The Eleventh Man Read online

  "You and Franklin D. got it, you clever devils," Ben's voice imitated newsreel pomposity. "Two hundred planes to our noble Soviet allies last month. Three hundred a month by the end of the year, if East Base doesn't freeze up solid."

  Bill Reinking cocked his head. "Should you be telling me all this, Lieutenant?"

  Ben wasn't listening. Eyes down into a certain section of the newspaper piece, he was back in the world of pilots.

  The sparse crossroads called Vaughn Junction was only the first stop, barely out of sight of Great Falls, but he had piled off right behind the bus driver anyway. This was the one part of the journey home he had been looking forward to.

  While the mailbag was being dealt with, he stretched his legs in the parking lot by the roadhouse. A slow little conciliatory smile worked its way onto his extensive face as he thought about the other times here, with her. A laugh helplessly followed the smile. At least there was one thing new about this trip: Cass, coming out of the blue to him.

  Checking his wristwatch, he kept scanning the sky to the west. First snow had only brushed the tops of the Rockies yet; a bit of hope there, maybe, that the weather would hold off during his leave. He moved around restlessly, his shadow in lengthened antics behind him as he faced into the afternoon sun. The air was good, out here in the grassland beyond the reach of the smelter stack, and he savored it while he watched the sky and waited. Whether it was football or what, he had always greatly loved these blue-and-tan days of the crisp end of October.

  Something else he greatly loved became just visible over the mountains now—at least one military saying turned out to be right, it took a pilot's eyes to see other pilots. Here they came, right on the button. The four specks in the sky, factory-new fighter planes incoming on the hop from Seattle. The unmistakable dart-nosed silhouette of P-39s; Airacobras, in the virulent military method of naming aircraft types.

  Ben felt his heart race; another expression that was validated now that he had met Cass. In the month since his fresh set of orders landed him at East Base and the Air Transport Command, he had seen this half a dozen times now, Cass and her WASP squadron ferrying in the sleek gray fighters. Planes poured into East Base from three directions for the Lend-Lease transit onward to Alaska and Russia, but the run from Seattle was all Cass's.

  Again this time, he watched hungrily as the Cobras cut through the clear sky, high overhead. From what she had told him, when the flying weather was good this last leg of the route was a snap, the turbulent peaks of the Rockies abruptly dropping behind past the Continental Divide and unmistakable guide-posts abundant on the prairie ahead—the Sun River, the grand Missouri, and for that matter, the Black Eagle smokestack. His imagination soared up there with her, her cat-quick hands on the controls, her confident wiry body in the tight-fit cockpit of the lead P-39.

  She had not told him this part yet, but by asking around the air base he'd learned Cass Standish also had a reputation for bringing in her flights safely no matter what the weather or visibility. ("She can navigate in zero visibility like a wild-ass Eskimo," a crusty tower officer had provided the apt quote, although Ben had to clean it up.) He stirred up inside just thinking of it. For the life of him, he could not see why the Women Air Force Service Pilots were not allowed to deliver the P-39s, and for that matter the B-17 bombers and anything else that flew, onward north to the waiting Russian pilots in Alaska. In a saner world, where his TPWP minder in Washington wondrously would not exist, his piece about the flying women of East Base would outright say that. Getting something like that across between the lines was becoming a specialty of his.

  Still mesmerized, he stood in the parking lot with his hands in the pockets of his flight jacket and yearned up at the fighter planes as only a grounded pilot can. Beyond that, much beyond that, he yearned for Cass. How many kinds of lust were there? The night before last, the two of them had been in a cabin in back of that roadhouse over there, uniforms cast off and forgotten, romantic maniacs renting by the hour. The whispered prattle of love talk, after: "So it's true what they say about redheads." "I'm wrongly accused. It's ginger, not red." "Ginger? That's a spice. No wonder." Now, for one wild instant he wished Cass would peel off out of the formation and buzz the roadhouse and him at an airspeed of four hundred miles an hour in tribute to that night and its delirious lovemaking.

  That was hoping for too much. The flight swept over with a roar, the P-39s as perfectly spaced as spots on a playing card. Watching them glint in the sun as they diminished away toward East Base, Ben jammed his fists deeper into his pockets. As quickly as the planes were gone, frustration filled him again. He drew a harsh breath. He knew perfectly well he was thinking about these matters more than was healthy, but it stuck with him day and night anymore, the overriding hunch that for him the war's next couple of years—and, who knew, the next couple after that, and after that—might go on and on as his first two years of so-called service had, yanking him away on noncombatant assignment to some shot-up corner of the world and then depositing him back here for this kind of thing, time after time. And, the worst part, Cass always out of reach. At this rate, he could foresee with excruciating clarity, her letters to him would add up to a string-tied packet in the bottom of his duffel bag. Somewhere in New Guinea there would be a similar packet, wherever her soldier husband chose to tuck them.

  Lovesick. Try as he would, he could not clear away the relentless feeling. Whoever stuck those two words together was a hell of a diagnostician. An incurable case of Cassia Standish he was definitely suffering from, its symptoms rapture and queasiness simultaneously. Vic would think I've gone off my rocker. Getting himself involved with someone married. Not just married: married to khaki. No surer way to risk loss of rank and beyond that, dishonorable discharge, the Section Eight "deemed unfit to serve" bad piece of paper, him and her both. Sometimes I think I've gone off my rocker. "My, my," Cass had kidded him, reaching out naked from bed the other night to stroke that new silver bar on his uniform and meanwhile leering at him as effectively as Hedy Lamarr ever did at a leading man. "What's next, a Good Conduct medal?" Not hardly.

  "Ready to hit the road if you are, Lieutenant." The bus driver had come up behind him, sounding curious about what kept a man standing in a roadhouse parking lot watching planes go over. Ben clambered back on and reclaimed his seat. He leaned against the window and shut his eyes to wait out all the road miles yet before home. Sometimes he dozed and sometimes he didn't, but either way he dreamed of Cass and more Cass.

  "Don't let me interrupt your enjoyment of great literature," the imperative note in his father's voice snapped him out of his absorption in the version of her he had put into newsprint. "But I have to get back at it." Bill Reinking indicated toward the job shop and the table where the addressograph waited. "Had any supper? There's some macaroni salad and fried chicken left."

  Ben looked at the bucket supper from the Lunchery down the street, then back at his father.

  "Your mother is in Valier," came the explanation. "Play rehearsal. They're doing The Importance of Being Earnest, and she couldn't pass up Lady Bracknell, could she?"

  "Can't imagine it," Ben conceded in the same deliberately casual tone his father had used. "Let me get some chicken in me, then I'll take over on the addresser, how about."

  "No, that's fine," his father spoke hastily, "I'm used to this by now. You can help wrap when I get to that." Turning away, he started up the addressograph again and, a sound his son had grown up on, the name-and-address plates began clattering through like metal poker chips as each alphabetical stack of half a dozen was fed in. Ben left him to it and moved toward the other end of the worktable to put together a semblance of supper. He still felt off-balance about being back amid the comfortable inky clutter of the newspaper office after so much military life. Food would be a good idea, even the Lunchery's.

  He was reaching into the meal bucket when he heard a lapse in the addressing machine's rhythmic slap-slap on the wrappers. Out the corner of his eye he watche
d his father quickly palm a subscription plate off the stack he was working with and slip it into his pants pocket. Ben frowned. His father always chucked aside any discards into a coffee can, there by the addressograph for that purpose, until there were enough to be dumped into the linotype melt pot.

  "Hey," Ben called softly. "I saw that." He held out his hand for the discard. "Gimme, gimme, my name is Jimmy."

  His father stood frozen there with his hand still in his pocket.

  "Dad? What's up?"

  A stricken expression came over the older man. "I—I didn't want you to come across this one in the wrappers. Ben, I'm sorry if—"

  He handed the flat little piece of metal to his son as if it were a rare coin. Flipping it over to the raised side, Ben instantly spelled out the inverted letters of type. Reading backward was a skill that came with growing up in a newspaper office, and right then he wished he didn't have it.

  VICTOR RENNIE CPL. SERIAL #20929246

  C CO., 26TH REGIMENT, 1ST INFANTRY DIVISION

  C/O U.S. ARMY OVERSEAS POST OFFICE

  NEW YORK, N.Y.

  Confounded, he stared at his father. "How'd you already know it's Vic? They sit on the names until I—" He gestured futilely.

  "I didn't, really." Bill Reinking's face was at odds with his words. "If it turned out to be some other reason you're here, I was going to hand-address this one at the post office."

  Ben swallowed hard. Tonelessly he told his father what had happened to Vic Rennie in the minefield in the Sicilian countryside.

  Bill Reinking blanched; two years of hardening from handling war news didn't help with this. It had to be asked:

  "Everybody else—?"

  "All accounted for, Dad, relax. I checked this morning." As he did every morning. Day by day he knew exactly where each one of them was, in the world of war. It was his job to know.

  Carl Friessen in New Guinea.

  Jake Eisman piloting at East Base.

  Animal Angelides on a Marine troop ship.

  Sig Prokosch patrolling a shore in the Coast Guard.

  Moxie Stamper bossing an anti-aircraft gun pit in England.

  Nick Danzer on the destroyer USS McCorkle in the Pacific.

  Dexter Cariston at the camp that was not supposed to be mentioned.

  Stanislaus Havel and Kenny O'Fallon in graves under military crosses.

  And Vic, whose chapter of the war had to be put to rest with this journey.

  Every soldier, in the course of time, exists only in the breath of written words. The gods that govern saga have always known that. There were times Bill Reinking stood stock-still in this newspaper office, hardly daring to breathe, as he tore open the week's Threshold Press War Project packet and pawed through the drab handouts until he spotted the words The "Supreme Team" on the Field of Battle ... by Lt. Ben Reinking. It awed him each time, Ben's unfolding epic of them, impeccably told. Taken together, they amounted to an odd number—eleven—whose combined destiny began one afternoon in 1941 on a windblown football field, and from there swirled away into the fortunes of war. Montana boys, all, grown into something more than gridiron heroes. One by one, the Treasure State teammates—the much-heralded entire varsity now enlisted one way or another—were individuals rehearsing for history, in newsprint across America. The one with the TPWP patch on his shoulder, with the mandate from somewhere on high to write of them all, now pocketed away the dog tag-sized piece of metal cold in his fingers, as his father wordlessly watched.

  The leaden arithmetic was not anything Ben could put away. "Two dead and Vic a cripple, how's that for being a 'chosen' team? If this keeps on, we can play six-man."

  Instantly he wanted that choice of words back. That's what gave us Purcell. Does it all start there? Not a one of the '41 starters came up out of six-man football, but Merle Purcell had, the newcomer from nowhere who met his doom in eleven-man. Two years hadn't made any of it less raw on the nerves. Fast and skittery as an antelope, Purcell materialized from some tiny high school out in the sagebrush where they played six-man, which was pretty much a cross between football and hundred-yard dash, and given a chance on the scrub team he ran circles around the Treasure State varsity in practice until he would poop out. And subsequently ran himself to death on the Letter Hill trying to toughen up enough for the TSU merciless steamroller brand of football. To this day Purcell was there in Ben's mind's eye, in the script ingredients, struggling up the giant slope to the white rocks after practice and even on his own on weekends; strange jinxed kid who by the miracle of modern sportsmongering had been made to live on as the inspirational "twelfth man" of the perfect season. Ben knew it wasn't fair, he had barely known Purcell, but the interior truth was that he would not have traded a dozen of him, or any like him, for Vic Rennie.

  "Son." Bill Reinking did not use that word much in the presence of the tall man in uniform across the table from him. "I know you're having it rough, the whole bunch of you, but—"

  "Never mind." He looked over at his father, the shielding eyeglasses, the oblique composure. This won't do. We skimp past this every time. "This is getting to me, Dad," he huskily spoke the necessary. "You have anything to do with it?"

  "I wouldn't be much of a newspaper editor if I didn't point out that's an indefinite pronoun."

  "Don't hand me that, you know as well as I do what I mean. This haywire assignment they've got me on. Anybody you happen to know happen to be behind it, just for instance?"

  His father's tone turned dry again. "I assume you mean the Senator. Just because I throw the awesome weight of the Gleaner behind him every six years doesn't mean we're in bed together. I would remind you, the Senator didn't want anything to do with this war—the only side he wanted us on is Switzerland's."

  "Then is it Mother's doing?" The words exploded from Ben with a force that shook both men. The level of his voice came down but his vehemence did not. "Did she talk some old family friend in Beverly Hills into picking up the phone and calling Robert Sherwood or Elmer Davis or Jesus D. Christ in the White House himself and say, 'Guess what, there's somebody I'd like to see grounded and stay glued to a typewriter for the next dozen years or the end of the war, whichever comes first.' Well? Did she?"

  "Ben, will you kindly quit? Unlike you, your mother and I are a bit grateful you're not stationed somewhere getting shot to pieces." His father took off his glasses and polished the lenses clean with the page of a torn Gleaner; only window-washers and newspapermen knew that stunt. "To answer you for once and all, though—we know better than to pull strings for you, even if we had any. You made that clear to us long ago." Bill Reinking went on in a milder tone. "I hate to bring up a remote possibility, but just maybe you were picked out for this because you're the natural person for it."

  "You don't know how the military works," Ben scoffed. But there was no future in arguing his TPWP servitude with his father, not tonight. "Speaking of that." He reeled off what he needed for his trip out of town in the morning.

  "I wish we'd known," dismay took over his father's voice. "Your mother has been putting on the miles, these rehearsals—"

  "Dad, don't look like that, it's all right. I know where I can always get it."

  His father sighed. "We both know that. Why don't you go tend to it before he closes for the night? Then you can give me a lift home so I can ride in style for a change."

  Ben walked briskly two blocks up the street and stepped into the Medicine Lodge. The saloon was as quiet as if empty, but it was never empty at this time of night. Inert as doorstops, at the far end of the bar sat a bleary pair of sheepherders he recognized—Pat Hoy from the Withrow ranch, and the other had a nickname with a quantity of geography attached. Canada Dan, that was it. Puffy with drink but not falling-down drunk, the two evidently were winding down a usual spree after the lambs were shipped, when there was half a year's wages to blow. Ever conscious of his uniform, Ben had a flash of thought that except for polar explorers, these befogged old herders off alone in their sheep wagons somewher
e would have been about the last people to hear of the war, back in December of 1941. It did not seem to be foremost on their minds now, either, as they and a third occupant expectantly looked down the bar in Ben's direction like connoisseurs of the tints of money.

  "Goddamn," Tom Harry spoke from behind the bar. Ben was beginning to wonder why the sight of him made people mention damnation. "You're back again, huh? I thought you'd be up in an aereoplane someplace winning the war single-handed, Reinking."

  "Nice to see you again too, Tom." With a ghost of a smile, Ben patted his way along the rich polished wood of the bar as if touching it for luck. The Medicine Lodge was not much changed since his high school Saturdays of wrestling beer kegs and emptying spitoons and swamping the place out with broom and mop. "Saturday night buys the rest of the week, kid," Tom Harry would always say as he paid Ben his dollar or so of wages. Hundreds of such nights produced a saloon that by now had a crust of decor as rigorous as a museum's. Stuffed animal heads punctuated every wall; the one-eyed buffalo in particular was past its prime. The long mirror in back of the bar possessed perhaps a few more age spots of tarnish than when Ben had been in charge of wiping it down, and the immense and intricate oaken breakfront that framed it and legions of whiskey bottles definitely had more dust. Still pasted to the mirror on either side of the cash register were the only bits of notice taken of the twentieth century: a photo of Tom Harry's prior enterprise, the Blue Eagle saloon in one of the Fort Peck Dam project's hard-drinking boomtowns, and a 1940 campaign poster picturing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt so cheerily resolute for a third term that it would have made any Republican cringe.

  Taking all this in, for the narrowest of moments Ben could almost feel he had never been away from it. Illusions had to be watched out for. He got down to business, which meant Tom Harry. "Do you still sell beverages in this joint or just stand around insulting the customers?"