The Eleventh Man (13 page)

"Alongside you, Carl," Ben replied more calmly than he felt about it, "that's the idea. Although they only let me carry paper and pencil."

Friessen deliberated again. "Suit yourself, Lefty. We've tried all other kinds on the Japs, why not pencil lead?"

A week later, the two of them were on a slippery trail in the head-high grass on the ridge above the Bitoi River, with the other seven men of Carl's squad. Ben intended to called it quits as soon as they made it back to the invasion perimeter. His pad was full with the past days. The predawn scene in the landing craft as it broached in a big wave and seasick soldiers had to dodge a sliding jeep that broke loose from its fastenings. The Australian commandoes guiding them ashore with blinking signal lights after wading in from behind enemy lines through a swamp and swimming to the assault beach, the winks of brightness showing each man of them standing in the sand proudly naked except for his Digger hat. The steady advice from Carl during the endless crawl for the shelter of the tree line as Japanese bullets flew over them: "Keep your head and butt down. Remember gopher hunting? We're the gophers here." By now, abundantly shot at but not shot up, Carl's unit was dug in inland from the beachhead and everyone agreed they had lucked out so far. The Japanese line had bent back up the height of ground overlooking the Bitoi River and the plan was to let the artillery plaster them there for a while. Sent on patrol before daybreak to sight out a forward observation point, the squad had mapped and azimuthed a good spot and, job done, were heading gingerly back down the trail, the scout out front with a tommy gun, followed by the buck sergeant in charge, then Carl with Ben tagging close behind, the rest of the column bringing up the rear. When something plopped in the mud at the heels of the scout, it took a split second for them all to realize it hadn't dropped from his pack. That left very little time before the grenade would go off.

"Down!" the buck sergeant screamed. Carl hit the ground, Ben an instant behind him. The grenade's explosion heaved the trail under Ben's belly. He heard somebody cry out, hit by fragments. The trailside grass tore open, Japanese in camouflage uniforms pouring out, five, six,
will they never stop coming,
eight. Carl reared onto his knees and shot one before his rifle was clubbed out of his hands by a Japanese mortarman madly swinging the mortar barrel like a sledgehammer. The American on the other side of Ben was being bayoneted by a surprisingly large enemy soldier. Fumbling for the only weapon he had, a trench knife, Ben rolled that direction and slashed the tendons across the back of the Jap's legs. As Ben scrambled to his feet above the shrieking, flopping enemy soldier, a shot came from someplace—he never knew where—and tore a piece of meat off the tip of his left shoulder. It missed bone and bicep by a fraction of an inch, but the impact and pain sent him reeling. Around him the trail had turned into a muddy trench of men clubbing, grappling, firing. Another American went down, then two Japanese blown away by the buck sergeant's .45 pistol. Carl was kicking at the maniacal mortarman who in a final wild sling hurled the mortar and grabbed for a grenade on his belt. Carl swarmed onto him and the two went down in a pile together, the Jap's arm outstretched and the grenade twitching in his hand as he tried to dislodge its pin. Wound and all, Ben flung himself, desperately pinning down the struggling arm, his blood dripping over the tangle of the three of them, until Carl clambered astraddle of the enemy soldier and with no other weapon at hand beat the man to death with his helmet.

"What's this, the poor man's Hemingway green around the gills?" Dex's tone turned unmistakably medical and concerned. "Something wrong with you?"

Trying not to let the effort show, Ben forced himself back to the task that had brought him to Seeley Lake.

"Sick of what we're all going through, isn't that enough?" he evaded with another modification of truth. He had led the camp director to believe Dex's decision not to fight could be read between the lines of whatever he wrote about the smoke-jumper camp; try as he might, people would need something stronger than Dex's microscope to find anything of the sort, Tepee Weepy would see to that. He had told poor Jones before leaving him to the dogs that he was going into Helena to spend the day covering a war bonds bingo marathon; half an hour had taken care of it, then he'd headed here.
Big day for the one-man liar's club.
He was starting to feel like he needed a bath. Something had to be said, and he put all he could into it:

"Dex? Guess what, it's your turn to be written about and I'm up against it."

"I thought so." The well-bred Cariston face smiled the slightest bit. "Isn't there a saying from one of your movie moguls, 'Include me out?'"

Ben brought the TPWP patch on his arm around under Dex's nose. "The outfit I'm assigned to believes in all or none, and they're not interested in none."

"Can't they count better than that? I'm only one man out of eleven and—"

"Nine, now. Counting Vic."

Dex winced. "Ben, all right, I am the only one without his rump on the firing line somewhere." He eyed his listener speculatively. "Even yours on occasion, if I don't miss my guess. You have the look of someone who wants 'at them.'"

I've been at them. They've been at me. My shoulder hurts, thinking about it.
"Let's don't argue about each other's reasons, Dex. Pearl Harbor and Hitler invading everyplace are signs enough to me they're out to get us, and I don't like being got."

"Granted. But I believe several million others are 'suited up for democracy'"—Dex took a meaningful look at Ben's flight jacket—"to forestall that. There will never be a shortage of people to fight wars, will there. Would the eleven of us be missed if it wasn't for this mysterious menagerie you write for?" He arched his head to one side as if a thought had just come to him. Ben was remembering the time Dex had stopped football practice cold by asking Bruno why football-field lines always were laid out in skin-eating lime instead of talcum. "Take that further," he was formulating now, "what if all of us together had said no to induction—"

"You'd have had to hog-tie Animal."

"—and instead—"

"And coldcocked Stamper and Danzer because they wouldn't get to show off at parades."

"—shut up a minute, will you; and volunteered for something like this outfit instead? The team that followed its conscience away from war instead of toward it." Dex's gaze at him had grown as intense as it could get. "You're the writer, Ben, what's wrong with a story like that?"

"You want my two-bits' worth? First, we wouldn't be known as the famous Golden Eagles of '41 anymore, we'd be called the Golden Chickens. Maybe that'd be a relief, I don't know."

"Not necessarily," Dex put in caustically. "There's still a reputation attached. When we hitchhike to town from here, the local yokels try to run over us." Somewhere overhead the Ford Tri-Motor droned around and around, no doubt dropping little weighted windage test chutes. Dex glanced up. "We even have to watch our step around our Forest Service trainers. Some are okay about us, some aren't."

"I imagine. To answer what you asked, though. If the rest of us pleaded conscientious"—he tried to glide nicely over the
conchie
sound in that—"alongside you, I figure we'd all add up to a footnote in some philosophy book someday. A one-paragraph kiss on the cheek from Bertrand Russell, tops. One thing sure, the United States military wouldn't be demanding a piece on you peachy-keen gridiron heroes from me every month."

"We're nothing but trophies, you're saying."

"No, on top of that you're a friend and a pain in the ass." Ben checked his wristwatch and made a face. "Dex, listen, I only came here because I have to know. This is it for you?" He swept a hand around at the camp. "For good?"

The uncommon furrow across Dex's brow showed he took that as an affront. Before he could say anything, Ben spelled out:

"For the duration. For however long this damned war takes. If there's any chance you're going to change your mind, get tired of people trying to run you over and decide to waltz off into a medical deferment from a friendly doctor your family might happen to be acquainted with"—he locked eyes with Dex and kept them there—"I need to know now. If I wiggle hard, I could skip writing about you maybe a month or two yet." He paused. "What I can't do, you better understand, is some piece that outright says you're a conscientious objector. They'd throw that away so fast it'd set the wastebasket on fire." Ben shifted from one foot to the other, as if adding body English to what he was about to say. "But I'm not the only scribbler in existence, Dex. If that's the story you want out, you could put it out yourself. The
Chicago Tribune
loves anything that shows up Roosevelt and his crowd. Or go the other direction, the parson who runs this place likely would have some ideas about how to show you off to the world as pacifist Exhibit A."

"Don't think he hasn't brought it up." Now Dex was the one who looked anguished. "You want to know if I'm here until the last shot is fired. All I can tell you is, I made the hardest choice of my life to be here and I
am
here. Believe me, I've lost sleep over it. Most nights." Ben read his face in a way he had never had to before; Dex was not the confessing sort. "You aren't able to write the plain truth about me," he could hear the cost in the words, "and I don't dare make it known either. One guess why, Ben. Cariston Enterprises. I have two brothers-in-law in the war. I'm the direct heir, but there'll be a family fight for control, down the line. The gaffer"—Ben wondered just how much wealth one had to grow up with to call one's father that—"is backing me, so far. But he doesn't want it shouted around that the last male Cariston refuses to shoulder arms for his country." Dex broke off, offering a bleak smile. "There. Secrets of the rich."

"One size fits everybody," Ben said thinly.

"So, you have to hide me in plain sight." The idea seemed to intrigue Dex. "I'll be interested to see what you come up with."

So will I, Dex, so will I.
Before turning to go, there was one more thing he had to tend to. "I'll bet an outfit like the Forest Service would have a jerry can of gas they could loan to a man. Particularly if they didn't know about it."

"Stuck your neck out to get here, did you?"

"Only about a hundred miles."

Dex clapped him on the shoulder. "Come on, there's a back door to the fuel shed."

The next day, his conscience objecting every word of the way, he wrote Dexter Cariston into undesignated war duty, a medic repairing men who parachuted into fields of fire, the type of fire not specified.

You're hard to keep up with, Ben. First time I've ever been on a date on an obstacle course.
The painted stones spelled the way down the steep sidehill, the enormous lettering ghost-white in the bunchgrass. "I've flown over this rockpile a hundred times," Cass said over her shoulder, trying to watch her footing on the path pocked with gopher holes, "and always wondered, What goofball did this?" She and Ben were in civilian clothes, gabardine slacks that cheatgrass and other pestiferous plants theoretically could not penetrate, and good warm canvasback jackets, and battered fedora and granny scarf which they teased each other looked like missionary throwaways. He carried the heavy picnic basket and she had the blanket over one arm.

Shaking his head at the countless chunks of sandstone amassed and laid out side by side into a blocky 5 and 7, Ben answered: "A pickle salesman with time on his hands." Together the numbers took up what looked like half an acre of hillside, sitting prominent enough on the prow of the butte that the dubious eminence of Hill 57 could be read from several miles off. "One guess on how many varieties the guy peddled."

She laughed and skidded a little at the same time.

"Hey, careful," he chided. "I don't want to have to pick you out of somebody's junkyard down there."

"It's your fault, Romeo. I'm usually in a cockpit when I'm up this high."

The view of Great Falls stretched below them, the squarely laid-out city with the renegade river winding through where it pleased, the smelter stack like a monstrous chess piece at the farthest city limits, the university cozy amid its groves of trees at the closer edge of the street grid, and nearest of all, the stadium cuddled at the base of the butte across the way, with game-day flags flapping brightly in the breeze. "How do you like Homecoming so far?" he asked with a solicitous grin as he gave her a hand around a patch of prickly pear cactus.

"My hunch is, it'll never replace poker." Cass stopped short, staring ahead. "Ben?" she murmured. "Are you sure this is such a hot idea?"

"Let's find out what our hosts think about it."

There were twenty or so of the Hill 57 residents on hand as spectators, mostly ragged-looking men but a couple of families with kids in charity clothes, all sitting with their backs against the pale curve of rocks that made the bottom of the 5 and now all looking over their shoulders at two unexpected visitors. Ben tried to read the line of Indian faces, but the scatter of rough-built shacks and even more miserable lean-to shanties farther down the hill said enough; tar paper and gabardine would never meet comfortably. He clutched Cass by a tense elbow and they stood waiting a minute. Finally a chesty man at the near end of the group lurched to his feet and faced up the slope toward them. Tottering alcoholically or arthritically or both, he rumbled out: "You folks a little lost?"