The Eleventh Man Read Online Free PDF

stewing, the silence of the dried-up little ranch seemed to reprove him. Out where weeds took over from the yard, the pole corral stood empty except for one broom-tail pony, and the barn looked like it would fall down if a person blew his nose in its vicinity. All right, he conceded, maybe pursuit of elk was the only business Toussaint did have. But where in this rugged upper end of the Two Medicine country would the old reprobate have a favorite hunting ground?
    For a moment—more than that, actually—he was tempted to give this up and concoct whatever he could, from football times together, for the TPWP piece about Vic. Give it the Loudon treatment for once. Loudmouth it, as the Treasure State team had learned to refer to the guff put out week by week by the sportswriter climbing to fame on their backs in '41. Ted Loudon's coarsest lead followed Vic's four-touchdown game:
Wyoming was scalped on its home field today by a halfback marauder from the northern plains named Vic Rennie.
Ben would have given plenty, then and now, to see the copy Loudon handed in and verify whether the sonofabitch had actually written
half-breed halfback
and a queasy editor struck it out, or if Loudon had chosen to let it just smirk there in the shadows of
marauder
and
scalped.
He and Jake Eisman and most of the rest of the team had wanted to go to Bruno and tell him to shape up his mouthpiece buddy Loudon, but Vic only said he was used to that kind of crap.
    Conscience makes tough company, Ben found again. Concocting would not do—this was Vic, and the last time he would be written about, possibly ever—and besides, in the zipper pocket of the flight jacket was what he was supposed to give to the old man who had raised his friend; he would have sworn he could feel the weight of the thing in there, featherlight though it was. No, at the very least he had to ask around.
This is such a famously friendly neighborhood, right, Vic?
He trudged back up to the Packard, patted it in apology, and navigated it across a barely wide enough stringer bridge to the reservation side of the river, to look up Toussaint's Blackfeet relatives. In-laws, rather, and that proved to be the problem.
    "That skunk fart—why would I keep track of him?" was the extent of the answer at the first ranch of the Rides Proud clan that he tried.
    Ben had been afraid of this. It was notorious throughout this Blackfoot end of the Two Medicine country that the Rennie bloodline was from away—some adamantly mysterious route that seemed to take in hazy tribal background to the east and the Métis rebellion in Canada to the north and very likely a French trapper named Reynaud somewhere along the way—and Toussaint Rennie reveled in perching just outside the edge of the reservation, knowing everyone else's business and never showing his Blackfoot neighbors any of his own hand except the back of it. He conspicuously never got along with his Blackfoot wife, Mary Rides Proud, while she was alive, and to judge by how good a job her blood relations were doing of keeping up hostilities in memory of Mary, even long after. Twice more Ben underwent it, amiable leather-faced men emerging from corral or barn in greeting, then turning away when he mentioned the name Toussaint.
Goddamn it, you'd think they were the Germans and the Russians going at it.
As he pulled in to the last ranch on that stretch of the river, he was watching cautiously for the next Rides Proud man on the prod.
    This time, though, a Blackfoot woman came out on the front steps, her hands in the folds of her checkered dress, and told him in the flattest of voices her husband was up on the bluff fixing fence.
    Something in her features reminded Ben of Vic. He gave it a try: "I'm looking for Victor's grandfather."
    "Victor," the woman tested the name and ignored the rest. "His mother was my cousin."
    Ben gingerly fished into the tangle of family. "The relative who'd raised Victor by the time I knew him was his grandfather. It's