The Eleventh Man (40 page)

Slick with sweat from the heat and tension of that Pacific noon, the officer of the watch stood clutching the railing on the wing of the
McCorkle's
bridge, transfixed by the sight of the escort carrier
St. Lo
blowing up repeatedly in the near distance. His rational side of mind knew that each thunderous explosion was another of the
Lo
's bomb and torpedo storage compartments going up, but the spectacle of blast after equally fiery blast erupting through the flight deck was beyond reckoning. In equal disbelief, the executive officer next to him cursed methodically while trying to figure out how the Japs had unobtrusively struck a ship in the middle of a victorious fleet; no sonar trace of a submarine had been reported. The gunnery officer now yelled out from the bridge something about a plane, although the destroyer lookouts had not spotted any aircraft overhead before the carrier began blasting apart, and the exec hustled back inside, leaving the watch officer alone in his spellbound state. None of the past hundred and some hours were supposed to go anything like this; the
Cork's
role at Leyte was to have been grandly ceremonial, delivering MacArthur into the bay for the historic moment of his promised return to the Philippines. The Japanese navy got in the way of that. Accordingly, the general found a lesser floating platform for his symbolic wade ashore while the
McCorkle
was scrambled into the battle formation with all other destroyers in the support fleet. In the ensuing near-endless days and nights, the man on watch believed he had done nobly—not heroically; that was a dimension he did not care to approach—at his post inside at the battle status board, keeping straight the tremendous number of ship names and their whereabouts during the constantly changing struggle. Now, sweaty and fatigued as he was, he felt entitled to a markedly more triumphant watch than this was turning out to be. By now Leyte Gulf was signed, sealed, and delivered for the American side, as would be the campaign ribbons and the commendations to go on one's service record. Yet there was the
St. Lo,
not that far off, still exploding like a gunpowder factory every few minutes.

Then he glimpsed the plane, in the low-hanging murk of smoke from the burning carrier. The half-hidden aircraft was skimming almost down onto the water, one of the carrier's own trying to ditch, he thought at first. But no, as it emerged incredibly low and fast out of the pall of smoke its wing markings flashed into view, the red ball of the Rising Sun bringing flame to the bridge of the
McCorkle,
the last thing Nick Danzer would ever see.

***

Your chum KIA confirmed. Sorry. Story needed soonest.

What was there to say? His first thought when the bells began going off on the TPWP teletype had been that surely it must be a case of mistaken identity. How was it conceivable that Danzer, of them all, would not maneuver through the war without so much as getting a toenail broken, until he came home a medal-polished version of the Dancer? But that notion or any other could not withstand a suicide plane.

Helplessly clutching the teletype message as if it had attached itself to him, it took him a little time to stop trying to outstare the blind numbers it brought with it. The Pacific war, its odds askew, now had chosen both Animal and Danzer for death out of what should have been statistical security. One wearing a uniform for what he could put into it, and the other for what he could get out of it, and it made no difference to the creeping wall of oblivion. "We've had the casualty figures from other wars run.... Many more soldiers survive than people think, and our figures merely back that up..."
Sure, Colonel, tell that to Bruno's eleven, marked down to four all of a sudden. When the hell is it ever going to let up?

The job brought Ben out of that, the newspaperman's allegiance to the story. Faced with writing a farewell to Danzer fit for the world to read, he felt like a mechanic without tools. The task was there to be done, but how? The report of the kamikaze attack was coldly without details. There was not even a service record to cadge from, the grim file with the red tag on the upper corner; the war's initials for combat death simply were banged onto teletype paper along with reams of other military lingo quantifying the Leyte Gulf carnage. It was times like this when the making of words turned into frantic manufacture, and Ben started out of the wire room sickly dreading what it would take to bring an obituary version of Slick Nick out of his fingertips across the next some hours.

Behind him, the TPWP teletype bell rang five times again.

***

As Pacific amphibious landings went, Leyte was not as murderous as Tarawa and Peleliu and Guam had been, nor Iwo Jima and Okinawa yet to come. But murderous enough, predictably, where the hard-luck Montaneers were involved.

On Leyte the bloodiest combat moved inland a lot sooner than in most other island assaults, with the Japanese line of defense swiftly pulling back from the usual hellish beach to higher, even more horrendous jungle terrain. The day the sailors' long-range battle out in the gulf drew to an end, the Montaneers after most of a week of costly attacks managed to secure a strategic but otherwise worthless ridge called Dry Gulch Hill. Probably there was a Dry Gulch Hill on every Pacific island where the Montaneer regiment had seen action, but none had been more treacherous than this. This one was about as high as a football field is long, a desolate muddy hump that had been given an artillery haircut, leaving only palm snags and a general air of determined destruction. With a completeness like that of fog, the stench of corpses of Japanese soldiers rotting in the sun hung over the trails up the hill. The fighting had moved on, and high on the most recently battered section of slope the first two stretcher bearers to arrive were at work amid the wounded and worse than wounded under an embankment that had become an aid station. The one in charge glanced around as a second pair of bearers came slipping and sliding up the trail, cursing the red mud. "Where you been, sightseeing?"

"Stopped for cigars and caviar, what the hell do you think?" the lead man snapped back. "Murray's carry strap gave out and we had to pull up to tie the sonofabitch together. What's the picture here?"

"Couple for us, one for the body squad. The others can still walk, more or less." The man in charge turned to the last of the stretcher squad. "Hey, Murray, you're from Missoula, aren't you?" He pointed to a laid-out figure shaded by a poncho. "That one's Standish—conked out, loss of blood."

"Yeah, we played pool together," Murray reflected. "Dan's a live wire." He lowered his voice. "Is he going to make it, you think?"

"Got the tourniquet on him in time, he ought to pull through." The first man swung a bothered gaze toward a still body beyond Standish's breathing one. "One there that didn't. Their medic—always hate to see that. Don't know him. You?"

Murray stepped over for a closer look, shaking his head this time. "Never had the chance to. Poor devil didn't have time to get his boots broken in."

"Fish out his tags, Murray—the chaplain is getting finicky, doesn't like to touch guys when he does the mort report. Let's get at this."

The mortal remains of one more man in uniform no longer the business of the stretcher bearers, they turned away from the dog tag-marked body of Dex Cariston.

Good God Almighty, Dex—if you ended up thinking anything like that. Why that conscientious? Couldn't you just sit out the war?

He could only try to imagine the change of heart or mind or guts or wherever a conscience as restless as Dex's was seated.

"I'm doing what I can to keep blood in people," back there amid the warless parachutes of the smoke-jumper camp, "instead of letting it out of them."

Fine, well, and good, Dex, that was your decision, as large as life itself. But then? What got to you? The hundredth time some yokel along the Seeley Lake road shouted "yellowbelly" at you? The feeling of odd man out, nagging at you in those nights you struggled to sleep? You were made of stronger stuff than that, though, you could shrug those off even if they did get under your skin. No, it took something that hurt you down to the bone, and I was a witness to it coming. You died of gossip. Mere goddamn gossip.

Slumped against the wire room wall, the two messages crumpled and then uncrumpled in his helpless hands, Ben numbly added and subtracted elements in the weighing of both lives. Gossip was never mere if you were a mercantile prince, an heir with rivals to the prideful fortunes of the Cariston name, was it. And if you sliced conscience with a blade of disdain like Danzer's, there was nothing unnatural about skewering a rival not even going through the motions of serving in uniform, right, Slick Nick?
Talk about enemy action. The war didn't invent that particular one. Goddamn Danzer, I did what I could to head him off while I was on the ship. But all he had to do was wait until people forgot that shark piece a little bit and then have his wolf pack of haberdashers start the gossip about Dex, the conchie who would not serve his country in uniform.

And Tepee Weepy fit into this—where? TPWP and the colonel, simply lost in the forest of good intentions? He felt entitled to doubt that. Yet as furiously as Ben searched for its red hand in it all, he could tell that Tepee Weepy's influence was not necessarily there this time. To his certain knowledge, it had kept hands off Dex all the while he was at the conscientious objector camp; if it had ever tried to push him into military service, the politically connected Cariston dynasty would have shown the Threshold Press War Project what real pull was. No, go over it every way he could find, it kept coming out the same: Dex surely must have enlisted on his own, and matters took their own course from there. A medic for the smoke jumpers, he offered himself as one for the infantry. Another Montanan built rugged enough to tackle jungle life, off he went to the next jungle awaiting invasion. All Tepee Weepy had to do was sit back and keep track, these past several months, and at the right time send Ben out to the Montaneers and there was the story, Dexter Cariston in change of uniform and conscience. It was heartless, but only heartlessly professional.

Feeling like he was in a vise the size of the TPWP teletype, Ben headed for the nearest wire room clerk. He grabbed up the paper pad, made two quick jabs with a pencil, and handed it over. The teletype operator blinked at it. "I can't just send a punctuation mark."

"You goddamn well will or you'll be peeling spuds until your thumbs fall off."

Sourly the operator hit the single key.

?

The reply came in a matter of minutes.

G
OOD QUESTION, YOUR ANXIETY ABOUT PRIORITY UNDERSTOOD
. F
ILE KAMIKAZE PIECE FIRST
. C
ARISTON TO HAVE FUNERAL
. N
O REMAINS OF DANZER; YOUR STORY THE LAST WORD
. S
END SOONEST
.

He had to give it a number of tries, but by late that night he had a thousand words that managed to say between the lines that it had taken the largest naval battle in history to corner the Dancer.

The eleventh day of the eleventh month came white and gray in Helena, sticky snow in the early morning hours and sullen overcast for the afternoon. At the cemetery, Ben and Jake were encased in the coarse military overcoats besides their dress uniforms, but it was cold on the feet. They picked their way through the slushy snow toward the graveside where the Cariston clan and what looked like half of Helena were assembling, Jake grousing at the weather and the war and funerals and the Alaska duty he still was stuck with. "Nome sweet Nome, they ought to give the place back to the Eskimos," he was ending up with. "Thanks for getting me out of that frozen dump for a couple of days for this, I guess."

"Habit by now." The words came from Ben as chilly as the fog of breath around them, and Jake looked at him with concern. He didn't notice. He could feel everything about this day crushing in on him, this icy conclusion of Dex's life to be written, and what waited later. Armistice Day with the world caught up in an even worse war was in itself not anything to help a mood. Fingers stiff and unwilling, he took out his notepad and started with the inchwork of writing, details of the burial service.

Snow lay in the stone folds of the carved monuments in the section of old Helena families where Dex was being interred. The Cariston family plot was granitic in its standing stones. Oddly as if on perpetual guard, not far away stood the commemorative statue of the World War One doughboy, bayonet fixed in readiness. While Jake was at atttention with the rest of the pallbearers and the Presbyterian cadence of the minister went on, Ben was pulled to the statue to make sure of something that had caught his eye. The bronze plaque appeared to be out of proportion to the natural dimensions of the base and as he drew nearer he saw this was not simply an artistic misfire; the list of names of the county's World War One dead stretched so long the plaque barely fit onto the soldier's pedestal of sculpted patch of battleground. Death in war was thought to be a random harvest, but the outsize crop of young lives taken here made a person wonder. Bill Reinking had always said the so-called war to end all wars drained a generation of lifeblood out of Montana. About like this one, his son thought to himself as he turned back to the graveside service.

Grimly making himself function, Ben wondered what he was looking at in this funeral on this designated day. Was it a thumbing of the nose at any hearers of gossip, any doubters that there had been a brave man—brave enough to risk his life alongside other Montaneers—in Dex Cariston? Was it a salute to Dex's depth of conscience against war, burial on the day the world's guns stopped taking lives in 1918? The numerous Caristons with their set Scotch faces were not a family one could see into.