James Salter - Burning the Days

There is a feeling Faulkner probably had — I have had it myself — that somewhere the true life is being lived, though not where you are. He may have heard the sound of it in Greenville, the rich, destructive roar not of planes such as he had known but ones far more potent. Something in him responded to that, the same thing most likely that had made him pose as an officer in the Royal Flying Corps, invent combat missions, crashes, a silver plate in his head. He was a small man. He could sit in a chair and his feet sometimes might not touch the floor. His world was small, an illiterate county seat, a backward state, though from it he fashioned something greater, far greater perhaps than even he knew. A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture; it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page.

One thing about Faulkner I like, apart from the simplicity, on the whole, of his life, was that he wrote on the bedroom walls. That seems to me the true mark of a writer. It is like a pianist practicing in the middle of the night when the whole household is asleep or trying to sleep — the music is greater than any of their lives.

That day in Greenville, Faulkner, ten years from his death, offered to write a story about the Air Force if in exchange he might have a ride in a jet. Sylvester promptly called the base commander, a colonel, who listened to the proposal. At the end his reply was only “Who’s Faulkner?”

—

One Monday, just after the pilots’ meeting, the phone rang. It was a clerk in combat operations. Did I know that one of my pilots had bailed out over Chaumont? Chaumont? In France? It must be a mistake — we had nobody flying yet, I said.

Then I remembered the two planes being ferried.

The preceding Friday night, in the camaraderie at the club, someone had suggested that the planes being sent to the depot at Châteauroux for overhaul, since they still had some hours remaining on them before inspection, be released to fly over the weekend. Why not? I thought. Pilots always wanted flying time. I did not check where they had gone. It was of no importance. They were heading for Châteauroux by a roundabout route.

We waited uneasily to hear something more. After a while it came. One pilot, it was reported, had bailed out on the approach. The second had landed; it was Carney. Of DeShazer, nothing further was known.

It developed that they had gone to Munich, where the ground crew had signed off the planes as fully serviced but failed to check the oil. After the weekend they had left early in the morning for Châteauroux. At thirty-five thousand feet DeShazer had a loss of power. It was the oil-operated main fuel regulator failing. He went over to his emergency fuel system and headed for the nearest field: Chaumont.

They made a long, straight-in final to Chaumont. Carney, flying on DeShazer’s wing, saw a burst of flame, brilliant and terrifying, come out of the tailpipe. The bearings had failed. The engine was devouring itself. “Get out, Bill!” he called, but DeShazer anticipated him. The canopy shot away. The seat followed, up and over, tumbling behind the airplane, DeShazer’s arms fluttering wildly. All our planes were equipped with a device that opened the safety belt automatically and allowed the pilot and seat to come quickly apart — all planes, it turned out, except one. The seat fell and fell, Carney trying to keep it in sight. Finally the seat and pilot separated. A long white writhing shape streamed out and reached full length but never completely bloomed before going into the trees. The sum of trivialities had reached a certain number — the result was the disappearance of a man.

They looked for him all day. At last, in midafternoon, they found him. He was dead.

Unmarried, homely, balding, with widely spaced teeth like pickets, he was good-natured. Someone had asked to borrow money and DeShazer said there was some in the bureau in his room. It was Kelley, I think, who went there and found five or six hundred dollars lying loose and uncounted among the clothes.

After it was over and the reports had been sent in, I stopped at the club for a drink on the way home. An accident occurring in another squadron seemed a consequence of some kind; in one’s own squadron it was fate, heavy and humbling. The days became divided, those before and those to come. DeShazer’s name would be taken from the board on which pilots were listed, the loss probably of his chief distinction. His personal effects would be packed and shipped home. The squadron commander, Norman Phillips, would compose a letter to his parents. In the year to come, four or five new pilots would arrive in the squadron to begin their tours, none of them having heard of DeShazer or prepared to believe in the sudden amazing flare, like the gust before a magician’s act, announcing the unfathomable.

Yet he would not be forgotten. Like others he would reappear, like the fair-haired, imaginary aces Faulkner wrote poems about. DeShazer, far more unassuming, with his wide, cracked-lip smile, would remain in one’s life. Arms flapping, he would tumble endlessly, his parachute, long and useless, trailing behind.

Not at first, and not until you accept that you are mortal, do you begin to realize that life and death are the same thing. DeShazer had gone elsewhere. Into the stars.

—

Munich for the last time, glittering in the darkness, immense — the shops, the avenues, the fine cars. The wingman’s ship is out to one side near a crescent moon. The Arend-Roland comet is visible, its milky tail flying southwards for thousands of miles, an inch in the sky. I lean back and gaze at it, my helmet against the padding. I will never see it again or, just this way, all that is below. Some joys exist in retrospect but not this, the serenity, the cities shining in detailed splendor. From the deeps of the sky we look down as if upon our flocks.

The farewell party a few weeks later seems like any other though it is the last; drinking, singing, the end of the tour and an occasion that fixes everything but that is also something else, not quite animate, an episode in the life of a squadron that will go on without you, without everyone. All will be superseded, all forgotten.

Uden and Tucker have come with German girls. The father of Uden’s had been a pilot, a Luftwaffe pilot, she said. He had never returned from his third raid over England. They never had any further news. She had been five or six years old when it happened, a child of the war, handsome now and composed.

For me it is particularly poignant, not her lost father but the evening. At the appropriate time, rising to my feet, I try to say something of what I feel, the allowable portion. I cannot simply say I’ve liked being in the squadron, I tell them — my life has been the squadron, a life, I do not explain, that I am abandoning. A few months earlier, Spry, who had graduated a few classes after me and was in group operations, had told me he was resigning. Almost at that instant — he had somehow given me the freedom, hurled the first stone — I made the decision. It was far from decisive. I discussed it with my wife who, with only a partial understanding of what was involved, did not attempt to change my mind. I had perhaps waited too long, but there was still part of me that existed when I was a schoolboy and had never really died — it was in me like a pathogen — the idea of being a writer and from the great heap of days making something lasting.

The Air Force — I ate and drank it, went in whatever weather on whatever day, talked its endless talk, climbed onto the wing to fuel the ship myself, fell into the wet sand of its beaches with sweaty others and was bitten by its flies, ignored wavering instruments, slept in dreary places, rendered it my heart. I had given up the life into which I had been born and taken up another and was about to leave that, too, only with far greater difficulty.