It Only Shows Up In Photographs

by Captain Evermind

A new series of vignettes, this time postwar, charting the lives and memories of the MASH characters through their photographs of the old days.

6. Mill Valley, California

Mill Valley, California.

BJ Hunnicutt leantback in his desk chair and sighed. He sipped from his mug of coffee and with one hand massaged the headache which was beginning to pound in his temple. He lifted his tired gaze and looked out over the streets. From his office, he could just see the Golden Gate bridge, lit up like a Christmas tree with the little fairy-lights of cars wending homeward through the growing dusk. He shuffled the papers in front of him into an irregular sort of pile, pushed back his chair, and yawned widely. His eyes performed the familiar flick upwards to the framed photographs on the desk. Peg. Peg and Erin. Peg, BJ and Erin. Waggle the dog. The 4077th MASH.

It was this last photo which held his attention. A cluster of people grouped about a painted signpost. Smiling, but not really smiling at all. His eyes passed slowly from person to person, recalling their names. Charles, standing upright and aristocratic, and only slightly pompous. His hand on Margaret's shoulder as she sat with eyes sparkling, pale golden hair soft upon her shoulders. Colonel Potter stood beside Charles, with Klinger beside him, looking strangely characterless in green regulation fatigues. BJ himself, seated on the far right of the picture, with a ridiculous moustache and a floppy straw hat, Father Mulcahy standing behind him with a benevolent twinkle in his eyes.

And there, right in the centre of the photo, Hawkeye. A tall, slender figure of a man, clad in rumpled army green. A young face, and once-dark hair now almost entirely grey. His eyes were blue, but not the blue that BJ remembered. In BJ's mind, his eyes sparked with delighted mischief, blue and devilish, and laughing. Laughing, always laughing, even though nothing was funny. It is only in photographs, BJ thinks, that Hawkeye looks no more than any other man. Just an old, scruffy doctor whose hair used to be jet black, who used to play Lothario and Lucifer by equal turns, who was once the be all and end all of BJ's world. And it only shows up in photographs, the sadness in his eyes.