The Eleventh Man

by Ivan Doig

  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.

  3

  "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.

  "I'll see you in Hell first, Maclaine." Cass took a dollar bill from her depleted stack and tossed it into the ante.

  "Tsk, Cassie. That's one for Mother." Reaching across, Della plucked up another wrinkled bill from Cass's pile of ones and dropped it aside into the cuss pot, which they always divvied after the game.

  "What's the program here," Cass said crossly, "to get rich off my vocabulary? That's chickenshit, Della."

  The others eyed her. They knew Cass had the best cockpit nerves in the human race; when she was not at the controls, things could fray at the edges now and then. Beryl, ritual elder of the group, was about to say something but thought better of it. This time, Della only crept her fingers a little way toward Cass's pile, asking as if it was a matter of etiquette: "Another for Mother?"

  Knowing that she needed to get a grip on the situation, Cass theatrically fanned at her mouth as if shooing off flies, then forked over another dollar for swearing during the game. As everyone laughed, she sneaked another glance at the nearest window port and still saw only fog; Seattle was socked in tighter than she could ever remember—that was saying a lot—and there
were mountains out there. Even she, who had to have faith in instrumentation, was ready to divert to sunny Moses Lake. She caught the eye of Linda Cicotte, her B flight lead pilot, and pointed urgently toward the cockpit. Linda nodded, teetered to her feet, and felt her way forward to talk to the pilot. The rest of the dozen women, all in the baggy flying gear called zoot suits, slouched in sling seats along one side of the aircraft; the majority of the cabin was taken up with bulky crates. TARFU Airlines, these numbing transport trips in the equivalent of a boxcar with propellers were known as: Things Are Really Fucked Up. Circling in grade A fog this way was worse than usual, on these trips to the Coast, but there was nothing to do about it but go with the routine. Linda's team of fliers as usual were curled up as best they could, trying to catch some sleep. C flight, Ella Mannion's, did crossword puzzles and read books. Cass was not sure she wanted to know what it said that hers always sat on their parachute packs in the tail of the plane and played cutthroat poker.

  Right now, Mary Catherine palmed the deck in cardsharp fashion, ready to keep dealing. "Cards, sisters in sin?"

  "Honey"—Della was only from somewhere in southern Ohio, but when she poured it on, she sounded like Tallulah Bankhead on a bender—"I couldn't possibly stand one more good card."

  Cass flinched inwardly. What am I getting myself into here? A lot of that going around lately. Saying "Hit me twice," she slid the deuce and trey to the discard pile. The new cards might as well have gone straight there, too. Lucky in love doesn't seem to count in poker either, Ben. Even so, when Della upped the ante, she stayed with her. Della raised her again, which mercifully was the limit. Cass met the bet and, fingers crossed, produced the jacks.

  "Pair of ladies." Della laid down queens and scooped up cash. "Thank you for the money, y'all, it'll go for good causes, widows and orphans and the home for overmatched poker players."

  Cass looked at Mary Catherine, and Mary Catherine at Beryl. Simultaneously they reached to their piles and each flung a dollar into the cuss pot. "Piss in the ocean, Della!" they chorused.

  "My, my," Della drawled, cocking a delicate ear. "Do I hear a whine in one of the engines?" Cass had to hand it to her; shavetail latecomer or not, she was sharp as a porcupine on most things. The full lieutenants, Beryl Foster and Mary Catherine Cornelisen, had earned their wings in the very first contingent of WASPs, as Cass herself had. The three of them together had endured the bald old goat of a flight instructor at Sweetwater, Texas, who claimed women pilots would never amount to anything because they couldn't piss in the ocean—the Gulf of Mexico, actually—from ten thousand feet through the relief tube like the male pilots. If that had been deliberate motivation toward every other kind of flying skill, it worked in their case. Sometimes the aircraft they ferried from the plant were finished products and sometimes they weren't. Mary Catherine once had been going through a cockpit check on the factory floor when the engine of the shiny new fighter burst into flames; pure textbook but against all human inclination, she rammed the throttle open and blew out the fire. And Beryl knew what it was to land at East Base with nothing but fumes left in a leaky auxiliary tank. With scrapes enough of her own, Cass would not have traded their cool heads for reincarnations of Amelia Earhart. Della, though. Nearly a year behind them in flight school and immeasurably more than that in experience, Della still showed signs of thinking of herself as a hot pilot. Hot pilots tended to end up dead pilots. Cass knew she had her work cut out for her with Della.

  Starting about now; Della was shuffling the cards in such a fashion that they purred expectantly, but she did have the smarts to check with Cass before dealing out another hand.

  Cass shook her head. "That's it, officers. Time to ready up." She climbed to her feet, stiff from all the sitting. "M.C., where'd you put those newspapers?" They had grabbed up a pile of the Great Falls Tribune before takeoff; the article about them and the picture of the squadron proudly posed on the wings of an Airacobra had brought whoops of tribute to the inquisitive war correspondent in the fancy flight jacket. And they're not even in the sack with him. Cass tried to stifle that thought and keep a straight face as Mary Catherine uncovered the newspapers from under her gear and began passing them out. "Here you go, read all about our classy squadron commander and her Flying Women. How many does everybody want? Cass?"

  "Oh, a couple." One to send to Dan. What a case I am. Show the hubby the nice things the other man I love writes about me. Dry-mouthed, Cass hoped she was better at a straight face than she was at stifling.

  Linda Cicotte came weaving her way to the back of the plane. "We're in the hands of a hero, Cass." She jerked a thumb toward the cockpit. "He still says he's going to get us on the ground in Seattle."

  "He didn't happen to say, 'Or die trying,' did he?" Cass asked in exasperation.

  Linda simply rolled her eyes. "Are we going to fly out in this, do you think?"

  "Too soupy for good health." Cass herself didn't mind instrument flying, bracketing the radio beam and the rest of the things you did to let the machine navigate itself through limited visibility. But she couldn't risk her fliers; Della in particular tended to trust her own instincts over the instruments, a good way to meet a mountain. "You know what a hard-ass this dispatching officer can be," Cass shared her thinking with Linda, who had flown the Seattle run nearly as many times as she had. "I'll work on him unmercifully. Tell your bunch and Ella's we're going to try to RON this one." Remaining overnight, when they were supposed to be picking up planes and heading back, would not be popular with the higher-ups at East Base. It also threw off tonight with Ben. Briefly she felt better about herself for not letting either of those get in the way of her decision.

  Beryl looked up from the newspaper she was holding. "Cass? I didn't know that about the ring. Mine won't come off even if I wanted."

  The line in there about the ringless hand, nothing between it and the controls of an Airacobra: Damn it, Ben, you don't miss much, but I wish you'd been looking the other way that time. They'd started off deadly stiff with one another when he showed up to interview her and the other WASPs, as was to be expected after that run-in in the hangar. The atmosphere started to thaw as soon as he discovered she gave a straight answer, no matter what the question, and she found out he knew his business about flying. He'd done his homework on P-39s, was familiar with the Cobra's reputation as a tricksome aircraft, with the engine mounted in back of the cockpit creating a center of gravity different from more stable fighter planes. And he had looked into the Lend-Lease lore that what was gained from the radical design was ideal room up front for a 30-millimeter cannon poking out of the propeller hub like a stinger; the Russians were said to adore P-39s for strafing, just point the nose of the plane at German tanks and convoys and blaze away. Cass drew a grin from him when she agreed it was a flighty aircraft, one you had to pilot every moment, but she confessed she didn't mind that about the Cobra; weren't you supposed to pay total attention when you were in the air? As to the funeral ticket always there in that big engine right behind the pilot's neck, she offhandedly said the answer was to not get in a situation where you had to make a belly landing. That drew somewhat less of a grin from him. The true tipping point came, though, when she climbed into a tethered P-39 to show him the cockpit routine, automatically slipping off her wedding band as she slid into the seat and he wanted to know what that was about. Somehow willpower—won't power, too, she ruefully corrected herself—went out of control from then on.

  "My husband is too busy to mind about something like a ring, he's in New Guinea."

  "With the Montaneers? So is one of my football buddies—I was there a little while back."

  "You were? Is it as bad as they say?"

  "I'll bring you the piece I wrote there, you can decide."

  All that. Then before they knew it, nights at the roadhouse or his room at the Excelsior. She had done anything like this only once before, during the spree in Dallas after winning her wings, when that well-mannered tank officer as viewed through a c
elebratory haze of drinks looked too good to resist. That was strictly a one-nighter, and she had no illusions that Dan Standish refrained from similar flings when he was loose on leave in Brisbane and Rockhampton among the Sheilas of Australia. Supposedly it was different for men, their urges painted as almost medical, "the screw flu"; to hear them tell it, nature was to blame. But what about the strain of being a woman in singular command of a squadron of nerve-wracking planes and pilots both, and Ben Reinking happens into your life, nature's remedy for desolate nights if there ever was one? In the world of war, turn down such solace just because chance made you female? It had started off as only friendly drinks, Ben still asking her this and that as he worked over his piece about her squadron, the two of them sudden buddies over the topics of planes and New Guinea, until all at once he was revealing to her that he'd been wounded during his correspondent stint there. Every word that followed had stayed with Cass ever since:

  "Where?"

  "Place called Bitoi Ridge. Kind of a jungle hogback, in from the bay at Salamaua."

  "Modest. I meant on you."

  Ben paused. "I don't generally show it off."

  She bolted the last of her drink, but there was a challenging dry tingle in her mouth as she spoke it: "Never make an exception?"

  And ever since, the part she hated: if she wanted to hang on to her marriage and officer's rank, they didn't dare get caught at it. Tell no one. Show nothing. Staying casual as you hid a lover was a surprising amount of work, but now she managed to shrug at Beryl's remark. "I've just always done it, Bear. Dan and I knew a mechanic who slipped off a ladder, caught his ring on a bolt head. Pulled it right off."

  "The ring?" Della was deep in admiration of the newspaper photo, where the flip of her blonde hair showed to advantage. "So what?"

  "The finger, fool."

  "Yipe. Guess I better stay single, keep on playing the field."