For HappierThanMost and lulusgardenfli~ great writers who push me to do better.
"More than kisses, letters mingle souls."
~ John Donne
*)0(*
It started with a mistake, a case of mistaken identity, the bumbling of the fucking United States Army, and two similar-sounding names. By this time in the war, the men in tattered uniforms and tattered morality are nothing but shadows. One no different than another, etched on a wall, under the humid coffin lid of the canopy. Even the other animals in the Jungle view them with suspicion, fear, or hate–and keep a careful distance. Save for the times Charlie or a landmine or a mother-effing tiger snatched a damaged soul or two. And sent it to hell.
So Soda felt oddly separated and detached, as he crouched leery-eyed under a great tree. His new world of kill or be kill had tumbled off-balance after FNG (fucking new guy) emerge from the dark brush where his platoon was stationed. Soda stared at the newcomer, bare limbs stiffened, but he smelled no hint of danger, challenge, misgiving, or anxiety from this strange creature (clean, neater uniform, face unpainted with grime or blood). Clear bright eyes stare down nervously at him; but Soda cannot comprehend such looks.
Can no longer understand them.
He'd been on the frontline for far too long, and his innate ability to connect with other human beings was slowly being castrated as a result. He mourned the loss at first, even shed a few tears for it. But truthfully, it was easier to shot Charlie between the eyes if he didn't instinctively understand the terror there. The change showed itself into the deaden apathy of Soda's gaze, hidden behind strands of poison gold, red bandana-wrapped hair, and his bare crossed arms. The tally-score on his rifle.
"Curtis? You're Curtis, right?"
His mirthless, mocking smirk, stolen from Dallas Winston's grave.
"What?" he asked, thumb pulling the saint medallion round his neck, enjoying making the new guy sweat and squirm. Once he would've been disgusted to think it, but Soda had found there was a taste to be acquired in being cruel. It kept you alive. Even kept others alive. And since that was the case, cruel he could be. "What was that?"
"M-mail," the new guy finally muttered, holding out a thick envelope cautiously, as though sliding it into an inferno. "There's some for you."
Soda blinked. For the past few weeks, his world had been bullets, and blood-stained greens, and substances shot into his arms. Letters from the outside were like Moses' burning bush for him. Darry and Pony both wrote to him faithfully, even when Soda didn't have the resources to write back (if anyone had paper, they would've wiped their asses with it first and foremost.)
He was tearing into the multipage letter (a good sign that it was from Ponyboy) with the hunger of a savage. Feasting but not savoring the kill. But the eagerness behind his eyes, the starved hunger for home and kin soon twisted first into disgust as he failed to recognize the writing or the sender.
"Dear Homer,
I can see why you wrote you didn't want me to show your last letter to Momma. To feel such dark things is a fate no parent wants to hear about their child. I'm sorry for your friend John Marvin's death. But please remember, death just opens a door out of this little, dark room (which we call this world, earth) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet and love and never feel lost again."
"What the fuck?" Soda demanded, hissed, turning over the envelope to glimpse the name scrawled on it. And cursed again. Homer Cursty. This letter was for Homer Cursty, an Indian-Negro mix-breed from Nebraska, and it ended in the hands of a Sodapop Curtis of Oklahoma. A mistake only the military could make.
He was sorely tempted to crumple the papers with its delicate script and throw it away...but his last scraps of decency, lingering leftovers from when he was just a boy with wild, reckless, laughing eyes and no blood on his hands, stopped him.
Homer Cursty was currently out on patrol. He was also a pretty big guy if decent enough. So if the situation were reversed, and Soda came back from brushes with death to find that someone had received a letter from Pony and chucked it...well, Soda didn't think he'd be in a forgiving mood. So he stuffed the pages into the violated envelope, jabbing his fingers between the lips to push the contents down, and tucked it in his belt, near the notches.
*)0(*
When the Patrol came back, Homer Cursty was being carried on a stretcher, seven bullets in his gut.
Soda sat with him as the medic worked frantically with Lone Wolf, trying to stop the bleeding till the helicopter came, but it was just no good.
Soda showed him the letter and watched as the man's eyes lit up to know it was from his seventeen-year-old baby sister. Olivia, he mouthed. Right before his jaw went slack, eyes blackened forever.
He never got to read it.
*)0(*
But Soda did. And often, as days and weeks and months blurred between patrols and villages and more ways of dying than he ever thought possible. Most times there was no radio, no card games, or quick fumbles to distracted them from the reality around them...and Olivia Cursty's letter became his mind's only escape from the Jungle of blood: into a world of Nebraskan tall grass and a tree near a water-hole where a rope still hung, waiting for the children that would never come again.
The papers were smudged now, crumpled with dirty fingers and rough folding, as brandy brown eyes traced them over yet again, the script now familiar to his eyes, as they roamed and fondled every word that wasn't his.
"Do you remember, back when you was just a tall old corn stock, and I was a dark little wren with chocolate braids? We was entirely happy. Perhaps happiness is to become a part of something else entire, to shrink the self 'till the self don't matter. At any rate, that was happiness, I think, that is love. To be dissolved into something complete and great. Like Angels in heaven's light. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep. You'll be happy again. I promise."
It was funny, in a way...Ponyboy had once said he liked to reread his books over again, cause each time, he found something new waiting for him there. Darry and he hadn't really understood the kid at the time (Darry was just thankful, cause it meant Pony could read the same books for years without needing to waste money to buy new ones).
But now he did. He understood. Understood how eyes could trace every line, sound, and curve. Supplying and imagining more answers than what the original author had even written. Fantastical fiction created within his own head, to match the sweet tone of voice that sang like a nightingale off the page.
Sometimes he tried to forget about it. To make himself forget. To return to kind-cruelty and hollow uncaring for himself. But something had been untethered in his gut, unfurled in the lap of a teenager half the world away by distance. And an entire universe by mindset.
But every time, it sweetness reeled him back in, out of the dank and the killing. Soda couldn't stay away from it.
"Today I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away, not when the sunset is making love to the earth. You remember the story Papa told us when we were little? Of how the sun loves the earth so much that he's willing to die for her, every night, just to steal a kiss? Even though the to lower himself down from the sky is death to him. The sun can't resist, he has to touch the earth's beauty. And the earth loves him for his bravery so much, she nurses him back to life through the night, and sends him home the next day."
There it was again: that feeling of complete addiction, of irrational attachment. A craving, a thirst, the blood rushing to his ears to sing a single-worded chant: more. More words, more letters, more life-hope disguised as paper. Soda always had a sweet tooth, an innate hunger for treats and candies. And Olivia…Olivia was no different. Tooth-aching sweet, her writing melted into him like milk in coffee. The same color he imagined her skin being, lighter than her brother's, with long chocolate hair. Her letter mentioned wearing it in braids for her birthday and summer swimmin', so it had to be long.
In his mind's eye, it went to her waist, the way that had been getting popular back home, in the time since he been there. Soft and dark and calm. Pleasantly cool against him.
Tickling his arms, his chest. Followed by her mouth. When, in his craziest moments, Soda stopped thinking of her as an abstract something and started imagining her as intimately female: pliable and yielding, the feel of her young body pressed against his. Down into the dirt of the earth, under the heat of his sun. Supplying him with what his hand was a damn poor substitute for.
He'd liked to have her.
Have her as anything a woman can be to a man, just to have this milky-cinnamon candle-flame soul apart of his world. By choice that is, and not by fuckup. The idea was slowly becoming a part of his mind; influencing his likes and dislikes here in the Jungle, curbing some of the bloodlusts, the savageness more than a hundred times when Soda didn't realize.
"I feel like the earth often...waiting for something, yet breathless for when it arrives. It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from— my country, the place where we ought to have been born, Homer. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back."
Soda was long past fantasizing about beds, clean sheets, or anything resembling a normal human joining of flesh and soul (this entire thing kinda proved that, didn't it?). Sex in 'Nam was quick, fleeting, dirty, and often in the dirt itself, the ditches of humanity. But now he…Soda wanted to think that even such a wild coupling as that could prove loving; if Olivia's touch was half as gentle as her tone of voice in her letter. He wanted to think she could tame him, stop him from going too rough, and accidentally hurting her. That she could take this beast the war had made him and turn him into a human being again.
"Standing there, I shuffling the memories on the frontstep, I remember what I sometimes forget. Forgiveness. Compassion. Gratitude. Three roads leading to being here now, where we can give the next moment a chance to exist without prejudice, so we can love what's here, while it's still here: each other, ourselves, our freedom. I love you."
Sometimes his thoughts on her, this wealth of feeling for a girl he'd never met, who didn't even know he existed, brought on a disorderly momentum: the whirling, voyeuristic chaos of being thrown off the edge. Hitchcock vertigo. The sense of being hauled off the orbit like some dysfunctional radio.
"Do you know why I write so much? Because when you read, we are together."
Christ...
And somehow out of this flying disaster that was the war, this world, this self coated in his skin, Sodapop Patrick Curtis knew that desire was not the right term of address, for the tenderness unfurling inside him; tugged 'long the gentle lyrics of her words.
Didn't stop him from feeling like the worse sort of thief as he looked at them. For having them, enjoying them, jacking off to them like skin-mags, while thinkin' about Olivia Cursty in several ways wicked. While the brother she'd intended this comfort for -the brother she'd clearly adored- never even got to see them.
Maybe if...when...Soda got back to the States, he could swing by Nebraska. Track her down. It wouldn't be hard; the address was on that brutally torn envelope. Maybe he could meet her, give her letter back to her, thank her for saving his life, his sanity, possibly his soul.
And maybe steal a kiss, as the sun did with the earth.
Soda chuckled with bitter hysteria, drilling the heel of his palm into his eye socket in the death of one night; thinking these thoughts. Glory, he could just picture Darry's face, Steve's face, hell, anyones' face if he wrote about this to them; in the process all but confirming that in this Jungle, he'd lost his damn mind.
What else could explain the fact that Soda of all people had fallen in love with a girl, not over her looks, but the contents of a single damn letter?
Review! And tell, do you think it's possible to fall in love over a letter?