The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [116]
13
"Morning, Captain."
Yawning his way into the office, Ben met those words and looked back down the corridor apprehensively. No such intruding rank in sight. "You're getting absentminded, Jones," he chided as he came on in and situated into his desk chair for another day on the calendar of limbo. "The captain's the guy around the corner, runs the mess hall, remember?"
The next surprise of the morning was the corporal's wanted-poster face breaking into a grin that went halfway around his head. "'The worthy shall be risen,'" he quoted as if he had been waiting for the chance and passed across a ditto set of papers. "Your promotion orders came in today's packet. Congratulations, Captain Reinking," he delivered with nice emphasis. Leaning closer, Jones squinted around as if to make sure they were alone in the dinky office. "The personnel clerk let me in on something. General Grady is going to pin the new bars on you himself at next commander's call."
"Jesus ten-fingered Christ! What's he want to do that for?"
The expostulation turned Jones prim and enlisted. "No one shared the general's thinking with me."
"Any other surprises from our lords and masters?" Ben immediately went to, trying to sort by eye the thin contents of the daily TPWP packet spread in front of Jones. "Like maybe the Prokosch piece miraculously set in type?"
Jones shook his head.
Which caused Ben to twist his as if trying to relieve a pain in the neck. You think General Grady's thought process is a mystery, Jonesie, what does that make Tepee Weepy's? Leave it to the military to think up its own form of purgatory and then not define it for you. Ever since he alit back at East Base from the Pacific, life with the Threshold Press War Project was every kind of a puzzle. The unseen powers in Washington had done everything with his Guam recording but play it over loudspeakers in place of the national anthem, and the account he wrote of Angelides' burial on the loneliest of prairies had likewise been punched up into maximum headline treatment. And the subsequent Supreme Team treatment that he had cobbled together about Jake—steadfast service hand in hand with our stalwart Russian allies; the kind of thing his father called a Ph.D. piece, Piled Higher and Deeper—also went out and into newspaper pages across the country like clockwork. Yet the weeks since Sig Prokosch was blown to bits on American soil were turning into months, and that story still was spiked somewhere. Tepee Weepy was even less forthcoming, in Ben's baffled estimation, over Dex and Moxie. It was not a pure silence, the distracted kind, either.
WHAT DO? he had telexed in frustration at the point on the schedule where he was due to write about one or the other of them and had heard nothing, and a message shot back short and cryptic: TIME OUT IN THE GAME. ADJUST PADS ACCORDINGLY.
Well, by now he and Jones indeed were padding desperately, doing articles about scrap drives and Red Cross blood draws. Top off the situation with this unlooked-for promotion (major, lieutenant colonel: he gulped at the thought that there were only two more ranks between him and the ghostly brass who operated TPWP) and Ben could not tell whether it was the altitude or the servitude that was getting to him.
"All right, Corporal," he braced up with a deep breath, "what journalistic exploit do we face today?"
"A twelve-year-old kid here in town invented a military vocabulary crossword puzzle," Jones recited. "Tepee Weepy wants a picture and a thousand words."
"One across, an unexploded shell, three letters," Ben said tiredly. "Dud."
Hill 57 had its hackles up, bunchgrass stiffly trying to resist the wind, as Ben started down the rutted path at the end of that afternoon. In off-duty civvies, he had on the canvasback coat he had worn that time here with Cass but was wishing for the flight jacket at the rate the wind was breathing down his neck. As ever he had to be mindful of what the gusts might bring; Great Falls collected weather from all around. Over