James Salter - Light Years

“There’s the store that’s shaped like a duck,” Franca said. “Remember?”

They saw it ahead where the road curved, the round, somewhat primitive shape, a door in its breast. A relic of childhood love, how often they had passed it at dusk with light spilling from the door.

“Papa hated it,” Danny said.

“Remember?”

“It was because we loved it so much. We wanted to live in a house shaped like an enormous chicken. I was going to have a room in the beak. All right, he said. But covered with real feathers, we insisted. And then we’d begin to cry. We’d howl and hear each other and then howl even louder.”

Franca nodded. “Why aren’t we doing it now?” she murmured.

“Because it isn’t pretending.”

“No.”

Eve sat silent, as if by herself, the tears rolling down her flat cheeks.

The car, which had tinted windows, fled along the highways, the bare, unplanted earth on either side, the fruit stalls with their hand-painted signs, the plain homes. An hour and it was into the thickness of buildings, still in hot afternoon, apartments, stores, speeding over trash-strewn roads into the center of life, into the swarm.

IT WAS A SPRING WHEN VIRI RETURNED. He drove up from New York on a warm day. He had come alone. The still, silent air, the light, filled him with a kind of dread, the fear of seeing again things too powerful for him. He stopped at a place on the cliffs above the river and stood looking out. The height made him strangely dizzy. He glanced down. Hundreds of feet below lay glacial rubble at the foot of the vertical walls. The great, soiled river gleamed in the sun. On the far shore, the endless houses; he could almost smell their still rooms, the warmth of cooking in them, of bedclothes, rugs. The radios were playing softly, the dogs lay in squares of sun. He had severed himself from all this, he looked, at it with a kind of indifference, even hatred. Why should he be so stung by what he had rejected? Why should he offer it even disdain?

He looked down once more, his thoughts spilling slowly. The idea of falling was terrible to him, yet at that moment it seemed that everything that had gone before, all of his life, was no larger somehow than the time it would take to pass through the air.

There were only two other cars parked, both empty, as he left. He could not see where their occupants had gone. He was afraid of meeting someone, even of being smiled at by a stranger. The rubbish cans were empty, the refreshment stand closed.

Everything unchanged seemed terrible to him, a gas station with its wooden buildings, the very land. His mind grew numb. He tried not to think of things, not to see them. Everything was a confirmation of days that had continued, of requited life. His own was cast into vagrancy, despair.

He walked in the greening woods beyond his house. He could see it briefly through the trees, silent, strange. The leaves about him were pale and sun-filled. Fallen vines tugged at his feet.

He was wearing a gray suit bought in Rome. He walked slowly. The soles of his shoes grew dark with moisture. The trees were huge and without lower branches. They had died and fallen while the crown sought the light. Damp, buried, they broke beneath his feet. He saw the faded flag of a surveyor’s stake; further on, forgotten, a children’s fort. Nearby was a hammer, rusted, its handle eaten by worms. Every step he took bristled with the sound of twigs and branches, the debris of years. He tried the hammer, the handle snapped. In the silence birds were calling. There were tiny flies in the air. Above, in the far sunlight, the roar of airliners bound for Europe.

The fort had fallen, the children were gone. They had hidden in these woods, had lain among the small wild flowers. Hadji had rolled in the snow, bathing in it, squirming on his back and pausing, fragrant beast, eyes dark as coffee, smiling mouth. Those afternoons that would never vanish, all ended. He, resettled. His daughters, gone.

An old man in the woods, his thoughts flashed forward as quickly as they had gone back. He walked with slow, careful steps, his gaze to the ground. He saw something then, domed and wondrous. He stopped in disbelief. How it had escaped the cars, the keen eyes of children, of dogs, he could not understand, but somehow it had. It was the tortoise. It had not seen him, he watched it going its way, rustling the leaves as it walked. He bent and picked it up. The reptilian face, impassive, wise, acknowledged nothing; the pale eye, clear as a bead, seemed anxious to look away. The powerful legs were curving their strokes at his fingers, but in vain. Finally it withdrew into its shell on which, faint as weathered writing on a board, the initials were scratched. He could barely make them out. He wet a finger and rubbed; miraculously they became plain. He put the tortoise down, he was reluctant to. He watched it for a while. It did not move.

It seemed the woods were breathing, that they had recognized him, made him their own. He sensed the change. He was moved as if deeply grateful. The blood sprang within him, rushed from his head.

He walks toward the river, placing his feet carefully. His suit is too warm and tight. He reaches the water’s edge. There is the dock, unused now, with its flaking paint and rotten boards, its underpilings drenched in green. Here at the great, dark river, here on the bank.

It happens in an instant. It is all one long day, one endless afternoon, friends leave, we stand on the shore.

Yes, he thought, I am ready, I have always been ready, I am ready at last.

James Salter was born in 1925 and grew up in New York City. Like his father, he attended West Point, and was commissioned in the Air Force in 1945. He served for twelve years in the Pacific, the United States, Europe, and Korea, where he flew over one hundred combat missions as a fighter pilot. He resigned from the Air Force after his first novel came out in 1957, and has earned his living as a writer ever since. His work has received numerous awards, including an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1982. Many of his short stories have appeared in O. Henry collections and Best American Short Stories; nearly all of them have been published in The Paris Review, Esquire , and Grand Street . His collection Dusk & Other Stories received the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988.

Dusk & Other Stories

Solo Faces

A Sport and a Pastime

The Hunters

Cassada (previously published as The Arm of Flesh )

Last Night

Gods of Tin

Burning the Days

“No author in so few pages has ever with such icy logic and steaming carnality depicted the inexorable passing of years.”

“Salter’s prose is spare, pared down so that the light on the other side of the language nearly shows through and makes the sentences luminous…. Salter’s achievement is that he uses his accomplished English to call our attention to precise moods and images, the feeling-tone of figures caught in landscapes of transcendent prose.”

“There is scarcely a writer alive who could not learn from [Salter’s] passion and precision of language.”