James Salter - Burning the Days

To solve the complexities of the traffic pattern, I had made, for quick reference, a small card with a diagram of each of the possible patterns drawn on it. Entry was always at forty-five degrees to a downwind leg, but to work it all out backwards and head straight for the proper point was confusing, and nothing seemed to annoy York as much as starting to turn the wrong way. The worst was when the wind changed while you were away from the field; the pattern had shifted, and everything you had tried to remember was useless.

A week passes thus. We fly to an auxiliary field, a large meadow five or ten minutes away. There is bare earth near the borders where planes have repeatedly touched down.

“Let’s try some landings,” he says. Nervously I go over in my mind what to do, what not. “Make three good ones and I’ll get out.”

We come in for the first. “Hold that airspeed,” he directs. “That’s good. Now come back on the power. Start rounding out.”

Somehow it works. Hardly a bump as the wheels touch. “Good.” I push the throttle forward in a smooth motion and we are off again.

The second landing is the same. I am not certain what I have done but whatever it is, I try to repeat it for the third. Almost confidently I turn onto final once more. “You’re doing fine,” he says. I watch the airspeed as we descend. The grass field is approaching, the decisive third.

“Make this a full stop,” he instructs. I ease back the throttle. The airspeed begins to drop. “Keep the nose down,” he suddenly warns. “Nose down! Watch your airspeed!” I feel a hand on the stick. The plane is beginning to tremble. Untouched by me the throttle leaps forward, but through it somehow we are falling, unsupported by the roar. With a huge jolt we hit the ground, bounce, and come down again. He utters a single contemptuous word. When we have slowed, he says, “Taxi over there, to the left.” I follow his instructions. We come to a stop.

“That was terrible. You rounded out twenty feet in the air. As far as I can make out, you’re going to kill us both.” I see him rising up. He climbs out of the cockpit and stands on the wing. “You take her up,” he says.

This consent, the words of which I could not even imagine. Alone in the plane, I do what we had done each time, taxi to the end of the bare spot, turn, and almost mechanically advance the throttle. I felt at that moment — I will remember always — the thrill of the in-achievable. Reciting to myself, exuberant, immortal, I felt the plane leave the ground and cross the hayfields and farms, making a noise like a tremendous, bumbling fly. I was far out, beyond the reef, nervous but unfrightened, knowing nothing, certain of all, cloth helmet, childish face, sleeve wind-maddened as I held an ecstatic arm out in the slipstream, the exaltation, the godliness, at last!

—

At night in the white wooden barracks not far from the flight line we talked of flying, in the clamor of the student mess, and on the battered buses swaying into town. We walked the streets in aimless groups, past lawyers’ offices with names painted in gold on the windows. There were tracks through the center of Pine Bluff along which freight trains moved with provincial slowness. There was the gold-domed courthouse and the bulky Pines Hotel, even then middle-aged with a portico entrance, balconies, and mysterious rooms. Of the silent residential neighborhoods with large clapboard houses or lesser ones set on the bare ground, we knew nothing. From the desolate life of the town on many Sundays we returned willingly to the field.

We flew less often with the instructor. It was late spring, the sky fresh and filled with fair-weather clouds — weather, which could mean so much, was already a preoccupation. Late in the day the clouds would become dense and towering, their edges struck with light; epic clouds, the last of the sun streaming through. One afternoon, alone, I caught sight in their tops, far above, of a B-24 moving along like a great liner. Dazzled by its distance and height I turned like a dinghy to follow until it was gone.

On an outlying field two rows of empty peach baskets had been placed at intervals on each side of a wide lane. A cross was marked on the ground halfway down. It was a kind of bull’s-eye. If your wheels touched on that spot you got a perfect grade, which is to say zero. Ten feet from it was a ten, twenty feet a twenty, and so forth. The figures were averaged and had to be below some number, I don’t remember, seventy or so, to pass. Around and around we flew, a supervisor on the ground in the blowing dust marking scores on a clipboard. Landing stages, this was called.

At noon they were talking about someone’s extraordinary grade, one of the regular air cadets with whom we were training. His score had been six. It seemed unbelievable. He was pointed out — suddenly everyone knew who he was — the one with the dark hair. I could see him in the food line, distinct from the others, slim, at ease. He had flown before, it turned out. He already had a pilot’s license and sixty hours in a Cub.

The hurdles in primary were soloing and then two check rides with an Air Force pilot given, I believe, after forty and sixty hours of flying time. Don’t forget to salute before and after the flight, they said, and be sure you can explain the maintenance form. In the air there would be brief commands to do this or that maneuver and at some inconvenient moment the throttle would be pulled back with the announcement, “Forced landing.”

The shakiest students confessed their fears and often did worse because of them, but some failures were unforeseeable, even unimaginable, like that of the dark-haired angel who had scored the six. One day he disappeared. He had somehow failed his forty-hour check and was gone. It made you realize how flimsy your position was and how unforgiving the machinery behind it all. The least promising of us, though we did not know it then, those with the least élan, would go to bombers and attack aircraft, and the others to fighters. That was a year off. Meanwhile, one by one they were dropping away, sometimes the leaders.

—

We were gone all spring and summer and returned much changed. We marched less perfectly, dressed with less care. West Point, its officer’s sashes and cock feathers fluttering from shakos, its stewardship, somehow passed over to those who had stayed.

Among the great firsts: first solo, first breath of outside air, in here belongs first love affair.

I had known her before, in New York, the younger of two sisters in a well-to-do Upper East Side family. She was dark-haired and theatrical and had grown, over a period of more than a year, to become very important, in fact essential, to me. Good-looking and expensively dressed, teeth fine and white, she stood at the entrance to life itself, the things I had yet to know and had sworn not to die before I did. Her father was a stockbroker with loyal, and many European, clients. Her mother, whose role was larger in our intrigue, disapproved of me, which was a stimulus. I was eager to have a past and a heart that longed for me.

From the early football weekends when we drank in hotel rooms and alongside other couples lay in the feverish dark with murmurs and the low rustle of clothing, to weekends when she stayed at the Thayer, above the ground floor of which cadets were forbidden to go, evenings at dances and sometimes afternoons in borrowed quarters, we fell in with one another. I was filled with urges which she put down skillfully, like insurrections. I was trying to impose my new-formed self on her, but she had known the previous one and wavered.

Gradually I prevailed. After many long overtures, occasionally desperate, something passed between us one New York weekend at the intermission of a musical called Panama Hattie. I can’t remember what was said; we casually edged through the crowd on the sidewalk and crossed the street to the hotel.