Author's Notes: In my opinion, "Sometimes You Hear the Bullet," aside from being one of the best episodes of M*A*S*H, also introduces one of the most intriguing walk-on roles -- Tommy Gillis. And the slash potential is really rather hard to overlook. After all, the first thing Tommy does upon seeing Hawkeye is kiss him.
Many, many thanks to Flick, Raven, and Carmarthen for their work as betas on this piece.
--Colonel Henry Blake, "Sometimes You Hear the Bullet"
It was the second week of fifth grade when the teacher called up a student and told the class that his name was Tommy Gillis. At lunch, under the sunlight that broke crisply through the frayed curtains, he spun them stories of the Carolina shore in his slight southern accent: brilliant water, languid palms, and quicksilver tidepool fish. He moved words fluidly, like beading a necklace; Hawkeye sat apart and pretended not to hear.
But when the early-morning air rang with silence, Hawkeye had to look up. Tommy stood before him, arms akimbo.
"You're the milk monitor, right?" asked Tommy. Hawkeye nodded. "Why're you over here?"
Hawkeye considered the question for a moment before he replied, "I'm studying."
"Studying what?" asked Tommy skeptically.
Hawkeye hesitated; then, with reluctance, he held out his arms, wrists upturned awkwardly so that the intricate blue veins stood out under his skin.
"My dad says those carry blood all over your body. Little cells, so small you can't see, and they go everywhere." With a brief curl of his lip, he added, "I told that to Harry, but he said it was disgusting."
Tommy took one of Hawkeye's arms and squatted down to examine it more closely. Finally, he said, "Do they really?"
"Yeah," affirmed Hawkeye, and began to tell him. His voice tumbled unsteadily over itself at first, frantic and hurried. Tommy, still studying the arm, began to rock back and forth on his heels, and Hawkeye soon unconsciously adjusted his speech to that rhythm.
They shared Hawkeye's food, the grease paper crackling privately between them, and neither mentioned Tommy's lack of a bag of his own. Beneath the long yellow windows, they sat for the duration of lunch, heads bent together.
It was the last day of their Christmas holiday when Tommy told Hawkeye what he wanted to do. They lay sprawled on the rug in the Pierces' living room: Hawkeye struggling with his musty physiology book, and Tommy, cheerfully resigned to failing his statistics test, listening to the radio. The melancholy strains of "I'll Be Home For Christmas" swam like dust motes through the noonday sun.
"Can't we turn that off?" asked Hawkeye.
Tommy grinned surreptitiously. Nowadays, in the dingy college halls, he all too often encountered something foreign in his friend, a calculated, sensual outrageousness. But here, somehow, everything was natural.
"I just wanna hear the news," replied Tommy, and, as if on cue, the voice of the announcer rose between them with news from the front, lurid names of faraway places. Tommy propped himself up on his elbows and, after a moment, said, "That's what I want to do."
Hawkeye bent and switched off the radio.
"I'm not interested in hearing about those idiots killing each other," he said distastefully. "You want to do that?"
"Not fight -- report."
Hawkeye smiled despite himself.
"You'd be good at it."
"You bet I would." Tommy looked at him oddly. "Y'know, sometimes I'm almost glad about not getting that university scholarship."
"Why?"
Tommy flushed.
"I don't know -- I just... like being around here." Absently, he extended a hand toward the radio and accidentally brushed Hawkeye's arm where it curved along the rug fringe. He paused; his fair head dipped as he inhaled and said helplessly, "Uh...."
Hawkeye stayed where he was, tilting his face toward Tommy. Then, abruptly, he sat up, knocking Tommy's elbow aside with a dismissive laugh. Outside, they heard Daniel Pierce's tread on the front porch, home from an emergency house call, and in the close space between them, they heard the rough rush of their breathing. They pulled apart, and as Daniel stepped through the door, Hawkeye turned on the radio and drowned it out, submerged it all hurriedly in the brash fervor of "Oklahoma!"
It was almost autumn when Tommy told Hawkeye that he was going back to South Carolina. They had just finished their senior year at Androscoggin, and now they walked down Pike's Lane toward Tommy's house, kicking up dust in the afternoon brightness.
"They've got a great paper down there in Charleston," Tommy explained, looking at Hawkeye sideways. "And my dad has a friend who works for it, so he could get me in."
Hawkeye was silent, looking over the familiar landscape: the trees taking on a scorched color, the white stones jaggedly breaking the roadside soil, and, just beyond the hills ahead, blue-gray water and houses clinging like sun-bleached barnacles to the shore. They continued on their way for a time, and Hawkeye said, "You know I'm staying here. Med. school... Dad...."
"I know."
"It'll be different in South Carolina. Nothing like this."
"I know, Hawkeye. I lived there for ten years, remember?"
Hawkeye looked at him then, missing a step. Something in his eyes fell away, and he was that graceless little boy again, holding out his wrists as if in a grotesque plea for nourishment.
"It'll be different here."
Tommy merely grinned.
And, when they halted by his house at the end of the lane, under the blurred shelter of a hawthorn bush, he took Hawkeye's face in his hands and kissed him, softly, fearfully, with the leaves curling like flame around them.
"I'll visit," he said, and let himself in through the gate.
It was early spring when Hawkeye told Tommy about the letter. A week later, in the raw chill, Hawkeye stood by the railroad station and waited for the two-o'clock train from New York. The sun glared cleanly off the tracks, and when the coaches finally pulled in with a belch of smoke, he had to squint to see the blond figure that emerged.
"Tommy," he called in a strained voice, waving an arm.
"Hey!" He was taller, perhaps had lost a little weight since last time, but it was still him. Hawkeye skirted the tide of disembarking passengers, but Tommy barreled straight through, dropped his bags on the platform, and clasped Hawkeye about the neck.
"Okay, okay," said Hawkeye nervously, after Tommy had held him for nearly a minute. Tommy laughed too loudly and released him.
"You look pale," he observed, lifting his bags. "Don't you ever get out?" He continued before Hawkeye could answer. "Ah, Hawkeye, it's been so long. Was it, what, Christmas?"
It had been Christmas. Tommy had turned up on his doorstep at ten o'clock p.m. on the 24th. "I came down to see some people," he said, winking, shivering in his threadbare jacket, "but I couldn't forget you." It was the way they always arranged things, since Hawkeye couldn't take periodic trips to New York without arousing Daniel's suspicion -- Tommy came up, telling his editor that he was using the time to visit his parents. Mr. Gillis had died of a stroke three years earlier; Mrs. Gillis had moved to Arizona.
They had walked through the snow together after Daniel fell asleep. The church bells echoed out over the white streets, -- eleven o'clock, twelve, one -- a vespertine sound floating like prayer through the cloistered town. They hadn't said anything, but when they returned home at two, tiptoeing across the treacherous floorboards, the guestroom that had been set up for Tommy was left vacant.
They didn't say anything now, until, at long last, Hawkeye ducked into the station, pulling Tommy with him. Away from the bustling crowd, Hawkeye sagged against the wall.
"I wish you hadn't come. There's nothing you can do."
"I didn't come to do anything," protested Tommy.
Hawkeye glanced away quickly, watching the station clock's hands move inexorably along their fine orbits. When he spoke again, his voice shook ever so slightly.
"I hardly even know where Korea is."
"I know." Tommy touched his shoulder. "Why didn't you tell me earlier? God, Hawkeye, we won't have time for anything; you're leaving tomorrow--"
"I planned it that way," said Hawkeye slowly. "Listen, I have to go, and -- and Korea's a lot farther away than New York. So I thought we -- we shouldn't -- we could just...."
"Let it go," finished Tommy. "Yeah, somehow that's what I figured you were up to." He laughed softly, with a touch of wistfulness. "It's gotten strange, anyway; four years, and I've never really...." A shrug. "Anyway. It makes more sense this way."
"If you knew what this was about," said Hawkeye, turning to face him in bemusement, "then why'd you come?"
"I lied," admitted Tommy lightly. "I did come to do something." Smiling, he leaned forward and kissed Hawkeye, there in the dim emptiness of the Bangor train station, with just the thin wooden door between them and the passersby. When they broke apart, Hawkeye's face was tight. He took Tommy's elbow and said, "Come home, just for tonight?"
Tommy smiled solemnly and handed Hawkeye one of his bags.
"All right. Just for tonight."
It was a little while after dinner, one night, when Hawkeye told Tommy about Trapper. Over the shadowy hills, the sun leaked away like blood, and Hawkeye sat with Tommy's last letter before him on the bed.
Who is this Trapper guy, anyway?
Tommy had always been a shrewd one.
Hawkeye refused to insult his intelligence. He wrote back in jagged script, tight and succinct. And Tommy's next letter came in two weeks, saying with that calm humor: I see. Once you guys played football; now you play footsie. Hawkeye put it under his mattress and didn't look at it again.
Days passed, and life went on in the Swamp, to all outward appearances. Of course, just outside the door, boys came in each day soaked with the acrid scent of gunpowder and decay. And, occasionally, the mortar fire behind the ridge rattled their glasses on the table like rasping bones, as Hawkeye's teeth rattled sometimes in the twilight when he'd forgotten he was awake. And maybe, every now and then, Hawkeye touched something of himself in the neatly folded stationary from New York, something he had swilled away in gin, something he had misplaced in the gangrene-black bowels of a kid in the O.R., something he had left back in Crabapple Cove where his father snored down the hall and honeysuckle blew against the windowpanes and Tommy slept warm in his bed every other month. But it became easier to forget.
One evening he was sitting cross-legged on his bunk, composing another awkward letter, and Trapper came in from post-op. Hawkeye heard the still slosh in the corner, and then the other doctor wandered over with drinks for them both. In the dead warmth, Trapper leaned against Hawkeye, moving with the rhythm of his writing arm. Presently, he turned and gestured toward the paper on the mattress.
"Who's the letter for?"
Hawkeye looked at him speculatively. After a moment, it occurred to him that it didn't even matter; there was nothing left. He raised his glass and said, with a vague smile and a void behind his eyes, " Just a friend."
It was dark, one night in late September, and no one had to tell Hawkeye. He had seen it himself, had put his hands into the chest slick with blood and felt it stop.
Just. Stop.
In the stillness of the evening, things stopped. He leaned against the wall of the O.R. building, outside the watery circle of white cast by the floodlights, and waited as his breath caught in his throat. He waited, and in the murkily pooling light, it was like hearing the beginning of an echo, fifteen years suspended in the hollowness:
When he was ten, he stood barefoot in the long grass, tears cooling on his face, and smelled Dad burning the bacon, just as they had burned Mom and released her across the gray Atlantic. When he was twenty-six, he stood in the hazy dust, his eyes aching, the stench of blood as familiar as his own sweat; and, in the gaps between the reedy cricket-song, someone was crying.
He didn't know why.
Sometimes, he had insisted, sometimes you hear the bullet. But sometimes it's just as Tommy said: sometimes, in the darkness, it lodges behind your ribs without a sound. You don't know it's coming, maybe, when you offer him your arm, brush his skin furtively, kiss him under the hawthorn, lie with him on Christmas Eve, send his letters over the ocean, offer him a glass of gin, but one night it will come, because it always comes, and you're not good enough to prevent it; one night, someone will tell you to let it be and go help Trapper, and you will, and everything will just
stop.