The Eleventh Man

  Catching up on their weeks apart, Ben told of his time with Prokosch on coastal patrol. "I hope to hell he's imagining those rafts," he finished up, "and keeps his finger off the trigger. He's kind of like a jumpy sheepherder with a lot of gun. Spending all his time with himself can do funny things to a guy."

  Cass in turn recited the latest twists and turns of keeping Lieutenant Maclaine in the air. "Last time up to Edmonton she was next thing to an ace, and this time we had to go on instruments and she was ready to quit by the time she found the ground. That's Della for you."

  He sat back, reflective. "So you have one you're trying to keep in the war, and I have one I hope never gets near it."

  "There are times life doesn't cooperate worth a damn. How's that, newspaper guy?"

  "I'll pass that right along to my father for filler. Guess what, we pay off in angel morsels." He speared his last oyster wrapped in bacon and held it across for her, and she leaned in and royally ate it off his fork. They traded a gaze of love well-flavored with lust. Or was it the other way around?

  "Christ, Cass, I'm glad you showed up." The mention of flying blind in Canadian weather reminded him he hadn't asked her about getting here. "Any trouble cutting loose from East Base for this?"

  "No, I flew a hospital ship over," she tossed it off along with a gulp of scotch.

  The startled expression on Ben said if that wasn't a definition of trouble, he didn't know what was. An aircraft flown back to the factory with something internally wrong was called that because the hospital was where you might end up from flying it. He helplessly studied this woman he wanted so bad it made his ears ring and who came with all manner of peril attached. First the MPs, now this news. He always had to be aware Cass was a good deal more complicated than anyone gave her credit for. However, he would gladly do without further surprises along this line tonight. "Don't give me that look, you," she fended, trying for innocence. "I'm not the one who cracked up a floatplane in high-and-dry Canada, am I. The hospital crate didn't give me any trouble. The engine didn't conk or anything."

  He resisted saying what a good thing that was, inasmuch as P-39s had the reputation of gliding like a brick. "I'm no authority," he graveled out, "the only damn thing they let me fly is a mahogany desk. But I don't want you risking your neck for me, Cass."

  "Look who's talking." She said it lightly enough, but there was stiff meaning behind it. "If I remember right, you're the one with the scar—"

  "The wound was only skin-deep, that isn't anything like—"

  "Don't give me that, hero. Skin is deep enough, when it comes to a bullet. You got that scar from following your football buddies around to places where people mainly get shot at. And you're about to do a bunch more of it."

  "Only partly. The next one I go to is having as nice and safe a war as anybody can." Omitting the one after that isn't.

  If Cass was reassured by the semi-alibi, she didn't show it. Cocking her head, she looked across as if needing to memorize him. "So how long do I have to get along without you?"

  "Until summer sometime," he came out with it. "Teepy Weepy keeps feeding more stuff between the Supreme Team stories. I'm going to be all over the Pacific."

  Cass smiled differently. "Next you're going to say, 'Write to me.

  "Took the words right out of my mouth, grabby." Ben put his own best face on it. "I'll be a moving target, but letters—"

  She reached over and flicked a blunt-nailed finger against one of his knuckles hard enough that it smarted. "I'd just as soon you didn't call yourself that."

  Shaking the sting out of his hand, he made a bid for truce. "Before I get any deeper into trouble, how about we have another drink and I show madame to our room?"

  Playing along, she leaned her arms way out onto the table of the booth and propped her chin on her hands before purring: "And will the accommodations be up to madame's expectations?"

  "I'll have you know," he gave back haughtily, "the hotel room, the last one available in Seattle, is actually larger than a closet. By a foot or two, at least. It even has a special feature. A Murphy bed."

  She hooted. "One of those that folds down out of the wall? Genius, what's to keep it from folding back up into the wall just when things get interesting?"

  "Murphy the bed has experience longer than a flatfoot's lunch hour," he gave it the tough-guy treatment, "at such matters as this. The first time Murph lays his mattress-button eyes on the likes of you, he's gonna say, This is a lollapalooza I could happily fold away with forever—"

  "See!"

  "—but she is too classy to do that to. No, I'm gonna keep my frame on the floor for her, just to show my respect. The second I seen her I says, Murph, this dame takes the icing—"

  "That's Captain Dame to you and Murph," she snipped in, "or I'll call my buddies, the MPs."

  "—and like I was saying, it ain't many femmes in the land of Murphy that's also an officer and a gentleman, in a manner of speaking. No, I tell you, Murph the bed has seen his share and then some, and this woman is like the royal jewels shined up. Like the Taj Mahal in a skirt. Like—"

  "Like a lunatic about to be with the guy for the last time in a blue moon," she took over the formulation, voice husky.

  "That, too," he conceded wistfully. "Let's make this drink a quick one."

  Out in the night the ferries came and went, shuttles on the dark loom of water. The port city in its nightspots and unbuttoned privacies settled to the business of such places down through time, harboring lovers and warriors.

  9

  Why have I never been able to stand Danzer? Let me count the ways. On the team, there was no love lost between the Dancer out there at right end grabbing glory with his jersey clean and the rest of the linemen beating their brains out throwing blocks for him with never any thanks. The only good word he ever had in the huddle would be for Moxie. "Good call, Stomp," I can still hear it, as if a Stamper-to-Danzer pass play didn't take the other nine of us to make it work. Jake used to say Danzer was so stuck on himself he had gum in his fur.

  That was football, only a game, supposedly. Games have any number of outcomes, though, personal scores that are not settled. If the ground of chance that brought us together had been in England, no doubt I'd be remembering a cricket match with Danzer in the whitest pants—and it still would be called only a game and count as eternally as if the score was being kept in the Doomsday Book.

  "You're sure this is the only way to get there, Chief?"

  Ben arrived alongside the USS McCorkle to find a chasm of disturbed gray-green seawater between it and him, with canyon walls of ship steel on either side. Consistently the swell of the open ocean lifted the destroyer, across there, atop a foaming crest while wallowing the oil ship he was aboard in the trough of the wave. The ships then would dizzily trade elevations. Between the rising and falling hulls stretched the pulley rope that was supposed to carry him across. The line looked to him as thin as spiderspin.

  "The motor launch might get crushed between if we tried that, sir," the oiler's bowlegged chief petty officer replied, unflappably tugging the breeches buoy into place around Ben's hips like an oversize canvas diaper. "Not to worry, Lieutenant. We'll haul you across in a jiffy and you'll get a real nice reception on the Cork—the mail sack is following you over. Ready, sir?"

  "No, and never going to be, so let's get it over with."

  Legs sticking out of the canvas sling and arms tight around the ring buoy that the sling hung from, he was sent bobbing into mid-air, dipping and soaring with the teeter-totter rhythm of the ships, the line with its dangling human cargo above the viciously sloshing water but not that far above it. The sleek gray hull of the destroyer loomed nearer and nearer until he began to be afraid the next toss of ocean would splatter him against it like a lobbed egg. Then there was a powerful yank from the crewmen handling the haul rope attached to the pulley and he spun up over the side of the hull into a sprawling descent onto deck.

  A helping hand came down to him, and an unm
istakable dig along with it. "Welcome aboard, eminent war correspondent. You're just in time for the invasion of Europe."

  Great start. Looking at my reflection in the Dancer's famous shoes. Unharnessing himself from the apparatus, Ben got up off his hands and knees and sought his footing, the deck of the destroyer livelier than that of the slow-rolling oil supply ship the past many days.

  Meanwhile Danzer stood planted like a yachtsman in an easy breeze. Even though both men knew it did not fit their acquaintanceship, he had put on for general show his languid smile, as if about to say something then disdaining to.

  Already irked—What was that Europe crack about?—Ben gave back the briefest of handshakes. "One of us has his oceans mixed up, Nick. I was under the distinct impression this is the Pacific." Without taking their eyes off the new arrival a number of sailors went about rote chores around them, their faded blue work attire a contrast to Danzer's khaki uniform, crisp in every crease.

  Elaborately considerate, Danzer drew him away from the rope-and-pulley rig. "Stand aside, Ben, here's the real cargo." The mail sack came zinging down the line to the cheers of the sailors, followed anticlimactically by Ben's travel pack. "Come on to the wardroom and catch the broadcast of how the war is being won for us."

  He realized Danzer wasn't just woofing him. There in officers' country it was standing room only, those who were off-duty awakened by the news and joining the morning watch in listening to the transmission piped in from the radio room. The entire compartment fell silent as General Eisenhower's crackling voice, half around the world on the Atlantic side of the globe of war, addressed his cross-Channel invasion force. "You are about to embark upon the great crusade toward which we have striven these many months ... In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine ... The tide has turned. The free men of the world are marching together to victory." Ben furiously scribbled down snatches of it, needing to do something while history was dispensed without him. D-Day somewhere on the coast of France and I'm out here with the albatrosses. Thanks a whole hell of a lot for the heads-up, Tepee Weepy.

  In the wardroom's explosion of speculation that followed the Allied supreme commander's brief pronouncement, Danzer murmured aside to Ben: "A gentleman's C, on that pep talk by El Supremo?"

  You're the one who would recognize one. "You were spoiled by Bruno," Ben came back at that. "Halftime dramatics don't sound that good with real blood involved." This was not a time he wanted to be standing around trading smart remarks, however. Like a change in the weather sensed in the bones, he could feel the time coming when the dateline on what he wrote would read SOMEWHERE IN EUROPE. "Moxie's ack-ack outfit is in that invasion force," he thought out loud, "you can about bet."

  Did he imagine, or did Danzer draw back a little in surprise at those words?

  Ben shot him a curious look, but the Dancer was elusive there in his naval crispness. He still was as lean as when he lined up at opposite end from Ben and as apart. "You knew he was stationed in England, didn't you?"

  "Merry old Moxie," Danzer said as if that constituted an answer. "You're bunking in the sick bay. I'll show you to it."

  Nicholas Edwin Danzer. "Ned" when he was growing up in Livingston, but "Nick" as soon as he hit Treasure State University and figured out what rhymed nicely with "slick." His family has the Paradise Gateway Toggery, outfitter to moneyed tourists on their way to Yellowstone Park. The snappy Stetsons. The gabardine slacks, men's instant fittings by a male tailor right there on the premises, women's by a female one. The specialized cowboy boots with walker heels, which takes the nuisance of cowboying out of them. How it all must have rolled into the cash register, and out of that, the vacation home up the Paradise Valley, the fishing trips with the Governor, the high school football camp at the Rose Bowl while most of the rest of us were teenage muscle sweating through summer jobs at a dollar a day. Born with a silver shoehorn in his booties and he took advantage of it. Give Slick Nick the benefit of the doubt, allow as how it was okay for him to be the clotheshorse of the locker room and a mile around, for that matter. The more-wised-up-than-thou attitude he wore, that was not okay.

  It was Vic, rest his soul, who shut him off at the mouth. Sooner or later it might have been Jake or Animal or, I like to think, me, but Vic drew first honors. That day Bruno had run us ragged in practice, all of us were out of sorts, and Danzer made the mistake of pushing past Vic into the showers with "Move it along, Tonto." Vic hit him in the chest with the base of his fist the way a person would bang hard on a door and that finished that. From then on, Danzer's attitude still showed but he kept it buttoned.

  And here he is, supply officer on the destroyer USS McCorkle, on station probably a thousand miles from the nearest Japs. As cushy an assignment as there is in a theater of combat, however he snagged it. He makes Dex Cariston look like an amateur at foreswearing war. For once, I wish I had less knowledge of the person I'm supposed to write about.

  But that's not how it is, or ever going to be, with the Dancer. I know him right down to his shoe size. Or in his case, to his shoe polish.

  The story galloped among the former teammates, after Animal Angelides picked it up from a troopship navigator who went through officer candidate school at Great Lakes with Danzer. Inspections were ferocious in their barracks, a terminally picky commander stalking through the squad bays handing out gigs—demerits—for specks of dust imaginary or not. Always with one exception. Danzer's shoes dazzled the man, as well they should have; shiny as black glass, sheerly flawless as obsidian. It reliably drew Danzer an approving nod and a squint at his nametag, and everyone knew that the good regard of the commander was the one sure route around wading the chickenshit that customarily awaited an officer candidate. Danzer's shoeshine secret, whether he bribed it out of some crafty yardbird at Great Lakes or more likely devolved it from making those fancy boots gleam to best advantage in the show window of the Toggery, was to press the polish into the leather with a spoon made hot by a cigarette lighter, buff it, melt some more polish in, buff some more. It wrecked the shoes for wearing—Danzer had to hop into an ordinary pair when inspection was over—but could not be beat for display.

  "Better have another pork chop, Ben. I had to practically buy out the hog farms of Queensland to get them." The gloss on Danzer these days shone up from the capacious plates the officers of the McCorkle ate off of. It had the reputation of a ship that fed exceedingly well.

  "No thanks. My stomach still wants to be back on land."

  Which he knew would take another week yet, before the destroyer put in at Brisbane. And Slick Nick can keep on with the war effort by bargaining the Aussies out of groceries.

  Supply and demand were immaculately matched in Danzer and this ship, he had already determined. By whatever flick of fortune in the chain of command, the vessel was something like a palace guard to the commander in chief in the Pacific, General MacArthur, headquartered in the Australian port. Or as those less kind put it, driven into exile there by Japanese triumphs. MacArthur's war thus far had been an early series of ghastly defeats—Bataan, Corregidor, then the entire Philippines—now somewhat assuaged by amphibious invasions that had rolled back the enemy from New Guinea and a handful of other strategic map spots strewn down the South Pacific. The McCorkle's war this far along consisted of patrol duty and support chores here in the conquered waters central to MacArthur's realm. Ben didn't think he could get away with writing it, but the Southern Cross in the night sky was a constellation of extreme luck for the crew of this ship.

  "Lieutenant Reinking? I can't resist telling you"—this was on its way from a redheaded officer so young and junior in rank that he practically shined—"I read one of your pieces in JWP at Northwestern. The one where they held the wake for your teammate in a bar."

  Ben wished the junior ranker had resisted speaking up; there were too many faces in that messroom plainly ready to savor morsels beyond any found on the plates. "Ken
ny O'Fallon, that was," he reeled off to try to get rid of this. "Butte knows how to give a person a send-off." He sent a knotted look back along the table. "What's JWP?"

  "Journalistic Writing Practice," the young admirer reddened as he said it. As he spoke, a white-jacketed mess attendant went around the table pouring coffee and dealing out fresh forks for pie. The Navy's ways made Ben feel at sea in more ways than one. Except for whoever was on the bridge the dozen or so officers all ate together at the one long table in obligatory lingering fashion, which meant the talkers got to talk endlessly and the listeners got to listen eternally. Cliques showed through the crevices in conversation; this nonfighting destroyer mostly was officered by a mix of merchant marine retreads, such as the gray slump-shouldered captain who sat at the head of the table regarding Ben without pleasure, and ninety-day wonders (example: Danzer) turned out by officer candidate school. All meal long, Ben had to behave like an anthropologist tiptoeing between tribes.