by Ivan Doig
"Okay, we both have it out of our systems," Loudon was saying, nervous at that laugh. "Now let's forget all that and get busy on the script, airtime will be here in—"
"I'm not going on the show."
Loudon gaped at him.
"The Supreme Team is yours, it always was." Ben found he could say it calmly. "Give it a funeral any way you want."
"Listen, Reinking—Ben." The famous voice rose. "We don't have to be pals about this, we just have to do the show. You'll get your gravy from this as much as I will. Everything's set up for us. The network time. The news cameras. The whole USO—"
A rap on the door and the major was in the room almost before the sound. "I couldn't help hearing the ruckus. Something I can help with?"
"It's him," Loudon flared. "Says he won't go on the show. Drive some sense into him, Major."
"You most certainly are going on the show," the major scolded Ben as if he were a Sunday schooler. "I've looked over Ted's script, you're everywhere in it. Let's not complicate things for him."
"Let's."
The major took another look at Ben. "Captain, I order you to pick up that script and prepare for the show." Loudon at the desk whacked his hand down on his copy to second that.
"Not a chance, Major," Ben said, stepping away. "I am a TPWP war correspondent, I have a story to write about what killed Moxie Stamper, and I am going out that door now and write it."
Commotion had spread to the other side of the door, from the sound of it. The major raised his voice, "Quiet, out there! We're in conference in—"
He stopped short at the sight of Maurice Overby striding in, military policemen in white helmets and white spats on either side of him, two more taking up a station at the door.
Maurice paused, glanced at the major's angry face and Lou-don's angrier one, and raised his eyebrows at Ben. "Have we come at an inconvenient moment?"
"I don't know how you got wind of this, Lieutenant, but you're right in time," the major recovered. "Have your MPs ready." He leveled a deaconly finger at Ben. "How does arrest for disobeying an order from a superior officer and a Section Eight sound to you, Reinking? If you don't—"
"Actually, sir," Maurice broke in as if to save the major the trouble of saying more, "I'm here on orders from considerably higher up. I speak of the general. We"—Maurice swept his hand around graciously to indicate the military police contingent—"are to place Captain Reinking aboard a plane. In the word from HQ command, 'soonest.'"
I hope I heard that right. I hope I'm not dreaming this.
Loudon's face went from bad to worse, a good sign to Ben. "This man can't go anywhere," the major protested. "He's to be on the show or else—"
"I beg to differ, sir." Not without a bit of flourish, Maurice produced a set of paperwork. "He is being sent forthwith 'stateside,' again in the phrasing of the order. I have that order here should you wish to examine it, Major." The major did not touch it. Maurice nodded to the MPs, who moved in around Ben like bodyguards. "So. If you'll make your farewells, Captain, we can be on our way."
Ben looked straight at Loudon and said as if it was a vow, "See you in the movies, sucker."
Within the wedge of MPs, the blue-clad RAF officer and the flight-jacketed American cut through the gathering crowd in the Wonder Bar and swung out into the long bunker corridor where the footsteps were their own.
"Maurice, am I completely wacko," Ben asked urgently out the side of his mouth, "or were you bluffing back there?"
"Not at all," came the benign reply. "I might admit to providing a pinch of dramatic effect in the matter, but that's all. No, you are in mightier hands than mine. Your TPWP people had to come clean in their 'urgent' message a bit ago to convince HQ command you're worth high priority. A home-state senator—is that the phrase for a political old tusker in America?—raised rather a ruckus about the number of soldiers' lives your Montana has contributed to the war. I believe you know whereof I speak." The New Zealander turned a solemn gaze on him, then resumed. "All in all, it has become in Tepee Weepy's best interest to fetch you back alive and in one piece as speedily as can be." Maurice patted the side pocket of his uniform jacket. "I procured you a copy of all that, it should make pleasant reading on the plane. I don't mean to take the cherry off the top ahead of you, but I do think you'd like to know, Ben—you're to be mustered out as soon as you're back at that base in Montana and write the piece about Stamper."
At the mouth of the bunker was a stocky MP with a two-way radio clapped to his ear. He held up a hand like the traffic cop he had probably been in civilian life. "Hold it here, everybody—ack-ack is tracking one in."
In the shelter of the concrete archway, Ben and Maurice and the armbanded soldiers watched the sudden cat's cradle of searchlight beams over Antwerp. The arcs of white frozen lightning swung and swung, hunting, until fastening onto a glint far up in the black sky. Flashes from gun batteries pulsed on the low horizon, and as the flying bomb seemed to slow and hesitate, tracer bullets converged toward it like the ascending lines where the arches of a cathedral meet. Then the buzz bomb lost course, faltering off in a drifting glide, away from the battered durable old city.
"One less to worry about," Maurice pronounced briskly. Turning to Ben, he tapped his watch. "Fifteen minutes. The plane can take off in ten." Choked up, Ben could only shake hands wordlessly. The stubby lieutenant gave him an unreserved smile. "Fare thee well, Ben Reinking. Happy ride home."
The jeep thrummed under him on the steel grid of runway as it sped toward the plane, the guardian MPs riding shotgun front and back, the war behind him in the darkness. With luck—it was an amazing feeling to trust that word again—within three days the hopscotch of flights would deliver him back to East Base. Back within reach of the woman he would never get over. In the whirl of his thoughts the memorized lines of her letter danced to and fro. "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.... Maybe it'll all sort out okay after the war."
Flooded almost to tears with the rapture of survival, Ben unloaded from the jeep the instant it screeched to a halt and raced toward the hatchway of the revving plane. You're getting giddy, Reinking. If not now, when? With his war over, in his every heartbeat he could feel the surge of his chances with Cass. A woman with no regrets, two men—
He did not even have to calculate. All the rest of his life, should he live forever, he gladly would take odds that good.
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Acknowledgments
This is a work of fiction, and so my characters exist only in these pages. There is, however, a breath of actuality to the plot premise of World War Two's disproportionate toll on a given number of young men who had played football together: by the accounts available, eleven starting players of Montana State College in Bozeman did perish in that conflict. I am indebted to my late friend, Dave Walter of the Montana Historical Society, for providing me the pieces of that quilt of lore. Research virtuoso of the state's past that he was, Dave also furnished a vivid sense of conscientious objector life in the Montana woods during the war in his history of the Civilian Public Service Camp at Belton, Montana, Rather Than War.
Montana's war losses are summed up in another key historical study, Montana, A History of Two Centuries by Michael P. Malone, Richard B. Roeder, and William L. Lang: "As in World War I, Montana contributed more than its share of military manpower—roughly forty thousand men by 1942—and the state's death rate in the war was exceeded only by New Mexico's."
A number of the women who piloted miltary aircraft in 1942-44 as WASPs—Women Air Force Service Pilots—learned to fly in the Civilian Pilot Training program before the war, as I had Cass Standish do. There were 916 WASPs—141 of those in the Air Transport Command, as Cass's ferry squadron would have been—when their branch of the service was disbanded ("inactivated") in December 1944. Thirty-eight women military pilots lost their lives in the course of duty. While East Base in Great Falls, Montana, was indeed a hub of ferryi
ng Lend-Lease fighters, bombers, and cargo planes north to Alaska and Soviet Union air crews waiting there—the total is listed as 7,926 aircraft—the presence of Cass's flying women at East Base and on the route to Edmonton is my own creation.
Similarly, I have taken literary leeway with a few settings in the book. Citizens of Great Falls will find that I have put nonexistent Treasure State University on about the site of C.M. Russell High School, and the Letter Hill in back of it. Hill 57 did exist. The Reinkings' town of Gros Ventre and the Two Medicine country remain as I originated them in my Montana Trilogy, imagined versions that draw on the actual geography in and around Dupuyer, the hospitable armful of town of my high school years.
The Office of War Information from 1942 until 1945 had various sections involved in war news for domestic consumption, but the Threshold Press War Project, "Tepee Weepy," was foisted on it by my imagination.
In my characters' combat experiences, I have sometimes drawn on oral history accounts, memoirs, and unit histories for touches of detail. One source in particular I would like to single out, my late writing colleague and friend, Alvin Josephy. When we coincided at the Fishtrap "Writing and the West" Conference at Wallowa Lake, Oregon, in 1994, I heard Alvin's recording of the amphibious landing at Guam, and his memoir A Walk Toward Oregon has a further account of his wading the bullet-pocked surf with that microphone as a Marine combat correspondent. Ben Reinking's narration and specific experiences of the Guam invasion are invented by me, but the spirit of Alvin Josephy surely goes ashore with him. As to a few other military instances of where actuality leaves off and the author begins:
—Many Montana soldiers did serve in the long and terrible jungle fighting in New Guinea, Biak, and the Philippines. The Montaneers regiment that held Carl Friessen, Dexter Cariston, and Dan Standish is my own version of such a unit.
—The U.S. Coast Guard in the middle years of the war did patrol the Olympic Peninsula coastline with dogs. The balloon bombs launched by Japan occurred a bit later in the war than I have portrayed; the first of the 32-foot balloons with an incendiary device was reported in November 1944, and across the remainder of the war an estimated one thousand of nine thousand launched may have reached the American mainland. At least six persons were killed, although I know of no instance of a Coast Guardsman encountering a balloon bomb as Sig Prokosch did.
—Antwerp in the last autumn and winter of the war did suffer attacks of a severity reminiscent of the Luftwaffe's earlier bombing blitz of London: more than five thousand buzz bombs were launched against the Belgian city and its strategic port in 154 days. The casualty figures are given as 3,752 civilians and 731 Allied servicemen killed. Behind a screen of heavy news censorship, a combined Allied anti-aircraft artillery command of 22,000 personnel was deployed against the V-1, and later V-2, flying bombs.
In this novel's inflections of life in uniform, certain phrasing and observations are drawn from my own military experience as an Air Force reservist on active duty during the Cuban missile crisis.
Lastly, a considerable community of friends, acquaintances, and research institutions provided me information, advice, or other aid, and I deeply thank them all: the University of Washington libraries, and Sandra Kroupa, Book Arts and Rare Book curator; the Coast Guard Museum of the Northwest, and director Gene Davis; the Montana Historical Society, and Molly Kruckenberg, Brian Shovers, Lory Morrow, Becca Kohl, Jodie Foley, Ellie Arguimbau, Zoe Ann Stoltz, Rich Aarstad, Karen Bjork; Marcella Walter, for shelter, conversation, and half the laughing again; the University of Montana library, and archivist Donna Macrae; the Great Falls Public Library; Curt Shannon, director of the Malmstrom AFB Museum; Judy Ellinghausen, archives administrator of the High Plains Heritage Center; Christine Morris, executive director of the Cascade County Historical Society; Les Nilson; Bradley Hamlett for providing me with his memoir of missions against the bridge on the River Kwai, Bombing the Death Railroad; Wayne and Genise Arnst, for hospitality and friendship as ever; Jean Roden, and John Roden for advice on flying and parachuting; Diane Josephy Peavey; Betty Mayfield, super-librarian and savvy friend; Paul G. Allen's Flying Heritage Collection, for letting me hang around its World War Two planes; Rex Smith; Laurie Brown, David Hough, Linda Lockowitz, and Tom Bouman, for their customary literary wizardry; Liz Darhansoff, for magic in the clauses; and my wife, Carol, first reader for the dozenth time.
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