The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [141]
Afterward, expecting it day after day as he was, the message from TPWP finally came like a blurted order:
DEPART TOMORROW.
First, a farewell to Jones that they both found hard to deal with.
Next, in an icy December dawn at East Base, he boarded an eastbound C-47, acutely conscious he was carrying with him what little was left of the law of averages.
"Bill, it's nearly midnight, you know. Or maybe the time got away from you."
"You're not exactly tucked into bed yourself, Cloyce."
"I needed an aspirin." She hesitated at the doorway, then came into his lair of books and snuggled into the easy chair across from his desk, tucking the lacy hem of her nightgown under her knees. Unaccustomed as they were to this anymore, they glanced at each other a bit shyly and then out the window to the whitened town. Flakes were coming down featherlike, yet every so often the wind dislodged a branchload from the cotton-wood trees, producing a commotion like white dust rising back up, more clods falling within it. The all-but-silent crash of snow lent an otherworldly quality to this night, the first of many such the two of them were going to have to get used to.
"Where do you think he is by now?" Cloyce asked in a hushed voice.
Bill cleared his throat. "The Long Island field, maybe." All during the day he had studied Ben's route on the wall map of the Gleaner office every time he glanced up. New York. Newfoundland. Greenland. Iceland. England. Europe and whatever that portended.
"At least we did get to see him," she mused, as if still trying out for her role as mother. "Even if it was slim pickings as holidays go."
It was not a Spam Thanksgiving as she had warned Ben in his last-minute phone call that it might need to be, but it was venison pot roast, dry and gamy, procured by Bill in some manner that he would not divulge. The guests' dishes similarly tasted of improvisation: Carnelia Muntz's tomato-soup-and-olives aspic, without the olives; Mae Vennaman's dried apple pie, craftily achieved with saved sugar coupons. A decidedly mixed review, Cloyce told herself, but better than none. The duration sat right up to the table with them all, and the talk among the older people, which was everyone but Ben, kept coming back to whether the war would be over by the end of the year. "Sure," Ben had replied, "I just don't know what year." It had drawn a laugh from everyone except his parents.
Now Cloyce gauged her husband and what was stacked in front of him on the desk. "You've been reading it again, haven't you."
Nodding, he reached around and squared the pages of the script. "You're the expert, but I'd call it one hell of a movie."
"You're right, it's a wonderful work." She paused, the tip of her tongue against the roof of her mouth. "They actually did that to the Purcell boy?" It both was a question and not.
"They did. Ben has a firsthand source."
"I just wish he hadn't been so dramatic about leaving it with us," she murmured. "Mother, Dad," his words still were in the air of the house, "if I don't make it back, do what you can with this, okay?"
Bill Reinking smiled gently. Just sitting there in her nightgown, she looked ready for a director to sing out Action! "I can't imagine where he gets it from."
She gave back a soft laugh, then looked out into the sift of snow again. "I would give years off my own life to have kept Ben from being sent into danger all the time." She turned her gaze to Bill. "I did try, you know."
"How would I?" His head dipped as he looked at her through the very tops of his glasses. "You never said so, Cloyce."
She smiled the slightest bit. "That's what comes of living with newspapermen. If I'd told you, it would have gone right into his ear." The smile flicked off. "As you can tell, I couldn't get the job done. All those family friends in Washington, Bill? People my parents were thick as thieves with in the old days? Not a one of them," her tone deadly