
It was Dunning.
“That husband of yours still up?” he asked.
“He’s in the other room, Bud. Hold on.”
“Listen,” Dunning said, “don’t bother getting him to come to the phone. Ask him if he’ll pick me up in the morning.”
“Who is it?” Isbell called.
“Bud Dunning.” She had her hand over the mouthpiece. “Can you stop by for him in the morning?”
“Sure, what time?”
“What time, Bud?” she said, removing her hand.
“Oh, something like seven,” Dunning said.
“Seven,” Marian said to her husband.
“I’ll be there,” Isbell called.
“I heard him,” Dunning said. “How are things going, Marian? Are you getting him all ready?”
“Oh, certainly.”
“Well, that’s good.”
After Dunning hung up, she returned to her chair and began reading again. She could hear her husband moving about in the next room—the steps and pauses—packing. There was not a sound or a silence she could not identify, not only in her own apartment but in a hundred others. Feet were creaking on the ceiling. Water ran at certain times. There was the quiet at mealtimes, not to mention the smell of cooking, the familiar odors.
Isbell came into the hallway between the rooms. “Hey, honey, where are my socks?”
“They must be in the drawer.”
“There’s only four pairs in there.”
“Don’t shout, you’ll wake them up. How many should there be?”
“I had lots of socks.”
“Not so loud.”
“It’s just a normal tone of voice. I’m not going to go around whispering all the time. Where are the rest of them?”
“I don’t know. In the wash, I guess.”
“In the wash? You knew I was going to need them.”
“Can’t you buy some when you get down there?”
“Jesus, I must own twenty pairs already.”
“All right. Just buy a few more. You can do that, can’t you?”
“Sure. You know I have all the time in the world. I could probably even knit them if I have to. I just thought I’d take some of the ones I already have. That’s one of the reasons I bought them.”
“Not so loud. Please.”
“They’re not going to wake up.”
“Well, you can try getting them back to sleep if they do.”
After a pause Isbell said calmly, “Marian, you knew we were going a month ago.”
“I forgot them,” she said, “that’s all. I didn’t mean to. I just forgot.”
Without saying anything more, Isbell turned away. After a while he brought two large bags, their side compartments bulging, into the hallway and set them down with a faint click of the metal studs on the bottom that helped them stand upright. Marian continued to read when he came into the living room.
“I set the alarm for six,” he said. “If the weather’s good we should be getting off first thing.”
“It’s supposed to be good, isn’t it?” she said, still reading.
“The forecast is good.”
“Six. Well, you’d better get to bed then. You’ll need your sleep.”
“What about you?”
“I think I’ll finish this chapter,” she said.
“How long is it?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She held apart about thirty pages. “That much.”
Isbell walked into the kitchen. There was the sound of ice being broken out of a tray. “You want a drink?” he called.
“Not really.”
She knew the moment it started, what he would say and the way he would walk and act. It was the awful familiarity of it, of everything, the sound of him brushing his teeth and spitting in the sink, the moment when that stopped and light flooded the dark hall as he opened the bathroom door and with ominous weight lay down beside her. And afterwards when she lay awake looking out the window at other apartments, dark too, and seeing a bathroom light come on, just as they saw hers. They knew what was happening. She had asked him once not to turn it on.
“What’s wrong?”
“People see it.”
“Well, so what?”
“They know what’s going on,” she said feebly.
“No, they don’t. That’s absurd. How do they know? It could be the children. It might be anything.”
“But it’s not just anything.”
Isbell came out with a drink and after a moment sat down and started to read a magazine. Marian found herself going over the same sentence two or three times. Her mind would not do what she wanted. She could hear him lazily turning the pages, moving in his chair, yawning.
“You sure you don’t want a drink?”
“No, thanks.”
“Come on.”
“I don’t feel like one.”
He turned a few more pages.
“We’re going to be down there for almost five weeks,” he said.
“I know.”
“That’s more than a month.”
She did not say what she felt which was, what difference does one time make? She simply didn’t feel that way. It was a cold act, there was something selfish at the heart of it. Why was it that important? It wasn’t; just some kind of male itch. But in the morning, she knew, he would be brief and irritable, even with all that lay ahead, Rome, crossing the Mediterranean, the islands, the North African shore. It would all be her fault. Why couldn’t he just accept it, she thought? What did the other husbands do?
“It’s getting late,” Isbell finally remarked.
“I guess so.”
“How much longer are you going to read?”
“Oh, a little while,” she said.
“Come on.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. You can read all the time I’m gone. You’ve got five weeks.”
“Just one more chapter,” she said.
“What’s
wrong, Marian?”
“Nothing, really. I don’t feel very well,” she added.
“Stomach again?”
“I don’t feel well, that’s all.”
He hated the whine in her voice. He went out on the balcony then. It was small, four or five paces long, and he stood there, leaning on the railing and looking out at the housing area. Lights were still on in many apartments. Only a few floors had dark stretches. The night was cold. The roads had ice on them and there was snow on the ground. The wind was whipping the shirt against his shoulder and back, but he stood as if not aware of it. The bitterness was warmth enough. On the floor below were Phipps and his wife, good-looking Carolina girl, nice legs. Every apartment had a wife in it, his included. You chose your wife yourself, that was the thing, but of course you didn’t know what you were choosing. He had known after the first week, the deadness that lay between them, but he believed it might be overcome. He thought she would change through their being together, grow, reveal a hidden person, the one he had wanted and thought she might be. After five or ten minutes he went in to the bedroom and began undressing without a word.
II
“WHERE’S CAPTAIN WICKENDEN?” DUNNING SAID.
“Where’s Captain Wickenden?” Dunning said.
“Everyone’s gone,” Godchaux said. “We were the only two around. Harlan went out to mobile.”
Dunning stood up. “How does it look to you out there?”
“Not too good.”
Dunning suddenly turned his head and raised a hand. “Be quiet a minute,” he said.
They looked at each other, waiting. The sound of the planes would grow from nothing. One moment, silence. The next, there it would be. Dunning’s hand, however, came down.
“You hear anything?” he asked Godchaux.
“No, sir.”
“Too soon, anyway. Where are they coming in from? Do you know?”
“There’s no flight plan. Marseilles, I guess. We just heard them go over and called the tower to find out who it was.” He looked towards the window. “I think they’re going to have a little trouble.”
“They can go to their alternate.”
“I don’t know. It’s been down everywhere all day.” He was a minister’s son. Dunning remembered when he first reported in. Wonderful, the perfect background. Can he fly on Sundays, Isbell asked? They send you these people, Dunning had said, and expect you to make something out of them. Well, they had. “Is Harlan out there yet?” he asked.
Godchaux was at the window. “I can’t see him from here,” he said.
“Get on the other extension. Ask him what they’re doing. Ask him what it looks like out there.”
The phone rang then. It was the forecaster. He had altered his observation slightly—he’d added a broken layer at three hundred feet. Dunning asked for the weather at the nearest alternates, everything within a hundred miles, and as the forecaster read them off, he scribbled them down, half-listening for the planes. Finally he stopped writing. The reports were worse and worse, the weather was no better anywhere.
“The only alternate open in Europe right now is Marseilles,” the forecaster said.
“What about England?”
“One moment, Major,” the forecaster said, his voice becoming distant as he reached for a clipboard. “I have my doubts.”
Godchaux, on the phone to mobile, could hear the radio out there. He put a hand over his receiver. “They’re on final again, Major,” he said.
“How far out? Give it here,” Dunning said, reaching. His look of self-possession was gone. In its place was nothing, the face of an officer who might still possibly be on the list to be promoted.
Just as Godchaux passed the phone they heard them, the sound low at first and then expanding, opening up, seeming to head for and almost pass over them. Dunning at the window knew what it meant. They were not landing. They had missed again and were going by, everything hanging, heavy and nose-high like a pair of sick men in the grey evening, the noise even louder when they had passed barely below the clouds, slipping in and out of them, the red tails visible, then into the clouds again and gone. The voice of the forecaster, now incidental and remote, came over the phone, “. . . down everywhere in England. I don’t see anything open. Major?”
At the same time there was the controller’s voice over the radio in mobile, “Fortify White, turn to three six zero . . .”
“Harlan!” Dunning said on the phone. “Hello!”
“Climb to twenty-five hundred feet,” the controller was directing.
“Harlan! Mobile control!”
There was the sound of the phone being picked up.
“Yeah, what is it, Billy? They screwed up another one.”
“This is Major Dunning.”
“Oh, sorry, Major. They just missed another approach. Maybe you better come out here.”
“I’m coming right out,” Dunning said. “What about the weather? How does it look out there?”
“You better come out, Major.”
“I’ll be right there.”
Godchaux was pointing to the other receiver from which the forecaster’s voice still came tinnily. “What about him?”
“Oh, hang up. Let’s go.”
The operations vehicle, a khaki-colored van, was parked outside. The engine started immediately. Dunning, in the driver’s seat, seemed huge. He struggled with the gearshift, shoving it one way then the other.
“Push down on it, Major. You have to push down on it.”
They lurched backwards. Dunning stamped on the brake and the van heaved to a stop. They started forward again, down the taxiway, picking up speed.
“Which way are you going?” Godchaux called.
“Right across.”
“It’s pretty rough out there.”
“Hold on!”
Dunning was looking towards each end of the runway as they drove, half expecting the planes to appear from anywhere. Towards the far end the clouds seemed a little higher. That might be it, to bring them in downwind, but as he looked he saw that it was shifting all the time, spaces were revealed and then covered over again.
At the intersection Dunning didn’t turn but went straight ahead, off the taxiway, jolting across the uneven ground, still watching for the planes. There was a sudden slam as he drove into a hollow, the van shot up and hit again on the front wheels. Godchaux was holding on to the seat. Dunning had the accelerator to the floor. Ahead was the mobile control with the shadow of Harlan showing through the flat glass. He opened the door as they came running towards him. Dunning pushed past and into the narrow space between the two counters on which were binoculars, frayed magazines, and a flare pistol. The radio hummed beneath.
“Where are they?” he asked.
“They’re on the downwind.”
“Have they said how much fuel they have?”
“I’m not sure. About a thousand pounds, I think.”
Dunning felt a moment of relief, not at the number but at having made it out in time, like someone who finds a piece of wreckage to cling to in a stormy sea. He looked to the north as he waited for the voices. All was calm. The sky was the cold grey of lead. It touched the hills. Three birds were standing in the middle of the empty runway, almost on the white center line. There were about twenty more minutes of daylight. The beacon had become brighter. It was skimming the base of the clouds, increasing in contrast each time around. No, he was imagining that. All was quiet, closed until morning, when the voice of the controller who was in a yellow and white checkered van at the far end of the field came up clear,
“Fortify White, turn left to one five zero and descend to two thousand feet for base leg.”
Godchaux, crowding in beside them, pulled the door closed behind him.
“Leave it open,” Dunning ordered. “I want to hear them if I can.”
“Perform final cockpit check,” the controller said. “Gear should be down and locked. Final flap setting at pilot’s discretion.”
&n
bsp; After a moment or two came the reply,
“White has gear down and locked.”
It was a hurried voice, a little nervous and high. Dunning tried to think; they were his planes, Fortify, but the voice . . .
“That’s not Isbell,” he said. He turned to Harlan. “That isn’t him.”
“No, sir.”
“What’s wrong? Why isn’t he leading?”
“His radio’s out,” Harlan said.
His radio was out. He wasn’t leading. The wingman was leading. In an instant everything had changed.
On the flight line in Tripoli forty or fifty planes were parked in a long, glinting row. Behind them where the blacktop ended the ground dropped away to a broad depression where seawater was evaporated in great, shallow beds. The first rule of gunnery camp was always the same, “Don’t piss in the Salt Flats.” Facing the planes was a line of corrugated iron huts with an occasional tent or some canvas rigged on poles to provide shade. The ground crews, many of them stripped to the waist, were squatting under the wings with wrenches, dropping the external tanks. Two of the three squadrons had landed. The first yellowtails were just taxiing in. The 72nd. Another flight of them was on the break. Pilots sat on their gear in the afternoon sun, waiting for the bus to take them to their tent area.
All of it echoed the war that had been fought here, not so many years earlier, along the narrow band of desert near the sea. The same brown tents, the sun, the dust, the overriding focus. In all likelihood the same bus, a tilting wreck with an Arab driver and no fixed schedule. Usually it would leave just when someone was coming to board or running towards it. The driver, a hand on the door lever, would start the engine in no apparent hurry and, as if unable to hear the shouts, swing the door shut and drive off. Twenty minutes later, sometimes more, at the far end of the parking area, white dust rising behind, the bus would return, the brakes squealing as it slowly came to a stop.
Struggling with their bags, pilots climbed aboard and lurched down the aisle. In the back, Grace sat down near Wickenden.
“Five dollars a man, what do you say?”
Wickenden shook his head.
“Five dollars, the same as last time. That’s fair enough.”