Gods of Tin Read online

somewhere he would shake the control stick from side to side, banging the student’s knees—the front and rear sticks were

  connected—to get his attention. He would then remove the

  pin holding the rear stick in place and, with the student twist-ing his neck to see what was happening, wave it in the air and toss it over the side, pointing at the student with the gesture You, you’ve got it, and pointing down. It had always worked. One day for still another lagging student he rattled the stick fiercely, flourished it, and tossed it away. The student nodded numbly, bent down, unfastened his own stick, and ignoring the instructor’s cries, threw it away also. He watched as the frightened instructor bailed out and then, fame assured, reached down for the spare stick he had secretly brought along, flew back to the

  12

  g o d s o f t i n

  field, and landed.

  m

  To solve the complexities of the traffic pattern, I had made, for quick reference, a small card with a diagram of each of the possible patterns on it. Entry was always at forty-five degrees to a downwind leg, but to work it all out backwards and head straight for the proper point was confusing, and nothing

  seemed to annoy York as much as starting to turn the wrong

  way. The worst was when the wind changed while you were

  away from the field; the pattern had shifted, and everything you had tried to remember was useless.

  A week passed thus. We fly to an auxiliary field, a large

  meadow five or ten minutes away. There is bare earth near the borders where planes have repeatedly touched down.

  “Let’s try some landings,” he says. Nervously I go over in

  my mind what to do, what not. “Make three good ones and I’ll get out.”

  We come in for the first. “Hold that airspeed,” he directs.

  “That’s good. Now come back on the power. Start rounding

  out.”

  Somehow it works. Hardly a bump as the wheels touch.

  “Good.” I push the throttle forward in a smooth motion and

  we are off again.

  The second landing is the same. I am not certain what I

  t h e f ly i n g y e a r s

  13

  have done but whatever it is, I try to repeat it for the third.

  Almost confidently I turn onto final once more. “You’re doing fine,” he says. I watch the airspeed as we descend. The grass field is approaching, the decisive third.

  “Make this a full stop,” he instructs. I ease back the throttle. The airspeed begins to drop. “Keep the nose down,” he

  suddenly warns. “Nose down! Watch your airspeed!” I feel a

  hand on the stick. The plane is beginning to tremble.

  Untouched by me the throttle leaps forward, but through it

  somehow we are falling, unsupported by the roar. With a huge jolt we hit the ground, bounce, and come down again. He

  utters a single contemptuous word. When we have slowed, he

  says, “Taxi over there, to the left.” I follow his instructions. We come to a stop.

  “That was terrible. You rounded out twenty feet in the air.

  As far as I can make out, you’re going to kill us both.” I see him rising up. He climbs out of the cockpit and stands on the wing. “You take her up,” he says.

  This consent, the words of which I could not even imag-

  ine. Alone in the plane, I do what we had done each time, taxi to the end of the bare spot, turn, and almost mechanically

  advance the throttle. I felt at that moment—I will remember

  always—the thrill of the inachievable. Reciting to myself, exu-berant, immortal, I felt the plane leave the ground and cross the hayfields and farms, making a noise like a tremendous,

  14

  g o d s o f t i n

  bumbling fly. I was far out, beyond the reef, nervous but

  unfrightened, knowing nothing, certain of all, cloth helmet, childish face, sleeve wind-maddened as I held an ecstatic arm out in the slipstream, the exaltation, the godliness, at last!

  m

  At night in the white wooden barracks not far from the flight line we talked of flying, in the clamor of the student mess, and on the battered busses swaying into town. We walked the

  streets in aimless groups, past lawyers’ offices with names

  painted in gold on the windows. There were tracks through

  the center of Pine Bluff along which freight trains moved with provincial slowness. There was the gold-domed courthouse

  and the bulky Pines Hotel, even then middle-aged with a por-

  tico entrance, balconies, and mysterious rooms. Of the silent residential neighborhoods with large clapboard houses or

  lesser ones set on the bare ground, we know nothing. From the desolate life of the town on many Sundays we returned willingly to the field.

  m

  We flew less often with the instructor. It was late spring, the sky fresh and filled with fair-weather clouds—weather, which could mean so much, was already a preoccupation. Late in the day the clouds would become dense and towering, their edges struck

  t h e f ly i n g y e a r s

  15

  with light; epic clouds, the last of the sun streaming through.

  One afternoon, alone, I caught sight in their tops, far above, of a B-24 moving along like a great liner. Dazzled by its distance and height I turned like a dinghy to follow until it was gone.

  m

  At noon they were talking about someone’s extraordinary

  Pine Bluff, spring 1944

  16

  g o d s o f t i n

  grade, one of the regular air cadets with whom we were training. His score had been six. It seemed unbelievable. He was

  pointed out—suddenly everyone knew who he was—the one

  with the dark hair. I could see him in the food line, distinct from the others, slim, at ease. He had flown before, it turned out. He already had a pilot’s license and sixty hours in a Cub.

  The hurdles in primary were soloing and then two check

  rides with an Air Force pilot given, I believe, after forty and sixty hours of flying time. Don’t forget to salute before and after the flight, they said, and be sure you can explain the maintenance form. In the air there would be brief commands

  to do this or that maneuver and at some inconvenient

  moment the throttle would be pulled back with the announce-

  ment, “Forced landing.”

  The shakiest students confessed their fears and often did

  worse because of them, but some failures were unforeseeable, even unimaginable, like that of the dark-haired angel who had scored the six. One day he disappeared. He had somehow

  failed his forty-hour check and was gone. It made you realize how flimsy your position was and how unforgiving the

  machinery behind it all. The least promising of us, though we did not know it then, those with the least élan, would go to bombers and attack aircraft, and the others to fighters. That was a year off. Meanwhile, one by one they were dropping

  away, sometimes the leaders.

  t h e f ly i n g y e a r s

  17

  m

  In early 1945, the final battles in both Europe and the Pacific were being fought. Salter’s class was finishing flight training and was to graduate at the beginning of June.

  m

  We were gone all spring and summer and returned much

  changed. We marched less perfectly, dressed with less care. West Point, its officer’s sashes and cock feathers fluttering from the shakos, its stewardship, somehow passed over to those who had stayed.

  Among the firsts: first solo, first breath of outside air, in here belongs first love affair . . .

  There was, that year, a then-irresistible novel called Shore Leave with a pair of Navy wings on its blue jacket, and written in a confident style. It became, at my insistence, our text. The name of its nihilist hero, gaunt and faithless, was Crewso
n. He had flown at Midway and in other battles. The blood baths.

  Would he remember as an old man, the author, Frederic Wake-

  man, wrote, rising at three in the morning on the third of June?

  The briefing at four and soon afterwards reports of enemy aircraft inbound. And then on the dense rippled sea, the Kaga, steaming upwind at a brisk thirty knots, the coming-out-of-the-ether feeling when he split his flaps and made an eighty-degree dive for the red circle on her

  18

  g o d s o f t i n

  flight deck . . . the first hit . . . — all this was indelible. Those bombs going home freed him forever from the trivial and mundane.

  His society girlfriend was only one of the women who trotted after him like colts.

  We shared this book as a Bible might be shared by a devout

  couple. It was a hymn to the illicit. Emboldened by it we acted as though we were part of the war. On the inside cover she

  inscribed it to me, the Crewson of her past. There were many things in it that she could have written herself, she continued, and then, as if granting to a beloved child possession of a

  favorite plaything, Keep this book with you, my dearest. If things had turned out differently, it managed to say, if we had, in the way of all failed lovers, only met years sooner or later . . .

  m

  At Stewart Field the final spring, nearly pilots, we had the last segment of training. This was near Newburgh, about forty

  minutes from West Point. We wore flying suits most of the

  day and lived in long, open-bay barracks. That photograph of oneself, nonexistent, that no one ever sees, in my case was

  taken in the morning by the doorway of what must be the day-

  room and I am drinking a Coke from an icy, greenish bottle, a ritual prelude to all the breakfastless mornings of flying that were to come. During all the training there had been few fatal-ities. We were that good. At least I knew I was.

  t h e f ly i n g y e a r s

  19

  On a May evening after supper we took off, one by one, on

  a navigation flight. It was still daylight and the planes, as they departed were soon lost in their solitude. On the maps the

  course was drawn, miles marked off in ticks of ten. The route lay to the west, over the wedged-up Allegheny ridges to Port Jervis and Scranton, then down to Reading, and the last long leg of the triangle back home. It was all mechanical with one exception: the winds aloft had been incorrectly forecast.

  Unknown to us, they were from a different direction and

  stronger. Alone and confident we headed west.

  The air at altitude has a different smell, metallic and

  faintly tinged with gasoline or exhaust. The ground floats by with tidal slowness, the roads desolate, the rivers unmoving. It is exactly like the map, with certain insignificant differences which one ponders over but leaves unresolved.

  The sun has turned red and sunk lower. The airspeed reads

  one-sixty. The fifteen or twenty airplanes, invisible to one another, are in a long, irregular string. Behind, the sky has become a deeper shade. The color of the earth was muted and

  the towns seemed empty shadows. There was no one to see or

  talk to. The wind, unsuspected, was shifting us slowly, like sand.

  On my mind apart from navigation were, I suppose, New

  York nights, the lure of the city, various achievements that a year or two before I had only dreamed of. The first dim star

  20

  g o d s o f t i n

  appeared and then, somewhat to the left of where it should be, the drab scrawl of Scranton.

  Flying, like most things of consequence, is method.

  Though I did not know it then, I was behaving improperly.

  There were light-lines between cities in those days, like lights on an unseen highway but much farther apart. By reading their flashed codes you could tell where you were, but I was not

  bothering with that. I turned south towards Reading. The sky was dark now. Far below, the earth was cooling, giving up the heat of the day. A mist had begun to form. In it the light-lines would fade away and also, almost shyly, the towns. I flew on.

  It is a different world at night. The instruments become

  harder to read, details disappear from the map. After a while I tuned to the Reading frequency and managed to pick up its

  signal. I had no radio compass but there was a way of deter-

  mining, by flying a certain sequence of headings, where in a surrounding quadrant you were. Then if the signal slowly

  increased in strength you were inbound towards the station. If not, and you had to turn up the volume to continue hearing it, you were going away. It was primitive but it worked.

  When the time came I waited to see if I had passed or was

  still approaching Reading. The minutes went by. At first I

  couldn’t detect a change but then the signal seemed to grow

  weaker. I turned north and flew, watching the clock. Some-

  thing was wrong, something serious: the signal didn’t change. I

  t h e f ly i n g y e a r s

  21

  was lost, not only literally but in relation to reality. Meanwhile the wind, unseen, fateful, was forcing me farther north.

  Among the stars, one was moving. It was the lights of

  another plane, perhaps one from the squadron. In any case,

  wherever it was headed there would be a field. I pushed up the throttle. As I drew closer, on an angle, I began to make out what it was, an airliner, a DC-3. It might be going to St. Louis or Chicago. I had already been flying for what seemed like

  hours and had begun, weakhearted, a repeated checking of

  fuel. The gauges were on the floor, one on each side of the

  seat. I tried not to think of them but they were like a wound; I could not keep myself from glancing down.

  Slowly the airliner and its lights became more distant. I

  couldn’t keep up with it. I turned northeast, the general direction of home. I had been scribbling illegibly on the page of memory, which way I had gone and for how long. I now had

  no idea where I was. The occasional lights on the ground of

  unknown towns, lights blurred and yellowish, meant nothing.

  Allentown, which should have been somewhere, never

  appeared. There was a terrible temptation to abandon every-

  thing, to give up, as with a hopeless puzzle. I was reciting

  “Invictus” to myself, I am the master of my fate . . . It availed nothing. I had the greatest difficulty not praying and finally I did, flying in the noisy darkness, desperate for the sight of a city or anything that would give me my position.

  22

  g o d s o f t i n

  In the map case of the airplane was a booklet, What to Do If Lost, and suddenly remembering, I got it out and with my flashlight began to read. There was a list of half a dozen steps to take in order. My eye skidded down it. The first ones I had already tried. Others, like tuning in any radio range and ori-enting yourself on it, I had given up on, something was wrong with that, it wasn’t working. I managed to get the signal from Stewart Field but didn’t take up the prescribed heading. I

  could tell from its faintness—it was indistinct in a thicket of other sounds—that I was far away, and I had lost faith in the procedure. The final advice seemed more practical. If you

  think you are to the west of Stewart, it said, head east until you come to the Hudson River and then fly north or south; you

  will eventually come to New York or Albany.

  It was past eleven, the sky dense with stars, the earth a

  void. I had turned east. The dimly lit fuel gauges read twenty-five gallons or so in each wing. The idea slowly growing, of opening the canopy and struggling into the wind, over the side into blackness, tumbling, parachuting down, was not as

  unthinkable as that of giving the airplane itse
lf up to destruction. I would be washed out, I knew. The anguish was unbear-

  able. I had been flying east for ten minutes but it seemed

  hours. Occasionally I made out the paltry lights of some small town or group of houses, barely distinguishable, but otherwise nothing. The cities had vanished, sunken to darkness. I looked

  t h e f ly i n g y e a r s

  23

  down again. Twenty gallons.

  Suddenly off to the left there was a glimmer that became—I

  was just able to make it out—a faint string of lights and then slowly, magically, two parallel lines. It was the bridge at Pough-keepsie. Dazed with relief I tried to pick out its dark lines and those of the river, turning to keep it in sight, going lower and lower. Then, in the way that all things certain had changed that night, the bridge changed too. At about a thousand feet above them, stricken, I saw I was looking at the streetlights of some town.

  The gauges read fifteen gallons. One thing that should

  never be done—it had been repeated to us often—was to

  attempt a forced landing at night. But I had no choice. I began to circle, able in the mist to see clearly only what was just beneath. The town was at the edge of some hills; I banked

  away from them in the blackness. If I went too far from the

  brightly lit, abandoned main street, I lost my bearings. Dropping even lower I saw dark roofs everywhere and amid them,

  unexpectedly, a blank area like a lake or small park. I had

  passed it quickly, turned, and lost it. Finally, lower still, I saw it again. It was not big but there was nothing else. I ducked my head for a moment to look down—the number beneath each

  index line was wavering slightly: ten gallons, perhaps twelve.

  The rule for any strange field was to first fly across at minimum altitude to examine the surface. I was not even sure it

  24

  g o d s o f t i n

  was a field; it might be water or a patch of woods. If a park, it might have buildings or fences. I turned onto a downwind leg or what I judged to be one, then a base leg, letting down over swiftly enlarging roofs. I had the canopy open to cut

  reflection, the ghostly duplication of instruments, the red

  warning lights. I stared ahead through the wind and noise. I was at a hundred feet or so, flaps down, still descending.

  In front, coming fast, was my field. In a panel near my knee were the landing light switches with balled tips to make them identifiable by feel. I reached for them blindly. The instant they came on I knew I’d made a mistake. They blazed like