Gods of Tin

by James Salter

  searchlights in the mist; I could see more without them but

  the ground was twenty feet beneath me, I was at minimum

  speed and dared not bend to turn them off. Something went

  by on the left. Trees, in the middle of the park. I had barely missed them. No landing here. A moment later, at the far end, more trees. They were higher than I was, and without speed to climb I banked to get through them. I heard foliage slap the wings as just ahead, shielded, a second rank of trees rose up.

  There was no time to do anything. Something large struck a

  wing. It tore away. The plane careened up. It stood poised for an endless moment, one landing light flooding a house into

  which an instant later it crashed.

  Nothing has vanished, not even the stunned first seconds

  of silence, the torn leaves drifting down. Reflexively, as a slain

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  man might bewilderedly shut a door, I reached to turn off the ignition. I was badly injured, though in what way I did not

  know. There was no pain. My legs, I realized. I tried to move them. Nothing seemed wrong. My front teeth were loose; I

  could feel them move as I breathed. In absolute quiet I sat for a few moments almost at a loss as to what to do, then unbuckled the harness and stepped from the cockpit onto what had

  been the front porch. The nose of the plane was in the wreckage of a room. The severed wing lay back in the street.

  The house, as it turned out, belonged to a family that was

  welcoming home a son who had been a prisoner of war in Ger-

  many. They were having a party and had taken the startling

  noise of the plane as it passed low over town many times to be some sort of military salute, and though it was nearly midnight had all gone into the street to have a look. I had come in like a meteorite over their heads. The town was Great Barrington. I had to be shown where it was on a map, in Massachusetts,

  miles to the north and east . . .

  m

  They came for me the next day and I watched them load the

  wreckage on a large flatbed truck. I rode back with the remains of the plane. In the barracks, which were empty when I

  arrived, my bed, unlike the rows of others, was littered with messages, all mock congratulations. I found myself, unexpect-

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  Great Barrington: The Graham house, May 8, 1945

  edly, a popular figure. It was as if I had somehow defied the authorities. On the blackboard in the briefing room was a

  drawing of a house with the tail of an airplane sticking from the roof and written beneath, Geisler’s student. I survived the obligatory check-rides and proceedings of the accident board, which were brief.

  m

  From the end of the war, Salter spent six years, 1945-1951, stationed in the Pacific and back in the States, typical of a career officer. He was in a transport squadron for about a year and afterwards occasionally flew a fighter.

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  m

  In the Pacific the war had ended but its vast, shabby landscape remained. In Manila Bay the water was the color of rust from sunken ships. Unidentified masts and funnels were sticking

  above the surface. Manila was half destroyed; the tops were

  blown off the palm trees, the roads were ruined, the air filled with dust. There were still rotting helmets and field equipment to be found on Bataan. The licit had disappeared. Theft was an industry, deserters coming into barracks before dawn

  to steal what they could. There were incomplete rosters, slack discipline. Men were threatening to shoot officers who were

  too conscientious. On Okinawa a corporal was driving a nurse around to the black units in an unmarked ambulance. She lay

  on a bed in back, naked from the waist down. She charged

  twenty dollars . . .

  We were at last sent to squadrons where a few languid old-

  timers reigned, secure figures who were on intimate terms

  with the supply sergeant and knew how everything was done.

  The fighter pilots went to remote fields in Korea, Japan, Okinawa. With fifteen or twenty others I was sent to transports and stayed on for a while in Manila, living in corrugated-iron huts that the last of the wartime flyers had abandoned, leaving behind among other things amateur photos of nude Australian

  girls and addresses scribbled in pencil on the back of instru-

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  ment cards.

  It was not long before, like the onset of a disease, the winnowing began. Word of mouth brought the news—someone

  had seen someone, someone had heard . . . Men began to dis-

  appear. One by one there came the names.

  Did you hear about McGranery? they said. Spun in on

  Palawan in a P-51. Gassman was killed there, too. Jack Ray,

  always smiling, was killed on Okinawa. Woods crashed in a

  coral pit on takeoff there and died. The planes had to be flown correctly or they were treacherous; they would stall, one wing dropping abruptly, like a horse stumbling. At low speed, on a go-around, suddenly opening the throttle could make them

  roll onto their back, the controls unable to prevent it.

  Schrader was dead, we heard. MacDonald. Like drops of

  pelting rain they were exploding in the dust. Averill got killed in Korea, going around in a P-38. Domey was killed; Joe

  Macur. Cherry got killed; Jim Smart, the streamers curling

  from his wingtips as he went into the sea.

  The accidents. They were the stark trees in the forest that

  stood alone, at the foot of which nothing thereafter grew. The wreckage of the cities would be cleared away but never the oil slick on the sea that was all they found of Smart. For me, however, it was a siren song—the fierce metal planes with their weathered insignia, the great noise as they launched, the distant runways at Negros, Yontan, Cebu. The danger of it was a

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  distinction which nothing else could afford. It would not happen to you, of course, it would never happen to you, and also, as has been pointed out, you could discover death as quickly by fleeing from it, be stung the soonest . . .

  Who had been killed—it was that for years. I flew in many

  funeral formations. Timed to pass over the chapel as the

  officers and wives, the widow among them, emerged, two

  flights of four, tight as nails, roaring past with one ship con-spicuously missing. In the evening the piano is playing at the club. They are rolling dice at the bar. You are surviving, more than surviving: their days have been inscribed on yours.

  m

  You remember the airfields, the first sight of some, the deep familiarity of others . . . I liked fields near the sea, Westhampton Beach on Long Island, Myrtle Beach, Langley, Elgin, Alameda, where we landed in the fall, ferrying planes to be shipped to the fighting in Korea . . . There are fields I would like to forget, Polk, where one night, as a rank amateur, I nearly went into the trees, trying clumsily to go around with my flaps down. Later, in the wooden barracks, came another lesson. Two men in flying suits, drab in appearance paused at the open door of the room where I sat on the bed. “Are you the one flying the P-51? Where are you from?” one asked.

  “Andrews,” I said. I felt a kind of glamour, being connected

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  with the silvery plane and its slim, aggressive shape, parked by itself on the ramp. It was not hard to deduce that they were lesser figures, transport pilots probably. I told them I was in the Fourth Group rather than going into the less interesting facts—I was actually a graduate student at Georgetown. They

  did not seem very impressed. “Ever hear of Don Garland?” I

  said, naming a noted pilot in
the Fourth.

  “Who’s that?”

  “One of the best pilots in the Air Force.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  I offered a few exaggerations I had overheard at one time

  or another in the Andrews Club. Garland flew the slot position on the acrobatic team, hanging there with his bare teeth, so to speak, the proof of it being the blackened rudder of his ship, stained by the leader’s exhaust and as a mark of pride always left that way—no mechanic would dare rub it clean. He was a

  wild man, Garland—I could tell them any number of stories.

  “What does he look like?”

  I gave a vague answer. Was he a decent guy? they wanted to

  know.

  I had almost been in a fight one evening at Andrews, not

  with Garland but with another member of the team. “Not

  particularly,” I said.

  Suddenly one of them began laughing. The other glanced

  at him. “Shut up,” he said.

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  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” the first one said. Then to me,

  “This is Garland,” he said, gesturing.

  I was speechless.

  “What the hell’s your name?” they wanted to know.

  I left early in the morning, before they were up.

  m

  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.

  m

  In November, in northern Maine, you might see two of them

  from far off, at the end of the runway set amid the fields. They are barely identifiable, early F-86s with thin, swept wings.

  Nearer there is the sound, wavering but full, like a distant cataract. Then, close, it becomes a roar with the smoke billowing up behind. They are being run up, engines full open,

  brakes on, needles trembling at their utmost.

  The pilot of the first airplane has his head bent forward

  over the instruments as if examining them closely. Red-haired, gaunt, he had so far said almost nothing to me. His name was Stewart. I knew little about him. He was a Korean veteran and a maintenance officer. Lined up beside him, I waited. Why do you remember some things above all others and men who have

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  hardly spoken a word to you? I was new in the group and

  nervous. I was determined to fly good formation, to be a

  shadow, almost touching him. We were taking off just before

  sunset. No one else would be flying.

  His head rose then and turned towards me. His hand came

  up and hesitated. I nodded. The hand dropped.

  Wreathed in thunder we started down the runway. Gath-

  ering speed I saw his arm suddenly swinging wildly in a circle.

  I had no idea what it meant, was I to go on, was he aborting?

  In a moment I saw it was neither, only exhilaration; he was

  waving us onward as if whipping a bandana around in the air.

  The noses came up; we were at liftoff speed. I saw the ground fall away and from that moment for him I ceased to be.

  There was a low overcast through which we shot, and

  above it brilliant reddening sky. I was barely twenty feet from him but he never so much as glanced at me. He sat in the cockpit like a prophet, alone and in thought, head turning unhurriedly from side to side. We had reached thirty thousand feet when the tower called. Weather was moving in, our mission

  had been canceled. “Operations advises you return to base,”

  they said.

  “Roger,” I heard him say matter-of-factly. “We’ll be in after a few minutes. We’re going to burn out some petrol.”

  With that he rolled over and, power on, headed straight

  down. I didn’t know what he intended or was even doing. I fell

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  into close trail, hanging there grimly as if he were watching. The airspeed went to the red line; thousands of feet were spinning off the altimeter. The controls grew stiff, the stick could be moved only with great effort as we went through rolls and steep turns at speeds so great I could feel my heart being forced down from my chest.

  We burst through the overcast and into the narrow strip of

  sky beneath. I’d moved to his wing again. We were well over

  five hundred knots at about fifteen hundred feet. It was almost impossible to stay in position in the turns. I had both hands on the stick. All the time we were dropping lower. We were

  not moving, it seemed. We were fixed, quivering, fatally close.

  Five hundred feet, three hundred, still lower, in what

  seemed deathly silence except for an incandescent, steady roar, in solitude, slamming every moment against invisible waves of air. He was leading us into the unknown. My flying suit was

  soaked, the sweat ran down my face. A pure pale halo formed

  in back of his canopy and remained there, streaming like

  smoke. I began to realize what it was about. Never looking at me, absorbed by the instruments in front of him and by something in his thoughts, sometimes watching the world of dark

  forest that swept beneath us, hills and frozen lakes, he was gauging my desire to belong. It was a baptism. This silent

  angel was to bring me to the place where, wet and subdued, I would be made one with the rest. If, like a scrap of paper held

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  out the window of a speeding train, my airplane were to

  instantly come apart, torn bits tumbling and fluttering behind, he would only have begun a large, unhasty turn to see what had happened, his expression unchanged.

  I had surrendered myself to all of it and to whatever might

  come when unexpectedly he turned towards the field. We had

  already crossed it two or three times. This time we entered on initial approach and dropped dive brakes, slowing as we

  turned. I had a feeling of absolute control of the airplane. It was tamed, obedient. I could have gently tapped his wing with mine, I felt, and not left a dent. I could have followed him anywhere, through anything.

  I remember that moment and the smoothness of landing in

  the fading light. Now that the sound of our passing violently over-head had disappeared, on the field all was still. There was unbroken calm. Our idling engines had a high-pitched, lonely whine.

  Afterwards he said not a word to me. The emissary does

  not stoop to banter. He performs his duty, gathers his things, and is gone. But the snowy fields pouring past beneath us, the terror, the feeling of being for a moment a true pilot—these things remained.

  m

  Friends on the outside were always asking why he stayed in, or telling him he was wasting himself. He had never been able to

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  Presque Isle, fall of 1951

  give an answer. With the fresh shirt on his shoulders still cold as ice, chilled from an hour in an unheated radar compartment at forty thousand feet . . . the marks from the oxygen mask still on his face, and on his hands the microscopic grit of a thousand-mile journey, he had tried to find an answer sitting alone at dinner in the club filled with administrative majors and

  mothers talking about their children, but he never could. In his mind he carried Saturdays of flying, with the autumnal roar of crowds on the radio compass and the important stadiums

  thirty minutes apart and button-small, the wingmen like

  metallic arrows poised in the air above a continent, the last sunlight slanting through the ground haze, and cities of con-

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  crete moss; but never any reasonable reply. Or, sick of the stars and bored with speed on those nights in the great black sea, the surf of which was cities bubbling
on the wave, listening to the others who were up, two unseen killers perhaps, calling themselves Butcher Red and seeking themselves in the darkness, he had tried to think of one—brief, understandable—but never

  could. It was a secret life, lived alone.

  m

  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

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  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