James Salter - Burning the Days

She had met him at a reception in New York in about 1941 or 1942. She was good-looking, European. She fell in love instantly, at first sight. He had been in America since a few months after the fall of France in the spring of 1940. I imagine him — these are the dark days of a long war in which he would eventually be lost, fate unknown — as somewhat drab, in a gray double-breasted suit with perhaps an overlooked stain on the lapel. Like an ex-fighter whose career had ended a decade before, he is carrying a bit of weight. Balding but with a face that is smooth and somehow youthful — the clarity of intelligence shines in it — in his buttonhole sits a distinguished dot of red.

She tries to talk to him, she absolutely must, “Monsieur …,” but her French is hopeless. She tries English, to no avail. Finally she says outright, “Wollen Sie mein telephone number?”

Then she goes home and waits, until late in the evening. The sullen black phone never rings. The next day, however, he calls, and the searing love letters he subsequently wrote she kept for the rest of her life.

There was also his affair on one side of the world or the other, among the palms of California or the forests of East Africa, with Beryl Markham — two ecstatic souls, somehow unjealous of each other. Over the years St.-Exupéry managed to progress, for me, from being a mere figure of culture to one of enviable flesh and blood.

In such footsteps I would follow.

—

Pine Bluff, Arkansas, on a loop of a sluggish, curving river, was where we learned to fly. The field was east of town. The flying school there was run by civilians.

We lived in barracks and were broken up into flights — four students to an instructor — alphabetically, of course, although inexplicably I was together with Marlow, Milnor, and Mahl. Our instructor was an ancient, perhaps in his forties, crop duster from a town in the southwest part of the state, Hope, which he described as the watermelon capital of the world. His name was Basil York. We were probably among scores of young men he had taught to fly, and were reminded of this by a stern warning for the next student to be ready when the plane taxied in from the previous flight. We waited, watching intently for the plane’s number and with no chance to question whoever had just come down about what had happened, what had they done in the air and what should we look out for?

Early flights, the instructor in the rear cockpit, the bumpy taxiing on the grass, turning into the wind, tail swinging around, dust blowing, and then the abrupt, wild sound of the engine. The ground was speeding by, the wheels skipping, and suddenly we were rising in the din to see the blue tree line beyond the field boundary and, below, the curved roofs of the hangers falling away. Now fields appeared, swimming out in all directions. The earth became limitless, the horizon, unseen before, rose to fill the world and we were aloft in unstructured air.

Looking over the side of the airplane, I could not believe it, the noise, the clatter of the engine, the battering wind, and the flat country below laid out in large rectangular patterns with dirt roads, the glint of occasional metal roofs, smooth water. They talked meaninglessly about “section lines.” In the air these quickly became real.

We passed a thousand feet. I felt as helpless as if sitting in a chair at that height. We climbed higher, to fifteen hundred or two thousand feet, the height of the stalls, the first of the demonstrated maneuvers. The nose soars up into steep blue air, higher, higher still, unforgivingly higher, something sickening is happening, the bottom of the seat feels ready to drop away, and the dry voice of the instructor is explaining it as at the top the plane, almost motionless, suddenly shudders, then starts to fall. Now I am to do this, his matter-of-fact voice directing it: throttle back, pull the nose up, way up, higher, hold it there, hold it …

There were spins, jamming the rudder in at the top of a stall and falling, the plane turning around and around like a maple pod. There was the anguish of trying to make proper “S” turns across a road, the wind making one loop bigger than the other unless you steepened your bank.

An hour has passed. All directions have melted away, the earth is too vast and confusing to be able to say where we are. Only later is it clear that the roads run on cardinal headings, north-south, east-west. The world and everything in it, the river, farmers’ houses, the roads and lone cars, are unaware of us, droning above. The field is nowhere in sight. Like a desert, everything visible is almost the same when he says, “OK. Take us home.” It must be this way, you think, though there is nothing to confirm it. After a few minutes, without a word, he brusquely corrects the heading ninety degrees as if in disgust.

Everything you have done has been unsatisfactory, the stalls not steep enough, the “S” turns uneven, the nose of the plane continually wandering off in one direction or the other when you are told to hold it straight and level, anything that could speed up, slide, or drift away has done so.

In the distance, magically, the field appears and with precision, sometimes explaining what he is doing, he enters the traffic pattern and expertly lands. My flying suit is black with sweat. Face glazed, disheartened, I scramble from the plane as soon as we park. One of the others is standing there to take my place.

—

All was tin, the corrugated hangars shining in the sun, the open-cockpit airplanes, the tin gods. We were expected to solo in a few hours, not less than four or more than eight. If you were not able to take off and land by yourself after eight hours, you were washed out. The days were filled with classes, briefings, flights, the sound of planes, the smell of them. We were mixed in with regular air cadets, some of whom were older and had flown before. We marched with them, singing their songs, the vulgarity of which was disarming, and continued to kick into spins at three thousand feet on every flight and mechanically chant the formula: throttle off, stick forward, pause, opposite rudder … Even after three or four flights I still did not fully understand what a chandelle was supposed to be and had only a faint conception of a landing.

Like the first buds appearing, individuals began to solo. Word of who had done it spread immediately. Face scorched red by the sun, in the back cockpit Basil York repeated over and over the desiderata as we entered traffic, “Twenty-fifty and five hundred, twenty-fifty and five hundred.” He was referring to engine rpm and traffic pattern altitude. “When you’re flying B-17s,” he said in his high-pitched voice, “I want you to still be hearing that: twenty-fifty and five hundred.” We had begun to execute the landings together, nose up, throttle all the way off, both of us on the stick. I knew his recitation, “Start breaking the glide, ease back on the throttle, start rounding out, all right, that’s good, hold it off now, hold it off …” The trouble was, I did not know what it all meant.

There was the story I heard later, of the instructor who had a favorite trick with students having difficulty learning to land. After exhausting the usual means, above the traffic pattern somewhere he would shake the control stick from side to side, banging the student’s knees — the front and rear sticks were connected — to get his attention. He would then remove the pin holding the rear stick in place and, with the student twisting his neck to see what was happening, wave it in the air and toss it over the side, pointing at the student with the gesture You, you’ve got it, and pointing down. It had always worked. One day for still another lagging student he rattled the stick fiercely, flourished it, and tossed it away. The student nodded numbly, bent down, unfastened his own stick, and ignoring the instructor’s cries, threw it away also. He watched as the frightened instructor bailed out and then, fame assured, reached down for the spare stick he had secretly brought along, flew back to the field, and landed.