The Eleventh Man

by Ivan Doig

  "Ted, no funny stuff with a football for the show. We're in a goddamn war zone and Moxie and I both are on our last legs and—"

  "Sure, sure. Anyway, how's it feel to make All-American? Catches you up with Eisman." Loudon's flat inexpressive face did not match the voice. "Hell of a thing with him and Danzer, isn't it—beyond dead, turned into part of the atmosphere." It took great effort, but Ben did not respond to that. "You guys as a team were something else," Loudon was going on, exuding sincerity. He did a slight jerking motion of his head to one side as if making a check mark with his chin. "Something else."

  Ben jammed his fists in his pockets to hide their readiness. "Look, Loud—Ted, how about showing me what pony trick you want me to do on the broadcast, so I can go get some rest."

  "Sam?" Loudon yelled across the room to the show director. "Doing a walk-through with my guest star. Come on up, Ben." The singing-and-dancing sister act was rehearsing on the stage, in gowns that looked spun from cotton candy. "Excuse us, ladies," Loudon pushed past with Ben following, "All-American coming through." At the far end of the stage was a folding mockup of a stadium broadcasting booth, pennants painted on and The Loudon Lowdown lettered large amid those. Rapidly the sportscaster rehearsed Ben in coming onstage when the Supreme Team cue was given and slipping into a seat behind the microphone in the fake booth. "It's tight for three," he jabbed a thumb at the empty seat on the other side, "but we'll make it work. Moxie'll be along later, he's getting dressed up. Hey, wasn't that tough about Bruno's team not making the Rose Bowl? One lousy touchdown short in the Stanford game."

  "Tough."

  "Anyway," Loudon thrust a copy of the script at Ben, "look over my questions so there're no surprises. Keep your answers short. Hell, I don't need to tell you the ropes—you're a star in your own right." The check mark with the chin again. "That Guam broadcast. Whooh."

  Ben as if by instinct had zeroed in on the nub of the script.

  The unbeaten Treasure State Golden Eagles of 1941 were a football team without precedent, and tonight I wish to honor them in a way befitting that. That gallant eleven, with every starting player enlisting in the service of our country after Pearl Harbor, went on to another peerless record, in courage. Nine of those football heroes gave their lives in this war, and in honor of how they gave their all, tonight I am naming that Supreme Team who so bravely traded football uniforms for military uniforms my All-American team for this year. We are lucky to have with us tonight the two surviving heroes...

  Ben's temples throbbed. You never spare the schmalz, do you, Loudon. Script gripped in hand, he rose to get away from the man.

  Loudon looked up at him expectantly. "The show's at midnight, remember, we have to do it that late to hit prime time back home. You're going to catch some rest, you said. Got an alarm clock?"

  "In my pocket."

  Ben left the Wonder Bar with Loudon staring after him in puzzlement.

  ***

  He flopped down on his bunk with the cocotte clock set to go off in half an hour. He knew better than to drop deep asleep for an extended time, he would still be groggy when it was time for the show. He had lived with the clock of war for so long, with its unending hours and split-second dangers, that rationing his time for one last night was worth everything. Tomorrow a plane homeward out of the war. In some other tomorrow, a script made into a movie that would reveal Loudon and Bruno for what they were. His tired mind traversed from the one thought to the other, forth and back, as Maurice would have said. He dozed off that way.

  When the cocotte clock dinged, he cracked his eyes barely a slit and closed them again against the corridor lighting pouring through the doorway. It was the most welcome indulgence in days just to lie there with the faint rosy nothingness behind the eyelids. The nothingness dimmed for a moment.

  He opened his eyes, unsure.

  Then the tossed-off words came back. "Moxie'll be along later, he's getting dressed up." Moxie hated dressing up. He had barely managed it for Purcell's funeral. His deliberately careless fashion was that of an unmade bed.

  Ben jerked upright on the bunk, put his shoes on in a hurry, and went out into the bunker corridor. He asked the officer next door: "Did the lights blink just now?"

  "Same like always," came the reply in a used-to-it voice. "The buzz bomb dimmer switch."

  He hurried down the corridor to Moxie's room. Empty. Okay, he must be hanging around the Wonder Bar watching them set things up, is all. Showing Inez the glamorous life. He couldn't quite convince himself. Moxie was not the kind to sit in a corner watching other people be in charge.

  This time he stuck his head in the room across the hall, the senior enlisted men's side. A grizzled gunnery sergeant at the wall niche desk writing a letter home looked around in surprise and started to get to his feet. "At ease, Guns," Ben said quickly. "Any idea where Captain Stamper's wandered off to?"

  "Sure thing. Him and that nurse went to the flicks, in town. Some newsreel guys wanted shots of his squiring her somewhere and you know him, he wouldn't pass up—"

  Ben set off for the wire room at a run.

  The entire section was a din of teletypes clacking and phones jangling. WRENs with messages in hand scurried off into the HQ staff's warren of offices. Forging his way through the traffic of messengers, Ben latched on to the owl-eyed clerk blinking up at him in alarm from his keyboard. "Sir, we're on emergency priority, we can't send to TPWP without the commander's—"

  "To hell with that. The buzz bomb that hit—where?"

  "In the city, right in the center. Bad one, sir. There's a call out for ambulances from units all the way to Brussels." The clerk skimmed the message pad he was transcribing from. "The Belgian authorities keep calling the place a 'cinema' but our regs say 'movie'—"

  Ben whirled, searching the room. Where was Maurice with the damn jeep when needed? Up to his tonsils in there with the commander and the intelligence dummies who blew this, that's where.

  Abandoning the wire room, he wove his way back to his quarters at a trot, grabbed his flight jacket and crush hat and the pistol belt, and plunged out into the long maze of corridors to the hospital bunker. The scene there was the confusion of the wire room multiplied. Stretcher bearers were bringing in a steady bloodied stream of men, women, children—some so blackened with blast dust and dried blood you could not tell which they were. Army doctors and nurses swarmed around the stretcher cases, scissoring off clothing, shunting the prone patients into surgery or wards. Constantly dodging out of the way, Ben hunted down the medical staffer keeping track of the military wounded and dead, learned most of the victims were Antwerp civilians so far, and Moxie's and Inez's dog tags were not among those the staffer had copied onto his clipboard list. Okay, they're among the missing, Ben tried to reason himself into, that's a different list. They could still be at the theater, Moxie by nature would take over any rescue task he could, she was a nurse—

  The decision churning within him, Ben zeroed in on an ambulance driver outside under the archway smoking a cigarette. Throat dry—Comparatively few direct hits compared to what?—he stepped out into the wintry Antwerp night, calling to the driver: "Sarge, the movie theater that caught it—are you going back in?"

  The driver stiffened but the cigarette stayed cupped in his saluting hand. "Probably all night, Captain, why?"

  "I'm riding with you."

  The driver shrugged, not wanting any more trouble on the night. "If you want, you can hop in back. Hang on to something, we give it the gas going in."

  Out the back windows of the jouncing ambulance he could see spikes of light driven into the blackness, searchlights on the hunt for buzz bombs. Whenever one was found, tracer bullets streaked toward it, the flaring bursts of larger ack-ack following, the sky over Antwerp like some hectic mosaic of fireworks. All through the careening ride he clung to a support of the tripledecker stretcher rack, watching through a porthole of the war that he knew might be his last view.

  As soon as the ambulance stopped alongs
ide others waiting to be loaded, he piled out. Unexpected brightness hit him. The market square with its avalanche of rubble, he saw from under his shielding hand, was like a movie set done by madmen. Huge arc lights illuminated the void in the line of gabled facades where the movie theater had been. Under the glare of the arcs, the mountainous spill of brickwork and rafters, framed by the pale wall of the neighboring building the theater had torn away from, lay at rest in either stark light or grim shadow.

  Rescue squads were prying up beams, military policemen were trying to direct the erratic traffic of ambulances and trucks bringing more squads. As if sleepwalking, Ben trudged farther into the scene where Hitler's rocket men had done their worst. Off to his left on the side of the square lay blanketed figure after figure. He helplessly counted as he passed the line of corpses; he quit at fifty.

  It was cold in the blast-strewn square, his breath smoked from him in ghostly wreaths. Reaching a bit of open space where he could see all around, he scanned the chainlike ranks of rescuers on the rubble heap for Moxie's lean form, Inez's broadset one.

  Suddenly, across the street from what had been the marqueed front of the theater, he spotted the tall newsreel cameraman from the troupe.

  As fast as he could reach there without slipping on the blood on the cobblestones, he came up beside the man as he was busy reloading the big shoulder camera. "Where's Captain Stamper? Where's Captain Stamper?"

  The cameraman turned and gave him a foggy look. Then realization came, and the eyes begged. "You didn't hear? Hell, I'm sorry, Mike must have missed you, I sent him back to the base for more film, he was supposed to tell Loudon. I've got to stay here and keep shooting—"

  Ben grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. "Just tell me what happened, goddamn it!"

  The cameraman blanched, backing off to his small stack of equipment. He tenderly put down his camera and picked up something from the pile. "Maybe you better see this for yourself." He held the thing out to Ben.

  It was a peaked officer's cap with leather brim, the kind that went with dress uniform. Taking it from him, Ben grasped the cap in both hands for a moment and then slowly tipped it over to look inside, already knowing. In the garish light cast by the arcs he could make out the inking on the hatband:

  LIKE HELL IT'S YOURS. THIS CAP BELONGS TO CAPT. MOXIE STAMPER SERIAL # 19071353.

  He looked the only question left to the cameraman.

  "All we wanted were a couple of shots of him and her going up to the ticket window holding hands, like they were out on a date." The cameraman pointed across to the collapsed front of the theater, a chunk of the marquee with the enormous maroon letters Rex sitting in the street crookedly but otherwise strangely unharmed. "They weren't even going in, the movie had already started. These old buildings"—his hand shook as he motioned up at the ornamented guildhall gables—"Loudon had that major scout these out, he told us it would make a terrific backdrop. So, we were just doing a second take, everything going fine, when the bomb hit."

  Ben stared into the empty air where the balcony of the theater would have been, the projection room, the offices above, and then to where it had all fallen into a crumbled heap of bricks and broken wood and bodies.

  The cameraman followed his gaze and hesitantly told the rest. "We were across the street here, it made a nice angle shot, the marquee there ... Mike's my soundman, he was knocked over by the blast. I got thrown around pretty good myself. Just as everything started to, to come down"—the man wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and managed to speak again—"the captain grabbed his cap off and threw it to us while he pulled the nurse to him with his other arm and covered her with himself. I don't know how he did both at once."

  "He was an athlete," Ben said dully. The cap in hand, he turned and walked off to catch a ride to the base in one of the ambulances.

  "Hey, Captain, uh, sir?" the cameraman called after him. "Do me a favor? Lug this film back for me?" He gestured up at the night sky, quiet at the moment, tracer-lit a minute ago. "In case something more happens here?"

  Ben took the film can and kept on walking toward the ambulances.

  Climbing out at the hospital bunker, he handed the cap to one of the medics. "Give this to the guy taking down names. Tell him Nurse Mazzetti was with the captain."

  The long tunnel of bunker corridors resounded to his footsteps as he headed for the Wonder Bar, his mind cold and clear. Inevitability was claiming him. The wall of oblivion had moved closer one more notch, its tenth, Moxie the next to last off the living list. The others, back at the start—O'Fallon, Havel—and on up the black climb of odds—Friessen, Vic, Prokosch, Animal—and off the chart of any foretelling—Dex, even Danzer, Jake—teamed one final time in his resolve. He was giving himself over. With Moxie gone he was the eleventh man, the perverse odds now solely out to get him and they would, he could see them piled overhead as if he were in the bottom of an hourglass looking at the deathly sand above. He knew it would happen according to the war's whim of time, when he would go out into the Antwerp night after doing this. If a buzz bomb did not find him this night, something else ultimately would. A leftover booby trap in whatever hiding place he sought out. A guildhall wall, wearied by the constant return of war, collapsing on him. The Germans barreling into the city, if the Bulge was not turned back, and dooming him in their pogrom of able-bodied defenders. He accepted, he couldn't not, that the war would see to him, one fatal way or another. But first, this. He could find no reason in himself not to rid the world of Loudon. The .45 still had bullets in its clip.

  Ben entered the hubbub of the Wonder Bar. Several members of the USO troupe were beside the stage signing autographs for early-comers, the confectionery colors of the singers and dancers glossy against the olive drab of the GIs. Loudon and the major, in conference at the show director's desk, spotted him and waved him over frantically.

  "Ben! We've been looking everywhere for you." Loudon's words came faster than ever. "It's Moxie, he's—" The expression on Ben stopped him. "You heard. You're upset. Can't blame you."

  Ben dropped the film can on the desk with a clatter.

  "This is what's left of him."

  Beneath the snap-brim hat the eyes guardedly darted down, then back to Ben. "Awful, what happened. We've got to make this into a tribute to him. Sit down, why don't you, we'll work over the script with—"

  "I need a few minutes with you, Loudon. Just us. Now."

  "Use my office," the major offered, all solicitude.

  As soon as the door was shut, Loudon started again. "My God, who could have imagined this. Moxie the tenth one, I mean, there's no story ever like it." The chin doing the check mark, confirming to himself the Supreme Team saga. "You and me—well, no way it can be called lucky, watching it happen to all those poor guys, but at least we saw to it that they'll always be remembered." He sat down at the major's desk and beckoned Ben over. "Okay, the script, we have to make changes." The undercurrent of excitement still was in his voice. "Got your copy?"

  Ben made no move toward the desk. As much as he had always despised the sportswriter, he at last realized Loudon in his darkest unacknowledged self wanted the whole team dead. Dead and buttered. Fit to serve up in his radio show, his newsreel, his newspaper column, probably a book. The Eleven Who Donned the Uniform, or something worse.

  "Ben? We need to get going on this script. It's less than an hour to airtime and—"

  "Shut up, Loudmouth." Ben's hand twitched against the pistol holster. He did not care whether Loudon noticed or not. "You're poison, you and your goddamn airtime and the rest, you're the death of the whole team. All the way back to Purcell."

  Loudon looked at him, blank as a flatfish. The automatic velocity of voice started up: "Hey, let's not say anything we'll regret, I know it hits you hard about Mox—" The yammer stopped as suddenly as it started, something coming into Loudon's eyes now. "Purcell? Why bring that up?"

  "You were in on it. You stood there with your hands in your pockets and watched Bruno
run him to death."

  "Ben, listen, you got it wrong. Bruno didn't have it in for Purcell, he had big plans for him on the team if he could turn him into enough of a man."

  "He turned him into a dead kid."

  "Sometimes things get pushed harder than anyone intended." Whatever it was in Loudon's eyes was matched now by the insinuation in his words. "It still bugs you that Bruno was turning Purcell into a starter, doesn't it. The team would've looked pretty different to you then, hey, Ben?"

  "You slippery bastard, where did you come up with that, Purcell on the starting team? We had almost a week of practices yet before the season, Danzer had plenty of time to get his act—" Ben halted.

  "In for Reinking at left end, Merle Purcell," Loudon maliciously mimicked broadcasting the substitution.

  "What the hell are you talking about? I was captain of the team."

  "That would have changed in a hurry if you were on the bench." The words came out of Loudon as if he couldn't resist the taste of them. "Bruno was going to bump you to the scrub team before the opening game, like that." He snapped his fingers. "Told me so, had me hold the story until he could put football religion into Purcell, on the Hill. He'd never give up on Danzer. Danzer was one of his. You weren't, sucker."

  It reached all through Ben. "Then I'm not—" Purcell was the eleventh man. The famously hexed varsity lineup picked by Bruno at that last practice—I'm not on the list. The freedom from the odds built upon that jinx day dizzied him. Death had made its clean sweep. The skew in the law of averages brought on by Bruno's manipulations on the practice field and Loudon's at the microphone, that entire fatal scheme of things was not necessarily meant to have a place for Ben Reinking. He was odd man out. Am. The inevitability lifted from him. From here on, if the war claimed him, it would have to do it on its own terms, not by the Supreme Team's wholesale bad luck. A crazy laugh broke from Ben. No, he realized, the sanest one in a long time.