The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [81]
"I don't really doubt it."
Sig's expression changed for the worse, which was saying a lot. "There's no limit to what people will do, I guess."
Just then they were coming to a creek mouth, and the Irish setter tugged at the leash.
"Rex thinks he's got something," Sig murmured as he swiftly unslung his tommy gun. In the next motion he handed Ben the .45 pistol from his holster. "Just in case."
Ben took in the situation uneasily. Where the brown-colored creek snaked out of the forest, vegetation proliferated. The dense greenery, too thick to see into, could handily hide a rubber raft and a raftload of touchy Japanese. The American jungle: he had never expected to be going into combat here. Sig showed no such concern.
Weapons ready, the pair of them stayed out of sight as best they could behind driftlogs and approached the verge of the overgrown patch, led by the stalking dog. The question ran in Ben's mind, what armaments would Japanese submariners bring to shore with them? Probably a hell of a lot more than one tommy gun and one pistol. As he and Sig edged in, far enough apart not to be raked by a single burst of gunfire, the bloody path above the Bitoi River came back to him full-toned as a film on a screen. In New Guinea the cover for ambush had been tall boonie grass; here it was salal, brush, fir forest. He tried to creep silently through the undergrowth that crowded the flow of water, watching the twisting creekbank ahead for any movement. Sig, with the dog now alertly obedient behind him on the leash hooked into the web belt, was in view one moment and then wasn't. Ben braced, reminded himself to blaze away with the pistol rather than sight in—the .45 would knock an enemy down if it so much as nicked him—and parted the last underbrush into a glade of grass.
Sig was standing there peering at the beaten-down vegetation. "Deer," he called over and shouldered his tommy gun. The dog wagged, awaiting praise.
It was when they resumed their line of march on the other side of the creek, raft rats receding back into the hypothetical, that Sig's line of thought circled around to:
"You got somebody like Ruby?"
"I do." Ben was surprised both by the question and his own answer. By any reading of law civil or military, Cass was anything but that definite in his prospect. And the war was not nearly done with either of them. Yet, for the life of him, he could not have replied other than he did. "She'll be in Seattle when I get there."
"Good for you."
So it went, those days of pounding the beach side by side with Prokosch. Bit by bit Ben absorbed the feel of the continental coast, the inevitable linkage of the Pacific to national destinies. The ocean named for peace now rims the widest war in history, his piece would begin. The circumference of war takes in even those who lived farthest from the muster of the surf. And Prokosch himself he liked in the way you like an oddball cousin met up with at a family gathering. Let him be vigilant against raft rats, quite possibly more imagined than real; it put a human boulder into place out here among the shore rocks, Ben could attest to that. For once he felt he was writing about duty without bloodshed hanging over it like a red cloud about to burst. Prokosch's modest odyssey, a saltwater watchman on watch, suited the coastal subject with the ease of a hearthside tale. So he thought.
"Lefty?"
On the last day, patrol nearly over, the hut within welcome distance, Sig had halted. He kicked at the sand, a sign Ben recognized. Then came out with it:
"I want to get up north. The Aleutians."
The grimness of a chronicler whose storyline had abruptly veered off the page took Ben over. You and Jones. That makes two of you out of the entire human race, maniacs for the Ablution Islands. He knew that a rain-quiet snuggery in which to read the Bible was not Sig's reason. He asked anyway:
"Why there instead of here?"
"Better chance to actually see what a Jap looks like before the war is over," Sig reasoned thinly as if still rehearsing