The Hunters (12 page)

Once they went in haze that made it like flying through yesterday, until finally, on top, it was as flat as a table at thirty thousand and the horizon was rimmed with a band of green mist. They wandered this plateau in long, straight legs, encountering nothing. Coming back, out over the water, the haze was thinner, and
slick patches of it far below looked like gilded mirrors as the sun hit and penetrated them.

There was a mission when they conned across seas of eternity, never catching sight of the ground except at the beginning and end. There was another when, halfway north, near Pyongyang, they heard in their earphones the high whine of what seemed to be gunlaying radar. The radio picked it up by some fluke. There was the thin tone of it, searching back and forth and then suddenly locking on and following them through the intervening clouds until they were out of range. It was a lone message from earth, and the sound of destiny, too, Cleve thought, tracking his path through even the quietest of flights. From all of these they came home at last, low on fuel and unsuccessful.

Billy Lee Hunter was depressed. He sat talking to Cleve one dark afternoon. It was raining outside. The sound of it on the panes of glass was like blowing sand. He didn't know, Hunter said. Everything was wrong. He supposed he was just not the type.

“Not what type?”

“Oh, you know,” Hunter explained. “The Doctor is the type.”

“Jesus Christ,” Cleve muttered.

“What?”

“Just Jesus Christ. Is that all that's bothering you?”

“It's this weather, too.”

“We'll get good weather. Spring will be here soon.”

“I suppose so. I wonder if it will make any difference, though. Sometimes I think I'll never see them, no matter what happens.”

“We'll see plenty of them when the weather breaks.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Sure.”

“It's all these stories about MIGs being shot down. They read them at home; my dad reads them and wonders why I haven't done anything here.”

“If your dad thinks it's so easy to do,” Cleve said, “tell him to come over and try it himself.”

“You don't understand. He's always been proud of me.”

“Well, you'll make him proud. Stop whining about it.” Cleve was sorry the moment he had said it.

“Listen here”—the Texas honor had been impinged upon—“I don't whine. No, sir.”

“Sorry. I didn't mean that. I know you're not whining.”

There was a recuperative silence.

“Just stick with it,” Cleve continued. “Things will work out. For all of us. You don't think I like it any better than you do?”

“No. I guess not. I just get discouraged.”

“Don't worry, Billy. You'll get your chance.”

“I wish I knew that.”

“You will.”

“I'll probably muff it anyway when it comes.”

“No, you won't. You're the least likely to muff it of anybody in the flight.”

Hunter looked at him with surprise.

“I mean it, Billy.”

He was a good man, childish and courageous. He reminded Cleve of prep school, when everything had been in moral primaries, and life had seemed as clear as a biography. Hunter's world had no vague pastels. It was bounded sturdily by boyhood, grand-fatherhood, the Bible, and the Cotton Bowl game. And yet Cleve could not do anything but admire an honest man, no matter how simple. Hunter was a good pilot, too. He had come along quickly.
He would be leading elements before long and flights before he was finished. He was considerably better than Pettibone, who still did not seem able to extend himself beyond merely staying in formation; and he was certainly as good, though not as aggressive, as Pell. Hunter was reliable. That was the quality for a wingman. In the end he would accomplish more than Pell. Cleve would see to that. It was a responsibility almost, and he wanted to fulfill it. He vowed to.

“We'll each get one before long,” Cleve told him.

“I wish I could count on that. I surely do.”

“You can. We'll get them.”

Cleve sat thinking about it, smoking a cigarette and watching the smoke fall to the ceiling in a blue, distending spire. He stared outside at the raining sky. It could not last much longer. The weather had been miserable for over a week. It would have to improve soon.

In vain, though, they waited. They watched the sky through dismal days. It was never blue. It was like a layer of grief. Almost unnoticed, because it brought no change, the spring started like this. The weather remained sullen. The rain fell drearily from swollen skies. It seemed as everlasting as surf. It came first hard, then soft, like layers of gravel. The slate roofs gleamed beneath it. Dirty streams of water coursed the roads, and the floors of every building were muddy from clodded shoes. Frogs appeared, legions of them. From the cold exile of winter, they returned with a vengeance. The croaking, especially at night, filled the air. In the evenings the club was loud with insane, continuous partying. It was on such a night that Cleve and DeLeo decided to go to Japan for a few days of leave. The idea was like finding a coin in the mud. Nothing was happening anyway, and the weather showed
no sign of breaking. It was a perfect time to get away. Cleve was enthusiastic.

Daughters agreed at first to go along, but then in the morning he changed his mind and decided against it. He was too close to finishing, he said. He had more than eighty missions, and he wanted to stay and fly the rest as quickly as he could, even if he only got in one or two during the time he might have been away. A delirium of home, not so far off now, had seized him. He had written to his wife that he hoped to be back before the summer started. The fever was on him, the unbearable longing for home and love that came when the end was near. It was irresistible. At the last he would be moving toward it, heedless of everything else, like a man making his way to an exit in a fire.

Cleve was elated, however. He felt as if a great holiday were at hand. The night before their departure for Japan, he convinced DeLeo that they ought to drive into Seoul for a steak dinner.

“To condition ourselves,” he explained.

Daughters went with them, and they left just after dark. It was the first time Cleve had traveled the road into Seoul since the day he had arrived. Though rougher and more uneven than he remembered, it gave him a strange sense of freedom to be going back over it, away from duty and its demands. Seoul was shattered. There was no traffic on the damp streets. A few weak yellowed lights shone from windows. It seemed a ghost city, with miles of empty trolley tracks threading the gutted shells of buildings stripped of all glass and wood. The wide avenues were like a sour-smelling trip through antiquity.

The bar at the Fifth Air Force club had been some sort of shrine. On three sides were double doors adjoining each other, which served instead of walls, but these were opened only in
warm weather. The wood was carved ornately and gilded. Mirrors multiplied the effect. It was like sitting in a huge jewel box, and there was a large crowd in a variety of uniforms. They ordered champagne. Outside, the rain began to fall.

“Listen to that.”

It sounded like a sheet of water waving before the wind. The gusts were as clear as if they could be seen.

“Come to Japan, Jim,” Cleve said. “The weather won't be any good here.”

“Pour me some more champagne.”

“I'll pour you all you want. How would you like a bath in champagne in Tokyo?”

“It's not high on my list. Sounds more like Bert.”

“Come on with us in the morning. We'll have a time.”

“The weather may break. I only have nineteen missions to go. I want to finish up. Besides, I'm married.”

“Not in Tokyo.”

“I can't go, Cleve.”

“Have some more champagne.”

They drank a second bottle. The rain had begun to abate. There was only the thin sound of it, like a hiss, and through that the musical, heavy drops falling from the roof. At the next table someone was complaining about how tough the briefing for General Breck had been that day. The general had been in an ugly mood. He had not even bothered to light his cigar.

“Cleve!”

It was Abbott, calling as he edged through the tables toward them. He was followed by another major. They came up to the table.

“How have you been?” he asked, smiling.

“Fine. What about you?”

“This is purgatory,” Abbott said. “I stoke fires with paper all day long.”

He introduced the major who stood beside him.

“This is Ben Gross. He works with me in this pest hole.” They sat down. “Well, you got yourself a MIG, Cleve, didn't you?” Abbott said.

It was nice to hear somebody saying that. Cleve nodded.

“That's the hardest one, that first one,” Abbott continued.

“Can you guarantee that?”

“That's what they say. How did it happen?”

“Oh . . .” Cleve began.

How did it happen? Abbott had asked. What did it matter to him now, but he had to know. His heart was still far away from here, wedged in the cockpit, waiting to go north again. His heart was beating like a fish in a net, miles up in the thin air over Sinuiju. Abbott made no pretense of being at home in these surroundings. He sat awkwardly in his chair, as if perched, like a caged wild bird. His friend, the other major, he seemed to have forgotten in a moment. He was with old comrades now. Everybody else was a stranger. Everything else fell away like cloth before fire.

“How did it happen, Cleve?”

“He just got in my way.”

“No, really.”

He had to know. It was news from what had been home, and he was famished for it, like an exile. He was a man lost, afloat on foreign tides. He could never return, nor would he find peace where he was. There was nothing he could do but exist on memories and seize upon an old friend passing, with the grip of a dying man.

It was painful to see. Cleve felt it in his stomach like an iron egg. It was like watching a man hanged. He could feel the rope about his own neck, his own hands lashed, his knees gone. It could be happening to him too easily, to anybody who loved too fiercely or was true to what he believed. He could see himself in Abbott's place, sitting across the table, devouring the crumbs he was lucky enough to find. He did not want to look, but the compunction was as strong as that of taking a last glance at the wax face of a friend lying in state. Perhaps that was why they all hated Abbott, Cleve thought, because they saw themselves.

He could not get away from it, even for an hour. There was a way to live and a way to die. He was supposed to show them that. It was what you had to demonstrate to be a leader. At moments like this he was certain that he was miscast. He did not have enough to give. He did not love men enough.

If he did have a failing, it was excessive lucidity, which can be the same as blindness. He should have been aware. DeLeo was proud, but not beyond yielding. He would have crawled for Cleve. Daughters was afraid, but he would have concealed it. The leader does not know he is their saint. He does not hear what they say about him. He feels his loneliness and does not recognize its meaning. He looks forward and does not see them following. He falls and does not know they have triumphed.

“. . . heavily outnumbered by enemy fighters,” Daughters was saying, improvising a citation for Cleve's story, “through curtains of flak, and the most adverse weather conditions, in the highest traditions of the United States Air Force.”

“All pilots will report to wing headquarters,” DeLeo added, “to receive medals. If you have one, draw one. If you have two, turn one in.”

They had another bottle of champagne after the majors left. By the time they were ready to eat, it was too late. The kitchen had closed. It was a fine evening despite that. They drove home after midnight, through a dark, exhausted city and along empty roads, singing most of the way. It had stopped raining. The night was cool and mild. The moon shone through thin clouds that looked like a layer of wet newspaper.

“Tokyo tonight,” DeLeo grinned.

“Tomorrow night, you mean.”

“This is tomorrow.”

It was drizzling again in the morning when they flew out on a transport. The ride was instruments all the way, nothing but sound and no movement, as traveling through sheer space in the register of absolute zero must be. Finally, they let down and landed at Tsuiki in southern Japan, just before noon. From there they took the train north.

It was an old car with worn plush upholstery on seats that released sudden puffs of dust when disturbed. Along the center of the ceiling ran a line of etched, opaque globes that cupped the bulbs; and all the fittings were yellow brass. Cleve settled back to watch through the water-rippled window the first hour or so of countryside. It was turning green beneath the wet, warming skies. The orange trees were dotted with fruit, cabbages were up, and the tea bushes gleaming. Only the rice stubble in the quilted, reflecting fields still appeared dormant. In the stations, vendors displayed slopes of candy, oranges, beer, and cigarettes on their stands.

He sat enjoying the gentle swaying of the car and a symphony of nostalgic sounds: the groaning of the axles, the subdued shriek of metal bindings, the iron clatter of the vestibules. They were traveling. They were fleeing, leaving the war behind. He had forgotten what it felt like to be going somewhere by train. The satisfaction
was as substantial as a liquid within him. He listened to the wheels pounding and watched the occasional flurries of clotted smoke that came back from the engine. He felt part of the country itself. There seemed nothing strange here, rather it was all very familiar and comfortable to him.