James Salter - Burning the Days

It was not duty, it was desire. Duty would not search with such avidity in the waning light, coming down the river one last time, the earth already in darkness that was rising slowly, like a tide, the heavens being the last to go. A strange high sound begins in the earphones: gun-laying radar. Along the river a final time. Near its mouth the darkened earth begins to light up, first in one place and then another, like a city come to life. Soon the entire ground is flashing. They are firing at us far below. Black shellbursts, silent, appear around us, some showing an unexpected red core.

It was victory we longed for and imagined. You could not steal or be given it. No man on earth was rich enough to buy it and it was worth nothing. In the end it was worth nothing at all.

—

Now as I shake the box there falls onto the desk not dust but a kind of particulate from old things, along with matchbooks, paper clips, stamps without glue, and a talisman that I carried and for a long time could not bring myself to throw away. I switch on the lamp. Memories of the past. In the early evening, the hour when civilization is at its most comforting, the talisman gleams in an almost forgotten way. It is made not of anything material but of something less lasting: words spoken once, late at night, in the coldness of that winter, after a day of flying. I was with Woody in the quiet of some room. We were like figures out of Beckett, bundled up, dirty as ranch hands. We had about fifteen missions apiece. The months, with whatever was to come, stretched out ahead.

His face ran in an arc, the chin jutting out to one side. His hair was like brushed silver. “You’re going to get a lot of them here,” he predicted.

I felt my heart race. He was unbrash by nature. We had been drinking but he was not drunk. “You think so?”

I said casually.

It was not only you against them but you against obscurity. There were men who had made a name for themselves and stood above the rest, older men, some of them in their thirties, with the broad hands and deliberateness of carpenters, men who kept their own counsel and knew in the thick of it what to do. Most, though, were younger. I was twenty-six and could have used a few things, gunnery practice for one. No matter.

“You’re going to hit the glory road here,” he said.

He was far more experienced. His words to me meant more than I could say. I carried them around as if they were written on a slip of paper. No one else had heard them, no one knew about them. I alone.

—

We had many aces: Thyng himself, Asla, later shot down, Baker, Lilley, Blesse. In our squadron alone there were Love, Latshaw, Low, and Jolley, as well as latent others with four victories, ready on any day to climb down from their plane in triumph, grinning, genuine at last. For me, though, for reasons I cannot fully explain, Kasler was the nonpareil.

He was in our flight, together with Low. I cannot remember exactly how he looked, and yet in a way I can. The image is like a dream just at the moment it begins to be lost in the light of day. He had a round head, thin lips, cold uninquisitive gaze. He was laconic, the words barely slipped from his mouth. He had dignity, from what I don’t know. It had been given to him, I believe, just in case. Skill, of course, great natural as well as acquired skill together with nerve, and a furied patience like that of a lion lying flattened in the tall grass. Crowning it all was the unsentimentality of a champion. He had served a long apprenticeship, first as a B-29 tail gunner and older than the others when he got his wings. He was an obscure lieutenant when he came. He left renowned.

There are certain indestructible people, stalwarts — leaders of squadrons and their best followers; mechanics numb-fingered in the cold; bleak colonels with eyes reddened by late hours — all having one thing in common: They are the dikes that stand against aimlessness and indifference, that hold back the sullen waters that would otherwise mingle and flood. Kasler was one of these. I flew on Colman’s wing and Kasler, in turn, flew on mine.

Darkness, silence, the dawn mission getting up and appearing, dull with sleep, in the lighted mess hall, gloomily looking into the empty steel pitchers. “Where’s the bunja juice?” I hear Kasler ask coldly. The Koreans call the canned orange juice “punch.” “Havano,” they say helplessly. We eat in silence, looking at the tray, and ride in silence down to the flight line.

Two hours later we are over the river. There is the reservoir, the ice of its wide surface crazed with dark lines. It looks like death invading the tissue — all is disorder, all has failed. You can gaze at it for only a few seconds — the sky seems dead, too, abandoned, but can come alive at any moment with fateful glints.

Then it is late in the day again and there has been action. We are looking for them desperately — radar is continuing to report enemy flights — the sun is sinking, the earth beginning to be awash. We fly and see nothing. “They’re up by the mouth of the river!” someone calls. Heading there, the sky remains maddeningly empty and then, in an instant, there are planes everywhere. The impatience, the frenzy — every one we come close to is friendly. A minute or two later we have somehow passed from among them and into emptiness again.

Suddenly a plane flashes by beneath: huge tail, red stars, incredibly close. I turn after it, glance quickly behind, my heart pounding. It’s clear, but Kasler cries, “Check your right! Look right!”

Not two hundred feet away, plain, foreign-looking, is the wingman. I turn hard towards him and then partway back. He seems fixed, frozen there, like a hare in the headlights. I’m nearly behind him. It will be point-blank. Before I can fire there are four of them almost on top of us, coming in from the other side. “Break left!” Kasler is calling. They turn with us, like cars on a speedway, and we are going down, I can’t see if they are firing. Then we are alone; they’ve broken off when we didn’t see it. It’s over. Above us the contrails are already fading.

—

The members of a flight, five or six pilots, lived together in one room. It was a makeshift life amid spare furnishing. There was a large table at which we sat or played cards and a houseboy who pulled the blankets taut on the cots, swept, and did errands. During the day you might often be alone in the room when not flying or at other tasks. At night, never, but there was the officers’ club and the bar. There you could talk to strangers but rarely did.

Someone, the houseboy perhaps, had found a couple of photographs and put them on the table in the middle of the room. They were the size of postcards. Picking them up idly, you saw the faces of two former members of the flight who, missions completed, had long since gone home. These photos, in a border of black, found their way onto the wall within a large, painted frame in which there was room, as in a cemetery, for others. A simple date was beneath them — the date, in fact, they had left, so far as could be recalled. It appeared to be something more final.

Glancing at his wristwatch, someone would quietly announce the time, “Nine o’clock.”

Colman stood up. “The wall,” he said.

Everyone rose to his feet. A bundled-up figure — Smith, who liked to go to bed early with a white scarf wound around his eyes like a bandage — jumped up and, standing on the bed, unwrapped his head. His right hand, like everyone’s, covered his heart.

It was a solemn performance. All eyes, including the bewildered visitor’s, were turned to the photographs outlined in black; there were eventually three or four of them. The cast remained motionless for a full minute, a long time to hold so fixed a pose, and then abruptly and without a word, relaxed. Smith, puffy-eyed, rewound his soiled turban. The card game started up again.