The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [84]
"Until summer sometime," he came out with it. "Teepy Weepy keeps feeding more stuff between the Supreme Team stories. I'm going to be all over the Pacific."
Cass smiled differently. "Next you're going to say, 'Write to me.
"Took the words right out of my mouth, grabby." Ben put his own best face on it. "I'll be a moving target, but letters—"
She reached over and flicked a blunt-nailed finger against one of his knuckles hard enough that it smarted. "I'd just as soon you didn't call yourself that."
Shaking the sting out of his hand, he made a bid for truce. "Before I get any deeper into trouble, how about we have another drink and I show madame to our room?"
Playing along, she leaned her arms way out onto the table of the booth and propped her chin on her hands before purring: "And will the accommodations be up to madame's expectations?"
"I'll have you know," he gave back haughtily, "the hotel room, the last one available in Seattle, is actually larger than a closet. By a foot or two, at least. It even has a special feature. A Murphy bed."
She hooted. "One of those that folds down out of the wall? Genius, what's to keep it from folding back up into the wall just when things get interesting?"
"Murphy the bed has experience longer than a flatfoot's lunch hour," he gave it the tough-guy treatment, "at such matters as this. The first time Murph lays his mattress-button eyes on the likes of you, he's gonna say, This is a lollapalooza I could happily fold away with forever—"
"See!"
"—but she is too classy to do that to. No, I'm gonna keep my frame on the floor for her, just to show my respect. The second I seen her I says, Murph, this dame takes the icing—"
"That's Captain Dame to you and Murph," she snipped in, "or I'll call my buddies, the MPs."
"—and like I was saying, it ain't many femmes in the land of Murphy that's also an officer and a gentleman, in a manner of speaking. No, I tell you, Murph the bed has seen his share and then some, and this woman is like the royal jewels shined up. Like the Taj Mahal in a skirt. Like—"
"Like a lunatic about to be with the guy for the last time in a blue moon," she took over the formulation, voice husky.
"That, too," he conceded wistfully. "Let's make this drink a quick one."
Out in the night the ferries came and went, shuttles on the dark loom of water. The port city in its nightspots and unbuttoned privacies settled to the business of such places down through time, harboring lovers and warriors.
9
Why have I never been able to stand Danzer? Let me count the ways. On the team, there was no love lost between the Dancer out there at right end grabbing glory with his jersey clean and the rest of the linemen beating their brains out throwing blocks for him with never any thanks. The only good word he ever had in the huddle would be for Moxie. "Good call, Stomp," I can still hear it, as if a Stamper-to-Danzer pass play didn't take the other nine of us to make it work. Jake used to say Danzer was so stuck on himself he had gum in his fur.
That was football, only a game, supposedly. Games have any number of outcomes, though, personal scores that are not settled. If the ground of chance that brought us together had been in England, no doubt I'd be remembering a cricket match with Danzer in the whitest pants—and it still would be called only a game and count as eternally as if the score was being kept in the Doomsday Book.
"You're sure this is the only way to get there, Chief?"
Ben arrived alongside the USS McCorkle to find a chasm of disturbed gray-green seawater between it and him, with canyon walls of ship steel on either side. Consistently the swell of the open ocean lifted the destroyer, across there, atop a foaming crest while wallowing the oil ship he was aboard in the trough of the wave. The ships then would dizzily trade elevations. Between the rising and falling hulls stretched the pulley rope that was supposed to carry him across. The line looked to