The Eleventh Man

by Ivan Doig

  Enough of that. This is the last time you'll ever hear from Capt. Standish—

  His eyes misted instantly at that.

  —in WASP uniform. They're inactivating us the middle of the month—happy holidays, P-39 birdwomen, huh?—and the squadron will scatter to the winds. Mary Cat is going into schoolteaching. Della has her hooks into a major in ops, and he's gaga enough she'll probably get him to marry her. I have my hands full with Dan, but I've been wondering whether to try to get on with the Forest Service after a while, flying smoke patrol. It'll be the same old thing, though, will they hire a woman pilot?

  Maybe it'll all sort out okay after the war. But that's too far away to think about.

  He pinched the bridge of skin between his eyes waiting for the worst of the thought to pass: if there is an after. Then he blinked back into reading the last of the letter.

  I suppose I could tell you I miss you something awful. But too much truth is maybe not a good idea, given the situation. You are always going to be a part of me, despite the gold string on my finger that ties me to Dan. I couldn't Dear John him while he was out in the Pacific, and I can't do it to you while you're over there. I think of you more than is healthy, and I just want you to know I regret not one damn thing of our time together.

  It is getting late, and it's snowing like sixty—the O Club windowsills look like igloo territory—and I have to get back to the apartment. Now all this is off my chest—no wisecrack about that sort of thing, you—and on its way to wherever you've ended up. Take care, Ben—I don't need another hole in my life.

  Hugs and tickles,

  Cass

  Back and forth, he walked the narrow confines of bunker room, holding the letter as if memorizing it. For all his skills at what was said between the lines, supposition resisted him here as he read the sentences over and over.

  In her feisty Cass way she wished him well, and maybe cast a major wish beyond that, but nothing under the ink had really changed, had it?

  There still was Dan Standish.

  There still was the war.

  And the creeping shadow of fear, always there, that oblivion was not through with the Supreme Team yet.

  Even so, he felt distinctly better about life with lines from Cass in his hand even if they led to nowhere.

  He figured he must be misunderstanding something.

  In the dining bunker he found Maurice poking a fork at chipped beef on overtoasted toast. By a grave misjudgment of joint command, the British had been put in charge of the food and the Americans in charge of the beer. "Saved you a spot," Maurice indicated across the table, "although you may not thank me when you taste this. No bad news from home, I hope, arriving in the fashion it did?"

  "Good enough. No news would have been bad news." With the ghost of a grin Ben let the allusion hang in the direction of his host and censor.

  "Ah, well, spoken like a journalist. Other than that," Maurice took a sip of tea or coffee, whichever it was, "still passing the time working on the hemstitch of your straitjacket?"

  "You nailed it, Maurice," Ben responded with his first outright laugh in days. He couldn't help it, he liked the company of this man who talked as some people sing.

  "I do have some allowable news, just between thee and me and the cocotte clock," Maurice brought out. "Intelligence estimates, to flatter them with that, indicate the Huns may be giving up on buzz bombs. It has been most of a week since that last batch. And no matter how many they've sent, they haven't managed to cripple the port at all. Hitler's rocket men may be out of business for lack of results—the German high command putting all that fuel into keeping the rest of its military machine alive, the thinking is."

  "The lights aren't blinking and the ground isn't shaking," Ben said gratefully, "so I hoped something like that was happening."

  "Absence of anything in the air at the moment may be the intelligence wizards' full evidence too," Maurice offered his own airy speculation. "We shall have to see." Furrowing his brow and on up into the bald outskirts, he stated: "I have been thinking. As things now stand, it might be possible to get out and about a bit, if that would help with your TPWP matter?"

  Ben tossed his fork into the gluey meal, ready to go that minute. "Christ, yes. It'd put legs under the piece."

  "We need to be quite cautious," came the voice of prudence across the table. "But the Antwerp outskirts have been less dangerous than the city proper. If there's an all clear in the morning, we might judiciously explore some area of interest to you." Maurice sent him an inquiring look. "Ben, I have forgotten to ask—which are you, bars-and-brothels or castles-and-cathedrals?"

  On the spot, he thought it over. "Somewhere between."

  "Wise choice. All horizons kept open, that way," the man from Nowhere spelled backwards declaimed, bouncing it word by word. "I should leave to you any excursions in the direction of sin, however, personal taste and all that. What would please you in the other direction?"

  "What I really want," Ben was somewhat surprised to hear himself say, "is to go to Waterloo."

  20

  The next day the two of them set off as soon as there was light enough to see by, before the fog was up. The stonework of Antwerp receded behind them in the thin winter dawn as the jeep passed through the successive belts of anti-aircraft gun pits, the ack-ack suburbs, and then out onto the main road in company with the around-the-clock line of trucks from the port. Squeezed in between the big six-wheeled cargo carriers, Maurice steered with the patience of a man whose reward was coming. "There are farm roads once we're out a ways—those will swing us around Brussels and this clot of lorries." He patted the plasticine map case atop his briefcase. "You're the navigator."

  Before long Ben spotted the first of the rural roads and they turned off into a landscape white and quiet. Low ruined houses and sheds stood skeletal every little distance, and even the few farms that the war had not ravaged sat empty in a spectral way. Wrapped in his horse-blanket overcoat and glad of it, Ben blew on his writing hand whenever he jotted in his notepad. As the stark farmyards went by, he noticed there were no animals in the fields and then caught up with why—all had been eaten during Belgium's starving years of Nazi occupation, including the horses.

  The graying snow on the farmyards and fields like a tablecloth on an abandoned empty table, they drove on into the flat midland of Belgium. In that world with all the noise smothered out of it, he and Maurice could talk comfortably. Moxie had told him they were goofy for going out on this. "You haven't seen enough battlefields to last you for one lifetime, Rhine King?" Not enough ones gone quiet. "I don't know if these are the same roads Wellington and Napoleon had," Ben remarked as he pointed out the next turnoff, "but you're sure as hell making better time than they did." Maurice handled the jeep as if captaining a yacht, swinging wide on the curves and making up for it with unfurled speed on the straight stretches.

  "Ah, well," the figure presiding at the wheel said loftily, "one likes to get there in timely fashion, forth and back."

  Not for the first time in honor of the New Zealander's locutions, Ben chuckled. "Is that a Southern Hemisphere way of looking at things, like the bathtub draining the opposite direction?"

  "Hmm? Not at all, it's simple logic. One cannot, Ben, go back before one goes forth, therefore—"

  Ben pursed a smile. "Spoken like a professor of argumentation."

  "We shall see how I am as a battlefield muse." Maurice patted the attaché case between them. "The Trekker's Guidebook to the Historic Battle at Waterloo. Gift from my father, right off, when he learned I'd been posted to Belgium."

  "He sounds about like mine," Ben mused. "Spends his nights in history up to his ears."

  "Up to his rifle shoulder, in my father's case," came the response to that. Ben glanced over, sensing why it was put that way.

  Maurice stayed staring straight ahead over the steering wheel as he spoke, the words suddenly less clipped. "Reads all the military history he can, the old fellow, says he's going to keep on un
til he finds the one that gets it right. He was at Gallipoli, in the first big go. Caught fragments from a Turk grenade in that shoulder, invalided home by Christmas of 1915. He never afterward could lift that arm enough to comb his hair. Mum has combed it for him for thirty years." A light of remembering, distant and wintry, had come into his eyes. "Even so, he counted himself one of the lucky ones. Some ten thousand New Zealanders and Australians did not make it home from that beachhead, ever." He paused. "My British colleagues can cite chapter and verse about their 'lost generation' in the trenches here, but they shrug off Gallipoli. As though there were a different set of numbers for those of us in the colonies." Breaking his spell of recital, Maurice sent a considerate look to Ben. "But why am I carrying on to you about unjust numbers? Sorry about that."

  They drove on in silence, in the white iron winter over the northern half of the world.

  The snow glare on the buttes against the clear morning sky lent Great Falls a rim of dazzling ivory. Wouldn't you just damn know. Perfect flying weather and we're grounded for eternity.

  Signing her way through last-minute paperwork, Cass every so often sent a pining look out the ready-room window. Around her, her pilots restlessly filled the wait as best they could, some jokes, some bitten lips to clamp emotion away. Taking extreme care not to show it, she herself was having to fight a case of trembles. So enormously much that was ending today. Everything else that was not. She had survived the war, the P-39, the P-63. Now to survive the situation with Dan. He was a bear some days—a lot of days—in the recuperation that sometimes he did not even seem to want. Other times, his old carnie self came through, he was full of plans, the old notion of barnstorming, flying, wing-walking. She was not sure wingwalking had survived the war.

  And when I'm not sure, I start dreaming about Ben, don't I. If wishes were fishes, I'd be Jonah.

  One more time, Cass strung herself together. She glanced at the clock next to the flight board, coming onto the hour. "All right, officers, let's get outside and form up."

  The eleven women lined up in three ranks at the edge of the long runway. They were in Sunday uniform, white shirt, tan slacks—except for the leather flight jackets worn against the Montana cold, the same dress uniform each of them had worn at graduation from pilot school in Texas, hundreds of flying hours ago. Deep-creased crush hats crowned manes of hair; Cass could have picked every member of her squadron out of a thousand by the way the hat sat. She inspected them one last time as they stood at attention.

  "Della, half step right. M.C., half step left. That's Beryl's spot between you."

  With a deep breath she gave the command, and the squadron marched along the flight line to the hangar where the inactivation ceremony would be held.

  Work on the unpainted bombers and P-63s stilled for a moment as the women mechanics in hairnets and overalls looked around from the wings and platform ladders they stood on, to the WASPs crisply saluting the waiting general. The gathering was not large. A perfunctory honor guard, rifles at rest and flag drooping in the still air of the hangar. The fresh-faced Canadian liaison officer, down from Edmonton for the occasion. Jones with a Speed Graphic camera, blazing away with flashbulb after flashbulb; he had worshipfully let Cass know there would be a set of photographs for each pilot.

  The general at the portable podium his aide had set up shuffled his papers as if this were one more chore, glanced up at Cass as if she were personally responsible for his being saddled with Grady's Ladies all this while, and gruffly began.

  Standing at attention determined to show him not so much as a quiver, she wondered if there would have been a ceremony at all if the general hadn't had to read out the special letter of commendation—the renowned flying women of East Base ... service above and beyond the call of duty—from the Senator.

  Rising from his chair like a gallant of old, the Senator came around the table and delivered a forehead kiss to his wife as she settled in her seat. "Good morning, Sadie, light of my life." He stayed standing, looking out the lead-paned windows of the breakfast nook at most of a week's worth of lazy flakes still descending on Washington like tired confetti. "Isn't this town the damnedest place? It doesn't even know how to have a proper blizzard."

  His wife helped herself to what little coffee he had left for her in the pot. "I hope, Luther, you aren't going to put yourself in charge of the weather next."

  "Not hardly," he drawled. "The Pentagon no doubt will be enough of a snow job, as our daughter the sailor would say." Despite his words, his wife knew he was relishing this lame-duck session of Congress, inasmuch as he was preeminently of the opposite species. The war having spawned so many military bases in the western states, the region at last was in line to seat a formidable old cuss of its own in the main chair of the committee that held the purse strings in such matters, now that the venerable chairman had retired to his peach farm. With his whopping reelection, the Senator fit the bill and he intended to fill it. His plateside reading these mornings was a tome titled Bureaucracies and Their Foibles.

  Her busy day of holiday chores on her mind with Christmas coming fast, his wife somewhat absently waited for him to pull out his dollar watch, his signal of leaving for the Capitol. Today he made a show of consulting its Roman numerals, but a governing instinct of a murkier sort had taken hold of him as it sometimes did. "First thing, I need to futz around in the mail room a little." His wife made a face as he left the table; she didn't like futz.

  Nor the mail room, for that matter. She never set foot into the alcove library where he felt most at home in the otherwise womanized house. And the colored maid was not let in the room, not since the time she tidied by stacking everything together. With the satisfaction of familiarity the Senator again gazed around at the musty bookshelves, the favorite framed Chicago Tribune political cartoon showing him as a bowlegged wrangler roping a runaway bull with the head and face of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and last and most comforting of all, the outmoded military trestle tables waiting with seven batches of newspapers, eight to a pile. The weeklies from all fifty-six Montana counties, right here in the Potomac swampland ready for his perusal whenever the spirit moved him. Of all the senatorial perquisites there were, this one especially tickled him. He knew his staff drew straws to see which of them, at the dawn of each week, would have to take a taxi down from the Hill with the bulging mailbag of newspapers and lay them out in prescribed order, and the fact that they despised the chore only made him snort to himself in amusement. Montana was big as hell and just as tricky to represent, and he long since had figured out that having the local view of things fetched into this room for him beat trying to chase down the moods of constituents across a six-hundred-mile swath of earth.

  Actually, there was more to it than that. In dismal bunk-houses and drafty line cabins when the century and he were unconquerably young, this gaunt old bone-sprung prairie Caesar had read his way up in the world via weekly compilations of community happenings just such as these; somehow even then he savvied more than was on the page, and the Faustian skills of small-town editors—recording angel one paragraph, gossip-monger the next—he had been careful to reckon with ever since. If nothing else, it appealed to him as cheap insurance for a man in his position. He could see no sign in the insane modern world that the pen was mightier than the sword, but it was damn sure stronger than most campaign speeches.

  As he worked through this day's stack of newsprint about livestock prices and the latest run of bad weather, he checked his watch again. The new power that was coming to him with the gavel of the committee needed judicious exercise in the halls of the Senate and he had to allow time for that. He at last was in a position to do something about alphabet-soup wartime projects that did not point straight to victory and he was not going to waste—

  The bold line of type caught his eye as he was paging through the Gros Ventre Gleaner.

  THOSE WHO GAVE ALL.

  At these words something occurred, like a catch of breath but much deeper, in the ha
rdened Senator. He blinked and looked again. He had not seen that heading since World War One. His kid brother had been one of those listed then, mortally wounded in a barrage at Château-Thierry in 1918.

  Staring, he bent closer over the column of names of young ones grown to military age in the quarter century since.

  Adamic, Stefan, killed in action in New Guinea.

  Baker, Raymond, died in military hospital of wounds suffered in the Anzio invasion.

  Cooper, Samuel, sailor on the USS Yorktown, missing in action.

  Copenhaver, Theodore, killed in plane crash during training at Sweetwater, Texas.

  Crosby, Vern, killed in action at Leyte...

  With a chill he ran his finger on down and down the alphabet of death. Godalmighty, that many? In one county? A county— and an editor—he thought he knew like the back of his hand. In their span of political alliances of convenience he considered Bill Reinking a bit soft on Roosevelt, but rock solid other than that. The list broke at the bottom of the newspaper column, and started anew at top of the next.

  McCaskill, Alex, killed in strafing attack in Tunisia.

  Peterson, Morton, died as prisoner of war in Bataan death march.

  Petrie, Laura Ann, Army nurse, killed by artillery barrage behind the lines at the battle for Avranches.

  Quigg, James, shot down over Germany, missing in action.

  Rennie, Victor, died in England during a bombing raid...