The Eleventh Man (6 page)

He jounced the car up the steep rocky road, praying for the tires with every jolt, as far as he dared, then set out on foot. He skirted timberline above a creek that dropped with a pleasant-sounding rush down through a coulee filled with tall grass and wild roses. He had never seen a more likely place for elk to browse, and there wasn't a one in sight. Nothing wanted to cooperate today. Dreading the moment when he would have to abandon the oldest etiquette and shout out a hunter's name in the possible presence of game, he scanned farther up the slope toward the gloom-gray chimney of rock at the forested summit, turning an ear to the wind in one last attempt to conjure the sound of an elk herd on the move somewhere out there in the timber. What he heard came into his other ear from not ten feet away.

"Looks like Ben."

Ben nearly levitated out of his flight jacket.

When he spun and looked, at first glance he still couldn't pick out the man in the shadowed patch of juniper and downed trees. "Saw the car," the old voice came again, a chuckle entering it. "That Packard. Stories it could tell." A swag of juniper branch lifted, not quite where Ben expected, and the walnut crinkles of the aged face came into view.

"Christ, Toussaint, they could use you in camouflage school. Room in there for one more?"

"Make yourself skinny."

Ben eased in from the back of the hunting blind and found himself in something like a man-sized thatched nest. Toussaint had bundles of long-stemmed sweetgrass stacked all around the interior of his lair; the place smelled like a sugarcane field, and no passing elk would get any scent of man. Ben tried to get used to the confined space in a hurry, shaking hands with Toussaint as he inched past him. Sitting there potbellied on a rickety kitchen chair, in faded wool pants and a mackinaw that had seen nearly as many years as he had, the old hunter peering up at him put Ben in mind of a Buddha that a pile of grubby clothes had been tossed on. The rifle propped against the side of the blind showed a catalogue shine of newness, however. Toussaint chuckled again. "Sold a cow to get the gun to hunt elk. Don't know if that's progress."

He gestured hospitably. "Pull up a rock, Ben." Ben settled for a log end. Dark eyes within weathered folds of skin were contemplating him as if measuring the passage of years. "Haven't seen you since Browning," Toussaint arrived at. "You were catcher."

Ben smiled. "It's called 'end' in football, Toussaint."

"Did a lot of catching, I saw."

A dozen catches, in that final high school game against the reservation town; good for three touchdowns. Gros Ventre always pounded Browning into the ground in football, just as Browning always ran up the score sky-high against Gros Ventre in basketball. That game, though, Ben and his teammates had a terrible time handling a swift Browning halfback named Vic Rennie. "Vic damn near ran the pants off us."

"He knew how to run."

Ben's heart skipped when he heard the past tense. Had word reached Toussaint already? It couldn't have. He bought a bit more time with an inquisitive jerk of his head toward the far-off Rockies. "The last I knew, the Two Medicine country had elk. Why hightail it all the way over here to hunt?"

"Those buffalo."

Toussaint spoke it in such a way that Ben nearly looked around for shaggy animals with horned heads down in the high grass.

The old hunter swept a hand over the farmed fields below the Sweetgrass Hills, the gesture wiping away the past seventy years. "It was all buffalo color then, Ben. Too thick to count, that herd. I was just yay-high"—a veined hand indicated a boy's height—"and mooching my way to that Two Medicine country. The Crows gave me a horse, let me ride here with them—don't know why. All the tribes came here for those buffalo. Too busy hunting to fight. Even those Blackfeet." The dark eyes, a spark of mischief in them, held on the visitor again. "Could be some leftover luck here, so I come hunting."

"I'm glad I asked," said Ben.

"You are not here about buffalo. Elk either."

"True." Softly but swiftly to get it over with, he told what had happened to Vic.

When that was done, Toussaint looked out past the old contested country of the tribes, off somewhere into the swollen world of war. His voice turned bleak and Ben wondered whether a chuckle would ever enter it again.

"They blew up my boy?"

"He was pretty badly torn up by the land mine. They had to amputate."

A grunt came from the grandfather, as dismal a sound as Ben had ever heard. Quickly he reached to his jacket pocket. "I don't know if it helps, but I brought you a letter from Vic."

The old man held the pale blue sheet of paper at arm's length to read it. Watching this, Ben felt uncomfortably responsible for its contents, whatever those were. He'd had to move military heaven and earth—Tepee Weepy, which amounted to the same thing—to get word to Vic and then speed the resulting letter through top channels. The courier, a sleek young Pentagon officer exuding importance, had stepped off the plane at East Base disdainfully looking over Ben's head for the almighty TPWP officer in charge. "I'm him," Ben had announced, and the courier's expression only grew worse when the briefcase handcuffed to his wrist was unlocked to produce a single slim envelope that looked like ordinary mail. Ben wished him a nice flight back to Washington and tucked the letter in his jacket. Now Toussaint lowered the piece of paper and refolded it carefully.

"Vic writes he can't get a new leg. All the things they can do these days, they can't get him a new leg?"

Ben shook his head.

Neither man spoke for a while, Toussaint still creasing the letter, until at last he asked the question his visitor had been dreading most:

"Why don't they send him home to me?"

Ben hoped it wasn't because a one-legged hero did not fit with TPWP plans. He could hear the strain in his voice as he tried to put the secretive hospital in the English countryside in the best light. "There's a facility—a place there where they help people pull through something like this. It's an estate." It was for depression victims. Mangled Royal Air Force pilots. Commandoes wrecked in body and mind from the disastrous Dieppe raid. And, Tepee Weepy had seen to it, a Supreme Team running back with an empty pantleg.

He left all that last part out; from the look on the man who had raised Victor Rennie, bringing the letter maybe was bad enough. After a bit Toussaint said absently: "Vic says it's awful green there. Hedges."

"Toussaint, you better know. I'm supposed to write something about Vic. It's my job."

"Funny kind of job, Ben, ain't it?"

You don't know the half of it, Toussaint, not even you.
He tried to explain the ongoing articles about the team, the obligation—if it was that—to tell people what had happened to Vic while he was fighting in the service of his country.

"Country." Toussaint picked up that word and seemed to consider it. He gestured in the direction of Great Falls. "Hill 57," he let out as if Ben had asked for an unsavory address. "You know about that." Something like a snort came from him, making Ben more uneasy yet. After a long moment, he held up the letter. "Here's what's left of Vic, that I know of." He handed it over. "Take down what it says."

Nonplussed, Ben unfolded the piece of stationery and read it through. He chewed the inside of his mouth, trying to decide. It had been offered and he couldn't turn it down. "You're sure?"

Toussaint shrugged as if surety was hard to come by.

Ben took out his notepad and jotted steadily. When done, he handed the letter back and put a hand on the rough shoulder of the mackinaw. "I'll get word to you when they give Vic the okay to come home, I promise." Drawing a last deep breath of sweetgrass, he started to get up. "You know how to put on the miles. I have to get back to Gros Ventre yet tonight."

Toussaint nodded. "Say hello. Your father is good people."

"
Ask a hard question when you have one foot out the door,
" that father schooled into every cub reporter, including his son, who passed through the
Gleaner
office. "
A person turns into an answering fool to get rid of you.
" Ben hesitated. Toussaint Rennie was never going to be an answering fool or any other kind.

The question did not wait for him to reason it out. "Help me with something if you can," he blurted, turning back to the seated figure. "Did Vic ever say anything about that kid on our team? Merle? You know the one I mean."

He watched the eyes encased within wrinkles; something registered there. "The one that died on that funny hill?" the voice came slowly. "With all the white rocks?"

"That's him."

"That one. Nobody ought to run that much." Now the old man scrutinized him in return. "Vic comes home, you can ask him."

"I want to. It's just that he's never brought it up."

"That's that, then." Toussaint glanced away, then back again. "Better look up that aunt of his."

Ben's hopes sagged. He had knocked on the door of that Hill 57 shack any number of times, trying to reach the elusive relative Vic had lived with during college. "She's never there."

"Downtown, drunk," Toussaint grunted as though he could see the woman from where he sat. "Catch her sober, after she gets over the shakes. That's the trick with a wino. Wait until allotment money's gone."

"End of the month, you mean?"

"Middle. She's a thirsty one."

"I'll give her another try." Ben touched the bowed shoulder again as he edged past.

"So long, Ben." The old man shifted his weight, settling deeper on the spindly chair. "See any elk, shoo them this way."

It was forming in his head by the time he reached the car. He could have kicked himself for not having brought the typewriter. He ransacked the glove compartment and came up with some old whiskey invoices billed to the Medicine Lodge. The backs of those gave him enough to write on. First he carefully tore out the notepad pages the letter was copied onto and laid them in order on the car seat, reading them over a couple of times. Then he began to scrawl, sheet after sheet, more like scribbling than writing, things crossed out often, but the words that survived felt right to him. He worked like fury at it, and the piece grew under the pencil.

In the hills he had made his own, the grandfather heard from the world of war only by farthest echoes. Little Bighorn. Wounded Knee. San Juan Hill. Montana boys, neighbors' sons, at a place from Hell called the Argonne Forest. Pearl Harbor. He knew death did not send a letter, but harm was likely to. He opened this hand-delivered one past the return address of the grandson he had raised—
Cpl. Victor Rennie, somewhere in England.

"Old man, the friend who will bring you this will tell you what happened. All I will say is that it was like dynamite going off under me.

"No more hunting for me. My left leg is gone, almost to the hip. These doctors treat me the best they can, but they can't bring back the leg.

"You will want to know what this place is like. There is a green lawn as big as our horse pasture, and hedges as high as the corral. It rains here. Days are all the same. You remember my folks' funeral. This is like being at my own, every day. They say I will adjust, whatever that means. I can't see it, myself. The crazy thing is, it reminds me of going to a movie with my friend Ben. We got a kick out of the Westerns, a stagecoach always going around and around those big buttes in Monument Valley while the Indians chased it. Time after time, same butte, stagecoach and Indians going like hell around it again. Grandfather, you are going to have to know—when I come home, my life will be like that, nothing but the same, over and over."

Vic's chapter of the war ends there, but not his story. When this war has its valley of monuments, in the tended landscape of history, they will not all look alike. One will be what we call in Montana a sidehill, a slope populated with shacks at the edge of a thriving American city. The nickname, Hill 57, speaks to the variety of hard luck there—poor, Indian, jobless—and it was from Hill 57 that Victor Rennie each day walked to college and, one farther day, into the world of war. His Army unit was in hard fighting in the invasion of Sicily. Vic survived that, as he had survived so much else. Then came the bivouac outside Messina in a stretch of country the German forces supposedly had retreated through too fast to set land mines. The routine patrol led by Vic set out at first light...

Football never entered into the piece.

"Cass? Are you in, Captain ma'am, or folding like a sane person would?"

Walled in by the drone of the cargo plane and the din of her own thoughts, Cass Standish forced her attention back to the cards in her hand. Pair of jacks, deuce, trey, ten.
Could be worse, but just as easy could be better.
The flight plan of the C-47 gooney bird, monotonously circling in bumpy air for the last half hour, could have stood improvement, too.
I'm not in charge of that, at least.
Just the lonely one-eyed jacks staring her in the face. Across from her, Della teased a finger back and forth across the edge of her cards as if sharpening them for the kill. Glancing right and left, Cass caught up to the fact that Beryl and Mary Catherine had already thrown theirs facedown on the makeshift table of parachute packs, bluffed out. It was a shame Della was not as good a pilot as she was a poker player.