The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [6]
"Ready to hit the road if you are, Lieutenant." The bus driver had come up behind him, sounding curious about what kept a man standing in a roadhouse parking lot watching planes go over. Ben clambered back on and reclaimed his seat. He leaned against the window and shut his eyes to wait out all the road miles yet before home. Sometimes he dozed and sometimes he didn't, but either way he dreamed of Cass and more Cass.
"Don't let me interrupt your enjoyment of great literature," the imperative note in his father's voice snapped him out of his absorption in the version of her he had put into newsprint. "But I have to get back at it." Bill Reinking indicated toward the job shop and the table where the addressograph waited. "Had any supper? There's some macaroni salad and fried chicken left."
Ben looked at the bucket supper from the Lunchery down the street, then back at his father.
"Your mother is in Valier," came the explanation. "Play rehearsal. They're doing The Importance of Being Earnest, and she couldn't pass up Lady Bracknell, could she?"
"Can't imagine it," Ben conceded in the same deliberately casual tone his father had used. "Let me get some chicken in me, then I'll take over on the addresser, how about."
"No, that's fine," his father spoke hastily, "I'm used to this by now. You can help wrap when I get to that." Turning away, he started up the addressograph again and, a sound his son had grown up on, the name-and-address plates began clattering through like metal poker chips as each alphabetical stack of half a dozen was fed in. Ben left him to it and moved toward the other end of the worktable to put together a semblance of supper. He still felt off-balance about being back amid the comfortable inky clutter of the newspaper office after so much military life. Food would be a good idea, even the Lunchery's.
He was reaching into the meal bucket when he heard a lapse in the addressing machine's rhythmic slap-slap on the wrappers. Out the corner of his eye he watched his father quickly palm a subscription plate off the stack he was working with and slip it into his pants pocket. Ben frowned. His father always chucked aside any discards into a coffee can, there by the addressograph for that purpose, until there were enough to be dumped into the linotype melt pot.
"Hey," Ben called softly. "I saw that." He held out his hand for the discard. "Gimme, gimme, my name is Jimmy."
His father stood frozen there with his hand still in his pocket.
"Dad? What's up?"
A stricken expression came over the older man. "I—I didn't want you to come across this one in the wrappers. Ben, I'm sorry if—"
He handed the flat little piece of metal to his son as if it were a rare coin. Flipping it over to the raised side, Ben instantly spelled out the inverted letters of type. Reading backward was a skill that came with growing up in a newspaper office, and right then he wished he didn't have it.
VICTOR RENNIE CPL. SERIAL #20929246
C CO., 26TH REGIMENT, 1ST INFANTRY DIVISION
C/O U.S. ARMY OVERSEAS POST OFFICE
NEW YORK, N.Y.
Confounded, he stared at his father. "How'd you already know it's Vic? They sit on the names until I—" He gestured futilely.
"I didn't, really." Bill Reinking's face was at odds with his words. "If it turned out to be some other reason you're here, I was going to hand-address this one at the post office."
Ben swallowed hard. Tonelessly he told his father what had happened to Vic Rennie in the minefield in the Sicilian countryside.
Bill Reinking blanched; two years of hardening from handling war news didn't help with this. It had to be asked:
"Everybody else—?"
"All accounted for, Dad, relax. I checked this morning." As he did every morning. Day by day he knew exactly