The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [36]
FIELD SLIPPERY HERE, PUNT INADVISABLE. GO TO CAMP?
He didn't even make it back to the office before the clerk chased him down. The reply awaiting him this time was anything but brief.
DO NOT REPEAT NOT GO TO CAMP. MAKE STORY LOUD ON BACKFIELD ANGLE. IMPERATIVE.
Ben's groan alarmed the clerk. Sonofabitch. Loudon, of all damn people to be expected to imitate. If they want the Loudon approach—twelve hundred overripe words about the glory days of the Treasure State backfield, the cloud-of-horseshit kind of sportswriting Ted Loudon could produce in his sleep—then why don't they just put the jerk in my uniform and be done with it? Let him phony it up about Dex.
Ben crumpled the message into his pocket and stalked out. The more he thought about it, the more fed up he got. The likes of Ted Loudon and Grantland Rice and other bards of sentimental slop about sports notwithstanding, the One Great Scorer was not visibly awarding touchdowns to the TSU backfield in the game of war. A misty-eyed glance backward to the season that ended with Pearl Harbor would do no justice to any of the four teammates. Jake would puke. Moxie Stamper would snicker. Vic above all deserved a decent cloak of quiescence over his running days. And Dex, whatever he had become, was no soap-slick halfback anymore. Ben reached the office with his mind made up.
"Jones, old lad, how would you like to go for a little ride tomorrow? Fill us out a motor pool requisition. Under REASON put down: dogs of war. And you better fill your pockets with puppy biscuits."
The pods of parachutes opened prettily, one blossom of silk after another, cloudflowers against the blue field of sky overtopping Seeley Lake and the Mission Mountains beyond. Ben had just joined the large circle of jumpsuited men craning their necks upward; even so, his uniform and flight jacket drew slanted looks from corners of eyes. He knew he had to hold his temper against the automatic hostility here; guys in the situation of these had plenty to watch out for. A groan went through the group as a billow of dust whirled across the landing strip, where strips of canvas were crisscrossed—tent-pegged down so as not to blow away, Ben could not help but notice—into a prominent X. Carrying its mischief higher, the gusty wind caught the dozen chutes, dancing the dangling men sideways across the air as if they were dandelion seeds. The first jumper managed to land with a neat tuck and roll, which could not disguise the fact that he had missed the X by fifty yards. The chutists after him, sawing desperately at their lines, landed progressively farther and farther off the mark, until the last few were blown into the chokecherry bushes at the far end of the airstrip.
"God damn it," the grizzled foreman of the parachutist squad hollered at the windstrewn legion, "if you can't come any closer to the God damned target than that, you might as well have stayed in the God damned airplane!"
Wincing at the language, the camp director made his way through the canvas-clad younger men and steered Ben off to one side.
"Tough way to get to a spot," Ben spoke the measure of sympathy he felt for the jumpers. More than once on New Guinea he had seen fliers bail out of flaming planes and be swept behind Japanese lines by tropical easterlies. It seemed to him an unfair fate even for war.
The camp director smiled thinly. Solemnly hatted, with silver showing at his temples and everlasting wrinkles in his thrush-brown suit, he looked like a parson. As Ben knew he was, of some kind.
"The U.S. Forest Service prefers to believe it can prevail over wind," there was a bit of pulpit in the voice. "Not to mention fire and terrain." The man