The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [142]
Bill touched the script again. "If—we have to do something with this, do you think you can?"
Her chin came up. "That's different, thank goodness. The Carteret name still means something at Zanuck's studio and some of the others." She nodded slowly. "I can get them to read The Ghost Runner and that's all it will take, I guarantee you. Ben's movie will be made, it's too good not to."
Cloyce saw her husband's mood uncloud just a bit and smiled further encouragement to him. "Ben will get to tend to that himself," she said firmly. "I told him I was counting on him for New Year's again."
He was cooling his heels in a few hours' layover in Newfoundland when a clerk tracked him down.
"Sir? Are you the TPWP captain? I'm from the wire room. Message there for you."
Wondering What now?, he let the soldier lead him to the communications building. The teletype sheet was ripped and ready, waiting for him. He read it, went outside, and threw up in the snow.
A week. And I didn't have so much as a goddamn hint about it. Jake's plane had been missing on the flight between Fairbanks and Nome for seven days, the official time for giving an aircraft and its crew up for lost. Oblivion of the worst kind; it was not known whether the B-17 bomber perished in the Alaskan mountains or the Bering Sea. Ben felt as if his soul had been operated on, an essence of life cut out of him. Why Jake? Why now? There in the Newfoundland cold, he tried to grapple himself together. Back in to the wire room. Dull jots on the message pad, handed to the clerk to be sent to Tepee Weepy.
I NEED TIME.
Tersely TPWP arranged a layover until the next morning's flight to Europe.
He spent a terrible day, wrestling the words out.
Sky-high in his hundred-mission crush hat, loud as a good takeoff, Lt. Jacob Eisman flew through life amending the laws of gravity as he went. He was Jake to the world, and jake with us, those who knew him in all his big ways.
A line, two, would come, and then he would have to abandon the typewriter, go outside to clear his head in the elemental Newfoundland weather.
He came to this war from a thousand years of one-sided battles, his family becoming American—All-American in the finest, truest use of those words—out of a past ridden over by Cossacks too many times. And by one of the quirks war is so good at, he piloted bombers to Russian comrades waiting in Alaska, back door to Siberia, in the airborne supply line to the Eastern Front where the largest battles in history are being fought.
At the end, he sought out the base library to look it up.
"The dear love of comrades," wrote one of us who knew how to make words sing. Walt Whitman inscribed that out of his service as a nurse in the Civil War, another chapter of lost good men. Jake Eisman would have shaken his big, outrageous Cheshire-cat head over those words, but no man in uniform ever earned them more.
Late that night, he filed the finished piece to TPWP. In the morning, he was back in a plane, somewhere over the gray cold North Atlantic, descending the latitudes to the older world.
Antwerp's airdrome looked like a military costume party. Ben understood that this rear-area supply sector was a joint command, with an American general serving under Belgium's liberator, the British tank tactician Montgomery. But Allied armed forces seemed to have proliferated far beyond that on this airfield. Belgian military types stationed themselves here and there, beaming in welcome but not notably in English. Over by the 'drome canteen a small herd of Free French brass was being met by an American liaison officer who looked overwhelmed. Elsewhere, coveys of soldiers in what appeared to be outmoded British uniforms were gabbling in some dour strange language; Ben at length figured out they must be Polish troops who until now had fought the war from England. Looking around futilely for any sign of a motor pool and a familiar