James Salter - Cassada

“Pretty close on, eh, Captain?” Abrams said in some confidence to Wickenden.

“Too close.”

“Boy, oh, boy.”

“I wouldn’t talk about it,” Wickenden said. “You start talking about it and the first thing you’ll have the group commander down here wanting to know what’s been going on.”

“Captain,” Abrams said, wounded, “I wouldn’t say anything. You know that.”

“Just so you understand.”

“Sir, I’d never say a word.”

“Just forget it. Make believe it never happened, that’s the best thing.” The door to Isbell’s office had been closed for nearly fifteen minutes. “Staying up there like that to tangle with someone, knowing what the weather was,” Wickenden declared. “Plain stupidity.”

And a flight commander, he refrained from saying. Ought to be grounded, as well as that clown Godchaux, in there where the rest of them were coming in wanting to hear about it. Experience, he once told Wickenden, that was the thing. Correct. Using his head once in a while, that was the experience he needed. Just occasionally. Once a month, maybe. Even that would make a difference.

It was like an infection. Wickenden could see it spread. He could pick out the next one to do something brainless even if he’d never happened to lay eyes on him before. It was all over his face. “Captain, I can fly the airplane.”

“Oh, is that it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Maybe so. Every fool says that.”

“I’m not a fool.”

“You don’t have to be, but that doesn’t mean you won’t act like one.”

“I’m not a fool,” Cassada had said.

After a while the door opened and Grace came out, head bent forward a little as if in submission, lips compressed like a schoolboy. As he passed he looked at Wickenden and raised his eyebrows to show some sort of regret. In the briefing room Godchaux wanted to know if he was next. “Me?”

Grace shook his head. He took Godchaux by the arm and led him away from the others. They stood in a corner of the room.

“What did he say?”

Grace bent and took a light from Godchaux’s cigarette. “We were too low on fuel, that was basically it. He’s right, too.”

“I’ll say he is.”

“Exactly how much did you shut down with? I told him four hundred pounds. He said it was lower.”

“About half that.”

“Well, that is low. That’s much too low,” Grace said as if there was no way for him to have known.

“What did you have?” Godchaux asked.

“I wasn’t that bad off. I was low, but not that low.”

“Like how much?”

“I was low.”

“But what did you have?”

“Three hundred,” Grace said.

Godchaux grinned at him.

“No, you weren’t that bad off,” Godchaux said. “Do you suppose those Canucks ever made it back all right?”

“I don’t know. Maybe one of them did.”

“What do you mean?”

They were both grinning.

“One of them is probably still hiding in the clouds,” Grace said.

“I was about two hundred feet behind him. Even closer. I actually saw him turn his head and look back at me.”

“Jesus, it was perfect.”

Isbell was standing in the doorway to his office. He may even have been able to hear it. He knew Wickenden was looking at him. He went back inside and closed the door.

Down the hallway, near the latrine, was a sign that said flying was inherently safe but, like the sea, unforgiving. Wickenden, standing there, was able to hear Cassada, dog-eager, asking Godchaux if he had used flaps to scissor. Godchaux illustrated with his hands. “Right here,” he said, “I swapped them, brakes in, flaps down.”

Cassada was nodding. Wickenden walked past without seeming to pay attention. Afterwards he motioned to Cassada. “Come here a minute,” he said.

They stood by the blackboard. The room by then was empty. Wickenden looked down at the floor. “I’ve been in three other squadrons,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“This is your first, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sometimes the first is the last one.”

Cassada said nothing. Though it was a matter of only eight or nine years, he seemed much younger standing there. He seemed a different, unrelated breed.

Wickenden went on, as if thinking back, “I had a pilot in my flight you remind me of. Back at Turner. You’re a lot like him. You want to know how?”

Cassada remained silent. Wickenden raised his eyes.

“You couldn’t tell him anything. He was too smart for that. He knew too much.”

“That’s not me, Captain.”

“One day I let him go out alone, just local, and about ten miles away from the field he started some low-level acrobatics. Unauthorized, naturally. He dished out of the first roll. Went straight in.”

Cassada was returning his look, almost with a kind of pity.

“You could have put what was left of him in a matchbox,” Wickenden said.

“So?”

“I knew all along it was going to happen. I just didn’t know how. Or when.”

“Is that it?”

“No, that’s not it. I want you to draw a lesson from that.”

“What kind of lesson?”

“You know what kind.”

Cassada nodded somewhat tentatively. A pilot like Grace was what he wanted to be, a pilot everyone respected, who had flown in combat and been shot at, who’d been hit by ground fire like Grace and brought the airplane back somehow, a man you could count on.

“You couldn’t tell him anything,” Wickenden repeated.

“That’s not me.”

“You think not?”

“No, sir, and I’m going to be alive after you are.”

Wickenden’s face hardened.

“Never happen,” he said grimly.

The flight commanders’ meeting was always at the end of the month, a discussion of concerns and of what things were coming up, ending with Isbell asking each of them directly about any particular problems. Wickenden sat without saying a word, looking bored.

“Nothing?” Isbell said.

“No.”

Isbell knew the truth. Wickenden was waiting for the others to leave, the lesser others. At last they did and Wickenden stayed behind, his mouth in a thin line, staring down at his hands and working the Zippo lighter, open and shut. At last he said, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but it’s not going to go away.”

“What’s that?”

“Cassada.”

“What’s wrong? What’s he done?”

Wickenden opened and clapped his lighter closed several times. Finally he said, “It’s not what he… It’s what he’s going to do.”

“Have an accident.”

“He’s going to kill himself. I know what I’m talking about. I had another one just like him, in the States.”

“The low-level acrobatics.”

“That’s right,” Wickenden said. When he spoke, everything was final. It was like someone beating a carpet, flat, heavy blows. “You could have put what was left of him in that ashtray.”

“I suppose you told Cassada the story.”

“Certainly.”

Isbell could imagine it. Maybe you don’t think so, but I’ve had them like you before. The difficulty was that once you said I can’t do anything with you, what was left after that? It was an ultimate statement.

“Well, I had my doubts about putting him in your flight. I didn’t want to put him with Grace or the others. You’ll just have to make it your job to keep him from killing himself.”

“Nobody can do that,” Wickenden said.

“They can’t?”

“He has the mark of death on him.”

“Oh, my foot.”

Wickenden began clapping his lighter shut again.

“The mark of death,” Isbell said. “You once told me the same thing about Dumfries.”