The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [138]
"Besides being Mister Priss, do I also get to be Uncle Jake and give you my two bits' worth of advice?"
"I'm in the goddamn car until we get to Great Falls, aren't I."
"You're not the first guy or the last to get in over his head where nature's better half is involved. For what it's worth, you chose an A-1 woman to fall for." The big dark head wagged back and forth as if sure of its ground here. "She's some piece of work. And I mean that in the nicest possible way, okay? So, go a little easy on yourself. Love is maybe meant to get the best of us. What's it for, otherwise?" Jake braked into a curve. "I'll tell you whose shoes I wouldn't want to be in, Cass's. She's got a tough row ahead."
"I didn't know the inactivation part," the words came out of Ben like the last of a bad taste. "She's as batty about flying as you are."
"Pilots are only barely of this earth," Jake said, seeming to mean it.
16
Days at East Base were a muddle after that. Ben avoided the flight line, the ready room, any flying-suited flock of WASPs in the distance, all the avenues of everyday that might conceivably lead to Cass. Putting in his time in the office and the wire room, he looked tensed up and narrowed in, like a man out on a limb that no one else could see. And he was.
Dex's death rattled him to his depths. What shook him even harder was that he found himself seriously questioning the amount of life he himself had ahead. It went against his nature. When you have not yet seen your twenty-fifth birthday you necessarily must feel you are unkillable. Why were you given all that vim if life was not meant to go on? Over and over he told himself to keep a sense of proportion. Eight men killed, when millions were being lost in this insatiable war. Yet from a group you knew best, it was a lot of dead men. And he had been counted into that hexed group from day one, hadn't he, back there on the TSU practice field. What kind of coach's witch's brew was it at that last practice, eleven names on a list jotted by Bruno to start the fate-filled season and sanctified by Loudon's Twelfth Man nonsense? Every man of them destined one after another, their lives issuing out in the war like rain falling in an open grave? Ben did not believe in omens and he did not want to believe in jinxes. Statistical quirks were something else, though, if the war kept on being so overpowering that it jiggled the odds on almost everything. Sure, you could believe for all you were worth that you were too young and fit and lucky to be chased down by death, but all of accumulated history yawns back, Why not you?
Ben did not have to struggle with the obvious any too long. I can't just go on being a target every place Tepee Weepy can think up. Already unstrung by Cass being gone from him, he did his best to assemble his scattered self, knowing worse consequences were out there waiting if he did not. Any infirmary sawbones will tell you there's no prescription that works on nervous in the service, Reinking, so get a grip on yourself. At least Jake had not managed to wangle his way into the flak-filled skies over Germany and remained stuck on the milk run—all right, ice-water run—from Fairbanks to Nome. At least Moxie was in some anti-aircraft rear echelon, getting to shoot first at any threats overhead. I'm going to give it a try, guys. Screwed-up law of averages or not, there's no rule I can see that we have to end up with the others.
He started what he knew had to be the last battle of words with Tepee Weepy the day after Dex was buried.
The funeral piece he filed spared nothing about the highborn Cariston name joining the oversize list of Helena sacrificial soldiery beneath the doughboy statue, but that was not the issue. Apprehension behind every word, that next day he fed the blockletter sentences one by one to the teletype operator.
END SUPREME TEAM SERIES NOW? GETTING LONELY, JUST