The Eleventh Man (51 page)

Ben entered the hubbub of the Wonder Bar. Several members of the USO troupe were beside the stage signing autographs for early-comers, the confectionery colors of the singers and dancers glossy against the olive drab of the GIs. Loudon and the major, in conference at the show director's desk, spotted him and waved him over frantically.

"Ben! We've been looking everywhere for you." Loudon's words came faster than ever. "It's Moxie, he's—" The expression on Ben stopped him. "You heard. You're upset. Can't blame you."

Ben dropped the film can on the desk with a clatter.

"This is what's left of him."

Beneath the snap-brim hat the eyes guardedly darted down, then back to Ben. "Awful, what happened. We've got to make this into a tribute to him. Sit down, why don't you, we'll work over the script with—"

"I need a few minutes with you, Loudon. Just us. Now."

"Use my office," the major offered, all solicitude.

As soon as the door was shut, Loudon started again. "My God, who could have imagined this. Moxie the tenth one, I mean, there's no story ever like it." The chin doing the check mark, confirming to himself the Supreme Team saga. "You and me—well, no way it can be called lucky, watching it happen to all those poor guys, but at least we saw to it that they'll always be remembered." He sat down at the major's desk and beckoned Ben over. "Okay, the script, we have to make changes." The undercurrent of excitement still was in his voice. "Got your copy?"

Ben made no move toward the desk. As much as he had always despised the sportswriter, he at last realized Loudon in his darkest unacknowledged self wanted the whole team dead. Dead and buttered. Fit to serve up in his radio show, his newsreel, his newspaper column, probably a book.
The Eleven Who Donned the Uniform,
or something worse.

"Ben? We need to get going on this script. It's less than an hour to airtime and—"

"Shut up, Loudmouth." Ben's hand twitched against the pistol holster. He did not care whether Loudon noticed or not. "You're poison, you and your goddamn airtime and the rest, you're the death of the whole team. All the way back to Purcell."

Loudon looked at him, blank as a flatfish. The automatic velocity of voice started up: "Hey, let's not say anything we'll regret, I know it hits you hard about Mox—" The yammer stopped as suddenly as it started, something coming into Loudon's eyes now. "Purcell? Why bring that up?"

"You were in on it. You stood there with your hands in your pockets and watched Bruno run him to death."

"Ben, listen, you got it wrong. Bruno didn't have it in for Purcell, he had big plans for him on the team if he could turn him into enough of a man."

"He turned him into a dead kid."

"Sometimes things get pushed harder than anyone intended." Whatever it was in Loudon's eyes was matched now by the insinuation in his words. "It still bugs you that Bruno was turning Purcell into a starter, doesn't it. The team would've looked pretty different to you then, hey, Ben?"

"You slippery bastard, where did you come up with that, Purcell on the starting team? We had almost a week of practices yet before the season, Danzer had plenty of time to get his act—" Ben halted.

"In for Reinking at left end, Merle Purcell," Loudon maliciously mimicked broadcasting the substitution.

"What the hell are you talking about? I was captain of the team."

"That would have changed in a hurry if you were on the bench." The words came out of Loudon as if he couldn't resist the taste of them. "Bruno was going to bump you to the scrub team before the opening game, like that." He snapped his fingers. "Told me so, had me hold the story until he could put football religion into Purcell, on the Hill. He'd never give up on Danzer. Danzer was one of his. You weren't, sucker."

It reached all through Ben. "Then I'm not—" Purcell was the eleventh man. The famously hexed varsity lineup picked by Bruno at that last practice—
I'm not on the list.
The freedom from the odds built upon that jinx day dizzied him. Death had made its clean sweep. The skew in the law of averages brought on by Bruno's manipulations on the practice field and Loudon's at the microphone, that entire fatal scheme of things was not necessarily meant to have a place for Ben Reinking. He was odd man out.
Am.
The inevitability lifted from him. From here on, if the war claimed him, it would have to do it on its own terms, not by the Supreme Team's wholesale bad luck. A crazy laugh broke from Ben. No, he realized, the sanest one in a long time.

"Okay, we both have it out of our systems," Loudon was saying, nervous at that laugh. "Now let's forget all that and get busy on the script, airtime will be here in—"

"I'm not going on the show."

Loudon gaped at him.

"The Supreme Team is yours, it always was." Ben found he could say it calmly. "Give it a funeral any way you want."

"Listen, Reinking—Ben." The famous voice rose. "We don't have to be pals about this, we just have to do the show. You'll get your gravy from this as much as I will. Everything's set up for us. The network time. The news cameras. The whole USO—"

A rap on the door and the major was in the room almost before the sound. "I couldn't help hearing the ruckus. Something I can help with?"

"It's him," Loudon flared. "Says he won't go on the show. Drive some sense into him, Major."

"You most certainly are going on the show," the major scolded Ben as if he were a Sunday schooler. "I've looked over Ted's script, you're everywhere in it. Let's not complicate things for him."

"Let's."

The major took another look at Ben. "Captain, I order you to pick up that script and prepare for the show." Loudon at the desk whacked his hand down on his copy to second that.

"Not a chance, Major," Ben said, stepping away. "I am a TPWP war correspondent, I have a story to write about what killed Moxie Stamper, and I am going out that door now and write it."

Commotion had spread to the other side of the door, from the sound of it. The major raised his voice, "Quiet, out there! We're in conference in—"

He stopped short at the sight of Maurice Overby striding in, military policemen in white helmets and white spats on either side of him, two more taking up a station at the door.

Maurice paused, glanced at the major's angry face and Lou-don's angrier one, and raised his eyebrows at Ben. "Have we come at an inconvenient moment?"

"I don't know how you got wind of this, Lieutenant, but you're right in time," the major recovered. "Have your MPs ready." He leveled a deaconly finger at Ben. "How does arrest for disobeying an order from a superior officer and a Section Eight sound to you, Reinking? If you don't—"

"Actually, sir," Maurice broke in as if to save the major the trouble of saying more, "I'm here on orders from considerably higher up. I speak of the general. We"—Maurice swept his hand around graciously to indicate the military police contingent—"are to place Captain Reinking aboard a plane. In the word from HQ command, 'soonest.'"

I hope I heard that right. I hope I'm not dreaming this.

Loudon's face went from bad to worse, a good sign to Ben. "This man can't go anywhere," the major protested. "He's to be on the show or else—"

"I beg to differ, sir." Not without a bit of flourish, Maurice produced a set of paperwork. "He is being sent forthwith 'stateside,' again in the phrasing of the order. I have that order here should you wish to examine it, Major." The major did not touch it. Maurice nodded to the MPs, who moved in around Ben like bodyguards. "So. If you'll make your farewells, Captain, we can be on our way."

Ben looked straight at Loudon and said as if it was a vow, "See you in the movies, sucker."

Within the wedge of MPs, the blue-clad RAF officer and the flight-jacketed American cut through the gathering crowd in the Wonder Bar and swung out into the long bunker corridor where the footsteps were their own.

"Maurice, am I completely wacko," Ben asked urgently out the side of his mouth, "or were you bluffing back there?"

"Not at all," came the benign reply. "I might admit to providing a pinch of dramatic effect in the matter, but that's all. No, you are in mightier hands than mine. Your TPWP people had to come clean in their 'urgent' message a bit ago to convince HQ command you're worth high priority. A home-state senator—is that the phrase for a political old tusker in America?—raised rather a ruckus about the number of soldiers' lives your Montana has contributed to the war. I believe you know whereof I speak." The New Zealander turned a solemn gaze on him, then resumed. "All in all, it has become in Tepee Weepy's best interest to fetch you back alive and in one piece as speedily as can be." Maurice patted the side pocket of his uniform jacket. "I procured you a copy of all that, it should make pleasant reading on the plane. I don't mean to take the cherry off the top ahead of you, but I do think you'd like to know, Ben—you're to be mustered out as soon as you're back at that base in Montana and write the piece about Stamper."

At the mouth of the bunker was a stocky MP with a two-way radio clapped to his ear. He held up a hand like the traffic cop he had probably been in civilian life. "Hold it here, everybody—ack-ack is tracking one in."

In the shelter of the concrete archway, Ben and Maurice and the armbanded soldiers watched the sudden cat's cradle of searchlight beams over Antwerp. The arcs of white frozen lightning swung and swung, hunting, until fastening onto a glint far up in the black sky. Flashes from gun batteries pulsed on the low horizon, and as the flying bomb seemed to slow and hesitate, tracer bullets converged toward it like the ascending lines where the arches of a cathedral meet. Then the buzz bomb lost course, faltering off in a drifting glide, away from the battered durable old city.

"One less to worry about," Maurice pronounced briskly. Turning to Ben, he tapped his watch. "Fifteen minutes. The plane can take off in ten." Choked up, Ben could only shake hands wordlessly. The stubby lieutenant gave him an unreserved smile. "Fare thee well, Ben Reinking. Happy ride home."

The jeep thrummed under him on the steel grid of runway as it sped toward the plane, the guardian MPs riding shotgun front and back, the war behind him in the darkness. With luck—it was an amazing feeling to trust that word again—within three days the hopscotch of flights would deliver him back to East Base. Back within reach of the woman he would never get over. In the whirl of his thoughts the memorized lines of her letter danced to and fro. "
I think of you more than is healthy, and I just want you to know I regret not one damn thing of our time together.... Maybe it'll all sort out okay after the war.
"

Flooded almost to tears with the rapture of survival, Ben unloaded from the jeep the instant it screeched to a halt and raced toward the hatchway of the revving plane.
You're getting giddy, Reinking. If not now, when?
With his war over, in his every heartbeat he could feel the surge of his chances with Cass. A woman with no regrets, two men—

He did not even have to calculate. All the rest of his life, should he live forever, he gladly would take odds that good.

This is a work of fiction, and so my characters exist only in these pages. There is, however, a breath of actuality to the plot premise of World War Two's disproportionate toll on a given number of young men who had played football together: by the accounts available, eleven starting players of Montana State College in Bozeman did perish in that conflict. I am indebted to my late friend, Dave Walter of the Montana Historical Society, for providing me the pieces of that quilt of lore. Research virtuoso of the state's past that he was, Dave also furnished a vivid sense of conscientious objector life in the Montana woods during the war in his history of the Civilian Public Service Camp at Belton, Montana,
Rather Than War.

Montana's war losses are summed up in another key historical study,
Montana, A History of Two Centuries
by Michael P. Malone, Richard B. Roeder, and William L. Lang: "As in World War I, Montana contributed more than its share of military manpower—roughly forty thousand men by 1942—and the state's death rate in the war was exceeded only by New Mexico's."

A number of the women who piloted miltary aircraft in 1942-44 as WASPs—Women Air Force Service Pilots—learned to fly in the Civilian Pilot Training program before the war, as I had Cass Standish do. There were 916 WASPs—141 of those in the Air Transport Command, as Cass's ferry squadron would have been—when their branch of the service was disbanded ("inactivated") in December 1944. Thirty-eight women military pilots lost their lives in the course of duty. While East Base in Great Falls, Montana, was indeed a hub of ferrying Lend-Lease fighters, bombers, and cargo planes north to Alaska and Soviet Union air crews waiting there—the total is listed as 7,926 aircraft—the presence of Cass's flying women at East Base and on the route to Edmonton is my own creation.

Similarly, I have taken literary leeway with a few settings in the book. Citizens of Great Falls will find that I have put nonexistent Treasure State University on about the site of C.M. Russell High School, and the Letter Hill in back of it. Hill 57 did exist. The Reinkings' town of Gros Ventre and the Two Medicine country remain as I originated them in my Montana Trilogy, imagined versions that draw on the actual geography in and around Dupuyer, the hospitable armful of town of my high school years.