Chapter IV

"What's your favorite two-player game, George?" BJ asked, shuffling the cards clumsily. He felt, rather than saw, the approving smile Hawkeye threw his way - Beej, such a decent guy, ever willing - before the door bumped shut.

George leaned his elbow on the table and pursed his lips.

"Um, to tell the truth,"

(And what else would he do, this impossibly good kid, not his fault his eyes are unshadowed, not his fault that he thinks he must look at Hawkeye and BJ separately, that he shifts his gaze from one to the other. Did he look at Trapper and Hawkeye together then, did he see in Hawkeye some ease and complacency unimaginable now?)

"I really don't know much about cards."

BJ raised his eyebrows, still concentrating on the geometric shape of the deck, solid in his palms.

"You talked like an old hand about that fortune-telling business."

"Oh, well," - George smiled apologetically - "that was just one of those things. My brother and I loved all of that, the supernatural things, as kids. I'm sure I read it somewhere."

"Hmm." BJ paused, the cards jumbled in his fingers, glossy and feeling like Hawkeye under the smoothness; his own skin touched the same spots as Hawkeye's. He laid the cards on the table and began spreading them out.

"That was a long time ago," said George. "Funny, the things that stick with you."

BJ smiled unreadably, tossing the cards out, easy, smooth, you can sort anything into these neat little piles

(He wonders, sometimes, why he doesn't seem to have his own fond childhood memories, like the others: George and his little brother under an old blanket tossed over their bunk bed, camping lantern and tarot cards grinning silver at them in the gloom; or Hawkeye flicking marbles over the Maine dust, suspended whorls of oil-in-water color spinning like dervishes, Hawkeye all scraped knees and coltish beauty. But maybe that's for the best, not remembering, because maybe one night George turned up the Lovers card, tree of flowers and tree of fruit, and saw in it the dark, sinuous betrayals of his flesh to come; or maybe Hawkeye missed a shot and knew, somehow, that someday he'd really be playing for his marbles--

And maybe BJ would have remembered someone crying, because Daddy was married to his work after all--

Or maybe that was just little Peggy Hayden, railing at her brother, watching her bicycle wheel spin and spin and spin on its disconnected axle, running forever into the future and all the pieces lying unrecognizable on the lawn.)

"What're you doing?" asked George.

"Oh - " BJ found his hands empty, the cards all resting before him on the table. "I was going to make a house of cards." He tilted his head up, meeting George's eyes.

George grinned briefly.

"That's not easy. I've never been able to make one, myself."

"Well, you just...." BJ put out a hand, scooped up a few cards. "Uh, you just build a solid foundation...." He faltered. "And you go from there, and - "

They looked at each other.

--And you try not to think about how pointless it is to try to hold up this fragile structure once you've seen there are other things to be done with the hand you've been dealt.

The door swung open, but BJ knew who it was before he turned around.

It was the bad timing-- the sheer, halting, single beat that countered the whole of the evening, tentative though that string of notes had been. A sharp, a flat, so utterly out of tune that BJ could almost see the black wreck of half-notes, rests, and quick, hooked eighths as they collided together in a dead stop. And even before that, there was that thin, clean smell that rotted with what it was meant to cover. BJ's spine straightened in a perverse pre-wince.

"This--" high, whiny, "my God-- get out of here, you filthy... abomination!"

"Frank," said BJ with a tired flippancy, watching George's face go very carefully blank, "I live here."

"I'm not talking about you, Hunnicutt!" Frank's voice climbed a pitch. "It's that sick pansy! You invited him in here?"

"George?" the captain asked, sparing an innocent glance toward the major. "Really, Frank, we water him every day, he should be fine...."

"Stop. Playing. Games." Frank's hands were fisted in his towel, wet hair at odd and contradictory angles. When George looked up from his careful contemplation of the floor, Frank colored and seemed to pull his body farther into his robe. "You're disgusting, you know that?" The words were aimed at George, but the boy with that straw-blond hair and blue eyes seemed like a slick Norman Rockwell painting, idyllic and impossibly sunshined.

(Well, what do you know. This boy leaves his body too, like Hawkeye, steps out of it like a cumbersome coat if it can't keep up with him. Pulls in, folds onto himself like an equation bending backwards into infinity until he becomes so small... there's a distinct pop, and he's gone.
POOF! It's magic.
--a turn of the cards; the star, the world, and the hanged man--
Where do you go, George, when you walk away from your bones? Is it that same land Hawkeye wanders, hand held over his eyes despite the eternal twilight? Do you know, as he does, that such a place is temporary and you will soon have to return to the rain of shells and red bursts of pain and blood and that thing that crawls over soldiers in the night?)

"You're disgusting," Frank repeated, flinging the words at the young soldier-- they hit their mark and they cut, but George wasn't in there, and he would return to find his body battered and bruised, yes, but he would not feel the initial slice of hate. "Look at you, sitting here in officer's country, daring to look at one of your superiors with that... filthy... lust!"

"Don't flatter yourself, Frank." BJ rolled his eyes. "I just ate."

The major touched a hand to BJ's shoulder in a caricature of concern.

"Surely you know what this man is!?"

"A soldier in the US army?" BJ slipped out from under the hand, shuddering and finding in himself a faint protectiveness of George.

(The enemy of my enemy....
And isn't that which hovers about George less--
*well, not less dangerous*
*and, if you'll admit it, much more tempting*
(hawkeye)
but certainly preferable to--
the undisguised bigotry swilling like warm beer in Frank's almost colorless eyes?

Because I can fear that difference in George that strikes a chord with the difference in me. And I can envy him Hawkeye's protective fondness, both for the kid soldier and the memory of stitching next to (Trapper) someone else.... But I can't--)

"He's a--"

"An inmate in our happy little hell-hole?" BJ offered, standing between the irate major and the boy who wouldn't and couldn't fight back against the entire world. "Maybe he's a patient under our care, Frank? Have you thought of that? How about he's a person, a human being? How 'bout you treat him with some dignity?"

"He's a homosexual!" There was a vibrato in Frank's voice, high and quavering with terror, because if one of them looked as sweet and nice as all that, then how are you supposed to know who the us is?

"Excuse me," said George, raising a single, inoffensive finger. His voice was calm and perhaps too tinged with politeness; BJ got the feeling the young man had been dipping inside himself for those words since Frank had entered the tent. "I really didn't mean to cause a problem, for anyone. I'll go back to post-op, if that's all right with you."

"Oh, no, bucko." Frank's voice overrode whatever half-formed reply BJ had attempted to express. "You're staying right here. I'm going to go get Colonel Potter, and we'll settle this right now. You don't deserve to be here!"

(A shadow, out of the corner of your eye. Flicker. Relief, down your spine, like a drop of water over glass, and for a minute the only thing you can smell is the wintertime ocean.)

"No one deserves to be here, Frank." And Hawkeye stood in the slightly crooked threshold, arms limp at his sides as if they simply couldn't stand to try and hold things together anymore. His surgical scrubs were white and red and pink and faint-brown with blood and life, and his eyes were closed even though they were open. Taking small, almost utterly motionless steps, Hawkeye passed between Frank and BJ,

(touch. brief. on your arm, his fingers cold and sweaty and then he is gone)

coming to sit next to George on the bunk. Without ceremony, the doctor grabbed for a drink with graceless hands, taking it as if it were acid eating him away. "No one-- goddammit, assuming there is a God and I'm really, seriously reconsidering that-- no one deserves to be here."

"Pierce," and yeah, maybe Frank was a ferret-- some type of small, jittery animal, vicious in its inability to think. "You-- you keep protecting this thing!"

"Really, Frank, this is why I never take you anywhere," Hawkeye said casually, leaning over toward George. "I'm really sorry about all this-- next time BJ and I will put him on a leash before we have visitors."

"I--" George began, but Hawkeye's blue gaze was earnest.

"Don't you dare say you're sorry." The older doctor lifted a finger. "You don't ever have to apologize to people like him." Then, absently, "Frank, get outta here."

"Hawkeye--," and then there were three on that small army cot, with Captain B. F. Pierce sitting slumped between his patient and his doctor, drinking like someone who had become disinterested in his own destruction.

"Look here, Pierce--" Frank began.

A rustle from the body left in the red robe. "What part of 'get lost' don't you understand?"

"I am an officer in the United States Army--"

"Congratulations," Hawkeye's gaze rolled and was empty. "You're the only one in this room."

"--and I will not tolerate this shameless flaunting in the face of God's Commandments!" It seemed, to BJ, that the major's features became more pinched with each word, and the young captain felt sick of and sorry for him all at once.

"You mean, for example," BJ offered with the words tight in his throat, "like that law about not playing footsie with women who aren't your wife?"

(Ah, ah, thou shalt not....
Thou shalt not lie-- even to thyself-- thou shalt not kill --'cept when the old men sitting safe in their armchairs order you to do so-- and no, thou shalt not covet.
Covet, which is desire, wanting, needing, grasping for a chance to touch and hold all of that person between your two arms, to try and distill them and hold them to this moment because damnit, they're always going away....
Covet.
Old dusty books of Latin in college, the language of the dead and dying and unchanging. From cupidous, the old word for desirable. To crave, to long for... implying jealousy, of words and deeds done with someone other than yourself, of that which is gone but still leaves a little throbbing ache you feel when you touch his hand.)

BJ found, quite suddenly, that his hand was on Hawkeye's knee, squeezing gently and utterly refusing his muscles' commands to return. Hawkeye's change of posture was like an understanding gaze, but no one else seemed to notice.

"Never mind that!" Frank said, eternally able to turn the mirror away, to refuse with stubborn ignorance to really look at himself. Only the flaws in other people, visible as the bones and ligaments in X-ray.

"Look, Ferret-Face," Hawkeye said with simple, profound distaste. "I don't take orders from you, and I don't take orders from the brass, and I don't even take orders from MacArthur. If God thinks that this" -- he gestured to George -- "nice kid should be killed because of what he believes, then I don't take orders from God, either."

"I--"

"Get out of here!" the older captain cried in frustration. For a moment, the higher officer turned, but seemed to think better of it and came to face the three other men once more.

"Listen here," he addressed BJ, "I know you're a bleeding-heart liberal-- all that 'live and let live'-- but you're gonna regret it. I suggest you follow my original suggestion and get as far away from" -- he shook several fingers in Hawkeye's direction -- "him as you can. We'll see how you like it when he starts trying to molest you!" There was stillness, and Frank's words came into it rough and grating. "Unless, of course, there's more of that sickness around here than I thought."

To be continued