Gods of Tin

by James Salter

  Isbell was now flying wing. In the silence he hung there. All that remained in the world was the other airplane. He stared at it. Every detail was terrifically clear. He read the black numbers on the tail. He watched the other plane move, rising slightly, sinking, as if borne by the calmest sea. It seemed incredibly heavy against the sky. He watched Cassada’s head move, nod—

  he was talking to someone—then looked this way and that.

  What was he saying? What were they telling him? Isbell began switching channels again, fumbling blindly for the set which was behind his left elbow. He called on each frequency, aching to

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  hear something. He saw then that they had started to descend.

  He glanced at the clouds beneath. They were dark, profound.

  They were at twenty thousand, the station still ahead. A

  thousand years had passed since Marseilles. Isbell glanced

  quickly at the needle. It was steady. They were close. It was holding dead on as if anchored. When he looked again it had

  begun to waver, darting from side to side. Speed brakes, he

  thought, and almost at that moment saw Cassada give the hand signal. In unison they put them out. The noses pitched down.

  The attitude steepened.

  At twelve thousand feet they began the turn to come back

  inbound. The cloud tops were streaming just beneath them,

  the threatening gray domes. Cassada’s wingtip lights came on.

  Isbell reached for his own, the panel lights also. Ten thousand feet. In a bank. The clouds were skimming below. In a silence that existed for Isbell alone they went down together towards the hidden earth.

  m

  Get us on, Isbell was thinking, get us on. They were trying the third time but everything was running the wrong way, he could feel it, a tide in the dark pulling at his legs. Get us on. He was either saying or thinking it when suddenly they came skimming out of the clouds in the moment of revelation, his heart rising up into his throat.

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  This time he saw it all. They had come down even lower, a

  hundred feet off the ground, bursting in and out of the ragged scud. Instants of vision, then into it again. The runway, the yellow mobile, everything passing by on the left as he saw it was like the others, no good. There welled up in him without thinking, oh, God, and looking down for a second too long he was late as Cassada turned. He turned hard himself, following, watching the ship ahead, the ground, clouds, the control tower almost straight on. Then Cassada was gone into a cloud lower than the rest. Isbell was in trail. He would see Cassada on the other side in a moment. Two moments. Longer. The cloud did

  not end. They never emerged. Isbell was on his own instru-

  ments, climbing. The tops were far above. The bases were

  frightening. He was climbing alone.

  He was unable to think. He didn’t know what heading he

  was on. It meant nothing just then. He was watching the fuel gauge. They were sometimes off by a couple hundred pounds.

  On top, he was thinking, on top. He could not concentrate on anything but that. The brightness above. To circle for a

  moment there within sight of the sky. He did not know

  whether there was something else he might be doing or not.

  He had to climb.

  It became a little easier the higher he went. The airplane

  was flying as if it could go on forever. It was powerful, light. He didn’t wonder about Cassada, where he had gone. There was

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  nothing left but a silent, darkening world, rock-hard, waiting for him to fall. He looked again at the fuel gauge. He was

  unable to keep his eyes from it, no matter how hard he tried.

  m

  In his mind Isbell prepares it. The details merge, become

  entangled. He forces his way through them, striving to make

  them distinct. He watches the instruments as he climbs, it

  seems to take a minute to read each one. A hundred and fifty pounds. He has made the decision but cannot move. He sits

  frozen, trying to believe.

  Twenty-five hundred feet. He is delaying but can’t think

  why. At any moment there’ll be a surge, the gauges dying then coming back. The expectation makes him hollow. His hand

  won’t move. He looks down at the red handle that blows the

  canopy. He can’t touch it. The first, warning lurch will make him jump like a cat but he does nothing. The engine is steady, the plane intact.

  One hundred pounds. The agony of the end. With an abrupt

  movement he levels the wings. He was rolling into a bank

  unaware. Pull it now, he thinks. Then sit erect. Squeeze the forked handles. He knows it from a thousand recitations. Pull. He can’t.

  The safety pin. Suddenly he thinks of that and looks down.

  It’s out. Three thousand feet. Should he begin slowing? The

  clouds are a death shroud. He is climbing for the last time, sick, clinging to a dream that is over. The cockpit lights gleam

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  in the glass above his head. Fifty pounds. He levels off and reduces power. He feels nothing. He is a ghost who is flying.

  Then in an instant that passes. He thinks: I have to do it now.

  I have to move my hands.

  He tries. They glide across his lap, independent, light. The left takes the stick. The right drops down and takes hold of the handle, round in his palm. He tightens his fingers and gathers himself. Ready. Pull!

  Nothing happens. His hand will not do it. It’s like trying to pull out a tooth. Mechanically, like a child, he starts counting.

  One . . . two . . . The next word jams. He begins again, resolute.

  One . . . Two . . . A pause. Three! He yanks up. The air

  explodes, icy, vast. The canopy is gone. A roaring surrounds him. He almost feels regret. Scraps of paper flash by. The maps inflate, rise past him and are torn away. The wind is tearing at his clothes. I’ve done it, he thinks! The relief is so great he could laugh.

  Suddenly he feels a heave. The ship hesitates for a moment

  and goes forward again. He can’t make out the instruments. It doesn’t matter. He could smash them with a hammer, break

  everything. All is profaned, all is going and at any moment, a terminal sounding, fierce and ultimate. The death dive. Get

  out, he thinks. He realizes he can’t tell what attitude it’s taking.

  He might be rolling over, blind, out of control. Get out!

  He sits there trying to think. He has hold of the forked

  ejection grip and is beginning to squeeze when there’s another

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  hesitation, mortal, abrupt. A surge as the engine catches again.

  The last of the fuel. He forces his head back against the heavy plate, tenses his legs bringing them close, and before he knows what has happened, with a shock, a hunching jolt, his fist holding the two leaves tight together, he is gone, through the darkness, into the black air.

  m

  There are wandering lights and soon the first pieces on the

  ground.

  “Here’s something,” Godchaux calls.

  He picks it up. Cadin’s flashlight plays on it. Impossible to say what it is. A metal shard. Perhaps part of a hydraulic cylin-der—it has a sticky sheen.

  A trail of debris begins. There is ammunition scattered on

  the ground, some of it linked together, the rest strewn like teeth. Then a large piece, one of the gun-bay panels. The drop tanks. Cadin stands, moving the beam back and forth over a

  large section of wing. Harlan kicks at something, stoops and picks it up gingerly.

  “Shine it this way, Colonel.”

  The first ominous chord.
It’s a shoe. Harlan holds it

  slightly away from himself and turns it so he can see inside.

  “It’s empty.”

  He places it alongside his own foot. It’s smaller.

  Twenty feet farther on there is something pale floating in a

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  small puddle. Godchaux reaches down. The water is deeper

  than it looks. He pulls up a map, soggy and dripping, a course drawn on it in grease pencil. There are other scraps of paper around, pages from the maintenance forms. At the edge of

  some woods they come to the end of it. The emblem of disas-

  ter, the engine, huge, with dirt packed into it, is at the base of a tree, the trunk marked with a great, white gouge.

  They stand, looking over the scene.

  “I don’t see the seat anywhere,” Dunning says.

  “No.”

  It may be elsewhere, part of an ejection.

  “We ought to work back.”

  “Yes,” the colonel agrees. “Spread out more.”

  Feet soaked, they walk through the rain, moving slowly.

  Ahead are two or three lights jerking from spot to spot on the ground. The sky is invisible, absolutely black. It’s like being in a mine or a deep, underground cave. They stumble over rocks.

  Then Harlan calls,

  “Over here!”

  The flashlight glides to something, hard to make out.

  “Here’s the cockpit,” Harlan says.

  The flashlight stays on it, then other lights as searches con-verge. The seat is lying on its side, ripped free. It’s empty.

  Cadin’s light moves to a section of the instrument panel and picks out the black gauges. Harlan is bending over something a few feet away.

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  “What is it?”

  “Canopy frame,” he says.

  They look at the seat again. The safety belt is unbuckled.

  Dunning tries to calculate what that might mean. The ejection handle hasn’t been raised. The seat wasn’t fired.

  “That’s where we found him,” somebody says.

  Cadin’s light comes up and holds there. It’s a corpsman,

  white uniform visible beneath a raincoat. He wears a pair of rubber boots.

  “Dead?” Cadin says.

  The corpsman nods. “Yes, sir.”

  The cold is making them shiver. Rain runs down their faces.

  Dunning has borrowed a flashlight and goes off by himself,

  poking his way from piece to piece, making small, slow circles at his feet with the light. He stops and then goes on, aimlessly it seems. He is gathering the catastrophe, wandering in it like a sleepwalker. The wreckage is total. Nothing can recombine it.

  m

  In formation with Minish one day, coming back from a mis-

  sion, I on his wing—without a word he pulled up and did an

  Immelmann, I as close as you can get, then another and

  another, then some loops and rolls, two or three away from

  me, all in hot silence, I had not budged a foot, the two of us together, not a word exchanged, like secret lovers in some

  apartment on a burning afternoon.

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  m

  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.

  m

  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.

  m

  I sat at a desk in Separations and typed out my letter; then, like the survivor of some wreck, I roamed, carrying it, through the corridors for more than an hour. Finally I saw a colonel I knew, Berg, coming out of the doorway. He worked in Person-nel, in charge of promotion boards. Needing the confidence of someone, I told him what I was about to do. He mentioned

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  [ James Salter]

  several other officers who had recently resigned. I found it of little comfort. Late in the afternoon, feeling almost ill, I handed in the letter. It was the most difficult act of my life.

  m

  Never another city, over it for the first time, in the lead, the field that you have never landed on far below, dropping down towards it, banking steeply one way, then the other, calling the tower, telling them who you are. Never another sunburned

  face in Tripoli looking up at you as you taxi to a stop, the expression asking, ship OK? A thumb raised, OK. And the

  dying whine, like a great sigh, of the engine shutting down, the needles on the gauges collapsing. It is over.

  IV.

  Years when I crossed the country alone, like some replica

  Philip Nolan, in thousand-mile legs. Taking off from Wright-

  Patterson in a tremendous rainstorm, unable to even see the

  end of the runway or the trees. Taking off at March and

  Forbes. Taking off at Tyndall, the earth like dust on a mirror, a long, unmoving line of smoke—from the paper mill, was it?—

  running south as far as the eye could see. Going out early in the morning, hands still numb, the magical silence of the runways, the whole pale scene. Heading for the Gulf under its

  blue haze, counties and parishes intent and unaware though I know their lives in vast detail, Brookley shining like a coin in the light off Moblie Bay.

  Sometimes, because of the light, in the visor there is the

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  moist dark of one’s own eye, bigger than a movie poster.

  Sometimes there is the sun directly ahead making it impossi-

  ble to read the instruments. The earth below is shadowed.

  There are mythic serpents of water, lakes, rivers smooth as

  marble. Empty sky, the rumbling aircraft, the radio overflowing with voices and sounds. Above the yellow horizon, near

  the vanishing sun, suddenly, a dot. Behind it a faint line, a contrail. By some forgotten reflex I am stunned awake, as in days past when we watched intently, when the body filled with

  excitement to see it: the enemy!

  m

  One night as I was calling for a letdown near St. Louis, the city jewel-like and clear, a voice in the darkness asked, “Flatfoot Red, is that you?” Flatfoot, our call sign from Bitburg, and Red, the color of the lead flight.

  “Yes,” I said. “Who’s that?”

  En route you seldom saw other fighters and almost never

  recognized a voice.

  “Ed White.”

  The pleasure, the thrill, in fact, the sort that comes from a lingering glance across a room, a knowing nod, or a pair of fingers touched briefly to the brow. We were able to exchange

  only a few words—How are you? Where are you headed? I

  looked for him in the blackness, the moving star that would be

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  his plane, but the heavens were littered with stars, the earth strewn with lights. He was on his way to somewhere, the

  heights, I was sure. I was going in to land.

  “See you,” he said.

  Who could know it would be otherwise and he was the one

  whom I would never see again? We had flown on the acro
batic

  team together, he on the right wing, Whitlow the left, Tracy in the slot.

  After his death his widow remarried. Not many years later,

  she herself died, apparently a suicide. The waters had closed over them both.

  m

  The then and now are intertwined, the dimming past and the

  present. Like an enduring disease there are the dreams. I am flying with someone, wide open, on the deck. The sky is

  cloudy, the flak terrifying. We are going at top speed, flashing past storage tanks, along a river on the way to the target. Suddenly ahead in the mist, steel bridges! Too late to pull up! We hit them! A great wave of heat sweeps over me. I have

  crossed—it is completely real—over into death.

  I wake in the darkness and lie there. The aftertaste is not

  bitter. I know, just as in dreams, I will die, like every living thing, many of them more noble and important, trees, lakes,

  great fish that have lived for a hundred years. We live in the

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  consciousness of a single self, but in nature there seems to be something else, the consciousness of many, of all, the herds and schools, the colonies and hives with myriads lacking in

  what we call ego but otherwise perfect, responsive only to

  instinct. Our own lives lack this harmony. We are each of us an eventual tragedy. Perhaps it is only that winter is coming on.

  a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

  We gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint from Cassada by James Salter, copyright © 2000 by James Salter, and The Hunters by James Salter, copyright © 1956, 1997, both published by Counterpoint Press; and from Burning the Days by James Salter, copyright © 1997 by James Salter. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

  Photographs are courtesy of the author with the following excep-tions: page 46 from The Yearbook of the Fourth Fighter Interceptor Wing, 1952; pages 55 and 61 from Fighters: the World’s Great Aces and their Planes, published by Thomasson-Grant, Inc., copyright © 1990 by Thomasson-Grant, Inc.; pages 72 and 90 courtesy of Robert F. Dorr.

  Document Outline

  Foreword

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  Acknowledgments