The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [7]
Carl Friessen in New Guinea.
Jake Eisman piloting at East Base.
Animal Angelides on a Marine troop ship.
Sig Prokosch patrolling a shore in the Coast Guard.
Moxie Stamper bossing an anti-aircraft gun pit in England.
Nick Danzer on the destroyer USS McCorkle in the Pacific.
Dexter Cariston at the camp that was not supposed to be mentioned.
Stanislaus Havel and Kenny O'Fallon in graves under military crosses.
And Vic, whose chapter of the war had to be put to rest with this journey.
Every soldier, in the course of time, exists only in the breath of written words. The gods that govern saga have always known that. There were times Bill Reinking stood stock-still in this newspaper office, hardly daring to breathe, as he tore open the week's Threshold Press War Project packet and pawed through the drab handouts until he spotted the words The "Supreme Team" on the Field of Battle ... by Lt. Ben Reinking. It awed him each time, Ben's unfolding epic of them, impeccably told. Taken together, they amounted to an odd number—eleven—whose combined destiny began one afternoon in 1941 on a windblown football field, and from there swirled away into the fortunes of war. Montana boys, all, grown into something more than gridiron heroes. One by one, the Treasure State teammates—the much-heralded entire varsity now enlisted one way or another—were individuals rehearsing for history, in newsprint across America. The one with the TPWP patch on his shoulder, with the mandate from somewhere on high to write of them all, now pocketed away the dog tag-sized piece of metal cold in his fingers, as his father wordlessly watched.
The leaden arithmetic was not anything Ben could put away. "Two dead and Vic a cripple, how's that for being a 'chosen' team? If this keeps on, we can play six-man."
Instantly he wanted that choice of words back. That's what gave us Purcell. Does it all start there? Not a one of the '41 starters came up out of six-man football, but Merle Purcell had, the newcomer from nowhere who met his doom in eleven-man. Two years hadn't made any of it less raw on the nerves. Fast and skittery as an antelope, Purcell materialized from some tiny high school out in the sagebrush where they played six-man, which was pretty much a cross between football and hundred-yard dash, and given a chance on the scrub team he ran circles around the Treasure State varsity in practice until he would poop out. And subsequently ran himself to death on the Letter Hill trying to toughen up enough for the TSU merciless steamroller brand of football. To this day Purcell was there in Ben's mind's eye, in the script ingredients, struggling up the giant slope to the white rocks after practice and even on his own on weekends; strange jinxed kid who by the miracle of modern sportsmongering had been made to live on as the inspirational "twelfth man" of the perfect season. Ben knew it wasn't fair, he had barely known Purcell, but the interior truth was that he would not have traded a dozen of him, or any like him, for Vic Rennie.
"Son." Bill Reinking did not use that word much in the presence of the tall man in uniform across the table from him. "I know you're having it rough, the whole bunch of you, but—"
"Never mind." He looked over at his father, the shielding eyeglasses, the oblique composure. This won't do. We skimp past this every time. "This is getting to me, Dad," he huskily spoke the necessary. "You have anything to do with it?"
"I wouldn't be much of a newspaper editor if I didn't point out that's an indefinite pronoun."
"Don't hand me that, you know as well as I do what I mean. This haywire assignment they've got me on. Anybody you happen to know happen to be behind it, just for instance?"
His father's tone turned dry again. "I assume you mean the Senator. Just because I throw the awesome weight of the Gleaner behind him every six years doesn't mean we're in bed together. I would remind you, the Senator didn't want anything to do with this war—the only side he wanted us