Burning the Days

by James Salter

  ——

  There was a special physical examination in the winter of 1944 that included the eyes: aligning two pegs in a sort of lighted shoe-box by pulling strings—“Am I good enough for the Air Corps, sir?”—and identifying colors by picking up various balls of yarn. In April, those who had passed, hundreds, that is, including my two roommates and me, went off to flight training in the South and Southwest. Hardly believing our good fortune, we went as if it were a holiday, by train. Left behind were classes, inspections, and many full-dress parades. Ahead was freedom and the joy of months away.

  ICARUS

  PASSING THROUGH darkened Virginia, lips eager and sticky from Southern Comfort, a girl and I talked intently in the vestibule. She was married, her husband was off in the army. I don’t remember where the bottle came from—it was either hers or we’d gotten it from the porter. The floor was trembling beneath our feet, the threshold between the cars creaking. She was from a small town somewhere and was wearing a cotton dress. The train leaned into slow, lurching curves, the metal squealing like a message passed along it. We saw nothing but each other’s faces. I was nineteen years old, on my way to primary flight training. The others were in the sleeping cars behind us; most had gone to bed. Soon we were embracing fiercely. A married woman on a train at night, her body tight against mine. “Pete,” she moaned, “oh, Pete …”

  I had told her my name was Peter Slavek—it came from a book by Arthur Koestler. I was linking everything together, fatalism, sex, war. In my imagination I was already a pilot, handsome, freedom reeking from me, winds coiled round my legs. I had no real idea of what lay ahead, vast southwestern skies with their clouds and shafts of light, towns with railroad tracks running through them and Masonic lodges, dejected country with little lakes and fading cabins amid the pines, Bible country, the air pure with poverty and religious broadcasts. It didn’t matter, I was going.

  Arthur Koestler had also written about an RAF flyer named Richard Hillary, well known at the time. Hillary had been a pilot in the Battle of Britain—grass fields and the insectlike planes bouncing across them, the sky dense with fights. He was nearly killed when the canopy on his burning plane jammed and he could not bail out. I knew his beautiful scarred looks by heart. He had written a book about his experiences called Falling Through Space. The chapters often closed with a knell: from this mission Peter Pease, from this mission Rupert someone, from this mission still another, failed to return.

  Hillary, Koestler noted, was burned three times—it was only the first when his canopy would not open. They patched him up—his face would be a glossy reminder as long as he lived—and he returned to flying and a second crash, which was fatal. He burned to death. His wish had been that his body be cremated and his ashes scattered in the sea, and to complete the cycle this was done. He was twenty-three when he died. I do not recall whether or not he was married, but there were many moving love letters to a particular girl.

  We have long forgotten those girls, doomed to go alone or with their parents down the lane to the village church, girls whose hopes had vanished. They were the fruit that had fallen to the ground. I longed to know these girls but also to bear the guilt for having robbed them, to have my ashes be the cause of their grief.

  Then there was St.-Exupéry. He seduced me as well. I had read him, joylessly at first, in French, line by line and forever looking up words. He was a favorite of the French teacher. Eventually I came to like him on my own—it was his knowledge I admired, his wholeness of mind, more than his exploits—and years later my feeling was confirmed by a woman who told me that her youthful love affair with him was the most cherished episode of her life.

  She had met him at a reception in New York in about 1941 or 1942. She was good-looking, European. She fell in love instantly, at first sight. He had been in America since a few months after the fall of France in the spring of 1940. I imagine him—these are the dark days of a long war in which he would eventually be lost, fate unknown—as somewhat drab, in a gray double-breasted suit with perhaps an overlooked stain on the lapel. Like an ex-fighter whose career had ended a decade before, he is carrying a bit of weight. Balding but with a face that is smooth and somehow youthful—the clarity of intelligence shines in it—in his buttonhole sits a distinguished dot of red.

  She tries to talk to him, she absolutely must, “Monsieur …,” but her French is hopeless. She tries English, to no avail. Finally she says outright, “Wollen Sie mein telephone number?”

  Then she goes home and waits, until late in the evening. The sullen black phone never rings. The next day, however, he calls, and the searing love letters he subsequently wrote she kept for the rest of her life.

  There was also his affair on one side of the world or the other, among the palms of California or the forests of East Africa, with Beryl Markham—two ecstatic souls, somehow unjealous of each other. Over the years St.-Exupéry managed to progress, for me, from being a mere figure of culture to one of enviable flesh and blood.

  In such footsteps I would follow.

  ——

  Pine Bluff, Arkansas, on a loop of a sluggish, curving river, was where we learned to fly. The field was east of town. The flying school there was run by civilians.

  We lived in barracks and were broken up into flights—four students to an instructor—alphabetically, of course, although inexplicably I was together with Marlow, Milnor, and Mahl. Our instructor was an ancient, perhaps in his forties, crop duster from a town in the southwest part of the state, Hope, which he described as the watermelon capital of the world. His name was Basil York. We were probably among scores of young men he had taught to fly, and were reminded of this by a stern warning for the next student to be ready when the plane taxied in from the previous flight. We waited, watching intently for the plane’s number and with no chance to question whoever had just come down about what had happened, what had they done in the air and what should we look out for?

  Early flights, the instructor in the rear cockpit, the bumpy taxiing on the grass, turning into the wind, tail swinging around, dust blowing, and then the abrupt, wild sound of the engine. The ground was speeding by, the wheels skipping, and suddenly we were rising in the din to see the blue tree line beyond the field boundary and, below, the curved roofs of the hangers falling away. Now fields appeared, swimming out in all directions. The earth became limitless, the horizon, unseen before, rose to fill the world and we were aloft in unstructured air.

  Looking over the side of the airplane, I could not believe it, the noise, the clatter of the engine, the battering wind, and the flat country below laid out in large rectangular patterns with dirt roads, the glint of occasional metal roofs, smooth water. They talked meaninglessly about “section lines.” In the air these quickly became real.

  We passed a thousand feet. I felt as helpless as if sitting in a chair at that height. We climbed higher, to fifteen hundred or two thousand feet, the height of the stalls, the first of the demonstrated maneuvers. The nose soars up into steep blue air, higher, higher still, unforgivingly higher, something sickening is happening, the bottom of the seat feels ready to drop away, and the dry voice of the instructor is explaining it as at the top the plane, almost motionless, suddenly shudders, then starts to fall. Now I am to do this, his matter-of-fact voice directing it: throttle back, pull the nose up, way up, higher, hold it there, hold it …

  There were spins, jamming the rudder in at the top of a stall and falling, the plane turning around and around like a maple pod. There was the anguish of trying to make proper “S” turns across a road, the wind making one loop bigger than the other unless you steepened your bank.

  An hour has passed. All directions have melted away, the earth is too vast and confusing to be able to say where we are. Only later is it clear that the roads run on cardinal headings, north-south, east-west. The world and everything in it, the river, farmers’ houses, the roads and lone cars, are unaware of us, droning above. The field is nowhere in sight. Like a desert, everythin
g visible is almost the same when he says, “OK. Take us home.” It must be this way, you think, though there is nothing to confirm it. After a few minutes, without a word, he brusquely corrects the heading ninety degrees as if in disgust.

  Everything you have done has been unsatisfactory, the stalls not steep enough, the “S” turns uneven, the nose of the plane continually wandering off in one direction or the other when you are told to hold it straight and level, anything that could speed up, slide, or drift away has done so.

  In the distance, magically, the field appears and with precision, sometimes explaining what he is doing, he enters the traffic pattern and expertly lands. My flying suit is black with sweat. Face glazed, disheartened, I scramble from the plane as soon as we park. One of the others is standing there to take my place.

  ——

  All was tin, the corrugated hangars shining in the sun, the open-cockpit airplanes, the tin gods. We were expected to solo in a few hours, not less than four or more than eight. If you were not able to take off and land by yourself after eight hours, you were washed out. The days were filled with classes, briefings, flights, the sound of planes, the smell of them. We were mixed in with regular air cadets, some of whom were older and had flown before. We marched with them, singing their songs, the vulgarity of which was disarming, and continued to kick into spins at three thousand feet on every flight and mechanically chant the formula: throttle off, stick forward, pause, opposite rudder … Even after three or four flights I still did not fully understand what a chandelle was supposed to be and had only a faint conception of a landing.

  Like the first buds appearing, individuals began to solo. Word of who had done it spread immediately. Face scorched red by the sun, in the back cockpit Basil York repeated over and over the desiderata as we entered traffic, “Twenty-fifty and five hundred, twenty-fifty and five hundred.” He was referring to engine rpm and traffic pattern altitude. “When you’re flying B-17s,” he said in his high-pitched voice, “I want you to still be hearing that: twenty-fifty and five hundred.” We had begun to execute the landings together, nose up, throttle all the way off, both of us on the stick. I knew his recitation, “Start breaking the glide, ease back on the throttle, start rounding out, all right, that’s good, hold it off now, hold it off …” The trouble was, I did not know what it all meant.

  There was the story I heard later, of the instructor who had a favorite trick with students having difficulty learning to land. After exhausting the usual means, above the traffic pattern somewhere he would shake the control stick from side to side, banging the student’s knees—the front and rear sticks were connected—to get his attention. He would then remove the pin holding the rear stick in place and, with the student twisting his neck to see what was happening, wave it in the air and toss it over the side, pointing at the student with the gesture You, you’ve got it, and pointing down. It had always worked. One day for still another lagging student he rattled the stick fiercely, flourished it, and tossed it away. The student nodded numbly, bent down, unfastened his own stick, and ignoring the instructor’s cries, threw it away also. He watched as the frightened instructor bailed out and then, fame assured, reached down for the spare stick he had secretly brought along, flew back to the field, and landed.

  To solve the complexities of the traffic pattern, I had made, for quick reference, a small card with a diagram of each of the possible patterns drawn on it. Entry was always at forty-five degrees to a downwind leg, but to work it all out backwards and head straight for the proper point was confusing, and nothing seemed to annoy York as much as starting to turn the wrong way. The worst was when the wind changed while you were away from the field; the pattern had shifted, and everything you had tried to remember was useless.

  A week passes thus. We fly to an auxiliary field, a large meadow five or ten minutes away. There is bare earth near the borders where planes have repeatedly touched down.

  “Let’s try some landings,” he says. Nervously I go over in my mind what to do, what not. “Make three good ones and I’ll get out.”

  We come in for the first. “Hold that airspeed,” he directs. “That’s good. Now come back on the power. Start rounding out.”

  Somehow it works. Hardly a bump as the wheels touch. “Good.” I push the throttle forward in a smooth motion and we are off again.

  The second landing is the same. I am not certain what I have done but whatever it is, I try to repeat it for the third. Almost confidently I turn onto final once more. “You’re doing fine,” he says. I watch the airspeed as we descend. The grass field is approaching, the decisive third.

  “Make this a full stop,” he instructs. I ease back the throttle. The airspeed begins to drop. “Keep the nose down,” he suddenly warns. “Nose down! Watch your airspeed!” I feel a hand on the stick. The plane is beginning to tremble. Untouched by me the throttle leaps forward, but through it somehow we are falling, unsupported by the roar. With a huge jolt we hit the ground, bounce, and come down again. He utters a single contemptuous word. When we have slowed, he says, “Taxi over there, to the left.” I follow his instructions. We come to a stop.

  “That was terrible. You rounded out twenty feet in the air. As far as I can make out, you’re going to kill us both.” I see him rising up. He climbs out of the cockpit and stands on the wing. “You take her up,” he says.

  This consent, the words of which I could not even imagine. Alone in the plane, I do what we had done each time, taxi to the end of the bare spot, turn, and almost mechanically advance the throttle. I felt at that moment—I will remember always—the thrill of the in-achievable. Reciting to myself, exuberant, immortal, I felt the plane leave the ground and cross the hayfields and farms, making a noise like a tremendous, bumbling fly. I was far out, beyond the reef, nervous but unfrightened, knowing nothing, certain of all, cloth helmet, childish face, sleeve wind-maddened as I held an ecstatic arm out in the slipstream, the exaltation, the godliness, at last!

  ——

  At night in the white wooden barracks not far from the flight line we talked of flying, in the clamor of the student mess, and on the battered buses swaying into town. We walked the streets in aimless groups, past lawyers’ offices with names painted in gold on the windows. There were tracks through the center of Pine Bluff along which freight trains moved with provincial slowness. There was the gold-domed courthouse and the bulky Pines Hotel, even then middle-aged with a portico entrance, balconies, and mysterious rooms. Of the silent residential neighborhoods with large clapboard houses or lesser ones set on the bare ground, we knew nothing. From the desolate life of the town on many Sundays we returned willingly to the field.

  We flew less often with the instructor. It was late spring, the sky fresh and filled with fair-weather clouds—weather, which could mean so much, was already a preoccupation. Late in the day the clouds would become dense and towering, their edges struck with light; epic clouds, the last of the sun streaming through. One afternoon, alone, I caught sight in their tops, far above, of a B-24 moving along like a great liner. Dazzled by its distance and height I turned like a dinghy to follow until it was gone.

  On an outlying field two rows of empty peach baskets had been placed at intervals on each side of a wide lane. A cross was marked on the ground halfway down. It was a kind of bull’s-eye. If your wheels touched on that spot you got a perfect grade, which is to say zero. Ten feet from it was a ten, twenty feet a twenty, and so forth. The figures were averaged and had to be below some number, I don’t remember, seventy or so, to pass. Around and around we flew, a supervisor on the ground in the blowing dust marking scores on a clipboard. Landing stages, this was called.

  At noon they were talking about someone’s extraordinary grade, one of the regular air cadets with whom we were training. His score had been six. It seemed unbelievable. He was pointed out—suddenly everyone knew who he was—the one with the dark hair. I could see him in the food line, distinct from the others, slim, at ease. He had flown before, it turned
out. He already had a pilot’s license and sixty hours in a Cub.

  The hurdles in primary were soloing and then two check rides with an Air Force pilot given, I believe, after forty and sixty hours of flying time. Don’t forget to salute before and after the flight, they said, and be sure you can explain the maintenance form. In the air there would be brief commands to do this or that maneuver and at some inconvenient moment the throttle would be pulled back with the announcement, “Forced landing.”

  The shakiest students confessed their fears and often did worse because of them, but some failures were unforeseeable, even unimaginable, like that of the dark-haired angel who had scored the six. One day he disappeared. He had somehow failed his forty-hour check and was gone. It made you realize how flimsy your position was and how unforgiving the machinery behind it all. The least promising of us, though we did not know it then, those with the least élan, would go to bombers and attack aircraft, and the others to fighters. That was a year off. Meanwhile, one by one they were dropping away, sometimes the leaders.