The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [156]
Great, Maurice. I can just say Antwerp has an unusual share of funerals, can I? You should work for Tepee Weepy.
When he grew tired of beating his head against a story he was not allowed to tell, he holed up in the windowless concrete room with the scent of root cellar and made tiny editing changes in the Ghost Runner screenplay, aware all the while how geographically ridiculous it was to be conjuring the Letter Hill in waffle-flat Belgium. All in all, distance maybe lent something, but it did not smell like enchantment. And when he ran out of things to fuss at in the script, he emulated Moxie and read, napped, brooded some more about the piece that couldn't say anything. All the while, the clock slowed to eternal Old World time. Another day in the war. What was the count up to by now?
He was marking the fourth day of the wait by reading a much-passed-around news magazine that grandly speculated the war could be over by Christmas—Yeah, right, has anybody told the Germans?—when Maurice rapped on the doorway in a grand announcing fashion. "A communiqué for you, in the priority packet." He held up the envelope by the tip of one corner. "Inasmuch as it's addressed in a feminine hand, I thought it wise to deliver it forthwith."
Eyes widening, Ben reached out for the letter. Maurice coughed discreetly. "I shall leave you to it. See you in the dining hall."
Dear Ben, wherever you are, Scar—
Already Cass's words had him aching for her. Quickly he turned the letter to take in a line written sideways along the margin near the top:
Your Holy Joe corporal looked like I was about to set his Bible on fire, but he took pity and said he could sneak this to you somehow.
Bedazzled as a kid with a kaleidoscope, he spun the full page of inked lines back into reading position.
This set of scribbles may surprise you as much as it does me. But I can't hold back—I've been writing this in my head for days on end and the only cure is to put it on paper. So here goes. Remember we used to talk about the milliondollar wound?
He remembered in all ways. The heart never forgets anything; the flesh remembers indiscriminately.
There were all those times I caught myself wishing you'd get a tiny one—just another scar—and be out of the war for good. But if Dan's is any indication, the price is awful damn high. I take him over to Fort Hairy once a week for the bone doc to test how his leg is coming along, and he hates that routine. He's on crutches in between—he hates that, too. Sometime after the first of the year, they'll ship him to the specialist who'll patch that tendon in and then all the time in rehab, as they call it.
We go around and around about whether I stay with him in California for all that. I say of course I will. He says like hell I will, he can be a cripple just the same without me around, go do something useful with myself. In some odd way I think he wants to be with other Montaneer guys—you know what a bloody mess Leyte has turned out to be, bunches of the worst wounded from his regiment are ending up there in San Diego—more than with me. I'm not crying on your shoulder, Ben, I just needed to tell somebody who knows up from down when it comes to a man and a woman.
Enough of that. This is the last time you'll ever hear from Capt. Standish—
His eyes misted instantly at that.
—in WASP uniform. They're inactivating us the middle of the month—happy holidays, P-39 birdwomen, huh?—and the squadron will scatter to the winds. Mary Cat is going into schoolteaching. Della has her hooks into a major in ops, and he's gaga enough she'll probably get him to marry her. I have my hands full with Dan, but I've been wondering whether to try to get on with the Forest Service after a while,