The rain had been coming down in unceasing torrents for what felt like days. Hawkeye was thoroughly sick and tired of the sound, the taste, the feel, the sight, even the smell of it, wet and musty as it seeped into everything. Shifting on the cot, he reached for the pitcher and the ever-present martini glass, but as he poured the gin reminded him of the rain, and he cursed the skies again for depriving him of even that comfort. The idea of drinking something that poured the same way the rain did turned his stomach.
He supposed he could go to the mess tent for coffee, but that involved running through the rain. Damp as it was inside the tent from all the collected moisture in the air, at least nothing was currently dripping on him. He couldn't say the same for Frank's bed—a tiny little hole in the canvas had suddenly gotten bigger. Hawkeye grinned. Childish though it had been to widen that hole, the prospect of Frank coming back in the middle of the night—making his usual entitled racket to make sure they all knew he'd worked a late shift for once—and then lying down on that soaking wet bed made up for a lot of damp and mildew.
The door flew open and BJ strode in, scattering water droplets as he came. Out of reflex Hawkeye dodged out of the way, protesting. Not that he could get any wetter, but the niceties had to be preserved.
"Klinger's building an ark."
"Out of what? Cubits of stale bread?"
"Bedpans." BJ grinned.
"He's a clever man. Think it'll float him home?"
"A few more days of this rain and we can all float home." BJ dropped his wet slicker on the floor.
"As long as we get there." Hawkeye leaned back on the cot and stared upward, only to get a drip of water straight in the eye as a hole spontaneously appeared in the canvas above him. "Ugh!"
Tossing him a towel, BJ sank down on his own cot, opening the tin box where he kept his letters from Peg. "These are all damp. Can't seem to keep the wet out of them. The words are running together."
"You've read them all a dozen times, anyway."
"Yeah, well, I was hoping to get a few dozen more readings out of them before they wore out."
"What's she have to say that you haven't read before?"
"Come on, Hawk."
"No, really. I want to know." Suddenly he did, too, with an urgency that had him sitting up on the edge of his cot. "You could sweet talk and 'aw, shucks' your way into the warm, solid, here arms of any nurse in camp, but you'd rather sit alone on your cot and stare at mildewy letters from one woman who's thousands of miles away. What's the difference? What makes loneliness better than companionship?"
BJ put the lid back on the tin, turning around. Hawkeye could see the glib response that was their stock in trade hovering on his tentmate's lips, but something in Hawkeye's face made him pause and reconsider. "You're serious."
"Yes. Surprisingly very."
"You really don't know what it is that makes one woman so much more special than the others that she's all you can think about?"
Hawkeye was confused by the doubt in BJ's tone. As far as he was aware, he displayed that lack of knowledge on a daily basis. Flaunted it, even. Then he remembered the name—and the face—that he'd tried so very hard to forget all over again. "I know what you're thinking," he admitted. "And maybe … maybe I do know that. But what I don't know is what makes one person—any person—the most important thing in your life. If I knew that … everything would be different. I would be different. So, tell me, Beej. What is it about Peg?"
"I don't know, Hawk. We just fit. She makes me more me, if that's possible. When I'm with her, when I can hear her voice and feel her love and her faith in me, I can do anything. And that's what keeps me going through all the long days of surgery and the nights full of boredom—that I want to go home to her and know that I lived up to all that love and faith." BJ ran his hands over the lid of the box; Hawkeye could practically see Peg standing over his friend's shoulder, giving him that support.
Thoughtfully, he said, "I can see that in you. In Potter, too."
BJ nodded. Then he laughed a little. "Putting it that way, it makes me wonder why guys like you don't crack up more."
"I loved her, you know?"
"I know." BJ didn't seem surprised by the jump in topic. He listened well—it was one of the things Hawkeye most admired about his friend. "But not enough?"
"Not enough for her."
"Enough for any woman?"
Hawkeye shrugged, shaking his head miserably. "How do I know? Maybe out there somewhere is a woman who will want what I have to offer … but will I want to offer it to her?"
"I don't think I can answer that for you, Hawk."
"It's not that I'm afraid." The tone came out too belligerent; BJ grinned, acknowledging the defensiveness. "Really," Hawkeye went on. "I'd like to feel what you feel, what Potter feels, but … Carlye said she didn't want to come in second to my work. And I know I do that. I'm alive in surgery in a way I can't even describe. How can I give that up?"
"Who says you have to?"
Hawkeye had to admire that about BJ. If their positions had been reversed, Hawkeye would have taken his own comments as a challenge, felt the need to defend his passion for the work. But BJ didn't need to prove himself, not to Hawkeye or anyone. Privately, Hawkeye felt his friend lacked a certain intensity, a drive to be the best … but BJ didn't miss that drive, and probably wouldn't have wanted it if he could have it. Sometimes, Hawkeye envied him. "You don't understand," he said now. "When I let a woman get too close, it feels like something's being taken from me, something I need. A focus, a … a … I want to say a devotion. Maybe the way Mulcahy would feel if something got between him and his calling, you know?"
"Surgery is god?" There was a faint smile in BJ's eyes, but a kind one, as well.
"Come on, Beej, you can't deny how it feels to have a kid come in in twenty or a hundred pieces and put all those pieces back together."
"Yeah, it feels good." BJ paused, then nodded more emphatically. "All right, it feels better than good. When it goes well, you feel like you can leap tall buildings in a single bound. I grant you that. But the cost, Hawk! Every time I have that feeling, I know it's because some kid has been plucked from his home and his classroom and stuck in the middle of a combat he wasn't prepared for." In a lower tone, he added, "Sometimes I feel dirty for being proud of my work."
Hawkeye digested that for a minute. He'd never had that particular feeling—in his mind, his job was to fix the mistakes of others, mistakes he had as little power over as did the boys who were wounded—but he could understand it.
"I read Peg's letters and I remember who I was before I came here, the reasons I wanted to be a doctor, the person I want to be when I go home. Who will you be, Hawkeye?"
"I don't know." He got up, pacing the tent, then stopped mid-pace. "Yes, I do. I'll be a doctor. What could be more important?"
"If that's the way you feel …"
"Then Carlye was right. I knew that when she left; I could admit it this time. Not the first time—I was so full of hate that I lost all the good things we'd done for each other. But this time, I could see what she meant. I just … knowing I'm not equipped to offer the right woman what she deserves— It doesn't feel right. Like somehow there's something wrong with me."
"There's nothing wrong with you, Hawk. You're just built differently. For you, the work is what's most important. You couldn't live without it. Take you away from medicine and you wouldn't know what to do with yourself. For me, the medicine is important, yeah, but doesn't touch the home and the family. If it was a choice between what Peg and Erin needed and practicing medicine … I'd do something else. You couldn't make that decision. Carlye knew it; I know it. The other nurses you date, they know it."
Hawkeye wandered toward the still, his hand hovering over the martini glasses, but the constant sound of rain had killed his thirst entirely. He glanced at BJ, his voice low. "An inability to love doesn't make me less than a man?"
BJ didn't offer a joke. He held Hawkeye's gaze and shook his head very seriously. "You don't have an inability to love—you have an infinite capacity for love. You just give it all to your patients, to your work, and what's left over you give to your friends." He paused a moment, searching for the right words. "What would make you less of a man would be to promise a woman all of you and not be able to give it to her. And I've never seen you pretend that way. You are who you are, take you or leave you, and it's that honesty that saves you from being insufferable and makes you human." He stroked the box of letters. "I can't tell you whether someday you're going to look back out of a lonely old age and wish you'd been something else, but I can tell you that you would regret making the wrong promises long before then."
It was impossible to know what to say to that. Hawkeye wanted—needed—to make a joke, anything to lighten the tone and make the weight of all this honesty more bearable, but he couldn't. Not in the face of BJ's thoughtfulness and sincerity. "Thank you, Beej," he said at last, his voice catching in his throat. He sucked in a breath, steadying himself. "Here I always wondered what you saw in me." It could have been a joke in a different tone, but it wasn't, and they both knew it.
"Ply me with enough homemade liquor, I'll be friends with any smart, dedicated surgeon who walks in," BJ answered with a smile.
Hawkeye was glad for the step down from the unwonted seriousness. He couldn't have sustained it much longer anyway. "More like floats in, if this keeps up. What do you say we grab a passing riverboat and head over to Aunt Polly's for a belt?"
"After you, Huck Finn."