The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [59]
"Next thing to dead, if you really have to know."
"The more you sleep, the less you sin," Jake said cheerily as he opened the blinds and let in sunlight harshly magnified by snowdrifts. "You ought to be pure as a daisy."
Ben shielded against the brightness with an arm. Groggy as he was, it occurred to him to ask: "What time is our plane back?"
"It's gone." Jake busied himself at his ready-bag. "The other guys went with it, but I got us a better deal. We are now the captain and crew of our very own bush plane, Benjamin."
Ben woke up entirely. "Bush plane?"
"Sort of, yeah. You'll see. Weather people up here use it. Needs a little fixing up, so they're sending it south. It'll get us there, don't worry."
"When?" He wrenched up in bed, with something like congealed panic oozing past dizziness and hangover. "Have you gone even more crazy than usual? I've got to get the piece on you done and in to Tepee Weepy on time or the bastards will never let me live it down."
"You're on assignment, ain't you? So assign yourself a nice leisurely flight and relax. You can write in the air as good as you can on the ground, I bet."
"Jake, square with me a minute, okay? Am I in a bad dream or something? Won't it take goddamn near forever to make it to Great Falls in the kind of kite you're talking about?"
"That's the whole point," Jake explained with magnanimous patience. "Hours in the air, Ben—guys like me have to live by 'em. This'll put me up on anybody else in the East Base group by twenty or more hours of flying time. That much closer to the real war, my friend."
"Let me catch up here." Ben wobbled his head to try to clear it, which proved to be a painful mistake. "This field just lets you walk off with one of their planes to go home in?"
Jake rubbed his jaw. "It took a radio message to Grandpa Grady. He said he could spare me for a couple extra days. Said he could spare you indefinitely."
***
"I'm trying to decide whether to commend you or bust your nuts in my report, Eisman." The Fairbanks operations officer petulantly kicked the tire of the parked aircraft as if shopping the last jalopy on a used-car lot. "At least it gets this thing off our hands. But when you said your friend here has his wings you didn't bother to tell me he hasn't used them since, did you." His eyes bored into Ben. "I've never let a paper-airplane pilot be a copilot before."
"He's just along as sandbag, sir," Jake soothed, "strictly a glorified hitchhiker."
"That is precisely what he needs to be. Reinking, is that your name?" The ops officer appeared dubious about even that. "Unless Eisman goes deaf, dumb, and blind, or has some other kind of shit fit, you are not to touch those controls. Do you hear me?"
"Loud and clear, sir. I am to sit at the right hand of flying ace Eisman and be inert bodyweight for the next two or three days." Ben's answer drew heavy gazes from both men. "Does that about sum up my heroic role in the war effort?"
Jake piously stepped in. "Don't mind him, Major, he rolled out of the sack on the wrong side this morning. I'll throw him out the cargo hatch if he tries to wrest the controls from me."
"With my blessing." The ops officer walked away as if the pair of them might be contagious. "Hand in your flight plan and vacate my airfield, lieutenants."
Skeptically Ben studied the aircraft again. "All right, Ice. What did you say this piece of junk is?"
"A Grumman Widgeon. Quite the rig, ain't it?" Jake was going through the motions of his inspection walk around the plane, although they both knew he was going to give it a clean report unless a wing dropped off and brained him.
Exhausted as the Widgeon OA-14 looked, Ben considered that a possibility. A spiderweb crack across half of the cockpit window—on the copilot's side, naturally—lent it a walleyed appearance. Perhaps fittingly for a weather plane, most of its paint from nose to tail had been swiped away by Alaska's vicious moods of climate. Dents in the struts of its wing pontoons indicated it had