The Eleventh Man

by Ivan Doig

  Noise poured over him and the ride was so rough he had to brace himself with both hands on the floor; otherwise, he stayed in football stance, ready to go at Jake's signal. He could tell they were nearly to the point of the runway where the drag of the wheels drew the plane into the gravel on previous tries. The part of the mind that deals with such things considered whether the battered metal of the hull would hold up through another highspeed skid or whether it would split open and he and Jake would smear against gravel at seventy miles an hour.

  "Now:" Jake roared, his hands busy with the controls and the throttles, and Ben leaped catlike toward the cockpit, grabbing onto the crank that controlled the wing flaps. As fast as his hands could go he dropped the full flaps, and an instant later, hoping Jake's brainstorm had something to it, yanked the lever that pulled the landing gear up.

  Its support gone from under it, held barely above the runway only by a sudden upthrust of air from the flaps, for a terrible moment the Widgeon seemed to hover in defiance of gravity, like a leaf on a last breath of breeze. It then gave a slight lurch upward as if startled. Don't stall! was the single thought in both men's minds. Jake did something, although Ben wasn't sure what, and the plane stabilized. They were airborne, at least at the elevation of a few feet. Now the line of trees was approaching fast. Delicately Jake fingered the controls and yelled, "Sandbag!"

  Ben flung himself to the back of the cabin, half-rolling into his crouched position again, trying to make himself heavy. As he did so, the nose of the plane lifted with the shift of balance, but he still could see green spears of treetops everywhere in the cockpit window. "Hang on!" he heard the shout from Jake.

  Instead he gave a little jump from his crouched position, and when he came down the front of the plane teeter-tottered a bit higher, still staggering toward the treetops.

  He did it again, the Widgeon's nose once more bobbing up ever so slightly. By now the wall of dark green branches was rushing at them so close and hard the effect was hypnotic. This was it, he knew, that daylight nightmare of Cass's engine hurtling forward to crush her but in this case two engines to rip loose and plow flesh, one each for Jake and him. His mortal organs getting busy with their last task, Ben braced himself into the back corner of the cabin for the crash, staring uncontrollably at the ridiculous agency of his oncoming death, the tops of evergreens as serene as Christmas trees.

  Then sky.

  It took some moments for this unexpected lease on existence to register on him. He huddled there not daring to move lest any twitch of a muscle disturb whatever equilibrium the Widgeon was struggling itself into. Its engines still at full throttle, he could feel the floor of the plane lurching drunkenly under him, but along with it was what could be construed as—Jesus, is it? Is it?—the sensation of lift.

  Then the engine noise settled to a guttural effort and Jake was calling over his shoulder in a shaky voice: "Nothing to it. You can come out of hiding now."

  Ben stumbled his way forward and dumped himself into the copilot's seat. Trees still were not very far below, but the Widgeon laboriously kept on rising above the branches' reach.

  He saw Jake was wearing a grin big enough to eat pie sideways.

  "Kind of puckers a guy up, down there in the seat of the pants, don't it? Better get busy writing all this up, scribe, so they'll give us medals for getting this tub off the ground."

  "Right, Ice. A piece of gravel pinned on with a Band-Aid. How about if I just sit here and let my insides catch up with me?"

  They flew giddily, men given wings, for the next little while. Canada's immense share of the earth spread around them in the clear autumn morning in timber thick as fur and pocket mirror lakes and rivers flowing north.

  Fondling the controls, Jake was chortling and calculating aloud how long it would take to fuel up in Edmonton and then the flying time to reach East Base for suppertime beer at the Officers' Club, when one of the engines went rough, smoothed out, sputtered a time or two, and quit.

  "Now goddamn what?" Jake indignantly checked the instrument panel. "Take a look, it's the one on your side."

  Before the words were out of Jake's mouth, Ben had craned around to give the stilled engine a looking-over. It only took an instant. Aviation gasoline was whipping away behind the engine in a fine mist. "It's slobbering fuel like crazy," he reported hoarsely.

  "Then I guess we do without that one, don't we." Jake feathered the propeller before the words were out of his mouth. "We'll have to limp on in to Edmon—"

  The other engine quit.

  —"aw, shit," Jake finished his sentence.

  In the vacuum after that, the only sounds the wind in the struts and the creaks of a gliding plane, the pair of men stared the question at each other and made the same guess without having to say it. The Widgeon's repeated rough treatment on the gravel runway must have ruptured the fuel lines, and the gravity-defying takeoff over the treetops had encouraged leakage. By now Jake was striving to maintain altitude with every stunt he could think of with the controls and the flaps, while Ben twisted in every direction in search of water they could set the plane down on. Off on the horizon a lake gleamed, but too far for any sinking airplane to reach.

  "This thing glides like a dump truck," Jake said with strained calm. "How about we belly in on that clear patch down there?"

  With gas all over us? Shielding the sun from his eyes with his hands, Ben scanned the stretch of forestless terrain coming under the plane, like a shaved-away spot on a mammoth pelt. He had to grit to give Jake the news that a windstorm had done the clearing. "It's full of downed trees, Ice. Tangled all to hell."

  "That changes things. Raise Newbride, quick"—as Jake spoke, Ben already was on the radio chanting their position—"then grab the chutes. Toss me mine and the bivvie bag and you go first."

  Having no choice, Ben clambered into jumping position, aware of the tail and other portions of the plane that he did not want hitting him when he went out the hatch. Jump plenty far out when you jump, at least I remember that from flight school. He gripped the rip-cord ring. Great gulps swept through him as he attempted to blot out Dex's experience of puking in mid-air. Clinging in the hatchway, he stared past the toes of his flight boots, trying to judge. The Widgeon was losing altitude like mad, he could see individual stumps and logs down there; wasn't the ground too close for jumping?

  "Get out! Now!" Jake's bellow and the sickening shift of the plane as he abandoned the cockpit sent Ben out into the air.

  Two opposed things happened almost simultaneously, the sensation of floating as the parachute opened and the uprush of a monstrously large downed evergreen directly beneath him, its root-ball splayed toward him like a natural mantrap. With everything he could muster, dangling and falling at the same time, he tugged at the parachute's lines in an effort to miss the log. At the very end of his mid-air dance of trying to twist aside, a limber root end raked up his body, swatting him under the side of the jaw and taking some face skin with it.

  The next thing he knew he was on his side on the ground. The tree, as prone as he was, was close enough he could reach out and touch it. Still foolishly gripped tight in his hand was the rip-cord ring.

  Raw-faced and wincing from the sideswipe by the tree root, he lay there testing himself for anything broken. Except for his breath, nothing seemed to be. He was gasping his way toward normal intake of air when he heard, somewhere off across the mess of downed trees, the nasty sound of a crash. Too big for Jake. Had to be the plane. That started his thought process whirring. Before he even was onto his feet he was calling at the top of his voice:

  "Jake! Jake?"

  It took several shouts, but then a voice not all that far away answered. "Tone it down, Ben. I don't want my ears hurting too."

  "Where are you?"

  "How the hell do I know? Over here."

  Using the root-ball as a rough ladder, Ben managed to climb high enough to see across various logs to where a white drape of parachute indicated Jake's location.

/>   "I'm on my way. Doctor yourself till I get there, can you?" The optimistically named bivouac bag, containing a medical kit and other emergency essentials, was with Jake.

  "Who said I need doctoring?"

  To Ben, that response did not sound particularly convincing. Wasting no time, he bundled up his own chute in his arms like dirty laundry and began picking his way through the maze of downed trees. Mostly the forest here had been tipped over by a big wind, roots and all, like a spill of wooden matches. A good many tree trunks, though, had been snapped off, leaving stray splintery snags tall as totem poles. Here and there stood survivor trees, incongruous loners with their kilts of evergreen branches above it all. The muskeg footing was laborious. Ben was sweating by the time he rounded the last big log and there was Jake, upright but wincing as he stood there flexing the ankle in his unlaced left boot.

  "How bad?" Ben asked.

  "I feel beat to hell, about like you look."

  Another spasm chased across the big man's face as he put weight on that foot. "Think maybe it's a sprain, not a break. Not gonna take the boot off to find out, the way the damn thing is swelling."

  Jake's eyes met Ben's. "Tell you what really hurts—I dropped the bivvie bag coming out of the plane. Piss-poor time to fumble. Sorry about that, Ben."

  "Don't worry," Ben spoke it with effort. "We've still got our chute packs. Can you walk?"

  Jake hobbled around to test that out. "More or less. We're not going anywhere for a while anyway, I guess." Both men turned and gawked south where a pillar of smoke marked the burning aircraft. After a bit, Jake said: "That was a sad-ass aircraft, you know that?"

  "Never mind that, let's see what we're supposed to live on." Ben knelt to unzip the pack portion of his parachute for its emergency items, and Jake did the same. Each reached in and pulled out the first thing they found. They stared at the short machetes in their hands.

  Next to come out was a tiny fishing kit, followed by rocklike pieces of chocolate called tropical bars.

  "Jungle issue," Jake said tonelessly. "Goddamn sonofabitching goddamn supply depot bastards—"

  "Quit," Ben ordered. "Eat. We've got to keep our strength up." He tried the chocolate and nearly broke a tooth. "Petrified."

  "Must be what the machetes are for," Jake muttered.

  They sawed their way through the chocolate and sucked on it while they spread out the white parachute canopies as a marker for any search plane. Around them hung the ear-ringing silence of the Canadian forest. It was at the forefront of both their minds that in country this far north, it was always about five minutes to winter.

  "Man oh man, this is not so good," Jake eventually observed out loud. "Where are the Canucks with all their rescue regalia when we want them?"

  Wondering that himself, Ben said, "Takes a while to fly here, you know that. We'd better get busy, just in case. Firewood. Come on, let's get to whacking with these daisy cutters."

  They had amassed a woodpile of the driest branches they could find to cut and were digging in the muskeg trying to reach water—none too successfully—when they heard the sound of a plane.

  A small spotter aircraft of some kind, it looked about the size of a moth as it puttered through the air, in over the forested edge of the windfall and ever so slowly toward them, an arm waving out the copilot's window in good cheer as it made a pass over them. No airplane created could land in the jumble of trees, snags, and logs, so both Ben and Jake knew what to expect, the drop of a bag of survival gear. Around again came the plane and again the cheery wave, but no bag was dropped.

  "I wish he'd hurry up," Ben muttered as the small plane buzzed off to circle in for another try. "Puddle jumpers like that don't carry all that much fuel." Jake simply fixed a solid glare at the visiting aircraft as if the emergency bag could slide down on that.

  One more time, here the frail aircraft came, propeller whirling like a child's pinwheel, and a sizable soft object was lobbed toward them. It blossomed out in a little parachute all its own, then decided to ride the breeze, straight toward the topmost branches of one of the taller standing trees nearby which Ben and Jake had paid no particular attention to, until now.

  The chute neatly snagged on the worst of the high branches, tangled itself, and dangled the bag sixty feet above the cursing pair of men.

  They bayed obscenities at the rescue bag festooned in the treetop like a Christmas trimming, until better sense kicked in. Meanwhile, the light plane wagged its wings—in the circumstances, it seemed more like a regretful shrug—and flew off in the direction of Newbride.

  It was Jake, sounding almost pensive, who remarked, "That guy wasn't waving for exercise, was he. He wanted us out away from this shit-eating tree."

  Taking stock of the situation, they could tell it was impossible to climb an evergreen that tall and spindly; the upper branches would break off under the weight of a man and so might the whole crown of the tree. On the other hand, the base of the tree looked appallingly substantial when the only thing you had to chop it down with were machetes meant for jungle vines.

  The first half hour's worth of excruciatingly careful chopping, so as not to break the blades, produced a notch about as big as a beaver could chew in minutes. Panting and arm-weary, they had just resigned themselves to another hour or so of chipping away, when the sound of a more powerful aircraft engine reached them.

  They looked up. This one was arriving from what they figured was the direction of Edmonton and coming like a streak.

  Ben identified the silhouette and wondered if he could be imagining.

  "VIP treatment this time around, Benjamin." Jake shaded his eyes. "We rate a P-39. Hope the guy is bringing us long woolies and his aim is better than that last prick's."

  There were thousands of Airacobras in the sky of war, hundreds of pilots gunning a twelve-piston engine to a full four hundred miles an hour at any given time. This one roaring in on them had no business being flown by her, Ben knew in the deepest reasoning part of himself; Cass could be on the Seattle run, or on the ground at East Base, or anywhere between. But reason did not stand a chance as he craved her into creation there in the sun-glint of the rapidly oncoming cockpit. As he watched, afraid to blink, the P-39 lowered its nose and dove toward them. Jake, waving both arms, froze into semaphore position as the plane skimmed into the clearing in the forest, low as a crop duster and fast as an artillery shell. Facing into the madcap flyover, Ben no longer knew whether to pray it was Cass or not at those controls.

  The P-39 tore past so close over them they could feel the prop wash. Now he was sure it was no one but her. He felt queerly responsible: Cass only would have flown a circus stunt like that to see what condition the crash left him in.

  "That," Jake declared in the corridor of dwindling roar as the fighter plane climbed sharply, "is one shit-hot pilot." Both men watched the Cobra's ascent as fliers do, as if counting contour lines of elevation.

  At around fifteen hundred feet the plane pulled up and settled into circling over them.

  "What the hell now?"

  "Writing a message," Ben somehow was sure. "Come on, let's get way out in the middle of this mess, we don't want the drop bag to end up in another tree."

  Clumsier than vertical bears, they plunged through the fallen-timber maze until they reached a marginally more open patch of muskeg. They planted themselves in anticipation there, and Jake took up waving again. "The goddamn guy doesn't have to check his spelling," he complained as the Cobra kept to its droning orbit over them for the next some minutes. "Just tell us how they're gonna get us out of here."

  "He will." Ben had nearly admitted She. "Next pass, watch for the drop bag."

  Both of them tensed, ready to chase down the weighted leatherine bag, like a long yellow stocking, wherever it landed.

  What came sailing out of the P-39 was the size of a bulging mail sack, so accurately aimed it very nearly hit them.

  Jumping back until they were certain it was through rolling, Ben and Jake needed a f
urther instant to realize it was a duffel bag. Together they pounced and opened it. They pawed through like pirates at a treasure chest. C rations. Wool socks and gloves and watch caps. A down mummy bag. Matches. Two canteens of water. Two thermoses of hot coffee. Four cans of beer. Nestled amid it all, the message drop bag, and inside, the scrawled note:

  Flyboys:

  Happy to see you up and around. Proceed five miles, compass heading S/SW, to nearest lake. Bush plane will be waiting for you tomorrow—sorry I can't, but WASPs and Cobras don't swim.

  Only room for one sleeping bag in the duffel, you'll have to share. Don't snuggle any closer than I would.

  Jake looked up from the note as the P-39 cut another perfect tight circle over them, as if they were the bull's-eye of a target the size of Canada. "Bitch, whoever she is," he said in admiration.

  The only acknowledgment Ben could think of was to throw up his hands in the possible direction of Edmonton—Go! Go! Jake looked at him for a moment, then commenced rummaging through the duffel bag. "Here's a dilemma—coffee or beer?"

  "Save the beer." Ben watched the fighter plane go. "It's going to be a long night."

  The five miles took them all the next day. Jake peglegged the distance, his twisted ankle splinted with halved tree branches, while Ben humped along with the precious duffel and picked out their compass route. At noon, barely halfway and their energy depleting fast, they made the decision to cram down all the C rations to give their bodies something to work with. Ultimately both men were staggering, but always in the direction pointed by the compass needle in Ben's hand, as they lunged out of the forest to a lakeshore just before dusk. Half a mile away at a mooring buoy, a floatplane revved its engine and began to cruise across the surface of the water. In terror that it was taking off, the two of them futilely tried to outshout the roar of the engine. Then the skimming floats beneath the plane cut an arc on the lakewater like skates curving on ice, and the aircraft slowed to a chug, aiming in to shore exactly at them.