The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [39]
"The Rochester doctor I didn't get to be, you mean."
They both laughed in their old way, briefly.
As if remembering his manners, Dex sobered and spoke as he turned from the window. "The way things are, doctors can't even begin to be everywhere they're needed. Not in the war, not here either. I'm the equivalent of a medic. I can splint a man up, shoot some morphine in him, until we can get him to the hospital in Missoula. If it's something besides bones and bruises," he shrugged, "there's a registered nurse here in town, comes in twice a week. Don't grin at me like that, Reinking. She's married."
Ben's grin went out like a light. He looked away, across postcard-perfect Seeley Lake to the summer cabins and rowboat docks spaced the distance of a flycast apart. The maintained forest along the shoreline stood sumptuous as fur trim, and even the hackles of brush looked scenic. Peaceful sonofabitching place. Skipped over by the clock of war. Cass with a dozen red-hot pistons gobbling combustible aviation fuel at the back of her neck this very minute. Jake Eisman freezing his bodacious butt at the controls of a B-17 while wishing the Alaskan caribou far below were Germans in his bombsights. Carl Friessen in the utmost swamp of Hell that was New Guinea, dug in for another night in a stench-filled foxhole that he didn't dare leave even to take a crap. Every one of the team members in the actual war, those who were left, ticked through Ben's mind like split seconds on a stopwatch. He realized he was breathing harder than he should and tried to steady down, the antiseptic air of the infirmary not helping. What bugged him so much? Conscience wasn't priced by the pound; Dexter Cariston could have found simpler ways to stay the warless one of them all—the purr of money in his family could have taken care of that. Even so. "This does it for you?" the question shot out before he had time to tame it any. "Watching guys hop out of planes into trees? I'm really asking, Dex."
"I'm doing what I can to keep blood in people," the words came clipped, "instead of letting it out of them."
The superior tinge in that answer did it. Anguish went through Ben like a convulsion. There's more to know about blood than shows up in a microscope, you medical Jesus conchie! He stood there unsteady, momentarily mindblind, wondering whether he had screamed that in the frozen face of Dexter Cariston.
The New Guinea jungle, a few months back. Everyone warned him the place dripped voracious insects when it wasn't oozing rain warm as monkey piss, and by the time he tracked down Carl Friessen in a rear-echelon tent encampment along the Sanananda road, the crisp new combat fatigues he'd been issued were wringing wet and he was trying hard not to scratch numerous bites that itched like crazy. At least nobody's shooting at me. Yet. Standing there smacking mosquitoes with one hand and then the other, he peeked in through the bug netting that served as a tent flap trying to make sure he had the right man. In their football years Friessen had been rangy enough to plug more than his share of the line at left tackle. Now he was rawboned, worn down to sheer frame. Deliberate as ever, though, he hunched there on his bunk wearing thin black Jap pajamas—Ben thought he had seen every conceivable form of war souvenir, until now—while cleaning his carbine with an old toothbrush. "How's the hunting been, Carl?"
The lantern jaw that had tempted football opponents to mention the word "horseface"—invariably to their regret—swung around from the rifle-cleaning task. "Lefty! They let just anybody in this bugger of a place, do they?" The same dromedary grin, even if its wearer was a barely passable imitation of the Friessen of old in any other way Ben could see. The nickname he so seldom heard any more twinged in him a little. He was not left-handed, not even close. Back