The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [35]
Choosing between perils, Ben turned the topic back to wing-walking: "Uh huh, well, that's quite a talent."
"Know what the first rule of wingwalking is?"
He could tell this was not the time to guess Don't sneeze? "I'm here listening."
"Never leave hold of what you've got, until you've got hold of something else."
He covered her ring hand with his own, the ache for her now a sharp pain.
"That goes for guys as well as guywires, am I to understand? Husband kind of guy?"
"For the duration, Ben," Cass said levelly, "like every other damn thing. Even if I wash out of the war somehow or who knows what happens"—he understood that meant even if something took him out of the war in more or less one piece—"I couldn't do it to Dan, leave him while he's out there getting shot at. If I did, you would always wonder what sort of tramp you'd ended up with."
Her next words stumbled a bit but they came.
"We're loco over each other, but that can't change the fact that I am as married as a person can get." She poked him in a rib, trying to change the mood, her eyes saying she was desperate to. "So, football hero—why aren't you? It might have saved us a lot of trouble."
Ben thought. "I didn't ever have time to."
"Ben!" Cass couldn't help laughing. "It only takes two minutes in front of a Justice of the Peace, believe me."
"Two minutes is a long time for a football player." He wanted out of the dead end of conversation as badly as she did. "The wingwalking. You're, ah, not going back to that, are you? After the war?"
"Don't know yet. A lot depends."
He shook his head, resorting to mock rue, some of it not so mock. "A woman who flies a fighter plane with a ceiling of thirty-five thousand feet, and as if that isn't enough fooling around with altitude, she wants to get out and stroll along the wing of some crop dust clunker. I have to inform you, Captain Standish, that's the long way around to get your kicks. A nuthouse doctor would definitely call that a promiscuous acrophiliac tendency."
Cass's smile crept out and grew impish. "Know what? You make it sound dirty."
"A guy can hope."
She peeked down. "I see he can. And there's still some night left."
The teletype clerk looked up nervously when he strode into the wire room, early if not bright, the next morning. Ben was used to causing dismay this way. He knew he was hated by innumerable men around the world who had never laid eyes on him. Public affairs officers required to keep close track of the doings of whatever member of the Supreme Team they were unfortunate enough to have in their unit. Code clerks who had to make room for the priority dispatches to some destination known as TPWP. All of them wondering, what in the name of brassbound military rigamarole was this about? Hell, he wondered that himself too much of the time. Resolutely trying to clear his head of the lingering effects of the scotch and Cass, he grabbed the nearest message pad—it happened to be the jittery clerk's—and wrote down in block letters:
ODD MAN OUT STILL OUT. WHAT DO?
As the clerk took it to code and send it, Ben added an instruction guaranteed to further mess up the man's day: "Let me know as soon as the reply hits that machine. Not a runner. You."
Ben had barely settled into his desk chair to try to look busy and Jones was assiduously sorting old piles of accumulated paperwork into new piles when the clerk stuck his head in the office. "It just came in, sir."
What there was of it. Standing over the teleprinter as the clerk fed in the decoded version, he frowned at the sole word that chattered out:
PUNT.
Very