William Boyd - On the Yankee Station - Stories

Pfitz’s considerable self-esteem never recovered from this blow and his fellow pilots ribbed him unmercifully. He came to the conclusion that the loss of his Phantom was somehow symbolic of the animosity of the Vietnamese people to the American presence, and more particularly, the direct result of some gross act of carelessness on the part of his ground crew. And it was Lydecker on whom his venom alighted.

Pfitz’s maintenance crew consisted of five people. There was Dawson, a huge, taciturn black; two Puerto Ricans called Pascual and Huq; Lee Otis Cooper, who came, like Pfitz, from Fayette County, Alabama; and there was Lydecker. There were good and sensible reasons for selecting Lydecker as scapegoat; Dawson was too big, Pascual and Huq too united, and Cooper — well, he was a white man. So was Lydecker, for that matter, but of a particularly inferior, Yankee city-scum sort. Lydecker came from Sturgis, New Jersey; a mean smog-mantled town that seemed to have stamped its own harsh landscape on Lydecker’s body and visage. He was small, dark and thin, with pale skin and permanently red-rimmed eyes. His face looked as if it had been compressed vertically in a vise, pursing his mouth and forcing his eyes close together.

Pfitz’s resolute persecution came as no surprise to Lydecker: persecution of one form or another, whether from drunken father, bored teachers or cruel playmates, was the abiding feature of his memories. Questions of justice or injustice, of blame rightly apportioned, had never carried much weight in his world. He never really stopped to consider how unfair it was, even though he had a good idea of who in fact was responsible. Lee Otis had been checking the engine casings of the Phantom’s port jet the morning before Pfitz’s doomed flight, and had borrowed Lydecker’s own small monkey wrench to adjust what he thought was a loose bearing deep in the complex mechanism. A fire drill had interrupted work on that shift, Lydecker remembered, and he recalled Lee Otis bolting down the inspection hatch immediately after work was resumed. He never returned the monkey wrench either, and, when asked for it a few days after the accident, Lee Otis flushed momentarily before informing Lydecker that he “Fuckin gave it back to you, turdbird, so beat it, heah?”

Lydecker shrugged. Maybe he was wrong, so who gave a shit anyway? He merely tried to keep out of Pfitz’s way as much as possible, and on occasions when he was chewed out or put on report, accepted the screaming flow of abuse with the practiced, hangdog, foot-shuffling resentment that he knew Pfitz’s injured pride demanded. Lydecker never thought about trying to change things; experience had taught him to adapt to the world’s crazy logic. It was a hostile alien terrain of unrelieved frustration and disappointment out there, and this was the only method of survival he had found. But at those times when its harsh realities inescapably obtruded into his consciousness, he responded with a sullen, silent hatred. It was a comfort to him, his hatred; comforting because he came to realize that no matter what the world or people did to him, they couldn’t regulate his emotions, couldn’t stop him hating, however they tried. After particularly bad days he would exult in his hatred at night, allowing the waves of his disdain and contempt to wash through his body with the potency of some magic serum, numbing and restoring, and letting him, when the sun rose, face once again whatever the world had to offer. Recipients of his hatred had in the past included his father, and Werbel, the manager of the gas station where he had worked before he was drafted. And now there was Pfitz.

Lydecker had expected the insults, the dirty jobs and the regular appearance on report to die down after Pfitz had flown a few more missions, but if anything they intensified. Soon Lydecker came to see that the old Crusader was acting as a catalyst, a regular reminder of Pfitz’s shame. Every time the Crusader was towed out amongst the Phantoms and the Skyhawks, Pfitz remembered all the details of that day: watching his new plane scythe cleanly into the waves, the hours of subjective time as he gently floated down into the sea, the rows of incredulous, grinning faces as the rescue helicopter deposited him back on board, the sly gibes and quips of his fellow officers in the messroom. And each time he climbed into the cockpit, saw the unfamiliar instrument layout and the dated mechanisms, the shame returned. And as he pulled away from the ship on a mission he imagined it brazenly echoing to the crew’s gleeful laughter. And every time he took the Crusader up and landed, Lydecker was there, the man who’d caused the foul-up, weaselly shitface Lydecker, draining the fuel tanks or fitting the chocks to the wheels. And then Pfitz would claim his cannon had misfired or the fuel-flow was unbalanced and he’d put him on report for slipshod work, or kick his narrow butt the length of the repair bay, or assign him to de-scale the afterburner all night.

For Lydecker the one benefit of the whole thing was the Crusader. His first posting had been to a Sixth Fleet carrier in the Mediterranean that still had a squadron of Crusaders in operation. He had grown familiar with the planes and had an affection for them that he did not bestow on the lean Phantoms or the dainty Sky-hawks. The Crusader was a hefty rectangular machine, large for a single-seater, with the crude geometry of a bus. Its single intake was set in the nose, like a gaping mouth beneath the matte-black cone that housed the radar. It was like greeting an old friend when Pfitz’s was wheeled out from storage and hoisted up to the deck. Its strong, unambiguous profile seemed to render the other planes less significant and somehow pretentious. Pfitz was loudly derogatory, complaining that she was a pig to fly and sluggish to maneuver. But then he soon discovered in it other qualities that he employed in wreaking his revenge on the population of Vietnam.

The payload of the Crusader was prodigious; its sturdy frame could carry an anthology of destructive weaponry beneath its wings. Pfitz was highly satisfied with this aspect, soon indifferent to the absence of computer technology that precluded his carrying laser or guided bombs like the Phantoms. And he was never happier than when he supervised his crew as they bolted the finless, cigar-shaped canisters of napalm to the underwing pylons. Pascual overheard him talking about a request he’d made to be excused from carrying all other bomb loads and how he’d voluntarily restricted himself to napalm. He started to refer to his aircraft as the Rose Train and had Huq, who was something of an artist, paint this below his cockpit.

“It’s like roses in the jungle, man,” he would crow on returning from a mission. “You see them cans tumblin’ and whoomph —it’s like a fuckin’ great flower bloomin’ in the trees. Wham, pink an’ orange roses. Beautiful, man, just beautiful.” He made Huq keep a tally of missions by painting a red rose beneath the cockpit sill.

Lydecker thought Pfitz had gone mad, and so did many of the other pilots. Napalm had to be delivered from low level, making the plane vulnerable to ground fire. With half a dozen canisters wobbling like overripe fruit beneath your wings, you could be transformed into a comet of blazing petroleum jelly with one lucky shot. Lydecker sometimes thought about this as he patched bullet holes in the wings and tail.

Often at night Lydecker would leave the brightly lit crew quarters, where the air was thick with smoke, and bored sailors played cards or told obscene stories, and wander up to the dark cavern of the main hangar below the deck where the atmosphere had a tranquil metallic chill and the smell of oil and engine coolant clung to the air. He would go over to the Crusader, ponderously low-slung on its curious trolley undercarriage which jutted like spavined legs from the fuselage belly, and run his hands over the scarred and chipped aluminum, his fingers tracing and caressing the lines of rivet heads. Like the halted, bullied schoolchild who tinkers with his bike all day, Lydecker enjoyed the mute presence of his plane. It was like some gigantic familiar toy, stored in a cupboard with its wings folded and canopy up. He knew every square inch of the plane, from its gaping intake to the scorched jet at the rear. He had clambered all over its body, fueling and rearming it, riveting patches of aluminum alloy over the puckered ulcers caused by random bullets. He had climbed into the dark ventral recesses of the undercarriage bay, checking the hydraulic system, and had inched along its ribbed length replacing frayed control wires and realigning the armor plate. And he found himself, like an anxious mother, fretting for its return after long missions to Laos or Haiphong.