The Eleventh Man

by Ivan Doig

  Right now, with more pluck than sense the redheaded one-striper was back at what he had read in college:

  "I'm trying to remember, in that piece. Your football buddy—your and Lieutenant Danzer's—he was killed out here in New Guinea, wasn't he?"

  Ben sat there struggling to measure out a more civil reply than No, shavetail, that was another dead one of us.

  He was aware of being worn to a thin edge by the time he reached the destroyer. Ever since shipping out of Seattle in what seemed an eon ago, he had filed stories from latitudes of the Pacific theater of combat. The Pacific conflict was a strange piecemeal war, fought from island to island, mapping itself out more like a medieval storming of castles, if the castles had been of coral and moated by hundreds of miles of hostile water and defended by men committed to die for their emperor rather than surrender. Out here, a war correspondent's movements from one jungle-torn place to another were like continually journeying into the black fire of nightmare. He had seen things it took all his ingenuity to put into words that TPWP would let pass into print, and some that would never surface in civilized newspapers.

  The dirt road at Rabaul, the dust carpeted with excrement, where the retreating Japanese had evacuated their hospital patients in some manner of forced march, the sick and wounded defecating while they walked like cows with the drizzles.

  Constant corpses, the accumulations of death on every fought-over island, decay and flies always ahead of the burial squads.

  The pilot who fell to earth—New Guinea again—near enough the American forces that a patrol was sent out to recover him.

  Ben was with them when the spotter plane dropped its flare where the dive bomber had failed to come out of its dive and they thrashed through the jungle in search of the pilot. No one had seen his parachute open for sure, nor did it. The lead man practically fell in the hole the body made in the jungle floor, three feet deep. Then and there Ben had been seized with a stomach-turning fear for Cass, the altitudes at which she did her job a deadly chasm as constant as the sky over him after that. No remedy in sight. He had tried to shake that feeling in his gut—he had enough of those already—but the thought of life without her refused to quite go away. It was going with him throughout this ocean of war, a hue of loneliness always accompanying him now, like another depth to his shadow.

  Solitary in the company of the destroyer officers, he at last came up with a response to the question that had pasted O'Fallon's fate onto Friessen's. "No, you're thinking of another teammate of ours. We've lost more than our share."

  Danzer had been watching throughout, gray-eyed as a stone visage. He showed no sign any of this fazed him. "It's strange how war has imitated life," he said as if mastering the philosophy for them all. "The middle of the line has taken the hits. Ben and I had the luck to be the ends." Smiling to take the edge off mortal matters, he knocked on the wood trim of the mess table.

  "We're jealous of Danzer, you know," one of the older officers said in a joshing tone, if that's what it really was. "You're here to make him famous back home, and as dog robber he already gets to be the first one off the ship when we hit port."

  "You wouldn't want the burden of being Slick Nick," Ben answered the officer oratorically enough to draw a laugh. Danzer joined in.

  "Still, it's an interesting morale device, isn't it," the executive officer spoke up briskly. The exec was a Naval Academy man, and chafing at this becalmed post in his career climb if Ben did not miss his guess. "Giving people a periodic glimpse—not that your talents can be entirely captured at any one time, Nick—of someone all throughout the war. Rather like time-lapse photography."

  Before the executive officer could hold forth further, Ben put in, "Right now I'm the one lapsing," barely covering a yawn. "If you'll excuse me, gentlemen"—he tried to intone it without irony and could not be sure he succeeded—"I'm going to have to hit the sack."

  The one advantage of bunking in the sick bay was privacy, which he craved in the crowded confines of the ship. Just me and the aspirin and the sawbones's slab. Those and the unsettling sense of being cast backward in time.

  Hands under his head, he lay there on the berth and mulled. It had been, what, nearly a year since his impatient period of mending in a similar medical compartment on the ship off New Guinea. The swollen thoughts of that time returned to him, as haunting as they were contrary. A main one, borne back by the dinner episode: why couldn't Carl Friessen have come out of the hand-to-hand combat on that bloodslick trail with just enough sacrifice of flesh to retire him from the war? The million-dollar wound, shrapnel in the back, a stray bullet in the lower leg, that sent a soldier home for good. His own encounter with a bullet seemed to him the two-bit variety, scarcely deserving of a Purple Heart or anything else, yet the twinge in his shoulder was a message of what might have been. At the time he was disturbed with himself for wanting any of the Supreme Team out of the war; Friessen, Vic, the others were in it of their own choice and who was he to wish carefully calibrated harm to any of them? With what he knew now, he should have called down the heavens in support of such a wish.

  That and ten cents would buy a person a dime's worth of difference in this life, wouldn't it. He swung up off the bunk, determined to leave the mood there, and crossed over to his typewriter on the cubbyhole desk. First, though—another habit back from that other sick-bay stay—he flicked on the radio tuned to Tokyo Rose. As ever, the sultry voice was there, alternating between taunting American soldiers all over the Pacific and playing the likes of "Tuxedo Junction," the rhythm that began swelling out now. The Japanese were good at such propaganda, he acknowledged; the German counterpart, Lord Haw-Haw, sounded like P.G. Wodehouse construing Bertie Wooster. Swing music outdid a drone any old night. Something to keep in mind, would-be scriptwriter, he told himself. He turned the sound just low enough to be background, and settled to his routine.

  His things were laid out on the slablike medical table and he reached over for fresh paper and rolled a page into the typewriter. He took his time at this, which would have astounded Jones or anyone else back at East Base who had ever seen him put a typewriter to work. On TPWP pieces he wrote as fast as the keys could tolerate, never needing to glance down—one of the blessings he owed his father was those boyhood sessions at the training typewriter in the Gleaner office, with bunion pads hiding the letters on the keyboard. But nights on his movie script, which were many, he deliberately slowed to a sculptor's pace, letting the imagination feel its way toward the shape of trueness. The scene he was working on took place on the Letter Hill. The character based on Purcell was the last player to reach the whitewashed rocks—Camera: the slope below him appears steep and endless, he tapped onto the paper—and others of the football team sagged against the stone emblem trying to catch their breath. His fingers resting on the keyboard, he tried out dialogue in his inner ear, trying to catch words out of the air. It was a pursuit that enabled him to stand the slow, slow passage of military hours, the way some other man in uniform somewhere might endure the duration by nightly reading in War and Peace, and upon finishing it, starting over. (He made a mental note to find out what Danzer did to pass the time, if he did anything.) It was an abiding mystery, the script, that promised to reveal itself only in the measured workings of his mind and his fingers. And it was something Tepee Weepy could not reach.

  ***

  He lurched through the next days at Danzer's side, listening over and over to him regulate a cook here, a baker there, a storeroom swabbie down in some gloomy chamber at the bottom of the ship. All of it about as exciting as the derring-do of the corner grocer. SUPREME TEAM MEMBER BATTLES ENEMY WITH BISCUITS, he could just see the headline. Tepee Weepy would be thrilled to the gills with this piece. Sure it would. As military service went, what he was reporting on aboard the USS McCorkle amounted to the essence of quiescence.

  Meanwhile the long lean destroyer itself was never at rest. The Cork was aptly nicknamed, bobbing with every bit of weather. Yet that was the only di
scernible peril it faced. There were moments, staring out at the methodical ocean, when he pined for a genuine storm to shake matters up into something he could write about with some life to it, before snapping back to his senses. Think about it, Reinking. Throwing up your guts doesn't help you do your job. Just ask Dex.

  So, it seemed like just another helping of the idly floating Cork's routine when Danzer turned to him over dessert one dinnertime and announced for all to hear: "You can't deprive us of your company this evening, Ben. It's movie night."

  Well, why not? he figured. Let's see if Slick Nick supplies popcorn and soda pop along with the main feature. He trooped into the wardroom with the topside contingent and the petty officers invited up from below and sat there in tight quarters watching Compromised with Edward G. Robinson and Bette Davis chewing up the scenery and each other. That soapy drama, however, did not stand a chance of staying with him after what flickered onto the white metal wall at the end of the room first. He should have known Danzer had something of the sort up his sleeve. The short reel, Your USO on the Go, blared into action standardly enough, jaunty Italian music as the blondest of Hollywood blondes entertained the troops on a woodsy stage somewhere near the Anzio beachhead. The announcer had just begun to boom in when someone in the wardroom spoke up:

  "Nick, I could look at Betty Grable's prow every night, but we did see this last week."

  "Our guest didn't," Danzer grandly dealt with that from his presiding spot near the projector. "Humor us once-upon-a-time athletes for a little bit, if you'd be so kind."

  Ben tensed, glad his face could not be seen in the dark. Oh, goddamn. Here comes the load of crap. Slouching down in his seat in a way he had not done since he was a kid captive to the screen back in Gros Ventre, he took in Bob Hope rattling off jokes and the McGuire Sisters spunkily harmonizing. Ten the soundtrack music trumpeted off in the direction he was expecting and dreading, and here came the voice like hail on a tin roof, resounding back from the season of the Twelfth Man into the darkened compartment.

  "Hello and a hurrah, for you fighting men and women everywhere! This is Ted Loudon with your USO sports report. Once again, the United Service Organizations and the man at the mike, yours truly, are in your corner as we bring you the events of—"

  Loudon had the knack, Ben had long ago divined, of spreading himself like a weed. Newspapers, airwaves, celluloid, the so-called sportscaster was everywhere but the backs of matchbooks and that was probably next. Ben set himself to endure another kaleidoscope of clichés, still trying to figure out Danzer's purpose in thrusting this in front of him. There's no football this time of year. Is he just throwing Loudmouth at me to see what will stick? Meanwhile in close focus there on the wardroom wall, Loudon himself was grandiosely shepherding an over-the-hill heavyweight boxer onto a hangar stage at the big air base in Newfoundland. In the space of the next breath, he was spouting his way through opening day of baseball season, replete with himself among the wounded troops in the box seats at the Washington Senators game.

  Then the projector beam gave a wink of light between scenes, composed itself into gymnasium bleachers full of cheering soldiers, and onto a basketball court surged a pair of teams, one wearing no jerseys and the other wearing beards that reached to the chest letters on theirs. "For the troops at Fort Dix gathered in the USO field house, it's basketball, down to hide and hair!" Ben jolted up in his seat. "Yes, folks, it's the Carlisle 'Skins versus the House of Isaiah! These barnstorming teams have entertained America from coast to coast, playing a brand of ball that their ancestors would not recognize but they have adapted for their own." Eerily he watched five fleet ghosts of Vic Rennie racing up and down the hardwood floor, the Indian team in just its trunks running and shooting like boys let loose. For their part, the big bearded men on the other team set up passwork plays of geometric grace. In between the pure basketball there were stints of showmanship nonsense, as one of the bearded giants held the basketball in one hand over his head and a couple of the shorter Indians jumped and jumped and couldn't come close to reaching it, then in the next sequence the Indians sped upcourt passing to one another so swiftly through the windmilling House of Isaiah players that the ball seemed to be in two places at once. It was all circus to Loudon, who in his patter managed to ignore superb run-and-gun plays to concentrate on exaggerated pronunciation of names like Hunts at Night and Buffalo Scraper, and for that matter, Perlmutter and Rosenthorn. Numbly Ben blocked out all of that he could, summoning instead the intrinsic memory of Vic with his hopes set on the 'Skins, on the playing career beyond football that would take him anywhere but Hill 57. Until his leg disappeared from under him. And then his life.

  I get it, Danzer, you bet I do. Luck looks after those with shiny shoes, not the ones in moccasins. You've got the recipe for cynical.

  The instant the lights went up at the end of the main show, Ben ducked out. He didn't know what the movie-night protocol was, coffee and cookies and conversation afterward or what, but he didn't care, he simply wanted time alone. Sleep was nowhere in the picture, he was too worked up. No sooner had he closed the sick-bay door than he was across at the radio to flip on Tokyo Rose for some distraction. Might as well make it a full night of propaganda.

  He settled to the cubbyhole desk and his typewriter as the Rose of Tokyo pleasantly promised doom ahead.

  "Poor American boys. Your ships go up in flames every day and your planes are shot from the sky every hour of that day. There are too many islands where your death waits for you, while slackers at home sit out the war. Go home, GIs, before a bullet brings you the sleep that lasts forever." Out wafted the eternal strains of Brahms's "Lullaby."

  "Sweet dreams to you too, Rosie," Ben mocked back but kept the music as he twirled a half-finished page of script into the typewriter. A warm awareness different from other writing nights kept coursing through him. As much as he hated to admit Ted Loudon could possibly amount to any kind of inspiration, that rapid-fire voice worked as a goad, evoking the Golden Eagles stadium, the cleated team poised to charge onto the football field, the gilded season that led to so much else. They probably didn't teach that in Journalistic Writing Practice. His fixated gaze at the waiting white space was just beginning to find the forms of words when a rap on the door broke the trance.

  Oh, goddamn came to mind one more time, and he went to answer the knock hoping it would be any other of the officers, even the lecture-prone exec. Naturally it was not.

  "You scooted out of the wardroom before I could catch you, Ben." Danzer stood there in the passageway as crisp as the cutout of a naval recruiting poster. "I thought we ought to have a chat, old lang syne and all."

  "It's your boat, Nick." Ben gestured him in.

  Gliding by, Danzer assumed a seat on the bunk and turned an ear as he did so. "Blotting out the war with Beethoven?"

  "Brahms."

  "Same difference?"

  "Hardly. Beethoven's is music to move the universe, Brahms's is to move the heart." Ben reached over and clicked the radio off. "Sorry. I picked that up somewhere and it's always stuck with me."

  "You were the word man among us and that hasn't changed," came the response from behind the held smile. "Our old friend Loudon hasn't lost his touch either, has he."

  "Nope. Bullshit stays green for quite a while."

  That did not appear to be the reaction Danzer had been counting on. He scrutinized his host briefly, then leaned forward, hands steepled together as if aiming a prayer. "I hope this isn't stepping on your toes, Ben, but I wanted to make sure you're coming along all right on your article. Two more days until we're in Brisbane, and you're off to wherever's next. It would be on my conscience if I haven't provided everything you need."

  Ben studied the slick source of those words. You're a provider if there ever was one. Danzer, monarch of the cold storage locker and master of the cooks and bakers and servers; the story that really interested Ben was how he had cozied himself into this slot in the American logistical empire. Some alliance o
f convenience made back there in shiny-shoe OCS? Some influential Yellowstone tourist, togged out by the Toggery, who knew someone on MacArthur's staff? Pull was involved somewhere, Ben would have bet any amount of money. There was nothing wrong with being a storekeeper. What rankled was Danzer being Danzer, his every pore exuding the attitude that he was entitled to a free pass through the war.

  "Well, Nick, I'll tell you. It's a little tough to make the commissary sound like a knife at Japan's throat. I'll come up with something along those lines, though. Bread knife, maybe."

  That drew a chuckle of sorts. "I'm the first to admit, patrolling MacArthur's backyard is a tolerable tour of duty. There's a nice amount of leisure." Danzer pronounced it as if it rhymed with pleasure. "But don't forget it's a long war for me, too. They also wait who only stand and serve." Ben could tell it was not nearly the first time that line had been trotted out.

  "By the way, how did you like the show, over all?" Danzer switched to, as though it was considerate of him to ask. "Lou-don's loud mouth aside, the bit of basketball was interesting, wasn't it? I thought you would get a kick out of it." Is that what you thought. Somehow I doubt it. Danzer steadied his gaze on his reluctant listener. "I never had anything permanently against Vic, you know. If his idea in life was to play shirts and skins, I'd have been glad to see him do it," not quite saying on the side of the redskins, naturally.

  "Life never did cut Vic a break," Ben answered shortly. Or the other three who lined up with us in that stadium. He did not want to go over that territory, the team's lives taken by the war, in the clammy companionship of Danzer. "Moxie's all right, by the way. I checked. His outfit's dug in high and dry in a lucky pocket at Normandy, not much resistance."

  "Is that what that was about, the code traffic ahead of the captain's morning messages," the other said blandly. "The skipper thinks you have more radio priority than Roosevelt." He thought to tack on, "Good for Moxie," before bringing the conversation to where Ben saw it had been aimed all along.