It is a bright, golden day in Texas. A little Mexican boy is working in
a field of sugar cane just back of Kelly Field. The airplanes from the
field are droning in the sleepy air above his head. Occasionally he
pauses in his work to glance half curiously at one of them. He is not
much interested in them. They are like the automobiles swishing
endlessly past on the highway near by. He is accustomed to them. And
besides, they are not of his world.
Sometimes the long motor roar of a ship coming out of a dive attracts
his half-hearted attention. Occasionally an intricate formation maneuver
over his head warrants his momentary gaze. Often he stares, half
abstractedly, skyward while he works. Like a shoe cobbler in a window
watching the crowds passing in the street.
This time, however, a curious interruption in the steady beating drone
of a three-ship formation of DHs passing over him makes him
involuntarily raise his head from his work. It is a strange sound,
somehow ominous to him. He is accustomed to hearing the motors run. Even
their tapering off for a landing is a different noise than this one. His
unknowingly trained ears and maybe some strange premonition tell him
that.
He sees two of the three ships locked together in collision. He sees
them, startlingly silent and arrested in their flight, falling in their
own debris. He sees two black objects leave the wrecks. He sees a white
streamer trail out behind each of them and then blossom open into two
swinging, slowly floating parachutes. He stands with his head thrown
back, his Indian eyes rapt in his Asiatic face.
Suddenly he is alarmed, then full of fear. The two milling wrecks, black
harbingers of doom by now, are going to fall on him. He begins to run.
Any way, any direction at all. He runs as fast as his little brown legs
will carry him. He covers a considerable distance from where he was
standing by the time the wrecks hit.
The spot he runs from, unruffled, undisturbed, lies warming, sleeping in
the sun. The wrecks don't hit that spot. They hit him, running.
The world that was not his has folded darkened crumpled wings of death
around him.