James Salter - The Hunters

“I not know, sir. I go see my grandfather.”

“Sure,” Pell said, “and you’re bringing your grandfather two packs of cigarettes.”

The boy nodded. His tiny hands hung nervously at his side. The round, placid face did not know what expression to assume. The beadlike eyes searched questioningly It seemed that he was preparing himself to give back the cigarettes as if he had expected that all along, that someone would take them from him.

“Don’t look so scared,” Pell ordered. “She smokes, too, eh?”

“I not know.”

“Do you have a carton, Billy Lee?”

“Sure.”

“Let me have them. I’ll buy you some this afternoon.”

Pell took the carton and gave it to the boy.

“Here,” he said. “Here’s some cigarettes. You’d better take some C rations, too.”

Pell pulled out an open case and found tea, sugar, coffee, and other staples. He made a stack of them.

“There’s some real presents for you,” Pell said. “She ought to give you some number-one loving for them.”

Chung cast a questioning glance toward Daughters.

“What are you looking at him for? I’m giving it to you. You don’t have to get anybody’s permission. Mine is all you need. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go ahead then. Wrap them up.”

The boy carried everything to the window and began to stow it neatly in his cloth. The two packages of cigarettes that had been there originally were lost in the comparative wealth of dry goods.

“Christ,” Pell announced, “could he spare it? Two lousy packages of cigarettes. Next time you want anything around here, Chung, you know who to see, don’t you?”

Daughters walked outside and sat in the sunlight alone. He was troubled. He fought against it. He was only serving out a sentence now and would soon be free. He was putting days behind him like miles, pushing them underneath, and his gaze was only forward. Nothing, no cry for help, no shouting, no clamor could have caused him to turn it elsewhere. He was looking toward home and the end of his war. The terrible excitement was no longer compelling. The tightness of the stomach when he was in the sky was like sickness. He could not have been made to stay for even the holiest of reasons. When he had done his tour, he would be released, and he was drawing close to that, unbearably close. The rending of the flight he did not recognize. He would have denied it, as a matter of fact. He would have said that it did not exist. He could not afford to be involved, and to protect himself he had grown to believe there was no such thing. But that afternoon he had been moved to want to talk to Cleve, to say something important to him, he did not know exactly what, since he had blinded himself to the realities of the situation for so long. There was something in him, though, some unsubmerged faculty that made him know, with what he felt must be instinct, that he had to try.

He found a chance that night in the bar. It was a warm, vagrant evening. Spring attacked the blood like a virus. Cleve was talking to Nolan, getting the schedule for the next day. Four missions for the squadron. Three that his flight would go on. The first one was at 0700, then 1030 and 1400.

“Do you feel like going on all three of them, Jim?”

“I’d like to.”

“0700 is the early-morning reconnaissance,” Nolan explained.

“And the other two?”

“Both sweeps.”

Cleve nodded. Those were the ones he would go on.

“All right,” he said. “It’s you and Pell on the reccy, Jim. Bert and Pettibone, too.”

“What time is the briefing?” Daughters asked.

“O five fifty,” Nolan said.

Daughters grinned.

“You can sleep during the mission,” Cleve said. “You won’t see anything.”

“They’ve been up that early.”

“Not often.”

“No, but when Pell got his second MIG, it was on an early-morning mission, remember?”

“I remember.”

“They ought to be flying sometime tomorrow,” Nolan said, as he moved off. “They’ve been up every day now for six days.”

That was the speculation the club buzzed with nightly. A contagious note of anticipation was steady in the air. Through it all, as the older pilots argued about tactics or personalities, and the new men who had yet to see the enemy sat in forced silence, listening to stories of great battles that had taken place in the past and increased in ferocity with the passage of time, the name kept coming up, the loving description of the ship shining inviolable, striped in defiance. He had returned, and they might encounter him any time, in the brightness of a spring noon perhaps, suddenly, unannounced, like a heavy angel come down to test the valor of men.

“Whoever gets him,” Imil was supposed to have said, “is going to have to be a better pilot than I am, and I don’t know if any of you boys are.”

It was a typical Imil story.

“I wanted to talk to you, Cleve,” Daughters said.

“What’s on your mind?”

“Pell.”

“Is that all?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not interested. Talk about something else. Do you know what they’re talking about here? I’ve been listening to it for an hour.”

“I know how you gave up a kill to go and help him. I’m not the only one, either.”

“He got the MIG.”

“What’s that?”

“More than a mouthful of ashes,” Cleve said.

“When this is over, he’ll be nothing. You know that, don’t you?”

“And what about us? What will we be?”

“That’s not the point,” Daughters said. “His getting that MIG was just an accident.”

“It doesn’t matter. He got it.”

“You’ll have your chances, Cleve, plenty of them to make up for it.”

“Sure, I suppose I will.” There was always that, right up to the end.

He had come prepared to acquit himself, but now he was not sure. He had come for a climax of victory, but in a way he did not want that now. He wanted more, to be above wanting it, to be independent of having to have it. And he knew, with the utmost certainty, he would never achieve that. He was a prisoner of the war. If he did not get MIGs he would have failed, not only in his own eyes but in everyone’s. Talking to DeLeo, to Daughters, to anybody, it was only too plain. They said it meant nothing, but their denials were a confession. They expected something from him. He was the old hand.

He would have seized anything that allowed him release. He dreaded the need of sacrificing himself on this pitiless altar, of fighting for something he no longer had the strength to disdain: a place beside the next ace in the group. Pell.

In the early morning he heard them rise. He lay there more asleep than awake, listening to the scraping of shoes and the creaking of cots as they dressed in silence or with occasional whispers. Then one by one they left, until finally the door slammed shut for the last time. He passed into grateful sleep again, and it seemed a long while, hours later, before he was aware of the sound of their engines opening full, cremating the quiet of the first daylight. The noise rolled up from the runway, interminable, wavering in climax, and then gradually diminishing as they released the brakes and accelerated away, trailing their thunder, fainter quickly, then still fainter, then gone. After that he remained awake, thinking unhappily of them, off without him, not abstractly, but as they were in their cockpits: Daughters first, Pell, DeLeo, Pettibone.

After breakfast, he walked down to operations. It was cool, with the promise of heat. Looking to the south, he could see patches of early mist remaining, through which the jagged hills thrust. A trail of dust followed the few vehicles that passed him. Birds darted by He could hear their frail cries. He walked along somnambulantly, lulled by concern. He looked at his watch. The flight was on the way back now, he calculated. They were probably starting to let down the long, invisible slope of sky that peaked fifty or sixty miles north. He passed through the maintenance area. Crewmen were working on the ships, preparing them for a full day of missions. He inspected the sky appraisingly for the first time. It was going to be fair. The sun was climbing and becoming just strong enough to be felt, like a layer of cloth.