It's only human nature to seek out entrapment. There is something comforting in being limited, in knowing the world extends only so far. It is only in being held that anyone has substance.
So it was natural for BJ to indulge that pull between himself and Hawkeye, protean, tenuous, sheer as a length of fishing line, only visible in his hands when the light caught it in a certain way -- but tightening, always tightening, reeling him in. The more he struggled, the more tangled it became.
Half an hour later, he trudged out into the pale-green heat of July and found Hawkeye leaning with exaggerated ease against the outside wall. BJ hesitated, crossing his arms over his chest as if to hold something in, his ribs aching with the pressure of that retention.
Hawkeye smiled wearily and, pushing off the wall, wandered over to join him.
"Beej," he said, resting an arm on the other doctor's shoulder in an unconscious echo of the previous night. His tone was airy, casual. "You wanna tell me what's wrong?"
"Wrong?" asked BJ, leaning into Hawkeye even as his throat closed up.
Hawkeye shoved him playfully, but his hand was tight on BJ's upper arm.
"You walked out on that kid so fast we thought you'd seen Frank. What, was it something we said?"
"I--" But there was no wisecrack with which to counter that. "There's nothing wrong. I just have my patients to think about, and you -- you have yours."
"Oh," said Hawkeye, and there seemed to be a shift in the way he was touching BJ, though there really was no change. "I see. So when did this new development happen? While I was brushing my teeth?" and his voice was filled with-- this is crazy-- almost fondly tolerant sarcasm. "BJ, you and I swap patients all the time. Heck, we take care of Frank's too, since with him it's like the mentally rotted leading the sick, if you know what I mean." BJ moved to walk forward, ahead, away, but somehow Hawkeye went with him, and there they were, two army doctors, those tricksters, hips touching together as though they ought to have been joined.
"I--" BJ groped, finding he couldn't even remember what he'd intended to say. Hawkeye's hand was warm and he was cold, but he only knew that he was cold because of Hawkeye's hand and if it would just go away then he wouldn't know it anymore.
"Come on," the older doctor said. "Seriously, Beej. What's the matter?"
"Nothing." BJ waved the concern off. "It's just... nothing."
"What?" Hawkeye studied an imaginary checklist. "D'you get a letter from Peg? A patient from San Francisco? Are you upset that I took your socks-- hey, they had holes in 'em already from a certain Bigfoot I'm bunking with."
"Doesn't a guy have a right to his own problems?" BJ asked, letting the words out through his teeth. Ducking into the Swamp, he headed for his bunk, silently thanking something for the absence of their third tentmate.
"All right, all right," Hawkeye let the door close loudly, saying to the open room, "Honey, we're home."
(Home--
On Cherry Street, just a little ways before it meets up with Harbor Lane. The red brick house with the windows facing out over the hill so you can see the tops of buildings in the valley. Black shutters, and that wrought-iron eagle you put up on the door for a knocker and the crooked mailbox you just never got around to fixing. Open the door, come on, a man's got to remember his own home, surely, or else....
//shhhh... shhh...//
So, right, there's the hallway with the black-and-white painted pictures of Erin in her cute little miniature baby dresses, holding a ball, giving a toothless smile. The stairwell, with the worn blue mat on the landing, and upstairs Peg's room (our room?) is all the way on the end and when you come in her vanity is on the right and your dresser is on the left, his and hers, blue and pink.
But in the Swamp, which has now suddenly and inexplicably become home-- crazy, crazy, boy, is Klinger gonna have a bird when you get his section eight--
No. In the Swamp, it's ours and Frank's; neatness and the Bible and the stony-eyed woman in the silver frame. On the right, two bunks and a still, Hawkeye's robe, BJ's argyle socks, and boots and books and all thrown together. No real distinction. )
Laying his arm over his face, BJ rested wearily against his pillow, only opening his eyes when Hawkeye offered him a cure-all glass of gin.
"Listen," Hawkeye said casually, slipping into his robe as if it were a second skin, "Frank and Hotlips have been doing mating calls today that would make a monkey blush, so I told George to stop by later tonight-- have a drink, lose some money...."
"George?" BJ's voice was neutral, but he was sitting up on one elbow and he couldn't feel the expression on his face, just the whiteness over it, and he saw in Hawkeye's eyes that he'd been caught.
"Yeah." The other man's shrug betrayed his carefulness. "Is that what this is about?"
"What what's about?" He closed his eyes, like pulling on a mask.
"Now you sound like a lightbulb," Hawkeye teased. "Watt! Watt!" Pause, and when BJ did look at Hawkeye again, the other man was sitting on the other bunk, leaning forward in concern. "I said, is this about George?"
"I don't know," he lied smoothly, with the emphasis all on the first syllable. "I mean--"
"Well," said Hawkeye with a half-smile, "what's the matter with George?"
And it came out, the words had been hiding under his tongue and damn it, it was an ambush; disbelief, echoing, "What's the matter with George?"
"Oh-oho--" The other captain laughed in such a way that it was anything but. "Come on, Beej. Is that what this is about? It's not like it's catching."
"I know that." BJ rolled his shoulders and his eyes. "It's just--"
"Just what?" Hawkeye spread his empty hands. "He's a good kid-- it's bad enough his unit's turned him into a regular scapegoat all on account of him sleeping with a man once or twice--"
(And oh, oh, oh-- here's where that saying comes from, "hold your tongue," down like a snake, don't let it go, and that bit of bar soap on your pallet for saying the word "hell" at the dinner table, washing your mouth out. If thy tongue doth betray thee, then cut it off, because the things you say--!)
Quietly, BJ asked, "Have you?"
"What?" Just one word, and an expression like a wide-gaping grin of confusion on Hawkeye's face.
"Nothing," the younger surgeon said quickly. "Nothing."
"I heard what you said." Yes, there was that smile, and only that tiny fissure like a crack in the ice on those blue, blue eyes. "I just can't believe you said it!"
"Look," BJ was biting his lip and trying to talk around it at the same time, "Hawk-- please, I didn't mean it." He'd tried so hard all day not to, but he reached out and put his hand on Hawkeye's arm, felt the worn terry cloth and the skin underneath it, because he was beginning to feel miles and miles coming into the few feet between himself and his best friend.
(Is there another term for this? Lover is only when you've slept together. Ah, such fine points of distinction.)
"I didn't mean it," BJ said to make it true. "I don't know what I was thinking. I guess I just--" He looked up to those eyes and found understanding (forgiveness) already halfway imparted upon him. "I hadn't really ever thought about stuff like that."
(It's not really a lie, not really, because you haven't thought about it, not in the abstract sense that there must be people like that. Only in the dark with the floodlights making strange shapes in the compound and Hawkeye only two feet away, that body that you know from all those little touches. Or in those odd moments when he's just close enough in a certain way and you think, if he was a... (you don't even say he would have to be peg) you would know what to do, but you're happy with the confusion because that's part of who he is. How does it even work-- how would you--? You don't know, which is maybe why moments sometimes hang waiting for you to do something.)
"It threw me," BJ found himself saying presently. "It wasn't fair for me to take it out on you." With some relief, because it had surfaced in his own mind that it was true, "You're right, I'm no Frank Burns. It just took me a bit to get used to the idea."
"Well, I know that, you dummy." Hawkeye's voice was thick with affection. "Look, I was being an ass too, getting up on my soapbox. All's fair, eh?"
(in love and in war and even when they're the very same thing)
BJ held out his hand, let Hawkeye clasp it and shake, holding his aorta where his palm should have been. A smile. "All's fair."
"You know," Hawkeye said after a beat, getting up to fix another drink, "that really wasn't a fair question for you to ask me, anyway." Gentle, smile in the words.
Carefully, "Oh?"
"Well," Hawkeye slanted his hips, moving one hand to his short black locks with a decadent flair, "after all, I am Hawkeye Pierce, famous delinquent degenerate pervert." He winked. "You-- you're about as clean as a bar of Dial soap, and I'm not talking about the mold-encrusted ones we have in the showers here."
BJ smiled at that, folding his hands in his lap. He trapped them between his knees as Hawkeye just looked at him with that grin, strange mixture of childishness and suggestiveness, BJ like a moth battering itself ragged to get at the light, holding back his hands.
"You make it sound like a bad thing," he said finally, weakly.
Hawkeye, a drink in each fist, paused and looked down at him.
"No," he replied, the grin smoothing out a little, "God, no, BJ, it's nice." BJ glanced up, bemused, and Hawkeye ducked his head defensively and explained, "Refreshing, you know? You're as clean as Frank thinks he is, which in and of itself is amazing." He leaned over to pass BJ his glass.
BJ took it by the stem, his fingers curving away from Hawkeye's. The coolness of it was startling, like their arms dangling together easily over the rail of George's bed--
Or like Peg's hands on his face as he rolled toward her, Erin snoring faintly down the hall, and kissed her, all his, dissolving into the pleasant chill of memory, spread out flat and unending as flower petals pressed in the pages of his life. Safe and gray and faded.
He shivered and took the glass, not Hawkeye. Even though Hawkeye was his in the way that all of Korea had become his, an extension of himself, craziness from within. To touch him would be natural, it was already coalescing in BJ's head
(The very firstlings of my heart shall be the firstlings of my hand -- and Hawkeye laughing fondly, saying, You know a lot of poetry, don't you? And BJ thinking, -- always thinking because, damn it, he couldn't stop thinking -- Not the kind you know. More clichés: poetry in motion, and what kind of idiot would think that upon seeing Hawkeye, bleary-eyed and unshaven, his hunched form vague and wraithlike in the floating darkness of the mirror?)
"Okay," said BJ, and took a sip. "So we've established I'm a good influence on you."
"Your suds rub off, huh?" said Hawkeye lightly, settling back down on his bunk.
"Yeah." BJ laughed halfheartedly. He wrapped his hands around the glass, wishing it were that easy -- if only he could flee out into the spring night, across the red compound, and wash all of this off, shed it like so much dust and dead skin under the white shower-water.
Hawkeye seemed to consider something for a moment, a darkly amused gleam in his eyes; then he sat up straighter and raised his glass.
"To us," he offered. "Two of the most unlikely bunkies this side of the Atlantic: Filth and Purity."
BJ raised his glass as well, and they each downed half of their gin. But there was still a dilute uneasy feeling pooling in the back of BJ's skull: someone loud and boisterous and boyish who crouched on the bed behind him and whispered, Back in my day, we went by Pigpen and Brothel, no distinction. That all-American-boy novelty's gonna wear off real fast.
"This side of the Pacific. You Easterners are oriented all wrong," insisted BJ, trying a smile as he lifted his glass again. Hawkeye arched an eyebrow, but he obligingly echoed the toast, and together they drained their glasses.
It was at that point that someone knocked on the door.
Hawkeye, jumping up almost guiltily, called, "Our door is always open, 'specially if you're warm and female."
George let himself in, waving a hand in greeting.
"Will I do?"
BJ flinched ever so slightly, but Hawkeye was too involved in playing the concerned host to notice.
"George! Welcome to our humble abode. Let me introduce you around. Let's see... in that corner, we have the roach clan; not very friendly, except when we turn out the lights, and then they love to come out and pay social calls. In this corner," -- he was leading George by his uninjured arm, ushering him toward Frank's cot -- "we have our cohabitant, Frank Burns -- oh, wait, he's out, that's just his dirty laundry. You picked a good time to swing by. You know BJ, of course, co-proprietor and all-around good guy, and then, in this last corner, we have our most honored personage." He paused in front of the still and adopted an attitude of reverence. "The giver of life in liquid form."
George chuckled and looked to BJ for approval. BJ, his legs crossed and his arms folded, was smiling with an evident effort, and George sobered, biting his lip.
"Gosh, Hawkeye, I didn't realize it was so small in here -- I don't want to crowd you guys. There's not enough room for a three-person card game, is there?"
"Of course there is," rejoined Hawkeye, pouring him a drink and leading him to a cot. "We don't want to use Frank's bunk -- we doctors have issues with sterility, you understand -- but we'll manage. You can sit on my bunk, BJ and I'll share his, and we'll set up the game in the middle." George shot a sideways glance at BJ, but Hawkeye pushed him gently down onto the cot and dragged a small bedside table into the gap. "There, see?" He produced a deck of cards from his footlocker. "Poker all right with everybody?"
His companions nodded their assent. There was a pause while Hawkeye looked searchingly at the empty spot on BJ's mattress, but then he stepped over, too quickly, and sat beside BJ.
They fit together awkwardly on the narrow bunk, Hawkeye's elbows bumping BJ as he shuffled the cards, his lanky frame thin and sharp against BJ's side. The cot was not the only thing still shaped emptily to the past, but things could change, if BJ wanted it enough, if he gave it time--
No, no, no. He shrank away a little, let himself blur into the riffle of cards between Hawkeye's dexterous fingers, Peg and Erin and the dog and the plush furniture and the neat patchwork garden and the approving faces of their parents framed in burnished metal down the halls
(Your full house beats this one pair any day.)