The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [37]
Ben looked around. The Seeley Lake smoke-jumper camp was a mix, right enough, old Civilian Conservation Corps buildings together with fresh woodframe ones that somehow appeared more ecclesiastical than governmental. An obstacle course at one end of the layout was balanced off by a restful chapel at the other. The whole place did have the feel of discipline, but not the military kind. Here, he was uncomfortably aware, a war correspondent was the odd man out. Every man at this camp—aside from profane exceptions like the parachutist foreman in a forest ranger hat—was a conscientious objector. "Enlistees in alternative service" by official jargon; "conchies" by rougher account. Somewhere in their number, conscientiously aloof from the fate-willed military brotherhood of the rest of the TSU football team, was Dexter Cariston.
Remember that hunting trip, Dex? I'd be ashamed to tell you, but I've thought many times how that could have come out different, and then this would have. If your rifle had gone off while we were climbing around up there in the rocks, the kind of thing that happens. Shot yourself in the foot—hell, just one toe—that would have done it. You'd have been safely out of the war and on into med school with nothing said, and I wouldn't be here trying to figure out how to lie about you in a couple of thousand newspapers.
The truth itself, in what he was seeing around him here, was strange enough. A pacifist camp born of wartime needs. Whoever ordained it, here the paradoxical project was in the tall woods of Montana, where the historic peace churches—Quakers, Mennonites, Church of the Brethren—were providing their able-bodied young men in place of other able-bodied young men conscripted for combat. And still were belittled for their pacifism; he regularly heard these rigorous noncombatants with parachute packs on their backs sneered at as draft-dodging yellowbellies, notwithstanding that they were volunteering to tumble out of airplanes into the worst mountain country to fight forest fires.
But where was the familiar husky form of Dex, in any of this? Up there in the jump plane doing wind calculations? Or hiding out when he saw the jeep with the stenciled U.S. ARMY AIR CORPS/EAST BASE pull in?
Ben's silent perusal of the camp was brought to a brisk end by the director. "What can I do for you, officer? I don't mean to be inhospitable, but the military is supposed to leave us alone."
"Preacher"—Ben had no idea on earth how to address a minister of these plain-collared denominations—"nothing would make me happier. I'm the palest imitation of 'military' you're ever apt to see, though. Only a pencil-pusher, sent around to write up several of my college buddies doing what they think their duty is. One of them thinks his is here with your bunch." I will now lead thee into temptation, Parson. "You wouldn't mind seeing his standpoint splashed across most of this country's newspapers, would you?"
"Mysterious are the ways," the camp director granted, again smiling marginally. "Which member of our 'bunch' is this?"
Ben spoke the name, still searching the faces of the sixty or so smoke jumpers arrayed on the airstrip as if Dex's familiar one had to be there.
"Ah, our Dexter," the ministerial timbre resounded. "He's in the boneyard, of course."
Everything within Ben, body and soul, turned over. Dex, dead, here in conchie Valhalla? How? There weren't odds steep enough to cover such a thing. The war killed O'Fallon and Havel a predictable way, on the battlefield, and claimed Vic Rennie's leg in the casual accounting on the margin of combat. But this lightning strike straight through any reasonable order of life onto Dexter Cariston in these peaceable woods—through the shock Ben tried in vain to make his voice work.
Nothing marred the camp director's. "You probably ought to hustle across there," he pleasantly indicated to the other side of the airstrip.