The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [23]
"He's engaged," Cass made up on the spot. "Head over heels for the lucky girl, from the sound of it. Everybody, strap on those chutes in case this moron pilot isn't any better at reading a fuel gauge than the weather."
Mary Catherine couldn't resist a last dig on Della. "You're losing your touch, Delly. You might have known that dreamboat of a correspondent is taken." She spoke with the air of one who had been through enough men to know. "The good ones always are."
"Lieutenant Reinking, sir? I've been looking all over for you."
Not again. Doesn't that damn general have anything else to do, like run the base? On edge anyway, Ben had intended to slip into his office only for a minute before heading to the communications section and then checking the flight board again. The last two times, the board showed NTO ZV—no takeoff, zero visibility—for Cass's WASP 1 squadron. It spooked him—possibly more than it should, but it spooked him nonetheless. Fog induced crashes. That 1,200-horsepower engine situated directly in back of the pilot seat, like a cocked catapult. Seattle wrote the book on fog, surely to God they'll scrub the flight, won't they?
Along with fretting about Cass and trying to wind down from leave, he had spent the afternoon with his typewriter in a back room at the base library, wrapping up the piece on Vic. The war did not recognize Sunday, but somehow it was the slowest day of message traffic and his intention was to send in the piece while the sending was good. In the way of that stood a squat broken-nosed hard case in rumpled uniform, nervously fiddling with his cap. Ben eyed him distrustfully until he realized there was no armband of an orderly-room runner on this one.
"All over is the right place to look for me," Ben admitted. "What's on your mind, soldier?"
"Didn't they tell you, sir? I'm your new clerk."
Caught off-guard, Ben shot a glance at the desk in the corner; it had been swept clean of everything except the typewriter and the Speed Graphic camera, making his own chronically overloaded desk look even more like a dump. "What happened to Wryzinski?"
"Nobody told me that, sir." The anthem of the enlisted man.
Ben had just been getting used to Wryzinski. "Right, why did I even ask. Tepee Weepy taketh away and Tepee Weepy giveth." He offered the new man a handshake. "What do I call you?"
Jones, sir.
"Nobody's named that," Ben responded, grinning to put him at ease. "It's taken."
"I don't quite catch your meaning, sir."
This was going to require some care, Ben realized. "Let's do this over, Corporal. First off, I'll try to remember to wiggle my ears when I'm making a joke and you try to pretend there is such a thing as a joke. Second, drop the 'sir' when there's no one here but us, and that's all the time." The makeshift office that had been tossed to Ben—in earlier life it was some kind of overgrown storage bin, for onions from the smell of it, at the rear of the mess hall—at least provided seclusion. "Maybe then we can get along reasonably well, okay?" The plug-ugly face indicated it was determined to try. "So, Jones, enlighten me—what did you do in civvie life to condemn yourself to being assigned to me?"
"College. Religious studies, ahead of seminary."
Ben examined him. Jones looked as if any study time he had put in likely would have been with Murder Incorporated. "No kidding. At any place I ever heard of?"
"Out at the university." This drew him closer scrutiny from Ben. "I was a freshman in '41. Yelled my head off at every game, Lieutenant. What a team you guys were."
"Then you know what this is about," Ben indicated the overloaded small office. "Go ahead and move into that desk. I'm just on my way over to the wire room and—"
"Sir—I mean, Lieutenant? I was just over there. Figured I could at least check on things until you showed up." The incipient clerk looked uncomfortable. "There's a slew of messages, but they said for your eyes only.