Chapter V

It surprised BJ that he felt no rage. An accusation,
(Do you want him? To touch him? Do you... --God help you-- love him?)
so obviously meant to provoke, but it landed against him harmlessly because he already understood what had lodged with such sweet pain inside himself. Nothing was ever going to be simple-- Hawkeye could not be Peg and Peg could not be Hawkeye, nor was that something BJ wanted. Far across the ocean that brought forgetfulness whichever way it was crossed, he understood that _love_ and *love* and /love/ can all mean different things.

And there was a small space, right beside his disgust at Frank, where he pitied the other man because Frank's love, that bit that he had, seemed to wither and feed on itself. So there was that one clear moment that rang with BJ's dull shock, and that was all right, but then....

Hawkeye was up and moving, possibly just in between two beats of BJ's heart; a whirl of red robe, with George backing away and BJ reaching out.

"Hawkeye, what are you--?" BJ asked, watching as the older captain connected his fist with Frank's jaw, the motion etched in calm violence. The major tumbled back onto his bunk, scrambling to press himself into a corner and eye the others with a suspicion that turned BJ's stomach.

"Defending your honor, of course," Hawkeye said lightly, rubbing his fist and looking anywhere save to meet BJ's gaze. To Frank, he said, "I really wish you'd keep your stupidity to yourself, Frank, I really do. You want to argue with me? Fine. But don't sit here and try to throw crap on BJ. He's ten times the man you'll ever be-- even if you do manage to somehow evolve and join our species."

(Quiet, dangerous, and is there an undertone there-- am I reading this right-- that speaks "he belongs to someone, lay off," and just really, who is that someone anyway?)

Frank made a hysterical half-laugh/cry, and there were footsteps in the night-dirt of the compound.

Soon Potter's voice said, "What in the name of Merciful Mother Mary is going on in here?"

But really, in a way, there was only Hawkeye. And BJ, wishing those blue eyes would turn and look at him.

"Colonel," greeted Hawkeye with preternatural composure, a quiescence to him that BJ had not seen before, as though in that last movement he had noticed something new within himself. He moved smoothly to the bed and settled into his former position, where BJ's hand crept tentatively back onto his knee, almost of its own volition.

As Potter barreled through the door, Frank arched up again the tent wall like a small, ruby-eyed snake in the swinging lamplight.

"Colonel!" he cried, a moment after Hawkeye.

"I'm glad you boys still know my rank," said Potter, glaring at each of them in turn: Frank hunched concavely in the corner; Hawkeye a distant, hollow shape on the bed, emptied of light; BJ slightly wide-eyed beside him, hand draped over his knee, startled out of that usual steadiness. Then Potter saw George, unobtrusive behind Hawkeye, slowly clambering back into himself, and lowered his voice. "All right, let's hear it. Who's this, and why's Frank getting better acquainted with the floor?"

BJ waited for Hawkeye to answer, but there was no sound, and so he spoke for them both.

"Uh, Colonel, this is George." He realized with gray, faraway surprise that he didn't even know George's surname -- but why did that matter? Here, Korea putting down roots like fungus in all of them, George was no one to anyone; less than no one, less that the common soldier, because he was

(Human.)

something else.

"That's an answer to one question," said Potter, and glanced at Frank, "even if it doesn't tell me anything."

"This is the Army," interjected Hawkeye, with little of himself behind the words. "Do you really expect substantive answers from anyone?"

"All right, Pierce," said Potter, sighing. "Why don't you come clean?"

"I'll never come clean," replied Hawkeye. "I'm permanently soiled." Potter gave him a look. "Well, it's nothing new, Colonel - Frank needed some sense knocked into him, and I took it upon myself to help."

Potter passed a hand wearily over his face.

"All right," he said. "I should have known better than to expect a straight answer from you." There was a strangled noise from Frank across the room, a noise of indeterminate emotion. Potter didn't seem to notice. "All right, then. Hunnicutt, you tell me. What happened?"

BJ tensed, and Hawkeye, feeling the tightening of the fingers on his leg, looked at him and touched his hand in discreet reassurance.

"Frank was bothering George, and it was completely inappropriate. So... Hawkeye hit him."

Potter's glance at Hawkeye was censorious, but they could see his jaw go rigid as he turned to face Frank.

"Burns?" he prompted, in his voice that low undertone, like the grinding of stone, that they recognized as sheer rage. "What in God's name possessed you to act that way with a patient? You're a doctor, man!"

"What?!" exclaimed Hawkeye, straightening up a bit. Potter, with the ease of custom, did not acknowledge him.

Frank remained where he was, but he leaned forward intently and propped himself up against the nearby bed.

"Colonel, I think it's my duty to inform you-"

"It's your duty to answer me," interrupted Potter.

"Well, I am, sir. You have to understand the context of-"

"Burns, I don't give a horse's hindquarters what the blasted context was. What were you doing?"

"That man," said Frank, drawing himself up in affront, his long forefinger curling out inexorably toward George, who sat stiff-backed and vacant-eyed, edged in light like a figure cut from tin, "is a homosexual. And those two are too busy being bleeding-hearts to see what a threat he is."

BJ sensed Hawkeye stir beside him, infused with sudden, brutal life.

"Hang on a second," BJ murmured warningly, his voice between only them.

Potter just waited, his back to the two captains, his shoulders together as if at attention, the winding sputter of the yellow lamps burning his shadow into the floor. At last, he put his hands into his pockets and said blandly, "How is he a threat, Burns?"

Hawkeye and BJ exhaled in relief simultaneously: their body rhythms synchronized, bone and nerve endings somehow folded together like the minute, iridescent interplay of watch gears. Unexpectedly, BJ felt the covert pressure of Hawkeye's shoulder blade against the side of his chest, as the other doctor moved closer and rested against him. BJ froze, spared George an unfocused glance, and saw that the young man's attention was fully on Frank, hidden back there somewhere in the oily folds of tent-cloth. Then, carefully, he shifted position to accommodate Hawkeye.

Hawkeye was shaking slightly. BJ soon found himself shaking too, so that their individual motions became inseparable.

"Colonel!" protested Frank, blocked from their view by Potter's silhouette. "This is the Army!"

"So men should be celibate here?" Potter asked, a touch of cool irony to his tone.

"Men like that should be celibate everywhere," spat Frank, and BJ envisioned him squatting there, his upper lip lifted, the unreasoning glint of terror in his eyes, because it was Them, They were everywhere. He scrabbled in the dim corner, his mind turning circles upon itself, his head ducked low, trembling - pathetic --

(BJ was gliding down Harper Lane on his new bike, the freedom of a Saturday afternoon flooding through his pumping muscles. Out on the narrow driveway, he and his father had fiddled with it, screwed down the seat, adjusted the pedals, so that now the chains sang fluidly as he hit a stretch of gravel.

Across the street -- he knew, because it was always happening; somehow, beside the high white fence, down on the asphalt made bright by the night's rain, it was always replaying itself -- a tight knot of boys stood, their arms cocked back, hefting stones. Between the lean, tanned bars of their legs, someone rolled and doubled in on himself, hands raised.

BJ knew on some level what it was that they chanted -- "Pansy, pansy!" -- and knew the bony rattle he heard was the shower of rocks in that closing circle, but somehow it didn't register, here among the carefully tended flowerbeds and neat shingled houses, and he leaned in, straining to hear, sick and suddenly heavy-limbed, until the bike scraped the curb and he was falling.

As the street reared up to meet him, he thought he saw, pale and stunned and uncomprehending, Peg's face in one of windows above, hands pressed to the glass as he fell away.)

"How is he a threat?" Frank was repeating, incredulous.

"That's what he asked," chimed in Hawkeye with bitter satisfaction. "How - not who, not what, not when or why or where." BJ jabbed him lightly with an elbow. They didn't need Frank, in all his no-lipped fury, peering around Potter to retort and noticing the way they had become inextricably tangled.

Then, like a sixth sense, suspicion flooded BJ, and he remembered George, his hands folded politely, his eyes sheer and reflective and unfaceted as a pane of glass, sitting just on the other side of Hawkeye. BJ didn't move for a moment, because it was always something. There was always a body in the way, Potter shielding him from Frank, Hawkeye shielding him from George, and somehow, always and forever, the smooth arc of Peg curving away in the darkness, illuminated when even the floodlights trailed off, when he felt It pool coldly where his heart was supposed to be. He raised his eyes and looked over Hawkeye's shoulder.

For a moment, it seemed as if George had dissolved entirely; vanished underground to surface elsewhere, someplace safe. But no, there he was-it was only the bright, spoiling yellow light of Hawkeye's lamp and the straw-blond of George's hair that made him seem too diffuse to look at. George's eyes were unfocused and dim, so BJ looked, really looked and saw only that old window with its dripping glass and Peg locked away behind it. George's eyes were such a light, ceramic blue, and Hawkeye's orbs had all the furious Atlantic locked away; it was Peg's eyes -- this is insane-- Peg's eyes he saw peering out that window, brown touched with hazel and understanding and for the first time BJ thought perhaps the woman with his wife's face was not the one he knew.

"He's a threat to security!" Frank's voice had reached a truly painful pitch, as off-key as Mulcahy's piano meanderings-- the tone was fumbling, but the words were a weapon fashioned in haste and rage, not notes dropped from the fingers of a priest too tired and heartsick to pray with his voice.

"Sir," Frank rose very briefly to his feet, then seemed to fall back against his cot, heavy with sweat and the lingering scent of Margaret and dreams in which sharp brown eyes measured him through silver glasses and found him always wanting. "The man is a homosexual. He's not a real man! He's a weakness for the enemy to exploit."

"Frank," said Potter with patience like that toward a blindly angry mutt, "how do you know he's a h--" The country doctor frowned, as if faced with some exotic species, just different. "Homosexual?"

"They said--"

Quick like a shot from the cavalry man, "Who?"

"His fellow enlisted men--"

At that, George seemed to snap back to the crowded Swamp and the smell of fermenting gin; his eyes met BJ's with brief and almost painful understanding. BJ imagined those eyes following another form-tall perhaps, lanky?-- marching ahead of George, someone cared for whose name was shouted by the shells as they rained. George's gaze dropped and seemed to trace the places where Hawkeye and BJ touched-- palm to palm, hand to knee, and back to chest, as if they might suddenly melt into one another and become a sum total.

In the mess tent, Igor was letting the creamed corn slide lazily out of the ladle. Hawkeye's voice was just a rumble without words, all brash and flashy with defiance despite the rusting of Korea's soil over his whole.
BJ said, "Easy, Hawk."
And Igor, without looking up, handed them two matching trays for one person. "Here you go, PierceIntyre."

So, Pierce and Hunnicutt, Pierceinncut, Pierce and Cut, isn't that a laugh!

"Colonel Potter." George's voice rang out like a distant sound you can't quite identify. "I'm... I never intended to cause any trouble."

"He speaks," said Hawkeye rather blandly, with a smile at George to take the edge off.

"Amazing things happen when Frank shuts up," BJ added, watching Frank's mouth form words like "disgusting" and "sick" and "filthy" without any audience at all.

"Don't apologize, son." Potter took a step forward, seemed not to see this new cocoon of Hawkeye and BJ, hands here and there and bodies resting together ready to metamorphose. "Frank's a doctor. You'd think all that book learning might knock some sense into his head, but we're starting to figure it's too small to fit much. He's outta line." And there-- BJ didn't need to look to see Frank's face as Potter placed his hand on George's shoulder. It was the face of every boy on that white-picket-fence lane, shouting "Pansy, pansy!" while the adults turned their eyes away to pretend it wasn't there.

(Peg's voice as she sat on her porch, home from school, her head on BJ's shoulder;
"Humans can be so cruel." Yes, and in one hand the tattered remains of her baseball glove, which the girls had stolen to burn, and in the other a tome proclaiming "Thrilling Wonder Stories!" with the promise of a bright rocket's escape skittering across the cover. Ungirl, Peg had been taunted with, It and Thing and Alien. But BJ could remember how she placed her tongue between her lips, eyes bright as she watched the ball. A*cack*! Such a fluid swing, there the white orb went into the heavens, an arch like the curve of the breasts she would grow. He remembered kissing them, soft and more than a little bit shy; remembered Erin curled against them. It was only now that he remembered Peg crying, arms crossed over her traitorous chest.
Her voice, again. "BJ, girls don't play baseball. Mom says it's not lady-like.")

"Colonel, I object!" Frank sputtered.

"Yes, Frank," Hawkeye tossed lightly, "you are an object. We've been trying to figure out what you are for ages. Maybe it's time we dissected you and made sure."

"It's not for you to object." The old soldier's voice was strangely calm, waiting for the funnel cloud to touch down. "Major Burns, you have behaved in a manner this evening ill befitting an officer, a doctor--"

"Not to mention a gentlemen, a human being or even a semi-intelligent life-form." Hawkeye again, before BJ could move his hand as if to steady the words. He realized that Hawkeye couldn't stop, wouldn't stop, until either he or Frank dropped dead from exhaustion-- until Frank's bigotry stopped ringing in the air or Hawkeye's soul had no ears with which to hear it.

He had the sudden, crazy image of an angel-Hawkeye (what a thought, that!), like the illustrations of Michael in his father's Bible. Sword raised against Satan-- and even God if He should judge-- because life was Hawkeye's trade and death was just that personal. Live and let live.

Hawkeye's voice, wrapped in nightmares on the other side of the Swamp;
"God, let them live!"

"Thank you, Captain Pierce." Potter's eyes flashed behind the ancient lenses. "Frank-- you'll see the MPs in a few minutes if you don't get out of here before a little lamb could even think of shaking its tail. I don't care where you go-- just don't come back until you've walked off this tantrum and are willing to act at least a little older than my grandson. God knows he has more sense than you-- but try for manners."

"I will not be kicked out of my own billet by a yellow-bellied pansy! I--"

"DISMISSED!" Potter's voice seemed to pick Frank up by his collar-the Major threw a sheering glance across the room, as if to raze the tent to the ground, but he turned and vanished into the night with the other boogey-men, crawling in the darkness of Korea and children's dreams.

Pause. Next act-- everyone get your programs out. Hawkeye met BJ's gaze; like a pure beam of energy, that glance settled somewhere inside the younger man, becoming part of his bones. George was silent and still, and Potter was frozen in his attitude of command-- BJ realized he couldn't feel the expression on his face and felt somehow exposed. The band of gold on his finger could not cover his vulnerability.

"Hawkeye," Potter said quietly, "next time Burns gets this way, get the MPs to beat some sense into him. I know you'd like to do it yourself, but one of these days he is going to nail you for striking a superior officer."

"Frank's not superior to anything." Hawkeye waved his hands. "Even HQ has enough brain cells to recognize that."

"You'd fight this whole war yourself if you thought it'd end sooner." The old man's voice was surprisingly gentle, almost fatherly and pained. In the same breath, he said to George, "Come on, son. I'll walk you back to post op." He led the patient away like a parent teaching a child to walk-- pausing at the door, the light obscuring his face so that BJ and Hawkeye heard "Night, boys. Take it easy," but had no context of expression in which to read it. Two voices raised and said "goodnight" to the colonel, but BJ couldn't figure how it could be himself or his partner, because their gazes had locked again and the language of his thoughts wouldn't translate.

"Right," said Potter, either to George or to himself. "Goodnight."

I wonder if everyone in Korea is running by two times-- clock hands racing against each other. Here, near the damn old 38th, it's such-and-such hour, but what time is it in Mill Valley, Boston, Crabapple Cove, Toledo, Ottumwa? What are Mother, Father, Sis, Peg, Erin, Dad, Ma, Uncle Ed, Laverne, Mildred doing now?

Time change, times change-- the international dateline like the Great Wall of China and you were just shouting over it, hoping the others could hear.

Maybe Peg was in the living room, rocking Erin in the curves of the chair and her embrace, staring out at the back yard and the apple tree, dangling fruit just out of reach. And maybe Daniel Pierce was tired and just getting home, tipping his hat to the picture of his wife sitting on the piano. Hawkeye had spoken about that, once-- that portrait of Ms. Maddoc Pierce, that single remaining flash of mother, which he greeted in the morning and said farewell to at night. Perhaps they, too, (Peg, trying on some type of grotesque widowhood; Daniel, railing against his childlessness) could see BJ and Hawkeye, sitting together, not speaking-- as if through a magic mirror or wishing well.

If they could see, then they would watch the two doctors lean toward each other and pull away-- fearful and heady and caring and needy. They would see the mouths opening and not making words.

They would see Hawkeye reach out and turn off the light.

To be continued