The Patriot

by Evan S. Connell

“Can you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Go when you feel like it?”

  “Certainly! Come on, maybe we can get away before she comes back.” He put the note on the stove with an apple on top to hold it and ran to the closet for his jacket. “Take some of those rolls along if you want to,” he called.

  “I was thinking I might,” Horne answered. “They really are very good.” And he was wrapping four of them in wax paper when Melvin reappeared.

  While they were driving toward the naval base Melvin explained what had happened to him after graduation day at Pensacola and what he was now doing. “I plan to use the remainder of the GI Bill,” he concluded. “Then, probably, I’ll try to locate a teaching position somewhere. Maybe some little college might hire me.”

  “If they don’t know you they might,” Sam Horne replied, not with any particular animus, but in a sociable tone, as though it were an established fact.

  29

  Around a bend in the road they came within sight of the base and of the bleak flint hills of Olathe, bare and frozen. Whorls of snow as fine and dry as sugar, or alkali dust, swiftly rose from the fields and gullies and swept through the barbed-wire fences and the ranks of splintered cornstalks like wraiths in the pallid winter sunlight.

  Horne brought the station wagon skidding to a stop at the gate. A guard appeared. Melvin, watching the guard’s face, saw it assume the customary expression—the man retreating well within the face, leaving it, the voice, and the body, to function as expected.

  “Good morning, sir,” said the guard, saluting.

  “Good morning.” Horne returned the salute and drove on.

  The sky was clear. A green beacon flashed from the squadron tower. The cups of the anemometer were spinning. A few planes were in the air.

  “North wind. Fifteen knots, twenty knots,” Horne observed, squinting at the wind sock, “and cold as my Aunt Mona.”

  He parked near the hangars and pointed to the Corsair he had flown from the West Coast. The bubble canopy was set far back on the fuselage, as close to the rudder as to the engine, and the lowest blade of the four-bladed propeller was almost touching the concrete.

  “That must be a new model,” Melvin remarked. “It seems different from the ones at Pensacola.”

  “Yuh, they gave it a few more horses and squared the prop tips.”

  “I’ve never seen this greenish color before. The others were always that midnight blue, or else camouflaged.”

  “It’s a new paint they’re trying, testing the corrosion, or some damn thing. Come on, it’s got only one seat and you ain’t about to solo.” He whistled into his fists and hopped up and down. The snow came whirling around his feet and he suddenly turned and ran for the hangar. “God above,” he muttered when they were inside, “I wish I was in California.” He shivered and peeked through a crack in the door. “You wait here, I’ll scare up some gear.”

  He returned a few minutes later dressed in winter flight clothing, with a parachute slung across each shoulder, and had brought a suit for Melvin. “I left those rolls in the car,” he said with a worried expression. “I hope nobody eats them before we get down. They certainly are delicious.” He scratched his head, frowned, and walked away.

  When he came back he had a map, a candy bar, and a number of cigars which he was easing into a pocket of his jacket. In the meantime Melvin had gotten dressed. The musty, brindled helmet was buckled under his chin and his ears tingled. The leather trousers were so heavy and the fleece so thick that he was scarcely able to walk.

  “I don’t know why it is,” Horne said, looking at him, “but you always remind me of a puppet. Come on, let’s go,” and he started for the door.

  The SNJ to which they had been assigned was parked behind some jets halfway down the line. Flurries of snow spun over it and under it, rattling the greenhouse and drifting against the worn tires. It was silver and green with orange squadron markings. They walked around it, examining the surfaces for damage, and climbed on the wing, one after the other, and it occurred to Melvin, seeing himself and Horne so bulky and brown, that from a distance they must look like gorillas clambering into the cockpits. He dropped into the seat, drew the canopy over his head to shut out the wind, and then began to untangle the shoulder harness, realizing presently that he should have arranged it before sitting down. He was still untangling it when there was a leaden thump and the control stick began flopping around between his knees. The pedals sank to the floorboards and the airplane moved a little as the rudder swung against the wind. The stick plunged forward and rocked back, the elevators descended and flipped upward; the tail of the plane did not leave the ground but for an instant it had felt lighter.

  Melvin got his arms into the harness and buckled it securely to the safety belt. There was another metallic clunk and Horne’s hulking figure dropped almost out of sight; only the top of his helmet was visible in the front cockpit. A moment later he was cranking himself up. The control stick continued banging noisily from side to side. The ailerons loosely lifted and fell in the wind.

  Horne started the engine; there was a weary whine, every second more shrill and powerfully protesting, until it seemed ready to burst; then all at once the propeller jerked, flung itself over, stopped, jerked again, and disappeared in a roar of noise. Out of the wavering, colorless hoop the blades emerged, fanning slowly around, first one way and then the other, with a drifting, leisurely motion, while acrid fumes streamed into the cockpit.

  Melvin unhooked the microphone from the radio box and said over the intercommunication system, “My feet are cold.” He could see Horne’s shoulder move as he reached for the front microphone.

  “Why don’t you open the heater?”

  “I forgot where it is.”

  “On the floor,” Horne said, observing him in the mirror, and then added, “I was going to let you handle the take-off. I just now changed my mind.”

  There was the valve on the floor, right where it had always been; he rotated it with his toe and felt a stream of air, not quite warm and yet not cold, inside the cuff of his trousers. Then he sat with his hands and feet riding on the controls and waited, looking around at the base, at the green beacon, at the distant figures in the control tower.

  The brakes depressed, the throttle knob slowly pulled his left hand forward. The direction of the propeller blades appeared to reverse, like the spokes of stagecoach wheels in the movies; the engine was howling. He looked at the instrument panel, for a moment unable to locate the magneto switch, but there it was, and he watched it, knowing it was going to move. It did; immediately he could feel a difference in the quivering fuselage. The tachometer needle was sinking. He tried to remember how much it was supposed to drop when the magnetos were tested.

  In a moment the throttle returned to its former position and Horne was signaling to the lineman, who had been standing by with the collar of his peajacket turned up and his back to the wind; the lineman ducked out of sight beneath the wing to kick away the chocks. He reappeared a few seconds later on the other side of the plane with his mittens raised, beckoning, trotting nimbly backward. The SNJ rolled after him like a captive dragon glinting in the January sun, growling but obedient to each command, rocking and waddling in the wind, hunch-backed, bandy-legged, and pigeon-toed, and Sam Horne pushed the throttle forward to blast the tail around.

  The lineman waved them on and ran for the hangar with his head buried in his coat.

  The wind whistled over the fuselage and the plane seemed to skip now and then as Horne taxied rapidly along the strip toward the far end of the runway. Melvin looked up and saw, not far above the leafless trees, where abandoned bird nests lodged here and there in the forks, a twin-engined transport gleaming in the winter noon, and then, at the same instant, as though they were still flying together at Pensacola, Melvin and Horne turned their heads toward the squadron tower: a red light was shining in their eyes. Horne drew back on the throttle.

  Snow spun up from the run
way as the transport thundered ponderously by them with its plump wheels reaching stiffly for the ground, and snow was still boiling in its wake across the center of the field when the tower light shone green.

  The SNJ trundled forward. The canopy rattled and danced like a teacup. They swerved onto the runway, the metal trim tabs moved as Horne adjusted for the take-off, then the throttle was sliding forward and the plane bumped ahead faster and faster and the tail hesitantly rose from the pavement. Melvin sat with his arms folded, smiling and looking around as he felt with his body for the diminishing bumps and for that subtle, final withdrawal of the earth.

  Gently but positively the wheels thumped into their pockets beneath the fuselage; he knew how they would look from below—tightly rolled, clasped there, side by side, like buttons or talons. A wing dipped and the J curved across the station. There was just time to glimpse the high wire fence flickering underneath the wing before a burnt white prehistoric horizon tilted into view—a fragment of decorated pottery from a cave, snow and trees, the solid mottled luster of a frozen pond, all at once a silo and pigs and the pens stark white, and the trampled, muddy, hay-strewn barnyard and one Gauguin horse beside the weathered door, railroad tracks, and the matted weeds beside the bridge. The plane was rising. In the distance was another farm, fenced and angular, all Kansas and honest, and away to the side the suburbs of Olathe itself, an unfinished tract, a cluster of pastel bungalows which belonged in the tropics, not on these bleak plains.

  Melvin unhooked the microphone and pressed the button. “Let’s go over the university. I have some unfinished business there.”

  Horne stared at him suspiciously in the mirror, but said, after a moment, “Heading three-one-zero. You got it,” and patted the top of his helmet and jerked his thumb backward.

  Melvin took the controls and for a while flew straight ahead. Then, cautiously, he began to bank from side to side, then lowered the SNJ into a shallow dive and pulled it into a climb while he followed the heading to Lawrence. The controls felt odd, unlike the pedals and wheel of an automobile. He tried a full-circle turn, pressing the pedals smoothly, but the bubble would not stay in the center of the arch—it slipped ahead of him all the way.

  The sheepskin jacket, the leather gloves, the engine fumes, the greasy steel, cold to touch, the knobs and levers, and the dials, the tight discomfort of the helmet, and the clamminess of the fleece, a coarse, hard corner of the parachute pack on which he was seated, and the memory of the odor of canvas after long hours in the summer afternoon—these recalled far more than he had been able to remember when he and his wife were visiting Pensacola. These she could not ever understand.

  “What do you remember most about the program?” he asked.

  “A couple of sons of bitches I’d love to get even with,” said Horne with no hesitation.

  “I know. But what else?”

  “I guess that Christmas dinner at Albuquerque,” said Horne after a while. “It was dark that day, that’s what I’ll never forget. They had to turn on the lights, it was so dark in the chow hall. I’ve still got the menu, those little printed, folded menus they had set up at every place, I’ve still got mine somewhere. That was a mighty fine dinner, after all those powdered eggs and cold beans. I just couldn’t believe we were going to get a decent meal. All the time I was eating that Christmas dinner I kept expecting the skipper to come running in there and shout, ‘What the hell do you people think you’re doing? Who gave you permission to eat turkey and cranberry sauce?’ Incidentally, if you want to go to Lawrence, you’re twenty degrees off course.”

  Melvin banked the SNJ and Horne’s shadow, followed by his own, slid along the wing and disappeared into space. A wisp of smoke floated through the cockpit. He glanced at the mirror and saw that Horne had a cigar in his mouth and was holding a match to it.

  “Yes, that was a good dinner,” Melvin said. “You know, the other day I got to thinking about that book of nudes. Did you take that with you to Jacksonville?”

  Horne removed the cigar and appeared to be thinking. At last he said with a serious expression, “I can’t remember. Be damn if I know what ever did happen to that. Somebody must have swiped it. Jesus, by the time we finished Saufley that book was so mangled you’d have thought it went through the wringer. It was a fine book,” he added thoughtfully, and resumed smoking.

  “Yes, it certainly was,” Melvin said. “I never saw anything like it. Six hundred and fifty women.”

  “Yes, that was all right. That was worth while.”

  They flew over the wind-rippled snow and Horne remarked, “It’s almost like I got cheated out of being an architect. If there hadn’t been this war, I’d have gone to the state university—I was saving for it. I’d have worked my tail to the bone, and right today I’d be a junior partner in a firm somewhere. In Omaha, probably—fat, dumb, and happy. Maybe in Chicago. You know, baby, I never told you this but when we were cadets I used to go off by myself sometimes just in order to look at buildings. I’d walk around them, and go inside and look at the corridors and stairs. And those liberty nights when nobody knew where I was, you know what I was doing usually? In the reading room of the USO, or in the library, or in some park under a streetlamp with a book. Sure, by the time we got through Pensacola I’d practically memorized Toward a New Architecture; I knew as much about the Bauhaus as if I’d been there. But we were at war and I felt—ah! Forget it.

  “Now it seems strange,” he continued, “but I used to lie in my sack at Barin and just think with admiration about people like Gropius or Le Corbusier. I used to daydream about the time when everybody would be discussing me and the stuff I was erecting. I was planning to use stone and glass and brick and wood in ways they’d never been used. I was going to design buildings so tremendous that you couldn’t help touching them. ‘This is by Samuel Thompson Horne’ people would say.” He fell silent, but then went on in a bemused voice. “I had a funny experience once in the South Pacific. We’d received orders to work over a couple of the islands. I’ve forgotten why, but anyway there we were—I was leading the section. We came across the volcano and on the beach, right where I’d suspected they’d be, were some troops. At least I figured they must be troops instead of natives, the way they deployed and scrambled for cover when they heard us coming, Anyhow, I was about to open fire when the weirdest thing happened, honest to God! Those people disappeared right in front of my eyes! You think I’m nuts, wait’ll you hear this: all I could see was a bird. Can you beat that? There was a web-footed bird flying up at me. It was a big gray albatross. It was a flash of light from somewhere, I think. One of those gooks had a mirror and was trying to blind me, and as soon as I realized that’s what it was I was all right. Christ, was I mad! I knew I was in position so I opened fire, even though I’d been completely blinded.

  “We went up and down that beach,” Horne added a few moments later. “When we got through with that beach nothing moved. Even the water seemed dead. I was a little uneasy. That bird scared the living Christ out of me. Till the day I die I’ll believe I saw that bird. But it was a smooth assault, what the hell. We received a Presidential citation.” He patted himself on the helmet and took the controls; an instant later the SNJ was rolling and Melvin clutched at the safety belt to make certain it had not come unfastened. He could not feel the rotation, but one wing was rising like a hand and the other was descending and he was able to see directly above his head a red barn and a snow-capped haystack, then a barbed-wire fence and a ragged, scorched cornfield where a few Holstein cattle stood at the edge of a blue-frozen creek veined with submerged branches. He saw the tails of the upside-down animals blowing in the wind. His feet dropped from the floorboards. His hands no longer rested in his lap but wanted to rise. The safety belt was taut. With some difficulty he pulled the microphone to his lips and said, “There’s a lot of dust sifting from the bottom of the cockpit—and some straw!” A cockroach struck the canopy. A metal object—it was a coin, a penny—dropped from somewhere and skidd
ed past his head. He tried to pick up the penny but it eluded him and slid wildly out of sight. He became conscious of the steadily thundering engine and the fumes. He began to feel bloated and soggy. His cheeks bulged, his lips felt like flaps, and his eyeballs grew uncomfortably large; he had the impression he must look diseased, swollen, with a snarling or indignant expression. Then the wings began to tilt; soon the pressure on his head was diminishing, it was easier to focus his eyes, and he was able to discern, straight ahead, not far beyond Sam Horne’s flaking brown leather helmet, a field which had been plowed after the last snowfall. The furrows were approaching, falling diagonally from above and sinking gradually under the engine. He was not sure what Horne did next, only that they were upside down again, and right side up, and down again. He glimpsed a horseman—it was a boy in a mackinaw on a galloping mule—corskscrewing toward the plane, and just as he was bracing himself for the impact there was a sweeping, sucking roar and he found himself blinking and squinting into the sun, which was pleasantly warm on his forehead.

  Horne reached for the microphone. “I can’t imagine how straw would get in a J, but it doesn’t surprise me. Once I was talking to a fellow who went through primary at Dallas, and he told me he got into a Stearman one day and something ran across his lap and it was a great big rat! And once at Diego I found a woman’s glove in an F6F.” He replaced the microphone and continued smoking while the airplane climbed across the valley toward Mount Oread and the red tile roofs of the University of Kansas.

  In a little while Melvin said, “Do you see that winding road coming up past the smokestack?”

  Horne nodded.

  “Well, beyond it a little ways, see those tennis courts?”

  “I do,” said Horne. “So?”

  “Well, on the west side of them is the fraternity house, that big place with all the steps in front and the sun deck on the roof. That deck looks strange from this view,” he added. “I don’t know why, though. Well, anyway, that’s it, and what I want to do is make a pass at it. Really give it the business!”