James Salter - Burning the Days

That May night, however, we parked near an orchard and went up beneath the trees. We got back to barracks very late. A day or two afterwards I came up to him while he was shaving before breakfast. “Have you noticed anything strange?” I asked.

“Yes. What is it? Have you got it too?” It was a rash. It turned out to be poison ivy covering our arms and legs, a first mock rendering to Venus.

We went without neckties, excused from formation. With blistered skin and unable to wear a full-dress coat, I stood at the window of my room and heard the band playing in the distance and the long pauses that were part of the ceremony of the last parade. There came the sound of the music played just once a year when the graduating class, some of them openly weeping, removed their hats as the first of the companies, in salute, came abreast, officers’ sabers coming up, glinting, then whipped downwards.

Far off, the long years were passing in review, the seasons and settings, the cold walls and sallyports, the endless routine. Through high windows the sun fell on the choir as it came with majestic slowness, singing, up the aisle. The uniforms, the rifles, the books. The winter mornings, dark outside; smoking and listening to the radio as we cleaned the room. The gym, dank and forbidding. The class sections forming in haste along the road.

The Area was filled with footlockers and boxes. Everyone would be leaving, scattered, dismissed for the last time, to the chapel for weddings, to restaurants with their families, to the Coast, the Midwest, to the smallest of towns. We were comparing orders, destinations. I felt both happiness and the pain of farewell. We were entering the army, which was like a huge, deep lake, slower and deeper than one dreamed. At the bottom it was fed by springs, fresh and everlastingly pure. On the surface, near the spillway, the water was older and less clear, but this water was soon to leave. We were the new and untainted.

On my finger I had a gold ring with the year of my class on it, a ring that would be recognizable to everyone I would meet. I wore it always; I flew with it on my finger; it lay in my shoe while I slept. It signified everything, and I had given everything to have it. I also had a silver identification bracelet, which all flyers wore, with a welt of metal that rang when it touched the table or bar. I was arrogant, perhaps, different from the boy who had come here and different even from the others, not quite knowing how, or the danger.

As we packed to leave, a pair of my roommate’s shoe trees got mixed up with mine and I did not notice it until after we had gone. In a hand distinctly his, Eckert, R. P. in ink was neatly printed on the wooden toe block. He was killed later in a crash, like his brother. His life disappeared but not his name, which I saw over the years as I dressed and then saw him, cool blue eyes, pale skin, a way of smoking that was oddly abrupt, a way of walking with his feet turned out. I also kept a shako, some pants, and a gray shirt, but slowly, like paint flaking away, they were left behind or lost, though in memory very clear.

—

One thing I saw again, long afterwards. I was driving on a lonely road in the West about twenty miles out of Cheyenne. It was winter and the snow had drifted. I tried to push through but in the end got stuck. It was late in the afternoon. The wind was blowing. There was not a house to be seen in any direction, only fences and flat, buried fields.

I got out and started back along the road. It was very cold; my tire tracks were already being erased. Gloved hands over my ears, I was alternately walking and running, thinking of the outcome of Jack London stories. After a mile or two I heard dogs barking. Off to the right, half hidden in the snow, was a plain, unpainted house and some sheds. I struggled through the drifts, the dogs retreating before me, barking and growling, the fur erect on their necks.

A tall young woman with an open face and a chipped tooth came to the door. I could hear a child crying. I told her what had happened and asked if I could borrow a shovel. “Come in,” she said.

The room was drab. Some chairs and a table, bare walls. She was calling into the kitchen for her husband. On top of an old file cabinet a black-and-white television was turned on. Suddenly I saw something familiar, out of the deepest past — covering the couch was a gray blanket, the dense gray of boyhood uniforms, with a black-and-gold border. It was a West Point blanket. Her husband was pulling on his shirt. How fitting, I thought, one exregular bumping into another in the tundra, years after, winter at its coldest, life at its ebb.

In a littered truck we drove back to the car and worked for an hour, hands gone numb, feet as well. Heroic labor, the kind that binds you to someone. We spoke little, only about shoveling and what to do. He was anonymous but in his face I saw patience, strength, and that ethic of those schooled to difficult things. Shoulder to shoulder we tried to move the car. He was that vanished man, the company commander, the untiring figure of those years when nothing was higher, privations mean little to him, difficulties cannot break his spirit … I was in the snow of airfields again where we dug our wheels free and taxied up and down the runway to let the exhaust melt the ice, in the rime cold of forty-five thousand feet with the heat inoperative, in dawns of thirty below, when to touch the metal of the fuselage was to lose your skin to it.

Together we rescued the car, and back at the house I held out some money. I wanted to give him something for his trouble, I said. He looked at it, “That’s too much.”

“Not for me,” I said. Then I added, “Your blanket …”

“What blanket?”

“The one on the couch; I recognize it. Where’d you get it?” I said idly. He turned and looked at it, then at me as if deciding. He was tall, like his wife, and his movements were unhurried. “Where’d we get it?” he asked her. The ladies who come up in June …, I thought. They’d been married in the chapel.

“That? I forget. At the thrift shop,” she said.

For a moment I thought they were acting, unwilling to reveal themselves, but no. He was a tattoo artist, it turned out. He worked in Cheyenne.

—

The summer after graduation, the first great summer of my life, passed without a trace. I had one ambition, to degrade myself. I first sped to New York to spend a weekend with a girl I had heard stories about for at least a year. The daughter of a diplomat, she was notorious throughout the regiment, passed from hand to hand, not particularly beautiful, as I discovered, but unsurprisable and even witty. I was eager to know what the others had known, the inner circle, and to be able to mention her casually.

After this came leave in sweltering Washington, indolent days and nights, and the minimal pleasure that went with them. Horner was there also. He was living with his mother. At the end of a month, still enchanted with ourselves, he and I climbed aboard a B-17 bound for Columbus, Ohio, and lay luxuriously amid the baggage, Horner strumming on his ukulele while the crew pulled the props through and prepared for flight. Island songs were among his favorites, and one called “Standard Gas.” Soon we were in the cool, thin air of altitude, the engines lulling us to sleep. Thus, rather clownishly, began days of roving. We were headed eventually for Oklahoma, regular officers, in the comfort of our status, unaware of the multitudes and their fate.

—

From time to time I would think of Bob Morgan, most often at year’s end, when you look back, sometimes a long way. I once went as far as to get a telephone number for him from long-distance information but I never called. There among my vague recollections he never changed, he kept his broad, flat chest, his modesty and doggedness.