Burning the Days

by James Salter

  ——

  We were gone all spring and summer and returned much changed. We marched less perfectly, dressed with less care. West Point, its officer’s sashes and cock feathers fluttering from shakos, its stewardship, somehow passed over to those who had stayed.

  Among the great firsts: first solo, first breath of outside air, in here belongs first love affair.

  I had known her before, in New York, the younger of two sisters in a well-to-do Upper East Side family. She was dark-haired and theatrical and had grown, over a period of more than a year, to become very important, in fact essential, to me. Good-looking and expensively dressed, teeth fine and white, she stood at the entrance to life itself, the things I had yet to know and had sworn not to die before I did. Her father was a stockbroker with loyal, and many European, clients. Her mother, whose role was larger in our intrigue, disapproved of me, which was a stimulus. I was eager to have a past and a heart that longed for me.

  From the early football weekends when we drank in hotel rooms and alongside other couples lay in the feverish dark with murmurs and the low rustle of clothing, to weekends when she stayed at the Thayer, above the ground floor of which cadets were forbidden to go, evenings at dances and sometimes afternoons in borrowed quarters, we fell in with one another. I was filled with urges which she put down skillfully, like insurrections. I was trying to impose my new-formed self on her, but she had known the previous one and wavered.

  Gradually I prevailed. After many long overtures, occasionally desperate, something passed between us one New York weekend at the intermission of a musical called Panama Hattie. I can’t remember what was said; we casually edged through the crowd on the sidewalk and crossed the street to the hotel.

  She was at last willing, unresistant, we were face to face, she gleamed in the dark. That hotel is gone now, though the act remains, the unremarkable act which cut life in two, one part falling to the ground and the other stretching gloriously ahead. The great, thronged palaces with their countless windows, the Astor, McAlpin, the Pennsylvania, their dangerous lobbies and corridors along which we uneasily strolled, their rooms with twin beds and ominous black phones, became our stage. There was, that year, a then-irresistible novel called Shore Leave with a pair of Navy wings on its blue jacket, and written in a confident style. It became, at my insistence, our text. The name of its nihilist hero, gaunt and faithless, was Crewson. He had flown at Midway and in other battles. The blood baths. Would he remember as an old man, the author, Frederic Wakeman, wrote, rising at three in the morning on the third of June? The briefing at four and soon afterwards reports of enemy aircraft inbound. And then on the dense rippled sea, the Kaga, steaming upwind at a brisk thirty knots, the coming-out-of-the-ether feeling when he split his flaps and made an eighty-degree dive for the red circle on her flight deck … the first hit …—all this was indelible. Those bombs going home freed him forever from the trivial and mundane. His society girlfriend was only one of the women who trotted after him like colts.

  We shared this book as a Bible might be shared by a devout couple. It was a hymn to the illicit. Emboldened by it we acted as though we were part of the war. On the inside cover she inscribed it to me, the Crewson of her past. There were many things in it that she could have written herself, she continued, and then, as if granting to a beloved child possession of a favorite plaything, Keep this book with you, my dearest. If things had turned out differently, it managed to say; if we had, in the way of all failed lovers, only met years sooner or later …

  I knew the handwriting well. I had received many letters, for a long time one each morning after class, special delivery, scented, covered with stamps, letters I read sitting with my dress coat unzipped, a torn undershirt beneath it, the insignia of the upper-classman. I thought of her constantly, in the stuporous hours of code class, legs jammed against the table in desire; listening to songs on the phonograph; hearing classmates on Saturday evenings walking to the hop. The question was simple, was I going to marry her?, for marriage was heavy in the air, graduation, the chapel, former roommates and young women they more or less knew passing beneath the flash of crossed sabers and down the steps into a waiting automobile and what was surely life. I was unreliable but she would steady me. I was in uniform but that would be over before long and I would come back to the city to lead an appropriate life. All that was muted but clear. She was only eighteen but sure in her instinct. Besides, she coolly admitted, there was someone else in the picture who had been a year behind me in prep school and was now an enlisted man in Sioux Falls, less glamorous but more sensible, with not even the vaguest idea of staying in the army an hour longer than necessary. His name had been tossed lightheartedly back and forth between us until the point when I received a fateful telegram: Yes or no, it demanded.

  Whatever indecisive form my answer took, she responded by doing what she had threatened. She married him just as I was graduating. For a moment it seemed like another bit of teasing, with the impermanence things had in those days. Nevertheless I felt an unexpected, sweet-sad pang. Later I saw it clearly, as I had not then. I had turned my back on three things, marriage, money, and the past, never really to face them wholeheartedly again.

  I try to summon her and all the letters with their girlish script, the pleas and admonitions, gossip of friends, endearments, exaggeration. Sometimes it seems that all that has happened since is less vital than what we were, and the luster of her eighteen years, the tawdriness I wanted to immerse them in, to stain their glory and make them immortal. She was, for a season, mine, and I was drunk with it. I had the hussarlike luxury of being bored by the genuine thing, and though places have vanished, where she stands is where she has always stood and I carefully place her story where it belongs, before the rest.

  ——

  In the fall of 1944, amid the battles on the continent, came word of the death of the unrivaled goat, Benny Mills. He was killed in action in Belgium, a company commander. Beneath a shroud his body had lain in the square of a small town; people had placed flowers around it, and his men, one by one, saluted as they passed through and left him, like Sir John Moore at Corunna, alone with his glory. He had fallen and in that act been preserved, made untarnishable. He had not married. He had left no one.

  His death was one of many and sped away quickly, like an oar swirl. I could never imitate him, I knew, or be like him. He was part of a great dynamic of which I, in a useless way, was also part, and classmates, women, his men, all had more reason to remember him than I, but it may have been for some of them as it was for me: he represented the flawless and was the first of that category to disappear.

  ——

  We bought officer’s uniforms from military clothiers who came on weekends that next spring and set up tables and racks in the gymnasium. The pleasure of examining and choosing clothes and various pieces of decoration—should pilot’s wings be embroidered in handsome silver thread or merely be a metal version, was it worthwhile to order one or two handmade “green” shirts, was the hat to be Bancroft or Luxembourg—all this was savored. Luxembourg, thought to be the very finest, was in fact two tailor brothers surrounded by walls of signed photographs in their New York offices. The pair of them were to the army as Brooks Brothers was to Yale.

  Like young priests or brides, immaculately dressed, filled with vision, pride, and barely any knowledge, we would go forth. The army would care for us. We had little idea of how careers were fashioned or generals made. Napoleon, I remembered, when he no longer knew personally all those recommended for promotion, would jot next to a strange name on the list three words: “Is he lucky?” And of course I would be.

  Eventually you meet generals, walk beside them, talk, and slowly, as with beautiful women, manage to hold your eyes on them. A few years after graduation I became aide to a general who was moody, dashing, and had a scar like a knife-slash across the bridge of his nose, made by German flak. He was from Savannah, Georgia, class of 1928, fearsome reputation and the face of a leading man
. On his starched collar was a single, slightly antique star.

  He gave me an initial piece of advice: “As long as you’re my aide,” he said pleasantly, “you can get away with murder. You’ll be able to make bird colonels jump when you speak. They’ll think you’re speaking for me, but as soon as it’s over, when I’m not around anymore”—he made a gesture near his neck—“they’ll slit your throat,” he told me.

  His name was Robert Travis and the stories preceded him, mostly of his toughness. The very first one I heard was of his simply reaching out and tearing the stripes off a sergeant who had failed to salute him. LeMay himself was said to have been his copilot before the war.

  The poker he liked was five-card draw, open on anything, guts, as he said. One night his first bet was forty dollars, which was a lot then. We were flying over the Pacific. The game was table stakes. I looked at my cards; I had two tens.

  There were five of us playing. All but one called. The dealer asked, “How many?”

  “I’ll play these,” Travis said.

  I had drawn a third ten. He began counting out money. Eighty dollars was his bet.

  I was to his left. There was more than a month’s pay on the table. It was late at night. “Get out,” he said without looking at me. The heaped green of the bills was mesmerizing, the fascination of all that money, the thickness of it folded. “Get out, Jimmy,” he said again. This was the game he liked to play, perhaps because it had always favored him. Was he truly advising me? I had three of a kind. “Get out,” I heard him warn for the last time.

  Youth that I was, I tossed my cards away and with them, unfortunately, the memory of what he had. He won the hand, I remember that. I had bent to power.

  We were close. He hid nothing from me, diaries, ambition, desire. He had a notable if ominous charm and had once almost married a movie star, when he was a lieutenant and she a doll-like celebrity, but his family I think objected on the grounds that his career would have been compromised. I see him in Shanghai, forty years old, sitting in the barber’s chair in Chiang Kai-shek’s bathroom—the house had been offered as a courtesy. We were touring the Far East. For him it was marking time. He was waiting for the chance he had not gotten during the war. Eventually it came.

  Was he lucky? Yes and no. The bluish flak had come within an inch of his eyes and he had led some of the most dangerous raids of the war. He was made for that, to dare and command, but he died in an accident a few years later—his plane, fully loaded and with atomic bombs aboard, went down in a trailer park immediately after takeoff and an airfield in California was named for him.

  ——

  At Stewart Field the final spring, nearly pilots, we had the last segment of training. This was near Newburgh, about forty minutes from West Point. We wore flying suits most of the day and lived in long, open-bay barracks. That photograph of oneself, nonexistent, that no one ever sees, in my case was taken in the morning by the doorway of what must be the dayroom and I am drinking a Coke from an icy, greenish bottle, a ritual prelude to all the breakfastless mornings of flying that were to come. During all the training there had been few fatalities. We were that good. At least I knew I was.

  On a May evening after supper we took off, one by one, on a navigation flight. It was still daylight and the planes, as they departed, were soon lost in their solitude. On the maps the course was drawn, miles marked off in ticks of ten. The route lay to the west, over the wedged-up Allegheny ridges to Port Jervis and Scranton, then down to Reading, and the last long leg of the triangle back home. It was all mechanical with one exception: the winds aloft had been incorrectly forecast. Unknown to us, they were from a different direction and stronger. Alone and confident we headed west.

  The air at altitude has a different smell, metallic and faintly tinged with gasoline or exhaust. The ground floats by with tidal slowness, the roads desolate, the rivers unmoving. It is exactly like the map, with certain insignificant differences which one ponders over but leaves unresolved.

  The sun has turned red and sunk lower. The airspeed reads one-sixty. The fifteen or twenty airplanes, invisible to one another, are in a long, irregular string. Behind, the sky has become a deeper shade. We were flying not only in the idleness of spring but in a kind of idyll that was the end of the war. The color of the earth was muted and the towns seemed empty shadows. There was no one to see or talk to. The wind, unsuspected, was shifting us slowly, like sand.

  On my mind apart from navigation were, I suppose, New York nights, the lure of the city, various achievements that a year or two before I had only dreamed of. The first dim star appeared and then, somewhat to the left of where it should be, the drab scrawl of Scranton.

  Flying, like most things of consequence, is method. Though I did not know it then, I was behaving improperly. There were lightlines between cities in those days, like lights on an unseen highway but much farther apart. By reading their flashed codes you could tell where you were, but I was not bothering with that. I turned south towards Reading. The sky was dark now. Far below, the earth was cooling, giving up the heat of the day. A mist had begun to form. In it the light-lines would fade away and also, almost shyly, the towns. I flew on.

  It is a different world at night. The instruments become harder to read, details disappear from the map. After a while I tuned to the Reading frequency and managed to pick up its signal. I had no radio compass but there was a way of determining, by flying a certain sequence of headings, where in a surrounding quadrant you were. Then if the signal slowly increased in strength you were inbound towards the station. If not, and you had to turn up the volume to continue hearing it, you were going away. It was primitive but it worked.

  When the time came I waited to see if I had passed or was still approaching Reading. The minutes went by. At first I couldn’t detect a change but then the signal seemed to grow weaker. I turned north and flew, watching the clock. Something was wrong, something serious: the signal didn’t change. I was lost, not only literally but in relation to reality. Meanwhile the wind, unseen, fateful, was forcing me farther north.

  Among the stars, one was moving. It was the lights of another plane, perhaps one from the squadron. In any case, wherever it was headed there would be a field. I pushed up the throttle. As I drew closer, on an angle, I began to make out what it was, an airliner, a DC-3. It might be going to St. Louis or Chicago. I had already been flying for what seemed like hours and had begun, weakhearted, a repeated checking of fuel. The gauges were on the floor, one on each side of the seat. I tried not to think of them but they were like a wound; I could not keep myself from glancing down.

  Slowly the airliner and its lights became more distant. I couldn’t keep up with it. I turned northeast, the general direction of home. I had been scribbling illegibly on the page of memory, which way I had gone and for how long. I now had no idea where I was. The occasional lights on the ground of unknown towns, lights blurred and yellowish, meant nothing. Allentown, which should have been somewhere, never appeared. There was a terrible temptation to abandon everything, to give up, as with a hopeless puzzle. I was reciting “Invictus” to myself, I am the master of my fate … It availed nothing. I had the greatest difficulty not praying and finally I did, flying in the noisy darkness, desperate for the sight of a city or anything that would give me my position.

  In the map case of the airplane was a booklet, What to Do If Lost, and suddenly remembering, I got it out and with my flashlight began to read. There was a list of half a dozen steps to take in order. My eye skidded down it. The first ones I had already tried. Others, like tuning in any radio range and orienting yourself on it, I had given up on; something was wrong with that, it wasn’t working. I managed to get the signal from Stewart Field but didn’t take up the prescribed heading. I could tell from its faintness—it was indistinct in a thicket of other sounds—that I was far away, and I had lost faith in the procedure. The final advice seemed more practical. If you think you are to the west of Stewart, it said, head east until you come
to the Hudson River and then fly north or south; you will eventually come to New York or Albany.

  It was past eleven, the sky dense with stars, the earth a void. I had turned east. The dimly lit fuel gauges read twenty-five gallons or so in each wing. The idea slowly growing, of opening the canopy and struggling into the wind, over the side into blackness, tumbling, parachuting down, was not as unthinkable as that of giving the airplane itself up to destruction. I would be washed out, I knew. The anguish was unbearable. I had been flying east for ten minutes but it seemed hours. Occasionally I made out the paltry lights of some small town or group of houses, barely distinguishable, but otherwise nothing. The cities had vanished, sunken to darkness. I looked down again. Twenty gallons.

  Suddenly off to the left there was a glimmer that became—I was just able to make it out—a faint string of lights and then slowly, magically, two parallel lines. It was the bridge at Poughkeepsie. Dazed with relief I tried to pick out its dark lines and those of the river, turning to keep it in sight, going lower and lower. Then, in the way that all things certain had changed that night, the bridge changed too. At about a thousand feet above them, stricken, I saw I was looking at the street lights of some town.

  The gauges read fifteen gallons. One thing that should never be done—it had been repeated to us often—was to attempt a forced landing at night. But I had no choice. I began to circle, able in the mist to see clearly only what was just beneath. The town was at the edge of some hills; I banked away from them in the blackness. If I went too far from the brightly lit, abandoned main street, I lost my bearings. Dropping even lower I saw dark roofs everywhere and amid them, unexpectedly, a blank area like a lake or small park. I had passed it quickly, turned, and lost it. Finally, lower still, I saw it again. It was not big but there was nothing else. I ducked my head for a moment to look down—the number beneath each index line was wavering slightly: ten gallons, perhaps twelve.