James Salter - Burning the Days

“Cousin Echo,” Tracy called, “I’ve lost you.”

Rolling out, on his own instruments then, Tracy managed to stop his descent. He found himself going over five hundred miles an hour. He called his leader a number of times on both channels, tower and departure control, but there was no reply.

The last few seconds, beneath the clouds, must have been a collapse of all reality for the colonel as he burst into the visible world in a nearly vertical dive. Everything he knew and had known was suddenly of no avail. If, even for a moment, he thought of bailing out, it was already too late. As if in a nightmare, in the final second his eyes smashed through surfaces, he entered a new dimension.

The first awareness for us that anything was wrong was the announcement by the tower that the field was closed to all traffic, an emergency was in progress. There was nothing more, no voices on the air, no instructions or calls. Only silence and a few dark birds flying low, near the wintry clouds.

Brischetto was forty-one years old. He had a family, children. In the housing area the telephone must have eventually rung in his apartment. “Colonel Brischetto’s quarters,” one of them would say.

The aircraft was completely demolished, the accident report read. Cause of death: injuries multiple extreme. The body, it was stated, was destroyed beyond recognition. More than that can hardly occur. It was impossible to know with certainty why it all had happened. Most likely the colonel had looked away from his instruments for several seconds, absorbed in trying to read the number on the channel selector, down by his left elbow. That had caused the first unintentional, steep turn. He had corrected that. Perhaps he could not understand why he heard no one on the radio and looked down again. Perhaps when he returned to his instruments he saw chaos beyond his power to decipher.

Subdued, we nevertheless flew to Rome that afternoon and on to Africa where we fired gunnery for weeks over the green, unoccupied sea.

—

North Africa had its spell. Silent, forgotten cities along the coast, joined by a single empty road. The marble columns from Roman days pillaged over the centuries for European palaces and estates.

On windless mornings we took off early and headed out to sea. The tow plane was already on course, at twenty thousand feet, the slender white target moving serenely some distance behind it.

The first mission of the day. The air has a full, damp quality. Long, holy streamers curve through it, marking our passes. There is a rhythm, like section hands dreamily pounding spikes. In the gunsight the target grows larger, slowly at first and then with a rush, in range for only a second or two. The bullets leave thin traces of smoke as they vanish into the cloth — each plane’s have been dipped in a different color paint so they can afterwards be counted. To the south, invisible, on the one great road of the kingdom, paralleling the sea, there are arches of palms and thousands upon thousands of stiff, laundered flags to mark the route of the wedding party traveling west from Benghazi. The king had taken a second wife, who was Egyptian.

That night in Tripoli, amid the rancid smell of smoke, a torchlight parade passed along the street through the crowds. I stood outside a tailor shop and watched. The owner, Salvatore Perrucio, stood beside me. “What is it, is the king coming?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” Perrucio said. “He wouldn’t dare.”

“Why not?”

“They kill him,” he said.

I laughed at the joke.

“Don’t,” he warned. “Never laugh. If they see you doing that, they kill you, too. Never laugh at them. Call them anything you want, but never laugh.”

It was difficult to know who he was talking about, the mobs in the street, the short dark men in double-breasted suits in the Uaddan Hotel, the wraithlike figures drifting without apparent purpose along the beach, the bare-legged men working in the salt flats near our planes? We knew none of them. They were part of something impenetrable. Together with the buildings and statuary of an ancient colonial world, they went back at least two thousand years, to the days of Leptis Magna and Sabratha. Surviving within them all this time was a seething and unalterable code.

Perrucio made suits, bespoke, for thirty or forty dollars, as I recall. When he was twelve, he told me modestly, he could make a complete suit all by himself. He’d been a prisoner of the English during the war and had made uniforms for them. The time he spent in prison camp was the happiest of his life, he said. “A lovely country. Such beautiful women — and so easy to get. Of course, I was different-looking then. I wasn’t like this”—he clasped his wide waist with his hands. He had the full, pleasant face of a man in touch with life. Inside the shop, half concealed by a curtain, a boy sat, two thin legs in shorts and a plum-shaped body, cutting and basting patterns, the very age Perrucio had been.

I flew south one day, a hundred or two hundred miles into the desert, the earth changing from ruggedness to orange dust. There was no life, no roads, no trace of anything. Turning, I began to descend in long, uninquisitive arcs until finally, at fifty or a hundred feet, I was heading back north.

At that height one can see only a few miles ahead. Unexpectedly, things began to appear, occasional lonely shepherds, grazing camels, a low, dark group of tents. Suddenly there were animals scattering before me, children throwing themselves to the ground, the momentary glimpse of women who had hurried to tent doors. In twenty minutes I would be on the ground at Wheelus but I would remain aloft much longer in the minds of these unknown people, crossing their world with furious sound and then gone.

Beyond them, past shale mountains and stretches of sand, came the first faint tincture of civilization: telegraph wires, cultivation, roads. Farther still, hard and gleaming, the sea.

It was from the other side of this sea that Perrucio had come, from the long, rugged peninsula that had been the center of the world. It was easy to see the long throw of his life, Italy, North Africa, the war, and finally North Africa again in unmarked exile, a life begun perhaps ten years earlier than mine and meant from the beginning to be more conventional and unesteemed. I envied its simplicity, the fineness of the suits he so carefully made. The days of pale English roses, probably less well scrubbed than I imagined and coarser voiced, were far behind. He lived among a less exotic species now, his wife, daughter, mother-in-law.

At the Bath Club, dreary and English, there were desiccated copies of London Illustrated News spread on the tables and a drink of scotch cost a dime. One night, when her escort had gone off for a few minutes, we invited a watery blonde, the only woman in the club, to come to the base on Saturday night. All right, she said. She wanted to bring along a friend, someone named Emma.

“Who is Emma?”

“You’ll like her,” she said.

I seem to recall Emma now as being older. Saturday night was always crowded and boisterous. Half-drunk and suddenly remembering the invitation, three of us went to the main gate to meet the women and guide their car to the club. “We’re waiting for a couple of visitors,” I told the guards.

The road leading to the base was empty. There were no headlights, only alien darkness. Minutes passed.

“What time is it?”

“Eight-thirty.”

“What time did we say?”

“I forget.”

After a while one of the guards turned his head. He heard someone approaching. “Might be your visitors,” he said.

“Couldn’t be,” I said with assurance. “They’ll be in a car,” I explained as the shadowy figures of the two demoiselles materialized down the road. They were walking in high heels. It was miles to town. Such was the allure of our pay and wrinkled khaki.