The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [44]
"The lady prefers whiskey." Ben tapped the lid of the picnic basket.
"Smart lady."
Wasting no time, Cass moved off to spread the blanket in a snug spot against the rocks and wink at the shy kids clustering in curiosity. Ben took the chance to steal a look around. The site was right. From up here, the bowl of the stadium was a green swatch amid the prevailing gold and silver of the Homecoming crowd; the band members at midfield blaring out the TSU fight song were the size of toothpicks and faceless, as he and Cass would be to anyone bored enough with football to gaze up here at the denizens of Hill 57. He could relax about that, but he felt keyed up every other way possible. Game day. Weren't they all, one way or another, with that bastard Bruno? The other paint-marked sidehill stood almost directly across from him, steeply rising out of the broad coulee where the facing buttes drew back to let the wind into Great Falls: the Letter Hill. He could not take his eyes off the chalky stone insignia there, the broad splay of the T, the coil of the S gripping its stem, the hanging swoop of the U. Every book on scriptwriting warned against the seductions of the sweeping overhead shot—Sam Goldwyn supposedly said that anyone who wanted to spend his money to go that high to look down ought to take the free elevator at the Empire State Building—but the conjured scene coaxed insistently into Ben's movie eye: a long line of figures in football uniforms, strung out on the trail up the Letter Hill as haphazardly as a caravan in distress, toiling toward the interlinked letters high above. Fade to dusk, and one lone runner still struggling against gravity.
The sound effects were not of his choosing. "Treasure State University is proud to welcome its special guests to Homecoming, 1943!" The announcer's voice on the stadium public address system sounded tinny and spectral as his spiel wafted up Hill 57. The Governor, the Senator, the alumni president—ritual tributes echoing from two years back. Ben's mind fastened on the thought of the team then waiting in the maw of that stadium tunnel to trot onto the field, Vic on two good legs, Havel and O'Fallon with breath and soul still in them, Dex and Jake smacking one another on their shoulder pads in jolly superstition, he himself fresh as a colt, the entire eleven of them magically unacquainted with defeat.
He wrenched himself back to present surroundings. Not far down the junk-cluttered slope of Hill 57 stood one shack that appeared more dilapidated than the others, if that was possible. Glancing toward it, he asked their Indian host in a low tone: "Whatever became of Vic's aunt? I keep trying to catch up with her, but she's never home."
"You mean Agnes? Went back to the reservation to mooch a while, last we knew. Got a daughter there."
"If you see her, would you tell her—" Ben broke off. Tell her what? Say he had been pointed to her by an old hunter, nearly as elusive as herself, who despised her and her drinking ways? Pass word to her that he could not get Vic, in despond somewhere in England, to answer his letters? I'm afraid you were right when you said "That's that," Toussaint. "Just say I have a mailing address for Vic I can bring her."
The chesty man lifted his shoulders. "If you want. She don't much know how to read, though."
Cass impatiently was motioning that she required the picnic basket. Ben went over. No sooner had he set it down than she reached in and began handing around opera glasses. "I want these back, lords and ladies." In no time the Indian kids were in fits of giggles as they peeked at one another through the wrong end of the lenses, and by kickoff time their elders were dividing their time between beer and binoculars.
Settled onto the blanket beside Cass, Ben nudged her. "I wondered why that basket was so hellishly heavy."
"Might as well get some benefit from having to make