by James Salter
best pilots. Across the room, wedged between men he did not
know, was the new one. Fair hair, eyebrows almost joined in
the middle. Never trust a man when they come together, they
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say. As good a rule as any, and the new man, taking it all in, just beginning to select a few idols, Isbell could have picked them out himself, the false glitter.
He emptied his glass and raised a finger for another. It was curious. There were times when he could see them in an
entirely different way, for what they were, full of simple courage and youth. Godchaux had a smile that even death would not
erase. Dumfries, that idiot, smooth-cheeked and smiling, he
had something, too, decent and admirable. There were times
when Isbell trusted them all. They were bound together, all of them, he and Dunning too in a great orbit, coming deceptively close to the rest of life and then swinging away. At the extremities were North Africa where they went for gunnery once or
twice a year and at the other end the skies of England where great mock battles were sometimes fought. The rest was at
home in the Rhineland, rumor, routine, occasional deploy-
ments, Munich now and then. They toured the Western world
together, stopping at Rome to refuel, Socked in? Divert to
Naples—watch the olive trees if you land to the west. Some-
thing was usually beginning before the last thing ended. Isbell’s true task was biblical. It was the task of Moses—he would take them to within sight of what was promised, but no further. To the friezes of heaven, which nobody knew were there.
m
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“What if both hydraulic systems go out?” Cassada wanted to
know.
“That’s bad,” Grace said.
“Can you move the controls at all?”
Grace shook his head. He had a broad, smooth face and
close-cropped hair.
“Not even using the trim?”
“No,” Grace said.
Hearts was the game of choice. It showed your true charac-
ter. Godchaux had the lead, the last trick lay faceup in front of him. Two hearts had fallen in it, the ace and nine. It was Harlan’s ace. Ferguson was chanting, “Smoke, smoke.”
“Shooting?” Harlan asked.
“Yeah, sure I am,” Godchaux said. He tapped his fingers on
the back of his cards.
“Well, is there anything else you can do?” Cassada wanted
to know. He had confidence in Grace. He was in no position
not to have, but still. “Can you do anything?”
“That’s what you carry a small screwdriver for,” Grace said.
“You have one, don’t you?”
“No.”
“You’d better get one before we go up.”
“You mean you can do something in the cockpit?”
“That’s right. You unscrew the clock.”
“The clock?”
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“For a souvenir. Just put it in your pocket and bail out.”
m
To the east it was becoming light, a great, forlorn light that seemed to sweep in from the steppes. The air was still, a
sealike calm. He laid his parachute against one of the wheels and began to walk around the airplane, starting at one wing
and then following the fuselage to the tail, running a hand
over the chilly skin as he went, sometimes patting it like a horse as if to calm it. He was entering the realm of his true authority. He had barely finished the walk-around when the
horn sounded. He saw Cassada running out the door, pulling
on his gloves as he went, the blare of the horn flooding around him, the crewmen coming after.
Quickly Isbell pulled on his parachute and climbed into
the cockpit, fumbling for the safety-belt buckles. The horn
kept blowing in panic. The high whine of the engines starting began.
Off on the first scramble, early in the day, no finer time,
cold and quiet, the smoke coming straight up from the towns.
Munich was blue, deserted. The roads seemed dusted with
chalk. The trains were running empty, the streetcars.
At altitude it was silent. The controller directed them
north. Serene, pure as angels they flew. At Ingolstadt some
clouds began, a thin, floating fence that went up towards
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Berlin, gray as a river. Cassada was in position just where he was meant to be, off to the left, looking past Isbell towards the sun and the unknown east. It was there the enemy lay, sometimes inactive, sometimes flying themselves on a parallel
course waiting for the slightest violation of the invisible border, or lurking below the contrails, unseen. The controller
would call them out but not always, and when the ground was
covered by clouds there was always the slight chance of error, a mistake in position or which radar blip was which. The threat of the unexpected was always there. Come and get us, Isbell
thought to himself. We’re here in the open, alone. Bring us
down. Try.
There was nothing, though. No targets, the controller
advised. They flew almost to Frankfurt and then turned back.
Cassada’s plane went from black, to gun color, to silver as he swung from one side to the other in the brilliant light.
They had spoken hardly a word. The earth lay immense
and small beneath them, the occasional airfields white as scars.
Down across the Rhine. The strings of barges, smaller than
stitches. The banks of poplar. Then a city, glistening, struck by the first sun. Stuttgart. The thready streets, the spires, the world laid bare.
m
I flew south one day, a hundred or two hundred miles into the desert, the earth changing from ruggedness to orange dust.
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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. Unex-
pectedly, 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.
m
Isbell walked back to where Cassada was standing. People
were still coming out of the club. There was the sound of a
woman’s heels on the cement. It was too dark to see.
“Who was that, Colonel Neal? He seemed pretty happy,”
Cassada said.
“Famous figure.”
“Why is that?”
“You know how old he is?” Isbell said.
“No.”
“Thirty-four.”
“Is that all?”
“He was one of the first men in his class to make bird.”
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They were alone in the darkness, beneath the stars.
“Major Dunning’s older than that,” Cassada remarked.
“Well, that happens, too. But he’s in line for a promotion.
His record’s good.”
“How old are you, Captain?”
“Thirty-one,” Isbell said.
Cassada shook his head a little.
“It’s a long pull, isn’t it?” he said.
“Not for everybody,” Isbell replied.
“Colonel Neal.”
“He’s not the only one.”
“You’ll get a squadron next.”
“I might. I hope so. Not here. I’ll be going home too soon.
In the States, maybe.”
“Well, let me know. I’d like to be in it,” Cassada said.
“I’ll come looking for you.”
The bus came rattling up, headlights quivering before it. It was filled with airmen and NCOs. Isbell stood with Cassada
in the back, at the end of a line of lolling heads and the slow reveal of faces as they passed a streetlight. A sergeant was talking. “Lieutenant,” he recited, “I loaded them myself, that’s what I told him.” He had a hard, lined face. Isbell could see him as they went by the hospital.
“You know what he says to me? He says, Bonney, that’s
good enough for me. That’s good enough for me, he says. I tell you, that means something when they talk to you like that.”
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The others were listening, turned sideways in the seats or
leaning from above, holding on with one hand.
“I seen a lot of them,” Bonney said, “but I’ll tell you one
thing, he’s the finest.”
“No.”
“The finest.”
“The colonel is.”
“Not as a gunner. As an officer, yeah. Not as a gunner.”
“Every way.”
“No, no. Hell, man, just look at the scores.”
“The scores ain’t everything.”
“Oh, yeah? What else is there?”
“They ain’t everything.”
They were going down the unlit stretch along the beach.
The water was invisible, the color of the night. They rocked along like commuters, the axles squeaking. Cassada’s head was bent down as if in thought, but his eyes were open. The light struck his cheekbones. Isbell was remembering, for no reason, the day he had come around the corner of the hangar with the flying suit wet and stuck to him and unwilling to go back and change. How for a moment, before knowing anything, Isbell
had thought: this one’s different.
“Listen,” the sergeant said, “I was in Vegas close to three
years. I seen them all.”
“Oh, yeah? You remember the one took all the trophies at
the meet there a couple of years back? That West Point major?”
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“Sure. I know him. He’s a real hotshot.”
“What’s his name again?”
“I know him,” the sergeant said. “I seen him shoot.”
“You think Lieutenant Piebes could beat him?”
“Hell, yes, he could.”
“He ain’t that good.”
“You want to know what he told me about how he learned
shooting?”
“What?”
“I was talking to him the other day and he said, Bonney, I
learnt it from flying the tow ship.”
“From what?”
“From flying the tow ship, he said.”
“Hell, Bonney.”
“No, that’s right. That’s right. It’s like a caddie learns how to play golf.” He looked around. “How do you think they
learn? By watching good golfers, that’s how.”
He was searching for someone in the dark of the bus,
squinting.
“Hey, Lieutenant,” he said to Isbell. Then, moving his head
a little, “What is it? Captain. I’m sorry. Listen, tell them, isn’t that right, that the way to learn is to watch somebody doing it who really knows how.”
“That’s one way.”
“There you are,” he cried.
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“He didn’t say it was the best way.”
“You heard the captain. I didn’t say nothing about the best
way. It don’t have to be the best way. The best way is different for everybody, right, Captain?”
Isbell nodded.
Coming to the officers’ area, the bus slowed down. When
it stopped, Isbell and Cassada jumped off. The door groaned
shut and like a battered metal curtain the side of the bus slid past them. They crossed towards their tent. Only the colonel’s was noisy. Many people were asleep, ready for departure the
next day. Off for Rome or Marseilles, the first leg home.
“What time do you plan to take off?” Cassada asked.
“Let’s get going early. Right after breakfast.”
“I hate to leave here,” Cassada said.
“Maybe you picked up a thing or two.”
“Sergeant Bonney. I don’t know how much he really
knows, but he wasn’t that far off.”
“It was a good week.”
“This was the best thing that’s happened to me since I’ve
been in the squadron.”
m
Already lay Valence, half in sunlight, half in shadow, gray
against white with touches of gold. They were still climbing, passing twenty-five thousand. Off to the left was an autumn
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sun in the light of which Cassada’s contrail gleamed, a late sun, emptied of heat. Long, clear rays. A sun that infused the
canopy like crystal. Isbell could see the minute scratches in the Plexiglas and in the rosy brown of his visor, unexpectedly, a huge eye, the size of a plum, his own. Moist pupil, dark watery iris, lashes. It was staring at something, unwary, intent. At itself.
He looked down towards the earth again and watched the
line of the first clouds that, very low, divided Valence in two.
Slowly all of it disappeared beneath the nose of the plane. The clouds were a vast glacier extending in all directions as far as he could see. Behind, like a departed shore, the last sight of the earth fell away. Brown hills were vanishing, a thin, polished river. Still in a climb they flew towards Lyons.
The clouds deepened as they went, the tops mounting. At
thirty-five thousand Isbell leveled off. The tops were about twenty—it was difficult to say because they weren’t solid
though they looked it at first. There were large breaks in them.
There were shaftways and passages. Milky rays of sunlight shot along them revealing caverns, abysses.
Nearing Lyons the needle of the radio compass began to
waver. It fell off halfway, returned, then swung completely
around. Isbell watched it, listening to the steady tone of the beacon and thinking not so much of the distance ahead but of how far they had come and how long a way it was back. The
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cockpit had become white with little stars of frost, as exact as if they had been etched in the glass.
The sun fell lower. It was in the last quarter of its eleva-
tion, the light flat. The white of the clouds had faded like an old wall. Everything seemed silent and still as they headed
towards Dijon. There was a strange, lost feeling, as though
they were in an empty house, in rooms without furniture,
looking through windows that had no glass. The world
seemed abandoned. The last being had vanished from earth.
There were ghostly cities below, desolate highways, meadows
bathed in dead light. He had the map unfolded across his lap, looking ahead, listening to nothing. One lone sound reassured him, steady, unending, the sound of the engine, closer to him than breathing, more familiar than his heart.
m
“You want the latest weather?” There was something more
that could not be made out.
“Roger.”
“Say again?”
“Roger. The latest
weather. The latest weather,” Isbell said.
He could hear Cassada transmitting but not clearly. There
was a long silence. He began to be uneasy. It was hard to wait.
They were traveling seven or eight miles each minute. The sun had sunk lower and a different cast was coming over the sky. In
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the distance, purples were appearing, the last faint reds. He looked to the east. There, past Italy, were the pillars of night, the deep, welling blues following in the wake of the sun, crossing the invisible Alps, darkening tidelike the clouds of
Salzburg, Munich.
“Did you get that?” he heard.
“Negative.”
“Did you get the weather, Lead?”
“Negative, negative,” Isbell said.
“I can’t read you. It’s five hundred overcast and two miles
. . . .” There was something else, unintelligible.
“What do they have at Chaumont?”
“I can’t read you at all. You’re very weak and garbled.”
Isbell repeated his transmission four or five times. Finally he was understood. He waited. They were past Chaumont by
then. The sun was just above the top deck of clouds. The quiet was unnerving. There was an immense, long silence. Time
slowed. The minutes grew.
Isbell heard nothing more. His radio was dead, there was
not even a side tone. He switched from one channel to
another, trying to call or hear anybody. There was nothing. Five hundred and two, he was thinking, trying to consider it calmly.
The sun was just touching the clouds, tangent to the highest layer, turning it dark as if an act were ending. They had been flying more than an hour. Five hundred and two.
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He looked out at Cassada and began rocking his wings. He
looked at the map. It was more than four hundred miles back
to Marseilles. Cassada hadn’t moved. Isbell rocked his wings again. Cassada banked gently in towards him. He watched him
curve in slowly, the white wake bending, and slide perfectly to Isbell’s wingtip.
Isbell passed a hand in front of his face two or three times and touched the side of his helmet. He saw Cassada nod. He
tapped his oxygen mask. Another nod. Transmitter and
receiver both out. He was still turning things over in his mind.
They were only ten or fifteen minutes out. He could feel Cassada waiting, watching, wondering perhaps, though able to talk to the ground. I’m going to touch down right beside you. It would be the reverse. Finally Isbell pointed a finger at him, then pointed straight ahead. Cassada’s ship moved forward.