Last Bus to Clarksville
By: dharmamonkey
Rating: T
Disclaimer: I don't own Bones. I am, however, interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply.
A/N: FYI, please note that in the monkeyverse, Booth's mother died when he was a child (regardless of what bizarre events the show's writers allowed to take place in Season 8) and Booth's dad didn't fly fighter jets—he flew helicopters. I know, I know. Just work with me, okay? :-)
Now that that's clear, it's time to wish my friend and fellow writer JazzyProz a very happy birthday. I wasn't sure what to give her for her birthday, but after driving through some of the more rural parts of Lake County, Florida a few weeks ago, I was inspired to write this story. I figure Jazzy wouldn't mind a little dose of a very young soldier!Booth in a Dress Green Class A Uniform for her birthday... :-)
They say your life can change in an instant. Sometimes that's true. The journey from college dropout to Army recruit was no longer than the stroke of a pen.
The journey from Army recruit to soldier was, well, quite a bit longer.
I signed my enlistment papers at the Army recruiting station across the street from Temple University, a half-hour SEPTA subway ride from my dorm at La Salle University, two weeks before the end of the second semester of my freshman year. I was eyeballing final exams and knew that, having lost my basketball scholarship, a federal work-study job was only going to go so far and I was going to have to borrow most of the money to cover my last three years of college tuition.
The idea of starting out life $40,000 in the hole scared the daylights out of me, and at the time, I just couldn't see how I was going to be able to make the math work for me. In the '60s, '70s and even into the early '80s, it was possible to work your way through college, but by May 1989, when I was facing the end of my freshman year, the supply of federal financial aid for college students had faded to a trickle, leaving little other than Stafford subsidized student loans. My dad, for all his faults—and, trust me, there were many—worked his fingers to the bone so he never owed a nickel to anybody. The idea of borrowing money—even for my own education—literally turned my stomach.
So I enlisted.
I reported to the Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) at Schuylkill Arsenal on Grays Ferry Avenue on June 21, 1989. When I showed up at the MEPS station that morning, the Cold War was still very much alive. By the time I graduated from the Infantry School at Fort Benning fourteen weeks later, the Berlin Wall had been reduced to a symbol of Communist failure as East Germans fled west across the country's unprotected borders with Czechoslovakia and Hungary. It was an amazing thing to watch—wonderful and yet kind of unnerving in a way—as the world changed overnight.
It was no small wonder then that my request (hidden somewhere in the back of my enlistment contract) to be posted with the Berlin Brigade was ignored. Shortly before graduating from the Infantry School, I found out I was being sent instead to Fort Campbell, Kentucky where I was to be assigned to the 101st Airborne Division's 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment. I wasn't exactly devastated about being assigned to the 101st (because it meant that I'd get to go to Air Assault School and learn to rappel out of a helicopter, which to a nineteen year-old sounded like pretty much the coolest thing ever) but it was weird and ironic that, out of all the places that the Army could have sent me, they decided to send me to Fort Campbell.
I was born at Fort Campbell.
My earliest childhood memories are of being pushed on a tree-swing my father set up in the backyard of our tiny little duplex in base housing where my father was a helicopter pilot in the 101st Aviation Battalion. I was born at the base hospital less than two months after Dad shipped off for his first tour in Vietnam. We left Fort Campbell and moved to my mom's hometown of Pittsburgh when my dad was discharged as part of the Army's post-war reduction in force (RIF) after the fall of Saigon.
I was set to begin my military career at the same base where I was born and where my dad's career ended. The idea struck me as so weird that I was still struggling to get my head around it as I stepped onto that Greyhound bus at the station in Columbus, Georgia.
The bus was full of soldiers—most of them, like me, fresh out of basic training—heading from Fort Benning to Atlanta, where we would all be changing to different buses that would take us to our respective duty stations: Fort Stewart (near Savannah), Fort Hood (Texas), Fort Drum (New York), Fort Carson (Colorado) and, of course, Fort Campbell, which was located right on the border between Kentucky and Tennessee.
I stood there at the top of the steps in my dark green Class A uniform, surveyed the three empty seats on the bus, and decided to go with the one closest to the front. I peeled off my wedge-shaped garrison cap and tucked it into the waistband of my trousers, placed my zippered black vinyl document holder (which held multiple copies of my orders and other Army paperwork) into the overhead rack and sat down in the open aisle seat next to a blond-haired private. I slipped my paperback into the seatback pocket in front of me and looked over at my seatmate.
"Hey," I said to him with a slight jerk of my chin. I saw his eyes immediately swivel to my sleeve, where I wore a chevron and one rocker stripe denoting my rank of Private First Class. He was, like all but one of the other guys on the bus, a one-chevron Private. Although I didn't have command authority, I outranked him, and after fourteen weeks of having drill sergeants and drill corporals breathing down our necks, we were each acutely aware of where we sat on the Army's totem pole.
"Hey," he replied, his eyes narrowing a little bit before he turned away and looked out the window to watch the bus driver help another uniformed soldier load his stuffed green duffel bag into the cargo compartment. I couldn't tell from that one syllable whether he was annoyed that I took the seat or not, but I didn't sense he was going to argue.
I shrugged, began to reach for my paperback but quickly decided to leave it where it was, then leaned back in my seat, exhaling a long breath. Here we go, I thought. It's really happening. By the next morning, I would be in-processing at Fort Campbell and sleeping that night in the barracks with my new unit. I was no longer a mere recruit. I was a soldier.
I couldn't help but smile at the idea of it, though with a twinge of bittersweetness, knowing that not only had losing my scholarship meant the end of my collegiate athletic career, but it forced me to give up all of the other things that I'd come to enjoy about college.
Shrugging away the thought, I put my hands on the thighs of my wool-blend uniform slacks, closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I'm a soldier now, I told myself. Just like my dad. Just like Pops. Just like Pops' dad. I'm a Booth, and I'm serving my country. I opened my eyes and looked down at the insignia on my chest: a rainbow-striped Army Service Ribbon denoting my completion of basic training, my Expert badge with clasps denoting Rifle and Pistol, and a Sharpshooter badge with clasps for Grenade and Machine Gun. I was going to be a good soldier, and maybe at some point, after serving my country, I'd make my way back to school to finish my degree. I felt a rattle beneath my feet as the bus driver started the engine and disengaged the air brakes, and after a moment the bus began to roll forward. Onwards and upwards, I told myself as I took a deep breath.
As soon as the bus pulled out of the Columbus station, I leaned my head back, crossed my arms, stretched my legs out in front of me, and closed my eyes. I was well on my way to enjoying a pleasant mid-morning nap when I felt a soft nudge against my elbow. Startled, I grunted and opened one eye to find my seat mate looking at me with a sheepish, apologetic grin. I sighed, turning my head to scowl a little at him for a second before glancing at his name badge: BUCKLEY.
"So, uhh, where ya headin' ta?" he asked me, his blond eyebrows arching high over his light blue eyes. It actually looked a little strange, the way his blond brows contrasted against his brown face, which was tanned with the kind of tan a guy with his coloring would have only after spending month after month, year after year working in the sun.
"Fort Campbell," I told him. "You?"
Buckley grinned. "Same," he said. "1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry. What about you?"
"3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry," I said with a smile, remembering the rush I felt when I read my unit designation off the paper the drill sergeant handed me the day they gave us our post-AIT assignments. Something about reading those letters—3rd Bn, 187th Inf Rgt on my Permanent Change of Station (PCS) order made all of it seem so suddenly and completely real—it literally sent a chill down my spine and made my ears flush hot with excitement.
"Huh," he grunted. He had a deeper voice than I did—the kind that was deep enough that, if it weren't for the fact that he had a sticky, twangy redneck drawl, would have made him perfect for the bass part of a doo-wop act. He had a sun-faded tattoo (a pair of crossed sabres and a skull with an eye-patch with "Rebel" written underneath in cursive letters) on his bicep that I remember seeing during some of the PT runs. Between the tanned skin, that sun-faded tattoo and his deep, gravelly voice, I had no clue how old he was.
"Yeah," I said a bit absently at first. "I'm pretty fired up about it. Did some reading up at the library—"
"Library?" Buckley cut in, cocking a puzzled eyebrow.
I blinked. "Umm, yeah," I laughed. "You didn't know there was a library at Benning?"
He frowned a little and looked down at his lap, clearly hurt by my response, and I suddenly felt like a little bit of a jackass.
"Yeah, so anyway," I said, trying to change the subject so I wouldn't feel like an asshole any longer than I needed to. "I looked 'em up—my new battalion, you know—and it turns out they were the most decorated battalion in the whole Vietnam war: two Valorous Unit Awards and two Presidential Unit Citations."
The frown faded from his face and he scratched his chin, which was already forming a tiny bit of blond stubble even though we'd all shaved at 0-dark-early that morning before donning our Class-A's and heading to the bus station. Shit, I thought to myself. His beard grows in faster than mine does. Poor bastard.
"I wonder if my battalion has a cool history," he said.
I grinned. "Well," I mused. "If I remember right from the book I just finished reading about the airborne assault at Arnhem...you know, during World War II?" Pops had given me a copy of Cornelius Ryan's A Bridge Too Far to keep me occupied in those tiny moments of spare time I found myself with while I was going through training at Benning. "1st of 502nd was part of the D-Day airborne drops and a major element of the 101st's order of battle during Operation Market Garden in '44. So, yeah, that battalion has a pretty storied history, too." I saw him shrug and bite back a smile, then nudged him with my elbow. "101st's a pretty bad-ass unit all-around."
"Yeah," he said, then fell quiet again. After a minute, he turned to me and said, "Where're ya from?"
There were forty guys in my basic training platoon so, while I obviously recognized him and knew his name, I didn't know him well. At Benning, I hung out with the guys on my end of the barracks, and in particular with a couple of guys from New York and Boston—city kids like me who liked baseball, muscle cars and punk rock. Buckley seemed to pal around with a guy from Texas named McLaughlin (I only know he was from Texas because all the guys called him "Tex") and a kid from the Midwest (Iowa, I think) named Larry Mullen (whose name I still remember because it's the same as the drummer from U2).
"Philadelphia," I told him. "South Philly, actually." I'm not sure why I corrected myself like that since Buckley probably didn't know where Philly was in reference to Harrisburg or Baltimore or Trenton or Dover, never mind the Schuylkill River or South Street. "What about you, Buckley?" I asked with a little grunt.
"Buck," he grunted back, correcting me with a crooked-toothed grin. "Just call me Buck."
"Okay," I said with a grin. The guy seemed like a redneck poster boy, and a nickname like "Buck" was perfect—the cherry on top.
He was obviously from the South but I wasn't sure where he was from, specifically. I sure as hell wasn't able to tell from his accent. I remember thinking he was maybe from Mississippi or Alabama, but I don't recall why I even thought that. I'd made a couple of trips to Virginia for out-of-conference basketball games and a preseason game in Miami as part of the NIT Season Tip-off tournament I played in while I was at La Salle. Other than that (and living at Fort Campbell when I was a toddler, but that doesn't really count), the farthest south I'd ever been before going to Basic Training was Ocean City, Maryland. All Southerners basically sounded the same to me.
If we were going to be traveling together, I wanted to know a little something about him. "So, uhh..."
"I'm from Florida," he said, averting his eyes and scratching his trouser leg distractedly.
That surprised me. He didn't seem like the kind of guy I imagined living in Florida. To me as a Philly kid, Florida was Disney World, chicks in bikinis roller-skating past Cuban cafes in South Beach, and Spring Break beer funnels at Daytona Beach.
"A beach bum, huh?"
Buck snorted. "Fuck no," he said. "Groveland's an hour and a half from the closest beach."
I quirked a brow. "Groveland?" I coughed.
My seat mate shot me a strange look. "Yeah," he said. "Groveland, like orange groves." He paused and smirked. "Ya do know that oranges grow on trees, right?"
"Yeah, I think I read that somewhere," I retorted with a roll of my eyes. "I guess I just didn't...whatever...where's Groveland?"
Buck grinned again, flashing his crooked, nicotine-stained teeth and closing one eye as he thought about it. "It's off State Highway 50 in Lake County, 'bout an hour west of Orlando." I nodded. The Orlando part made sense, but the rest of it was more or less meaningless to me. "Maybe, ehh, I dunno, an hour and a half northeast of Tampa. Smack dab in the middle of the state." I suppose I should have figured as much, being from Pennsylvania and a student of military history, but it always surprised me to find that there was a lot more to a place than the famous bits everyone knows about. "It's a small town. Area's mostly orange groves and cattle ranches."
I never thought about Florida having farms or ranches. I'm not sure why. I mean, I knew that Florida's big crop was oranges (I wasn't that ignorant), but cattle ranches? That surprised me. I sat there and thought about it, then remembered that the movie Cool Hand Luke took place in Florida, then told myself that, if that was the part of Florida Buck was from, I'd want to get the hell out of there, too.
As another silence fell between us, I continued to sit there in my nap-ready position (legs extended, arms crossed as I slid my ass forward to get as close to a reclining position as I could in a non-reclining seat) but I didn't close my eyes. I smirked to myself and looked down at the paperback novel I'd stuffed into the seat-back pocket and wondered if my seatmate was going to keep talking or if I'd have a chance to either nap or read before we got to Atlanta and changed buses. That's when it occurred to me that, since he was going up to Fort Campbell, too, he'd be riding with me the whole way. I reached into my uniform coat pocket and fished out the bus tickets/transfers and thumbed through them. In addition to the stub for the two-hour Columbus-to-Atlanta leg, I had transfer tickets for Atlanta-to-Chattanooga, Chattanooga-to-Nashville, and Nashville-to-Clarksville, and it seemed that Buck was going to be with me the whole way.
Buck's burst of chattiness did fade and we both fell asleep soon after. The whoosh of the bus air brakes woke me up as we pulled up alongside the curb at the Greyhound station in Atlanta. I nudged Buck awake and we gathered up our gear and, after grabbing a cup of bus-station coffee (which was reputedly better than the crappy Army coffee at Benning that we had been forbidden from drinking during Basic and AIT), we humped our bags over to the platform to catch the bus to Chattanooga.
About a half hour after the bus pulled out of Atlanta, it made a stop at Marietta, where it dropped off a couple of folks and picked a few others up, then rolled back onto Interstate 75 north to Chattanooga, where we were due to arrive in the early afternoon. Buck was asleep again, so I reached for my paperback. I opened up the book (Ken Follett's newest novel, Pillars of the Earth) and pulled out the photograph I'd been using as a bookmark. I closed the book and held up the photo, swiping my thumb across my girl's chin as if by doing that to the photo I could actually somehow feel her skin.
"Who's 'at?" Buck asked me, his eyes squinting then quickly widening as he did a doubletake at the beautiful, doe-eyed face smiling back at me between my fingers. "I mean, uhh, wow."
I looked at him for a second, unsure of whether his surprise was because of how pretty she was or the color of her skin.
"That's Camille," I told him, my jaw somewhat tense and my voice a little pinched as I waited for my redneck seatmate to make some kind of smartass comment about black girls while resolving to punch him in the nuts in the men's room when we got to Chattanooga if he said a single fucking word that even sounded racist.
"Man, she's pretty," he said with a smile, the soft warmth in his voice suddenly leaving me feeling like an idiot for having assumed the worst of him. "Where's she live?" he asked me, then gestured for me to hand him the picture.
After second of hesitation, I handed him the photo. "Cam went back to New York," I told him. "The Bronx, you know—that's where she's from. I met her at college, but after I, uhh…" I rolled my lips together and sighed, shrugging away the niggling murmur in the back of my head that whispered that I'd made a mistake pulling the plug on it all. "After I told her I was gonna quit and join the Army, she transferred to Fordham up in the Bronx."
Buckley thought about that for a minute, then handed the photo back to me. I looked at it and my chest ached as I thought about our last night together before I shipped off to Basic. Cam cooked me a big spaghetti dinner ("You'll need all the energy you can get, big guy," she told me with a smile, "'cause you know they're gonna pound the crap out of you at boot camp") and then we sat on her couch to watch TV. After a few minutes, it was obvious we weren't really interested in watching anything. 21 Jump Street and Alien Nation droned on, ignored, in the background as we made love, first on her sofa and then again in her bedroom as the neon light outside her window flickered back at us, making her sweat-slicked mahogany skin glow a gorgeous orangish-pink as those fabulously curvy hips of hers rode me into sweet oblivion. I remembered kissing her forehead and wiping the tears off her cheeks with my thumb as she lay against my chest. "It's not fair, Seeley," she said, her voice cracking as she stroked my chest. "I know, baby," I told her. "I know."
"Ya miss her," he said gently, stating what was probably written as plain as day on my face. Buck scratched the back of his head and looked at the paperback I still held against my thigh, then asked, "So, you went to college?"
"Only for a year," I said quickly, though I'm not sure why. "I was at La Salle—it's a, uhh, Catholic college in Philadelphia. I had a basketball scholarship, but I blew out my shoulder last fall, and though the docs got my rotator cuff fixed and all, my jump shot was never quite the same after that. My timing was messed up and my quickness was just …" My voice trailed off as I saw a flash of sadness flicker in his light blue eyes. "I dunno. The timing was never quite right after that. I lost my scholarship. I didn't have the dough to pay private school tuition without a scholarship and I didn't want to be up to my eyeballs in student loan debt, so…"
Buck looked down at his lap and cracked his knuckles loudly. His hands were big and strong, like mine, but the tanned skin was dry and rough, and it made his hands look like they were ten years older than he was. He extended his fingers and cracked his knuckles again, and that's when I noticed his wedding band.
"I know what ya mean," he said. "My father-in-law Julio and my mother-in-law Lupe each work two jobs. He actually worked three when his kids were young and Lupe had to stay at home with them, but..."
He fell silent for a minute, which would have puzzled or even bothered me but I was so surprised by the revelation that his wife was Hispanic that for a minute, I was too busy thinking about who he was and where he came from to think about why he'd gone quiet on me.
Buck was sitting there, rotating his wedding band around his finger by swiping the underside of it with his thumb, when the bus driver came on the intercom and asked who was changing buses in Chattanooga. There were eight passengers on the bus—me, Buckley, three other soldiers and three civilians—and it was quickly determined that everyone had long enough layovers in Chattanooga to permit the bus to make a quick detour to grab a late lunch at a place recommended by the driver, a beefy black man with a deep voice and a belly big enough to convince me that the guy knew his way around every greasy spoon between Miami and Detroit.
Fact was, I was damn near starving. I was already pretty fit before I enlisted, but by the time I was done with AIT, I was more or less solid muscle and could polish off a large pizza by myself and still have room for dessert. It only took one growl of my stomach to convince me that our beer-bellied bus driver was the returned Messiah sent back to save hungry soldiers from starvation en route to their new duty station.
The bus rolled up to a red brick building with a steel roof and a sign out front that read "Uncle Cyrus's Chicken." The driver, who Buck whispered looked a little bit like a Cyrus himself, threw the bus into park, set the air brakes and jogged off that bus as fast as his short, thick legs could carry him.
The place specialized in fried chicken. That's basically what they served: fried chicken and fried catfish, served with two sides. I ordered a three piece white meat plate with fries, mac and cheese and a side of gravy (one of the guys at Benning introduced me to the delicious decadence of dipping French fries into brown gravy), then made my way back to the pair of tables in the back of the restaurant where the driver and the other passengers were. I took off my uniform jacket and draped it over the back of my chair, then sat down next to Buck.
"This is gonna be awesome," I told him, my voice just a touch louder than a whisper as I waggled my brows and rubbed my hands together. "Back in Philly, the diviest, scrungiest places are the ones with the best food. Pizza, cheesesteaks, gyros, whatever—if it's got plastic covering the tables and metal chairs with vinyl cushions, you know the food's gonna be great. If they only take cash, even better. Hell, the best pizza joint in my neighborhood back in Philly only took cash." I nudged him in the arm with my elbow and said, "It's probably a front for a mob money-laundering operation, but the pizza was the fuckin' nads, so nobody really gave a crap."
I looked up at him, expecting a smile but instead saw a vacant look sweep across his face. "I worked in a place just like this, right before I went in," he told me, his voice distant and wistful.
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah," Buck said, crossing his arms in front of him and leaning over the table. He'd taken his uniform jacket off, too, rolled up his sleeves and tucked his black necktie into his shirt. "I met Isabel at the plant—the Indian Hills plant." I must have shot him a scrunch-browed look of confusion, so he rolled his eyes a little and explained. "It's a, uhhh, citrus processing plant, ya know? The juice oranges come in, and they turn 'em into juice concentrate and pulp, which they use for marmalades and shit, right?"
I took a long drink of my Coke (I wanted iced tea but they only had sweet tea, which I didn't even know existed before I went to Benning but quickly learned I couldn't stand) and nodded. "Yeah, okay, alright, I get it. So?"
Buck laughed at me and I realized then that I probably came across as a cartoon of a snarky Yankee kid from the big city as much as he seemed like a stereotypical redneck.
"So, yeah, anyway, they ran three shifts there—seven to three, three to eleven, and eleven to seven, right?" He sighed, but didn't wait for me to respond. "There was a freeze in early March," he explained. "It wiped out a quarter of the crop that year. Came on quick, too quick for them to hose down the trees so the fruit'd get that protective layer of ice on 'em. It just...came on too damn quick, basically. Warmed up a couple days later, but it was too late for the fruit. Froze 'em right on the branches. With a quarter of the crop gone, there wasn't enough crop to supply the plant with three shifts worth of fruit to process. They cut a shift, ya know? Went down to two shifts. I got laid off."
Although it was a completely different business in a very different place, I knew what it was like for folks when a plant shut down or downsized. I thought back to the middle of my freshman year of high school when my best friend, Jamie Mulrooney, came to hockey practice and told me his dad had lost his job as a union millwright because Westinghouse was closing its steam turbine manufacturing plant in Lester, about twenty minutes southwest of Philadelphia. Another guy on the team was in the same boat—his dad was some kind of a supervisor at the plant and they were laying everybody off, from the lowest-ranking hourly worker all the way up through management—and I remembered feeling bad for Buck the same way I felt bad for Jamie. Whether it's putting blades on turbine rotors or running a machine that smashes oranges into juice, a job is a job.
"I got let go on a Tuesday," he continued, shaking me out of my memory just as a hazel-eyed girl with her hair braided in corn-rows brought us our lunch baskets. "We found out Isabel was pregnant that Friday."
We dove into our chicken baskets. The chicken was so good—tender and juicy, with a crusty breading with a hint of pepper—that I pretty much inhaled the meat off the bone of both of the breasts and was about to polish off the wing when Buck set down his second gnawed-to-the-bone drumstick and started talking again.
"My wedding was half in Spanish and half in English," he told me with a crooked grin. "Julio and Lupe—my in-laws—they don't speak a lot of English, though they understand a lot more than they let on. They're not real comfortable speaking English in public, so they really only speak English to me and my folks, and in Julio's case, to the foremen he works with on the farms."
"Oh," I said awkwardly. I didn't want to be rude, but I felt compelled to ask the question that was burning in my mind. "So, uhhh, your father-in-law, he's a, uhhh...you know, umm…"
Buck blinked and said, "He's a picker," then took a big bite out of the chicken thigh he held in his hand. "Picks oranges, tangelos, whatever. Takes care of the trees during the summer and picks fruit during the rest of the year."
I just nodded and dunked one of my French fries into the styrofoam tub of brown gravy, then popped it in my mouth, miraculously managing to avoid dripping gravy on my tie in the process. Buck watched me tuck my tie into my light green Army dress shirt as he picked at his coleslaw with a plastic fork.
"After me an' Isabel got married, I knew I had to find another job," he said. "You know, with a baby on the way. There was a place on the south side of Highway 50, between Clermont and Groveland, that did alignments and tire rotations, and I used to play baseball with the guy that owned the place, so I got me a job there. With all the expenses we had from Isabel being pregnant and all, and so we could save up for her not to have to work after the baby was born, I got myself a second job workin' in the back at the Krispy's Chicken a couple miles down the road."
"But—?" I prompted him.
Buck sighed and stabbed at his macaroni and cheese with his plastic fork, stared at the couple of cheesy elbows on his fork for couple of seconds before he frowned and looked back up at me.
"After our son was born," he said, his voice brightening at the word son, "it was obvious we needed somethin' more than what I was gonna be able to do working at the garage and at Krispy's. The plant had a second round of layoffs, and Isabel got let go, just a month after she went back to work. Then Adam came down with a couple of ear infections, and the doctors were talking about putting tubes in his ears, and it was obvious that me workin' two shitty jobs with no benefits while Isabel stayed home with our son just wasn't gonna make ends meet. I was driving between the garage and Krispy's one day and noticed the sign for the Army recruiter in a strip center on the north side of 50."
"And the rest is history, right?"
Buck shrugged and nodded, then glanced at his watch and saw we didn't have much more time before the driver would be herding us back into the bus to go to the Chattanooga Greyhound station. He gave me a smile and tucked into his mac 'n' cheese as I gnawed on my fries and gravy until the driver stood up with a screech of his chair and gestured towards the bus.
We played cards to pass the time during our two-hour layover in Nashville.
After I won the third hand in a row, Buck swept the cards off the table with his big, blond-knuckled mitt, sat back in his chair and shuffled the cards as he cocked his head and gave me a skeptical look.
"What?" I said, draining the last quarter of my lukewarm coffee in a single swallow, then tossed the empty styrofoam cup into the trashcan about four feet away from us. I grinned as the shot went in, banking off the rim of the can before vanishing into the trash, then made a cheering sound under my breath and flashed my brows at Buck, who just rolled his eyes. He shuffled the cards again and began to deal for our umpteenth game of five-card draw, smirking at me as he dealt the last card and set the stack on the table between us.
"Tell me this, Booth," he said, holding his cards up and narrowing his eyes as he frowned briefly at the hand he'd been dealt, then shrugged. "So, if you dropped outta college after a year, how come you came outta AIT as an E-3 and the rest of us came out as E-2s? I thought they only gave ya a bump if you had a degree." He got quiet again as he studied his cards, then said, "I mean, you're smart an' all, but you don't have much more paper to show for it all than I do."
Buck had dropped out of high school his senior year, but after Isabel got pregnant, he not only worked two jobs but finished his GED, which enabled him to enlist even though he didn't actually receive a high school diploma. After spending all day with him on buses and in bus stations, I'd come to realize that, while Buck didn't come from a well-educated background or even a house where people read books, he wasn't dumb. He wanted more from his life—and more for his wife and son—than he had growing up. And he was hopeful that, somehow, the Army would be a way for him to escape the economic quicksand of rural Florida.
He gestured with a jerk of his chin at the Private First Class insignia on my uniform sleeve. I'd unbuttoned my uniform coat and the cuffs of my shirt, loosened my tie and was slouching in the plastic-backed chair in the bus station food court, and as I glanced down at myself, I wondered how badly I'd get reamed if an officer or senior non-commissioned officer walked by and saw me this way.
Who am I kidding? I thought. Like an officer or senior NCO would be caught dead in a fucking bus station at ten o'clock at night.
"Really," he said. "Who'd ya suck off to get promoted to PFC without a degree?"
I rolled my eyes. "Fuck you, pal," I said to him with a grin, peeling two cards out of my hand and setting them on the table with an audible smack. "And just in case you're wondering, I'm definitely not taking a piss next to you next time we hit the latrine, okay?" I whistled to bring his attention back to the cards. "So hit me already."
Buck shook his head and dealt me two more cards and three for himself. "I dunno why you're in such a damn hurry," he said, glancing at his watch. "We've got another fifteen minutes before we can get on the bus. They're not gonna in-process us tonight anyway."
My attempt to improve my hand by dumping a couple of my low cards backfired badly, and I found myself sitting there with a king of spades, jack of spades, queen of clubs, a four of clubs and a three of hearts.
"So," he prompted me.
"So?" I grunted back. "I don't have shit here, so unless you have the shittiest hand ever, I—"
Buck snorted. "I'm not talkin' about your hand, fool," he said. "I wanna know how ya scored an E-3 rank comin' outta Basic."
I set my cards down and rolled my lips together in a firm line as I drew a deep breath. "I was an Eagle Scout."
Buck leaned back in his seat and blinked. "Wow," he said. "Seriously? That's cool as shit." I picked my cards up again, shook my head and sighed, and I could feel him staring at me. "Wait—why'd ya say it like it's a bad thing?"
Suddenly I felt a little faint and dizzy. I fumbled for my coffee, then realized I'd finished it and already thrown away my cup. Setting my cards down on the table again, I looked up at him and swallowed the hard knot that had taken up residence in my throat.
"I got my Eagle Scout when I was fifteen, alright?" I explained. "My dad walked out on us, leaving me and my brother with our grandfather. My mom…" I swallowed again, then the words began to tumble out. "She died. It was a sudden thing—an aneurysm—and though I don't know if Dad beating her up had anything to do with it, after she died, my dad came totally unglued. Totally lost his shit. His drinking got real bad and he started pounding on me and my little brother." I cleared my throat, trying to make it seem like I wasn't feeling like I was about to fall apart telling him all this. I wasn't really sure why I was telling him this stuff—stuff I hadn't told anyone other than Cam—but for whatever reason, I felt safe telling him. "I tried to protect Jared from it all, and took more of the beatings so he got less…"
My friend's mouth had been hanging open a little as I spoke, but when I fell silent again, he closed his buck-toothed mouth and nodded. "How old were you?"
I stared at the cards on the table in front of me, then sighed. "Mom died when I was nine," I said quietly, remembering the morning I had gone into my parents' bedroom and found her asleep, and how I'd tried and tried and tried but couldn't wake her up. "Dad beat the crap out of me for the next couple years, then one day upped and split. Pops—my grandfather—took us in when I was eleven. Moved us to Philadelphia to live with him and Nan."
"I'm sorry," Buck said, his deep voice warm and, in that moment, strangely comforting.
I shook my head and rubbed my hand over my close-trimmed high-and-tight hair, scratching my scalp with my nails as I thought about his original question. "Pops was great," I said, my voice a little clearer and less cracked than it had been just moments before. "But I felt like shit. My own fucking dad up and split town. He didn't give a fuck about us enough to try and get sober. He just fuckin' bailed. I…"
I drummed my fingers on the table as I remembered what it was like when Pops moved us from Pittsburgh to Philly and enrolled us in the local Catholic school there.
"Pops signed me up for the Boy Scouts and the local Peewee hockey league. I threw myself into Scouts and sports. Just to keep myself busy, you know? From having to think about the fact that my brother and I were living with our grandparents because our mom was dead and our dad had high-tailed it to wherever-the-fuck he went. I made Eagle Scout before my sixteenth birthday. After that, I took up another sport, just to fill the time. I was a three-sport letterman at Roman Catholic High School my junior and senior year, and on weekends, when I wasn't playing sports or taking my girlfriend out on dates, I fixed up an old 1970 Chevelle that I found abandoned in an alley off Lombard Street. I didn't want any spare time. If I had spare time and sat around thinking, I'd get depressed, so I made sure I didn't have time to think."
For a minute, neither of us said anything.
Finally, Buck called and we flipped our cards over. He had a king of hearts, a jack of diamonds and not much else. I won the hand with a high card, the king of spades.
"Your hand sucked worse than mine," I said.
Buck grinned. "This time," he said, cocking an eyebrow as he asked, "Wa' me to deal another?"
I was about to answer when I was cut off by the now-familiar male voice making an announcement over the bus station's P.A.
"May I have your attention please," the disembodied voice called out. "Greyhound service for Clarksville, Tennessee, is now boarding passengers at gate number two. Now boarding at gate number two. Welcome Aboard. Have a pleasant trip, and thanks for going Greyhound."
"Time to gear up and move out, buddy," I said with a faint smile and a shrug as I watched Buck gather up the cards, box them up and drop them into the pocket of his uniform coat.
"Guess so," he said, buttoning up his coat before reaching down for his olive drab canvas duffel and slinging it over his shoulder.
"Haa-ooah," I grunted as I heaved my own duffel over one shoulder and tucked my vinyl document holder under my arm along with my paperback, grateful that we still had a little of that crappy bus station coffee buzzing through our veins as we caught the last bus to Clarksville, the last stop on our journey to Fort Campbell.
A/N: So there you have it. JazzyProz, I hope you enjoyed that, my friend. Happy birthday!
I hope the rest of you enjoyed it, too. But don't leave me in the dark. Let me know what you think. Share your thoughts as I've shared mine. Please consider utilizing that conveniently-located box down there and leave a review.
Acknowledgments: Big props to threesquares, fauxmaven and my Army-vet husband (OMG!) for being beta-readers for this story and offering their insights as I crafted this piece. Thanks, ladies and spouse!
* Special note to Dharmasera readers * Chapter 4 of our crossover story "Hand to Hand" (the 9th story in our Bones/Angel crossover series) has posted. It includes a scene with Booth and Brennan in the hospital delivery room after the birth of their daughter. A serious fluff advisory applies to the warm fuzziness in that chapter. You'll smile. You'll laugh. You may even say "squee." We're quite proud of it. So, what are you waiting for? Go, read! And if you're new to the crossover series and don't know where to begin, send me a PM and I'll point the way.