The Eleventh Man (11 page)

"You passed up Joe E. Brown for me?" Ben's voice rose mischievously. "Where's your sense of humor?"

"Yuk yuk," she obliged. "He has his audience, I evidently have mine." He watched as she poured double wallops of scotch, then driblets of water from the chipped enamel pitcher: Cass could fly with the boys, Cass could drink with the boys.

He made room for her now as she slid in and propped up against the bedstead next to him, each being careful with the precious scotch. Nonetheless Ben snuggled in on her. Do illicit lovers snuggle? He decided hell, yes, they do in this case. The war was away for the night, even if it was going to be a short night.

Cass, though, interrupted his attentions by clinking her glass against his.

"Hey you, Mister Busy. We need to have a toast. To General Grady, our poor ass-chewn commanding officer."

Very slowly Ben took a sip, eyeing her. "How'd you know he hauled me in to his office yesterday because of that?"

Her turn to be surprised. "I didn't. We just heard tonight about Grady getting reamed out good, along with the change of orders. Mary Catherine's sister is a WAVE clerk back there"—
there
always meant Washington—"and she phoned M.C. to say it was all over the Pentagon, how the prissy old Air Transport Command got turned every way but loose over a dozen WASPs in Great Falls."

He took a stronger swig of his drink. "What change of orders?"

"We get to fly on the Alaska run, Ben." She looked at him proudly. "The first leg of it anyway, up to Edmonton. That's a big, big start—WASP 1 crossing the border just like the big boys."

"The hell you say." It took him no time whatsoever to put it together. "The Senator kicked until they gave in."
The old wirepuller reads a line or two I put in that piece, and Cass and her pilots get Canada handed to them? Tepee Weepy and me, that deadly a combination?

Cass grinned. "Maybe Mrs. Senator did some kicking of her own."

"Could be. Anyway, screw Grady, let's drink to Luther and Sadie." With that, the state's senior senator and possibly just as senior spouse were accorded their due in scotch.

Cass belted hers down while his was barely to his lips, and scooted to the dresser to fetch the bottle. This time Ben saw not only a lovely, lively woman who happened to fit into a Cobra cockpit, but a destined ace pilot of some kind. Captain Cassia Standish and her squadron given the go-ahead to fly in wartime airspace outside the U.S., even if it was only across a couple of Canadian provinces so far: who knew where that would lead? War correspondents read other correspondents, and he was well apprised from Russian dispatches that the Red Air Force already had women flying in combat, surely some of them in the same P-39s—the Laplander legend notwithstanding—that had hop-scotched all the way from East Base. It went through him in a chill mix of clarity and dismay: if the powers that be were ever to begin miraculously handing out assignment orders according to abilities shown thus far in World War Two, Cass and her WASPs might as well go all the way to the Eastern Front and take on the Luftwaffe, while groundpounders like him stirred the Kool-Aid at USO dances.

Cass luckily broke in on his tumble of thoughts. "I've been so wound up, I haven't even asked how leave was. Fun?"

"The opposite." He told her the story of Vic.

"That's rough." Without being asked, Cass bolstered his drink. "A leg off—I think I'd rather be dead, put out of my misery."

When Ben didn't say anything, she shifted around on the covers to face him more directly. In bed and out, he was unbeatable company, bright as a mint silver dollar, funny when he wanted to be, but deep-down serious about life; any way she looked at him, he amounted to a first-class passion ration. And while maybe she was stuck with wearing a wedding band, he was the one trapped in a wartime marriage of inconvenience with the shiny-pants Washington outfit with all the initials.
It's going to happen one of these times like that, isn't it, Ben. That Tepee Creepy outfit will yank you off somewhere to chase after another one of your team buddies and make you keep going, no more East Base, no more me. No more us, except pen pals. And that kind of ink never lasts.
Asking, she carefully confined it to: "What's next?"

Sensing treacherous territory, Ben answered with equal care: "Just more of the same, a catch-up piece on one of the guys on the team. He's—someplace I can't tell you about or why."

Cass let her puzzlement show. "Then how do you write about somebody like that?" Jake Eisman the other night had asked the same thing: "How in the hell do you show off Dex without blowing his cover?"

"Goddamn carefully," Ben recited the same answer. "Don't give me that look, you with the airplane. I know better than anybody that what they've stuck me doing in this war is a strange business, stranger some times than others."

"Touchy. All I was going to ask is, are you going to be away? To wherever this mystery gink is?"

"I find that out tomorrow."

"Ben?" Cass swirled the last of her drink, gazing into the bottom of the glass as if fortune-telling. "Something you better know."

At her tone, he braced back a bit against the bedstead. "Ready on the firing line, I guess."

"I'm a wingwalker."

He looked at her cautiously. "The county fair kind?"

"Fairs, air shows, rodeos, you name it. Anywhere people would pay to see somebody swoop over them hanging on to the struts and guywires of a biplane. If it was a woman, so much the better for the take." She tossed her head, as if the whipstream of wind from back then was in her hair again.

"I, ah, more figured you for a stunt pilot."

"That, too. We—"

Her voice caught on the word, Ben waiting unmoving until she could get hold of herself enough to go on. She had told him how she'd haunted the airfield outside Missoula when she was a kid, brassed her way into the Civilian Pilot Training course when there was a tiny opening for women, and in the end linked up with a smoke jumper turned aircraft rigger for the Forest Service; the wedding ring there on her finger told the rest of that.

"—Dan and I," she managed to get the words out, "talked about barnstorming across the whole country. Turn into flying gypsies, kind of. We weren't much more than punk kids, it sounded like heaven to us. Off we went, weekends, holidays, giving it a try wherever there was some kind of two-bit show. I'd loop the loop and all that, and for the finale a buddy of ours who flew for the smokies would take the controls and I'd waltz out onto the wing. We were hot stuff on the fairgrounds circuit there for a while. Then right away with the war, Dan's Guard unit was called up—you know all that."

Choosing between perils, Ben turned the topic back to wing-walking: "Uh huh, well, that's quite a talent."

"Know what the first rule of wingwalking is?"

He could tell this was not the time to guess
Don't sneeze?
"I'm here listening."

"Never leave hold of what you've got, until you've got hold of something else."

He covered her ring hand with his own, the ache for her now a sharp pain.

"That goes for guys as well as guywires, am I to understand? Husband kind of guy?"

"For the duration, Ben," Cass said levelly, "like every other damn thing. Even if I wash out of the war somehow or who knows what happens"—he understood that meant even if something took him out of the war in more or less one piece—"I couldn't do it to Dan, leave him while he's out there getting shot at. If I did, you would always wonder what sort of tramp you'd ended up with."

Her next words stumbled a bit but they came.

"We're loco over each other, but that can't change the fact that I am as married as a person can get." She poked him in a rib, trying to change the mood, her eyes saying she was desperate to. "So, football hero—why aren't you? It might have saved us a lot of trouble."

Ben thought. "I didn't ever have time to."

"Ben!" Cass couldn't help laughing. "It only takes two minutes in front of a Justice of the Peace, believe me."

"Two minutes is a long time for a football player." He wanted out of the dead end of conversation as badly as she did. "The wingwalking. You're, ah, not going back to that, are you? After the war?"

"Don't know yet. A lot depends."

He shook his head, resorting to mock rue, some of it not so mock. "A woman who flies a fighter plane with a ceiling of thirty-five thousand feet, and as if that isn't enough fooling around with altitude, she wants to get out and stroll along the wing of some crop dust clunker. I have to inform you, Captain Standish, that's the long way around to get your kicks. A nuthouse doctor would definitely call that a promiscuous acrophiliac tendency."

Cass's smile crept out and grew impish. "Know what? You make it sound dirty."

"A guy can hope."

She peeked down. "I see he can. And there's still some night left."

The teletype clerk looked up nervously when he strode into the wire room, early if not bright, the next morning. Ben was used to causing dismay this way. He knew he was hated by innumerable men around the world who had never laid eyes on him. Public affairs officers required to keep close track of the doings of whatever member of the Supreme Team they were unfortunate enough to have in their unit. Code clerks who had to make room for the priority dispatches to some destination known as TPWP. All of them wondering, what in the name of brassbound military rigamarole was this about? Hell, he wondered that himself too much of the time. Resolutely trying to clear his head of the lingering effects of the scotch and Cass, he grabbed the nearest message pad—it happened to be the jittery clerk's—and wrote down in block letters:

O
DD MAN OUT STILL OUT
. W
HAT DO
?

As the clerk took it to code and send it, Ben added an instruction guaranteed to further mess up the man's day: "Let me know as soon as the reply hits that machine. Not a runner. You."

Ben had barely settled into his desk chair to try to look busy and Jones was assiduously sorting old piles of accumulated paperwork into new piles when the clerk stuck his head in the office. "It just came in, sir."

What there was of it. Standing over the teleprinter as the clerk fed in the decoded version, he frowned at the sole word that chattered out:

P
UNT
.

Very funny, you bunch of sadistic deskwarmers.
Actually he had no idea whether Tepee Weepy's cryptic messages emanated from an entire bureaucratic swarm or from that mustached colonel single-handedly thrusting pieces of paper at some frazzled wire clerk. Either scenario, it came to the same: orders were supposed to be orders. In the face of that, Ben pulled the message pad to him again and wrote out:

F
IELD SLIPPERY HERE, PUNT INADVISABLE
. G
O TO CAMP
?

He didn't even make it back to the office before the clerk chased him down. The reply awaiting him this time was anything but brief.

D
O NOT REPEAT NOT GO TO CAMP
. M
AKE STORY LOUD ON BACKFIELD ANGLE
. I
MPERATIVE
.

Ben's groan alarmed the clerk.
Sonofabitch.
Loudon, of all damn people to be expected to imitate.
If they want the Loudon approach—
twelve hundred overripe words about the glory days of the Treasure State backfield, the cloud-of-horseshit kind of sportswriting Ted Loudon could produce in his sleep—
then why don't they just put the jerk in my uniform and be done with it? Let him phony it up about Dex.

Ben crumpled the message into his pocket and stalked out. The more he thought about it, the more fed up he got. The likes of Ted Loudon and Grantland Rice and other bards of sentimental slop about sports notwithstanding, the One Great Scorer was not visibly awarding touchdowns to the TSU backfield in the game of war. A misty-eyed glance backward to the season that ended with Pearl Harbor would do no justice to any of the four teammates. Jake would puke. Moxie Stamper would snicker. Vic above all deserved a decent cloak of quiescence over his running days. And Dex, whatever he had become, was no soap-slick halfback anymore. Ben reached the office with his mind made up.

"Jones, old lad, how would you like to go for a little ride tomorrow? Fill us out a motor pool requisition. Under REASON put down:
dogs of war.
And you better fill your pockets with puppy biscuits."

The pods of parachutes opened prettily, one blossom of silk after another, cloudflowers against the blue field of sky overtopping Seeley Lake and the Mission Mountains beyond. Ben had just joined the large circle of jumpsuited men craning their necks upward; even so, his uniform and flight jacket drew slanted looks from corners of eyes. He knew he had to hold his temper against the automatic hostility here; guys in the situation of these had plenty to watch out for. A groan went through the group as a billow of dust whirled across the landing strip, where strips of canvas were crisscrossed—tent-pegged down so as not to blow away, Ben could not help but notice—into a prominent X. Carrying its mischief higher, the gusty wind caught the dozen chutes, dancing the dangling men sideways across the air as if they were dandelion seeds. The first jumper managed to land with a neat tuck and roll, which could not disguise the fact that he had missed the X by fifty yards. The chutists after him, sawing desperately at their lines, landed progressively farther and farther off the mark, until the last few were blown into the chokecherry bushes at the far end of the airstrip.