The Eleventh Man (45 page)

"Guess what, you're kind of grumpy, for a short-termer." Ben's own mood was not one of his best. "What's eating you?"

"Short-termer," Moxie scoffed, "in an ass-backwards way. I've been extended. But you know all about that from A to Why, don't you."

The coldly spoken words sent a clammy sense of dread into Ben. "Mox, slow down and talk sense, will you? I don't know a rat's ass worth about you being extended."

Moxie studied him without so much as a blink. "Well, then, let's just go over this, Ben old buddy." As usual, there was about as much give in him as an ice pick. "The adjutant calls me in, the first of the month. Says my new orders have just come in. I'm standing there expecting the million-dollar handshake and the plane home, and instead he tells me I've been extended indefinitely. Back I go, to the goddamn ack-ack and buzz bombs. Next thing, you show up. You think I don't know when somebody screws me over, Rhine King? Was it your own bright idea to get me held until the Germans give up, so you can have your nice story—the last of the team makes it to the end of the war? That is just so shitty, Reinking, and I—"

Slamming a hand down on the table so hard the beer bottles teetered, Ben put a period to Moxie's rush of words. "If anybody is screwing you over, it's not me. I'm here because you were due to get that handshake and a pat on the butt and be sent home, goddamn it. If it was up to me, we'd both be out of here before I finish this sentence." He was furious with Moxie and that mouth of his like a cheap pistol, constantly ready to go off in any direction. "How'd you manage to mess it all up—smart off to that adjutant? The general? Eisenhower himself?"

Moxie was sitting back out of the way of any more hand forays. "Hey, not me. I've been keeping my nose clean, up the ranks—no way did I want to queer that plane ride out of here." With a mix of disgust and agitation he glanced around the cavernous bunker again. "I don't go for this living like a mole."

Tense as a harp, Ben took several strained seconds to decide he was on the level. Moxie had never smarted off to Bruno, even during the worst Letter Hill travesties of football practice. In the perfect season, game after game, the tougher the situation on the field, the more businesslike his quarterbacking became. It added up. In extreme cases—and Antwerp fit that, did it ever—the gambler side of Moxie Stamper was perversely capable of the oldest cardshark survival trick, win by not losing. "Okay, maybe it's not your doing. I'll—"

"Your pal Baldy," Moxie shot in. "Could be he knows what's up with this? One thing I learned around the Brits, it's hard as hell to tell when they're screwing you over."

"He's not—" Ben didn't pursue the issue of nationality. "I'll put it to him. If he doesn't have the goods about this, I know who does." He was half out of his chair before remembering Maurice was on catch-up shift somewhere performing what censors perform. And Maurice was his doorkeeper to the only other source, the wire room. "Tomorrow will have to do," he muttered as he sank back down. "Damn." Another set of hours with TPWP in touch only as a pain in the neck. "
Time-out," right, you Tepee Weepy so-and-sos. Until when—the last goddamn buzz bomb is fired? Moxie will shrivel up so much by then he can be sent home in a matchbox. I won't be much of a specimen of humanity myself.

Moxie was checking his watch again, and remembering Maurice's mild mention of an occasional V-1 straying to the airfield, Ben wondered if he should be setting the cocotte clock in his pocket. The weight of the war came down over him once more. "Mox, I'm going to have to get to the wire room early, so I'm calling it a day. I'll look you up tomorrow after—"

"Hang on a little while, can't you?" Moxie practically begged. "There's somebody I want you to—hey, all right, here she is."

An Army nurse, in off-duty khaki, was forging her way toward them through the packed tables. Busty and broad-beamed, she came with a fixed bedside smile on a square plain face.

Slick as a whistle, Moxie was on his feet and standing proud to greet her. "Hi, angel of mercy. This is my press agent I was telling you about," he allotted a foxy grin back and forth between Ben and her. "Ben Reinking, Inez Mazzetti." Moxie winked. "But that's all the
z
's a guy ever catches around her, right, sugarpuss?"

"Knock it off, you," Inez gave him a tender swat on the arm. "Hi, Ben, gee, I'm glad to meet you." She kept the smile going as Moxie delivered her into a chair. "You can give me the lowdown on this Stamper guy—did he always have a vocabulary like a garbage can?"

"You should have heard him in football uniform—the Army has cleaned him up."

"Go right ahead," their subject of discussion grinned around at them again before embarking for the bar, "gossip about me while I'm hunting down beer for you, ingrates."

Left with no choice, they made small talk, Inez in a practiced way, Ben uncomfortably, until Moxie came back clasping bottles with both hands.

"To the oldest profession," he toasted as soon as he sat down, "nursing!" It drew him another little swat from Inez, smiling all the while.

Overflowing with possession, Moxie leaned toward Ben and divulged: "Inez is from Butte. Her old man worked with O'Fallon's in the mines. How's that for a small world?"

"Awful small," Ben vouched, hiding everything more than that behind a long swig of beer.
The damned odds again. Why can't the numbers just behave and quit giving out coincidences like card tricks?
In all likelihood he had crossed paths with that miner father at O'Fallon's wake, back at the start of all this. Back when one life subtracted from eleven was thought to be a lot.

In what passed for conversation from then on, Moxie kidded Inez as if he was playing with a kitten, and she all but purred in response. It would have been plain to a blind person, Ben summed it up to himself, that he was screwing her socks off at every opportunity. The undertow of desire lapping around the table made him want to wade away and flee to higher ground and at the same time dive in and let his imagination soak in it. He stayed helplessly there aswim in times with Cass. Cass curled beside him after making love in his hotel room...
I interrupted the greatest movie never made, didn't I.
Cass bright as her uniform buttons the giddy night in Seattle...
One of those that folds down out of the wall? Genius, what's to keep it from folding back up into the wall just when things get interesting?
Cass snuggling next to him in the shelter of the Hill 57 rocks, the Homecoming game losing their interest...
Do I have a better offer?

"Hey, we're not hearing any fooling-around report out of you, Ben." Moxie was feeling better and better as the beer and the night went on. "Haven't you hooked up with anybody yet?"

Silence was no longer an option, with the two moony faces turned to him. "I did for a while. She's a," he swallowed hard, "a nurse, too—of a kind."

Nine time zones away, Jones was trying to make a readable press release out of East Base's announcement of another one thousand Lend-Lease aircraft successfully transported into Russian hands. He hummed a snatch of hymn when he was alone and bored, and he was humming now; there were six previous announcements of this sort and even he did not regard this as the freshest of news. He was trying to decide whether it was worth it to change
seven thousand
to
the seventh thousand
when he became aware someone had paused at the office doorway.

He glanced around, and for this officer rose nicely to his feet as he had been taught to do at home.

"Help you with something, Captain?"

"If you're feeling full of Christian charity," said Cass with a lump in her throat.

The lights blinked in the Wonder Club bunker. The whole place went momentarily still, then the electricity steadied and the usual Officers' Club din of conversation came back with a rush of relief. One of the music-hall wits at the piano began to belt out, "I'll meet you at the Underground, you'll know it by the rumbly sound, and we will slip away, for a cozy day..."

"It's hard to get used to, the rocket SOBs see to that," Moxie addressed the tight look on Ben's face, his own expression more constrained than before. "That one must have hit near the power plant by the river. The night gunners have a tough time of it," he defended the ack-ack brotherhood, "they have to hope the searchlight crews get a fix on the goddamn buzz bomb before it cuts off." He shook his head and went back to, "It's hard."

"You know what, I'm going to go freshen up while there's light to see by," Inez said with practicality and headed for the toilet.

Moxie watched her wend her way. All at once he was talkative again. "Funny how things turn out. Back in high school, a carload of us would head into Butte to visit a cathouse and we wouldn't get parked before the Butte kids spotted the Dillon license plate and ganged up to beat the crap out of us. 'Come and get it, sheepherders!' they'd yell." He laughed, more bark than amusement in it. "And we would with our dukes up, and more often than not get our butts kicked good."

Ben knew Moxie was from a sheep ranch in the Dillon country, but he had not known he ever came out second in mouthing off. "That's Butte for you," he contributed, thinking back to the boisterous wake.

"And look at now, me and her—" Moxie held Ben in his gaze. "I know what you're thinking, I'm just using her for reconnaissance in the dark. But she keeps me sane, Ben. And she gets something out of it besides a good time in the sack." He leaned in to drive his point home. "Inez is not the greatest looker, unless you like them on the hefty side. But getting herself seen with me, and now you, gives her a lot of brownie points on this base. There are plenty of guys in this room right now you could shake awake in the middle of the night and they'd know how many touchdown passes I threw and how many you caught." He knocked wood. "Like it or don't, we're not nobodies. Even here."

No, that's been the trouble.
Ben sat up to pursue that. "Listen, Mox. I found out something about Purcell—"

"Purcell? Haven't thought about him in years," Moxie was shaking his head, "dumb-ass kid." The head shake slowed into solemnity. "All the guys on the team. All the tickets to the marble farm," he said bitterly. "You know the one that really gets me?"

I'm afraid I do.
Ben would have bet six months' wages he was about to hear a halo put on Danzer, courtesy of the Stomper-to-Dancer mutual admiration society.

"Jake." Moxie choked up on the name. "It is just a goddamn shame he didn't have the last laugh on the Nazi sonsofbitches."

Too much had welled up in Ben for him to say anything. Inez came to his rescue by returning, and he used the chance to exit the drawn-out day. He left the flirtatious pair with "Have fun, don't do anything I wouldn't do," and wove through the obstacle course of tables. He stepped outside to the long sunken row of concrete archways topped with more concrete and several acres of the sod of Belgium. It was starting to snow, the first natural thing he had found since arriving to Antwerp. He stood there a minute in the night gone quiet with the weight of snow as the storm came in off the Atlantic, general as the pattern of winter across the war-linked pair of continents and the cold ocean between, the hypnotic flakes accumulating as patiently as the passage of time.

This was a dry snowfall that would not cling long, but Gros Ventre, which had not tasted paint since the war effort was born, appeared grateful for any fresh coating. Behind him he heard the grind of gears as the bus pulled away in the night to other towns too modestly populated to have a depot, a familiar accompaniment as he walked in so many years of his footsteps toward the newspaper office. The burden handed to him by the bus driver seemed heavier as the war went on, although he knew that was fanciful. Even so, carrying it in the new-fallen snow he took extra care, stomping every so often so his shoe soles would not cake up and grow slick. Shortly he came to the only other lighted enterprise on the whitened main street, two blocks up from where the
Gleaner
office cast its square of light. He thought to himself he really ought to write a piece about this, how in the ever-changing bargain with time one way-spot of civilization would offer up a cathedral while another would answer human yearning with something as homely as this, a place that could be counted on to be open in the snowy dark, a saloon like a book known by heart. What was the saying? Ancient faith and present courage. He smiled at himself a bit crookedly. Tonight he could stand a glass of courage.

"Haven't seen you in here in a hell of a while," he was greeted as he stepped into the Medicine Lodge. "I'd about given you up for lost."

"A man can't be in two places at once, Tom," Bill Reinking replied, slapping snow off his cap and coat. "I'm supposedly running a newspaper."
Or as Cloyce would say, it's running me.

Toweling the dark wood to a trail of gleam as he came, Tom Harry mopped his way down the bar to him. "Liked what you said there in the gizette, back before the election. Franklin D. showed them his rosy red one again, didn't he." Beaming as if in response, Roosevelt presided larger than life on the whiskeyladen breakfront behind the bartender, the campaign poster accurately predicting Four more in '44! Bill Reinking noted with bemusement that right next to it was pasted a faded placard spelling out, in the biggest letters to be found in a printer's jobcase, F
ORT
P
ECK—DAMN!
Momentarily he was taken back to before the war when those unlikely allies of the time, the President and the Senator, blessed into being the huge Fort Peck Dam and put Montana back to work. There was something to ponder there. Was it possible that the depths of the Depression, so daunting at the time, were no kind of a challenge compared to finding an end to this war? He knew the world was more complicated now, but he also knew that every era makes that excuse for tripping over itself.