The Eleventh Man (41 page)

When the burial was done, they shook hands with the family and said their condolences. Jake showed surprise when Ben begged off the gathering at the Montana Club afterward, saying the two of them had something else they had to tend to in town before heading back to East Base.

"Something better than good whiskey at the fanciest place in Helena?" Jake asked righteously as they left the cemetery.

"You'll see," Ben said.

He took him along to meet Cass.

They met out at the edge of town in the Broadwater Hotel, which was not far from the Fort Harrison military hospital. Its landmark turrets and spread-eagle porches caked with snow, the elderly hotel looked under the weather in more ways than one, having seen better days and ritzier assignations. Cass, in uniform, was waiting in a faintly Victorian parlor off the lobby.

Standing to greet the pair of them, she led off with a pinpoint smile to Ben. "I see you brought some reinforcement along, good." She and Jake knew each other by sight from East Base life, but shook hands pilot to pilot for the first time. "Ben was just telling me about you," he said with ponderous neutrality.

Cass looked more worn-out than Ben had ever seen her. "I don't have as much time as I'd like"—she gazed at him and then included Jake—"I had the nurse tell Dan I was going to the drugstore. He's most likely asleep. He sleeps huge amounts since he was brought back."

They sank into the nearest plush triangle of chairs. In the awkward settling in, Ben went first: "What are they telling you at the hospital?"

Cass steeled herself and began. "Dan got shot through the shoe top. Doesn't sound like much, does it?" She looked at the two men who were sound of limb as if reluctantly translating this for them. "Wouldn't you know, though, the bullet caught the leg dead center. There'll need to be a bone operation and a skin graft and—we don't know what all yet." She shuddered a little, not just for effect. "No wonder they call the place Fort Hairy." Rushing now to get this part over with, she listed off: "As soon as he has enough life back in that leg, they're sending him to California. There's some specialist there—he takes a tendon from somewhere else and patches it into the leg. Dan will have to learn to walk."

The thought sat there, until it was Jake who rumbled, "That's a rough go, for both of you."

Cass tried to grin gamely. "I'll have time. They're kicking me out of the service, around Christmas." Seeing Ben's expression become even more tortured, she quickly went on: "All the women pilots, not just me. They're inactivating the WASPs." She toughed it out for a few sentences more. "The boys are coming home. Nobody needs the female of the species in the cockpit from here on."

Was there anything the war could not warp? After all of Ben's times of wanting Cass out of fighter planes with half a ton of engine riding at the back of her neck, now he sorrowed for her over this, too.

Jake gave a sympathetic murmur, and leaving the two of them with that, cleared his throat as if on cue and negotiated his bulk out of the depth of his chair. "I'm going to see if they have a beer anywhere in this mausoleum. Catch you later, Cass." When he had gone, Ben moved to the chair nearer hers, even though the difference was only inches.

"Hi, Scar," she said wistfully.

"How are you holding up?"

"Not so hot." She closed her eyes and knuckled each lightly, as if the strain had collected there. Then a sudden blink, and the straight-ahead hazel-eyed honesty that had been her hallmark with him. "Dan's a handful, with this medical rigamarole. The squadron is a handful, ever since our official boot in the butt. No morale, everybody's flying on empty, why shouldn't they be?" She lifted her shoulders a tiny bit, let them drop just as suddenly, one of her gestures Ben could have traced in his sleep. "End of report. How about you—the Tepee outfit show any signs of sanity?"

"Barely. They haven't come up with any new ways to kill me off yet."

"Please don't keep saying 'yet.'"

"Sorry. They're making noises that the war could be over by the end of the year. I'll believe it when I see it."

"Won't we all."

"Cass?"
What a privilege it has been to love you,
the words he did not dare to start saying denied him voice.
Even if you are going back to being his wife, what a privilege it will have always been.
He removed his gaze from her to the snowbound topiary of the hotel grounds until his speech steadied enough. "I—I came to tell you. At the base and"—he gestured in a way that took in everything from there to here—"so on, I'll stay out of the way. From now on. It's the least I can do."

"I'd say it's a lot more than that, Ben." Cass looked like a touch would send her to pieces. "If you don't go, right about now, I'm going to turn into a gibbering idiot."

"I'll drive," Jake let him know in no uncertain manner as they slopped through the wet snow of the hotel driveway to the motor pool sedan. "You look like you walked off a cliff and are still going."

Neither said anything as the car pulled out of town and headed up the long incline out of Helena's valley, past the scrub -forested Scratchgravel Hills, past the slow-flowing passageway of the Missouri River called the Gates of the Mountains, past the historic baronial sheep ranch with sheds broad and long as hangars. The road back to East Base and the war was winding into the bends of Wolf Creek Canyon shared between colored cliffs and gray river before Jake burst out.

"Call me cockeyed, Benjamin buddy, but you're the one who told me I was asking for trouble when all I was doing was getting my knob polished by a Commie. I guess you were more of an expert on the topic of trouble than I knew."

"Cass and I didn't set out to cheat on her husband." Ben couldn't speak beyond a monotone. "Just the opposite, at first—we gave each other the porcupine treatment. Then we got to talking, just stuff. Next thing we knew"—by now his voice was down to where pain comes in, and it hurt to listen—"we couldn't live without each other. It gets into your blood before you can turn around, Ice."

Jake seemed to gather his thoughts around that before finally saying: "Even porkies find a way to make love."

"I'll have to think about that."

"It takes two, Ben."

With Jake's words lodged in him he sat there lost in himself, seeing her in every phase of their time together—Cass over him, under him, clothes on, clothes off, making a face over coma cola, the long talks, the quick jokes, the wedding ring that only came off in the cockpit pocket of a P-39. "Her husband's outfit regularly got the raw end in the Pacific," he heard himself saying as if under ether. "There wasn't a whole lot of chance he would make it through the war. But I never damn once hoped he wouldn't. Not once. You can't and stand yourself." He halted. "There was no lifetime guarantee on me, either. The eleven of us haven't been any insurance agent's dream, have we. Why shouldn't she hang on to her marriage when every time she turned around I was being sent someplace where people were getting knocked off? I can't blame Cass."

The car moved on in the silence of the canyon, the cuts of the road hemmed to the river now with seams of snow. This was territory for black ice and Jake tapped the brakes a few times to gauge the road surface. Between, he asked:

"So I was the chaperone, back there at the hotel?"

"You guessed it."

Jake gave a large sigh. "First time I was ever picked for that part of the party." He was gauging Ben now. "What did you figure would happen if I hadn't been there?"

"We probably wouldn't have snatched the clothes off each other and gone at it in the lobby, but who the hell knows." He bit the inside of his mouth, a hurt that would shut off. "It doesn't matter now."

"Besides being Mister Priss, do I also get to be Uncle Jake and give you my two bits' worth of advice?"

"I'm in the goddamn car until we get to Great Falls, aren't I."

"You're not the first guy or the last to get in over his head where nature's better half is involved. For what it's worth, you chose an A-1 woman to fall for." The big dark head wagged back and forth as if sure of its ground here. "She's some piece of work. And I mean that in the nicest possible way, okay? So, go a little easy on yourself. Love is maybe meant to get the best of us. What's it for, otherwise?" Jake braked into a curve. "I'll tell you whose shoes I wouldn't want to be in, Cass's. She's got a tough row ahead."

"I didn't know the inactivation part," the words came out of Ben like the last of a bad taste. "She's as batty about flying as you are."

"Pilots are only barely of this earth," Jake said, seeming to mean it.

Days at East Base were a muddle after that. Ben avoided the flight line, the ready room, any flying-suited flock of WASPs in the distance, all the avenues of everyday that might conceivably lead to Cass. Putting in his time in the office and the wire room, he looked tensed up and narrowed in, like a man out on a limb that no one else could see. And he was.

Dex's death rattled him to his depths. What shook him even harder was that he found himself seriously questioning the amount of life he himself had ahead. It went against his nature. When you have not yet seen your twenty-fifth birthday you necessarily must feel you are unkillable. Why were you given all that vim if life was not meant to go on? Over and over he told himself to keep a sense of proportion. Eight men killed, when millions were being lost in this insatiable war. Yet from a group you knew best, it was a lot of dead men. And he had been counted into that hexed group from day one, hadn't he, back there on the TSU practice field. What kind of coach's witch's brew was it at that last practice, eleven names on a list jotted by Bruno to start the fate-filled season and sanctified by Loudon's Twelfth Man nonsense? Every man of them destined one after another, their lives issuing out in the war like rain falling in an open grave? Ben did not believe in omens and he did not want to believe in jinxes. Statistical quirks were something else, though, if the war kept on being so overpowering that it jiggled the odds on almost everything. Sure, you could believe for all you were worth that you were too young and fit and lucky to be chased down by death, but all of accumulated history yawns back,
Why not you?

Ben did not have to struggle with the obvious any too long.
I can't just go on being a target every place Tepee Weepy can think up.
Already unstrung by Cass being gone from him, he did his best to assemble his scattered self, knowing worse consequences were out there waiting if he did not.
Any infirmary sawbones will tell you there's no prescription that works on nervous in the service, Reinking, so get a grip on yourself.
At least Jake had not managed to wangle his way into the flak-filled skies over Germany and remained stuck on the milk run—all right, ice-water run—from Fairbanks to Nome. At least Moxie was in some anti-aircraft rear echelon, getting to shoot first at any threats overhead.
I'm going to give it a try, guys. Screwed-up law of averages or not, there's no rule I can see that we have to end up with the others.

He started what he knew had to be the last battle of words with Tepee Weepy the day after Dex was buried.

The funeral piece he filed spared nothing about the highborn Cariston name joining the oversize list of Helena sacrificial soldiery beneath the doughboy statue, but that was not the issue. Apprehension behind every word, that next day he fed the blockletter sentences one by one to the teletype operator.

E
ND
S
UPREME
T
EAM SERIES NOW
? G
ETTING LONELY, JUST WE THREE
.

The final line was trickiest of all to come up with, possibly because it was hard to write with fingers crossed.

W
HAT IF
T
OKYO
R
OSE AND
L
ORD
H
AW
-H
AW KNOW HOW TO COUNT.

"Don't you want me to put a question mark on this, sir?"

"It's not a question, soldier, it's a supposition. Just send it."

Nothing came back that day, no matter how much Ben hung around the wire room and mooched coffee and sprang alert every time a teletype bell went off.
Come on, you TPWP SOBs. Answer. Call off the damned series. Or are you going to tell me and the couple of thousand newspaper editors watching for this byline you set me up with that eight dead heroes aren't enough?

The days after that, he sent Jones to check for a reply so many times that at last the corporal just gave him a funny look and started off before he could get the words out. Finally, at week's end, a wire room clerk stuck his face in the doorway and said there was a five-bell message waiting.

TPWP
MINDFUL OF
H
AW
-H
AW AND
T
OKYO
R
OSE
. F
ULLY INTEND ENEMY PROPAGANDA WILL NOT SCORE BIG ON
S
UPREME
T
EAM
. S
ERIES WILL BE MODIFIED
. D
ETAILS FOLLOW SOON
.

Ben read and reread the sheet of wire copy for what it said and did not say. That damned "modify" again. The Tepee Weepy meaning of soon was also clear as mud. He plainly enough had their attention, though, with that dig about what the master propagandists in Berlin and Tokyo could do with the obliteration of any more of the team.
So, okay, that does spook them and it's up to me to keep them spooked.
Immediately he holed up in his office and went back to block-letter work.