Cassada (9 page)

“I don't see too many yellow hits here,” Dunning said, pursing his mouth speculatively. “What seemed to be the trouble, bad sight?”

“No, sir,” Cassada said. “The sight was good.”

Dunning waited.

“Major, I don't understand it,” Cassada admitted.

Dunning made a slight sound of acknowledgement.

“Oh, let's face it,” Harlan muttered. “You're not about to hit anything.”

Cassada looked at him, unable to speak. The words were jammed in his throat.

“What did you get?” he said. His cheekbones were burning.

“I don't know,” Harlan shrugged. “Forty-eight percent. Something like that.”

Cassada stood there, humiliation coloring his fairness.

“Good enough for you?” Harlan said. He was dropping the pebbles from one hand to the other.

“I'll beat it,” Cassada said.

Dunning was watching with a cool, remote smile.

“You will, eh?” Harlan said.

“Yes, I'll beat it.”

“You'll be lucky if you even qualify.”

Cassada's hands were trembling. He had put them in his pockets.

“I'll beat any score you make,” he said.

“Just put up your money.”

Cassada stood there. He tried to think for a moment of what he was doing. Harlan was pouring the pebbles from hand to hand. That was the only sound. The vehicles passing, the aircraft engines being started, all of it seemed far off.

“Well?”

“All right,” Isbell broke in. He was about to say, that's enough, but Dunning lifted a hand in restraint.

“Look . . .” Isbell nevertheless began.

“Captain Isbell,” Dunning warned.

“I'll bet,” Cassada said. “How much?”

“Just whatever you want,” Harlan said.

“Fifty dollars.”

Isbell was shaking his head in disgust.

“Hell. Is that all?” Harlan said.

“I'll bet whatever you want to bet. A month's pay. Is that good?”

“Yours or mine?”

“I don't care. Yours,” Cassada said.

Harlan sniffed calmly. He dropped the pebbles he was holding to the ground. “All right, that's a bet.” He held out a hand.

Cassada ignored it. “My word's enough,” he said.

“Your word, hell. Shake on it.”

Cassada didn't move. “You have enough witnesses,” he said.

He stayed at the target afterwards, alone, staring at it as one might at some construction where everything had gone wrong. Isbell went back into the operations hut. Wickenden followed him.

“That's about what I would expect of him,” Wickenden said. “Didn't surprise me at all. He's a fool.”

“Somebody should have stopped them. I wanted to,” Isbell said.

“What for?” Wickenden said. “That's the only way someone like that ever learns.”

In Sunday quiet, in the creaking of canvas, Wickenden lay on his cot reading. When he turned a page he folded it back, doubled, so he could hold the book in one hand. With the other he brushed at his arm or leg from time to time, at an annoying fly. Dumfries sat writing a letter. From the next tent a voice occasionally drifted over, a voice that was confiding to Grace, confessing to him. He
had
to hit—something like that—it was hard to make out the exact words. In any case, Wickenden ignored them and the slight they represented. He read on.

Idle Sundays. Dunning was off playing golf with the group commander and group ops on a course that was mostly sand dunes. Godchaux and Phipps had driven the silken black road that ran along the coast—the same road on which the guns and sun-baked armor of the Afrika Korps and British Eighth Army had fought back and forth—to one of the ruins, Leptis Magna, with its chalk-white columns and vacant amphitheater scorched by the sun, a great tumbled quarry near the sea. He and Phipps wandered the wide
avenues. The Romans had built three cities along the coast, Phipps explained. “Tripoli, three cities. That's what it means.”

“Is that right? Where'd you find that out?”

“Sabratha is the other one.”

“Why'd they build this? What did they do here?”

“This was a big city. Everything.”

“Let's go this way,” Godchaux said. He had seen a man and two girls walking along a nearby street of what, ages past, had been shops.

They turned out to be Italian and stopped for a moment. One of the girls, dark-haired, was wearing a tight top, a sailor's shirt. She stood with the sunlight gleaming on her while Godchaux tried to make conversation, but none of the three spoke English.

“You know any Italian?” Godchaux turned to Phipps.

“Cunati does.”

“That's not going to help us. So, listen,” he said to the Italians, “you live here, in Tripoli?”

They didn't understand, however, and wandered off. Godchaux watched them. The shirt was above white pants, also tight. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Let's go down to the harbor,” Phipps said.

“Yeah. You can throw me in.”

“What for?”

“Take a cold shower. That's what they used to say.”

“The girl?”

“Jesus.”

They wandered on. The sea was strewn with brown sea grass. They didn't catch sight of the trio again.

Harlan and Ferguson were in town at the Del Mahari, sitting among the short dark men in business suits and the heavy-looking women. Cassada had been over talking to Grace about gunnery again, Ferguson commented.

“Oh, yeah?”

“He's really focused on it.”

“Is that right? Well, he can talk all he wants.” Harlan was reading the menu. “The bird that talks the most is the parrot,” he added, “and
it
can't fly.”

“
Teniente?
” the waiter asked.

“I'll take the sirloin, rare.
Capisce?
Rare.”

“I'll have the same thing,” Ferguson said. He was wearing sunglasses. His blond hair looked dirty. He was the same size as Harlan but more amiable. Everyone liked him.

Grace hadn't been able to tell Cassada much. It would have been disloyal to Harlan, to a member of his flight. He just went over the usual things. Make sure the ball is in the center, you don't want to be even the slightest bit uncoordinated. Try and shoot at a low angle off. The best scores have hits nearly as long as your little finger. Hits the size of your fingernail are no good.

Day after day. Gradually the men on the line became darkened by the sun, and the pilots, too, their hands and faces. Officers and men grew together here, more than anywhere else. They pitched in. They knew one another's names. The men had their champions, the pilots their favorite crew chiefs and armorers.

Abrams, the operations clerk, worked long hours, as well. He was short and overweight with red cheeks. Isbell was not his favorite nor was he Isbell's. Too many mistakes, Isbell said. He went over the figures, the gunnery reports.

“What are seven and sixteen?” he said.

“Where is that, sir?”

“Right here.”

“Seven and sixteen,” Abrams said. “Twenty-three.”

“You've got twenty-two.”

Abrams looked at the sheet.

“I don't know what happened there,” he said.

“It's a mistake is what happened.”

“I'll fix it,” Abrams said. He knew Isbell wanted to humiliate him. The figures were not that important anyway. Who would find out they had fired three thousand and eighteen rounds instead of three thousand and seventeen? Who would care? There were mountains of ammunition out there. They could lose track of a whole case of it in supply, no one would bat an eye, but let it be just one bullet off. . . . In the other squadrons it was nothing like this. That was his luck, to be in this one.

The projector in the film room—a plywood booth with a blanket over the entrance to make it dark—was running. From time to time it would stop, go into strained reverse, then start forward again. The two of them were in there; Abrams could hear their voices plainly in the empty building.

“You wasted rounds on every one of those passes. You started to break off before you were finished firing. You have to follow through, just like everything else. Let up on the trigger, track for a split second,
then
break off”

“Let's run it through again.”

“No, that's enough. It's hard on the eyes.”

Lifting a corner of the blanket, Isbell came out rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. He waited until Cassada rewound the reel and put it away.

“I'll tell you something else,” he said when Cassada emerged. “You're pressing in a little too close. You're going to fly right into the target one of these times. That target bar is made of iron. Start breaking off at six hundred feet like you're supposed to.”

“I'm not going to run into it, Captain.”

“Listen to me. You'll have a major accident on your hands and the major and I will get the blame. Break off at six hundred feet.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go ahead and catch the bus. I'm going to be here for a while.”

“What does the schedule look like for tomorrow? I need missions.”

“You'll see it. Go on, now.”

Cassada hesitated at the door as if he were going to say something, then let go of the jamb and walked out, heading towards the bus stop.

Isbell turned to Abrams,

“All finished?” he asked.

“I'm just checking it over.”

“That doesn't sound like you.”

Abrams lowered his head as if in even greater effort. “Sir,” he said, “I always check it.”

“You do?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It's a good thing we're not running a bank,” Isbell said. “Here, give it to me.”

He took the page and scribbled his name at the bottom of it without looking at the figures. “How many mistakes are in there?” he asked, handing it back.

“Captain, it's correct. I checked it. There are no mistakes.”

“That would set a record,” Isbell said.

He began reading the score sheets on the wall. They had been posted at the end of the day.

“Those are up to the minute,” Abrams offered.

There was no reply. He began to type the envelope the reports went into.

“We're not doing too bad,” Isbell murmured, almost to himself.

“No, sir. We're ahead of the other squadrons. I keep tabs.”

“I know.”

Abrams shook out the black typewriter cover and began to put it back on. Through the window he could see the lone figure, waiting.

“Do you think the lieutenant will win the bet?” he asked.

“I doubt it,” Isbell said. “What do the men think?”

“Well . . . they're betting on Lieutenant Harlan, I guess.”

“Probably a good idea,” Isbell said. “Who are you betting on?”

“Oh, I haven't made any bets. Lieutenant Cassada is certainly trying though, isn't he?”

“Yeah, he's trying.”

Abrams glanced out the open window again. “He sort of puts me in mind of the turtle.”

Cassada was walking slowly back and forth, a few steps each way, watching for the bus.

“Which turtle?”

“You know, Captain. The one that beat the rabbit. In the story.”

“That's a little lesson for you, isn't it?”

“He might come from behind, like the turtle.”

“We'll see. It's a good thing he believes in himself.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Doesn't always mean a lot. I can tell you that from experience.”

In flying school Cassada had been an enthusiastic student. He loved flying and had never, from the very first, felt any fear. When he received his wings he could not repress his excitement and pride. He'd had two years of college and for a while the love, somewhat dramatic, of a girl in Savannah who wanted to be an actress, but all that did not matter compared to what lay ahead. He was going to join the ranks, go to a squadron overseas. He was going to make a name for himself, become known.

Somehow it had not happened. He had found himself under the command of an unsympathetic officer who neither liked nor tried to understand him. He had never imagined this as a possibility. It had stolen all the joy out of life. The squadron was like a large family with a history he was not really part of, and he felt like a foster
child in the house of a stern father. He looked forward only to the day that Wickenden would be gone. He disliked Wickenden and could hardly look at him. He would receive a bad effectiveness report from him, he knew, and already accepting that, he behaved with indifference, almost sullenly and ready to take offense at the least provocation.