James Salter - Cassada

In their tent Dunning was still sleeping, heaped up like an old bear. It would be at least an hour before he woke, groaning and stretching his arms. He slept in his khaki underwear and sometimes received the first sergeant in it—it did not diminish his authority. He would go to the mess for coffee, talk a little to whoever was there, then wander over to the flight line.

Isbell had long since driven down the black road, heading into the open, past the trees beyond which like some mysterious stretch of water the silent runway lay. A wind was blowing, a German October wind, chilly, with points of moisture in it. They had been sent here on maneuvers, one lone runway, a building or two. There were stars in the sky and tug lights among the airplanes parked in a long line.

In the alert shack Ferguson was sitting by the stove, the poker dangling from his hands. A furious sound filled the room. It was coming from the stove which glowed brilliant red along the bottom, the middle of the lid, too, and the pipe. Outside, a stream of wild sparks was dancing above the dark roof.

“Step up and warm yourself, Chief,” Ferguson invited. “Compliments of ‘B’ Flight.”

“You’ll be hot enough when that thing explodes.”

“Have to chance that, Cap’n,” Ferguson said. “The Natchez is trying to pass us.”

“Which Natchez ?”

“Right behind us, Cap’n. She’s only half a mile back and gaining all the time.”

“You’d better cut down the draft,” Isbell said.

Ferguson raised a boot and kicked the hinged door closed a little.

On the floor lay a page of the Stars and Stripes he had been piercing with the radiant tip of the poker. There was a full-length picture of a girl in a bathing suit. Only her head and shoulders were untouched.

“What time do you go on status?” Isbell asked.

“In about five minutes.”

Just as he said it, the scramble phone rang. A line check. As Ferguson was hanging up, the others began to come in, rubbing their hands and going to the stove. Godchaux was last. He was twenty and had been in the squadron for more than a year, Dunning’s favorite, “the best natural pilot I ever saw.” Isbell didn’t disagree. White teeth and the smile of an angel. Show me a man who knows how to lie, he thought, and I’ll show you a smile of genuine beauty, I’ll show you someone who knows how the world runs.

Godchaux stood with his back to the stove and his elbows out to the side, espaliered against the glow, almost satanic. Isbell beckoned him with a slight lifting of the chin.

“Yes, sir,” Godchaux responded without moving.

Isbell motioned to him. Godchaux took a step or two forward.

“Did you have a flashlight out there?”

Godchaux’s innocence held for a moment and then he shook his head, not much, like a mischievous, already forgiven boy.

“How’d you inspect the airplane, then?” Isbell said.

“I borrowed the crew chief’s.”

“You did, eh? Where’s yours? What’s wrong, don’t you have one of your own?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where is it?”

“The batteries are no good, Captain. They’re dead.”

“Well, buy some,” Isbell said. “You’re getting paid enough.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Today.”

Grace, the commander of “B” Flight, was shaking his head a little in fatherly disappointment, as if agreeing. In all likelihood he had no flashlight himself.

Soon after, there was the uneven ring of the field phone and the first scramble went off, two ships flowing down the runway, fleeing from a roar that washed over the field like a furnace thrown open, making the corrugated walls tremble. Isbell stood watching as they crossed the trees together, the wheels coming up. An hour of absolution in the clean, holy morning. An hour and a half. How often he had relied upon it himself, a taste of the immaculate with unknown cities far below and in cold silence the first mist vanishing from the hills.

Dunning came to the pilots’ meeting later. He appeared in the doorway a few minutes before eight o’clock as someone was trying to go out and stood there, filling the whole frame, waiting for them to come to their senses and step aside. He was the size of a lineman and in fact had played two years in college early in the war. He’d had his crew chief remove the spacer from the back of the seat. As a result it was hard to fly his airplane. It was like sitting up in bed.

“What do you think of that bird of mine?” he would say.

“Yes, sir. It’s all right.”

“A little slow,” Godchaux said.

“Slow? Slow? You’re crazy. It’s the fastest ship on the line.”

“If you say so, Major.”

“Don’t just take my word for it.”

“It may not be fast, but it is roomy.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You can hardly reach the stick. You have to have arms like a gorilla.”

“You’ve got to grow some, that’s all,” Dunning said. He looked around, grinning.

There were always a couple of minutes like that. Nothing began until Dunning leaned back with an expectant look on his face and puffed on his cigar. He would listen attentively, hands folded one over the other in his lap, thumbs like broom handles. After Isbell finished he would rise to say a few words himself, walking to the front like an owner, hands in the pockets of his flying suit. He started off with a courtly, “Gentlemen. I’d like to impress a few things on your minds,” he said, “though we may have mentioned them before. Very important things. This field, gentlemen, pretty as it is, has a few shortcomings which you should all be aware of. Can you name one of them, Lieutenant Godchaux?”

“No GCA,” Godchaux said.

“No GCA, gentlemen. If the weather starts closing in, don’t take any chances, there’s no one here to talk you down. What else, Lieutenant Grace?”

“The runway is a thousand feet shorter than ours, sir.”

“Shorter runway. Also unfamiliar. The road you always put your base leg over back home—you know the one I mean—it’s not here. You have to use your judgement more in the landing pattern. Short and unfamiliar. Got that? Lieutenant Ferguson, what else?”

In a slow voice, “Long way to town,” Ferguson said.

Amid the laughter someone said, “But when you get there…”

“Good beer,” Ferguson added.

“Nice professional attitude,” Dunning said, perhaps tolerantly, it was difficult to tell.

When the meeting was over a small circle formed. Harlan, blunt and usually suspicious, began on the inevitable subject, flying time and how much a rival squadron, the 72nd, was getting. They had over five hundred hours already this month. They were pushing. “They say Pine claims he’s going to get twelve hundred.”

Dunning smiled at him, a false V, nothing humorous in it, just a seam across his face like the line on a stuffed toy. Harlan shrugged slightly.

“That’s what I hear.”

“I wouldn’t pay too much attention to that,” Dunning said knowledgeably. “There just may be a few things Captain Pine doesn’t know about.”

“That’s the trouble,” Harlan muttered. He was a country boy. His hands were large, too. “He don’t know, so he’ll probably go ahead and fly the twelve hundred.”

Dunning nodded a bit as if weighing. “I wouldn’t worry about that, Lieutenant,” he said.

Dunning’s squadron was the red tails. He would never admit to fearing anything from the yellows. Pine was famous for the conviction that flying hours were the magic formula: “Log two hours every flight whether you fly that long or not.” Isbell was more constrained. There was the meaning of a signature, an official statement.