Cassada by James Salter Page A

shoulder and back, but he stood as if not aware of it. The bitterness was warmth enough. On the floor below were Phipps and his wife, good-looking Carolina girl, nice legs. Every apartment had a wife in it, his included. You chose your wife yourself, that was the thing, but of course you didn’t know what you were choosing. He had known after the first week, the deadness that lay between them, but he believed it might be overcome. He thought she would change through their being together, grow, reveal a hidden person, the one he had wanted and thought she might be. After five or ten minutes he went in to the bedroom and began undressing without a word.

“Where’s Captain Wickenden?” Dunning said.
    â€œEveryone’s gone,” Godchaux said. “We were the only two around. Harlan went out to mobile.”
    Dunning stood up. “How does it look to you out there?”
    â€œNot too good.”
    Dunning suddenly turned his head and raised a hand. “Be quiet a minute,” he said.
    They looked at each other, waiting. The sound of the planes would grow from nothing. One moment, silence. The next, there it would be. Dunning’s hand, however, came down.
    â€œYou hear anything?” he asked Godchaux.
    â€œNo, sir.”
    â€œToo soon, anyway. Where are they coming in from? Do you know?”
    â€œThere’s no flight plan. Marseilles, I guess. We just heard them go over and called the tower to find out who it was.” He looked towards the window. “I think they’re going to have a little trouble.”
    â€œThey can go to their alternate.”
    â€œI don’t know. It’s been down everywhere all day.” He was a minister’s son. Dunning remembered when he first reported in. Wonderful, the perfect background. Can he fly on Sundays, Isbell asked? They send you these people, Dunning had said, and expect you to make something out of them. Well, they had. “Is Harlan out there yet?” he asked.
    Godchaux was at the window. “I can’t see him from here,” he said.
    â€œGet on the other extension. Ask him what they’re doing. Ask him what it looks like out there.”
    The phone rang then. It was the forecaster. He had altered his observation slightly—he’d added a broken layer at three hundred feet. Dunning asked for the weather at the nearest alternates, everything within a hundred miles, and as the forecaster read them off, he scribbled them down, half-listening for the planes. Finally he stopped writing. The reports were worse and worse, the weather was no better anywhere.
    â€œThe only alternate open in Europe right now is Marseilles,” the forecaster said.
    â€œWhat about England?”
    â€œOne moment, Major,” the forecaster said, his voice becoming distant as he reached for a clipboard. “I have my doubts.”
    Godchaux, on the phone to mobile, could hear the radio out there. He put a hand over his receiver. “They’re on final again, Major,” he said.
    â€œHow far out? Give it here,” Dunning said, reaching. His look of self-possession was gone. In its place was nothing, the face of an officer who might still possibly be on the list to be promoted.
    Just as Godchaux passed the phone they heard them, the sound low at first and then expanding, opening up, seeming to head forand almost pass over them. Dunning at the window knew what it meant. They were not landing. They had missed again and were going by, everything hanging, heavy and nose-high like a pair of sick men in the grey evening, the noise even louder when they had passed barely below the clouds, slipping in and out of them, the red tails visible, then into the clouds again and gone. The voice of the forecaster, now incidental and remote, came over the phone, “. . . down everywhere in England. I don’t see anything open. Major?”
    At the same time there was the controller’s voice over the radio in mobile,