The Eleventh Man (22 page)

"The fun and games of dealing with Washington. I'm going to have to take lessons from you." Ben did not smile as he said it.

"Don't I wish I had the formula to give you," came the swift response. "How hard did TPWP kick about your piece on Vic?"

"Enough to smart for a while," Ben had to admit, the hard-edged teletype messages back and forth still with him. "I finally had to dig in and point out to them they got all the goddamn combat angle they could possibly want in the one I had to do on Friessen."

A cascade of laughter from the contingent surrounding the Senator caused Ben to pause and look over there, then back at his father. "It was just Tepee Weepy's view of the war against mine, Dad. I'm over it." He wasn't. The whole thing with Vic still haunted him. Escorting caskets had that effect. When Corporal Victor Rennie was interred with full military honors in the cemetery up on the hill, the scene drew everlasting lines in the sod of memory. Toussaint ancient and alone on one side of the grave, the Blackfeet relatives at a little distance on the other side. Jake thumping around on his cast served as a pallbearer; Dex sent word he could not. Ben withstood it all except for the final three words in granite.
I managed to wangle out of my story what the lying bastards wanted in, buddy, but I couldn't keep it off the gravestone for you.
He glanced out the nearest window-well of light at the flurries lacing the bases of everything with whiteness; the stone-cut line
KILLED IN ACTION
soon would be covered until spring, at least.

Bill Reinking shook his head. In his time he had thrown away bales of news releases less fanciful than the Threshold Press War Project version that bestowed a heroic death in combat on a one-legged hospital patient confined to a wheelchair. "What've you been able to find out," he asked low and close, one journalist to another, "about the honest-to-God circumstances?"

"It wasn't pretty," Ben began tightly, "but it wasn't that different from what England has been put through all the time, either." Once more he imagined Vic there in the green and gray countryside where distant skytrails of smoke marked the ongoing battle between the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe. "Officially they called what happened a bombing raid on the hospital—that's how they tagged it 'combat' because it's a military installation of a kind and maybe somebody there did take a shot back at a plane." He lifted his shoulders, the universal
who knows?
In the scene in his mind, what counted was the amputee on wheels suddenly left to himself, his perch on the rolling lawn forgotten in the general scurry away from the approaching sounds of bombs. "Since no buildings were hit, my guess is it was some Jerry dumping his load before scooting back across the Channel and a few bombs strayed onto the hospital grounds."

The next words he organized with slow care, not wanting them to be too theatrical. "There's one of those old canals they have everywhere in that part of England, at the bottom of the slope from the hospital, where they used to haul supplies in by barge. During all the commotion, Vic's wheelchair went in the water. They didn't find him until the next day."

Ben stopped there, although he need not have. He was certain as anything that while the hospital attendants were ducking for cover, Vic had taken one last sharp look around and given the wheelchair a running start down the slope toward the deep-sided waterway, his chosen exit from a life that no longer held anything for him.

"Not quite like the official handout, was it," Bill Reinking summed that up in the arid tone of a veteran editor. Uneasy with what Ben had to contend with, he asked: "Who makes a decision like that, how they classify that kind of a death?"

"Someone who wants every dead soldier in any uniform of ours to be a shining hero."
Four for four, so far. The Supreme Team stays perfect with a little help from Tepee Weepy and in spite of me. Or Vic.

Just then Chick Jennings, the postmaster, reeled past on his way to the bathroom. "You sure know how to throw a party, Bill. And how you doing, Ben?" he delivered with a passing clap on the shoulder. "What do you think, this the year the boys will whip the Japs and Krauts and get to come home?" It was common knowledge Chick's son was a Navy quartermaster safely tucked away in Pascagoula, Mississippi.

"Not all of them," Ben said through his teeth.

"Ben," his father began, "people say things they don't—"

"I know, Dad, it's okay. I lost it there for half a second, is all."
Don't get on your high horse,
he chided himself,
this is just the Officers' Club of the home front.
He knew he ought to rouse himself to the business of festivity even though he had no stomach for it away from Cass. "Any chance to be home, do it," she had urged him to take the holiday pass, a case of use it or lose it. "Get away from this military madhouse. I'm on standby that weekend anyway, you won't be missing any ton of fun here. Go, palooka."

She at that moment was nursing her one lonely scotch in the back area of the Officers' Club known as the "orphans' corner." It felt odd to be there with the handful of male loners—for some reason, they tended to have tidy little cookie-duster mustaches like department store floorwalkers—who sat one by one staring out darkened windows as they toyed with their drinks. However, it was the safest territory around. A woman sitting alone anywhere else in the building invited the interest of every brass type with a touch of the screw flu. Here Captain Cass Standish was just another withdrawn officer trying to drink slow and write a letter. Besides, at midnight she had to go back on standby in the ready room; unless Germany or Japan directly attacked Great Falls, that meant another stint of killing time until 0800. Nineteen forty-four did not look like anything to celebrate yet; she hoped Ben was having better luck where he was.

Out of sight of Cass although definitely not out of hearing, the throng around the piano player gleefully spotted a target of opportunity as Della Maclaine and her date frisked in from outside. If they were somewhat mussed from fooling around with each other on the way over, in the overriding smudge of cigarette smoke and pall of alcohol no one was paying attention to personal tidiness. What caught the combined choral eye was the sassy tilt of the crush hat on Della's blonde flow of hair and, of course, the pilot's insignia prominent on her chest. The piano bunch was instantly inspired.

Oh, don't give me a P-39,
The engine is mounted behind.
She'll tumble and spin,
She'll augur you in,
Don't give me a P-39!

No, give WASPs the P-39,
Let them cuss the design.
There'll be medals in baskets
For flying those caskets,
Give WASPs the P-39!

Della gamely lingered and took it, the motor pool officer she was with nervous at her side. The song done, she sent a honeyed smile to the serenaders and gave them a thumbs-up. No, wait. It was a different digit. Passing the hooting piano gang as her date broke trail toward a table at the quieter far end, she could not help but notice the big pilot with a rakish flop to his dark hair giving her the eye as she went by, but she was not in the market for the glee-club type. Better someone with a jeep or classier wheels.

On past the singing drinking coterie, she spotted Cass holding down one of the spots for the socially backward. Captain Standoffish, too occupied with herself to join in the celebration along the bar. Seizing the chance, Della cooed an excuse in the ear of her date and promised him better things to come, then headed for Cass.

"Care if I join you, Captain ma'am?"

Cass looked up in surprise from her writing paper. "What the hey, Lieutenant Maclaine, sit yourself down."

Ben felt a hand, loving but firm, at the crook of his elbow. "Time to break it up, you two. I need to borrow my soldier." Words warm as toast, and the crust there for emphasis. His mother's diction made her a standout in amateur theatricals, the loftier the dialogue the better. Certainly she looked like the leading lady tonight, with her hair freshly fixed and her aquamarine party dress on, and both men self-consciously shrugged around in their clothes a bit as if that would help to approach her level. "Bill, I think people are ready for another round."

"Next year I'll just hand out bottles instead of glasses." As his father went off to liquor duty, Ben set himself to escort his mother sociably around the room as she no doubt wanted. But she didn't move toward that and her tone was forgiving—he tried to think for what?—as she said: "Are your ears burning? We were just talking about you."

"And here I thought that was frostbite from the bus ride," he endeavored to make it sound teasing. "So," he watched his mother for a further moment to see where this might go, "what did you conclude?"

She had not expected that he would treat her remark as more than a pleasantry to warm him up for the meeting and greeting ahead. But then Ben was inadvertently dramatic tonight, the last healing traces of scrapes from that plane crash like character lines drawn strong on his face. "If it were up to me," she decided to venture, "I'd say that you look like you could use more than a night off. I'm worried about you, you've been all over the map without letup. Doesn't that strange unit of yours ever have furloughs?"

Ben drained the last of his drink. "The war doesn't take furloughs, Mother, so TPWP sees no reason to. I'm theirs for the duration, lock, stock, and typewriter."

She looked at him critically, hoping Carnelia Muntz didn't cross paths with him while he was like this. "Are you tight?"

"Sober as a gravedigger." The old saying fit his frame of mind, if not the moment.

"Ben." His mother's intensity broke the spell of debate. "I know you've had a hard time of it recently, but heavens, it's New Year's Eve. Can't you enjoy yourself for that long?"

The prowess of more than one small-town drama director rested on Cloyce Reinking's ability to use her voice the way a hypnotist uses a watch fob. The trouble was, the two men in her own house had built up a certain level of resistance down through the years.
I'm here, Mother. Your competition is on standby tonight or you'd really have a vacant spot where I'm standing.

Smiling winningly, she slipped her arm in his. "Come on over and meet the Senator's daughter. Adrianna is in the service too. She's stationed in Washington. You'll have a lot to talk about."

So that was it. Glancing across the gathering, he picked out the significant young woman in the cluster around the Senator and his wife; no male of military age in sight there or for that matter anywhere else in the room. He nearly laughed out loud, wishing Cass were here to see what happened when good intentions met up with his mother's designs.

Cass took a quick look at the moonstruck officer Della had left parked at a table to wait for her; another new one, chronically the case with Della.
Playing the field. I wonder what that's like. I hope to hell I never find out.
The question of Dan or Ben constituted as much choosing as she ever wanted to have to do in one lifetime.

"Tough night to draw standby." Della's sympathy did not sound overwhelming. Actually, Cass was unprepared for any at all from her after their run-in at Edmonton just before Christmas. On that flight up, Della had piloted like a Sunday driver, lagging the formation and straying off the radio beam. Luckily the group of planes hadn't hit heavy weather or Cass would have had a lame duck back there to worry about along with everything else. It had taken a monumental chewing-out and a threat to ground Della if she didn't shape up, but it had worked, for the time being. Right now she had her eyes modestly down on the blue air-letter paper Cass's pen rested on. "Catching up on your correspondence?"

"To my husband. Della, what's on your mind?"

"I'm thinking of putting in for a transfer. To ground duty."

Happy New Year to you too, gutless wonder.

The entire party seemed to somehow have shifted about a step and a half toward the far wall of the living room, leaving a pocket of expectation where he and Adrianna were left together to make the most of this chance to get acquainted.
The young people, herded together as if nature intended. You'd think the two of us were being bartered by our tribes.

"I heard you on
Meet the Forces,
" she was saying, wasting no time, "telling about your plane crash. You made it sound all in a day's work."

"They put anybody who can deal in consecutive sentences on that show."

"That's awfully modest of you." She studied the traces on his face as though they were gladiator souvenirs. "You maybe can guess—my folks have followed your doings ever since football. They tell me when you set out to do something, you're the best at it."

It took just a few such battings of the eyes for Ben to realize that she was being a good deal more than daughterly civil in making talk with him. And he had to admit, being around her was not hard duty. Adrianna was cute and a dash exotic in the same glance. Slender but substantial in the right places and in a snug maroon skirt and matching sweater that showed that off well enough. Caramel-colored hair that no doubt received a hundred brush strokes a day. Almond eyes and olive complexion. It was well-known that she was adopted, the senatorial couple setting an example of humanitarianism after that first inhumane world war. From somewhere on the Adriatic, or was he simply mixing that up with her name? She was a WAVE, that much he was sure of; the Senator had a practiced chuckle when he'd introduced her as his daughter the sailor.