Burning the Days

by James Salter

  ——

  There are things that seem insignificant at the time and that turn out to be so. There are others that are like a gun in a bedside drawer, not only serious but unexpectedly fatal.

  For Colonel Brischetto, it was not a single detail but a series of them, none of great importance and spread over months. He was the new wing commander at Bitburg who had arrived in August, filled with ambition but having very little jet time. Tom Whitehouse, the old commander, diminutive and gallant, turned over to him a veteran fighter wing. It was like turning over a spirited horse to a new, inexperienced owner who would, of course, attempt to ride.

  All wing and group flying officers were attached to one of the squadrons. The wing commander flew with ours, not very frequently, as it happened, and not very well, though there was nothing alarmingly wrong. You could feel his weakness on the radio where he was like an actor fumbling for his lines, and in following instructions in the air there was often a slight, telltale delay.

  We went, each year, to North Africa to gunnery camp. The weather was always good there. At Wheelus, a large airfield in Tripoli, we lived in tents for four or five weeks and flew every day. It was essential for all pilots to qualify during that time though there were occasional opportunities for a few planes to go and fire elsewhere. There were fighter wings from all over Europe scheduled into Tripoli throughout the year, nose to tail. Not so much as an extra day there could be begged.

  That year we were booked for Wheelus in the very beginning of January. All preparations had been made but we did not go—the weather at Bitburg prevented it. Throughout the holidays there had been freezing rain and low ceilings; the runway was covered with heavy ice. In North Africa the sun was shining and irreplaceable days were passing. At last the rain stopped and the forecast seemed encouraging. All through the final night there were airplanes taxiing slowly up and down the runway, trying to melt the ice with the heat of their exhaust.

  At noon the next day the ceiling lifted sufficiently. We were ready. It was six days after our intended departure.

  An outwardly calm but impatient Colonel Brischetto was to go in the first flight. He was on the wing of an experienced pilot, a lieutenant, his favorite instructor, in fact, Cass. They were already on the runway when he called that his tailpipe temperature, a critical instrument, was fluctuating wildly, and asked Cass for advice—he had already had some minor difficulties with the ship. Airplanes had their own personalities. They were not mere mechanical objects but possessed temperaments and traits. Some were good in gunnery, others hopeless. Some were always ready to fly, others rarely. Some planes, if not creaking like ships, nevertheless made strange noises. Without minds or hearts, they were somehow not wholly inanimate. An airplane did not belong to one pilot, like a horse, but to all communally. There were no secrets—pilots talked freely about the behavior of planes and in time flew most of them.

  When Brischetto asked Cass whether or not he should take off with an erratic indication, he was told that such a decision was up to the pilot. Despite his great anxiety, Brischetto made a prudent choice and aborted. He taxied back to the ramp, was assigned another airplane, and became part of another flight.

  Now it was early afternoon. The first planes, Cass and his flight, were well on their way to Rome, where they would refuel before continuing. The clouds at Bitburg were holding at six hundred feet. The bases were ragged, the top of the overcast layered and uncertain; the visibility, threatened by rain, stood at five miles. Brischetto had just forty minutes of actual weather experience in the airplane. He felt, probably correctly, that he would have more difficulty flying on the wing of another plane in these conditions than having another plane flying on his, and he indicated he would like to lead the flight.

  The four ships, in elements of two, the colonel leading, taxied out to the runway. The takeoff interval between elements was to be five seconds, and they were to join up, if possible, beneath the clouds so that all four could penetrate together with a single leader and a single voice.

  Brischetto read his clearance back to the tower incorrectly. He was obliged to repeat it three times before permission was given to take the runway. He had a very steady pilot, Tracy, who had never flown with him previously, however, on his wing. So, after many delays, some unavoidable, they were ready to depart.

  The planes lined up on the runway together. The noise of their engines swelled. With an almost dainty slowness, the first two ships began to roll. Five seconds later, the next two. I was watching with no particular interest, sitting in the cockpit in the squadron area, a flight leader, waiting to start. Very quickly the four planes disappeared into the clouds. They had not—I attached no meaning to it—come together as a flight.

  In the air the colonel, as it happened, had responded with a distracted “Roger” to the request to reduce power slightly to allow the second element to catch up after takeoff. He then gave the command to change channels, from tower to departure control. Changing radio channels meant reaching down and back. The indicator was hard to see. It was best done by counting the clicks between numbers—perhaps Brischetto did this, though he was never heard on departure control.

  On the ground time passed slowly, slipping by in the small, hesitant movement of the second hand on the instrument panel clock. Though it is hard to imagine, it was passing at different rates, not to be calculated in ordinary seconds, for the colonel and his wingman when they went into the clouds. For Tracy on the left wing it was like the regular, slow beat of a pulse, but for the colonel, in an abstract world of utter whiteness and noise, it had begun to accelerate. He had started a slight turn to the left towards the departure beacon, which became tighter, nearly vertical, his wingman at full power pulling hard to stay in position. Then, suddenly correcting, he began to roll the other way, to the right, going past straight and level, banking steeper and steeper, past the point where Tracy could stay with him, becoming inverted, heading down.

  “Cousin Echo,” Tracy called, “I’ve lost you.”

  Rolling out, on his own instruments then, Tracy managed to stop his descent. He found himself going over five hundred miles an hour. He called his leader a number of times on both channels, tower and departure control, but there was no reply.

  The last few seconds, beneath the clouds, must have been a collapse of all reality for the colonel as he burst into the visible world in a nearly vertical dive. Everything he knew and had known was suddenly of no avail. If, even for a moment, he thought of bailing out, it was already too late. As if in a nightmare, in the final second his eyes smashed through surfaces, he entered a new dimension.

  The first awareness for us that anything was wrong was the announcement by the tower that the field was closed to all traffic, an emergency was in progress. There was nothing more, no voices on the air, no instructions or calls. Only silence and a few dark birds flying low, near the wintry clouds.

  Brischetto was forty-one years old. He had a family, children. In the housing area the telephone must have eventually rung in his apartment. “Colonel Brischetto’s quarters,” one of them would say.

  The aircraft was completely demolished, the accident report read. Cause of death: injuries multiple extreme. The body, it was stated, was destroyed beyond recognition. More than that can hardly occur. It was impossible to know with certainty why it all had happened. Most likely the colonel had looked away from his instruments for several seconds, absorbed in trying to read the number on the channel selector, down by his left elbow. That had caused the first unintentional, steep turn. He had corrected that. Perhaps he could not understand why he heard no one on the radio and looked down again. Perhaps when he returned to his instruments he saw chaos beyond his power to decipher.

  Subdued, we nevertheless flew to Rome that afternoon and on to Africa where we fired gunnery for weeks over the green, unoccupied sea.

  ——

  North Africa had its spell. Silent, forgotten cities along the coast, joined by a single empty road. The marble colu
mns from Roman days pillaged over the centuries for European palaces and estates.

  On windless mornings we took off early and headed out to sea. The tow plane was already on course, at twenty thousand feet, the slender white target moving serenely some distance behind it.

  The first mission of the day. The air has a full, damp quality. Long, holy streamers curve through it, marking our passes. There is a rhythm, like section hands dreamily pounding spikes. In the gunsight the target grows larger, slowly at first and then with a rush, in range for only a second or two. The bullets leave thin traces of smoke as they vanish into the cloth—each plane’s have been dipped in a different color paint so they can afterwards be counted. To the south, invisible, on the one great road of the kingdom, paralleling the sea, there are arches of palms and thousands upon thousands of stiff, laundered flags to mark the route of the wedding party traveling west from Benghazi. The king had taken a second wife, who was Egyptian.

  That night in Tripoli, amid the rancid smell of smoke, a torchlight parade passed along the street through the crowds. I stood outside a tailor shop and watched. The owner, Salvatore Perrucio, stood beside me. “What is it, is the king coming?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” Perrucio said. “He wouldn’t dare.”

  “Why not?”

  “They kill him,” he said.

  I laughed at the joke.

  “Don’t,” he warned. “Never laugh. If they see you doing that, they kill you, too. Never laugh at them. Call them anything you want, but never laugh.”

  It was difficult to know who he was talking about, the mobs in the street, the short dark men in double-breasted suits in the Uaddan Hotel, the wraithlike figures drifting without apparent purpose along the beach, the bare-legged men working in the salt flats near our planes? We knew none of them. They were part of something impenetrable. Together with the buildings and statuary of an ancient colonial world, they went back at least two thousand years, to the days of Leptis Magna and Sabratha. Surviving within them all this time was a seething and unalterable code.

  Perrucio made suits, bespoke, for thirty or forty dollars, as I recall. When he was twelve, he told me modestly, he could make a complete suit all by himself. He’d been a prisoner of the English during the war and had made uniforms for them. The time he spent in prison camp was the happiest of his life, he said. “A lovely country. Such beautiful women—and so easy to get. Of course, I was different-looking then. I wasn’t like this”—he clasped his wide waist with his hands. He had the full, pleasant face of a man in touch with life. Inside the shop, half concealed by a curtain, a boy sat, two thin legs in shorts and a plum-shaped body, cutting and basting patterns, the very age Perrucio had been.

  I flew south one day, a hundred or two hundred miles into the desert, the earth changing from ruggedness to orange dust. There was no life, no roads, no trace of anything. Turning, I began to descend in long, uninquisitive arcs until finally, at fifty or a hundred feet, I was heading back north.

  At that height one can see only a few miles ahead. Unexpectedly, things began to appear, occasional lonely shepherds, grazing camels, a low, dark group of tents. Suddenly there were animals scattering before me, children throwing themselves to the ground, the momentary glimpse of women who had hurried to tent doors. In twenty minutes I would be on the ground at Wheelus but I would remain aloft much longer in the minds of these unknown people, crossing their world with furious sound and then gone.

  Beyond them, past shale mountains and stretches of sand, came the first faint tincture of civilization: telegraph wires, cultivation, roads. Farther still, hard and gleaming, the sea.

  It was from the other side of this sea that Perrucio had come, from the long, rugged peninsula that had been the center of the world. It was easy to see the long throw of his life, Italy, North Africa, the war, and finally North Africa again in unmarked exile, a life begun perhaps ten years earlier than mine and meant from the beginning to be more conventional and unesteemed. I envied its simplicity, the fineness of the suits he so carefully made. The days of pale English roses, probably less well scrubbed than I imagined and coarser voiced, were far behind. He lived among a less exotic species now, his wife, daughter, mother-in-law.

  At the Bath Club, dreary and English, there were desiccated copies of London Illustrated News spread on the tables and a drink of scotch cost a dime. One night, when her escort had gone off for a few minutes, we invited a watery blonde, the only woman in the club, to come to the base on Saturday night. All right, she said. She wanted to bring along a friend, someone named Emma.

  “Who is Emma?”

  “You’ll like her,” she said.

  I seem to recall Emma now as being older. Saturday night was always crowded and boisterous. Half-drunk and suddenly remembering the invitation, three of us went to the main gate to meet the women and guide their car to the club. “We’re waiting for a couple of visitors,” I told the guards.

  The road leading to the base was empty. There were no headlights, only alien darkness. Minutes passed.

  “What time is it?”

  “Eight-thirty.”

  “What time did we say?”

  “I forget.”

  After a while one of the guards turned his head. He heard someone approaching. “Might be your visitors,” he said.

  “Couldn’t be,” I said with assurance. “They’ll be in a car,” I explained as the shadowy figures of the two demoiselles materialized down the road. They were walking in high heels. It was miles to town. Such was the allure of our pay and wrinkled khaki.

  These European women, few as they were, now seem faint pencil marks on the North African page. It was more or less clear why they had come and also that they would find little here. The bargains that could be struck were meager. Perhaps it was exactly this, the injudiciousness, their need for luck, that made one remember them at all.

  ——

  In Morocco, where we went for good weather in which to fly the new airplanes, F-100s—more powerful and less forgiving—with which we were to be equipped, the air was different. Morocco had been a French colony and bordered another sea. From its coast one could reach England or even the New World. There were boulevards, apartment houses, the elegy of French names.

  Fedala was to the south with wide beaches and surf breaking close to shore. It was for off-duty hours, inexplicable blue bulbs in the ceiling of the hotel and a waiter awkwardly pouring the wine. We would sit on the terrace in the evening, the faces around the table slowly becoming indistinct. In the distance the sea, which defined everything, fell endlessly upon itself. Our glory was endless, too. We were great captains all. We sat at ease. The beeves had been slaughtered; the cooks, all in white, stood ready to prepare the meal. The idle hours are passed in drinking, talking, desiring. There are weeks left in the campaign; another follows.

  Later there is the Sphinx, named probably for its predecessor in Paris on Boulevard Edgar Quinet. You could see it from the air, iron gates and a gravel driveway. Inside it was tiled, a nightclub: downstairs, blue films and books; upstairs, women. The rooms on the second floor faced the sea. “As many times as you like,” she said, speaking French at the bar. At the far end of the room a band was playing. She was from Marseille, skin pale and shining like fruitwood. Her dress was cut low, her breasts smooth and perfectly separated. We danced like a couple, as if we had come there together. She was pressed against me. The black tile pillars slid before my eyes, the mirrors, the trio at the floorside table, two men and a girl with short black hair, the gold of a wedding band on her finger. They were the haut monde, come for titillation.

  Canadian pilots are entering. The band is playing something I would like to remember. Far away it seems, unmourned, are all the other nights, the unattainable women, nurses, admirals’ daughters, the colonel’s wife that time unsteadily playing blackjack. “Just give me a little bitty one,” she pleaded, “don’t give it to me unless it’s little.” It was dealt. A jack. She stared at it, looked at her hole c
ard, stared again. Her handsome, slurred face. “All right,” she announced, “twenty-one.” But it was not. The dealer took the money.

  The morning light of Africa is brilliant and flat. The empty street, the silence. How was it? they want to know. That, one can embroider, one can tell, but there is a foolish thing one cannot—she came to the gate to say goodbye. She asked if you would write, a postcard from Port Lyautey, addressed simply to Dené, Sphinx, Fedala.

  In Tangier the peddlers and guides were outside at all hours, some displaying letters of recommendation. In 1956 you could buy a palace—baths, servants’ quarters, patios—for twelve thousand dollars. Like other exotic cities, Tangier reeked of dust, of the endless cycle of living and dying. The market was teeming, hundreds of stalls, chickens with their feet tied lying docilely on the ground, mounds of tomatoes, many misshapen, goats, women nursing babies, bags of grain. It seemed merciless. In the garden of the sultan’s palace legions of ants were streaming around a dead sparrow.

  I wake from a nap. The city is at its most frightening, most implacable. Day is past and night is falling. Across the avenue two girls at the beach club are hanging up their bathing suits to dry. To be alone here, I think … to be improvident or penniless, to feel the darkness on every side.

  I am not sure where the terror of North Africa comes from—from its emptiness, I suppose, from all that is unknowable. Life is cheap there, it is only a husk. Perhaps it is the cruelty, the mutilation, the followers of El Glaoui drenched with gasoline and set afire, although, as someone said, it had thoughtfully not been done in front of their children and wives; the British sergeants found with their genitals sewn in their mouths; the man who was in “that square” in Marrakech and turned to bargain with someone—when he turned back, his wife was gone, never seen again. Perhaps it was the trade in sex, the White Horse, where beneath bright lights, as calmly as if undressing backstage, a young Spanish girl, flawless as a statue, steps from her clothes. A heavier girl produces a threatening device and straps it on …