The Eleventh Man

by Ivan Doig

  "What's this, the poor man's Hemingway green around the gills?" Dex's tone turned unmistakably medical and concerned. "Something wrong with you?"

  Trying not to let the effort show, Ben forced himself back to the task that had brought him to Seeley Lake.

  "Sick of what we're all going through, isn't that enough?" he evaded with another modification of truth. He had led the camp director to believe Dex's decision not to fight could be read between the lines of whatever he wrote about the smoke-jumper camp; try as he might, people would need something stronger than Dex's microscope to find anything of the sort, Tepee Weepy would see to that. He had told poor Jones before leaving him to the dogs that he was going into Helena to spend the day covering a war bonds bingo marathon; half an hour had taken care of it, then he'd headed here. Big day for the one-man liar's club. He was starting to feel like he needed a bath. Something had to be said, and he put all he could into it:

  "Dex? Guess what, it's your turn to be written about and I'm up against it."

  "I thought so." The well-bred Cariston face smiled the slightest bit. "Isn't there a saying from one of your movie moguls, 'Include me out?'"

  Ben brought the TPWP patch on his arm around under Dex's nose. "The outfit I'm assigned to believes in all or none, and they're not interested in none."

  "Can't they count better than that? I'm only one man out of eleven and—"

  "Nine, now. Counting Vic."

  Dex winced. "Ben, all right, I am the only one without his rump on the firing line somewhere." He eyed his listener speculatively. "Even yours on occasion, if I don't miss my guess. You have the look of someone who wants 'at them.'"

  I've been at them. They've been at me. My shoulder hurts, thinking about it. "Let's don't argue about each other's reasons, Dex. Pearl Harbor and Hitler invading everyplace are signs enough to me they're out to get us, and I don't like being got."

  "Granted. But I believe several million others are 'suited up for democracy'"—Dex took a meaningful look at Ben's flight jacket—"to forestall that. There will never be a shortage of people to fight wars, will there. Would the eleven of us be missed if it wasn't for this mysterious menagerie you write for?" He arched his head to one side as if a thought had just come to him. Ben was remembering the time Dex had stopped football practice cold by asking Bruno why football-field lines always were laid out in skin-eating lime instead of talcum. "Take that further," he was formulating now, "what if all of us together had said no to induction—"

  "You'd have had to hog-tie Animal."

  "—and instead—"

  "And coldcocked Stamper and Danzer because they wouldn't get to show off at parades."

  "—shut up a minute, will you; and volunteered for something like this outfit instead? The team that followed its conscience away from war instead of toward it." Dex's gaze at him had grown as intense as it could get. "You're the writer, Ben, what's wrong with a story like that?"

  "You want my two-bits' worth? First, we wouldn't be known as the famous Golden Eagles of '41 anymore, we'd be called the Golden Chickens. Maybe that'd be a relief, I don't know."

  "Not necessarily," Dex put in caustically. "There's still a reputation attached. When we hitchhike to town from here, the local yokels try to run over us." Somewhere overhead the Ford Tri-Motor droned around and around, no doubt dropping little weighted windage test chutes. Dex glanced up. "We even have to watch our step around our Forest Service trainers. Some are okay about us, some aren't."

  "I imagine. To answer what you asked, though. If the rest of us pleaded conscientious"—he tried to glide nicely over the conchie sound in that—"alongside you, I figure we'd all add up to a footnote in some philosophy book someday. A one-paragraph kiss on the cheek from Bertrand Russell, tops. One thing sure, the United States military wouldn't be demanding a piece on you peachy-keen gridiron heroes from me every month."

  "We're nothing but trophies, you're saying."

  "No, on top of that you're a friend and a pain in the ass." Ben checked his wristwatch and made a face. "Dex, listen, I only came here because I have to know. This is it for you?" He swept a hand around at the camp. "For good?"

  The uncommon furrow across Dex's brow showed he took that as an affront. Before he could say anything, Ben spelled out:

  "For the duration. For however long this damned war takes. If there's any chance you're going to change your mind, get tired of people trying to run you over and decide to waltz off into a medical deferment from a friendly doctor your family might happen to be acquainted with"—he locked eyes with Dex and kept them there—"I need to know now. If I wiggle hard, I could skip writing about you maybe a month or two yet." He paused. "What I can't do, you better understand, is some piece that outright says you're a conscientious objector. They'd throw that away so fast it'd set the wastebasket on fire." Ben shifted from one foot to the other, as if adding body English to what he was about to say. "But I'm not the only scribbler in existence, Dex. If that's the story you want out, you could put it out yourself. The Chicago Tribune loves anything that shows up Roosevelt and his crowd. Or go the other direction, the parson who runs this place likely would have some ideas about how to show you off to the world as pacifist Exhibit A."

  "Don't think he hasn't brought it up." Now Dex was the one who looked anguished. "You want to know if I'm here until the last shot is fired. All I can tell you is, I made the hardest choice of my life to be here and I am here. Believe me, I've lost sleep over it. Most nights." Ben read his face in a way he had never had to before; Dex was not the confessing sort. "You aren't able to write the plain truth about me," he could hear the cost in the words, "and I don't dare make it known either. One guess why, Ben. Cariston Enterprises. I have two brothers-in-law in the war. I'm the direct heir, but there'll be a family fight for control, down the line. The gaffer"—Ben wondered just how much wealth one had to grow up with to call one's father that—"is backing me, so far. But he doesn't want it shouted around that the last male Cariston refuses to shoulder arms for his country." Dex broke off, offering a bleak smile. "There. Secrets of the rich."

  "One size fits everybody," Ben said thinly.

  "So, you have to hide me in plain sight." The idea seemed to intrigue Dex. "I'll be interested to see what you come up with."

  So will I, Dex, so will I. Before turning to go, there was one more thing he had to tend to. "I'll bet an outfit like the Forest Service would have a jerry can of gas they could loan to a man. Particularly if they didn't know about it."

  "Stuck your neck out to get here, did you?"

  "Only about a hundred miles."

  Dex clapped him on the shoulder. "Come on, there's a back door to the fuel shed."

  The next day, his conscience objecting every word of the way, he wrote Dexter Cariston into undesignated war duty, a medic repairing men who parachuted into fields of fire, the type of fire not specified.

  5

  You're hard to keep up with, Ben. First time I've ever been on a date on an obstacle course. The painted stones spelled the way down the steep sidehill, the enormous lettering ghost-white in the bunchgrass. "I've flown over this rockpile a hundred times," Cass said over her shoulder, trying to watch her footing on the path pocked with gopher holes, "and always wondered, What goofball did this?" She and Ben were in civilian clothes, gabardine slacks that cheatgrass and other pestiferous plants theoretically could not penetrate, and good warm canvasback jackets, and battered fedora and granny scarf which they teased each other looked like missionary throwaways. He carried the heavy picnic basket and she had the blanket over one arm.

  Shaking his head at the countless chunks of sandstone amassed and laid out side by side into a blocky 5 and 7, Ben answered: "A pickle salesman with time on his hands." Together the numbers took up what looked like half an acre of hillside, sitting prominent enough on the prow of the butte that the dubious eminence of Hill 57 could be read from several miles off. "One guess on how many varieties the guy peddled."

  She laughed
and skidded a little at the same time.

  "Hey, careful," he chided. "I don't want to have to pick you out of somebody's junkyard down there."

  "It's your fault, Romeo. I'm usually in a cockpit when I'm up this high."

  The view of Great Falls stretched below them, the squarely laid-out city with the renegade river winding through where it pleased, the smelter stack like a monstrous chess piece at the farthest city limits, the university cozy amid its groves of trees at the closer edge of the street grid, and nearest of all, the stadium cuddled at the base of the butte across the way, with game-day flags flapping brightly in the breeze. "How do you like Homecoming so far?" he asked with a solicitous grin as he gave her a hand around a patch of prickly pear cactus.

  "My hunch is, it'll never replace poker." Cass stopped short, staring ahead. "Ben?" she murmured. "Are you sure this is such a hot idea?"

  "Let's find out what our hosts think about it."

  There were twenty or so of the Hill 57 residents on hand as spectators, mostly ragged-looking men but a couple of families with kids in charity clothes, all sitting with their backs against the pale curve of rocks that made the bottom of the 5 and now all looking over their shoulders at two unexpected visitors. Ben tried to read the line of Indian faces, but the scatter of rough-built shacks and even more miserable lean-to shanties farther down the hill said enough; tar paper and gabardine would never meet comfortably. He clutched Cass by a tense elbow and they stood waiting a minute. Finally a chesty man at the near end of the group lurched to his feet and faced up the slope toward them. Tottering alcoholically or arthritically or both, he rumbled out: "You folks a little lost?"

  "We came to watch the game, if you wouldn't mind some company," Ben called back. He gestured toward the stadium in the middle distance. "I played football with Victor Rennie, down there. Then we went in the service together."

  "Are you that Ben friend of his?" The tone had changed markedly. "From up the country, at Gros Ventre? Vic talked about you plenty. Come on down." As they approached, the big-chested man swept a hand around the tan grass-covered slope. "Grab some ground. Want a Shellac?" A case of Great Falls Select beer sat open and obviously in use.

  "The lady prefers whiskey." Ben tapped the lid of the picnic basket.

  "Smart lady."

  Wasting no time, Cass moved off to spread the blanket in a snug spot against the rocks and wink at the shy kids clustering in curiosity. Ben took the chance to steal a look around. The site was right. From up here, the bowl of the stadium was a green swatch amid the prevailing gold and silver of the Homecoming crowd; the band members at midfield blaring out the TSU fight song were the size of toothpicks and faceless, as he and Cass would be to anyone bored enough with football to gaze up here at the denizens of Hill 57. He could relax about that, but he felt keyed up every other way possible. Game day. Weren't they all, one way or another, with that bastard Bruno? The other paint-marked sidehill stood almost directly across from him, steeply rising out of the broad coulee where the facing buttes drew back to let the wind into Great Falls: the Letter Hill. He could not take his eyes off the chalky stone insignia there, the broad splay of the T, the coil of the S gripping its stem, the hanging swoop of the U. Every book on scriptwriting warned against the seductions of the sweeping overhead shot—Sam Goldwyn supposedly said that anyone who wanted to spend his money to go that high to look down ought to take the free elevator at the Empire State Building—but the conjured scene coaxed insistently into Ben's movie eye: a long line of figures in football uniforms, strung out on the trail up the Letter Hill as haphazardly as a caravan in distress, toiling toward the interlinked letters high above. Fade to dusk, and one lone runner still struggling against gravity.

  The sound effects were not of his choosing. "Treasure State University is proud to welcome its special guests to Homecoming, 1943!" The announcer's voice on the stadium public address system sounded tinny and spectral as his spiel wafted up Hill 57. The Governor, the Senator, the alumni president—ritual tributes echoing from two years back. Ben's mind fastened on the thought of the team then waiting in the maw of that stadium tunnel to trot onto the field, Vic on two good legs, Havel and O'Fallon with breath and soul still in them, Dex and Jake smacking one another on their shoulder pads in jolly superstition, he himself fresh as a colt, the entire eleven of them magically unacquainted with defeat.

  He wrenched himself back to present surroundings. Not far down the junk-cluttered slope of Hill 57 stood one shack that appeared more dilapidated than the others, if that was possible. Glancing toward it, he asked their Indian host in a low tone: "Whatever became of Vic's aunt? I keep trying to catch up with her, but she's never home."

  "You mean Agnes? Went back to the reservation to mooch a while, last we knew. Got a daughter there."

  "If you see her, would you tell her—" Ben broke off. Tell her what? Say he had been pointed to her by an old hunter, nearly as elusive as herself, who despised her and her drinking ways? Pass word to her that he could not get Vic, in despond somewhere in England, to answer his letters? I'm afraid you were right when you said "That's that," Toussaint. "Just say I have a mailing address for Vic I can bring her."

  The chesty man lifted his shoulders. "If you want. She don't much know how to read, though."

  Cass impatiently was motioning that she required the picnic basket. Ben went over. No sooner had he set it down than she reached in and began handing around opera glasses. "I want these back, lords and ladies." In no time the Indian kids were in fits of giggles as they peeked at one another through the wrong end of the lenses, and by kickoff time their elders were dividing their time between beer and binoculars.

  Settled onto the blanket beside Cass, Ben nudged her. "I wondered why that basket was so hellishly heavy."

  "Might as well get some benefit from having to make nice to the damn USO at the Civic Center, I figured. The Gilbert and Sullivan bunch won't miss these until tonight." She checked to make sure all other eyes were on the football game, then leaned against him and kissed his ear. "I was starting to get lonesome. What were you doing so long with our buddy over there, negotiating a treaty?"

  "Just agreeing that Custer had it coming." The petite binoculars nearly lost in his hand, he watched a Treasure State pass fall flat against the Colorado team. It looked like a long game; he nestled closer to Cass. "I forgot to ask. Do you even like football?"

  "I like a certain football guy."

  Ben smiled; that was good enough. Among women of his acquaintance only his mother evinced understanding of the contrary grace he'd found in playing the rough-and-tumble sport. "I can hardly ever say so, but you take after me in that, Ben. I loved that same feeling in ballet lessons"—girlhood in Beverly Hills had its advantages—"it stays with you, the right muscles still know the rules. Even square dancing with your father."

  Cass was scrabbling in the picnic basket. "Here, Jim Thorpe, have a sandwich. There's Spam or Spam."

  "Yum."

  "I know, but it's the best I could do." They munched on the manufactured meat and had nips of scotch as the game went along. Cass scanned elsewhere half the time, often to the planes taking off from East Base in the distance, but Ben was not really conscious of that, lost in his private tunnel of vision back to the scrimmage where everything began in the season of 1941.

  The play was whistled dead before the ball could be snapped, the shrill echo in the empty stadium halting the practice game sooner than usual, and varsity and second-stringers alike uncoiled from their stances reluctantly.

  Animal Angelides spat toward the sideline. "Here it comes. Why the hell can't he stay over there playing pocket pool with Loudon instead of frying our nuts?"

  The other interior linemen groaned along with him and Ben at left end held in his own with effort. He watched with the others as their coach and chief tormenter came striding onto the field as if he personally owned Treasure State stadium. In his camel-hair topcoat and snap-brim hat Lionel Bruno could strut standing still, so
when he added some swagger to it as he did now, he was practically parting the grass like the Red Sea. It was times like this when Ben wished he had been elected, say, water boy instead of team captain.

  Hastily he checked over his shoulder to see how the backfield was taking this development. Moxie Stamper smirked unmercifully behind his quarterback privileges, about as expected. At the left halfback position, Vic sent Ben a private look as if he couldn't believe what was happening to this season either. At right half, Dex was coldly watching the coach's progress onto the field. Bulking between the pair of them, Jake had yanked his helmet off and stood tapping it in agitation against his thigh pads.

  As if scripted, Bruno marched straight to the football. He plucked it off the ground and walked back and forth through the players, holding the ball in front of their faces as if all twenty-two of them were nearsighted morons. Ben couldn't even guess which speech it was going to be this time, there were so many.

  "If the bunch of you would pull your heads out of your butts," the coach started in on them, "and put aside the lesser things of life to concentrate on the basic game of football—"

  Oh oh, that one.

  "—then you just possibly might have the makings of a genuine team." At the word might, Bruno squeezed the ball so hard it threatened to pop. "Forget nights on the town. Forget dessert and the cigarette after. Forget about trying to get into your girlfriend's pants," he preached with rising intensity. "This"—he brandished the football higher—"this is the one and only object of your desire from this moment forward, people. You have to want this ball. You have to lust for this ball. You have to love getting this ball and handling it as if you are the only ones on the face of God's green sod it is entrusted to." Pausing for emphasis or maybe it was breath, Bruno nursed his disgust in front of them for all it was worth.