As a Southerner, Michael is deeply imprinted with the Code. A man fights when called on. A man is tough, straightforward, honorable, and strong. He can play football, he loves to hunt, and he allows no nasty talk around the ladies, although he discusses them in lewd terms among his fellows.
When you are a child, the Code without the equipment will kill you.
Michael has learned not to fight twelve-year-olds if he can help it. He is told that he is a coward. He believes it. He is articulate and has not yet learned to conceal it. He is told that he is a sissy. He believes that this must be true.
He has finished reading his paper before the class now. He knows how Junior Atkins’s breath will smell in his face. The teacher tells Michael he is a “good classroom citizen.” She does not understand why he turns his face away from her.
September 10, 1947, the football field behind Willett-Lorance Consolidated:
Michael Lander is going out for football. He is in the tenth grade and he is going out without his parents’ knowledge. He feels that he has to do it. He wants the good feeling his classmates have about the sport. He is curious about himself. The uniform makes him wonderfully anonymous. He cannot see himself when he has it on. The tenth grade is late for a boy to begin playing football, and he has much to learn. To his surprise the others are tolerant of him. After a few days of forearms and cleats, they have discovered that, though he is naive about the game, he will hit and he wants to learn from them. It is a good time for him. It lasts a week. His parents learn that he is going out for football. They hate the coach, a godless man who, it is rumored, keeps alcohol in his home. The Reverend Lander is on the school board now. The Landers drive up to the practice field in their Kaiser. Michael does not see them until he hears his name being called. His mother is approaching the sideline, walking stiff-ankled through the grass. The Reverend Lander waits in the car.
“Take off that monkey suit.”
Michael pretends not to hear. He is playing linebacker with the scrubs in scrimmage. He assumes his stance. Each blade of grass is distinct in his eyes. The tackle in front of him has a red scratch on his calf.
His mother is walking the sideline now. Now she is crossing it. She is coming. Two hundred pounds of pondered rage. “I said take off that monkey suit and get in that car.”
Michael might have saved himself in that moment. He might have yelled into his mother’s face. The coach might have saved him, had he been quicker, less afraid for his job. Michael cannot let the others see any more. He cannot be with them after this. They are looking at each other now with expressions he cannot stand. He trots toward the prefabricated building they use for a dressing room. There are snickers behind him.
The coach has to speak to the boys twice to resume the practice. “We don’t need no mama’s boys no way,” he says.
Michael moves very deliberately in the dressing room, leaving his equipment in a neat pile on the bench with his locker key on top. He feels only a dull heaviness inside, no surface anger.
Riding home in the Kaiser, he listens to a torrent of abuse. He replies that, yes, he understands how he has embarrassed his parents, that he should have thought of others. He nods solemnly when reminded that he must save his hands for the piano.
July 18, 1948: Michael Lander is sitting on the back porch of his home, a mean parsonage beside the Baptist church in Willett. He is fixing a lawn mower. He makes a little money fixing lawn mowers and small appliances. Looking through the screen, he can see his father lying on a bed, listening to the radio, his hands behind his head. When he thinks of his father, Michael sees his father’s white, inept hands, the ring from Cumberland-Macon Divinity School loose behind the knuckle of his ring finger. In the South, as in many other places, the church is an institution of, by, and for women. The men tolerate it for the sake of family peace. The men of the community have no respect for the Reverend Lander because he could never make a crop, could never do anything practical. His sermons are dull and rambling, composed while the choir is singing the offertory hymn. The Reverend Lander spends much of his time writing letters to a girl he knew in high school. He never mails the letters, but locks them in a tin box in his office. The combination padlock is childishly simple. Michael has read the letters for years. For laughs.
Puberty has done a great deal for Michael Lander. At fifteen he is tall and lean. He has, by considerable effort, learned to do convincingly mediocre schoolwork. Against all odds, he has developed what appears to be an affable personality. He knows the joke about the bald-headed parrot, and he tells it well.
A freckle-faced girl two years older has helped Michael discover that he is a man. This is a tremendous relief to him after years of being told that he is a queer, with no evidence to judge himself either way.
But in the blossoming of Michael Lander, part of him has stood off to the side, cold and watchful. It is the part of him that recognized the ignorance of the classroom, that constantly replays little vignettes of grade school making the new face wince, that flashes the picture of the unlovely little scholar in front of him in moments of stress, and can open under him a dread void when his new image is threatened.
The little scholar stands at the head of a legion of hate and he knows the answer every time, and his creed is Goddamn You All. At fifteen Lander functions very well. A trained observer might notice a few things about him that hint at his feelings, but these in themselves are not suspicious. He cannot bear personal competition. He has never experienced the gradients of controlled aggression that allow most of us to survive. He cannot even endure board games; he can never gamble. Lander understands limited aggression objectively, but he cannot take part in it. Emotionally, for him there is no middle ground between a pleasant, uncompetitive atmosphere and total war to the death with the corpse defiled and burned. So he has no outlet. And he has swallowed his poison longer than most could have done.
Though he tells himself that he hates the church, Michael prays often during the day. He is convinced that assuming certain positions expedites his prayers. Touching his forehead to his knee is one of the most effective ones. When it is necessary for him to do this in public places, he must think of a ruse to keep it from being noticeable. Dropping something beneath his chair and bending to get it is a useful device. Prayers delivered in thresholds or while touching a door lock are also more effective. He prays often for persons who appear in the quick flashes of memory that sear him many times a day. Without willing it, despite his efforts to stop, he conducts internal dialogues often during his waking hours. He is having one now:
“There’s old Miss Phelps working in the teacherage yard. I wonder when she’ll retire. She’s been at that schoolhouse for a long time.
“Do you wish she was rotten with cancer?”
“No! Dear Jesus forgive me, I don’t wish she was rotten with cancer. I wish I was rotten with cancer ferst. [He touches wood.] Dear God, let me be rotten with cancer first, oh, Father.”
“Would you like to take your shotgun and blow her rotten ignorant old guts out?”
“No! No! Jesus, Father, no, I don’t. I want her to be safe and happy. She can’t help what she is. She’s a kind and good lady. She’s all right. Forgive me for saying Goddamn.”
“Would you like to stick her face in the lawn mower?”
“I wouldn‘t, I wouldn’t. Christ help me stop thinking that.”
“Fuck the Holy Ghost.”
“No! I mustn’t think it, I won’t think it, that’s the mortal sin. I can’t get forgiven. I won’t think fuck the Holy Ghost. Oh, I thought it again.”
Michael reaches behind him to touch the latch of the screen door. He touches his forehead to his knee. Then he concentrates hard on the lawn mower. He is eager to finish it. He is saving his money for a flying lesson.
From the first, Lander was attracted to machinery and he had a gift for working with machines. This did not become a passion until he discovered machines that enveloped him, that became his body. When he was inside
them, he saw his actions as those of the machine, he never saw the little scholar.
The first was a Piper Cub on a grass airfield. At the controls he saw nothing of Lander, but he saw the little plane banking, stalling, diving, and its shape was his and its grace and strength were his and he could feel the wind on it and he was free.
Lander joined the Navy when he was sixteen, and he never went home again. He was not accepted for flight school the first time he applied, and he served throughout the Korean War handling ordnance on the carrier Coral Sea. A picture in his album shows him standing before the wing of a Corsair with a ground crew and a rack of fragmentation bombs. The others in the crew are smiling, and they have their arms around one another’s shoulders. Lander is not smiling. He is holding a fuse.
On June 1, 1953, Lander awoke in the enlisted men’s barracks at Lakehurst, New Jersey, shortly after dawn. He had arrived at his new assignment in the middle of the night and he needed a cold shower to wake up. Then he dressed carefully. The Navy had been good for Lander. He liked the uniform, liked the way he looked in it and the anonymity it gave him. He was competent and he was accepted. Today he would report for his new job, handling pressure-actuated depth-charge detonators being prepared for experiments in antisubmarine warfare. He was good with ordnance. Like many men with deep-seated insecurities, he loved the nomenclature of weapons.
He walked through the cool morning toward the ordnance complex, looking around curiously at all he had not seen when he arrived in darkness. There were the giant hangars that held the airships. The doors on the nearest one were opening with a rumble. Lander checked the time, then stopped on the sidewalk, watching. The nose came out slowly and then the great length of it. The airship was a ZPG-1 with a capacity of a million cubic feet of helium. Lander had never been so close to one before. Three hundred twenty-four feet of silver airship, the rising sun touching it with fire. Lander trotted across the asphalt apron. The ground crew was swarming under the airship. One of the portside engines roared and a puff of blue smoke hung in the air behind it.
Lander did not want to arm airships with depth charges. He did not want to work on them or roll them in and out of hangars. He saw only the controls.
He qualified easily for the next competitive examination for officer candidate school. Two hundred eighty enlisted men took the test on a hot July afternoon in 1953. Lander placed first. His standing in OCS won him a choice of assignments. He went to the airships.
The extension of the kinesthetic sense in controlling moving machines has never been satisfactorily explained. Some people are described as “naturals,” but the term is inadequate. Mike Hailwood, the great motorcycle racer, is a natural. So was Betty Skelton, as anyone will testify who has seen her do an outside Cuban Eight in her little biplane. Lander was a natural. At the controls of an airship, freed of himself, he was sure and decisive, pressure-proof. And while he flew, part of his mind was free to race ahead, weighing probabilities, projecting the next problem and the next.
By 1955, Lander was one of the most proficient airship pilots in the world. In December of that year, he was second of ficer on a series of hazardous flights from South Weymouth Naval Air Station in Massachusetts, testing the effects of ice accumulation in bad weather. The flights won for the crew the Harmon Trophy for that year.
And then there was Margaret. He met her in January at the officers’ club at Lakehurst, where he was being lionized after the flights from South Weymouth. It was the beginning of the best year of his life.
She was twenty years old and good-looking and fresh from West Virginia. Lander the lion, in his perfect uniform, knocked her out. Oddly, he was the first man for her and, while teaching her was a great satisfaction to him, the memory of it made things much more difficult for him later when he believed that she had others.
They were married in the chapel at Lakehurst with its plaque made of wreckage from the airship Akron.
Lander came to define himself in terms of Margaret and his profession. He flew the biggest, longest, sleekest airship in the world. He thought Margaret was the best-looking woman in the world.
How different Margaret was from his mother! Sometimes when he awakened from dreaming of his mother, he looked at Margaret for a long time, admiring her as he checked off the physical differences.
They had two children, they went to the Jersey shore in the summer with their boat. They had some good times. Margaret was not a very perceptive person, but gradually she came to realize that Lander was not exactly what she had thought. She needed a fairly constant level of reinforcement, but he swung between extremes in his treatment of her. Sometimes he was cloyingly solicitous. When he was thwarted in his work or at home, he became cold and withdrawn. Occasionally he showed flashes of cruelty that terrified her.
They could not discuss their problems. Either he adopted an annoying pedantic attitude or he refused to talk at all. They were denied the catharsis of an occasional fight.
In the early sixties he was away much of the time, flying the giant ZPG-3W. At 403 feet, it was the biggest nonrigid airship ever built. The forty-foot radar antenna revolving inside its vast envelope provided a key link in the country’s early-warning system. Lander was happy, and his behavior while he was at home was correspondingly good. But the extension of the Distant Early Warning Line, the “DEW Line” of permanent radar installations, was eating into the airships’ defense role, and in 1964 the end came for Lander as a Navy airship pilot. His group was disbanded, the airships were dismantled, and he was on the ground. He was transferred to Administration.
His behavior toward Margaret deteriorated. Scalding silences marked their hours together. In the evenings he cross-examined her about her activities during the day. She was innocent enough. He would not believe it. He grew physically indifferent to her. By the end of 1964, her activities in the daytime were no longer innocent. But, more than sex, she sought warmth and friendship.
Lander volunteered for helicopters during the Vietnam expansion, and he was readily accepted. He was distracted now by his training. He was flying again. He gave Margaret expensive presents. She felt uncomfortable and uneasy about them, but this was better than the way he had acted before.
On his final leave before shipping out to Vietnam they went to Bermuda for a good vacation. If Lander’s conversation was tiresomely larded with the technicalities of rotary-wing aircraft, he was at least attentive, sometimes loving. Margaret responded. Lander thought he had never loved her so much.
On February 10, 1967, Lander flew his 114th air-sea rescue mission off the carrier Ticonderoga in the South China Sea. A half hour after moonset, he hung over the dark ocean off Dong Hoi. He was in a holding pattern fifteen miles at sea, waiting for some F-4s and Skyraiders coming home from a raid. One of the Phantoms was hit. The pilot reported that his starboard engine had conked and he was showing a fire light. He would try to make it to the sea before he and the second officer ejected.
Lander, in the rattling cockpit of his helicopter, was talking to the pilot all the time, Vietnam a dark mass to his left.
“Ding Zero One, when you’re well over the water gimme some lights if you gottem.” Lander could find the Phantom crew on the water by their homing device, but he wanted to cut down on the time as much as possible. “Mr. Dillon; he said to the door gunner, ”we’ll go down with you facing landward. Ops confirms no friendly vessels are close by. Any boat that ain’t rubber ain’t ours.”
The voice of the Phantom pilot was loud in his earphones. “Mixmaster, I’ve got a second fire light and she’s filling up with smoke. We’re punching out.” He yelled the coordinates, and before Lander could repeat them for confirmation he was gone.
Lander knew what was happening—the two-man crew pulling down their face curtains, the canopy blowing off, the fliers rocketing up into the cold air, turning in their ejection seats, the seats falling away, and then the jar and the cool rush down through the darkness to the jungle.
He wheeled the big helicopt
er landward, blades slapping the heavy sea air. He had a choice now. He could wait for air cover, hang around trying to contact the men by radio, waiting for protection, or he could go in.
“There it is, sir:” The copilot was pointing.
Lander could see a shower of fire a mile inland as the Phantom blew up in the air. He was over the beach when the homing signal came through. He called for air cover, but he did not wait for it. The helicopter, showing no lights, skimmed over the double canopy forest.
The light signal blinked from the narrow, rutted road. The two on the ground had the good sense to mark a landing zone for him. There was room for the rotor between the banks of trees flanking the road. Setting it down would be quicker than pulling them up with the hook one by one. Down, sinking between the banks of trees, blowing the weeds flat at the sides of the road, and suddenly the night was full of orange flashes and the cockpit ripped around him. Splattered with the copilot’s blood, falling, rocking crazily, the smell of burning rubber.
The bamboo cage was not long enough for Lander to stretch out in it. His hand had been smashed by a bullet, and the pain was constant and terrible. He was delirious part of the time. His captors had nothing to treat him with except a little sulfa powder from an old French medical kit. They took a thin plank from a crate and bound the hand flat against it. The wound throbbed constantly. After three days in the cage, Lander was marched northward to Hanoi, prodded along by the small, wiry men. They were dressed in muddy black pajamas and carried very clean AK-47 automatic rifles.