by Ivan Doig
Ben did not have to struggle with the obvious any too long. I can't just go on being a target every place Tepee Weepy can think up. Already unstrung by Cass being gone from him, he did his best to assemble his scattered self, knowing worse consequences were out there waiting if he did not. Any infirmary sawbones will tell you there's no prescription that works on nervous in the service, Reinking, so get a grip on yourself. At least Jake had not managed to wangle his way into the flak-filled skies over Germany and remained stuck on the milk run—all right, ice-water run—from Fairbanks to Nome. At least Moxie was in some anti-aircraft rear echelon, getting to shoot first at any threats overhead. I'm going to give it a try, guys. Screwed-up law of averages or not, there's no rule I can see that we have to end up with the others.
He started what he knew had to be the last battle of words with Tepee Weepy the day after Dex was buried.
The funeral piece he filed spared nothing about the highborn Cariston name joining the oversize list of Helena sacrificial soldiery beneath the doughboy statue, but that was not the issue. Apprehension behind every word, that next day he fed the blockletter sentences one by one to the teletype operator.
END SUPREME TEAM SERIES NOW? GETTING LONELY, JUST WE THREE.
The final line was trickiest of all to come up with, possibly because it was hard to write with fingers crossed.
WHAT IF TOKYO ROSE AND LORD HAW-HAW KNOW HOW TO COUNT.
"Don't you want me to put a question mark on this, sir?"
"It's not a question, soldier, it's a supposition. Just send it."
Nothing came back that day, no matter how much Ben hung around the wire room and mooched coffee and sprang alert every time a teletype bell went off. Come on, you TPWP SOBs. Answer. Call off the damned series. Or are you going to tell me and the couple of thousand newspaper editors watching for this byline you set me up with that eight dead heroes aren't enough?
The days after that, he sent Jones to check for a reply so many times that at last the corporal just gave him a funny look and started off before he could get the words out. Finally, at week's end, a wire room clerk stuck his face in the doorway and said there was a five-bell message waiting.
TPWP MINDFUL OF HAW-HAW AND TOKYO ROSE. FULLY INTEND ENEMY PROPAGANDA WILL NOT SCORE BIG ON SUPREME TEAM. SERIES WILL BE MODIFIED. DETAILS FOLLOW SOON.
Ben read and reread the sheet of wire copy for what it said and did not say. That damned "modify" again. The Tepee Weepy meaning of soon was also clear as mud. He plainly enough had their attention, though, with that dig about what the master propagandists in Berlin and Tokyo could do with the obliteration of any more of the team. So, okay, that does spook them and it's up to me to keep them spooked. Immediately he holed up in his office and went back to block-letter work.
MODIFY IS MIDDLE NAME HERE AT EAST BASE. HOW ABOUT WRAP-UP PIECE ON STAMPER AND EISMAN AS SURVIVORS?
Again, a last line onto that was the hard stunt. Before deciding whether to send all three, he had Jones bring him the regulations to see what it took to be court-martialed for insubordination. Not that much. He sucked in his cheeks and had the third sentence sent anyway. FIRST THEY MUST SURVIVE.
Tepee Weepy's response practically jumped out of the teletype, the bells chorusing before he had even turned around to leave the wire room.
WRAP-UP PIECE IS SHARED GOAL. YOU WILL GIVE IT SHINE AND SHADOW AT RIGHT TIME, RIGHT PLACE.
Ben waited expectantly for the clerk to pass him the next decoded sentences. The clerk shrugged and held up empty hands.
"That's it? It can't be, look again."
"I already did. That's all they wrote, sir."
Fuming, Ben stoked up on coffee and claimed a vacant desk there in the wire room. He jotted and wadded three versions before hitting on the one that upped the ante unmistakably enough.
UNSURE I CAN TOUGH IT OUT UNTIL RIGHT TIME, RIGHT PLACE. ILLNESS DISCUSSED WHEN COLONEL HERE MAY RECUR. DIAGNOSIS NOT SO HOT, DETAILS MIGHT HELP WITH CURE.
Get it, Colonel and your partners in manufacturing the news? I damn sure am sick of guys from the team turning into dead men whenever the sonofabitching war feels like it, whatever the odds are supposed to be. If you can't pull strings to save Jake's skin and Moxie's and for that matter mine, then kick me out with a dishonorable piece of paper for refusing orders, see if I goddamn care. I may be blackballed for life, but at least I'll be in one piece. He sent this message knowing he really was playing a thin hand now, but gambling that Tepee Weepy had its own stake in keeping him in the game.
ILLNESS UNDERSTOOD, the answer clattered back within minutes. PLAN IS TO HONOR STAMPER, EISMAN, YOU, AS SURVIVORS OF SUPREME TEAM SAGA. FEELING BETTER?
Hovering at the clerk's shoulder, he sent right back:
SOME. WAITING TO SEE WHAT MEDICINE IS INVOLVED.
The wait this time stretched his nerves to the sagging point. It was growing dark enough outside for the five bells of the TPWP wire machine to constitute a vesper serenade before the return message began coming in.
MANDATORY BURN THIS AFTER YOU READ.
I guess I have their attention. "Loan me your lighter and nab a clean butt can for a bonfire." The clerk sighed and complied.
The whacking teletype keys seemed to spell out the message with particular emphasis now.
STAMPER IS FINAL STORY, BLAZE OF GLORY, ALL THAT.
"Quick, shoot this off to them." Ben was grabbing for the notepad.
"You want me to break in on a priority message from Washington?"
"You heard me." He jotted the words big and bold and handed them to the reluctant clerk. Where is STAMPER, ANYWAY?
STAMPER STATIONED WITH NEW ACK-ACK UNIT AT HQ EUROPEAN THEATER. VITAL DRAMATIC STORY THERE.
Ben paused over that. Supreme headquarters where the invasion of Europe had been planned and carried out was in England. England meant London, and every correspondent from Ernie Pyle to Hemingway had a soft spot for London and the British, so dauntless under the bombing of the Luftwaffe in the first years of the war. He had learned to love the old city himself in his early stint of reporting there, and now the Luftwaffe bombers had been driven from the sky over Great Britain and even the rocket buzz bomb attacks were reported to have dropped off sharply. There was second allure in what Tepee Weepy was proposing; while he could not have put a name to her, Mnemosyne once more was gliding forth from the eternal grove with that double handful of tantalizing choice. If the Allied forces took Berlin by the end of the year, as everyone was saying could happen, London would be a fine place to write the one thing guaranteed to preserve Jake and Moxie and himself, the story that the war itself was dead. Ben cast his lot. I'M LISTENING.
AS WE WERE SAYING, the TPWP teletype implacably resumed. STAMPER A SHORT-TERMER NOW IN ACK-ACK DUTY. HE WILL BE MUSTERED OUT WITH COMMENDATIONS AND APPROPRIATE CEREMONY, OVER THERE, THEN BRING HIM HOME AS HERO. EISMAN TO BE HERO BY THEN TOO, LONGEST-SERVING ATC PILOT ON ALASKA RUN, ALSO WILL BE MUSTERED OUT. SATISFIED?
It was a better bargain than he'd thought he could get: Jake would not be going to Europe, would not be at risk from Nazi flak and concentration camp. With a sense of relief, he sent back: FEELING BETTER ALL THE TIME.
GLAD CURE IS TAKING HOLD. WIND UP AFFAIRS AT EAST BASE NEXT FEW WEEKS. EARLY DECEMBER YOU WILL PROCEED FORTHWITH TO—
At first he thought the clerk at the Tepee Weepy end had garbled together some wrong keys in typing the ultimate word. Then he still had to think for a moment where Antwerp was.
17
Belgium had been a main road in two world wars, Ben knew that much, every schoolkid knew that much. It was notoriously easy for the Kaiser's army in 1914 and the Führer's in 1940 to rumble into the supposedly neutral low country where the port of Antwerp faced out alluringly into the entire maritime world. Back to Napoleon and Wellington, back greatly farther than that in the centuries-long swash of war as European monarchies contended for that foothold on the North Sea, the Belgians' lot had been to prosper cautiously during intervals of peace and to su
ffer foreign occupation as soon as the cannons were fired. Now, glory be to the dazed and half-starved little country, the four-year Nazi grip on Belgium had been wrenched free by a surprise British offensive after the D-Day landings. "Surprise" scarcely said it; Field Marshal Montgomery's tanks thrust north out of Normandy with such astounding rapidity that German forces emptied out of Belgian cities in mad haste. In particular, they unwisely abandoned Antwerp without taking time to sabotage the strategic waterfront along the River Scheldt and its mouth into the North Sea. There it sat, the prize port with its nicely intact docks and locks and cranes, and the Allied high command lost no time in turning Antwerp's dockland into the supply conduit for the final push on into Germany. Which, Ben could see, meant defending Antwerp against air raids as the Germans might seek to make up for their error of hasty evacuation. Which, also as far as he could see, meant duty as usual for anti-aircraft batteries such as Moxie Stamper's. Keep your damn head down for a few weeks more, Mox, and we're home free.
Days were hectic, nights were forlorn, as he readied to leave for Europe. There was a last quick visit home for Thanksgiving, his mother to be soothed, his father to be bolstered. The soldier's oldest ordeal before shipping out, how much to say to loved ones, how much not to say.
Afterward, expecting it day after day as he was, the message from TPWP finally came like a blurted order:
DEPART TOMORROW.
First, a farewell to Jones that they both found hard to deal with.
Next, in an icy December dawn at East Base, he boarded an eastbound C-47, acutely conscious he was carrying with him what little was left of the law of averages.
"Bill, it's nearly midnight, you know. Or maybe the time got away from you."
"You're not exactly tucked into bed yourself, Cloyce."
"I needed an aspirin." She hesitated at the doorway, then came into his lair of books and snuggled into the easy chair across from his desk, tucking the lacy hem of her nightgown under her knees. Unaccustomed as they were to this anymore, they glanced at each other a bit shyly and then out the window to the whitened town. Flakes were coming down featherlike, yet every so often the wind dislodged a branchload from the cotton-wood trees, producing a commotion like white dust rising back up, more clods falling within it. The all-but-silent crash of snow lent an otherworldly quality to this night, the first of many such the two of them were going to have to get used to.
"Where do you think he is by now?" Cloyce asked in a hushed voice.
Bill cleared his throat. "The Long Island field, maybe." All during the day he had studied Ben's route on the wall map of the Gleaner office every time he glanced up. New York. Newfoundland. Greenland. Iceland. England. Europe and whatever that portended.
"At least we did get to see him," she mused, as if still trying out for her role as mother. "Even if it was slim pickings as holidays go."
It was not a Spam Thanksgiving as she had warned Ben in his last-minute phone call that it might need to be, but it was venison pot roast, dry and gamy, procured by Bill in some manner that he would not divulge. The guests' dishes similarly tasted of improvisation: Carnelia Muntz's tomato-soup-and-olives aspic, without the olives; Mae Vennaman's dried apple pie, craftily achieved with saved sugar coupons. A decidedly mixed review, Cloyce told herself, but better than none. The duration sat right up to the table with them all, and the talk among the older people, which was everyone but Ben, kept coming back to whether the war would be over by the end of the year. "Sure," Ben had replied, "I just don't know what year." It had drawn a laugh from everyone except his parents.
Now Cloyce gauged her husband and what was stacked in front of him on the desk. "You've been reading it again, haven't you."
Nodding, he reached around and squared the pages of the script. "You're the expert, but I'd call it one hell of a movie."
"You're right, it's a wonderful work." She paused, the tip of her tongue against the roof of her mouth. "They actually did that to the Purcell boy?" It both was a question and not.
"They did. Ben has a firsthand source."
"I just wish he hadn't been so dramatic about leaving it with us," she murmured. "Mother, Dad," his words still were in the air of the house, "if I don't make it back, do what you can with this, okay?"
Bill Reinking smiled gently. Just sitting there in her nightgown, she looked ready for a director to sing out Action! "I can't imagine where he gets it from."
She gave back a soft laugh, then looked out into the sift of snow again. "I would give years off my own life to have kept Ben from being sent into danger all the time." She turned her gaze to Bill. "I did try, you know."
"How would I?" His head dipped as he looked at her through the very tops of his glasses. "You never said so, Cloyce."
She smiled the slightest bit. "That's what comes of living with newspapermen. If I'd told you, it would have gone right into his ear." The smile flicked off. "As you can tell, I couldn't get the job done. All those family friends in Washington, Bill? People my parents were thick as thieves with in the old days? Not a one of them," her tone deadly level, "would find a safe spot for our only son." It was not like her to curse, but she found the coldness of voice for it now. "The short-memoried bastards."
Bill touched the script again. "If—we have to do something with this, do you think you can?"
Her chin came up. "That's different, thank goodness. The Carteret name still means something at Zanuck's studio and some of the others." She nodded slowly. "I can get them to read The Ghost Runner and that's all it will take, I guarantee you. Ben's movie will be made, it's too good not to."
Cloyce saw her husband's mood uncloud just a bit and smiled further encouragement to him. "Ben will get to tend to that himself," she said firmly. "I told him I was counting on him for New Year's again."
He was cooling his heels in a few hours' layover in Newfoundland when a clerk tracked him down.
"Sir? Are you the TPWP captain? I'm from the wire room. Message there for you."
Wondering What now?, he let the soldier lead him to the communications building. The teletype sheet was ripped and ready, waiting for him. He read it, went outside, and threw up in the snow.
A week. And I didn't have so much as a goddamn hint about it. Jake's plane had been missing on the flight between Fairbanks and Nome for seven days, the official time for giving an aircraft and its crew up for lost. Oblivion of the worst kind; it was not known whether the B-17 bomber perished in the Alaskan mountains or the Bering Sea. Ben felt as if his soul had been operated on, an essence of life cut out of him. Why Jake? Why now? There in the Newfoundland cold, he tried to grapple himself together. Back in to the wire room. Dull jots on the message pad, handed to the clerk to be sent to Tepee Weepy.
I NEED TIME.
Tersely TPWP arranged a layover until the next morning's flight to Europe.
He spent a terrible day, wrestling the words out.
Sky-high in his hundred-mission crush hat, loud as a good takeoff, Lt. Jacob Eisman flew through life amending the laws of gravity as he went. He was Jake to the world, and jake with us, those who knew him in all his big ways.
A line, two, would come, and then he would have to abandon the typewriter, go outside to clear his head in the elemental Newfoundland weather.
He came to this war from a thousand years of one-sided battles, his family becoming American—All-American in the finest, truest use of those words—out of a past ridden over by Cossacks too many times. And by one of the quirks war is so good at, he piloted bombers to Russian comrades waiting in Alaska, back door to Siberia, in the airborne supply line to the Eastern Front where the largest battles in history are being fought.
At the end, he sought out the base library to look it up.
"The dear love of comrades," wrote one of us who knew how to make words sing. Walt Whitman inscribed that out of his service as a nurse in the Civil War, another chapter of lost good men. Jake Eisman would have shaken his big, outrageous Cheshire-cat head over those words, bu
t no man in uniform ever earned them more.
Late that night, he filed the finished piece to TPWP. In the morning, he was back in a plane, somewhere over the gray cold North Atlantic, descending the latitudes to the older world.
Antwerp's airdrome looked like a military costume party. Ben understood that this rear-area supply sector was a joint command, with an American general serving under Belgium's liberator, the British tank tactician Montgomery. But Allied armed forces seemed to have proliferated far beyond that on this airfield. Belgian military types stationed themselves here and there, beaming in welcome but not notably in English. Over by the 'drome canteen a small herd of Free French brass was being met by an American liaison officer who looked overwhelmed. Elsewhere, coveys of soldiers in what appeared to be outmoded British uniforms were gabbling in some dour strange language; Ben at length figured out they must be Polish troops who until now had fought the war from England. Looking around futilely for any sign of a motor pool and a familiar U.S. Army driver to be conscripted, he wondered if he was lingually up to this. So far, it's as bad as when Sig sneaked up on me in Japanese and I didn't know what the hell to—
