The Eleventh Man Page 3

  The sole proprietor and entire staff of the Medicine Lodge glanced to the far end where the raggedy sheepherders were gaping hopefully in Ben's direction. "Hard to do, on some of them. What can I get you?"

  "Whatever's on tap," Ben said before it registered on him that he was home now, he didn't need to nurse away the evening on beer. "No, wait, something with a nip to it—an old-fashioned, how about." Still in the mood, Cass. The other night in the road-house when they were priming themselves by playing coma cola roulette—each buying the other some unlikely concoction off the mixed drinks list before adjourning to the cabin for the night—she'd wickedly ordered him up one of these, saying it might put him in the mood for an old-fashioned pilot like her. Now he dug into his wallet. "Give the choirboys a round. Catch yourself, too."

  "Thanks, I'll take mine in the register. Save you the tip." Schooners of beer flew down the bar, the whiskey and paradoxical bitters and sugar were magically mixed, Ben watching fascinated as ever at the skill in those hands. Tom Harry could never be cast as a bartender, he decided. He overfilled the part. The slicked-back black hair, the blinding white shirt, the constant towel that swabbed the bar to a gleam. The peerless saloonkeeper scowled now in the direction of the sheepherders, which seemed to make them remember their manners. In one voice they quavered a toast to Ben: "Here's at you."

  With that tended to, the man behind the bar put his towel to work on the trail of the glass after he slid it to Ben. "Just get in?"

  "Hour ago."

  "Been places, I hear."

  "They ship me around, some."

  "Gonna be anybody left on the face of the earth when this war gets done?"

  During this the sheepherders conferred in mumbles. Celebrating their largesse of beer, the two were counting out their pooled small change, pushing the coins together with shaky forefingers. "Barkeep?" Canada Dan cleared his throat importantly. "You got any of them jellied eggs?"

  "Jesus, gourmets," Tom Harry muttered, carrying the briny crock of preserved boiled eggs down the length of the bar along with his disgust. While the egg transaction dragged on, Ben quietly sipped and gazed past the reflections in the plate glass window to downtown Gros Ventre at night. The civil old trees. His father's newspaper office, still alight down the street, another timeless pillar of the town. On the next block beyond the Gleaner, the Odeon theater where teenaged Ben Reinking every Saturday night of his life stayed on through the second show—the "owl show" at nine that repeated the feature movie for a tardy gathering of drunks, late-arriving lovers, and insomniacs—to dissect how the makers of movies made them. Centralities of his growing up here, those, along with the one where he sat now. He knew there was no denying the influence of bloodline, but by quite a number of the readings he could take on his life so far, Gros Ventre and the Two Medicine country, out there in the dark, served as a kind of parentage too. Whatever he amounted to, this was where it came from.

  The keeper of the bar returned, still wagging his head over the jellied egg binge. Ben twirled his glass indicatively on the dark wood. "Any more of this in the well?"

  "The war must be teaching you bad habits," Tom Harry grumbled as he mixed the refill.

  "Speaking of those." Ben watched for a reaction, but could see none. Standing there swishing the towel, the saloonman showed no sign he had ever been acquainted with practices such as providing working quarters for prostitutes, bootlegging, and, now with the war, operating in at least gray margins of the black market. "Here's what it is. I need a car and a bible of gas coupons."

  "Where you think you're gonna drive to with those—Paris, France, to get laid?"

  "You ought to know. Probably all over hell, but I'll start at the Two Medicine."

  The uncomprehending look on his listener was a reminder that not all of the world knew about Vic, at least yet. He again told what the minefield had done.

  "What a hell of a thing to go through life like that." Eyes reflective, Tom Harry wiped slowly at the bar wood after Ben told him. "Known that kid since he was a pup." He flicked a look at Ben. "Weren't you here for funerals the last couple of times?"

  Ben gulped more of his drink than he'd intended, unsteadied by having something like that attached to him. O'Fallon's and Havel's, those were. The mouthy mick left guard and the taciturn baby-faced center. Tepee Weepy wanted every drop of drama from the Supreme Team; it had sent the Pulitzer judges his piece about the Butte slum wake held for O'Fallon. He hadn't even liked O'Fallon.

  How much does history rehearse? he had to wonder. The first funeral of all was Purcell's. The entire team in that tumbleweed hometown cemetery. Coach Bruno piously delivering the eulogy into the radio microphone at graveside. Didn't it set the pattern, the team's every movement on the airwaves and in the headlines from then until—

  All at once he realized Tom Harry still was eyeing him speculatively.

  "There's a war on," he managed to say evenly. "Things happen to people."

  "Must get kind of old, is all I'm saying." The bartender slung the towel aside. "Drink up. The Packard is out back."

  The long black car, its grandeur a bit faded from ten years of imaginative use, seemed to fill half the alley behind the saloon. Ben circled the streamlined old thing as Tom Harry stood by, proprietorially. "How are the tires?"

  "What do you think?" the Packard's beset guardian barked. "Thin as condom skin. Here, throw these in the trunk." He rummaged in the shed room piled high with amazing items that Medicine Lodge customers with more thirst than cash had put up as collateral, and rolled two spare tires toward Ben.

  "Reinking." Tom Harry tossed him the keys to the car, then the packet of gas ration coupons. "Tell Toussaint for me I'm sorry his grandkid got it that way. If you can find the old coyote."

  2

  How did you ever stand it out here in hermit heaven, Vic? Looking around from the height of the river bluff at the silent miles of prairie in three directions and the mute cliffs of the Rockies in the other, Ben reconsidered. Make the question, how did his best friend ever stand being crammed into Army life after an existence populated only by wind, buffalo grass, and a wraith of a grandfather? Military routine could tie a person's guts in knots; he knew the feeling himself.

  Impatiently he checked his wristwatch again; half the morning was gone just getting here. Cass was curious, the other night, why this had to be circled in on, phony days of leave and the bus ride home and all, and he couldn't blame her. In between kissing him silly she had asked why he couldn't just requisition a motor pool car for a day and get back in time to attend to business in bed. The answer was not a damn bit more satisfying now than it was then: because that wasn't how Tepee Weepy did things. There's the easy way and their way.

  Leaving the Packard on what passed for a road along the rocky upper gorge of the Two Medicine River, he picked his way on foot through the braid of ruts that led down to the Rennie ranch buildings huddled at the river's edge. The log house did not show any activity as he approached, although all too plainly a visitor was a rarity.

  There was a bad sign, literally, the moment he stepped into the dooryard, a blotch of something written in red on the rusty weathered door, like lipstick on a witch. Walking up to it with a sinking feeling, he found it was a shingle tacked to the doorwood and lettered on it in barn paint the message: ELK SEASON.

  Incredulous, Ben squinted west, met there by half the mountains in North America. Hunt a hunter in one day, in all that? It was too much, this whole deal of Quick Vic and a roving grandfather old as the hills. Toussaint Rennie must be crowding eighty-five. He didn't have any business going after elk alone.

  While Ben stood there stewing, the silence of the dried-up little ranch seemed to reprove him. Out where weeds took over from the yard, the pole corral stood empty except for one broom-tail pony, and the barn looked like it would fall down if a person blew his nose in its vicinity. All right, he conceded, maybe pursuit of elk was the only business Toussaint did have. But where in this rugged upper end of the Two M
edicine country would the old reprobate have a favorite hunting ground?

  For a moment—more than that, actually—he was tempted to give this up and concoct whatever he could, from football times together, for the TPWP piece about Vic. Give it the Loudon treatment for once. Loudmouth it, as the Treasure State team had learned to refer to the guff put out week by week by the sportswriter climbing to fame on their backs in '41. Ted Loudon's coarsest lead followed Vic's four-touchdown game: Wyoming was scalped on its home field today by a halfback marauder from the northern plains named Vic Rennie. Ben would have given plenty, then and now, to see the copy Loudon handed in and verify whether the sonofabitch had actually written half-breed halfback and a queasy editor struck it out, or if Loudon had chosen to let it just smirk there in the shadows of marauder and scalped. He and Jake Eisman and most of the rest of the team had wanted to go to Bruno and tell him to shape up his mouthpiece buddy Loudon, but Vic only said he was used to that kind of crap.

  Conscience makes tough company, Ben found again. Concocting would not do—this was Vic, and the last time he would be written about, possibly ever—and besides, in the zipper pocket of the flight jacket was what he was supposed to give to the old man who had raised his friend; he would have sworn he could feel the weight of the thing in there, featherlight though it was. No, at the very least he had to ask around. This is such a famously friendly neighborhood, right, Vic? He trudged back up to the Packard, patted it in apology, and navigated it across a barely wide enough stringer bridge to the reservation side of the river, to look up Toussaint's Blackfeet relatives. In-laws, rather, and that proved to be the problem.

  "That skunk fart—why would I keep track of him?" was the extent of the answer at the first ranch of the Rides Proud clan that he tried.

  Ben had been afraid of this. It was notorious throughout this Blackfoot end of the Two Medicine country that the Rennie bloodline was from away—some adamantly mysterious route that seemed to take in hazy tribal background to the east and the Métis rebellion in Canada to the north and very likely a French trapper named Reynaud somewhere along the way—and Toussaint Rennie reveled in perching just outside the edge of the reservation, knowing everyone else's business and never showing his Blackfoot neighbors any of his own hand except the back of it. He conspicuously never got along with his Blackfoot wife, Mary Rides Proud, while she was alive, and to judge by how good a job her blood relations were doing of keeping up hostilities in memory of Mary, even long after. Twice more Ben underwent it, amiable leather-faced men emerging from corral or barn in greeting, then turning away when he mentioned the name Toussaint. Goddamn it, you'd think they were the Germans and the Russians going at it. As he pulled in to the last ranch on that stretch of the river, he was watching cautiously for the next Rides Proud man on the prod.

  This time, though, a Blackfoot woman came out on the front steps, her hands in the folds of her checkered dress, and told him in the flattest of voices her husband was up on the bluff fixing fence.

  Something in her features reminded Ben of Vic. He gave it a try: "I'm looking for Victor's grandfather."

  "Victor," the woman tested the name and ignored the rest. "His mother was my cousin."

  Ben gingerly fished into the tangle of family. "The relative who'd raised Victor by the time I knew him was his grandfather. It's important that I find him. Where would he go to hunt elk, do you think?"

  The woman kept her gaze on Ben for some seconds, then came down off the steps. She turned her back to the mountains and pointed. "Likes to say he has his own herd."

  Totally surprised, Ben stared east into the deep V of the river valley and the distant patches of prairie captured between the outline of the bluffs. He had never in his life heard about any elk herd in the Two Medicine bottomlands. She's putting me on. What do I do now? Then it sank in on him. The woman was pointing all the way east, to the horizon. To the Sweetgrass Hills, rising like three mirage islands on the earthbrim where the sun came up.

  Back at the car, he took another sighting on the ghostly trio of distant hills. He figured the trip at a hard two hours' drive, but he didn't mind that as much as the direction. He still could not shake the creepy feeling that the law of averages was not working, something was cockeyed; every point on the compass since this set of orders caught up with him in New Guinea was east.

  East Base had changed beyond sane recognition when he'd alit there, the month before. Only the Black Eagle smokestack stood the same as ever on the transformed prairie—the military in its inexplicable fashion having chosen to install an airfield almost under the shadow of the highest man-made obstacle between Seattle and Minneapolis. Who would have thought Montana was destined to become a staging area for the war in the first place? But the world of war shifted massively when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and with the task of conveying thousands of aircraft to the forces of America's new ally Joseph Stalin, the Air Transport Command had snatched up this base since the last time Ben landed here. Up until now he had not paid much attention to the ATC, something of a stepchild in the military scheme of things, other than the jeer he'd heard in fighter pilot school that the initials stood for Allergic To Combat. Never mind, he tried to tell himself, hadn't he pulled temporary duty at out-of-it outfits before?

  Reporting in, fatigued from bucket-seat flights in C-47 transports, he presented his paperwork in the same tired routine as he'd done countless times, countless places. This time the processing clerk, a bald corporal, furrowed up over the orders before stamping them and handing them back with a dubious "There you go, Lieutenant"—they all did that—then jabbed a finger to the base map on the wall. "Here's your next stop, the clap shop."

  "Cut the crap, okay? I don't have anything." In no mood for dealing further with a cynical paper-pusher, Ben was trying in vain to pick out the bachelor officers' quarters on the map; whatever else the Air Transport Command transported, it brought buildings by the dozens.

  "That's what all the boys say, sir," the clerk sang out. "Commander's orders. He's on a tear about VD. All incoming personnel have to be checked out, first thing."

  Drawing on his annoyance to plot how he might get away with infectious in a piece on the level of enthusiasm here, Ben stepped out into the world of East Base. Now that he had a chance to take a good look around, there wasn't a trace of the tar-paper infirmary he remembered before, nor anything else from his last quick TDY here. Mammoth hangars yawned open onto the longest runway he had seen yet in his war travels. Deep inside the hangar nearest him, swarms of mechanics on platform ladders squirmed into open bays of fuselages. Fresh new bombers and fighter planes had to undergo shakedown here after being flown in from factories on the West Coast and before being handed over to Russian pilots waiting in Alaska, he understood that much of the Lend-Lease operation. But he puzzled over the relatively empty flight line, no clusters of aircraft rolled out and sitting ready to go. Instead, great batches of unpainted planes were lined up on an apron behind the hangars, like shorn sheep trying to get out of the weather. A sudden wild gust that had him grabbing at his crush hat made him laugh in spite of himself. Think about it, Reinking. You're in Great Falls, home of the seventy-yard punt when the wind is up. Those planes were tied down to mooring rings back there so they wouldn't blow over.

  At least the wind was something familiar. He had not paid enough attention to where the irksome clerk pointed on the map. Casting around for directions, he wandered into the huge hangar and over to the nearest P-39 where a lone mechanic was up on a wing and head-down in the engine compartment. "Hey, buddy, which way to the clap shop?"

  The figure in coveralls withdrew from the engine and a fetching brunette hairdo and hazel eyes with temper in them came with it. "Cozying up to strange women," the voice was feminine but oh how it carried, "is usually a good start toward it."

  Ben stood there wondering if he looked as mortified as he felt. All over the hangar other heads popped out of other planes: a set of blonde curls here, a hairnet there, and everywher
e chest-high indications in the coveralls. The place was all women. A majority of them, it seemed to him as he tried not to gape, were devoting full attention to him and this vixen high over him on the airplane wing.

  Trim as a terrier within the folds of the coveralls, she was wiping her hands on a grease rag while she eyed Ben up and down. If looks could kill, she did not need a fighter plane on her side. Squinting up as she glared down, he parked his hands in the pockets of his flight jacket, hoping a casual approach might simmer her down. "Don't get the wrong idea. I'm only checking in. Which means I have to be checked out, they tell me. Look, miss, I'm not trying to be fresh."

  She did a little something to the collar of her greasy coveralls, and an insignia flashed out. "Try 'Captain,' why don't you."

  Too late he caught sight of the ready-bag sitting in the cockpit hatch, with WASP wings and a squadron commanding officer's striped star stenciled on it. Just my luck with this base, I light in here and brush up against a queen bee. "Next time I'll be sure to, Captain. Steer me to the infirmary and I'll have my IQ checked along with the rest, how about?"

  "Three buildings down from Ops, where the control tower is, and ask for the short-arm inspector. If your IQ is where I think it is, you can have both done at once." She finished him off with a last dismissing look. "Crew chief!" she was moving on to her next victim even before he turned away. "Who looked over this engine, Helen Keller? The points are burned. I want them filed down and reset before I take this crate for a checklist run."

  Glad to get out of there with his hide on, Ben went and presented himself at the infirmary for the evidently important process of dropping his pants. A clean bill of health promised to be his only gain for the day, however. At his next stop, the BOQ clerk did not even make a pretense of looking up an empty bunk for him. "You're billeted downtown, transient basis. The Excelsior Hotel."