James Salter - Burning the Days

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They were divorced in 1959, two years after our second child was born. It was Paula who insisted on the divorce — she must have been young and happy once but she couldn’t remember, she said. Leland was shattered by it. He married again soon after. She did not, and we once more drew close. By then I was out of the Air Force. She came up from Washington frequently and we went there. A sudden burst of missing you unbearably, she wrote. There were three of us again, and it was still she and I who were intimates, excluding the other. When she was visiting I would come back in the evening and find two women, both amiable, smiling, sitting on cushions on the floor and waiting for me. We would drink and have dinner at a low table in front of the fire. She would tell stories of dates with other men, or the lack of them, just as I had once done with her. Someone had a man they wanted her to meet. Unrewarding adventure — he brought his sister along, they were obviously in love with each other, and it looked like a long affair, she added. She worked for a while on Capitol Hill, then for a foundation, then a boutique, and wrote for The Washington Star. For years she had an off-and-on relationship with the alcoholic son of an old family she and Leland had been fond of, but she was too intelligent to marry him. Finally she met the man she was looking for, a journalist, divorced, urbane. He and I seemed to have limited interest in one another, or perhaps he felt her interest should end. In any event, the curtain descended.

I saw Leland once more. It was in 1961 during the Berlin crisis. As a reserve, I’d been sent to France. Leland was stationed at Fontainebleau and one weekend I drove up there. He, his wife, and I had dinner. It was as always — at the last minute there wasn’t enough food in the house and he and I went out in the evening dark for some hasty shopping, a bottle of wine, meat, some cheese. He was in fine spirits and on good terms with the shopkeepers. I was impressed that he knew the French word for “wedge,” as in “wedge of Camembert.” He spoke good French. He called his wife darling. Somehow I didn’t believe it.

He retired as a colonel and they went to live in the south of Spain. I had news of him only rarely. I imagined him as he had always been: a perfect companion on the links, drinker in the bar afterwards, the heels on his loafers a bit worn down. Like an unimaginative British officer in some remote town, but knowing exactly who was who and what their business was.

Then I heard he was dead. It was completely unexpected. He hadn’t been ill. The night before they had gone out to dinner and played bridge with friends. In the morning he couldn’t be wakened.

I called Paula. I hadn’t spoken to her for a long time — she was living near Palm Beach. Yes, it was true, she said. She seemed undisturbed by it. There was some Spanish law that a body had to be buried within twenty-four hours, and because arrangements to fly him home couldn’t be made in time, he was buried there, in Spain. A memorial service was being held in Washington but she wasn’t going up for it; she would not look back.

LATE IN THE SUMMER OF 1951 I entered at last the realm long sought and was sent to Presque Isle, Maine, to the 75th Fighter Squadron.

The operations officer, distinguished by having had his photograph, while fighting in Korea, on the cover of Life, had been killed in an accident a few days before I arrived. What the history of the squadron was I did not know and was not told. Its tradition was embodied for me by the new operations officer, a plump Southerner, lying on the floor of a bar in town, too drunk to stand but still animatedly talking to and later borne from the place by his admiring pilots. It was he who gave me my first jet rides. His equipment always looked as if it had been borrowed — helmet oddly perched on his head, flying suit too small and deeply pinched by parachute harness — but he was an experienced pilot, the stick held daintily in his stubby hand. It was September. The heat had never died. Flies were trying to come indoors for the winter and a pennant race that turned out to be the most famous ever was going on. In a car parked out near the runway my wife waved congratulations as I taxied in alone in the trainer for the first time.

I felt I was born for it. One of the initial things I did when I went up without a chase plane in an F-86 was climb to altitude and shut the engine off. The sky was suddenly flooded with silence, the metal deadweight. Calmly, though my fingers were tingling, I went through the steps to restart it, air start, it was called. Afterwards I did it again. I wanted to be confident of the procedure in case of a flame-out, and following that I never thought of them with dread.

The true hierarchy was based on who was the best pilot and who flew the most. There might be an obvious leader or two or three near equals. One quickly sensed who they were. In addition there were those who had flown in combat. Their stories were listened to more attentively. There was a big, overconfident pilot in another squadron who starred in one of the first I heard. He had flown F-80s, the earliest jet, in Korea. He was coming back from a mission one day, leading his flight home, at thirty thousand feet on top of an overcast. He called radar for a vector, “Milkman, this is Maple Lead.” Milkman answered, identified the flight on the radar screen, and gave them heading and distance to their field, which was K-2: One hundred and seventy degrees and a hundred and twenty miles.

The flight was low on fuel and the weather deteriorating. They would have to make an instrument approach, the leader knew. He called his element leader for a fuel check, “What state, Three?”

The fuel gauge on the F-80 had a small window where the pilot set in the number of gallons he had at takeoff, and thereafter, like an odometer in reverse, they clicked off during the flight. “Sixty gallons, Lead,” the element leader replied.

“No sweat.”

The clouds were solid. They could see nothing. After a while the radar station gave them another steer, still one hundred and seventy degrees, ninety-five miles.

“How are you doing, Three?”

“Forty-two gallons.”

“Roger.”

The ships, not far apart, could do nothing to affect one another though they shared a common fate. There was no need to speak. Silent minutes passed. The gallons fell away.

“Milkman, Maple Lead. Where do you have us now?”

“Stand by one, Maple Lead. We have you … steer one eight zero to home plate, sixty-six nautical miles.”

“Roger. Sixty-six out. Will you inform K-2 that we’re in the soup, low on fuel? We’ll be declaring an emergency.” Then, to the element leader, “What do you have, Three?”

“Twenty-four gallons.”

That was six or seven minutes of flying at altitude, throttled back to minimum cruise, but they also had to let down, make an approach, line up with the runway if they could find it. The heads in the cockpits were motionless, as if nothing of interest were going on, but they were facing the unalterable. The wingmen might have even less fuel than the element leader. After a while the flight leader called again, “Milkman, Maple. How far are we out?”

“We have you thirty-four miles out, Maple flight.”

“Roger.” He looked over at the element leader, who was perhaps fifty feet away. “What do you have now, Brax?”

“I’ve got nine hundred ninety-eight gallons, buddy,” the reply came calmly.

Not long afterwards, one by one, they ran out of fuel. The entire flight dead-sticked onto the runway at K-2.

It was among the knowledgeable others that one hoped to be talked about and admired. It was not impossible — the world of squadrons is small. The years would bow to you; you would be remembered, your name like a thoroughbred’s, a horse that ran and won.