The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [15]
"Duly noted, sir. I'll be doing a piece on Jake Eisman as soon as—"
"That's all, Reinking," the commander swung around in his chair to peruse some imagined event out on the flight line. "Go see the adjutant," came the imperial drift of order over his shoulder, "he'll fix you up with desk space somewhere."
Where does the military find these types, central casting? Ben let silence do its work before he cleared his throat and uttered:
"But sir?"
The general's chair grudgingly swiveled in his direction again.
"The situation is," Ben stated as if he had been asked, "I'm under orders to do other stories, too, wherever I see them." He had been in front of enough base commanders to have perfected a polite stare that nonetheless underlined his standard message: "Orders from Washington, sir."
"Lieutenant, shit's sake, we're all under orders from Washington!"
Not like mine, Buster. He reached to the zipper pocket of his jacket. "May I?"
Eyeing him more narrowly now, the general reached for the folded orders. He opened them with impatience and read at top speed. Then went back over the words, evidently one by one. Sucking in his cheeks, he handed the paper back to Ben. "Why didn't you say so?" he rasped. "Carry on, Lieutenant, it sure as shit looks like you will anyway."
On the way out, Ben had taken a closer look at a base map to locate the ready room where the WASPs would be waiting for takeoff.
***
East Butte, the farthest of the Sweetgrass Hills, was keeping its distance as Ben drove the undeviating dirt road from the map-dot town of Chester where he had gassed up again; every time he looked, the rumpled rise of land ahead added another fold of steep ridge, another tuck of timbered canyon large enough to swallow an elk herd and an old hunter.
The geography definitely did not budge in his favor while he had to change flat tire number two, in a wind doing its best to blow the hubcap away. Off to the west where he had started this day, the Rockies were a low wall on the horizon. Ben glanced up at the midafternoon sun and cursed with military fluency. Toussaint, you old SOB, I can about hear Vic laughing at what you're putting me through. I thought I liked hunting, until today.
While he grunted over the lug nuts and the bumper jack and the lug nuts again, that other time of hunting came back to him, the Christmas vacation—in 1940 before the war meant much in America—when Jake Eisman and Dexter Cariston and Vic rode home from college with him to go after deer. So ungodly much had happened to the Treasure State teammates since, but what a benign autumn that was. Bruno's coaching had not yet turned apocalyptic as it would the next season, and they could feel reasonably good about the team's seven-and-three record, topped off by beating Butte Poly in the Copper Cup game. Ben searched closely in his memory as he tightened the tire on. Did he have it right, were he and his hunting companions already breathing the heights of the next football season, their senior year of crazy glory, there under the mind-freeing palisades of the Rockies? Time colors such occasions. By then the draft was somewhere on their horizon, but so was the knowledge that the previous time the world had gone to war, America sat out most of it. So, as far as the four of them knew then, in some not distant future they would victoriously hang up their cleats, Ben would take a newspaper job until he mastered the art of movie scripts, Dex would go on to medical school and save the human race, Jake would return to the Black Eagle smelter but in a spotless office where his engineeering and metallurgy degree hung on the wall, and Vic would play basketball for the barnstorming Carlisle 'Skins from one end of the continent to the other.
You could dream those types of dreams when the rifle in your hand was of civilian