The Eleventh Man (23 page)

For the next few minutes they kept on trading generalities—she told him she was just another of fifteen thousand Navy women serving in Washington wartime offices; he told her he was just a typewriter soldier being sent off on an overseas assignment early in the new year—until he came around to asking, "What do they have you doing?"

"I'm in the wire room."

Ben tried not to show any sign of the disputes he'd had with teletype clerks of many kinds down through time. Maybe she wasn't one of those, maybe she was in charge of changing the spools of telex ribbon. Which he immediately doubted; a senator's daughter would not be doing the chores.

"Keys to the kingdom, A to Z," he said guardedly.

"There's one bad part of the clerk job." Adrianna made a face. "Carbon paper. Our seersucker uniforms sop it up." She leaned a trifle closer, confidentiality coming with it. "Know how I get it off?"

"I have to confess I don't."

She looked around, then right up at him. "I climb in the bathtub with the uniform on and scrub the carbon off. It's kind of like using a washboard. Rub a dub dub." Hands in front of her chest, she surreptitiously pantomimed washerwoman motion on that handy part of herself for him. "Then drain out the blue water, take off the uniform and hang it to dry," she continued ever so innocently, "and go ahead and have my bath. It works."

"I'll bet it does." The back of his throat felt dry. There was a great deal more than a fleck of attraction in the thought of rub a dub dub. A debate had started up in him like dueling lightning. When someone such as Adrianna handed herself to him on a platter, was he obliged to do his best to drop it? After all, you can cordon sex off from love. Soldiers did it all the time.

"That's up to you," Cass was saying to the problem pilot across the table from her. Leave it alone, she told herself. Let her turn into a groundpounder if that's all she has the brains to do. And heard herself asking: "How come, Della?"

A flip of the blonde hair heralded the answer. "There's no room for me to move up in the squadron, is there. I'm always going to be Tail End Charlie."

Cass lifted her hands from the table and let them fall back.

"I'm not kicking about that, understand," Della hastened to say. "It's the way things are, seniority is something I can't do anything about. Buy you a drink, to show there are no hard feelings?"

The Alaska vodka lesson staying with him, he sipped cautiously as Adrianna steered the conversation.

"TPWP is sort of hush-hush, isn't it." She treated this as though it were a secret between just the two of them. "You have your own code—it's off-limits to us."

"Mysterious are the ways of Tepee Weepy, I'm the first to agree."

"Tepee Weepy," she laughed low in her throat, "oh, that's funny. We have all kinds of those insane abbreviations in Washington. My father gets a charge out of saying the government is nothing but one big pot of alphabet soup."

Ben glanced now at that senatorial father, still holding forth to the other half of the room as inexhaustibly as if he were filibustering.
Sharp-cornered old devil. To look at him, you'd never know he's busy shopping for a son-in-law.
Right there in the fray, feeding the occasion in more ways than one, was the zealous hostess of all this. Ben had the passing thought that his mother should be the one writing a movie script.
Mr. Touchdown Goes to Washington,
by Cloyce Carteret Reinking.

Uncountable down through the terms in office—like a canine's, a politician's years measured differently—these home-state gatherings out away from that company town, Washington, were part campaign ritual and part self-schooling for the Senator. In the crisscross of conversations loosened by a bit of booze, he often picked up matters of interest that might otherwise surface unpleasantly on election day. He himself was a restrained drinker at these, as was Sadie, Adrianna a little less so. At the moment the daughter they had so fondly adopted and raised was, to his understanding eye, a sailor on leave, chatting up the pick of the evening, Cloyce and Bill Reinking's prize son. He and Sadie had needed to learn that Adrianna was rapid in her affections—at Thanksgiving it had been the Free French naval attaché. One of these times, something would have to come of these acquaintanceships sparked by the war. Gazing around the living-room party in apparent benevolence, the Senator marked Ben Reinking as one would a passage in a book worthy to return to.

The drink offer was the only good thing Cass had heard out of Lieutenant Maclaine since she plopped down at the table. "Can't. Going on duty at midnight." Which, she figured, Della well knew when she volunteered to buy.
Why the hell can't she strut her stuff when it counts?
"It's a shame, though," Cass said as if the words were too stubborn to keep in. "You throwing away your wings."
Messing up the squadron just when I was finally starting to get you straightened out.

Della checked her for sarcasm. "What do you mean, a shame?"

"Don't you remember?" Cass waved accusingly in the general direction of Texas. "From day one at Sweetwater, those bald old coots who called themselves flight instructors said that about us. 'Most of you women won't stick around in that pilot seat,'" she mimicked their seen-it-all drawl. "'Something will git on your nerves and you'll take up being a pedestrian again.'"

That set off a blonde flare in the chair opposite. "Cass, that is in no way fair. My nerves are perfectly fine and I am not most women."

"It's rough," Cass led into, "to be low schmoe on the totem pole, I know. I've been there." She drained the last of her lonely drink and took a quick look at the clock. "But lack of seniority doesn't last forever, if you keep on breathing." She mulled how to say the rest of this, knowing she should be strenuously debating with herself about saying it at all.
What the hey, bluff on through, you have nothing to lose but a Tail End Charlie.
She honored the fact that Beryl did not want her request for a transfer to the Wichita bomber factory run bandied about, but a hint would serve the same purpose, would it not. "There are a dozen slots in the squadron, there just might be some turnover."

It changed Della's approach markedly. "I'd have a shot at being wingman?"

Cass rose to go on duty. "Only if you hang on to your wings. Happy new year, Lieutenant."

One thing was leading to another more precipitously than Ben wanted to be led, all signs pointing to a celebratory kiss at midnight to start off the Adrianna era. He could wish dozens of things for the coming year, starting with Cass and him in circumstances that did not know war or inconvenient husband. All that went onto the tosspile of dreams, however, if he got involved with what was standing in front of him in snug maroon. "My father just gave me the high sign about something," he resorted to. "Let me get you a drink while I go see what's on his mind."

"I'll hold out for champagne," Adrianna said with a wink. "Hurry back."

A sign of some sort, in fact, was what Ben had spotted across the room, the back of his father as he slipped away from the party hubbub to the quiet book-lined room upstairs. Hearing Ben step in, Bill Reinking turned from the window where he was looking out at the snow sifting down. "What's this, another absconder from the merrymaking?" He smiled faintly. "You needn't take after me in that bad habit."

"The merrymaking can stagger along without us for a little while, Dad."

His father nodded. Swirling his glass, he turned back to the snow scene of the window. "Vic Rennie," he said barely above a murmur. "I owe it to Toussaint to write a little something more about him." He chugged the last of what was in the glass. "Don't worry, I'll stay away from how he died. I'll keep to the soldier-from-the-reservation peg, although I goddamn sure won't make it heartwarming." He shook his head one more time. "Poor divvied-out kid, always caught between. What was he, half-breed, quarter—?"

"I don't even know," Ben answered. "When anybody would ask, he'd say 'Enough.'"

Bill Reinking grunted and moved off from the window-well to the bookshelves that walled the room. His son followed him with his eyes, the old feel of the words in wait enwrapping the two of them. Ben never forgot the touchable value of the books in this room, his boyhood times of running his fingers across the collected spines standing on the shelves like delicately done upright bricks. All the good-nights when he would pad in to find this bespectacled man deep into Thucydides or Parkman or Tolstoy, and there would come the brief contented smile and the adage, time and again, "History writes the best yarns." As Ben watched now, his father scanned the rows of titles as if reminding himself there was this room to come back to after tonight. Thinking aloud, the older man said: "Your mother will nail both our hides to the wall if we don't pitch in at the party pretty quick."

"Mine, anyway," Ben conceded. "I'm supposed to be down there making out like mad with fair maiden Adrianna."

His father took down a book and put it back without looking at it. "Peril is not confined to the theaters of war, son."

This from the man known to have put in as the filler at the bottom of a newspaper column
The matrimony vine is also called boxthorn.
Ben shifted restlessly. He had pieced together the story of his father and his mother considerably beyond even the evidence he grew up around in this house. The opening scene: the glamorous set of grandparents he had never met, Clyde and Joyce Carteret, early Hollywood royalty, silent-movie producer and actress. In 1919 the Carterets had brought their film company to Glacier National Park and the adjacent Blackfoot Reservation to shoot a quickie movie full of Indians and headdresses. While there, their teenage daughter Cloyce met and fell for the young man on assignment from the
Gleaner,
Bill Reinking. They bedded and wedded, in a hurry both times; natural inquisitive reporter that he was, Ben long since had figured out that his parents' was a shotgun wedding. And early in that marriage, the Carterets of Hollywood and Beverly Hills were killed in a car accident on location and Cloyce, reluctantly of Gros Ventre from then on, was left with another of those utterances fit to sneak beneath a column of type, "
God made the country, man made the city, and the devil made the small town.
"

Family, the oldest argument on earth. Ben gazed across the room at the male half of the one that endured under this roof. "I'm open to ideas that won't put both of us in the doghouse, Dad."

Bill Reinking paused in his roaming of the bookshelves as if he had come to what he was looking for. "If you want to head down to the Medicine Lodge," he said over his shoulder, "I'll cover for you. I'll tell your mother you just remembered you had to cadge some gas coupons, she really can't argue with those."

Ben grinned for the first time that night. "The daughter of a senator up for reelection can't afford to be seen trotting off to a saloon with a soldier, would you say?"

"I would. Don't forget the gas coupons."

The Pacific was anything but pacifying as he picked his way along a shore completely foreign to him. To one side of his narrow line of march, giant logs gray as archeological bones had been tossed by storms into an endless pile he could not see over, while just beyond the driftwood barricade the forest came crowding in, thick and bristling as bear hair. On the ocean side, a short distance offshore towered dark contorted seastacks like the Great Wall of China fractured by eternal assault. The tide, thick cream-colored surf changing eerily back to milk as it slid up the beach, seemed particularly determined to hem him in; every step of the way he had to monitor the tide line from the corner of his eye or the hissing white water would flood over his boots. Meanwhile the footing shifted from gentle sand as black-gray as gunpowder one minute to rugged gravel the next and then to roundbacked rocks, without rhyme or reason that he could see.
And this is the easy part,
Ben reasoned with himself.

He had hiked his full share of the arch of North America, the high hunting country that crisscrossed the Continental Divide back in Montana, but this was his first time to explore any of the other national extremity, the coastal sill where the landmass wrested itself from the sea. Out here in the state of Washington was the American shore at its most remote, dangling like a coarse fringe from the huge cape where the Strait of Juan de Fuca angled into the continent. Its isolation spooked Ben. He'd slogged the beach for three hours from the barely extant salmon fishing village of LaPush without seeing another living soul or even a footprint, and now nearly another hour from the prefabricated military hut where the Coast Guardsman he roused from off-duty sleep told him Prokosch was on patrol somewhere around the next big rocky headland. Somewhere translated to anywhere, Ben discovered as he neared the rugged point of rocks backed by a clay cliff fully a hundred feet high and there still was no least evidence of Prokosch.

"Sig!" he shouted again through cupped hands. "H
EY, BUDDY, YOU'VE GOT COMPANY.
" The Coast Guardsman at the hut had warned him sentry duty here tended to make a person jumpy and it would be a good idea to yell out for Prokosch every so often. The problem with that was, the crash of the surf obliterated all shouts. Checking back at the crescent beach he had just crossed, Ben still saw only the solitary string of his own tracks, no other human sign, and with consummate dread he faced around to the headland.
It just doesn't let up.
Surf poured onto the outermost ledge of stone with a power he could bodily feel, the spray spewing into the air like a school of geysers. The cliff was too steep and slick to tackle, so the only route lay across jumbled boulders in avalanche repose at the base of the headland. He wiped from his lips the saltwater taste that clung in the air and took a swig from his canteen while he eyed the situation some more. The question remained whether he could work his way across that rockfield without the tide catching him there. This notorious coast frequently drowned entire ships, it wouldn't hesitate a smatter of an instant on him. Yet Prokosch somehow navigated this shore on foot, didn't he, proving it could be done.
Or maybe he's learned amphibious rock climbing by now.