A co-fic by Epigone and Meredith Bronwen Mallory
Of course BJ knew.
In a place like this, you became attuned to certain things, because it was better to focus on the details than on the blinding enormity of the war. He remembered, one night, how Doris Day crooned on the jukebox in the washed-out dimness of Rosie's, and the way Hawkeye looked at him when they ran out of flippant words, but later he never knew who else had been there or what had been said between the silences. Or he knew the way the muscles moved, sinuous and fragile, on a kid under the wide glare of the O.R. lights, chest spread open -- the way BJ sometimes lay in the dark Swamp and thought he felt the wind sweep through the emptiness of his body -- but the kid never had a face. And so, in the same way, BJ knew.
It was a mess, that night in July: the Chinese had broken through the line to the west, and the jeeps rumbled through the compound in a line thick and tortuous as blood. In triage up ahead, Hawkeye stooped and stood endlessly, as if held up by wires, lifted a sheet here, probed a chest wound there. At one point, he paused halfway to the ground, his outline blurring against the sky: the young man below him had murmured something inaudible. Hawkeye touched him on the arm and yelled ahead to Margaret that he'd take this one.
BJ didn't see the boy again until after the operating session. Once they had peeled off their scrubs, baring the new sheen of sweat to the lights, Hawkeye took him by the elbow and led him into post-op, where the older doctor leaned on the bed beside the door and stared earnestly at its occupant.
"This kid's already been here, Beej," Hawkeye said softly.
BJ caught himself mid-yawn and bent over beside him, so that their elbows brushed together over the coolness of the metal rail.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
BJ looked at him carefully.
"How long's he been out on the front?"
"I don't know. At least six months; Trap and I treated him for contusions in January."
"Uh huh."
Hawkeye ran a hand through his hair.
"I don't know why the hell the Army hasn't sent him back to the States yet." He surveyed the patient with that look that sometimes came into his eyes when he touched the still. "Well, I guess it's the same reason it hasn't sent us back. It doesn't give a damn."
"Look, Hawk," said BJ, slinging an arm companionably about his neck, "let's go home. Or," -- and he thought of sitting on a bunk still not quite shaped to the contours of his body, the still's tubes warm from someone else's fingers, and Hawkeye watching not him but the gap between the beds -- "or I'll buy you a drink at Rosie's."
Hawkeye went stiff under the curve of BJ's elbow.
"I can't. I've got post-op duty."
BJ drew back his arm reluctantly. Then, with an effort, he said, "Don't worry about it. I'll cover for you. You wanna just go back to the Swamp?"
Hawkeye looked at him, that flicker of -- what? Relief, gratitude, affection? -- showing in his face before he shrugged and turned away.
"All right. Thanks, Beej."
He gave the unconscious patient one more lingering glance over his shoulder and slipped out. BJ heard the hollow creak of the door, and then it was quiet.
He didn't know then. He didn't know, so he pulled up a chair to the bedside of this kid and tried to see Hawkeye and Trapper in the faint scar below his right eye. Which one had stitched that gash up? BJ noted the way the edges smoothed out into the arch of the cheekbone, and he knew it was Hawkeye. Hawk knew how to do that; Hawk knew how to downplay a scar, but not how to conceal it.
He might have dozed off for a time, the wood of the chair firm against his aching back, the dreary hospital illumination heavy on his eyelids -- but not for long. Later, in the still dark, he was sufficiently awake to hear the voices across the room. He couldn't tell whose they were, but in these situations you never could, you never tried to attribute your knowledge to an individual. There was a communal pool of knowledge here, and sooner or later you skimmed it. Not wanting to hear made no difference, because the voices were always there, there was always someone who knew, and who were you to refuse that information?
So, by the end of the night, without ever coming fully awake, BJ knew. He knew who George was, just from the details, scattered words and winks. But after Hawkeye relieved him at two o'clock, pulled him to his feet and helped him stagger the long, dusty way back home, -- when had the compound gotten so wide, and Hawkeye so warm and slow-moving beneath his robe; when had the Swamp become "home"? -- BJ, lying on his bunk and watching his bunkmate move off in redness through the mesh, didn't know who George was to Hawkeye.
BJ had been in Korea long enough to know it was useless to try to trick himself, but he did it anyway-- it was a type of ritual, offering a supplication to the woman in his memory and it kept his other life
(Not home. Ha, home is here, isn't that crazy. What's that they say? Home is where the hea-- Oh, shut up. Don't think about that, just think about how absence makes the heart grow fonder, if you have to think of those stupid clichés at all. What do they know anyway?)
close to him like an open wound over his belly. With his eyes closed and his body laid out carelessly over his bunk, BJ tried, tried hard. In his mind, he made the rough cot dim and vaguely remembered another, wider bed, and those blue-striped sheets Peg put under the overstuffed white comforter. Now, the sounds of the camp had to be banished, and just Peg's soft breathing close to where she'd curled herself against his back, head pillowed on her hands and those few sweet curls dangling over her face. That's right, BJ thought, as if he were a artist sketching things into detail, she's sleeping and....
And he couldn't remember the rhythm of her breathing; he knew she wore a rose perfume, but the smell of roses had dimmed to nothingness in his mind along with the memory of her skin-- just where was that little mole on her neck? the scar on her leg?-- and it all came crashing down. Crashing, not like pieces, but like water with nothing to hold it up, like thunder so loud and so close in his ears he couldn't hear himself think. Slowly, BJ relaxed his jaw where his teeth had been pressed harshly together, as if to bite into that memory-- it was useless, and he simply lay there with his mind fully awake inside his exhausted body. Briefly the world diffused and he was treated to the flicker of an image he didn't really want to see; sleep and wakefulness were the same always because he was trapped. (Trapped. Trapper. Let's not think about that.)
Awareness.
"--this is just disgusting!" A nasal, high voice with just that small edge of perpetual panic.
"Frank," Hawkeye now, tone full of exaggerated patience, "what did we tell you about wetting the bed?"
"You're sick, Pierce," Frank sputtered, and behind the fleshy-darkness of his eyelids, BJ could just imagine Hawkeye's small, triumphant smile.
"Now, Frank, there's no shame--"
"You know what I'm talking about, you degenerate." A kick against the pitiful stove, sounding hollow. "I won't stand for this again. That... thing doesn't deserve to be in the army! Henry Blake may have been sympathetic towards that sort of disgusting--"
"Do you want to borrow my thesaurus?" Here, of course, Hawkeye would be leaning back on his own bunk and raising an eyebrow. "You're repeating yourself, Frank."
"If you were a true American," Frank spat, "you'd know why I'm so angry I can't think straight."
A snort as Hawkeye swallowed his laughter. "'Straight'? I'd like proof you've ever thought in the first place."
"Just you wait." Now BJ opened his eyes slightly, watching the blur of Frank stand over Hawkeye, brandishing his admonishing finger like a sword. "Potter-- thank God-- is regular army. He'll see that things are properly taken care of this time, bucko. Just you wait, I'll get that deviant--"
"And his little dog, too?" Hawkeye offered, rolling his eyes. "Come on, Frank, don't make BJ and me--"
(Yes, "BJ and me," easy, assuming, and in his own mind BJ could imagine that faceless, featureless form of Trapper John standing behind Hawkeye in some other time. Back you up, buddy, one hundred percent, always. And, in the cot still molded to someone else, still loose and tight in all the wrong places, BJ closed his eyes and swallowed that lingering, unnamed emotion clinging to the back of his throat.)
"Don't make BJ and me," Hawkeye was saying, "tell Margaret about your little momentous--"
"Ha, you think you can blackmail me?" The door slammed, but Frank was still yelling, outside the tent and probably walking backward, too. "I mean business, this time, and you jim-dandy can't do thing one about it!"
Yes, exit Frank, stage whatever, as long as he's gone, BJ thought, and listened to the now-familiar sounds of Hawkeye mixing a drink. Then there came the touch BJ hadn't even been aware he'd been waiting for-- the other captain's hand on his shoulder, resting there for a moment.
"Hey, you're on in ten," Hawkeye joked, handing BJ a drink even as the younger man sat up. "I hope you got enough beauty sleep."
"With a face like this," BJ said with his words mostly in the gin, "how can I go wrong?" Hawkeye flashed a brief tilt of his lips and proceeded to search the floor for semi-clean articles of clothing, pulling them on with unselfconscious grace.
"I suppose," the older doctor said as he pulled a shirt over his head, "it's too much to hope that if we throw water on Frank, he'll melt."
"If that was true," -- BJ turned his back a little to dress -- "we'd have found a little puddle of Frank in the showers long ago."
"Yuck." Hawkeye made a face around his smirk. "Can you imagine stepping in that?" He reached for BJ, pulling the other man to his feet. "Come, my dear-- our adoring fans await!" The dim smell of shell powder touched over BJ as they walked through the compound, and he stumbled, just once, before he moved a little away from Hawkeye and began to feel his new separateness amidst the vague, gray morning tents.
(Why call attention to it, why drag it out into the light where it can be seen and damn it, first they took away my family and my daughter's childhood and now they're taking away the one good thing in Korea and why can't I be blithely unaware, why do I have to think about it at all?)
Peg, if he could only just focus on Peg and her soft glory waiting behind those golden gates-- of the lethe in her embrace and maybe one day, he'd wake up and Korea would just be a dream he'd had, all of it, and Hawkeye just a quick, crazy element of his sleeping mind. Subconscious, the "id" -- no one can control that.
In post-op, BJ counted all the patients in "line" ahead of George and watched the numbers dwindle until he was standing just behind Hawkeye, watching the older doctor pull down the clipboard with flair.
"Morning, George," Hawkeye said, moving to sit down on an empty bed, while BJ kept his hands on the metal rail and his body behind it. The younger doctor nodded towards the patient, his smile sincere but his eyes watching, seeing, taking everything in. George had his hands folded politely in his lap; his eyes moved between his two visitors and settled on the one he knew. "Are you enjoying the wonderful view of bedpans and IV dips?" Hawkeye winked. "We set it up just for you."
"It's lovely." George's smile was earnest and laughing.
"Good," said Hawkeye, tapping the clipboard for emphasis. "Only the best for our faithful customers." Lifting a hand briefly in BJ's direction, the older doctor leaned in to examine the dressing on George's shoulder. "This is BJ Hunnicutt-- Trapper John was sent back to the States, so they brought him in."
"My condolences," George said to BJ, though his eyes were looking at Hawkeye through the fall of his messy blond bangs.
BJ laughed shortly.
"Ah, but you're the one who's had to come down our assembly line twice in, what, four months?" And -- damn it, there he went again -- he looked to Hawkeye; he was speaking to George, but somehow everything spiraled back into Hawkeye, and he didn't want to think about time in terms of months anymore. Here, there was no time in that sense, no continuity, and maybe, just maybe, if he thought it hard enough, no causality. Just sharp, short bursts of awareness, no obligation to anything outside of the dust and the blood and the places his eyes went illicitly, unthinkingly.
Hawkeye smiled, the faintest angle of bitterness in the line of his mouth, and said, "Yeah, by now he knows the ins and outs of the great American meat-processing facility."
George's glance settled on BJ, as if he wanted to examine more closely this man who knew how to cut straight to the quick of Hawkeye's blustering humor.
"You guys do a good job," he said after a beat, letting his smile broaden again and his eyes return to Hawkeye. "I would've liked to tell Doctor McIntyre that, too, that I appreciate - " He paused, shifting in the bed ever so slightly, the arm nearer to BJ tucking under the blanket. "What you did."
"I'd hate to think that I completely wasted my time in med. school," said Hawkeye lightly. "I mean, aside from my pretty female colleagues and the out-of-the-way broom closets, I really did do some studying." He concluded the brief examination and placed his hands on his knees. "Good to see you've got some honest combat wounds this time," he kidded.
This time, George looked right at BJ, his face bare and vulnerable, and BJ thought, God, wasn't there a time we all knew how to be so honest? When he had arrived, maybe, he hadn't known how to close himself off, had even exposed to the air the rawness that Peg left -- but at some point he brought it back into himself, because Hawkeye looked at him oddly about it, and soon it was as though he had smothered it under the weight of secrecy. He tried to dredge it up sometimes; now, faced with George and Hawkeye and the bright pinpoints of the post-op lights, he tried in earnest to dredge it up, chafe it back into being, recreate the shiver of her eyes down his spine. But Hawkeye, blinding as any shot of gin they shared in the inviolate Swamp, drowned all that out when he glanced up, grinned, and leaned across the bed rail to pat BJ on the arm.
"It's all right," he assured George, his shoulders moving with cat's grace as he bent over. "BJ's no Frank."
The ache that BJ had been cultivating was gone instantly, scorched out by the exquisite agony of Hawkeye's fingers -- and BJ smiled dully and thought, The best laid plans of mice and men--
"I do try," he said.
Hawkeye smirked without really seeing him, taking the remark at face value. And why shouldn't he, when he still thought BJ's face could tell no lies?
"I've got to see to some other patients," BJ said abruptly. "Business is brisk, you know, and" -- he gave a brittle smile to George -- "you're already in the best of hands." He freed himself from those hands, pulling away so that Hawkeye's arm pressed the metal bar for a moment, trapped. But then he liked to be trapped.
BJ turned and moved off down the row of white cots. He went swiftly, purposefully, until all he felt was the fluidity of his strides and the unyielding slap of his feet against the floor, the iron bed rails rising up on him from all sides.