Chapter Text
Late July, 1953
As the helicopter rose high over the land, desiccant wind tearing at his clothes, he watched the dust plume of BJ’s departure dissipate. He leaned out and craned back, keeping the paving stones in sight as best he could, but within the space of a minute they were too high and too far and the landscape blended and cerulized with distance. Something within him stretched painfully and then snapped, as though BJ, as one last parting-shot prank, had nailed Hawkeye’s aorta to the land when he wasn’t looking.
And just like that it was over.
///
He watched the coast of Japan recede behind him, its green giving way to grey giving way to an endless glassy plane of blue in every direction. He amused himself briefly by imagining he was a stationary object, floating untouched by friction and wind resistance and atmospheric vicissitudes, as the world moved below him. Free of relativity. An objective observer. Existing in a preferred frame.
When that made him motion sick, he settled for tracing patterns in the surface of the water far below as waves constructively and destructively interfered. Light glinted off of the water in full-spectrum white, which turned pink and then orange as the sun began to sink. When it disappeared completely, and the view outside his window turned to black, he leaned back and let sleep take him, confused images of Henry Blake’s fishing cap, Radar’s teddy bear, a flash of blonde hair, and, absurdly, baseball flickering through his consciousness as he sank into himself.
///
SeaTac was a dream. Unreal. He deboarded hazily, stumbling behind ten other men wearing identical clothes, hefting a duffel he couldn’t remember packing onto his shoulder.
They shuffled together into the airport’s hall, and then stopped as a unit, clustered together, squinting beneath the hard viridescent glare of fluorescence.
Hawkeye dropped his duffel. Airport foot-traffic parted around the group. A portly man in a business suit walked by, dragging a suitcase with one lame wheel whirling freely over the tiled floor. The tile was white, with flecks of iridescence visible at certain angles of incidence with the light. He looked at his feet, shifting a boot to get a better look at the way the floor seemed to change colors as his shadow moved. His boots were red-stained and scuffed. The hems of his fatigues were worn. A woman walked by in the other direction, her dress purple, the seams of her nylons crooked. Her heeled shoes clicked sharply over the tile. She had no luggage. The tile looked possibly greenish in shadow, Hawkeye thought, but it could have been a reflection of eleven sets of closely clustered olive drab fatigues giving an impression of nonexistent verdigris. A little girl, no more than five, was sitting beside her mother at a gate across the hall, playing with a ribbon braided into her hair. It was green. Emerald green. Cadmium green. Green as rich as velvet. Green the color of everything precious and alive. Nothing remotely like olive.
Hawkeye turned blearily away, dragging his luggage behind him.
///
Bangor was stranger still. He had no idea the date, much less the time. His wristwatch was worse than useless. He’d been chartered on a commercial plane from SeaTac, and had studiously avoided eye contact with the only other man in uniform on the flight. His fatigues felt stiff, his hair greasy. His face itched; he hadn’t packed a razor. He scanned the faces waiting by the gate. Had his plane arrived early? Late? He’d called his father in Seattle, he was pretty sure, but found the details of the conversation blurry and uncertain in recollection.
He pushed through the throng of deboarding passengers and hauled his bag over to a payphone. The light was just as harsh here as it had been in SeaTac. He leaned against the wall, picked up the receiver, and patted his pocket. Perfect—he had a ten-cent bill, though he couldn’t remember if he’d changed it over. It was possible it was outdated scrip—
—All scrip was outdated. He was a free man.
He cursed softly, and then turned, looking over the crowd of passengers waiting around the gate.
A younger man wearing coke-bottle glasses walked past.
Hawkeye stuck a hand out, trying to grab his attention. “Hey, fella. You got a dime I could borrow?”
The man shook his head, holding his hand up.
“For a call,” Hawkeye said to his retreating back. He refocused on a man walking in the other direction. “Excuse me. Sir. Got a spare dime?”
The man looked away.
“Nice,” Hawkeye said. “Thanks.” He turned towards a woman about his age who was lingering nearby. He tried on his best hang-dog expression, stretching out and leaning against the wall, letting his legs cross at the ankle. “Excuse me. I just left Korea—”
“Where?” the woman asked. She was maybe five feet tall at the uppermost, and had her dark hair in a plait.
“Korea,” Hawkeye said. “The war?”
“Oh,” the woman said, turning away. “Sorry, honey, I’m married.”
“I was just going to ask for a dime,” Hawkeye called after her.
Several passing people shot him a suspicious look.
He turned to BJ to complain, found empty air, and remembered he was alone.
He reached out again, towards a man in a heavy-looking jacket. An odd choice for summer in Maine, but then, so were combat fatigues. “Excuse me, sir, can I borrow a dime, just ten cents so I can—”
The man walked past him.
“—call my dad,” Hawkeye finished, an unfamiliar lick of rage pulling him up to his full height. He addressed nobody in particular. “I’m a stranded veteran. This is America, isn’t it? A dime, that’s all, for three lost years, and—”
“Hawkeye?”
Hawkeye turned sharply.
His father was there, ten feet away. Daniel Pierce, MD. Seeing him felt for a horrible half-second like looking in a mirror—the height, the silvered hair, the nose—before the differences began to assert themselves: hazel eyes instead of blue behind his tortoiseshell glasses, build softer through the middle, crow’s feet starker.
“Dad,” he said, voice already breaking.
“Hawk,” Daniel said, reaching out for him, face creasing, expression somehow fearful. He took Hawkeye by the arms, looking him up and down. “Oh, my boy. Little bird.”
Hawkeye gripped his father’s forearms. “Dad. I—I—”
“Come here,” Daniel said, fierce.
Hawkeye folded forward, eyes burning. His chest ached. He breathed deeply, taking in the scent of his father’s soap, the woodsy smell of the fireplace, and something indefinably homey.
“It’s okay,” Daniel said. “Hawk, it’s okay. You’re coming home, bird. I’ve got you.”
Hawkeye made an effort to loosen his grip on the back of his father’s shirt. His hands were numb and rigid.
Daniel cupped the back of his head, sinking his hand into his hair. “I’ve got you.”
“Yeah,” Hawkeye managed, letting Daniel take his weight for a moment. He was exhausted.
“Still need that dime?” Daniel asked, voice creaky with emotion.
“You’d do that?” Hawkeye asked, equally overwrought. “You’d lend me a whole ten cents?”
“Anything for my boy,” Daniel said, pulling back and clapping his hands to Hawkeye’s cheeks, squeezing his face. “Anything for you. Anything in the world. Let’s go home, huh? Get you a shave. Get you some new clothes.”
“Yeah,” Hawkeye said again, swiping at his eyes.
“I owe you, what was it,” Daniel said, gathering up Hawkeye’s duffel bag. He slung his free arm around Hawkeye’s back, palm warm on his shoulder. “A couple things. You were always writing those letters about what was it you missed. Pistachio ice cream. Bananas. Lobster. Eggs. Fresh bread and butter. French toast. Plenty else I’m forgetting.”
“I said a lot of things,” Hawkeye said, stumbling. His boots felt all wrong. Too big, suddenly. Ill-fitting.
“I kept track,” Daniel said, gently urging him through the airport, through a just-disembarked crowd and towards the baggage claim. “Believe me I kept track. Hawk, there’s something that happens when you’re a parent, this, this, this empathy thing, listen, when your boy is hurting, when he’s missing something, well, you hurt just as much when you can’t help him. I would’ve done anything to send you a carton of eggs.”
“They would’ve shown up scrambled.” Hawkeye clutched the back of his father’s shirt, focusing on moving his legs, urging himself not to stop in the middle of the airport. He pictured the muscles in his legs, imagined them flayed of skin and laid out for demonstration of a stable gait: Quads keep the leg extended, bearing weight. Ankle dorsiflexion. Left heel strike. Quads stabilize the knee. Peroneus longus, brevis, and tertius contract and stabilize the foot. Glutes and tensor fascia latae contract and maintain balance. Hamstring extends the thigh. Ankle dorsiflexes, and the foot lifts. Iliopsoas maintains extension. The leg swings forward. Quads extend the leg, and prepare for impact. And repeat. Picture perfect: a functional man.
Daniel jostled their shoulders together. They were precisely the same height. “We’ll get you home. You can shower, you can shave, you can put on some sweatpants, for God’s sake, and then we’ll see what kind of welcome home we can cook up. Huh?”
“Yeah,” Hawkeye said. He tightened his grip on his father’s shirt. “Hey, Dad?”
“Yeah, bird?” Daniel slowed their pace, turning to look at him. That was something Hawkeye had missed. How his dad always looked at him. Looked right at him. No matter what. Like he was never too afraid of what he’d see looking back.
“I love you,” Hawkeye said, the left side of his face going myoclonic in his urge to keep his composure.
Daniel blinked hard, eyes bright. “I love you too, kiddo. Now come on. Home.”
///
Hawkeye trailed his fingers over the dashboard. The air was thick with humidity. Outside the pavement shimmered with heat. The car shook as Daniel slammed the trunk, and then again when he opened the front door.
“You got a radio put in,” Hawkeye noted, rolling his thumb over a round, ridged dial. It clicked satisfyingly, and stopped at the extreme ends of its range on either side.
Daniel paused, and then shut his door softly. “Yes. About a year ago. I guess I must not have written about that.”
“Maybe I forgot,” Hawkeye said, fiddling with the dial.
“Maybe,” Daniel conceded. He started the car, and the radio crackled to life. Hawkeye spun the volume up.
The car pulled out of the airport’s parking lot. Hawkeye didn’t notice.
“God damn,” Hawkeye said, hand still hovering over the radio’s face. “What the hell is that?”
Daniel smiled slightly. “You like it?”
“What is it?” Hawkeye asked again, foot tapping. He couldn’t seem to make it stop.
“What do you think?” Daniel asked, merging them onto the highway.
“It’s jazz,” Hawkeye said, after a long pause. His whole leg was bouncing, now, and his head was starting to get in on the action. “No. Blues. Jazz? Ragtime? Jesus, I don’t know. What the hell is it?”
“You like it?” Daniel asked again.
“I love it,” Hawkeye said, knocking his knuckles against the window in time.
“Oh, Hawk,” Daniel said, grinning insufferably, reaching over to hold his arm, “Things are changing. It’s a whole new world out there.”
“What is it?” Hawkeye asked, laughing in disbelief at how terribly infectious the rhythm of the music was, the way it reached down deep inside him and made him want to move.
Daniel laughed at him laughing, and took them smoothly around a curve in the highway as the piano on the radio rolled and jumped. “They’re calling it rock and roll.”
///
They took the scenic route home, jagging more east than necessary to catch Highway 1 south along the coast. The water was still and blue. Seagulls rode thermals and bobbed sedately in the waves. Slowly the highway turned inland—Rockland, Thomaston, the crumpled-paper-textured houses along the road constituting the border of Warren slid by, unremarked upon—and just as slowly it turned back towards the coast.
Hawkeye leaned his forehead against the car’s window as they passed over a bridge in Waldoboro. The river was a deep blue, the water line visibly low, striations of sediment running parallel along the bank.
Cars roared past them, heading north, their distant shapes warping in the heat haze.
The sky was glaringly clear. Harshly blue. Fluorescent, almost.
“Has it been dry lately?” Hawkeye asked a few minutes later, shifting to look at Daniel.
“Yeah,” Daniel said, after a fractional pause. “Dry season. Bad droughts out west, I hear. Texas is in real trouble.”
“When isn’t it,” Hawkeye said, turning his attention back to the landscape. The trees were all coniferous. It looked an awful lot like Korea.
The car went over a patch of poorly-maintained pavement. Hawkeye’s forehead jounced against the window, and he hissed, falling back against his seat.
“Some welcome home,” Daniel said. “Sorry. I’ve been campaigning the city council to do something about that pothole since last December, but you know how they feel about the unincorporated townships.”
“It’s alright.” Hawkeye rubbed at his forehead. “We’re back?”
Daniel shot him a glance.
Hawkeye gestured out the window defensively. “They chopped down the old white pine. And, and, and where’s the Hutchinson cabin? That old teal eyesore, anytime I drove in, that’s how I knew I was in town.”
“They painted it brown,” Daniel said, eyes on the road.
Hawkeye looked again. Sure enough, set back from the road maybe twenty meters was the Hutchinson cabin. A dull shade of beige.
“That’s terrible,” Hawkeye said, pressing his nose against the glass, watching the cabin recede behind them. “I loved that stupid, ugly house. What happened? Why’d they change it?”
Daniel shrugged. “Somebody else bought it. Somebody inland. Rents it out summers. Mostly college kids on break there, these days.”
The car slowed significantly as they turned off the paved primary road and onto a packed gravel lane. The shoulder was nonexistent; the gravel just phased directly into front yards.
“Old Jeannie Fairsboro get rid of her chickens?” Hawkeye asked, pointing to a shambles of wire and plywood that had once constituted a coop.
“She moved down south. Anne got married to some engineer in Durham—or Greensboro, I forget where—and she got tired of making the trip. Wants to be closer in case of grandkids, she said.”
“South-south, you mean.” Hawkeye shook his head. “When you said south I thought you meant Portland.”
“No. South-south,” Daniel repeated. “So did Mr. Allen. Atlanta, if you can believe it.”
The car rolled past a house with a sagging roof, its paint peeling off in long horizontal curls. A rusted-out truck was parked diagonally across its front lawn, the tires bald and mostly deflated. A water trough lay on its side in the dirt. Every last lawn looked yellowly nauseated.
Hawkeye rolled the window down, leaning out and breathing deeply. Pine. Humidity. Sun-warmed dirt. Salt air. At least some things would never change.
Daniel turned off the gravel lane onto a packed-dirt road, the width of one car. The woods rose high, trees curling in over the road, leaving only a narrow sliver of sky visible. It was like sitting at the bottom of a green ravine.
“Would you look at that,” Hawkeye said, craning up to stare at the power lines strung along the side of the road. “They were just starting that when I went to med school.”
“We’re all wired up,” Daniel said. “No generators needed. And we’re on the water main, too.”
“Get out of town!”
“More like into it,” Daniel said. “I wasn’t so sure at first, but let me tell you, some of the things you can do…I’m getting too old to read by candle.”
After a few minutes, the pines thinned and the road widened, turning from packed dirt to gravel again. The pine woods transitioned into a sparse covering of white ashes and red maples.
The car slowed, and then stopped.
Daniel parked, and Hawkeye stepped out of the car, leaning against the door. The house was precisely as he remembered it. The porch was wide, the steps warped. The wood shingle siding was salt-bleached and flaking, though the construction of the house remained solid. The window panes were white, the shutters and door a periwinkle blue. The house’s attic rose to a sharp peak, its two west-facing windows shuttered against the July heat.
Around the base of the porch rested a series of impromptu planters. They were made out of aluminum troughs, driftwood, and what looked to be the roof of Jeannie’s old chicken coop, and were filled with wild onion, chives, and wilted-looking parsley. A terracotta pot brimmed with red geraniums. An array of wind chimes hung from the porch’s rafters. Some were metallic and tubular, a few were clear glass bulbs with hanging metallic clappers, and the majority were colorful glass strips of varying lengths. The racket was tremendous, and deeply nostalgic.
Behind the house, the land fell away sharply, down to the beach. Waves broke on the pebbled shore, audible from the road.
“Welcome back,” Daniel said, smiling at him over the roof of the car.
Hawkeye walked up to the house, the gravel shifting under his boots. He laid a hand on the stair rail, thumbing at the wood grain, which was a few years overdue for a refinishing. There was an assortment of mud-covered wading boots tucked up under the bottom stair. A salt-crusted bucket rested upside down beside the door. A pair of beat-up chest waders was slung haphazardly over the side of the porch swing, underneath of which rested a fishing rod. A lobster pot was barely visible around the side of the house.
He knelt. There was a visible divot in the wood of the third stair. More than two decades ago, he’d tripped while carrying a garden spade and taken a chunk out of the steps.
“You ought to get that fixed,” Hawkeye said.
Daniel clapped him on the back. “Can’t. Who would I be to reject your first attempt at remodeling?”
Hawkeye took his bag off Daniel’s shoulder and clumped up the stairs, brushing a green sea glass wind chime as he went.
“It’ll be pretty much as you last saw it,” Daniel said. “Which I think was, what, New Years’ Day, 1950?”
“Mm, later, I think. Remember I was up for, for something. You wanted me to get those sweaters out of the attic room, which I guess was worth a ten-hour train ride.”
Daniel laughed, the sound familiarly wheezing. He propped the screen door open, and opened the interior door.
“Dad,” Hawkeye sighed.
“What?”
“You gotta start locking the place when you leave.”
Daniel toed off his shoes just inside the door, and then moved aside to let Hawkeye in. “It’s not like New York, kiddo. You were just fine with leaving the door open for the mosquitos and racoons and deer until you turned eighteen. Not a thought in your head about closing the screen. Much less locking the door. You went away to college and got all these city slicker ideas.”
“Like locking up when I leave?” Hawkeye asked, stepping inside and leaning down to undo his bootlaces.
“His apartment gets broken into one time, and he thinks the world is out to get him,” Daniel lamented to the empty house.
“Well, I did get drafted,” Hawkeye joked.
The mood fell. It was like he’d shattered a lamp.
Daniel squeezed his shoulder silently.
“Maybe I leave these outside, huh?” Hawkeye asked, stepping out of his boots.
“Maybe,” Daniel said. “What’s that you got, red clay?”
Hawkeye peered at his shoes, holding them up by the laces. “Blood.”
Daniel winced, and then covered over it by squeezing his shoulder again.
Hawkeye tossed the boots outside. They landed near the stairs, one on top of the other. He pulled the door shut, and turned his attention to the house.
Not much had changed in three years. The floors were still hardwood, and were still mostly covered by an eclectic collection of rugs. The front door opened directly into the living room, which was populated by plush furniture in a variety of shades; the couch was low and upholstered a deep forest green, two armchairs a mismatched set of red and orange. The hearth set into the far right wall was swept clean. A Tiffany lamp perched, unlit, on a side table. The walls were nearly fully obscured with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, which sank under the weight of their own contents. Books were stacked horizontally on top of each regular row to maximize storage capacity. A record player occupied a place of honor near the hearth. The big bay windows at the front of the house were curtained to keep the room cool. A staircase ascended to the second floor at the left of the room. Just beyond it, a cutout doorway led into the kitchen. A closed door on the left wall, perpendicular to the kitchen door, led to Daniel’s room.
“Well?” Daniel asked, holding his arms out. He was standing precisely in the place Hawkeye had stood when he’d lost his first baby tooth to a tough piece of deer jerky. “What do you think?”
“I love it,” Hawkeye said, looking at the plush chair he’d sat in while his dad bandaged his first-ever scraped knee.
“Really?” Daniel asked. He held his hands out again, and then rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m just a little worried. Seeing as you’re not really reacting.”
“I’m—?” Hawkeye paused. He readjusted his grip on his duffel.
Daniel’s face creased.
“Huh,” Hawkeye said. “I—I guess not. I don’t really—Dad, I’m sorry.”
“No, no,” Daniel said, holding his bicep. “No apology necessary. Feel whatever you need to feel. You go get settled in. When you’re ready, we can do lunch. Dinner. Whatever, whenever. Take your time.”
“Sure,” Hawkeye said. He turned towards the stairs.
///
Hawkeye closed his eyes, letting the hot water run across his face. The dark was soothing. As was the heat. Nothing like showering at the—at the place he had been, where the water was always the exact opposite temperature a guy hoped it would be, and didn’t make you smell much nicer than before you went in. The showerhead was mounted far up the wall, to accommodate Daniel’s—and by extension Hawkeye’s—height, and had very impressive water pressure. Or at least it seemed like it did. His baseline for what constituted a good shower was skewed these days.
When he was a little kid, they hadn’t been connected to a water main. They’d had to pump water from the well, and heat it in buckets over the fire, and pour it into the tub. And now here he was, standing in the very same tub, with the brilliance of modern technology bringing him scaldingly hot water with the twist of a knob.
He turned under the water’s stream so the water flowed down his back. “What a wonderful thing, technology,” he mused aloud to the bathroom. The tiles echoed his voice, muddying it with the hiss of the shower until it was a ringing of under- and overtones, unidentifiable as human in origin.
“Knowledge for the sake of knowledge,” he added, pitching his voice lower to catch the room’s natural resonance point, listening to the tones separate and sustain.
He scrubbed his hands through his hair. “What delights it brings. Eh? Sound storage. Intercontinental ballistic missiles. Fireworks. Flak cannons. The electric guitar. The electric chair. The electric lamp. Electroconvulsive therapy. Lobotomy. Laryngectomy. Cancer given to you in a stick. Cancer taken away from you with a rock. Big magnets that let you see inside of people. Ditto with big guns. The automobile, the automotive manslaughter, murder, broadcast TV and propaganda, planes, trains, and a thousand new ways to put holes in each other, and a thousand and one ways to patch them up, and then a thousand and two ways to put the holes back in. Death! Mayhem! Life! Love! Music! Laughter! Light! Death! Twice, because you never outrun him. Buses and ambulances and everybody who ever died in the presence of a so-called doctor! The end of the world as I’ve known it, and the end of the man, too! The end of the universe! Telescopes and microscopes and rifle scopes and every last piece of glass that keeps us from taking in the light of the world directly! ‘La Bamba’ on a 45 and the bomb in ‘45! It is the century of progress, damn your whiplash, and we cannot, will not, are not slowing down!”
He fell against the side of the shower, panting. The tile resonated.
“Sorry,” he said to nobody, still catching his breath. “I don’t know where that came from.”
The bathroom tile hummed at him sympathetically, and then went back to copying the sound of falling water.
Hawkeye shut off the water, reaching blindly for a towel. They were where they had always been.
He dried his hair, and then wrapped the towel around his waist, stepping carefully out of the tub. He considered talking to his dad about getting a step-stool of some sort in; he didn’t like the thought of his dad risking a fall.
He leaned down to retrieve his shaving kit from his bag, kvetching instinctively to no one in particular about his prematurely old back. The mirror was still fogged from the heat of his shower, so he went about setting up the sink for a shave.
When he had the drain plugged, the sink filled with warm water, and his shaving brush lathered, he glanced up to find—
“Jesus,” he said, double-taking sharply, pausing over the sink. He dropped his hand to the sink’s ledge. Soap dripped from the end of his shaving brush.
He leaned in, running his free hand over his face. He hadn’t seen a reflective surface worth anything for the last three years. He had been aware, vaguely, that he was going grey, could tell that much from the warped and tarnished communal mirror the Swamp denizens had shared. But that was all, more or less. Leaning over the sink he’d accidentally dropped one of his mother’s earrings down twenty-four years ago, he was disturbed to see somebody he hardly recognized.
His stubble was silvering, and so was a fair amount of his hair. He’d developed worry lines in between his eyebrows. His face was gaunt.
He ran a hand down his bare chest, briefly hiking up the towel wrapped around his waist. He’d dropped weight he couldn’t afford to spare, leaving him precariously thin, with the sort of shaky, tabescent look of the terminally ill. His ribs were starkly visible.
He thumbed at the line of his jaw, frowning, and thought about how nurses and the occasional corpsman had slowly but surely stopped flirting back at him as nineteen fifty-three wore on. How often BJ, at the end, had tried to drag him to the mess, when all he wanted to do was sleep.
“You look terrible,” he said to the dour man in the mirror. “What’d you do, go to war?”
His reflection stared back, eyes pale and dead.
“Too soon?” he asked, and sighed. He lathered his shaving brush again, and set about making himself a civilian.
///
“There he is,” Daniel said, smiling warmly from the kitchen. “Come on down. I put tea on.”
“It’s too hot for tea,” Hawkeye said, making his way down the staircase. The second, fifth, and eighth steps creaked all over, but the rest were quiet if one kept his weight near the wall.
“Says the kid in a sweater.” Daniel handed him a steaming mug as he entered the kitchen.
“You painted,” Hawkeye said, lightly surprised, setting his mug on the table. The cabinets had been a dark walnut last he’d seen them, but now the whole kitchen was done up in shades of white and pale goldenrod. A small herb garden flourished in the window above the sink, oregano and thyme and something stringy and pine-like Hawkeye didn’t recognize. Mint was quarantined in a pot by itself. A hanging basket in the larger windows over the counter trailed leggy philodendron branches, the leaves heart-shaped and a vivid, waxy green. The table was still the same one he’d grown up with, though. Pale wood scored and stained from decades of wear.
Off the kitchen to the left was a door to the sunroom, essentially a greenhouse in the summer months. Hawkeye peeked in, blinking at the rush of humid heat that greeted him.
“African violets,” Daniel declared, proud. “That’s what I’m into, lately.”
“I can tell.” Hawkeye leaned into the room a little further, inhaling deeply. “What do you have, twenty of ‘em?”
“Eighteen. They don’t smell like anything, you can stop hyperventilating.”
Hawkeye shut the door, and moved back to the table, pulling his jeans up by the belt loops. He tried not to read any symbolism into the fact that his civvies no longer fit.
Into the fact that he thought of them as civvies.
“So,” Daniel said, after they’d sipped tea for a few moments in atypical silence. They’d never kept a quiet house.
“Buttons,” Hawkeye guessed. “No. Darts. Uh, hems. Patches.”
“Feeling better?”
Hawkeye put his mug down. “About what? Who said I was feeling bad?” Hawkeye crossed his legs, and then uncrossed them. “I feel fine. I feel great. No, I feel, I feel phenomenal. I’m free. I’m off my leash. I’m running up and down the beach, emotionally. Tearing my shirt off and diving into the lake. Ocean, I mean. I can go and get ice cream without asking for a weekend leave. I can walk to the grocery store without a flak helmet. I never have to wear olive drab again, if I don’t feel like it. I’m home! I’m home! What feeling could be better than this?”
Daniel looked out the window. “I meant do you feel better after getting a fresh shave. Cleaner, like.”
“Oh.”
Daniel looked back at him.
“I think,” Hawkeye said, tracing a finger along the rim of his mug, “that maybe this doesn’t feel quite real to me. Yet.”
“Uh-huh,” Daniel said, inclining his head, putting particular emphasis on the first syllable.
“I mean, a day and a half ago, I was—I was—” he swallowed against the memory of BJ shouting something at him from the helipad, inaudible under the whir of machinery. “Elsewhere,” he finished.
“It’ll take time to adjust,” Daniel said. “You can feel however you need to feel. Whatever you need to feel. Take your time. I’ll be here for you. Whatever you need.”
Hawkeye tapped the side of his mug. He tried to reach inwards, get a handle on what it was he was feeling, and got something that felt how radio interference sounded. “I think I’m actually going to try and catch a nap.”
Daniel took the mostly-full mug Hawkeye pushed over to him. “You’re sure you don’t want to eat?”
“Later,” Hawkeye said. He walked back upstairs, full of radio fuzz.
///
He opened his eyes in the 4077. There was just enough time to feel his entire body relax, flooded with inappropriate and inexplicable bone-deep relief, before Radar threw open the door to the Swamp, shouting.
Hawkeye stood, wading through snow that was hip-deep and still accumulating. The wind was coming in hard at a forty-five degree angle, driving snow down his collar. He couldn’t see more than five feet in front of him. His coat wasn’t a coat. Everybody else had a coat, and so did he, but his coat wasn’t a coat. The snow and wind chill sliced right through to his skin. He stumbled forward, trying to aim to fall into footprints leading forward into the gale. He wasn’t lost. He knew where he was going.
A man in olive drab emerged briefly ahead of him, hazy in the blizzard. He surged forward again and disappeared into the storm as the gale caught his hat, blowing it past Hawkeye, who was able to catch sight of a row of orange fishing lures attached to its circumference before it, too, was lost.
Hawkeye continued on, shivering. There were wounded at the helipad. The snow was up to his ribcage, now, and getting harder to displace. He shoved on, tucking his frozen hands under his arms.
The helicopter loomed abruptly out of the white. Everybody from camp was already there. He was late.
He ran forward, the snow no longer impeding his progress, and zipped down the body bag resting in the helicopter’s side compartment. It was full of ice. There was a body, and it was him, but there was something very wrong.
BJ grabbed his shoulder, hauling him back from the corpse, speaking directly into his ear, eyes big and blue and terribly concerned. Hawkeye couldn’t hear him.
Tommy Gillis was there, notebook pages fluttering in the gale. Henry Blake leaned down and whispered something to Radar, who turned and took off running down the hill. A woman in black waded in from the storm, and sat delicately on one of the helicopter’s struts. BJ was somehow holding his hand even as they both began to sink into the snow. The pressure was unbearable. The weight of the snow against his chest made it almost impossible to breathe. The stuff was up to his neck, and his arms were pinned flat against his body. He couldn’t breathe, or see. He took a single desperate gasp of air before his face was buried and the weight of the snow crushed his lungs flat, and he woke up in his childhood bed.
“Hell,” Hawkeye said to himself, breathing gratefully, staring up at the ceiling. He rubbed at his sternum, feeling his pulse start to slow.
He sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. He was sweating profusely, and his room was suffocatingly stuffy. He threw open a window, breathing deeply, taking in the cooler air, letting the sound of wind chimes and the distant ocean calm him. The sun was preparing to set, and the house’s shadow stretched long towards the water.
He turned back, making his way over to the desk pushed against the wall. Most of the drawers were empty, but he found a pad of stationary in one, and a loose pen in another. He sighed, rotating his wrist, and began to write.
///
To one Dr. BJ Hunnicutt, hopefully by now in his rightful place as one-third of the Hunnicutt household—
I’m home!! Home!! Home!!
There’s no place like it, or so I’ve heard. I’m here and I can hardly believe it.
I mean that. I can hardly believe it. It’s like nothing happened. I came back and so many things have changed, and so many are the same, and I’m not sure what feels stranger: the idea that the world went on without me for three years, or the idea that the only thing the last three years changed was me.
That’s an unfair way of looking at it, maybe. I think I just haven’t settled in. I haven’t even eaten yet—though I can tell I’m about to. The whole house smells like banana pancakes. Nutmeg, cinnamon, sugar, fresh fruit, whipped cream. Bet that’s nothing on the welcome home you got, though, Mr. Married.
How is sunny Mill Valley, anyway? Bright? Beautiful? Blonde (x3)?
I admit I’ve got this picture of you—not literally. You know I realized as I stepped onto that helicopter I don’t have a single photo of you? Of us? Not one. All I’ve got to go on is memory. Big feet, mustache, pink shirt. That’s how you come to mind. Anyway, I’ve got this mental picture of you at home. In your house (imagine! A house! Four walls! A ceiling! No Frank Burns snoring away in a cot five feet to your left!). It’s one of those classic San Francisco houses. Pastel, tall and lean like you. I admit I picture it in pink, too. Treacherous stairs baby-proofed for Erin. Very clean. Very sunny. On a hill, like everything else there. Urban, but with a big backyard (is it obvious yet that I have no idea where Mill Valley is, in relation to the city? Do you live on top of the Golden Gate Bridge, maybe? In a redwood forest? On a mountainside? It’s all California to me). Anyway you live there, in this California house, and you’ve got a life so perfect I can hardly believe you didn’t clip it out of a magazine. It looks like an ad for the American Dream, and marrying young, and Protestantism or whatever it is we value these days. It’s perfect and perfect for you. I bet you pick up right where you left off, no trouble at all. Bastard.
Anyway, that’s what I picture. But I could have it all wrong. So write me and right me, for God’s sake, and tell me all about it, and what I got wrong and how, and tell me how Erin is doing (I’m no pediatrician, those moony-eyed slackers, but unless I’m mistaken, she’s probably to the stage where she’s talking your ear off but only about two-thirds of what she says makes any sense). I want to know what you ate for your first meal back. I want to know what you’re reading. I want to know how happy you are, and why. So tell me, why don’t you.
I miss you already. Though I won’t miss you stealing my socks. I hope Peg doesn’t make you shave. Give her and Erin my best.
I’d give you my best, but I think you accidentally packed it in your duffel on your way out. God knows I can’t find it anywhere.
Second best,
Hawkeye
///
“Good news?” Peg asked.
“Hmm,” BJ said, leaning against the sink. “Just a letter.”
Peg raised a brow, hanging her keys on the hook by the fridge. “And is there anything of note in the letter?”
“Mm,” BJ said, tilting his head.
“The return address is Crabapple Cove,” Peg said. “That’s where the Pierces live.”
“Yep.”
“So?” Peg asked, both brows raised. “Anything of note?”
“Ah.” BJ folded the letter, and put it back in his pocket. “No. Not really. Just the usual. Talking a lot, not saying anything.”
“Right.” Peg dragged a stepstool over to the counter, and reached up to bring down a heavy-looking pan.
“I could have reached that for you,” BJ said. “You don’t have to—I’m taller. I can get things down if you need them.”
“Right,” Peg said again, with different intonation. She seemed startled. “That’s true.”
BJ leaned against the sink for a few more beats. “Do you need any help in here?”
Peg set the pan on the stove, and bent to retrieve something from a low cabinet. “No. I think I’ve got it all sorted.”
“Okay.” BJ looked around. The house had been painted. The walls were sage, allegedly. He thought they looked olive. “I think I’m going to go over a few things with Erin again. Just a couple double-checks.”
“Honey, come on,” Peg said, setting down a stick of cold butter with a clatter. “Give it a rest, why don’t you? She’s fine.”
“No, no, I know,” BJ said. “I’m not saying she isn’t. It just makes me feel better to see it myself.”
“If you keep testing her, she’s just gonna memorize the answers. And then where will you be? No benchmark, that’s where.”
“It’s not that kind of test,” BJ said. “It’s developmental psychology. Simple stuff. Play with a purpose, like, can she copy the line I’m drawing, can she name an animal I point at, can she identify the concept of self and other, can she follow two- or three-step instructions like ‘put the block here and then bring me the stuffed lion.’ It’s testing information parsing, language facility, memory, spatial reasoning.”
“She’s fine,” Peg said, slicing off a tablespoon of butter with a butcher’s knife. “I don’t know why you’re so convinced she’s going to backslide a year out of nowhere. She’s exactly where she needs to be. She’s maybe even ahead, according to Dr. Nguyen. She’s never even been ill. She’s the queen of well-baby visits.”
“If I had been around, you wouldn’t have needed to take her anywhere,” BJ said, staring at the table. It was new, too, in a modern style, with inbent steel legs. He didn’t like it. It was too small. He always felt pushed out, when the three of them tried to eat there together. “I could have handled all that.”
“You’re a surgeon, not a pediatrician.”
“Pediatricians are C students,” BJ said darkly. “All of them.”
Peg turned the faucet on. “You’re biased. I would have wanted to take her to see a professional, even if you had been here.”
“See, I don’t understand that. I’m a professional, this is something I can do. I trained for this. There’s no reason to go seeing other doctors behind my back—”
“Behind your back?” Peg asked, shutting the faucet off hard. She turned back to the stove, her yellow skirt swirling. It was the first time he’d seen her in a skirt since he’d been back. She’d started to favor trousers while he’d been away, evidently. “BJ, it was a series of checkups. Why are you acting like a visit to the pediatrician is high infidelity?”
BJ shrugged, snapping over into amiability. There was no problem in the world one couldn’t solve by smiling until it went away. “You’re right. I’m still going to check up on her, though. She’s been awfully quiet.”
Peg relaxed, shoulders lowering—only then did BJ notice she’d been tense. “Sure, honey. Dinner in an hour.”
BJ thought about patting her hand, decided it would be a strange thing to do, and then headed upstairs.
///
“Erin, sweetie,” he said, cross-legged on the floor of his daughter’s bedroom.
Erin looked up at him, eyes wide. She was still getting used to his presence. Her eyes were big and blue, her blonde hair wispy and impossibly fine. Peg had styled it into a small spike that stuck straight up from her head using some sort of tiny rubber band.
“Uh?” Erin asked, holding a block. She swayed slightly in place, raising the block to touch the bottom of her chin, before launching it away with a two-hand toss.
“Let’s play a game,” BJ said, sliding a piece of paper and a pack of crayons towards her. “I’m going to draw something, and then you get to copy me.”
Erin picked up the crayons, grasping clumsily inside the box.
“Which color do you want, sweetheart?”
Erin went on scrabbling at the box. “Bue.”
BJ reached over and gently pulled out a blue crayon. “How about this one?”
Erin considered it carefully.
“Blue?” BJ asked again.
“Yeah,” Erin confirmed, and took the crayon.
“Okay,” BJ said, grabbing a red crayon for himself. He paused. “Erin?”
“Yes,” Erin said.
“What color is this?” He held the crayon up between two fingers.
“Red,” Erin said immediately.
BJ grinned, sitting back. He held up a yellow crayon. “How about this one?”
“Yellow,” Erin said, or something like it, with a few more vowel sounds than necessary.
BJ grinned, casting his gaze briefly towards the ceiling. He ducked his head and considered Erin carefully. It was strange to see her, still, two years older than she’d been before he left. Photos were no substitute for the real thing. Amazing, the way time moved everywhere, all the time. He could already tell she would have his nose. And probably his height. “You are so, so smart,” he told her. “You know, most kids can’t reliably identify colors until thirty-six months? You’re a genius. I can’t wait for—”
He broke off, startled to realize he was about to say something about Hawkeye getting home. But Hawkeye no longer lived with him. Hawkeye might not meet Erin for several months—maybe years, if he went out to visit Hawkeye, instead of the other way around. How odd it was going to be, having to adjust to that distance. His best friend thousands of miles away, instead of across the room. No more casual conversation, no more building off each others’ jokes—everything would have to be formal, intentional, set down in a letter. Nothing spontaneous, real, extemporaneous. God, that would be hard—Hawkeye was so vividly alive. It was painful to imagine only ever conversing with him on paper.
Erin placed crayon to paper and started scribbling with abandon.
“That’s beautiful,” BJ said, brushing off melancholy. He’d see Hawkeye soon enough. After all, he’d promised. “Now, do you think you can do this?” He drew a straight red line down his own paper, slow and with great care to show her how his hand moved.
“Like, like,” Erin said, stopping the scribbling. She viewed BJ’s paper closely.
BJ repeated the action, adding a second line to his paper.
Erin imitated him, and then looked at his face.
BJ beamed. “Oh, wonderful. Perfect. Surgical precision.”
///
After he finished watching the late-night newscast, BJ crept upstairs, trying to be careful not to make the stairs creak. The house was unfamiliar to him—he couldn’t remember which steps to avoid.
He headed to the washroom and brushed his teeth, considering himself in the mirror. He still looked tired. Shaving his mustache off had made him look a little younger, at least, but he wasn’t sure he liked it. He was split. He looked how he had before he left. Like nothing had changed. But then, he didn’t look anything like he looked before he’d left Hawkeye.
Korea, he internally corrected himself. He patted the pocket of his robe, where he’d transferred Hawkeye’s letter.
He spit, rinsed his mouth, and put his toothbrush away. He flicked the lights off. Peg had had somebody install new light switch plates to match the olive—sage, he politely reminded himself—décor. He realized he’d left a fingerprint behind, and quickly balled the sleeve of his robe up, polishing the escutcheon with the cloth-covered heel of his hand. He felt guilty, and then confused, and then decided to ignore both feelings in favor of going to bed.
BJ stretched lightly as he opened the door to the master bedroom, and then paused. The lamp was on, but had been covered with some sort of pink cloth. Candles burned low on the nightstand, and the dresser. Peg was sitting primly on the edge of the bed, her legs crossed neatly. She was wearing something pale green, gauzy, and incredibly translucent.
I don’t remember that outfit, BJ thought, before redirecting his eyes to the ceiling. He was, absurdly, blushing. “Sorry! I’ll, uh—”
Peg pulled a pillow down from the head of the bed and held it to her chest, crossing her arms over it. “No, I’m sorry. I just thought, now that you’re settled in, you might want to…?”
“No. Yes, I mean.”
“Oh.” Peg lowered the pillow she’d been holding slightly.
BJ coughed, just to have something to do.
“BJ?”
“I’ve got to write a letter,” he lied.
Peg raised her eyebrows. “A letter? Now?”
“Mm. Yeah,” BJ said, backing towards the door.
“You know, I’m your wife. You’re allowed to look at me.”
“I know.”
Peg dropped a hand to the bed, picking at the duvet. “Is it me?”
“What?”
“Are you not attracted to me anymore?” Peg asked, face falling. “BJ, I don’t understand. It’s been years. Years. I missed you. I thought you missed me. Us.”
“I do—did,” BJ corrected. “I’m happy to be back. I just—I’m sorry. I’m tired, I’ve got this headache. I keep—I’ve got to write a letter.” He backed out of the room and walked swiftly to the office. He set a few of Peg’s files aside, and brought out Hawkeye’s letter. Mr. Married , Hawkeye had called him. Tell me all about it .
Well, it wasn’t a lie if he made it true, wasn’t that the case? Now he had a letter to write, and all was well.
BJ tapped a pen against a blank sheet of paper.
Hawkeye:
I miss you too. I’m not sure I’ve settled in yet, either.
He wadded up the paper and threw it away.
Hi, Hawk. I’m back home. Erin’s perfect. She can draw straight lines now, and can name colors accurately, months ahead of schedule. She’s brilliant. I think that she
He threw that one away, too.
Hawk,
I hope you’re feeling more at home than
Toss.
Hawk: Hope Crabapple Cove is treating you well. How’s the weather? Good? Bad?
BJ groaned lowly, rubbing at a headache growing between his eyes. He never knew how to write with Hawkeye. Speaking to the man in person was so easy. Being around him was simple as blinking. Or it was for BJ, anyway. As near as he could tell, Hawkeye seemed to have some sort of fundamental semi-secret belief that he was difficult to love, or hard to be around for very long, which had never made much sense to BJ, who had started missing him like a limb the second his helicopter had taken off. He thought it maybe had something to do with Carlye, who apparently had had issues with the aforementioned loving-of-and-living-with Hawkeye even outside of a warzone, which also made very little sense to BJ. Hawkeye was a catch. If Hawkeye were a woman, he would have married the man himself.
The woman, he meant. And only if BJ hadn’t already been married. After all, Hawkeye was smart, and saw people. Not how they wanted people to see them, but how they actually were. And he was funny. Quick. He knew how to talk about important things, and beautiful things. He could stand on a table and sing every Broadway hit ever penned and then sing the praises of every painter he’d ever loved and tell a fellow just where their best works hung in the Met, and then start all over railing against the war and War, capital-W, and still have enough energy afterwards to spin BJ a story involving the entire female cast of Bringing Up Baby that always ended up somewhere between frustrating and funny, no matter how heavy it started off. He would have made somebody a great wife, if he hadn’t been a man.
Hawkeye was a slob, admittedly, though surely there were a few women who weren’t natural homemakers. Hawkeye would’ve been one such girl, BJ figured. Too busy following her husband around, cracking jokes at him over the kitchen table while bread turned to charcoal in the toaster to think about things like laundry. She’d be tomboyish. Sort of odd and inappropriately rakish. A little too gawky to be classically pretty, too flat to be a bombshell, her laugh too goose-like to be truly elegant, with her dresses permanently rumpled. But she’d be almost unbearably endearing. Always endearing, that was his Hawkeye.
BJ smiled, chuffed at the clarity of the image. Hawkeye was already sort of pretty, if one thought about it. And kind of girlishly shaped, with a feminine set to his hips and a touch of pectoral softness, before he’d become so frighteningly thin at the end. It didn’t take much imagination to think of him as a her. How he would look with his hair grown out, height-wise a little shorter—or, no, the same height, but in heels—smiling across a room at BJ. Asking him to do up the back of his dress. Sprawled on the edge of a bed, smug, wearing something sheer and delicate and the farthest shade from olive possible. Funny to imagine, a thing like that.
Or if BJ had been a woman, maybe he could have been the one to convince Hawkeye to finally settle down. They’d’ve met the same way, in Korea, BJ recognizing the bastardized Kipling quote, Hawkeye looking him over and then seeing him, and he would have looked longer, then, too, with BJ pretty and neat and blonde in the summer sun. He wondered if Hawkeye would have flirted with him, if BJ had been a new nurse. If Hawkeye would have used the moves BJ had seen him try on nearly every nurse who caught his attention, the soft touch on the lower back, backing him up against a post or a wall of some sort, a hand flat against the wall by his head, leaning in, flicking his gaze down to BJ’s lips, and then back up, a smile that said exactly what he wanted to do where and for what duration, which if BJ was a nurse he would have found terribly attractive coming from a handsome doctor like Hawkeye, broad-shouldered yet alluringly wiry, his jet hair only just beginning to suggest a regal silvering at the temples—maybe then they’d be together now, instead of a country apart.
BJ frowned, unnerved, and then put the thought away. He jounced his knee. The point was, everything about being around Hawkeye was good, and natural, except writing to the man, which was almost impossible. It only made sense for there to be some sort of downside, though. Everything good came as a package deal with something awful. That was just life.
He reread Hawkeye’s letter, lingering over the line where Hawkeye admitted to missing him.
He turned the letter over. Hawkeye’s handwriting was small and atrocious and covered the paper he’d sent front and back. The letter ended with a nearly-unreadable scribble that translated on careful inspection to a cursive ‘Hawkeye.’ He traced over the signature. He hadn’t seen Hawkeye sign this version of his name very frequently. Most of the time Hawkeye had to sign B. F. Pierce, or military administrators got annoyed and sent people to poke around and post passive aggressive reminders about decorum and appropriate paperwork protocol on the bulletin board. Seeing the way Hawkeye signed Hawkeye felt secret and special. Knowing that Hawkeye had held a pen and traced the shape of both his own name and BJ’s on a paper, thousands of miles away, and then sent it to BJ—they had both touched this paper—that was special, too. BJ thumbed across Hawkeye’s signature again, trying to imagine Hawkeye holding the letter in Maine while thinking about BJ holding it in California. He sighed deeply as his chest twinged, and then endeavored to stop thinking about Hawkeye so much when his wife was waiting in the other room in a negligee, for Christ’s sake.
BJ pushed the stationary aside. He dug around in the desk drawers, and came up with a slightly battered old postcard. The front was a pretty picture of Mount Tamalpais. The back was blank.
Hawk, BJ wrote, Things are great. -BJ
BJ nodded decisively, and blew on the postcard to dry the ink.
He’d write a longer, better letter tomorrow. He just couldn’t wait to tell Hawkeye hello.