The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [100]
The ship's radioman and the code clerk both were watching him with apprehension. "Any reply, sir?" the coder asked as if he very much hoped not.
"Yes. Send: POSTERITY DOESN'T KNOW WHAT IT'S GETTING."
When he went back down into the hold to tell Angelides he was going to be famous of a kind, the bunk compartment was in such uproar he figured the poker game had drawn blood. It turned out to be simply mail call. Squirming through clamorous Marines clutching letters and packages from home, he worked his way to his bunk hoping to hear his name called, but it was all already there on the blanket, postal riches in a heap.
Flat on his back in the next bunk reading the sole V-mail letter that had come for him—from his uncle—Angelides commented: "You're a popular guy. I must have answered up for you twenty times."
"The stuff's been chasing me all over the Pacific, thanks for nabbing it," Ben rattled out his gratitude. As if fondling gifts, he sorted the pieces of mail into piles. The long-awaited treasure, Cass's letters. Weeks' worth of Gleaners, his father's fillers at the bottom of columns peeking out: The only hope a person can be sure of is his own hatful. Envelopes with his mother's wellschooled penmanship. A couple of blunt cheery notes from Jake Eisman done in pencil and beer. So many patches of his life, suddenly catching up with him. Almost reverently he slit open the letters from Cass and sped through the first one and the last, saving the others to savor more leisurely.
Ben, love—
How does a person write to a writer? I feel like a backward kid with a crayon. Maybe I can start by saying how much there is of you to miss. I can't turn around without remembering some crazy thing we did together. You've only been gone a week and I already have such a bad case, what is this going to be like from here on?...
...Nine weeks gone, letter no. 9 to you, and I at least know you're okay so far by reading you in the paper. You look good as ever in print, but no substitute for the warm body. Must sign off for now, we take off for Edmonton in an hour. I'll waggle my wings toward Hill 57 as we go.
Keep low out there, you with the typewriter.
Cass
Her P-39 met the first of the rough air at the Sweetgrass Hills that afternoon.
It was an ordinary Edmonton run, although Cass long since had absorbed the cockpit wisdom that flying through thin air is never exactly ordinary. On a summer day of this sort, however, from fifteen thousand feet above these borderland plains between Montana and Alberta, usually you could see around the world and back again. But right now in the telltale tremor of air above the humpbacked hills her eyes would not leave the sight of the weather making itself, big prairie clouds ahead where none should be, building up alongside the Rockies over toward Calgary. Who came up with that meteorology briefing we got, a blind man? "Clear and calm," my fanny. Customarily the squadron could scoot in behind such weather cells before the cloud piles sucked the energy of heat from the prairie and rolled off eastward building into major thunderstorms. What was coming at the squadron looked major enough. We get caught in glop like that, we'll be lucky to know where our own wingtips are.
She checked around on her pilots. Beryl waggled her wings, showing she was watching the same cloud pattern. Off Cass's other wing, Mary Catherine made the universal hand signal as if pinching her nose against stinko weather. The plane in back of Cass was steady as if being towed, and she felt both relieved and guilty about that. Della Maclaine was on compassionate leave—a death in the family, it happened to everybody sooner or later. The TDY pilot filling in from the Michigan group was always on the mark, where Della as a rule was