The Eleventh Man

by Ivan Doig

  The Eleventh Man

  Ivan Doig

  * * *

  Harcourt, Inc.

  Orlando Austin New York San Diego London

  * * *

  Also by Ivan Doig

  FICTION

  The Sea Runners

  English Creek

  Dancing at the Rascal Fair

  Ride with Me, Mariah Montana

  Bucking the Sun

  Mountain Time

  Prairie Nocturne

  The Whistling Season

  NONFICTION

  This House of Sky

  Winter Brothers

  Heart Earth

  * * *

  Copyright © 2008 by Ivan Doig

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and

  retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work

  should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact

  or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department,

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Doig, Ivan.

  The eleventh man/Ivan Doig.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Ex-football players—Fiction. 2. Montana—Fiction.

  3. World War, 1939-1945—Fiction. Title.

  PS3554.O415E43 2008

  813'.54—dc22 2008010046

  ISBN 978-0-15-101243-5

  Text set in Minion Pro

  Designed by Linda Lockowitz

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition

  K J I H G F E D C B A

  * * *

  To Becky Saletan

  editor extraordinaire

  1943

  1

  Never much of a town for showing off, Gros Ventre waited around one last bend in the road, suppertime lights coming on here and there beneath its roof of trees. As the bus headed up the quiet main street toward the hotel, where the lobby served as depot, Ben Reinking saw the single lighted storefront on the block with the bank and the beauty shop. Of course. Thursday night. His father putting the newspaper to bed after this week's press run.

  "Here will do," he called to the driver.

  The bus driver jammed on the brakes and heaved himself around to take a better look at this final passenger. Using all the breath he could summon, the man let out slowly: "I'll be goddamned. You're him. Awful sorry, Lieutenant, I didn't—"

  "I'll live." Most civilians could not read the obscure shoulder patch on his flight jacket, and any camouflage he could get anytime suited Ben.

  Right there in the middle of the street, the driver laboriously dragged out the duffel bag from the luggage bay and presented it to him. The man looked tempted to salute. Ben murmured his thanks and turned away toward the premises of the Gros Ventre Weekly Gleaner. Well, he told himself as he swung along under the burden of his duffel, now to see whether his father had picked up any news about the repeal of the law of averages, as it apparently had been.

  Habit dies hard, even the military variety that never came natural to him; he caught himself surveying these most familiar surroundings in terms of ambush and booby trap, and with a shake of his head sought to change over to observation of a more civil sort. Storefront by dozing storefront, the town still looked as if the world of war had nothing to do with it, yet he knew better. It was simply that buildings don't read casualty lists. He tried to put that thought away and just come to terms with being home. Gros Ventre, he'd learned growing up here, was the same age as the tree rings in the mature cottonwood colonnade along its streets, and altered itself as slowly. Only the season had changed appreciably since the last time he had to do this, early evening unrolling a frosty carpet of light from the front of the Gleaner building now as he approached.

  He stopped to read the window as he always did. Posted beneath the gilt lettering on the plate glass were handbills announcing a war bonds box supper and a farm machinery auction on lower English Creek. Both were set in the familiar exclamatory typeface his father called Visual Braille. Fooling around as a printer paid for the indulgence of being a small-town editor, Bill Reinking liked to say. Just this moment, Ben spotted him there at the back of the office in the job shop, running the addressograph himself. As ever, his father looked like a schoolmaster out of place, peering foggily through his bifocals while he fed the dog tag-sized subscription plates into the small machine for it to stamp those names and addresses onto the out-of-town mail wrappers. Ben remembered now: the office help, Janie, had moved to Arizona, where her husband's tank corps was in training.

  Past his own reflection in the glass of the door, Ben watched his father at his lonesome chore until it started to hurt. This part doesn't get any easier either, does it. Two bylines under one roof. At least we both write with the pointed end, he taught me that.

  With that he stepped inside to the subtle smell of ink fresh on newsprint, calling out as cheerfully as he could manage: "All the news that fits, again this week?"

  "Ben!" The addressograph made empty thumping sounds onto wrappers until his father could shut it down. "Surprise the living daylights out of a man, why don't you. We weren't expecting you until the weekend."

  "Well, guess what, the Air Transport Command turns out to be full of surprises. It's only a forty-eight-hour leave, not the seventy-two I put in for." He tried to cover the next with a shrug. "And there's something I have to do out of town tomorrow. Other than that, I'm the perfect guest."

  "Better enjoy you in a hurry, hadn't I," his father said in his dry way as they shook hands. His face alight, the older man gazed at the younger as if storing up on him. He was dying to ask what was behind this trip home, Ben could tell, but doing his best to be a father first and a newspaperman second. That was fortunate, because Ben himself did not have the right words anywhere near ready. In the strange labyrinth of TDYs—temporary duty assignments—that Ben Reinking's war somehow had turned into, this one was the hardest yet to talk about.

  Bill Reinking could see most of this. Not wanting to prompt, he ventured only: "You've seen a lot of the world lately."

  More than enough. England, bombed stiff by the Luftwaffe. New Guinea, beachheads backed against Japanese-held mountains two miles high. The close call from ack-ack over Palau on the B-17 ride; the even closer one no one was being told about. Not exactly pleasant conversation, any of it. Ben got rid of it for now in mock-heroic fashion: "It was hell out in those there islands."

  His father laughed uncertainly. After a moment, the bifocals tilted up in appraisal. "Nice addition to your uniform, by the way. The Ernies"—Pyle and Hemingway preeminently, but newsman slang for war correspondents as a species—"don't have that."

  "This?" Self-consciously Ben rubbed the new silver bar of a full lieutenant on the tab of his shirt collar. Another hole in the law of averages. The promotion had caught him by surprise almost as much as the blindside orders that landed him back at East Base yet again. He lacked the time in grade, base commanders were never glad to see him coming, and for its own murky reasons the Threshold Press War Project did not bother with fitness reports—So why boost me from shavetail all of a sudden? What do the bastards have in mind for me next? For his father's sake, he forced a grin. "It doesn't amount to that much, Dad, to outrank civilians."

  All during this each looked the other over to see how he was holding up since last time. Bill Reinking was bald
to the back of his head, but his ginger mustache still matched the color of Ben's hair. His strong glasses schooled a square-cut face on a chunky man into the most eager kind of lookout—the newsdigger's close curiosity that he had passed on to his son. That and the ginger follicles and not much else. Ben had the Hollywood lineaments of his mother's people—the bodily poise, the expressive hands. Those and that unbuyable mark of character: a deeply longitudinal face, neighbored with latitudes of experience—a surprising amount for a twenty-three-year-old—evident in the steady sea-blue of the gaze. The difference in stature between the two men was long-standing. Tall enough that he just skimmed under the Army Air Corps height limit, Ben had an altitude advantage over his father in a number of ways, although he usually tried not to press it. Even so, the college education, the football fame, the TPWP correspondent patch, the bylines and datelines from his stopovers in the world's many combat zones, those all came home with him every time, and both men stood back from it a bit.

  "How was the trip up here?" Bill Reinking asked, to be asking something.

  "Like Gone with the Wind without somebody to neck with," his son said and laughed in a way he did not recognize. "Long."

  Wondering how many more times this could happen in one lifetime, early that afternoon he had stepped out into the familiar blowy weather of Great Falls and pointed himself toward the same old tired bus that again and again had taken him to college and from college, to the war and from the war.

  This time around, a person could tell there was a war on from the melancholy wheeze of the bus driver. On easier journeys home, he had been accustomed to forking over his fare to this narrow-shouldered fatherly man—an asthma sufferer, from the sound of it—in the drowsy waiting room of the Rocky Mountain Stageline depot. Now there was a sallow woman in that job who issued "God bless you real good, sonny," along with the ticket, and the ex-ticket agent was puffing around out in the loading area, dragging mail bags and the civilians' suitcases toward the belly of the bus. The war effort, preached on posters everywhere you turned these past two years since Pearl Harbor: it wore on people, without doubt, although that did not seem what the sloganeers intended to convey. Ben tried to slip his duffel into the bus and the seat next to him so he could lean against it and possibly nap during the familiar trip, but the hunched driver grabbed it away and insisted on stowing it for him. "Save your strength for the enemy, Lieutenant," he panted.

  Which one?

  Keeping that to himself at all costs, Ben boarded. He never liked being last at anything, but the half dozen other passengers, farm people with their city shopping clutched in their laps, long since had claimed specific seats and were giving him the gauging looks that young men in fleece-lined flight jackets tended to draw. If they only knew. Swiftly nodding in everyone's general direction the way he imagined someone who looked like a hotshot pilot was counted on to do, he deposited himself nearest the door as always, the coat leather crackling as he folded his considerable height into the worn confines of the seat. In his travels through the world of war, he had learned never to shed the fleece jacket on any means of transport, whether it was plane, train, ship, jeep, or bus, until he had proof the heater worked.

  In this case it did not, at least to any noticeable degree, and by the time the bus lumbered away from the depot and rumbled west onto the bridge across the Missouri, he had turned up the coat collar for the full effect of the wool. In more ways than one, he had never really warmed to Great Falls. Scrunched in the perpetual bus seat he felt less comfortable than ever with the thought that this smokestack-marked city—the Anaconda Copper stack there above the Black Eagle smelter dominated the sky of center-most Montana with a constant plume of smoke—seemed to have some kind of unquenchable claim on him.

  Three times in a little over a year. How the hell is it possible? How's this for a scene, Mr. Zanuck:

  "What did you do in the war, my boy?"

  "It's highly classified, but since you asked so nicely—I set the record for making hardship trips home."

  There. He had managed to laugh at himself, if nervous laughter counted; maybe he wasn't utterly losing his grip on who and what he was. It still amounted to too much hardship, though. Compassionate leave. Vic wouldn't have had any trouble laughing over that, poor buddy—I get the leave and he's stuck with the compassion and a folded flag in what's left of his lap.

  "Can't ever get used to the size of that stadium," he heard come his way, the wheeze in that observation alerting him to its source. Always wary of this sort of thing, he kept on staring out his side of the bus, as if the remark was an announcement the bus driver routinely offered up at this point on the route.

  "Big old sister, ain't she," the driver persisted. "They don't build 'em like that anymore."

  For a few seconds longer, Ben carried on pretending that the remark had been addressed to everyone on the bus, or for that matter, to passengers immemorial. Then, as he had known he would, he pulled his gaze away from the dominating smokestack and turned it to a very different landmark coming up, the mammoth Treasure State University stadium. The other Great Falls industry, football.

  He felt his throat dry out. If the pair of years since were any evidence, he was in danger of unwanted conversation about TSU's fabled 1941 team until his last day on earth. But this time, thanks be, he lucked out. The bus driver had given up on him. Better than that, evidently had not recognized him.

  Alert all the way to his fingertips now, Ben leaned forward and studied the big stadium and its Romanesque hauteur almost as if he had never played there. The art deco golden eagles, wing-tip to wing-tip up there around the entire edifice. The colosseum archways that funneled in the biggest crowds in the state's history, to watch the unbeatable '41 team. The perimeter of flagpoles around the entire top of the stadium, like unlit candles on a giant birthday cake. Not for the first time he took in each morsel of detail in writerly fashion, digesting them for the script. If I can ever get the damned thing written at all. It had been, what, half a year since he last did this, but he was finding that all of it gripped him as tenaciously as ever. The team's story, his, Jake's, Dexter's, the rest of the unique starting eleven. More than ever now, Vic's story; Quick Vic, most slippery runner in the conference, leaving after practice every afternoon to walk back to the Indian shack-town on Hill 57 over there. Bruno's story, everlasting bastard as football coach; and Loudon's, ruthless bastard as sportswriter. Under and over all the others, Merle Purcell's story, the most famous substitute who never played a game: the twelfth man's story. The story coded somehow there in the white alphabet, those painted rocks arranged into the huge letters TSU, stairstep-style, high on the side of the butte that loomed over the stadium; the Letter Hill. The mental camera in Ben moved across it all with deliberation, panning the scene for the screen, until at last the bus reached the highway and veered northward.

  He patted the typewriter case on the seat beside him, which he had refused to yield to the bus driver. Maybe in these next few days he would be able to steal a bit of time in his father's office to work on the script. Although even there, the world of war was always in the way. It was in the way of everything.

  Bill Reinking had missed out on war—younger than wanted in the first worldwide one, old enough to be ignored in this one—but he knew the caliber of a war story when he saw one.

  "Quite the piece you did on those pilots," he was saying with professional gruffness. "It should have people all over the country burning their tongues on their coffee in the morning." He plucked a Gleaner off the top of the mailing pile and pitched it to his son. "I gave it three columns of page five. More than I gave myself, I'll have you know."

  "I was hoping that'd be in. Christ, they held it long enough." Ben rattled the newspaper open, and the headline his father had put on the piece all but hit him in the face: RAINBOW OF PLANES FROM MONTANA TO RUSSIA.

  Hastily he read his lead to make sure it had survived—The pulse of war can be felt the minute you step onto East Base, a former
buffalo prairie on the sunrise edge of Great Falls, where the ground vibrates under you not from eternal stampede but modern 12-piston fighter plane engines—and skimmed on down, holding his breath. Of all the perplexities that went with a TPWP byline, the most constant was the red pencil of the invisible copy officer back in Washington. Censor, really. Inimical to logic. After a year and a half of this, Ben was as mystified as ever by the inner workings of the Threshold Press War Project, what was let past and what wasn't. He full well understood that the name was meant to invoke the doorstep homefront, the breadbasket America served by mid-size dailies and small-town weeklies such as his father's; the vital breakfast table readership, with its sons and daughters in the war. But it never left his mind for long that a threshold also was where people wiped their feet on something.

  Not this time. The cherished name, the bit about the ringless hands at the P-39 controls, all that was still in there. Foxed the bastard. Can't every time, but—

  His father had been watching in surprise. It wasn't like Ben to nuzzle his own prose. "Maybe I had better go through that piece again myself. What did you sneak in there, an invitation to neck on the bus?"

  "Bad business, giving away a trade secret to an editor," Ben intoned, his expression saying he couldn't wait to. "My minder back at Tepee Weepy went for a decoy. I threw in a graf about Red stars over Montana, and he cut that clean as a whistle." He described to his father the East Base paint shop where the giant red stars of the Soviet Union were sprayed on the wings and fuselages of new bombers and fighter planes before they were delivered north. "No way they'd ever let that graf stand, I figured, and maybe I'd get away with the rest of the piece. It worked out."

  "Shame on you," said his father, reaching for a pencil and paper. "I don't suppose you'd remember that particular paragraph?"

  Ben recited it as his father jotted. When he was done, the older man sighed. "I'll need to be a little careful with this. Probably half the county thinks there's a Red star on me, I wrote so many editorials in favor of Lend-Lease."