by James Salter
The rule for any strange field was to first fly across at minimum altitude to examine the surface. I was not even sure it was a field; it might be water or a patch of woods. If a park, it might have buildings or fences. I turned onto a downwind leg or what I judged to be one, then a base leg, letting down over swiftly enlarging roofs. I had the canopy open to cut reflection, the ghostly duplication of instruments, the red warning lights. I stared ahead through the wind and noise. I was at a hundred feet or so, flaps down, still descending.
In front, coming fast, was my field. On a panel near my knee were the landing light switches with balled tips to make them identifiable by feel. I reached for them blindly. The instant they came on I knew I’d made a mistake. They blazed like searchlights in the mist; I could see more without them but the ground was twenty feet beneath me, I was at minimum speed and dared not bend to turn them off. Something went by on the left. Trees, in the middle of the park. I had barely missed them. No landing here. A moment later, at the far end, more trees. They were higher than I was, and without speed to climb I banked to get through them. I heard foliage slap the wings as just ahead, shielded, a second rank of trees rose up. There was no time to do anything. Something large struck a wing. It tore away. The plane careened up. It stood poised for an endless moment, one landing light flooding a house into which an instant later it crashed.
Nothing has vanished, not even the stunned first seconds of silence, the torn leaves drifting down. Reflexively, as a slain man might bewilderedly shut a door, I reached to turn off the ignition. I was badly injured, though in what way I did not know. There was no pain. My legs, I realized. I tried to move them. Nothing seemed wrong. My front teeth were loose; I could feel them move as I breathed. In absolute quiet I sat for a few moments almost at a loss as to what to do, then unbuckled the harness and stepped from the cockpit onto what had been the front porch. The nose of the plane was in the wreckage of a room. The severed wing lay back in the street.
The house, as it turned out, belonged to a family that was welcoming home a son who had been a prisoner of war in Germany. They were having a party and had taken the startling noise of the plane as it passed low over town many times to be some sort of military salute, and though it was nearly midnight had all gone into the street to have a look. I had come in like a meteorite over their heads. The town was Great Barrington. I had to be shown where it was on a map, in Massachusetts, miles to the north and east.
That night I slept in the mayor’s house, in a feather bed. I say slept but in fact I hung endlessly in the tilted darkness, the landing light pouring down at the large frame house. The wing came off countless times. I turned over in bed and began again.
They came for me the next day and I watched them load the wreckage on a large flatbed truck. I rode back with the remains of the plane. In the barracks, which were empty when I arrived, my bed, unlike the rows of others, was littered with messages, all mock congratulations. I found myself, unexpectedly, a popular figure. It was as if I had somehow defied the authorities. On the blackboard in the briefing room was a drawing of a house with the tail of an airplane sticking from the roof and written beneath, Geisler’s student. I survived the obligatory check-rides and the proceedings of the accident board, which were unexpectedly brief. Gradually transformed into a comedy, the story was told by me many times, as I had felt, for a shameless instant, it would be that night when the boughs of the first trees hit the wings before I saw the second. There was a bent, enameled Pratt and Whitney emblem from the engine that I kept for a long time, until it was lost somewhere, and years later a single unsigned postcard reached me, addressed care of the Adjutant General. It was from Great Barrington. We are still praying for you here, it said.
——
Confident and indestructible now, I put a dummy of dirty clothes in my bed and one night after taps met Horner near the barracks door. We were going off limits, over the fence, the punishment for which was severe. Graduation was only days away; if we were caught there would be no time for confinement to quarters or walking the Area; the sentence would be more lasting: graduating late and loss of class standing. The risk, though, was not great. “Anita is coming up,” he told me. “She’s bringing a girlfriend.” They would be waiting in a convertible at the bottom of a hill.
Anita was new. I admired her. She was the kind of girl I would never have, who bored me, in fact, and was made intriguing only by the mischievous behavior of Horner. In some ways I was in that position myself, his Pinocchio, willing and enthralled.
Anita was the daughter of a carpet manufacturer. She wore silk stockings and print dresses. She had red fingernails and was tall. Her efforts to discipline Horner were ineffective and charming. “Well, you know Jack …,” she would explain helplessly. I did know him and liked him, I think, at least as much as she did and probably for longer.
Staying close to the buildings we made it in the darkness to the open space near the fence and climbed over quickly. The road was not too long a walk away. We came over a slight crest and halfway down the hill, delirious in our goatlike freedom, saw the faint lights of the dashboard. One of the doors was open, the radio was softly playing. Two faces turned to us. Anita was smiling. “Where the hell have you been?” she said, and we drove off towards Newburgh to find a liquor store. Jack was in front with her; their laughter streamed back like smoke.
The Anitas. I had more or less forgotten them. Ages later, decades, literally, in the deepest part of the night the telephone rings in the darkness and I reach for it. It’s two in the morning, the house is asleep. There is a cackle that I recognize immediately. “Who is this?” I say. To someone else, aside, gleefully he says, “He wants to know who it is.” Then to me, “Did I wake you up?”
“What could possibly give you that idea?”
Another cackle. “Jim, this is Jack Horner,” he says in a businessman’s voice. He was divorced and traveling around. “Doing what?” I ask. “Inspecting post offices,” he says. Bobbing around his voice are others, careless, soft as feathers. One of them comes on the phone. “Where are you?” I ask. My wife is sleeping beside me. A low voice replies, “In a motel. About three blocks from you.” She adds a burning invitation. In the background I can hear him telling them I am a writer, he has known me since we were cadets. He tries to take the phone again. I can hear them struggling, the laughter of the women, his own, high and almost as feminine, infectious.
That May night, however, we parked near an orchard and went up beneath the trees. We got back to barracks very late. A day or two afterwards I came up to him while he was shaving before breakfast. “Have you noticed anything strange?” I asked.
“Yes. What is it? Have you got it too?” It was a rash. It turned out to be poison ivy covering our arms and legs, a first mock rendering to Venus.
We went without neckties, excused from formation. With blistered skin and unable to wear a full-dress coat, I stood at the window of my room and heard the band playing in the distance and the long pauses that were part of the ceremony of the last parade. There came the sound of the music played just once a year when the graduating class, some of them openly weeping, removed their hats as the first of the companies, in salute, came abreast, officers’ sabers coming up, glinting, then whipped downwards.
Far off, the long years were passing in review, the seasons and settings, the cold walls and sallyports, the endless routine. Through high windows the sun fell on the choir as it came with majestic slowness, singing, up the aisle. The uniforms, the rifles, the books. The winter mornings, dark outside; smoking and listening to the radio as we cleaned the room. The gym, dank and forbidding. The class sections forming in haste along the road.
The Area was filled with footlockers and boxes. Everyone would be leaving, scattered, dismissed for the last time, to the chapel for weddings, to restaurants with their families, to the Coast, the Midwest, to the smallest of towns. We were comparing orders, destinations. I felt both happiness and the pain of farewell. We were enter
ing the army, which was like a huge, deep lake, slower and deeper than one dreamed. At the bottom it was fed by springs, fresh and everlastingly pure. On the surface, near the spillway, the water was older and less clear, but this water was soon to leave. We were the new and untainted.
On my finger I had a gold ring with the year of my class on it, a ring that would be recognizable to everyone I would meet. I wore it always; I flew with it on my finger; it lay in my shoe while I slept. It signified everything, and I had given everything to have it. I also had a silver identification bracelet, which all flyers wore, with a welt of metal that rang when it touched the table or bar. I was arrogant, perhaps, different from the boy who had come here and different even from the others, not quite knowing how, or the danger.
As we packed to leave, a pair of my roommate’s shoe trees got mixed up with mine and I did not notice it until after we had gone. In a hand distinctly his, Eckert, R. P. in ink was neatly printed on the wooden toe block. He was killed later in a crash, like his brother. His life disappeared but not his name, which I saw over the years as I dressed and then saw him, cool blue eyes, pale skin, a way of smoking that was oddly abrupt, a way of walking with his feet turned out. I also kept a shako, some pants, and a gray shirt, but slowly, like paint flaking away, they were left behind or lost, though in memory very clear.
——
One thing I saw again, long afterwards. I was driving on a lonely road in the West about twenty miles out of Cheyenne. It was winter and the snow had drifted. I tried to push through but in the end got stuck. It was late in the afternoon. The wind was blowing. There was not a house to be seen in any direction, only fences and flat, buried fields.
I got out and started back along the road. It was very cold; my tire tracks were already being erased. Gloved hands over my ears, I was alternately walking and running, thinking of the outcome of Jack London stories. After a mile or two I heard dogs barking. Off to the right, half hidden in the snow, was a plain, unpainted house and some sheds. I struggled through the drifts, the dogs retreating before me, barking and growling, the fur erect on their necks.
A tall young woman with an open face and a chipped tooth came to the door. I could hear a child crying. I told her what had happened and asked if I could borrow a shovel. “Come in,” she said.
The room was drab. Some chairs and a table, bare walls. She was calling into the kitchen for her husband. On top of an old file cabinet a black-and-white television was turned on. Suddenly I saw something familiar, out of the deepest past—covering the couch was a gray blanket, the dense gray of boyhood uniforms, with a black-and-gold border. It was a West Point blanket. Her husband was pulling on his shirt. How fitting, I thought, one exregular bumping into another in the tundra, years after, winter at its coldest, life at its ebb.
In a littered truck we drove back to the car and worked for an hour, hands gone numb, feet as well. Heroic labor, the kind that binds you to someone. We spoke little, only about shoveling and what to do. He was anonymous but in his face I saw patience, strength, and that ethic of those schooled to difficult things. Shoulder to shoulder we tried to move the car. He was that vanished man, the company commander, the untiring figure of those years when nothing was higher, privations mean little to him, difficulties cannot break his spirit … I was in the snow of airfields again where we dug our wheels free and taxied up and down the runway to let the exhaust melt the ice, in the rime cold of forty-five thousand feet with the heat inoperative, in dawns of thirty below, when to touch the metal of the fuselage was to lose your skin to it.
Together we rescued the car, and back at the house I held out some money. I wanted to give him something for his trouble, I said. He looked at it, “That’s too much.”
“Not for me,” I said. Then I added, “Your blanket …”
“What blanket?”
“The one on the couch; I recognize it. Where’d you get it?” I said idly. He turned and looked at it, then at me as if deciding. He was tall, like his wife, and his movements were unhurried. “Where’d we get it?” he asked her. The ladies who come up in June …, I thought. They’d been married in the chapel.
“That? I forget. At the thrift shop,” she said.
For a moment I thought they were acting, unwilling to reveal themselves, but no. He was a tattoo artist, it turned out. He worked in Cheyenne.
——
The summer after graduation, the first great summer of my life, passed without a trace. I had one ambition, to degrade myself. I first sped to New York to spend a weekend with a girl I had heard stories about for at least a year. The daughter of a diplomat, she was notorious throughout the regiment, passed from hand to hand, not particularly beautiful, as I discovered, but unsurprisable and even witty. I was eager to know what the others had known, the inner circle, and to be able to mention her casually.
After this came leave in sweltering Washington, indolent days and nights, and the minimal pleasure that went with them. Horner was there also. He was living with his mother. At the end of a month, still enchanted with ourselves, he and I climbed aboard a B-17 bound for Columbus, Ohio, and lay luxuriously amid the baggage, Horner strumming on his ukulele while the crew pulled the props through and prepared for flight. Island songs were among his favorites, and one called “Standard Gas.” Soon we were in the cool, thin air of altitude, the engines lulling us to sleep. Thus, rather clownishly, began days of roving. We were headed eventually for Oklahoma, regular officers, in the comfort of our status, unaware of the multitudes and their fate.
——
From time to time I would think of Bob Morgan, most often at year’s end, when you look back, sometimes a long way. I once went as far as to get a telephone number for him from long-distance information but I never called. There among my vague recollections he never changed, he kept his broad, flat chest, his modesty and doggedness.
Decades passed, and I happened to be in Texas, though far from his town. On an impulse I called information again. There were no Morgans listed in Spur; I had waited too long. There were two Robert Morgans in Lubbock, a large city not far away that he often mentioned, but neither was the right one. I finally tried the Veterans Administration. There were countless Morgans on the computer, the man said, including hundreds of Roberts. He suggested I call Spur, where I talked to the editor of the local paper.
“Morgan?” Speaking to someone else, the editor said, “Didn’t we run an obituary for a Morgan this past fall? I don’t know if it was Robert,” he said to me—he had only been there since 1952, he was a newcomer, he admitted. “Wait a minute, here.” He was looking at the subscription list, “There’s a Bob Morgan who takes the Texas Spur. He’s in New Waverly, Texas.” He read me the postal code. Where New Waverly was, he couldn’t say, but I knew at last I had found him, gone but still subscribing to the hometown paper, he and Nona.
In New Waverly a woman answered the phone. Yes, she said, this was Bob Morgan’s number. I described who I was, his roommate from long ago if this was the Bob Morgan who was in the army during the war.
“He was in the Air Force,” she said.
“The Air Force? Not the paratroops?”
“I think you want his uncle,” she said. “He was in the paratroops.”
“Was he ever wounded?”
“I don’t know about that. You might ask my husband, he’d know. He’ll be home about four.”
Where did the uncle live? I asked. He lived in Plano, she said, outside of Dallas, but she used the past tense.
“He doesn’t live there anymore?” I said. She was afraid not; he’d died back here a bit.
I felt a sudden, terrible disappointment. There was no real reason. It was just that a distant piece of the shoreline had dropped away. When had it happened? I asked. She wasn’t sure. About 1985, she said. After a moment’s pause she added, “He committed suicide.”
I wanted to know more, I wasn’t sure why, and she gave me the name of his sister, who was visiting a niece in Lubbock. I called ther
e and left a message, which they said they would get to her.
Two days later, early in the morning, the phone rang. It was Bob Morgan’s sister. I talked to her about him. I had wanted to call his widow, I said, but hadn’t known how. “He wasn’t married to her when he died,” his sister told me. “He divorced her about three years before and married the girl he always wanted to marry, he said, his high school sweetheart.”
“Nona?”
“Not Nona. He married Betty,” she said. She told me about his children; there were four, two of them his former wife’s that he adopted. “So he had two natural children?” No, she said, there was another adopted one, a girl, from an even earlier marriage to a rancher’s daughter in New Mexico.
“Actually,” she said, “I think he married her as much as anything because he liked her father. He always formed an attachment to older men, ever since his own father was murdered when Bob was, let’s see, he must have been about four. I guess he never did get over that.”
Their father was murdered by two men, she said. “They knew he was headed for Amarillo to buy some horses, and of course they never heard of a letter of credit or anything like that. They thought he was carrying a lot of money so they robbed and killed him. Actually, he only had forty dollars on him; it was a lifetime rule never to carry more than that, two twenty-dollar bills folded up. There were five of us,” she said. “My mother—she was a remarkable woman, I don’t know how she did it—was left with five small children, a ten-thousand-dollar estate and twelve thousand dollars of debt, with the Depression just ahead. That was around 1925. She moved us all into an old house and on her own learned to farm and to break horses.”