Chapter One
NEVER MUCH OF a town for showing off, Gros Ventre waited around one last bend in
the road, suppertime lights coming on here and there beneath its roof of trees.
As the bus headed up the quiet main street toward the hotel, where the lobby
served as depot, Ben Reinking saw the single lighted storefront on the block
with the bank and the beauty shop. Of course. Thursday night. His father putting
the newspaper to bed after this week’s press run.
“Here will do,” he called to the driver.
The bus driver jammed on the brakes and heaved himself around to take a better
look at this final passenger. Using all the breath he could summon, the man let
out slowly: “I’ll be goddamned. You’re him. Awful sorry, Lieutenant, I didn’t-”
“I’ll live.” Most civilians could not read the obscure shoulder patch on his
flight jacket, and any camouflage he could get anytime suited Ben.
Right there in the middle of the street, the driver laboriously dragged out the
duffel bag from the luggage bay and presented it to him. The man looked tempted
to salute. Ben murmured his thanks and turned away toward the premises of the
Gros Ventre Weekly Gleaner. Well, he told himself as he swung along under the
burden of his duffel, now to see whether his father had picked up any news about
the repeal of the law of averages, as it apparently had been.
Habit dies hard, even the military variety that never came natural to him; he
caught himself surveying these most familiar surroundings in terms of ambush and
booby trap, and with a shake of his head sought to change over to observation of
a more civil sort. Storefront by dozing storefront, the town still looked as if
the world of war had nothing to do with it, yet he knew better. It was simply
that buildings don’t read casualty lists. He tried to put that thought away and
just come to terms with being home. Gros Ventre, he’d learned growing up here,
was the same age as the tree rings in the mature cottonwood colonnade along its
streets, and altered itself as slowly. Only the season had changed appreciably
since the last time he had to do this, early evening unrolling a frosty carpet
of light from the front of the Gleaner building now as he approached.
He stopped to read the window as he always did. Posted beneath the gilt
lettering on the plate glass were handbills announcing a war bonds box supper
and a farm machinery auction on lower English Creek. Both were set in the
familiar exclamatory typeface his father called Visual Braille. Fooling around
as a printer paid for the indulgence of being a small-town editor, Bill Reinking
liked to say. Just this moment, Ben spotted him there at the back of the office
in the job shop, running the addressograph himself. As ever, his father looked
like a schoolmaster out of place, peering foggily through his bifocals while he
fed the dog tag-sized subscription plates into the small machine for it to stamp
those names and addresses onto the out-of-town mail wrappers. Ben remembered
now: the office help, Janie, had moved to Arizona, where her husband’s tank
corps was in training.
Past his own reflection in the glass of the door, Ben watched his father at his
lonesome chore until it started to hurt. This part doesn’t get any easier
either, does it. Two bylines under one roof. At least we both write with the
pointed end, he taught me that.
With that he stepped inside to the subtle smell of ink fresh on newsprint,
calling out as cheerfully as he could manage: “All the news that fits, again
this week?”
“Ben!” The addressograph made empty thumping sounds onto wrappers until his
father could shut it down. “Surprise the living daylights out of a man, why
don’t you. We weren’t expecting you until the weekend.”
“Well, guess what, the Air Transport Command turns out to be full of surprises.
It’s only a forty-eight-hour leave, not the seventy-two I put in for.” He tried
to cover the next with a shrug. “And there’s something I have to do out of town
tomorrow. Other than that, I’m the perfect guest.”
“Better enjoy you in a hurry, hadn’t I,” his father said in his dry way as they
shook hands. His face alight, the older man gazed at the younger as if storing
up on him. He was dying to ask what was behind this trip home, Ben could tell,
but doing his best to be a father first and a newspaperman second. That was
fortunate, because Ben himself did not have the right words anywhere near ready.
In the strange labyrinth of TDYs-temporary duty assignments-that Ben
Reinking’s war somehow had turned into, this one was the hardest yet to talk
about.
Bill Reinking could see most of this. Not wanting to prompt, he ventured only:
“You’ve seen a lot of the world lately.”
More than enough. England, bombed stiff by the Luftwaffe. New Guinea, beachheads
backed against Japanese-held mountains two miles high. The close call from
ack-ack over Palau on the B-17 ride; the even closer one no one was being told
about. Not exactly pleasant conversation, any of it. Ben got rid of it for now
in mock-heroic fashion: “It was hell out in those there islands.”
His father laughed uncertainly. After a moment, the bifocals tilted up in
appraisal. “Nice addition to your uniform, by the way. The Ernies”-Pyle and
Hemingway preeminently, but newsman slang for war correspondents as a
species-“don’t have that.”
“This?” Self-consciously Ben rubbed the new silver bar of a full lieutenant on
the tab of his shirt collar. Another hole in the law of averages. The promotion
had caught him by surprise almost as much as the blindside orders that landed
him back at East Base yet again. He lacked the time in grade, base commanders
were never glad to see him coming, and for its own murky reasons the Threshold
Press War Project did not bother with fitness reports-So why boost me from
shavetail all of a sudden? What do the bastards have in mind for me next? For
his father’s sake, he forced a grin. “It doesn’t amount to that much, Dad, to
outrank civilians.”
All during this each looked the other over to see how he was holding up since
last time. Bill Reinking was bald to the back of his head, but his ginger
mustache still matched the color of Ben’s hair. His strong glasses schooled a
square-cut face on a chunky man into the most eager kind of lookout-the
newsdigger’s close curiosity that he had passed on to his son. That and the
ginger follicles and not much else. Ben had the Hollywood lineaments of his
mother’s people-the bodily poise, the expressive hands. Those and that
unbuyable mark of character: a deeply longitudinal face, neighbored with
latitudes of experience-a surprising amount for a twenty-three-year-old-evident
in the steady sea-blue of the gaze. The difference in stature between the two
men was long-standing. Tall enough that he just skimmed under the Army Air Corps
height limit, Ben had an altitude advantage over his father in a number of ways,
although he usually tried not to press it. Even so, the college education, the
football fame, the TPWP correspondent patch, the bylines and datelines from his
stopovers in the world’s many combat zones, those all came home with him every
time, and both men stood back from it a bit.
“How was the trip up here?” Bill Reinking asked, to be asking something.
“Like Gone with the Wind without somebody to neck with,” his son said and
laughed in a way he did not recognize. “Long.”
Wondering how many more times this could happen in one lifetime, early that
afternoon he had stepped out into the familiar blowy weather of Great Falls and
pointed himself toward the same old tired bus that again and again had taken him
to college and from college, to the war and from the war.
This time around, a person could tell there was a war on from the melancholy
wheeze of the bus driver. On easier journeys home, he had been accustomed to
forking over his fare to this narrow-shouldered fatherly man-an asthma sufferer,
from the sound of it-in the drowsy waiting room of the Rocky Mountain Stageline
depot. Now there was a sallow woman in that job who issued “God bless you real
good, sonny,” along with the ticket, and the ex-ticket agent was puffing around
out in the loading area, dragging mail bags and the civilians’ suitcases toward
the belly of the bus. The war effort, preached on posters everywhere you turned
these past two years since Pearl Harbor: it wore on people, without doubt,
although that did not seem what the sloganeers intended to convey. Ben tried to
slip his duffel into the bus and the seat next to him so he could lean against
it and possibly nap during the familiar trip, but the hunched driver grabbed it
away and insisted on stowing it for him. “Save your strength for the enemy,
Lieutenant,” he panted.
Which one?
Keeping that to himself at all costs, Ben boarded. He never liked being last at
anything, but the half dozen other passengers, farm people with their city
shopping clutched in their laps, long since had claimed specific seats and were
giving him the gauging looks that young men in fleece-lined flight jackets
tended to draw. If they only knew. Swiftly nodding in everyone’s general
direction the way he imagined someone who looked like a hotshot pilot was
counted on to do, he deposited himself nearest the door as always, the coat
leather crackling as he folded his considerable height into the worn confines of
the seat. In his travels through the world of war, he had learned never to shed
the fleece jacket on any means of transport, whether it was plane, train, ship,
jeep, or bus, until he had proof the heater worked.
In this case it did not, at least to any noticeable degree, and by the time the
bus lumbered away from the depot and rumbled west onto the bridge across the
Missouri, he had turned up the coat collar for the full effect of the wool. In
more ways than one, he had never really warmed to Great Falls. Scrunched in the
perpetual bus seat he felt less comfortable than ever with the thought that this
smokestack-marked city-the Anaconda Copper stack there above the Black Eagle
smelter dominated the sky of centermost Montana with a constant plume of
smoke-seemed to have some kind of unquenchable claim on him.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Eleventh Man
by Ivan Doig
Copyright © 2008 by Ivan Doig .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
Copyright © 2008
Ivan Doig
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-1510-1243-5
