by William Boyd
The payload of the Crusader was prodigious; its sturdy frame could carry an anthology of destructive weaponry beneath its wings. Pfitz was highly satisfied with this aspect, soon indifferent to the absence of computer technology that precluded his carrying laser or guided bombs like the Phantoms. And he was never happier than when he supervised his crew as they bolted the finless, cigar-shaped canisters of napalm to the underwing pylons. Pascual overheard him talking about a request he’d made to be excused from carrying all other bomb loads and how he’d voluntarily restricted himself to napalm. He started to refer to his aircraft as the Rose Train and had Huq, who was something of an artist, paint this below his cockpit.
“It’s like roses in the jungle, man,” he would crow on returning from a mission. “You see them cans tumblin’ and whoomph—it’s like a fuckin’ great flower bloomin’ in the trees. Wham, pink an’ orange roses. Beautiful, man, just beautiful.” He made Huq keep a tally of missions by painting a red rose beneath the cockpit sill.
Lydecker thought Pfitz had gone mad, and so did many of the other pilots. Napalm had to be delivered from low level, making the plane vulnerable to ground fire. With half a dozen canisters wobbling like overripe fruit beneath your wings, you could be transformed into a comet of blazing petroleum jelly with one lucky shot. Lydecker sometimes thought about this as he patched bullet holes in the wings and tail.
Often at night Lydecker would leave the brightly lit crew quarters, where the air was thick with smoke, and bored sailors played cards or told obscene stories, and wander up to the dark cavern of the main hangar below the deck where the atmosphere had a tranquil metallic chill and the smell of oil and engine coolant clung to the air. He would go over to the Crusader, ponderously low-slung on its curious trolley undercarriage which jutted like spavined legs from the fuselage belly, and run his hands over the scarred and chipped aluminum, his fingers tracing and caressing the lines of rivet heads. Like the halted, bullied schoolchild who tinkers with his bike all day, Lydecker enjoyed the mute presence of his plane. It was like some gigantic familiar toy, stored in a cupboard with its wings folded and canopy up. He knew every square inch of the plane, from its gaping intake to the scorched jet at the rear. He had clambered all over its body, fueling and rearming it, riveting patches of aluminum alloy over the puckered ulcers caused by random bullets. He had climbed into the dark ventral recesses of the undercarriage bay, checking the hydraulic system, and had inched along its ribbed length replacing frayed control wires and realigning the armor plate. And he found himself, like an anxious mother, fretting for its return after long missions to Laos or Haiphong.
The war was a distant affair to the men on the “Yankee Station” in the South China Sea. Just a green haze on the horizon sometimes. Even for the pilots who flew above it, dumping tons of high explosive on the jungle, the war and the enemy remained abstract and remote. To them it was a dangerous, demanding job and only Pfitz openly expressed the requisite warlike antagonism; only he seemed to be exulted by the regular missions and the crop of red roses that grew on the side of the plane.
Then one late afternoon a seabird was sucked into the intake as the Crusader came in to land. The thump made Pfitz veer up and away to make his approach again. This caused a lot of hilarity among the deck crew and when Pfitz had landed safely someone shouted, “Hey! Why din’t ya eject, Pfitz?” There was no real danger, as, set about five feet down the intake vent, there was a fine wire mesh that protected the delicate compressor fans of the engine from such incidents.
Lydecker wheeled the light ladder against the fuselage as soon as the plane was towed to its bay on the deck. Pfitz took off his helmet, sweat shining in his crew-cut hair, his beefy face red with anger. As he climbed down, Lydecker stepped back from the ladder and looked away, but Pfitz grabbed him by the arm, fingers biting cruelly into his bicep.
“Fuckin’ bumpy landing again, you fuckin’ shithead creep. How many times I told you to get those tire pressures reduced? You’re on fuckin’ report.”
That night Lydecker abandoned the letter he was trying to write to a movie usherette he had known in Sturgis and made his way up to the hangar. He roved around the familiar contours of the plane, noting with a surge of anger the bulge of the fat soft tires on the steel floor. His brain hummed with an almost palpable hatred for Pfitz. His hands were raw and astringent from an evening spent cleaning latrines with coarse scouring powder as a result of his having been placed on report. He leaned up against the side of the Crusader and rested his hot cheek on the cool metal, his eyes blank and tearless, yet his mouth uncontrollably twisted in a rictus of sadness and utter frustration with his life. He forced himself to think of something else. He thought of the plane and the bird it had engulfed, how his heart had leaped in panic as the plane had jerked from its approach run. Without thinking he peered into the maw of the intake. In the gloom he could make out the detritus of feathers and expressed flesh stuck to the fine grille. He climbed into the intake, easily adapting the posture of his body to the narrowing curves of the interior, and began to pick the feathers and bones away from the wire mesh. He felt his spine molded against the curve of polished metal and sensed all about him the complex terminals of controls and cables running from the cockpit above his head. The only sound was the noise of his breathing and the quiet pinging of his nails on the wires as he plucked the trapped feathers away.
When he heard the voices he suddenly realized he did not know how long he’d been hunched in the throat of the plane. With a chill of alarm he recognized Pfitz’s oddly high laugh among them and hastily clambered out of the intake. He saw three officers sauntering toward the Crusader down the aisle of parked aircraft. Momentarily distracted, he tried to slip around the plane out of sight but Pfitz had seen him and ran forward.
“Hey! You there, sailor, stop!”
Lydecker stood at attention, his face red with embarrassment, as if his mother had discovered him having sex or masturbating. As Pfitz approached, the shame dissipated and fear suddenly gripped like a hand at his heart.
“Lydecker! This is off limits to you, man.” Pfitz was enraged; he clutched a beer can in his fist. “What’re you fuckin’ doing here, jerk-off?”
The other two officers stood back grinning. Pfitz was aware of their amused observation.
Lydecker held out his hand, showing the ball of fluff and feathers by way of explanation.
“Uh, I was just clearing the intake, sir. The bird? You know, when you landed this afternoon …?”
The two officers snorted with laughter. Pfitz’s eyes widened in fury. He cuffed at the feathers, and the bundle exploded into a cloud of swooping fluff.
“Hey, Larry,” one of the officers guffawed, “it’s a fuckin’ souvenir, man.”
Pfitz struck out blindly at Lydecker, punching him in the chest. Lydecker staggered backward. Pfitz’s voice rose to a shriek.
“You’re fuckin’ finished, you fuckin’ dipshit asshole! Get outa here an’ don’t come back or I’m gonna dump a giant shit on you, boy!”
Pfitz held the beer can up threateningly. Lydecker backed down the row of planes. Helpless with laughter, the two officers tried to restrain Pfitz.
“You’re getting transferred off of my crew. You ain’t gonna mess around with me anymore, you bastard. Now git out!” His face rigid with fury, Pfitz hurled the half-full beer can at the retreating Lydecker. It glanced off his forehead and went ringing along the steel deck. Lydecker turned and fled, only to slip on a patch of oil. He skidded to the ground, careening into the nose wheel of a Skyhawk. The beer can rested against the tire. All Lydecker could hear was laughter—Pfitz’s harsh, triumphant laughter. He picked up the beer can, paused for an instant, then got to his feet and limped off, the can clutched to his chest with both hands.
Pfitz had Lydecker transferred from aircraft crew to catapult maintenance, one of the worst details on the ship. It meant hours on the exposed bow of the carrier as it steamed full speed into the wind for a mission launch. Ly
decker’s new job was to shackle the planes on to the towing block that protruded from the indented track of the catapult. He wore a huge goggled helmet with bulging ear protectors that made him look like some insect-headed alien or demented astronaut. It was a cheerless, companionless job. The rush of wind made his bright nylon coveralls crack like a pennant in a hurricane, and conversation of any kind was impossible due to the shattering roar of jet engines driven at full thrust As the plane was moved into take-off position, Lydecker would run forward with the cumbersome steel-cable towing strop. He would secure each end of the strop to pinions in the undercarriage bay or just below the leading edge of the wings, and slip the middle over the angled blade of the towing block. He then darted out from beneath the plane, giving a thumbs-up to the catapult officer. If everything was in order the officer held five fingers up to the pilot of the plane, who saluted his acknowledgment Then, like some ardent coach cheering on his team, the catapult officer dropped to one knee, swept his arm forward, and a seaman on a catwalk across the deck pressed the launch button. The catapult would be released, hurling the plane, on full afterburn, along the narrow expanse of deck and into the air. The cable, too, would be flung out ahead of the carrier, dropping away from the climbing plane to splash forlornly into the sea in a tiny flurry of spray. The next plane was then towed into the take-off position, ghostly wreaths of steam hissing from the length of the catapult track.
Some strange impulse made Lydecker keep the beer can Pfitz had thrown at him. It stood on a small shelf above his bunk beside his electric razor and a creased Polaroid snapshot of the movie usherette. For a week after the incident he had worn adhesive tape on his forehead; then the scab had sloughed off, leaving a paler stripe on his already pale skin. Lydecker found that he unconsciously kept touching the thin scar, repeatedly running his forefinger over it, as if he had to keep reminding himself of its presence, like a teenager with his first moustache.
Denied the satisfaction of working on a plane, Lydecker’s life became one of routine mindless boredom. There were long periods of inactivity or futile chores. There was the deadening monotony of the catapult maintenance crew; the endless scurrying beneath screaming jets with the heavy cable, the grease thick on his gloves as he fought with recalcitrant pinions. Sometimes the frequent malfunctioning of the Chester B.’s old steam catapult brought tedious afternoons of stripping the mechanism down, searching for faults and elusive defects. The pressure that was required to fling tons of lethal weaponry into the air caused valves to blow back, bearings to jam and gauges to crack and leak. There were many accidents. Planes, given insufficient lift from the catapult, belly-landing in the sea; a tardily raised blast deflector had caused a parked helicopter to be flipped overboard; combat-dazed pilots had misjudged their landings and ploughed off the end of the carrier. Once a deck-tractor had momentarily stuck in reverse and backed a Skyhawk into the ocean—just like kicking a pebble off a dock.
Throughout this time Lydecker appeased his tired and numb body by hating Pfitz. The man came to obsess him. His throat would be thick with emotion and fury as he forced the launching cable onto the Crusader’s grips. Sometimes he would wander over to the plane when the crew were working on it, but he was invariably met with insults and told to stay away. Slowly he came to feel that Pfitz had deliberately set out to deprive his life of the little meaning and satisfaction it had, and for some reason the only solace he found, the only way he knew of combating this emptiness, was to replace it with his hatred. The emotion gave his life a structure of sorts; it became something he could rely on, constant and unwavering, like a picture he had once seen of Saint Paul’s cathedral in the London blitz. Lydecker’s hatred was a familiar comfort; it had done able service from his earliest days. It had sustained him as he had lain in bed and listened to his father batter his frail mother in a frenzy of crapulous rage. It had provided support when Werbel took him off cars and put him on the pumps and had then restricted him to cleaning the rest rooms and sweeping the concrete apron. As he had freed plugged drains or picked sodden cigar butts from chill pools of oil, listening to the laughter and banter of the mechanics in the warm garage, all that had kept his mind from tilting over into twitching insanity was his passionate hatred. It was this and the knowledge that no matter what Werbel made him do, no matter how he was debased by him, the hate lived on—secretly firing and fueling his spirit. He was grateful to the Navy for allowing the hate to subside for a while. He still had no friends, was still one of the few despised and ignored that figure in any large company, but his ability with machinery was recognized and his self-esteem inched up from ground zero. He found his reward in the perfect roar of an engine, the smooth retraction of an undercarriage, or the clean function of an aileron. Never having asked for much, he needed nothing more, and his life reached a plateau of tolerance which was as close as he’d come to happiness. Until Pfitz had lost his Phantom.
Working away from Pfitz’s immediate sphere of influence, Lydecker became more aware of the man’s other obsession. Pfitz’s fascination with napalm was the subject of bemused reflection among the members of the catapult maintenance crew. “Hell, there goes Fireball Pfitz,” one of them would remark, and there would ensue some discussion about the “poor fuckin’ gooks.” Lydecker didn’t pay much attention at first. He had never been to Vietnam, even though he’d been on the Yankee Station for four months. The fleet made an endless patrol, usually just over the horizon from the coast, rarely steaming into sight unless cruisers or destroyers were called to bring their large guns into play. But gradually Lydecker came to see that Pfitz hated Vietnam as much as he loathed Lydecker himself; and he felt an involuntary sympathy start up in his body as Pfitz lovingly recounted, to the wide-mouthed audience of his ground crew, the devastation eight canisters of napalm had wrought in a straw village. The Rose Train climbed the gradients into the sky weighted with seething latent fire like some modern archangelic predator. Lydecker would watch it go, his head a confused muddle of thoughts and sensations.
And each night, exhausted, he would gaze at the slightly buckled beer can as if it were some icon or idol of his hate. In the distorted planes of its surface he seemed to see a vague metallic template of Pfitz’s bullish features. He would stroke the scar on his forehead and think about Pfitz and the men he had known like him—his father and Werbel—and the intensity of his hatred brought his flesh up in goose pimples. He would clutch the sides of his bunk and screw his eyes tight shut as if in the grip of an acute migraine attack. Men like that shouldn’t be allowed to go about unhindered, he would think distractedly; something should be done to them.
Then one day Pfitz had an engine cut out as Lydecker was shackling the expendable wire bridle to the nose wheel of the Crusader. The air vibrated with the idling jets of planes waiting in line and the hot gases of the exhausts made the crowded deck of the carrier shimmer and dance in the haze. Pfitz had to be towed off line and there was some delay as Lydecker fought to free the cable from the stiff nose-wheel clamps. Pfitz had raised his cockpit canopy and as Lydecker stood up, the cable finally released, he saw Pfitz’s purple enraged face screaming inaudible obscenities at him through arcs of spittle. It was as if Lydecker had been responsible for the cutout, as if his particular touch on the nose wheel had mysteriously spooked the functioning of the jet. And in the waves of Pfitz’s anger, Lydecker was disturbed by the sudden realization that Pfitz was a hater, too; that, like him, he needed his hate, needed his malice to beat the world.
That evening Lydecker applied for some long-overdue shore leave. The bizarre feeling of kinship had unsettled him. It appeared that Pfitz’s plane would be out of action for a week, and now—more than ever—Lydecker didn’t want to be around.
Lydecker was granted five days and opted for Saigon. He passed nearly all of his time in a Tu-Do bar brothel, methodically working his way through the nine girls who serviced the clients. Out at the back of the bar there were three lean-to-cabins with rickety iron beds. Lydecker spent the day d
rinking beer and every now and then would stagger up to one of the girls—comicbook whores with thickly mascara-ed eyes, miniskirts and padded bras—and lurch outside to a cabin.
It was only on the third day that he noticed the young, thin-shouldered girl who wiped and cleared the tables and periodically swept out the cabins. She was quiet and withdrawn and had slightly buck teeth. Unlike the others, she wore an ao-dai and a thigh-length chemise. Her status in the bar was indeterminate. He never saw her with G.I.’s and she never used the cabins. Sometimes she would go out to the back or into the toilets, but only with civilians or the occasional Vietnamese soldier, only spending the briefest time—about two minutes—away from her chores. She did not pout, flirt or posture like the other girls and never wore their cheap Western clothes. Yet for all her quiet dignity and restraint, she was the lowest creature in the bar. A quick-time girl—lower than the pimps and shoeshine boys, lower even than the many cats and stray dogs that nosed around and were temporarily adopted and spoiled by the American servicemen. Why is she doing this? Lydecker found himself asking. What was it about her that kept her in this whores’ city, so calmly accepting the shitty jobs and compliantly carrying out the spurious sex acts demanded of her? The paradox enraged and excited him and the girl gradually took a hold on his mind. Not having noticed her at first, he now seemed to see her everywhere. She hovered around the perimeter of his vision: taking the empty bottles from his table, slipping from a cabin as he entered, mopping up pools of vomit in the men’s room. He discovered a disproportionate irritation in this, and despite himself swore and shouted at her if she approached. Strengthened by his uniform in this city of obsequious servants, he befriended other servicemen who used the bar and in his noontide drunkenness wove obscene stories around the thin girl, flashing his eyes in her direction as he joined in the raucous guffaws.
