by Ivan Doig
Twenty-four hours later, with Jake unhappily tractioned in a hospital bed by the Canadian medical authorities, Ben mustered himself as the C-47 shuttle from Edmonton touched down at East Base. He ached in every possible part of himself and his face looked like he had been in a fight with a bobcat and he still had the entire slew of writing about the bomber journey to Alaska to be done. Am I imagining, or am I losing ground faster than I can type?
Jones was waiting for him on the runway, faithfully rumpled and homely as a mud fence. "Welcome back, Lieutenant. I spent yesterday going over the regulations about escorting a coffin, but I'm glad it's you instead."
"Jones, you say the sweetest things." Even as the wind added its pesky greeting, Ben had to admit East Base looked like an oasis after where he'd been.
"Tepee Weepy radioed," Jones reported, awed at having heard the voice in clear air. "They want your first-person story of the crash right away. 'Soonest,' they said—I didn't know that was a word."
"It is with them."
"Uhm, Lieutenant, I'm supposed to tell you. Commander's orders, you're to report to the infirmary before you do anything else."
"If Grandpa Grady thinks I've had time to bring a dose of clap in from Canada—"
Jones surveyed Ben's black-and-blue jaw and skinned-up face. "Somehow I don't think it's that." He leaned in as if giving solace to a parishioner. "My guess is, he considers you a hero and wants to make sure you're all right."
"I'm touched," Ben growled.
"You maybe want to look at this while you're getting checked over—it came yesterday, highest priority." Jones handed him a wax-sealed packet. "The courier didn't want to give it to me, but I told him it was that or he could go find you in the Canadian wilderness."
"You're getting the hang of this, Jones." Throatily Ben pushed the words out past the choke hold of apprehension brought by the packet, the kind his transfer orders to another base ordinarily came in. He didn't want to open it with Jones watching. "Meet you back at the office."
"Don't forget the—"
"—clap shop, I won't, thank you very much, Jones." Ben stood there at the edge of the East Base runway buffeted by the wind, his thoughts whirling wildly. If they yank me out of here now ... How will I ever see her ... When will the war ever quit ... He trudged toward the nearest hangar—it happened to be the one where he had first laid eyes on Cass—and ducked in out of the wind. Not a P-39 in sight; a B-17 bomber, clean-skinned and somehow the more ominous for that, was being worked over from nose to tail by a swarm of female mechanics. A hairnetted crew chief more muscular than Ben immediately slipped over to him. "Help you with something, Lieutenant?"
"Something sharp, chief, to open this with?"
The brawny woman pointed to a workbench strewn with tools. Ben went over and picked up a chisel. He lightly gouged the wax, the clock of war turning in him. How many time zones away from Cass Standish could a man stand to be? Her husband was seventeen away, if that was any guide. And look what's happening to him.
He reached in and instead of orders pulled out a P-file, the standard military personnel folder, with the name, rank, and serial number inked in the upper right corner. In the opposite corner the file bore a red KIA tag, denoting Killed in Action. Carl Friessen was dead.
Stunned, Ben took in the words—"On patrol to secure the Hollandia perimeter in the New Guinea campaign ... enemy ambush..." No million-dollar wound nor any other kind short of lethal for the laconic lineman he had played next to, in the faraway of two years ago. Somehow Friessen's number had come up on the wrong side of the law of averages with the earlier two—so much for Tepee Weepy's goddamn statistical measurement—and a sick fury at the merciless twist in arithmetic filled Ben. Making a fist, he crumpled the envelope to hurl it in the waste barrel at the end of the bench; something inside resisted. He shook the envelope onto the worktable. Another file fell out, also with a KIA tag.
This one was Vic Rennie's.
1944
6
The weather ever since Christmas had not been able to make its mind up, thawing and then turning cold, and candles of ice hung silvery on the otherwise darkened eaves of Gros Ventre. Now snow flurries and the breeze courting them waltzed across the surfaces of light spread onto the hardened ground from the front windows of the festive house, lit up in more ways than one this last and most celebrated night of the year. All evening long Cloyce Reinking had reminded her husband to keep the drinks flowing, people in this town soaked it in in a fashion that would have put a Beverly Hills crowd under the rug. She appraised the heightened conversations filling the living room from corner to corner and took as much satisfaction as she would allow herself in how the party was going.
"Unfair." Carnelia Muntz materialized at the buffet table as Cloyce was trying to deploy the buffet remnants to better effect. "How am I supposed to top this when I have the canasta club over, spike the angel food?" Carnelia was the banker's wife and always regally aware of it. She sighted over her glass to the circle of guests around the prize of the evening, the Senator and his wife and daughter. "You're a hard act to follow, Cloycie."
"You sound like Bill. He accuses me of a pagan passion for New Year's Eve."
"Your night to shine. I see Ben finally made it."
"The bus was late. This weather."
Carnelia negligently nibbled a crumble of the colorless cheese from the local creamery which neither woman would have stooped to if it hadn't been for wartime rationing. "He's quite the hero one more time, isn't he, walking away from that plane wreck."
Cloyce held her tongue, not wanting to further sharpen Carnelia's. She looked across the jammed room past the medleys of the socially positioned of the town—doctor, lawyer, mayor, school superintendent, county agent, on down to postmaster and druggist, and their wives in holiday best—to the kitchen hallway where her son's ginger hair overtopped her husband's. What now? she wondered with a frown as the pair of them in their nook stayed oblivious to the wall-to-wall guests. Midnight was not that far off, and Ben still had not been in general circulation.
"So we won't be seeing much of you for a while." Bill Rein-king's knuckles whitened on his bourbon glass.
"Mine not to reason why," Ben responded, tired through and through from trying to do exactly that. "I'll let Mother know tomorrow." What his latest set of orders, courtesy of Tepee Weepy, had in mind for him in the weeks and months ahead passed for creative in the military, but that didn't make it any less daunting to handle. All during the bus trip from East Base, calendar and map of war blended together into a twisty scroll he could see no end of, and arriving home under these circumstances further blurred the proportions of the existence being asked of him. Even the favorite old civilian clothes he had slipped into felt unfamiliar. The rising and falling crescendoes of party hubbub seemed otherworldly, echoes from some everlasting spot of time when mead and feasting greeted a solar change of fortunes. Yet this year's version held one prominent difference from his mother's other annual extravaganzas, there across the room where the Senator was holding forth about something and everyone around him was nodding as if keeping time. "Our hostess with the mostest hit the jackpot tonight, didn't she," Ben acknowledged. "The big sugar himself. How'd you drag him in on this?"
"The incalculable power of the press, of course," came the puckish answer. Bill Reinking elaborated that the lawmaker was in town on the start of a swing to sprinkle reclamation appropriations down the Continental Divide watersheds where his big voting majorities lay county by county. In short, the Senator had his own way of celebrating the onset of an election year. "When his press mouthpiece—sorry, his spokesman—phoned wanting to know if the Senator could get together with a few people while he was here, all I said was, 'How about half the town?'" The proprietor and opinion-setter of the Gleaner sighed. "Now I have to give the old boy a hard time in a couple of editorials to show he doesn't have me in his pocket."
"The fun and games of dealing with Washington. I'm going to have to take less
ons from you." Ben did not smile as he said it.
"Don't I wish I had the formula to give you," came the swift response. "How hard did TPWP kick about your piece on Vic?"
"Enough to smart for a while," Ben had to admit, the hard-edged teletype messages back and forth still with him. "I finally had to dig in and point out to them they got all the goddamn combat angle they could possibly want in the one I had to do on Friessen."
A cascade of laughter from the contingent surrounding the Senator caused Ben to pause and look over there, then back at his father. "It was just Tepee Weepy's view of the war against mine, Dad. I'm over it." He wasn't. The whole thing with Vic still haunted him. Escorting caskets had that effect. When Corporal Victor Rennie was interred with full military honors in the cemetery up on the hill, the scene drew everlasting lines in the sod of memory. Toussaint ancient and alone on one side of the grave, the Blackfeet relatives at a little distance on the other side. Jake thumping around on his cast served as a pallbearer; Dex sent word he could not. Ben withstood it all except for the final three words in granite. I managed to wangle out of my story what the lying bastards wanted in, buddy, but I couldn't keep it off the gravestone for you. He glanced out the nearest window-well of light at the flurries lacing the bases of everything with whiteness; the stone-cut line KILLED IN ACTION soon would be covered until spring, at least.
Bill Reinking shook his head. In his time he had thrown away bales of news releases less fanciful than the Threshold Press War Project version that bestowed a heroic death in combat on a one-legged hospital patient confined to a wheelchair. "What've you been able to find out," he asked low and close, one journalist to another, "about the honest-to-God circumstances?"
"It wasn't pretty," Ben began tightly, "but it wasn't that different from what England has been put through all the time, either." Once more he imagined Vic there in the green and gray countryside where distant skytrails of smoke marked the ongoing battle between the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe. "Officially they called what happened a bombing raid on the hospital—that's how they tagged it 'combat' because it's a military installation of a kind and maybe somebody there did take a shot back at a plane." He lifted his shoulders, the universal who knows? In the scene in his mind, what counted was the amputee on wheels suddenly left to himself, his perch on the rolling lawn forgotten in the general scurry away from the approaching sounds of bombs. "Since no buildings were hit, my guess is it was some Jerry dumping his load before scooting back across the Channel and a few bombs strayed onto the hospital grounds."
The next words he organized with slow care, not wanting them to be too theatrical. "There's one of those old canals they have everywhere in that part of England, at the bottom of the slope from the hospital, where they used to haul supplies in by barge. During all the commotion, Vic's wheelchair went in the water. They didn't find him until the next day."
Ben stopped there, although he need not have. He was certain as anything that while the hospital attendants were ducking for cover, Vic had taken one last sharp look around and given the wheelchair a running start down the slope toward the deep-sided waterway, his chosen exit from a life that no longer held anything for him.
"Not quite like the official handout, was it," Bill Reinking summed that up in the arid tone of a veteran editor. Uneasy with what Ben had to contend with, he asked: "Who makes a decision like that, how they classify that kind of a death?"
"Someone who wants every dead soldier in any uniform of ours to be a shining hero." Four for four, so far. The Supreme Team stays perfect with a little help from Tepee Weepy and in spite of me. Or Vic.
Just then Chick Jennings, the postmaster, reeled past on his way to the bathroom. "You sure know how to throw a party, Bill. And how you doing, Ben?" he delivered with a passing clap on the shoulder. "What do you think, this the year the boys will whip the Japs and Krauts and get to come home?" It was common knowledge Chick's son was a Navy quartermaster safely tucked away in Pascagoula, Mississippi.
"Not all of them," Ben said through his teeth.
"Ben," his father began, "people say things they don't—"
"I know, Dad, it's okay. I lost it there for half a second, is all." Don't get on your high horse, he chided himself, this is just the Officers' Club of the home front. He knew he ought to rouse himself to the business of festivity even though he had no stomach for it away from Cass. "Any chance to be home, do it," she had urged him to take the holiday pass, a case of use it or lose it. "Get away from this military madhouse. I'm on standby that weekend anyway, you won't be missing any ton of fun here. Go, palooka."
She at that moment was nursing her one lonely scotch in the back area of the Officers' Club known as the "orphans' corner." It felt odd to be there with the handful of male loners—for some reason, they tended to have tidy little cookie-duster mustaches like department store floorwalkers—who sat one by one staring out darkened windows as they toyed with their drinks. However, it was the safest territory around. A woman sitting alone anywhere else in the building invited the interest of every brass type with a touch of the screw flu. Here Captain Cass Standish was just another withdrawn officer trying to drink slow and write a letter. Besides, at midnight she had to go back on standby in the ready room; unless Germany or Japan directly attacked Great Falls, that meant another stint of killing time until 0800. Nineteen forty-four did not look like anything to celebrate yet; she hoped Ben was having better luck where he was.
Out of sight of Cass although definitely not out of hearing, the throng around the piano player gleefully spotted a target of opportunity as Della Maclaine and her date frisked in from outside. If they were somewhat mussed from fooling around with each other on the way over, in the overriding smudge of cigarette smoke and pall of alcohol no one was paying attention to personal tidiness. What caught the combined choral eye was the sassy tilt of the crush hat on Della's blonde flow of hair and, of course, the pilot's insignia prominent on her chest. The piano bunch was instantly inspired.
Oh, don't give me a P-39,
The engine is mounted behind.
She'll tumble and spin,
She'll augur you in,
Don't give me a P-39!
No, give WASPs the P-39,
Let them cuss the design.
There'll be medals in baskets
For flying those caskets,
Give WASPs the P-39!
Della gamely lingered and took it, the motor pool officer she was with nervous at her side. The song done, she sent a honeyed smile to the serenaders and gave them a thumbs-up. No, wait. It was a different digit. Passing the hooting piano gang as her date broke trail toward a table at the quieter far end, she could not help but notice the big pilot with a rakish flop to his dark hair giving her the eye as she went by, but she was not in the market for the glee-club type. Better someone with a jeep or classier wheels.
On past the singing drinking coterie, she spotted Cass holding down one of the spots for the socially backward. Captain Standoffish, too occupied with herself to join in the celebration along the bar. Seizing the chance, Della cooed an excuse in the ear of her date and promised him better things to come, then headed for Cass.
"Care if I join you, Captain ma'am?"
Cass looked up in surprise from her writing paper. "What the hey, Lieutenant Maclaine, sit yourself down."
Ben felt a hand, loving but firm, at the crook of his elbow. "Time to break it up, you two. I need to borrow my soldier." Words warm as toast, and the crust there for emphasis. His mother's diction made her a standout in amateur theatricals, the loftier the dialogue the better. Certainly she looked like the leading lady tonight, with her hair freshly fixed and her aquamarine party dress on, and both men self-consciously shrugged around in their clothes a bit as if that would help to approach her level. "Bill, I think people are ready for another round."
"Next year I'll just hand out bottles instead of glasses." As his father went off to liquor duty, Ben set himself to escort his mother sociabl
y around the room as she no doubt wanted. But she didn't move toward that and her tone was forgiving—he tried to think for what?—as she said: "Are your ears burning? We were just talking about you."
"And here I thought that was frostbite from the bus ride," he endeavored to make it sound teasing. "So," he watched his mother for a further moment to see where this might go, "what did you conclude?"
She had not expected that he would treat her remark as more than a pleasantry to warm him up for the meeting and greeting ahead. But then Ben was inadvertently dramatic tonight, the last healing traces of scrapes from that plane crash like character lines drawn strong on his face. "If it were up to me," she decided to venture, "I'd say that you look like you could use more than a night off. I'm worried about you, you've been all over the map without letup. Doesn't that strange unit of yours ever have furloughs?"
Ben drained the last of his drink. "The war doesn't take furloughs, Mother, so TPWP sees no reason to. I'm theirs for the duration, lock, stock, and typewriter."
She looked at him critically, hoping Carnelia Muntz didn't cross paths with him while he was like this. "Are you tight?"
"Sober as a gravedigger." The old saying fit his frame of mind, if not the moment.
"Ben." His mother's intensity broke the spell of debate. "I know you've had a hard time of it recently, but heavens, it's New Year's Eve. Can't you enjoy yourself for that long?"
The prowess of more than one small-town drama director rested on Cloyce Reinking's ability to use her voice the way a hypnotist uses a watch fob. The trouble was, the two men in her own house had built up a certain level of resistance down through the years. I'm here, Mother. Your competition is on standby tonight or you'd really have a vacant spot where I'm standing.
