James Salter - The Hunters

For a long time he sat quietly, in a solitude that gave only a vast discomfort instead of peace, pushing his thoughts before him as if through a jungle of spears. He was miserable. It could not go on. He had never been beaten, and it could not happen now; yet there was this before him which seemed to endanger everything he had fought for within himself. The mystic tissue that joined the soul of a man together, he felt it dissolving. He had to succeed. If he could only find them. He needed just a fragment of triumph, only that, to remove the doubts.

He did not know how many minutes or hours passed like that, but slowly his despair was washed away by visions, and he could see, as if it were reality, the enemy falling before him, hung on lengths of sailing tracers. He wanted only his chance, nothing more. Gradually he left the room, traveling with his dreams, heading as he always did to the same place, to the north with its silent seas of air, in which, if he lived, his victory had to be gained.

Major Abbott came around one evening in the long hour just before dusk. He was desperate to talk. There was an urging in him, a hunger, that was greater than he could bear, but it was difficult to say anything. Only a few inane phrases came at first. The houseboy stood by the window, motionless, staring out of it like a dog watching for birds.

“You get a few lousy breaks,” he finally began, “and they’re down on you. Everybody together. You might touch them or something. This fifty-cent war they’re so proud of. My God, I was fighting a war, a real war, when they were taking grammar, most of them. Spelling!”

He had held it in for so long that it came out in painful fragments. He sat in his chair like someone applying for a badly needed job. It was impossible, but everything was being taken away from him. His life had been distinguished by only two things, his courage and his skill, but he had found them before he was very old, these precious stones, and when they were admired or spoken of he had known the fulfillment of owning the greatest prizes in the world. Suddenly, though, the past was being counted as nothing, like rescinded currency. What he had had for so long, what he had grown old in possession of, was gone now, sickeningly, and there was nothing else of importance to him, as with men who have given their lives to their children. It was all ended, the listeners to his stories, the crewmen eager to serve, the respect, the hundred happy terrors and ecstasies of height. He was alone, like a cripple facing the cruelty of running boys. They had no time for him any more as they tested their own keen nerve against each other.

“I’ll be glad to get away,” he said bitterly. “I just can’t take any more, Cleve.”

“You don’t have a hundred missions.”

“Fifty-one. And seventy in Italy last time. Seven kills. Six confirmed. Then you abort a few times because you’ve flown enough to know when a ship’s not the way it should be, and the first thing, they think… oh, who gives a damn what they think, anyway.”

“Why let it bother you? You’re not finished yet. You have another fifty missions to get even.”

“Not me. I’m going to Fifth. I’m all through with my missions.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Seems pretty sudden,” Cleve said.

“Not to me. I’d go tonight if I could.”

“Who did it? Imil?”

“Yes. My old pal Dutch. He was careful to fix it up so that I was requested by Fifth.” He laughed dryly. “To make it look good. To keep himself clean. I don’t care.”

“What will you be doing?”

“I’ll be in operations. Not a bad job, either. A colonel’s spot. Maybe even a promotion, just to rub in Imil’s face a little.”

“It’s all for the best then, in a way.”

Abbott looked up. He nodded his head reflexively, as if in time to some distant rhythm. He had looked everywhere for reason or relief, and sometimes he had been able to find it, temporarily, as when men achieve that stage of drunkenness at which they comprehend infinities. Suddenly his eyes filled with tears.

“Sure. It’s really fine. Only I’d rather be a goddamned lieutenant flying wing, that’s all,” he cried, turning jerkily away. “I’d rather be dead.”

Cleve took a quick, steadying drink of air. He was always embarrassed by nakedness. He seldom touched anyone physically.

“Carl,” he began.

Abbott shook like a girl, with brimming, bottomless sobs. The houseboy stared out the window, never turning or seeming to hear.

It has to end some way, Cleve thought. He sat uncomfortably, with his reflections turned inward. The time came when you either did it yourself or it was done for you. Either way was hard. Prepared or unprepared, sudden or slow, it was all the same. Life stopped, and the world went on in the hands of others.

“I can’t help it,” Abbott said after a time, sighing unevenly. He kept his face turned. “You’ll have to come down and see me in Seoul, when you get a chance.”

“You’ll be too busy briefing generals.”

“No, I mean it. Come down.”

“All right,” Cleve said. He would have agreed to anything. He longed for a decent parting phrase.

“Any time,” Abbott insisted. “You’re the only one I can talk to.”

That stayed in Cleve’s mind afterward. He was reminded piercingly of school, where the athletes held to each other and the scholars strolled side by side. He hated Abbott for having said it; more and more as, with the maddening insistence of a nightmare, the days went on, cold and empty. They were the kind that, when looked back upon, seem indistinguishable one from another.

He started every mission with at least some measure of hope, but never was it realized. He was flying the day that Gabriel, the fourth flight leader in the squadron, who had come to the group after Cleve, got a MIG, but he saw nothing. He flew his twenty-eighth mission, his twenty-ninth, his thirtieth. His flight began to take some shape as an entity. Pell, it developed, was a good pilot who picked up experience quickly. He flew on a wing consistently well from the first, always in the right place, and his close formation was almost too close, a measure of insolence. Pettibone, in comparison, was uneven and would never get close enough. He seemed to meet an invisible barrier ten feet out. Cleve patiently guided him, never dwelling on more than one point at a time and as if incidentally.

“You have to anticipate more,” he would say, “keep ahead of the ship. You’re not doing that enough.”

“I’m trying not to use the throttle too much.”

“Stop worrying about that. That’s a refinement. Use it all you want. Use it all the way from the gear warning to the fire warning light if you have to. That’s what it’s there for. Only use it in time, not when it’s too late. Make the throttle your intention, not your reaction. You understand me?”

“I think so, sir.”

“Good.” It was slow work, but gradually it would come about.

One afternoon when Cleve did not go, Daughters led and got a damaged. Hunter had been on his wing; and that evening they listened as he enthusiastically described how it had happened, the first bit of mutual success. Cleve tried to feel happy, but it was poison to him. He felt, instead, as men do when they realize that they are losing their sanity, rational but overwhelmed.

When he sat in the briefings and looked at his name printed on the scheduling board at the head of his flight, he burned with self-consciousness. It seemed to stand out vividly beside the others: Nolan’s for instance, Robey’s, Imil’s.

Finally, it was Colonel Moncavage who had no kills either, but then, on a single wild mission, got two. It was like an evisceration for Cleve when he heard it. Even Moncavage, he thought, somehow… At the bar the colonel took Cleve’s congratulations smilingly, but soon turned back to Robey sitting beside him, to resume a narrative of how it had been accomplished. Cleve listened, feeling alien and empty. Robey was decorating the colonel’s story with experiences of his own. There was nothing that Cleve could contribute.