The Eleventh Man (14 page)

"We came to watch the game, if you wouldn't mind some company," Ben called back. He gestured toward the stadium in the middle distance. "I played football with Victor Rennie, down there. Then we went in the service together."

"Are you that Ben friend of his?" The tone had changed markedly. "From up the country, at Gros Ventre? Vic talked about you plenty. Come on down." As they approached, the big-chested man swept a hand around the tan grass-covered slope. "Grab some ground. Want a Shellac?" A case of Great Falls Select beer sat open and obviously in use.

"The lady prefers whiskey." Ben tapped the lid of the picnic basket.

"Smart lady."

Wasting no time, Cass moved off to spread the blanket in a snug spot against the rocks and wink at the shy kids clustering in curiosity. Ben took the chance to steal a look around. The site was right. From up here, the bowl of the stadium was a green swatch amid the prevailing gold and silver of the Homecoming crowd; the band members at midfield blaring out the TSU fight song were the size of toothpicks and faceless, as he and Cass would be to anyone bored enough with football to gaze up here at the denizens of Hill 57. He could relax about that, but he felt keyed up every other way possible.
Game day. Weren't they all, one way or another, with that bastard Bruno?
The other paint-marked sidehill stood almost directly across from him, steeply rising out of the broad coulee where the facing buttes drew back to let the wind into Great Falls: the Letter Hill. He could not take his eyes off the chalky stone insignia there, the broad splay of the T, the coil of the S gripping its stem, the hanging swoop of the U. Every book on scriptwriting warned against the seductions of the sweeping overhead shot—Sam Goldwyn supposedly said that anyone who wanted to spend his money to go that high to look down ought to take the free elevator at the Empire State Building—but the conjured scene coaxed insistently into Ben's movie eye: a long line of figures in football uniforms, strung out on the trail up the Letter Hill as haphazardly as a caravan in distress, toiling toward the interlinked letters high above. Fade to dusk, and one lone runner still struggling against gravity.

The sound effects were not of his choosing. "Treasure State University is proud to welcome its special guests to Homecoming, 1943!" The announcer's voice on the stadium public address system sounded tinny and spectral as his spiel wafted up Hill 57. The Governor, the Senator, the alumni president—ritual tributes echoing from two years back. Ben's mind fastened on the thought of the team then waiting in the maw of that stadium tunnel to trot onto the field, Vic on two good legs, Havel and O'Fallon with breath and soul still in them, Dex and Jake smacking one another on their shoulder pads in jolly superstition, he himself fresh as a colt, the entire eleven of them magically unacquainted with defeat.

He wrenched himself back to present surroundings. Not far down the junk-cluttered slope of Hill 57 stood one shack that appeared more dilapidated than the others, if that was possible. Glancing toward it, he asked their Indian host in a low tone: "Whatever became of Vic's aunt? I keep trying to catch up with her, but she's never home."

"You mean Agnes? Went back to the reservation to mooch a while, last we knew. Got a daughter there."

"If you see her, would you tell her—" Ben broke off. Tell her what? Say he had been pointed to her by an old hunter, nearly as elusive as herself, who despised her and her drinking ways? Pass word to her that he could not get Vic, in despond somewhere in England, to answer his letters?
I'm afraid you were right when you said "That's that," Toussaint.
"Just say I have a mailing address for Vic I can bring her."

The chesty man lifted his shoulders. "If you want. She don't much know how to read, though."

Cass impatiently was motioning that she required the picnic basket. Ben went over. No sooner had he set it down than she reached in and began handing around opera glasses. "I want these back, lords and ladies." In no time the Indian kids were in fits of giggles as they peeked at one another through the wrong end of the lenses, and by kickoff time their elders were dividing their time between beer and binoculars.

Settled onto the blanket beside Cass, Ben nudged her. "I wondered why that basket was so hellishly heavy."

"Might as well get some benefit from having to make nice to the damn USO at the Civic Center, I figured. The Gilbert and Sullivan bunch won't miss these until tonight." She checked to make sure all other eyes were on the football game, then leaned against him and kissed his ear. "I was starting to get lonesome. What were you doing so long with our buddy over there, negotiating a treaty?"

"Just agreeing that Custer had it coming." The petite binoculars nearly lost in his hand, he watched a Treasure State pass fall flat against the Colorado team. It looked like a long game; he nestled closer to Cass. "I forgot to ask. Do you even like football?"

"I like a certain football guy."

Ben smiled; that was good enough. Among women of his acquaintance only his mother evinced understanding of the contrary grace he'd found in playing the rough-and-tumble sport. "I can hardly ever say so, but you take after me in that, Ben. I loved that same feeling in ballet lessons"—girlhood in Beverly Hills had its advantages—"it stays with you, the right muscles still know the rules. Even square dancing with your father."

Cass was scrabbling in the picnic basket. "Here, Jim Thorpe, have a sandwich. There's Spam or Spam."

"Yum."

"I know, but it's the best I could do." They munched on the manufactured meat and had nips of scotch as the game went along. Cass scanned elsewhere half the time, often to the planes taking off from East Base in the distance, but Ben was not really conscious of that, lost in his private tunnel of vision back to the scrimmage where everything began in the season of 1941.

The play was whistled dead before the ball could be snapped, the shrill echo in the empty stadium halting the practice game sooner than usual, and varsity and second-stringers alike uncoiled from their stances reluctantly.

Animal Angelides spat toward the sideline. "Here it comes. Why the hell can't he stay over there playing pocket pool with Loudon instead of frying our nuts?"

The other interior linemen groaned along with him and Ben at left end held in his own with effort. He watched with the others as their coach and chief tormenter came striding onto the field as if he personally owned Treasure State stadium. In his camel-hair topcoat and snap-brim hat Lionel Bruno could strut standing still, so when he added some swagger to it as he did now, he was practically parting the grass like the Red Sea. It was times like this when Ben wished he had been elected, say, water boy instead of team captain.

Hastily he checked over his shoulder to see how the backfield was taking this development. Moxie Stamper smirked unmercifully behind his quarterback privileges, about as expected. At the left halfback position, Vic sent Ben a private look as if he couldn't believe what was happening to this season either. At right half, Dex was coldly watching the coach's progress onto the field. Bulking between the pair of them, Jake had yanked his helmet off and stood tapping it in agitation against his thigh pads.

As if scripted, Bruno marched straight to the football. He plucked it off the ground and walked back and forth through the players, holding the ball in front of their faces as if all twenty-two of them were nearsighted morons. Ben couldn't even guess which speech it was going to be this time, there were so many.

"If the bunch of you would pull your heads out of your butts," the coach started in on them, "and put aside the lesser things of life to concentrate on the basic game of football—"

Oh oh, that one.

"—then you just possibly
might
have the makings of a genuine team." At the word
might,
Bruno squeezed the ball so hard it threatened to pop. "Forget nights on the town. Forget dessert and the cigarette after. Forget about trying to get into your girlfriend's pants," he preached with rising intensity. "This"—he brandished the football higher—"this is the one and only object of your desire from this moment forward, people. You have to want this ball. You have to lust for this ball. You have to
love
getting this ball and handling it as if you are the only ones on the face of God's green sod it is entrusted to." Pausing for emphasis or maybe it was breath, Bruno nursed his disgust in front of them for all it was worth.

There was more than one audience for this. Ben risked a glance toward the near sideline where Ted Loudon, Bruno's pet sportswriter and nobody else's, was taking in the coach's every word hungrily.
Why? He'll keep making up whatever he wants to about "the team that can't find itself" anyway.
Loudon even trigged himself up in camel-colored topcoat and snap-brim hat in imitation of Bruno but fell short as a fashion plate due to newspaper pay.

"Listen up, people," the coach intoned, as if they had any other choice, "do you know what you want to be as a team? Slick. Operating together smooth as shit through a goose. I want teamwork from you so slick the sissies across from you won't be able to see straight, you hear me?"

Nearest across the scrimmage line from Ben, Purcell uncomfortably did. The lanky sophomore was blushing red-hot at the coach's choice of language.
Where the hell was he raised, in a Sunday school?
A walk-on from six-man nowhere, Merle Purcell had been turning pink since the first day of practice when he stepped into the locker room wearing a droopy high school sweater that showed he had lettered in football, basketball, and track. Instantly he became known as
the three-letter man
and crude suggestions were made as to what those letters stood for. He wasn't necessarily hazed any harder than any other sophomore scrub, but on him it seemed to stick. On the field the freakish kid could outrun anything said about him—Ben, who was quick, comprehended the cosmic difference between that and fast—yet when he wasn't in motion he lapsed into a sitting duck. Purcell was a handful in more ways than one, but right then Ben had everyone else on the squad to worry about.

Bruno paused again, then resumed like a thunderclap:

"There is not, I repeat,
not
an opponent on the schedule that the Treasure State University Golden Eagles of nineteen hundred and forty-one can't beat the living piss out of, if you will merely play this game my way.
If!
Do you hear that word?
I-F!
And now that I have your attention, may I point out to you something there is no goddamn
if
about. It is one week from today to the season opener.
One week!
That gives you seven days to pull together into a team that devotes itself heart, soul, and fart hole to this ball."

Now—Hollywood could not have cued him better, Ben had to admit—the coach put the football down gently as an egg. By then varsity and second-stringers alike knew Animal indeed was prophetic, here it came. "People?" the coach addressed them as if dubious about that. "To help you concentrate on the loving care of this miraculous object, you are now playing under the Golden Rule."

Despair followed those words like jackal tracks behind a caravan. The only thing biblical about Bruno's Golden Rule was that it was blunt-edged and carried the whiff of Hell. The dreaded maxim was actually a catchall for his wrathful coaching canons—no fumbling the football, no missing a tackle, no messing up a play, no time-outs to fix shoulder pads, no anything else that could conceivably offend the exacting eye on the sideline—but what sane person in a football uniform was going to stand out there arguing singular and plural with the gridiron lord and master?

Not Ben, not quite yet.
Not in front of everybody. He'd run the legs off all of us up to those big white sons of bitches just to show me.

His involuntary glance toward the butte looming out there beyond the end zone stands was not the only one. The Letter Hill was roundly hated. Of all Bruno's raging innovations this year, trickier drills, tougher calisthentics, full-length slam-bang practice games that pitted the varsity against the scrub team twice a week, the punishment runs up to those pale letters halfway into the sky were the hardest to take. Penalty laps around the field were a custom as old as football cleats, but nobody had signed on to clamber up a junior mountainside any time a volcanic coach blew off steam. Dex would be his bet, for the first to shove the Golden Rule in Bruno's face and walk off the team, followed immediately by Animal and Jake. Today could be the day. Even the Butte hard case at left guard, Kenny O'Fallon, looked mutinous. Sig Prokosch, the other guard, built like an engine block and usually as imperturbable, showed similar signs. Stan Havel would stay; hiking the ball was the one thing he was fluent at. Moxie Stamper and Nick Danzer were Bruno's cubs, they couldn't be driven off this field by any means known to mankind. Carl Fries-sen could tip either way, easygoing but with a razor streak of sensibility underneath. Ben himself—
God damn it, this isn't football, it's Russian roulette.

Still looking supremely disgusted at what he had to work with, the coach gathered himself to go. "All right, Stamper"—another mark of Bruno was that he did not acknowledge the existence of first names—"show us something that resembles football."

Instantly Moxie yapped at the varsity, "You heard the man, huddle up, everybody get your ass in gear." In his ornery pirate-captain style as quarterback, he had in his favor a quick slinging way of passing that made it hard for the defense to see the ball coming. On the first play now, he hit the right end, Danzer, with a screen pass for ten yards. Right away he caught the scrubs by surprise with the same play again, good for a dozen yards this time. The second-stringers, no slouches, did not like being patsies on such calls and Danzer didn't help the matter any. Physically flawless as a swan, the lithe receiver preened past them with an exceedingly leisurely trot back to the huddle. Ben by contrast, with no action on his side of the field but to block the daylights out of Purcell, was starting to feel like a paying spectator; his hands itched for the ball but he couldn't argue with first downs.