The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [28]
Jake Eisman wasn't bunked in anywhere, he could count on that. Halfway up the whitewashed walkway to the Officers' Club, Ben caught the sound of his penetrating baritone—in their playing days, Jake was restricted to whispers in the huddle lest he be heard the length of the football field—in the mob of song emanating from within; the O Club always tuned up drastically when a planeload of pilots returned from the Alaska run. Ben never ceased to marvel at how fertile the war was for songs. He intended to write about this someday, just for the havoc to be created at Tepee Weepy by lyrics such as Jake was enwrapped in at the moment:
Oh, the Russians are drinking in Fairbanks,
While we fly through snow, ice, and shit.
When we land they shout out, "Thanks, Yanks!
Now watch us bomb Hitler,
And Himmler,
And Fritzie,
And Mitzi,
While you fly through snow, ice, and shit!"
Central as a vat in the bibulous bunch ganged around the piano and hoisting another drink at the end of each chorus, Jake jerked his head toward the bar as soon as he spotted Ben. They hadn't seen each other for a week and the ATC's largest and possibly most boisterous pilot always came back from the far north with more Alaska tales than Robert Service. Tonight Ben was more than ready to let the conversation flow from that direction. Ordering a beer for himself and another as reinforcement for Jake, he drifted to their usual corner table while the bass-and-baritone crowd around the piano roared through a final chorus like sea lions.
Tense as he was about Cass, he didn't manage to have the best face on things when Jake showed up at the table. Jake plainly had been here indulging in beer and song long enough to be justifiably somewhat askew. His dark hair flopped to one side—on him it looked good—and his tie was loosened. His breast pocket nametag was a radical number of degrees off angle; a hand-lettered last name only on everyone else, his as ever notified the world in full: LT. JACOB EISMAN.
"What's eating you, scribe?" The big man roughed Ben's shoulder with a mitt of a hand as he went around to a facing chair. "A three-day leave don't agree with you? Send the next one my way, and you can freeze your ass over the Yukon while I party."
"Why would they hand me an airplane when they barely trust me with a pencil?" Ben roused himself and got busy deflecting the topic of his leave. "No substitutions allowed anyway, you ought to know that. Grandpa Grady himself told me within this very hour you are the pride of the ATC—"
"Only because I slipped him tickets on the fifty-yard line for the Homecoming game."
"—so there you go, who'll mush the flying dogsleds north if not you? The serum must reach Nome, Nanook."
Jake snorted. "Alaska runs on vodka these days, ain't you heard?"
"War is heck," said Ben, cracking a smile in spite of himself.
"I'll clink to that." Jake tapped Ben's beer bottle with his own, drained what he had left, and reached for the next bottle. "Been meaning to ask you, Ben friend. If I'm so all-fired popular, when do I get my moment of fame again?"
That particular question had more behind it than Ben wanted to deal with. Juggling the Supreme Team pieces into some kind of monthly sequence was always tricky, even without what had happened to Vic and what waited in the file after his. Now this. He said shortly, "Dex is next. No cutting in line."
Jake leaned in, covering the table like a cloud but grinning as he came. "Where is he, Ben? C'mon. Where's the dexterous one putting in his war?"
"Goddamnit, Ice, will you lay off that? I still can't tell you. They'd have me cleaning latrines from here to eternity if I did." And you wouldn't like knowing.
"That rich sneak," Jake was saying appreciatively. "He's in something like the OSS, isn't he. Greased his way in there with the other blue-blood daredevils. The glamorous war, that'd be his. Parachuting into Krautland in the dark of the moon