The Hunters (21 page)

The inaccuracies were greater at the club, and when Pettibone came in, he was loudly greeted now.

“Lover!” they called out when they saw him. “Stud!”

Colonel Moncavage stood up and promised he would get the Purple Heart for Pettibone, if proof of injury were shown at the bar. There was a roar of approval and cheers for Pettibone.

“Lay it out there,” somebody urged.

“Show him the stitches.”

Pettibone looked at the floor, flushed and speechless. He yearned for the presence of mind to say something cutting.

“Weren't any stitches. Pell exaggerates everything,” he murmured.

“You want the Purple Heart?” the colonel said. “Come on.”

The more Cleve saw of it, the more withdrawn he became. Daily, hourly, building up after every mission, during the talks with DeLeo, the evenings in the club, the nights in bed, running through the mind like a stream through the earth, cutting a path for itself, increasing in intensity, growing, dominating everything he did on the major plane of life, he hated Pell. He hated him in a way that allowed no other emotion. It seemed he was born to, and that he had done it from the earliest days of his life, before he ever knew him, before he even existed. Of all the absolutes, Pell was the archetype, confronting him with the unreality and diabolical force of a medieval play, the deathlike, grinning angel risen to claim the very souls of men. When he dwelt upon that, Cleve felt the cool touch of fear. There was no way out. He knew that if Pell were to win, he himself could not survive.

He lived with uneasiness. In the afternoons it had become hot enough to take a cot outside and lie in the sunshine. The waves of heat rolled up and over, as he lay there fevered and stripped to shorts. The traffic pattern was almost directly above him. With closed eyes, the rushing sound of the ships seemed to swell quickly and then start to fade before they were even overhead. It was a trick of the wind.

The early mornings were bad. He disliked the first-light missions because of it. He was weakest then, in the mornings, naked, with the film of total sleep still coating his eyes and mouth. He
was his true age when he looked into the mirror to shave, and he doubted his own ability.

At night, though, especially if there had been any losses, it was worse. There was the endless fight against imagination. He could not help wondering, weighing chances. He felt beyond all men and places. The States were far away, impossible even to think of. Only to be in Tokyo once more, only that, down the wide avenues in the warm evening, beside the river, through the park. There was no pleasure in the world to equal that, as it passed through his mind like bursts of music. The rich, drunken darkness, he thought, and moving lazily through it in a lurching cab to be again on the clean mat floors at Miyoshi's, to know the deference, the deep, satisfying night.

One afternoon, following a mission, Imil spoke to him for the first time. It was after debriefing. The room was almost empty.

“I've been wanting to talk to you.”

Cleve felt the awkwardness, and within himself an excitement that he was instantly ashamed of.

“Let's walk outside,” the colonel suggested.

They stood in the sunshine, leaning against the sandbag walls that surrounded the building.

“I've got a lousy temper, Cleve,” the colonel said. “I say things I'm sorry for later. I mean them at the time maybe, or I think I do, but then I'm sorry for them.”

Cleve said nothing. The colonel looked down at the ground.

“But I'm not a small man. At least there's nobody around here that can call me that.” He ventured a smile.

A pair of airmen walked by and saluted. Imil saw them but did not move to return it.

“I made a mistake,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“I'd like you to forget it. If you want to know, I'd probably have done the same thing you did. Acted the same way. But it's all over with now, and I admit I was wrong.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is that all?” Imil asked.

“I say things I'm sorry for, too,” Cleve replied after a moment.

Imil shrugged to indicate he understood. “Maybe this will be one,” Cleve continued. “Colonel, it's not a matter for apologies.”

Imil flushed.

“Well, goddamn you,” he said angrily. “All right. If that's what you want.”

He walked away without saying anything further. Even if Cleve had not realized then how grievous was a wounded, mighty pride, the days that followed made it clear. Imil never approached him again in any way.

DeLeo had only three more missions left to make his hundred, and he was anxious to finish. He would not be happy when he was home, and he knew it; but it did not deter him. Toward the end they all got that way. With the strange, unreasoning quality that puts aside everything to satisfy some fleeting desire, they became transfixed with the thought of finishing and moved to do so as those dying of thirst follow mirages.

“Three trips,” DeLeo said. “Three more. Then to hell with it.”

“Twenty-five for me,” Cleve counted. They were marked on the wall. They seemed like days left to live.

“I'll send you a postcard to keep your morale up.”

“Fine.”

“Hope you're having a good time. Get one for me. Your admirer, Albert E. DeLeo.”

“You'll wish you were back.”

“Oh, no. Not even when I'm drunk. It's all yours. I've had this war. Ninety-seven missions and still looking for a damaged. What's the use?”

“You wouldn't be the first who got hot on the last two or three.”

“Why kid myself? I'm not having that kind of luck. Neither are you.”

This luck or that. They believed in it like gamblers, right from Desmond at the start on those first winter days.

“It isn't luck,” Cleve said.

“No? I'd hate to tell you who I heard that from last. Face it, Cleve. You get the breaks or you don't.”

“Don't blame the breaks.”

“Thanks. You've a lot to be proud of, too.”

“I haven't quit,” Cleve said.

“It wouldn't make much difference, believe me. It's too late.”

“You don't know that.”

“Maybe not,” DeLeo said. “Maybe I'm stupid. All I know is that I thought once I'd be able to boast: I was in that flight; I was with him; we were together.”

There was a long silence, midnight deep.

“It hasn't turned out that way, has it?”

“Oh, Christ. Let's not talk about it. All I want is to be on that schedule tomorrow.”

On a day with only a few thin stories of clouds high up, like the froth on a great swell, DeLeo went on his final mission. The MIGs came up. When they were announced in the area, he felt as nervous as he had been in his first fight; but neither he nor anybody else saw them; and finally, a little earlier than was necessary, he turned the flight and headed back toward the south. He sat hunched in the cockpit, thinking, his vigilance gone. Although he continued to scan the sky occasionally, he did it with unseeing eyes. He relied on Pettibone's and spent most of the time looking at the ground and out over the enameled surface of the sea.

It was like leaving an old love. There was so much more than he could ever remember. He stared down at the hand-sized earth that had drifted by beneath him so slowly every time before. Now he seemed to be crossing it with great speed, as if running with the current of time. Ribbons of ocher road, highlands and villages were all floating swiftly out of sight under the wing. He felt an overwhelming, captive sadness. It was his farewell. He twisted around in the seat to look behind, to see in the unclear corner of his vision just once more the river, the silent, muddy Yalu. It was already far behind and dropping back more every minute, a languid trace of reflection among the hills and flatlands. He had never heard of it
before he had come, and the closest he had been to it was a distance to be measured in vertical miles, but he felt that he knew it as well as a familiar street—its mud flats and wide mouth, its bridges, cities, bare banks, islands, and the lonely way it came from the interior. It seemed unbelievable that he would never see it again.

Almost from the moment that he parked his ship after landing, he began to experience a feeling of increasing detachment from the whole thing, of no longer being a participant or in any way involved in the war. It took an effort to draw himself back into it. He had no victories, only a hundred missions and a few Air Medals that had been awarded to him with all the objective deliberation of birthday presents. Now it was over. He wanted to be away as quickly as possible, to start forgetting.

There was a wait for orders that would send him home, however. They did not come immediately, and a week of complete idleness for him began. He tried to indulge in it. He stayed up and drank until the club closed at night, singing and telling stories. In the mornings, he slept late and spent the rest of the day out in the sun getting brown. Somehow, there was little pleasure in it. He was living by the wrong clock. Regularly, through the day, the doors would slam, the men wander out, and the trucks gun down to briefing. It was no privilege to lie in the warm sun and see them go, only a reminder of his passing as a comrade. Sometimes, he went to the ridge that ran behind the barracks and watched the fierce, hunting groups devour the runway and vanish to the north.

On the day of his departure, he stood with Cleve on the top of the hill and looked out across the field. His bags were gathered nearby, and they waited for the jeep that was to take him to the
airport in Seoul. They would be able to see it coming for a full mile, down the straight run of road from the operations buildings, around the curve, and up the hill, throwing dust behind it all the way. It was a calm, sunny afternoon. A thin surf of heat waves washed across the runway, collapsing it before their eyes.

Speech seemed completely inadequate to Cleve. It transmitted nothing of time gone and ways dividing. He wanted to put his arm around DeLeo's shoulder.

“There seems to be a lot I haven't had a chance to say, Bert.”

“That's right. All of a sudden.”

“I think you know most of it, though.”

DeLeo did not reply. He brushed a fly from his cheek.

“Remember that day when I first came into the flight? You were all sitting around the table?”

“Sure.”

“You called yourself a wop.”

DeLeo nodded abstractly.

“You've made it into one of the finest words I know.”

“I wish you were going with me, Cleve.”

“I wish you weren't leaving. Somehow I'm still not prepared for that.”

“We'd spend a few days in Tokyo.”

“Like the old times, eh?” He thought of it, everything passing swiftly and inconsecutively through his mind. On a morning long ago they had left to go there. “Well, I'll get to Tokyo. A little behind you this time.”

“What do you have, twenty-one left?”

“Yes.”

“That's not many.”

“No. Enough maybe, but not many.”

“It won't be long,” DeLeo said.

The jeep was coming down the road. They both saw it, far off, and stood watching it approach. After a while they could hear the slamming of its axles on the rough surface and then the ripple of the engine. Cleve helped load the baggage in the rear seat. DeLeo sat down beside the driver. He reached out, and they shook hands with each other. It was the first time, Cleve felt certain, that they had ever done it.

“Take care of yourself, Cleve.”

“You, too.”

Their hands were still clasped, moving reflexively up and down.

“And good luck.” The jeep began to move.

“So long,” Cleve said.

DeLeo gave a little half-salute.

“Sayonara,
Cleve.”

He watched the jeep go up the road, make a quick turn, and start back down the hill, round the curve at the bottom, and travel along the road that paralleled the runway, a trail of thin, ascending dust behind it. Then it passed beyond the warehouses and out of sight. All along the road the soft film of dust still hung in the air. He turned and walked toward the barracks.

Being in a squadron was a digest of life. You were a child when you joined. There was endless opportunity, and everything was new. Gradually, almost unknowingly, the days of painful learning and delight were over; you achieved maturity; and then suddenly you were old, with new faces and relationships that were difficult to recognize rising up quickly all around you, until you found yourself existing practically unwelcome in the midst of them,
with all the men you had known and lived with gone and the war little more than unsharable memories of things that had taken place long ago. It was like the last year of college, and the final examinations just over. Everybody was rushing to leave, many of them friends. Most of them you would never see again. Desmond was gone, Robey, Daughters, and DeLeo. The rooms were being continually filled with strangers, more of them every week. They knew nothing of the past and its holiness. For them, the war began the day of their arrival, and it would be a long time before they were tired of it and going home themselves, those that finished. Cleve searched, but he could not find himself among them. They were all so inexperienced and confident.

Two of them, replacements just assigned to his flight, came up to him in operations the next day and introduced themselves. They were like grandchildren, generations away from him.

“Kiser, sir,” the first one said.

“Schramm.”

“How much jet time do you have?” Cleve asked.