The Eleventh Man (21 page)

Taking stock of the situation, they could tell it was impossible to climb an evergreen that tall and spindly; the upper branches would break off under the weight of a man and so might the whole crown of the tree. On the other hand, the base of the tree looked appallingly substantial when the only thing you had to chop it down with were machetes meant for jungle vines.

The first half hour's worth of excruciatingly careful chopping, so as not to break the blades, produced a notch about as big as a beaver could chew in minutes. Panting and arm-weary, they had just resigned themselves to another hour or so of chipping away, when the sound of a more powerful aircraft engine reached them.

They looked up. This one was arriving from what they figured was the direction of Edmonton and coming like a streak.

Ben identified the silhouette and wondered if he could be imagining.

"VIP treatment this time around, Benjamin." Jake shaded his eyes. "We rate a P-39. Hope the guy is bringing us long woolies and his aim is better than that last prick's."

There were thousands of Airacobras in the sky of war, hundreds of pilots gunning a twelve-piston engine to a full four hundred miles an hour at any given time. This one roaring in on them had no business being flown by her, Ben knew in the deepest reasoning part of himself; Cass could be on the Seattle run, or on the ground at East Base, or anywhere between. But reason did not stand a chance as he craved her into creation there in the sun-glint of the rapidly oncoming cockpit. As he watched, afraid to blink, the P-39 lowered its nose and dove toward them. Jake, waving both arms, froze into semaphore position as the plane skimmed into the clearing in the forest, low as a crop duster and fast as an artillery shell. Facing into the madcap flyover, Ben no longer knew whether to pray it was Cass or not at those controls.

The P-39 tore past so close over them they could feel the prop wash. Now he was sure it was no one but her. He felt queerly responsible: Cass only would have flown a circus stunt like that to see what condition the crash left him in.

"That," Jake declared in the corridor of dwindling roar as the fighter plane climbed sharply, "is one shit-hot pilot." Both men watched the Cobra's ascent as fliers do, as if counting contour lines of elevation.

At around fifteen hundred feet the plane pulled up and settled into circling over them.

"What the hell now?"

"Writing a message," Ben somehow was sure. "Come on, let's get way out in the middle of this mess, we don't want the drop bag to end up in another tree."

Clumsier than vertical bears, they plunged through the fallen-timber maze until they reached a marginally more open patch of muskeg. They planted themselves in anticipation there, and Jake took up waving again. "The goddamn guy doesn't have to check his spelling," he complained as the Cobra kept to its droning orbit over them for the next some minutes. "Just tell us how they're gonna get us out of here."

"He will." Ben had nearly admitted
She.
"Next pass, watch for the drop bag."

Both of them tensed, ready to chase down the weighted leatherine bag, like a long yellow stocking, wherever it landed.

What came sailing out of the P-39 was the size of a bulging mail sack, so accurately aimed it very nearly hit them.

Jumping back until they were certain it was through rolling, Ben and Jake needed a further instant to realize it was a duffel bag. Together they pounced and opened it. They pawed through like pirates at a treasure chest. C rations. Wool socks and gloves and watch caps. A down mummy bag. Matches. Two canteens of water. Two thermoses of hot coffee. Four cans of beer. Nestled amid it all, the message drop bag, and inside, the scrawled note:

Flyboys:

Happy to see you up and around. Proceed five miles, compass heading S/SW, to nearest lake. Bush plane will be waiting for you tomorrow—sorry I can't, but WASPs and Cobras don't swim.

Only room for one sleeping bag in the duffel, you'll have to share. Don't snuggle any closer than I would.

Jake looked up from the note as the P-39 cut another perfect tight circle over them, as if they were the bull's-eye of a target the size of Canada. "Bitch, whoever she is," he said in admiration.

The only acknowledgment Ben could think of was to throw up his hands in the possible direction of Edmonton—
Go! Go!
Jake looked at him for a moment, then commenced rummaging through the duffel bag. "Here's a dilemma—coffee or beer?"

"Save the beer." Ben watched the fighter plane go. "It's going to be a long night."

The five miles took them all the next day. Jake peglegged the distance, his twisted ankle splinted with halved tree branches, while Ben humped along with the precious duffel and picked out their compass route. At noon, barely halfway and their energy depleting fast, they made the decision to cram down all the C rations to give their bodies something to work with. Ultimately both men were staggering, but always in the direction pointed by the compass needle in Ben's hand, as they lunged out of the forest to a lakeshore just before dusk. Half a mile away at a mooring buoy, a floatplane revved its engine and began to cruise across the surface of the water. In terror that it was taking off, the two of them futilely tried to outshout the roar of the engine. Then the skimming floats beneath the plane cut an arc on the lakewater like skates curving on ice, and the aircraft slowed to a chug, aiming in to shore exactly at them.

Twenty-four hours later, with Jake unhappily tractioned in a hospital bed by the Canadian medical authorities, Ben mustered himself as the C-47 shuttle from Edmonton touched down at East Base. He ached in every possible part of himself and his face looked like he had been in a fight with a bobcat and he still had the entire slew of writing about the bomber journey to Alaska to be done.
Am I imagining, or am I losing ground faster than I can type?

Jones was waiting for him on the runway, faithfully rumpled and homely as a mud fence. "Welcome back, Lieutenant. I spent yesterday going over the regulations about escorting a coffin, but I'm glad it's you instead."

"Jones, you say the sweetest things." Even as the wind added its pesky greeting, Ben had to admit East Base looked like an oasis after where he'd been.

"Tepee Weepy radioed," Jones reported, awed at having heard the voice in clear air. "They want your first-person story of the crash right away. 'Soonest,' they said—I didn't know that was a word."

"It is with them."

"Uhm, Lieutenant, I'm supposed to tell you. Commander's orders, you're to report to the infirmary before you do anything else."

"If Grandpa Grady thinks I've had time to bring a dose of clap in from Canada—"

Jones surveyed Ben's black-and-blue jaw and skinned-up face. "Somehow I don't think it's that." He leaned in as if giving solace to a parishioner. "My guess is, he considers you a hero and wants to make sure you're all right."

"I'm touched," Ben growled.

"You maybe want to look at this while you're getting checked over—it came yesterday, highest priority." Jones handed him a wax-sealed packet. "The courier didn't want to give it to me, but I told him it was that or he could go find you in the Canadian wilderness."

"You're getting the hang of this, Jones." Throatily Ben pushed the words out past the choke hold of apprehension brought by the packet, the kind his transfer orders to another base ordinarily came in. He didn't want to open it with Jones watching. "Meet you back at the office."

"Don't forget the—"

"—clap shop, I won't, thank you very much, Jones." Ben stood there at the edge of the East Base runway buffeted by the wind, his thoughts whirling wildly.
If they yank me out of
here now ... How will I ever see her ... When will the war ever quit ...
He trudged toward the nearest hangar—it happened to be the one where he had first laid eyes on Cass—and ducked in out of the wind. Not a P-39 in sight; a B-17 bomber, clean-skinned and somehow the more ominous for that, was being worked over from nose to tail by a swarm of female mechanics. A hairnetted crew chief more muscular than Ben immediately slipped over to him. "Help you with something, Lieutenant?"

"Something sharp, chief, to open this with?"

The brawny woman pointed to a workbench strewn with tools. Ben went over and picked up a chisel. He lightly gouged the wax, the clock of war turning in him. How many time zones away from Cass Standish could a man stand to be? Her husband was seventeen away, if that was any guide.
And look what's happening to him.

He reached in and instead of orders pulled out a P-file, the standard military personnel folder, with the name, rank, and serial number inked in the upper right corner. In the opposite corner the file bore a red KIA tag, denoting Killed in Action. Carl Friessen was dead.

Stunned, Ben took in the words—"On patrol to secure the Hollandia perimeter in the New Guinea campaign ... enemy ambush..." No million-dollar wound nor any other kind short of lethal for the laconic lineman he had played next to, in the faraway of two years ago. Somehow Friessen's number had come up on the wrong side of the law of averages with the earlier two—so much for Tepee Weepy's goddamn statistical measurement—and a sick fury at the merciless twist in arithmetic filled Ben. Making a fist, he crumpled the envelope to hurl it in the waste barrel at the end of the bench; something inside resisted. He shook the envelope onto the worktable. Another file fell out, also with a KIA tag.

This one was Vic Rennie's.

The weather ever since Christmas had not been able to make its mind up, thawing and then turning cold, and candles of ice hung silvery on the otherwise darkened eaves of Gros Ventre. Now snow flurries and the breeze courting them waltzed across the surfaces of light spread onto the hardened ground from the front windows of the festive house, lit up in more ways than one this last and most celebrated night of the year. All evening long Cloyce Reinking had reminded her husband to keep the drinks flowing, people in this town soaked it in in a fashion that would have put a Beverly Hills crowd under the rug. She appraised the heightened conversations filling the living room from corner to corner and took as much satisfaction as she would allow herself in how the party was going.

"Unfair." Carnelia Muntz materialized at the buffet table as Cloyce was trying to deploy the buffet remnants to better effect. "How am I supposed to top this when I have the canasta club over, spike the angel food?" Carnelia was the banker's wife and always regally aware of it. She sighted over her glass to the circle of guests around the prize of the evening, the Senator and his wife and daughter. "You're a hard act to follow, Cloycie."

"You sound like Bill. He accuses me of a pagan passion for New Year's Eve."

"Your night to shine. I see Ben finally made it."

"The bus was late. This weather."

Carnelia negligently nibbled a crumble of the colorless cheese from the local creamery which neither woman would have stooped to if it hadn't been for wartime rationing. "He's quite the hero one more time, isn't he, walking away from that plane wreck."

Cloyce held her tongue, not wanting to further sharpen Carnelia's. She looked across the jammed room past the medleys of the socially positioned of the town—doctor, lawyer, mayor, school superintendent, county agent, on down to postmaster and druggist, and their wives in holiday best—to the kitchen hallway where her son's ginger hair overtopped her husband's. What now? she wondered with a frown as the pair of them in their nook stayed oblivious to the wall-to-wall guests. Midnight was not that far off, and Ben still had not been in general circulation.

"So we won't be seeing much of you for a while." Bill Rein-king's knuckles whitened on his bourbon glass.

"Mine not to reason why," Ben responded, tired through and through from trying to do exactly that. "I'll let Mother know tomorrow." What his latest set of orders, courtesy of Tepee Weepy, had in mind for him in the weeks and months ahead passed for creative in the military, but that didn't make it any less daunting to handle. All during the bus trip from East Base, calendar and map of war blended together into a twisty scroll he could see no end of, and arriving home under these circumstances further blurred the proportions of the existence being asked of him. Even the favorite old civilian clothes he had slipped into felt unfamiliar. The rising and falling crescendoes of party hubbub seemed otherworldly, echoes from some everlasting spot of time when mead and feasting greeted a solar change of fortunes. Yet this year's version held one prominent difference from his mother's other annual extravaganzas, there across the room where the Senator was holding forth about something and everyone around him was nodding as if keeping time. "Our hostess with the mostest hit the jackpot tonight, didn't she," Ben acknowledged. "The big sugar himself. How'd you drag him in on this?"

"The incalculable power of the press, of course," came the puckish answer. Bill Reinking elaborated that the lawmaker was in town on the start of a swing to sprinkle reclamation appropriations down the Continental Divide watersheds where his big voting majorities lay county by county. In short, the Senator had his own way of celebrating the onset of an election year. "When his press mouthpiece—sorry, his spokesman—phoned wanting to know if the Senator could get together with a few people while he was here, all I said was, 'How about half the town?'" The proprietor and opinion-setter of the
Gleaner
sighed. "Now I have to give the old boy a hard time in a couple of editorials to show he doesn't have me in his pocket."