The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [129]
"Lit up like a church, whatever's got into her," the roadhouse bartender diagnosed as if a second opinion was needed.
Busy digging for silver, Ben specified: "That cabin with the whorehouse tub."
"No can do," the man behind the bar replied with a minimum shrug. "Don't get enough call for that one this time of year, so I shut down the water heater. Freeze your tails off if you was to get to piddling around in—"
"We're trying out to be Eskimos." Ben unloaded round dollars onto the bar until the bartender pushed them back, then returned to the matter of Cass.
She alternately tended toward limp and squirmy as he maneuvered her to the cabin. The massive claw-footed tub stood suggestively not that far from the bed, and he was able to prop her there on the mattress and keep an eye on her while he resorted to the cold water tap. He shed his clothes first, then advanced to where she sat wavering on the bed. "Ben, sugar," she greeted him glassily, "I don't feel so hot. I know you're always ready for a go, and so'm I, but—"
"Radio silence, Captain Standish," he blared, baffling her into shutting up while he went to work on her buttons. He had undressed her in a hurry enough times before, but this one was of a different sort of urgency. Off fell her blouse, the revelatory brassiere, her zippered skirt, the tedious shoes and stockings, the panties as ever the last prize of all.
What is love but random magic? It applies itself in unexplainable ways. Tenderly he swooped Cass up as if carrying her across a threshold, kissed her in the sweet spot between the breasts, crossed the space to where the water was running, and dumped her, squawking, in the frigid tub.
Gritting, Ben climbed in after her. It was all he could do to hang on to her, rubbing where he could to get the blood running, while she strenuously thrashed and gasped. Sobering by visible degrees from the shock of the cold water, she let herself subside quivering into his arms. "M-m-maniac," she chattered, gratefully or not, he couldn't tell.
When she looked clear-eyed enough, he helped her from the tub and wrapped a towel around her and then himself around the towel. As warmth began to return with the clasp of body to body, the towel was pitched away and they gave themselves over to the ancient powers of bare skin.
14
His day of departure, it was raining hard enough to concuss the gophers of Hill 57. Water was standing all over East Base, as though the Pacific had decided to come to him, and eddies of wind caught at his travel pack in his sprint from the ready room to the C-47 idling on the taxiway. Struggling aboard with him came a couple dozen other dampened officers and airmen, cramming the transport plane to Seattle. Beyond that, he was jumpily aware, awaited the interminable flight to Hawaii, and from there the hopscotch journey to speck after speck of captured island airfields that would ultimately land him to whatever awaited out there. As ever, the tight rounded confines of the plane cabin compressed such thoughts. The flying culverts that passed for Air Transport Command travel accommodations were his living quarters for these next days, and so far he was not lucking out at all, his bucket seat next to that of a talkative major.
"How do, Captain. Can't help but notice your flight jacket, it's a beauty. Pilot, are you?"
"The jacket," Ben conveyed, "has a higher cockpit rating than I do."
The major chortled, the kind that descends from the adenoids. "You still have a sense of humor, you must be passing through this glorified cow pasture on TDY."
"No, I've been attached here. More or less forever."
"Well, you can have Least Base, as far as I'm concerned. I was sent here for a week of detached duty—dot and dash stuff, I'm in the code area—and I'll tell you, it seemed like Noah's forty days and forty nights. I'll be perfectly glad to get back to San Diego." Companionably he looked Ben and his travel pack over again. "And where are you being sent? Somewhere sunny and warm, I hope?"