by Ivan Doig
"No go, Purcell's still going to get it," he reported tightly as all the faces in there turned to him. "Maybe not the rest of us from here on out—I think I got through to our esteemed coach that we've had enough of that Hill crap."
In the lateness of the day, everyone showering and clearing out in a hurry, it was not noticed that Purcell never showed up in the locker room.
He was found the next morning almost all the way up the Letter Hill, at the stem of the T. Word raced through the dorms, and instead of breakfast the team went to the locker-room meeting hastily called by Bruno. White-faced, he reported that he had watched Purcell make his run to the base of the letters and head back down, before he himself quit for the day and went to his office. Never dreaming, he vouched, that Purcell would take further punishment on himself and keep running the Hill, evidently time after time, until his heart gave out. The funeral was to be on Wednesday, just three days before the opening game and most of the way across the state, but as though it was the most natural thing in the world, the coach announced the whole team had been named honorary pallbearers and would attend.
And out there in a dried-up homesteader cemetery with tumbleweeds banked against a wire fence, they climbed off the team bus and gathered at the grave, outnumbering Purcell's relatives and townspeople. Ben sensed something as soon as he spotted the metal call-sign initials on the radio microphone at graveside: KOPR, statewide coverage. What unsettled him more was the sight of Ted Loudon instead of a radio newsman stepping to the mike before the funeral service got under way. In a rapid-fire patter he obviously been practicing, Loudon reeled off phrases of pathos: "Not since the sad demise of Notre Dame's George Gipp in the prime of his playing life has football seen a tragedy such as this.... Now in the eternal annals of the game, The Gipper is joined by The Ghost Runner, for that is what Merle Purcell's teammates called him for his fleet-footed elusiveness on the gridiron.... Every lad of the TSU team is here today to do him honor..."
Having grown up around journalistic boilerplate, Ben knew beyond the shadow of a doubt Loudon's same words would show up in tomorrow morning's sports column in virtually every daily paper across Montana. The copper company owned those as well as the statewide radio network. For whatever reason, Purcell was getting a send-off from the powers that be.
Stepping up to the mike, Bruno dramatically cleared his throat and the ears of countless listeners. "We at Treasure State University, and indeed this great state for which it is named," he boomed his words out as if to make sure they reached from border to border, "have suffered a loss before the football season of record has even begun."
Dex and Jake and several others of the team stirred uneasily with Ben at equating a death on the Letter Hill with losing a game played with a ball. Vic, who knew all about treacherous slopes from his daily ascension of Hill 57, listened cold-eyed. Moxie Stamper, in a suit coat and pants that didn't match, was trying to adjust his slack face to the posthumous promotion of Purcell to The Ghost Runner.
The coach of them all swept right on. "But valor can rise from a field of loss. That is the lesson we must take from this tragedy. Merle Purcell was among us for too brief a time on the patch of earth he loved above all other, the football field. What better site, then, to remember him on."
Now Bruno sprang it.
"I have gone to the president of Treasure State University. Mr. and Mrs. Purcell"—he inclined his head solemnly their direction; it proved to be the first of pauses emphatic as bullets—"are to be our honored guests at every game, home and away. As shall Merle, present in spirit. In our commemoration of the undying valor of giving his life for the sport he sought to excel at. There will be eleven men on the field each Saturday, but by the presence of his memory among us, he will be there too. I ask every member of the Treasure State team in their endeavors on the field, and all TSU alumni and supporters in your cheers in the stands and beside your radios, to dedicate this season to Merle Purcell, our twelfth man!"
Notepad pages flipping, Ted Loudon was writing it all down like a mad monk.
Afterward, Ben could look back and see the team had been trapped. By the trappings draped all over TSU home games from then on, if nothing else. The stadium-shaking stomping roars of "Merrrle!" led by the student section as Twelfth Man pennants flew in their hands. Purcell's awkwardly dressed-up parents unmissable in the guest seats of honor. While up there in the KOPR booth, inflated to sportscaster by the heady vapors given off by his prose back there at graveside and the days of headlines after, Loudon rattled on about the uncanny inspiration driving the team to destiny.
Did the eleven of them buy into it? Not fundamentally. But there is always a but. Among themselves they tried not to feel the pull of the so-called season of the Twelfth Man, seized upon by Bruno and Loudon and their helper bosses to make a football saint out of a yokel kid who blew a gasket on his heart doing something he shouldn't have. There were times in the huddle when Moxie, having had to motion the crowd to settle down so his signals could be heard, would crack something like "Never knew Purcell had lung power like that" and draw cynical laughs. Yet as the victories piled up, something unaccountable had to be credited. Even Ben, their elected skeptic, could feel it. They all, every one of them, were playing every minute as if their lives depended on it. This season was like no other; it was that simple and that complicated. They could try to ignore each weeklong buildup of expectation or joke past the game-day din all they wanted, but Purcell's fate up there on the hill over them sobered their talent to a certain purity. Death was death, no matter how you cut it. Ben did not quite have the words for it yet, but somewhere deep he came to understand that for these inexplicably singled-out young men he was among, one short of a dozen, what had happened to that remindful twelfth man was like an alarm clock going off murderously early in someone's room next to yours.
"Hey." Long thoughts left him at halftime as Cass passed the scotch bottle back and forth under his nose like smelling salts. "Better revive yourself, your team could stand a shot of something, too."
"Nothing a wholesale bunch of touchdowns couldn't cure." He'd have felt better about the shellacking TSU was taking if Bruno still were the coach. Naturally the bastard had parlayed the '41 season into the job at a California football powerhouse. Scum always rises.
A covey of waist-high Indian boys blasted past, tussling and trying to tackle one another. Ben glanced down the line of white-rock seating to see how his and Cass's welcome was holding out. Opera glasses clapped to their eyes—somewhat unevenly in the case of the most serious beer drinkers—the Hill 57 grownups were engrossed in the gyrations of the marching band and the cheerleaders. He did justice to the scotch and passed it back to Cass.
She had been watching him. "Old times getting you down?"
At her words, emotions rose up in him like contending creatures and the nearest one won out. He slipped a hand to the back of her slacks. "New times don't have that problem. You want to see the rest of this travesty of football?"
"Gee, do I have a better offer?"
"Not much of a game, I hear. Ain't civilization declined since we hung up our jockstraps? Whup, I saw that, don't wear yourself out reaching for your dough—this round's on me. Here's to bolshoya semnadtsi." Jake tapped the first Officers' Club bottle of beer of the night against Ben's and swigged enthusiastically.
Ben didn't lift his. "Call me suspicious, but I don't drink to anything I can't savvy."
"Where's your linguistic skills, Benjamin? It's Russian for 'big seventeens.' Uncle Joe's gang in Fairbanks goes around yakking that every time we hand over those nice shiny new bombers to them." Beer in hand, he leaned back like a Murphy bed going up and angled a look across at Ben. "There, now that I've educated you, how's the war treating you these days?"
"Same as usual. Dodging bullets from the teleprinter."
"I've got the cure for that." Jake could hardly wait to get it out. "Whyn't you come along on the Alaska hop tomorrow? See what a real airplane is like instead of those
puddle jumpers you flew."
Surprised enough that he didn't trust his tongue—Do you actually sit up nights thinking of ways to complicate my life?—Ben waited a bit to respond. "I thought the ATC drill is you always fly with a full crew, no hitchhikers."
"Yeah, well, my bombardier has had enough practice at not pulling the trigger on trapper cabins. Fact is, he feels like he's coming down with three-day flu. Twenty bucks' worth. I figured you could take it out of petty cash from that oddball outfit you work for."
"Short notice, Ice, I'll need to get busy and run this past Grady—"
"—who like a sane general thinks this is the perfect chance to grab off some long overdue notice for his star B-17 coolie, the modest but capable Lieutenant Eisman. I already cleared it with him. C'mon, Ben, Dex got his rah-rah for slapping splints on guys somegoddamnwhere. Moxie gets his for shooting off ack-ack in some English cow pasture. How about mine, what're you waiting for?"
He had to resist yanking his feet off the floor of the Plexiglas nose cone as the bomber shuddered across acres of unforgiving concrete in what seemed to be a never-ending takeoff. Then, like an elevator going up, the B-17 Flying Fortress lifted, turned its tail to the smelter stack, and began the long climb north.
Beneath and on all sides of him, old known earth mapped itself on the underside of the plastic shell where he huddled in fascinated suspension. Wheatfields winter-sown and fallow stretched below like checkered linoleum laid to the wall of the Rockies. There to the west he could pick out the long straight brink of Roman Reef and its dusky cliff, and the snake line of watercourse that would be English Creek. Gros Ventre, though, held itself out of sight beneath its cover of trees. The four big engines drummed loud enough he regretted he had not brought earplugs. However, that would have denied him the company of Jake and the crew via the earphones.
"Everybody copacetic? Navigator, the fake bomb jockey still with us? Make sure he doesn't touch anything that can go off."
"I'll slap his hands, skipper."
Ben was pretty sure they were kidding. On the other hand, twin half-inch guns poked up from the cheeks of the plane just on the other side of the plastic from him and he made a hurried inventory of switches not to bump.
Jake got back to business. "Sparks, how's that weather by now?"
"Clear at Edmonton. It starts to heavy up after that. Cumulonimbus to thirty thousand, the whole ball of horseshit."
"Hear that, Ben? Arranged a ceiling flight for you."
Christ and a bear, that's seven miles up in one of these things. "Just don't drop me, Lieutenant Eisman."
"Haven't lost a scribbler yet."
Soon the Sweetgrass Hills crouched beneath the plane, their three ancient summits the only sentinel points in uncountable miles of prairie. For a fleeting moment aligned with the bomb-aiming panel of Plexiglas directly in front of Ben, Devil's Chimney looked like the front sight of a rifle zeroed in. He thought back to Toussaint Rennie and hoped a dressed-out elk was hanging in that windsprung barn on the Two Medicine. Scanning the passing geography and jotting frantically, crystals of detail for the Tepee Weepy piece, snatches to write to Vic, his thinking as ever quickened with the vantage point of defied gravity. Maybe I was meant for thin air. Or is that birdbrain logic? Either way, he had the giddy feeling of being on top of it all. The colossal modern warp of time claimed everywhere below him; only a man's puny lifetime ago, the swiftest things on this shoulder of the planet were buffalo and Indian ponies. B-17s annihilated every pace of the past and along with it substituted sky for high ground. "Space is the bride of time." Elemental Gaussian physics, weirdly brilliant even back there in the stolid print of the college textbook, the blindered genius Carl Friedrich Gauss sitting in Gottingen unaware of the Napoleonic Wars going on around him while he figured out basics of the universe. The goddamn Germans, too bad they were born with brains.
The intercom broke in. "Friendlies at three o'clock, skipper."
"I see them. Our sisters in arms."
"Not in mine," moaned another voice on the intercom.
Ben reached behind him to the airframe and grabbed binoculars out of their wall pouch. Sleek as the four points of a prong, the formation of Cobras was overtaking them as if the bomber was a lumber wagon. Flying tight and right. He knew, he just knew. Cass in her element.
"Bruiser at nine o'clock, Captain, fifteen hundred yards, same heading as ours."
There could not be a better wingman than Beryl. Cass radioed back, "Roger, over. Hold course, everyone, there's plenty of elbow room." And our route just as much as theirs, now. She grease-penciled this portion of the Edmonton hop onto the flight plan map strapped to the right thigh of her flying suit; the Canadian border stood out down there like the edge of a new jigsaw puzzle, the patterns of its fields contrasting with the American side. Automatically she checked how the rest of her pilots were doing. The other wingman, Mary Catherine, was hanging in perfectly, smooth as a mirror reflection. Even Della, bringing up the rear, matched up with the formation without wandering today. Damn. You just get something going good and it starts coming apart. She was going to hate to lose Beryl if her transfer came through. Couldn't blame her, wanting in on the Wichita factory run, closer to her husband. And getting to ferry B-17s like that one, now that the high brass had decided women of a certain height and heft could possibly handle the controls of a bomber in the most wide-open airspace in the country. Cass had to laugh. There wouldn't be all this half-step stuff if it had been the Wright sisters at Kitty Hawk.
As the flight of P-39s pulled away to the north, Jake's voice crackled on the intercom again. "There they go, Grady's Ladies into the Great Canadian Beyond. You happy now, newspaper guy?"
"All God's chillun got the wings they earned, Ice."
From Edmonton on, the flight was a relay race from one bush-country airstrip to the next, with malicious weather in the way. Between Watson Lake and Whitehorse, Ben had to abandon the nose cone; he hated losing the vantage point, but riding there had become too much like being the hood ornament on a snow tractor. Shaking with chill, he retreated to the table corner offered by the navigator. Then through the earphones came the further numbing news that the aircraft's heater had frozen up and quit. He'd thought it might be a prank back there in sunny Great Falls when Jake made him put on double layers of long underwear, three pairs of heavy socks, a fur-lined hooded flying suit over his flight jacket, and a chamois face mask. The Yukon climate was not impressed. The cold, some perverse apex at this altitude, went through fur, fabric, and skin alike. It seemed possible his blood had turned to slush. He not only couldn't take notes, he could not even make a fist. Time seemed frozen to a standstill. What the hell did Jake want missions over Germany for? This was bad enough. Hunched there helplessly in the refrigerated body of the bomber, he could not get beyond wishing he had something to thaw out with. A blowtorch, maybe. When Ladd Field at Fairbanks at last presented its snowy self, he was hoping the frigid chamois would not take his face off with it.
In the warming hut that seemed tropical, Jake drew him aside. "So, Benjamin, the transport from Nome doesn't pick us up until morning. How do you want to celebrate the layover?"
"Thawing out."
"Wallflower." Jake delicately fingered a frost-abused ear as if to make sure none of it had dropped off. "Got a little something I better tell you." He took a circumspect look toward the other end of the hut where the rest of the crew was loudly stomping and rubbing warmth into themselves, then leaned in close to Ben and whispered:
"I'm getting Russian tail."
Still numb enough that he was not sure he had heard right, Ben checked the lusty expression on Jake and saw that he had. "Are you." If his enterprising friend had come across some Muscovite hot number in an Alaskan whorehouse, so what? "They owe you some, I guess."
"Yeah, wouldn't the Cossacks just cream their britches?" Jake grinned proudly.
"Who's the unlucky woman?"
"She's a pilot."
Ben stared at him.
"Well, was a pilot. She's missing a few parts—got all the right ones, though. But a couple of fingers." Jake waggled a hand with the last two digits down out of sight. "Those pissant Nazis like to shoot back. Now she's a bug driver."
This, Ben found nearly as stupefying as the pilot part. The runway they had just come in on was pulverized ice, gray banks of chips spewed up by metal grippers in countless plane tires, with furrows that were more like ruts to land into. Buzzing around out there in thirty below, on one of the little tow tractors called bugs, sounded to him like a job for only the hardiest Eskimo. Or a madwoman. Or worse.
"Jake, or should I just say Bonehead—"
"Ben, Ben, hold it down, okay?"
"—get your mind up from between your legs and think about this a little, will you? What the hell are you doing, bucking for a Section Eight? Anybody the Russians trust enough to station here is apt to be a Red, like those big stars on the sides of these planes, remember? And the United States government does not look kindly on the Communist Party."
"What are they going to get me for, consorting with an ally?" Ben's point did cause Jake to reflect. "I wouldn't be surprised if she diddled a commissar or two along the way to get here. She knows her diddling."
"Will you listen a goddamn minute? You and Tractor Woman—"
"Katya. Katya Gyorgovna Zhukova. The Russians really go in for names."
"Jake, we're heading to the mess hall," the copilot called. "You two coming?"
"My scribe and me have got matters of national importance to attend to. You're in charge, Charlie, see you at breakfast."