Chapter 4

Something small and dark erupted from the field on the right-hand side and was out on the road in a second. Margaret gasped and slammed the brakes with no thought of traffic behind her. There wasn't any, thank God, apparently people had other places to be on a sunny Wednesday afternoon than the middle of nowhere, heading west. She heard all the loose stuff in the backseat shift, and the sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper they had bought for lunch and left half-eaten on the dashboard - neither she nor Hawkeye had been fond of the excessive amount of mayonnaise - pressed up against the windshield.

"Whoa!" Hawkeye sat up beside her, coming up from his slumped-over position with his head resting against the side window. "What? What's happening?"

"Sorry!"

Margaret turned and saw the small, dark creature disappear into the corn on the other side of the road. The little rascal was having a very lucky day.

"It was an animal, it ran out right in front of the car. It made it. You okay?"

"Yeah, fine. Are you?"

"Fine, it just scared me. Happy I didn't hit it." She really was, hitting an animal would have been awful.

Hawkeye sat up straighter and yawned.

"Well, that was a wake-up call for sure. How long was I asleep? Where are we?"

"A couple of hours. Nowhere in particular."

Margaret tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. It felt greasy, even though she had washed it that very morning. Traveling always did that to her. The stale air in motel rooms, the scent of gasoline and hot dogs at the gas stations, and the smell of french fries, coffee, and cigarettes in highway diners stuck to her hair and skin like a thin film. She longed for her apple shampoo and coconut body lotion, she wanted to smell like a fancy fruit basket. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, trying to get her heart to slow down, and felt the last pinpricks of adrenaline leave her body through her fingertips.

"Really? It didn't feel that long."

He stretched, as much as the crowded space would allow him, and sank back against the seat, letting his left hand land on her thigh.

"Have I missed anything?"

"You have missed corn. Lots and lots of corn. A sea of corn, and the occasional farm with sad-looking cows. And small creatures with suicidal tendencies, apparently."

Margaret glanced at the road behind them in the rear-view mirror, but it lay deserted. What had that even been, a badger? Well, whatever it was, it was going to be able to gather its friends later and tell the tale of how it had dodged a scary, blue car of doom.
She let her eyes scan the sides of the road ahead of them, now on high alert for any kind of movement that wasn't corn swaying in the breeze.
They had left the ocean behind them back in Maine, but the endless fields made her feel like they had driven right into a new one. An ocean made of green and brown, an ocean that was slowly shriveling up as autumn took a stronger hold with each passing day.

"Oh, and a while back," she continued, "we passed a sign for county fair at a place called Merryvale, and apparently they have their own lady of the lake and everything."

"Really? That's impressive."

"Right? From what I could tell from the sign, she looks like some sort of cross between a mermaid and a goat that lives in a very small pond."

"I can't believe you didn't stop, I wanna see mermaid-goat-lady. We are stopping there on our way back, let me tell you that."

Margaret chuckled and glanced at him. He still looked sleepy, his eyes a bit puffy, and his hair a messy mop on his head. It was nice that he was awake, but it had been nice when he slept too. The sound of the car, and the endless sea of corn under the clear, blue sky had felt hypnotic.
The radio had kept cutting in and out, but eventually, she had found a station that seemed stable, where an elderly gentleman talked about gardening with a voice smooth and calm like silk. If weevils ever decided to invade her garden, Margaret was now prepared.
She enjoyed driving, had ever since she got her license. The hum of the engine, and the way she was in control of the big machine, always relaxed her. Especially when the car had a roof, and there were no enemies lobbing shells at her.
Driving relaxed her mind, anyway, Margaret moved her shoulders and felt how tense they were. Not only from driving, they had been that way for as long as she could remember. No matter how hard she tried, no matter how many massages, no matter how much yoga she did, her shoulders always seemed to be on high alert. Anytime there was bad news, anytime something went wrong, they tightened up more. Old habits die hard. Habits of hiding things away. You can't let anyone know you're afraid, or hurt, or just want to curl up into a ball and cry, so you train your face to not show emotions, just carry on, lead by example. But Margaret's shoulders had turned out to be untrainable, they never stopped reacting. They carried the weight of a world crumbling around her, literal or metaphorical, and on the night of Mildred's call, the petrification seemed to have sped up.
Sitting behind the wheel didn't help, enjoyable as it might be in other ways. The tension gave her a headache; it went all the way from her shoulders, up over her head, and ended in her temples.

Hawkeye drew small circles on her thigh. He stayed close to her knee, knowing not to push his luck when she was driving. Mildred's call had made Margaret tense up, and it had made Hawkeye clingy, in constant need of physical contact. He kept sneaking his arms around her from behind and hooking his chin over her shoulder, and when she moved he just held on, so they turned into a four-legged creature moving through the house. She didn't mind, though, she felt the same need herself, and just hearing him breathe close to her ear gave the world softer edges.
It reminded her of Korea, where all of them had sat so close around the table in the mess tent, their upper arms pressed together. Even when they were too tired to speak, to do anything other than just sit, there had been such a comfort to feel another person's presence so close by. Someone living and breathing. Muscles and tendons moving under warm skin. Nothing broken, nothing shattered, nothing missing. There had been a time in her life when she could have identified any one of them just by how their upper arms felt against hers.
In the O-Club too, sitting around those tiny tables. Even with drinks in their glasses and up-tempo songs in major keys playing on the jukebox, the closeness was needed. They had been so tired, so helpless. Always balancing on a thin line to terrible, and the physical contact had helped, if only ever so little.

"I like these pants on you," Hawkeye said as his fingers kept playing over her leg. "But they're not my favorites. Do you know which pair is my favorite?"

"Yes, I do know that," Margaret said without taking her eyes off the road.

"Yeah, those are great."

She could hear the big grin in his voice. She knew exactly which pair he was talking about. An old pair of capri pants, one of the first items she had bought when she got back to the States, worn soft and thin over the years. They always felt like a second skin, and she felt like just Margaret in them, no left-over traces of Major Houlihan.
A couple of years ago, she had worn them out on a trip to the woods for blueberry picking. The owner of the diner downtown, Mrs. White, had without asking recruited Margaret to help out with the pie baking for the End of Summer-fest, and Margaret had recruited Hawkeye to help out too. Also without asking. She had ended up crawling through some shrubs to get to some big, beautiful berries that looked like an illustration out of a storybook, and on her way out again, she had somehow managed to get one of the back pockets caught on a low-hanging branch, and it had torn off almost completely, taking a huge chunk of the fabric underneath with it.
Hawkeye had laughed until he shrieked and spent the rest of the outing close behind her, swatting away bugs from her exposed skin. Apparently, there had been a never-before-seen number of bugs in the woods that afternoon, and when they got home, they ran upstairs and didn't deal with the berries until next morning. It had been a very good day. And night.
Margaret still wore the pants around the house, sometimes, with very little underneath. She wore them when Hawkeye needed cheering up. When she needed to apologize. Or when she simply felt like it.
Last summer, she had put them on while waiting for Hawkeye to get back from a four-day conference he had absolutely not wanted to go to. She had sat out on the porch all afternoon, looking down the lane, and when she finally caught the first glimpse of his blue car, she had quickly gotten up, turned her back, and bent over a flowerpot while the car came to a stop behind her, wanting to give him a view she knew he would appreciate as a welcome home-present. Mr. Linkin, who owned the hardware store and lived further down the road, had recently bought a blue car too, as it turned out, and had been keen to show it off to the Pierces. Margaret still felt her face turn hot every time she saw him, and he did his best to look everywhere but directly at her. She wasn't even gonna tell Hawkeye that story at first, but she hadn't been able to keep such a good laugh from him. And laughed he had, until he couldn't even breathe, had just flopped around like a helpless seal.
He still chuckled and waggled his eyebrows at her every time they passed the hardware store.

"Did you bring them?" he asked, sounding like an excited teenage boy.

"No, Benjamin, I did not bring them," she said, trying to sound like a stern schoolteacher. "For some reason, I decided not to bring my practically assless pants to a funeral."

In a second, the mood in the car changed. Turned heavy. Funeral. Both of them had avoided that word. 'When we go to see Colonel Potter', they had said when they planned the drive, or just called it 'the trip'. The trip was gonna end the next day, and then there it waited, just around the corner. The funeral. Saying hello to old friends and saying goodbye to the person who had tied them all together.

"Ironic, isn't it," Margaret said, keeping her eyes fixed on the road. "Other people get to have ten-year reunions. They get to go to some fancy venue, dress up, and brag about how incredibly successful they have become. We get a nine-year reunion, and it's a goodbye."

Hawkeye was quiet for a while, his hand still on her leg, just resting now.

"Closure," he said slowly. Like the word was the first bite of a strange fruit and he wasn't sure what to make of it. "We're getting closure. Dad said that. When it's over, it will feel like closure. Like people are doors. People aren't doors, people are floorplans. Entire labyrinths. And you can get lost. Or trapped in the crawl space."

Margaret glanced at him, but he kept looking straight ahead and didn't meet her gaze. His voice was low when it came again, like he was lost in time. In the crawl space.

"All of Korea was a trap. A glue trap. We had to leave parts of us behind to break free."

She cast a quick glance at him again, saw him shake his head, and heard him sigh. He was quiet for a while, looking out the side window.
Margaret sat quiet too and thought of things left behind. She thought of camp, of all the places they had moved around to. Suddenly she wondered what those places looked like now. When the war ended and all of them scattered for the winds, heading back home to try and fit back into their old lives, what had happened to the places, to all the emptiness left behind? The cement floor of the OR, was it just a strange, random square in the middle of nowhere now? Did kids sometimes run past it and wonder why it was there? Did a whole bunch of them play games on it, maybe? Bounced balls and watched them fly high towards the sky where no choppers tore through the stillness anymore. She hoped so, to have life and joy in a place that had seen so much death, that would be beautiful.
Did the corn still grow where Father Mulcahy once planted it? Where her tent stood, what was there now? Maybe those yellow flowers that grew everywhere had taken over and made the ground come alive, she really hoped they had. They were beautiful. Her tent had not been, but she had done what she could to make it feel like home, and she had succeeded, apparently, because suddenly she felt an irrational longing for it.
And the animals, what had happened to them? The stray dogs and cats that kept showing up, what had become of them? Margaret felt her chest tighten at the thought of that orange tabby she used to pet, it had been such a sweetheart, what if something bigger and stronger and hungrier had come along, and the last thing the small cat had seen was big teeth and sharp claws. Suddenly, the thought of the cat hurt more than anything else, and she had to force her thoughts away from it. She shifted as much as she could in her seat and shook her head quickly. Stupid, so stupid to want to cry over a cat that wasn't even hers to begin with.

She heard Hawkeye move beside her as he turned towards her again, and gave her leg a squeeze.

"But it gave us something too, though, didn't it? This. Colonel Potter."

Margaret put her hand over his and squeezed it back. He brought hers up to his lips and kissed it, and she smiled at him before turning her attention back to the road. They sat in silence again, both of them lost in the crawlspaces of their mind. Margaret's head was a jumbled mess of thoughts, of strings that kept pulling, all the strings that tied them all together. Made of steel. Of blood. Of sweat and dust. Of icy winds, mud, and need. Of too many drinks, too little sleep, too much frustration. Unbreakable bonds, tied around her heart, forming the word 'family'.
She thought of the tiny little speckle of professional respect that had shivered between her and Hawkeye at first, reluctant and frail, but somehow it had endured even when they hated each other the most.

She heard him chuckle to himself.

"What?"

"No, I just…" He laughed again, heartily this time. "When we went to visit, when he wasn't our superior officer anymore and he didn't have to think about what he said, remember how blunt he was? How goddamned funny? That first dinner?"

Margaret laughed too.

"I know, I almost died."

"Me too. 'I always knew there was something going on between the two of you,'" he said in his best Colonel Potter impression, which actually was quite good, and made Margaret's heart ache again. "'I never knew if you were gonna strangle each other or fuck each other senseless'".

They both laughed again, and Margaret felt a big patch of warmth spread in her chest. Yes, she for sure remembered. The first evening in the Potter's house, and Margaret had been a big ball of emotions. So happy to see Colonel Potter again, to hug him and see that his smile, despite everything his body had been through, was the same. The warmth of it, and the way it made her feel. It had hurt to see how slowly he moved, and that his back wasn't as straight anymore, but he hadn't lost his sharpness, and absolutely not his sense of humor.
She had been about to swallow a sip of wine, and hearing Colonel Potter say 'fuck' made her gasp. The involuntary intake of air had sent some wine down her throat at too high a speed, as the rest of it shot up her nose. She had managed to swallow, her throat making a horrible, gurgling sound, before she started to cough while fumbling for her napkin with wine dripping out of her nose, and a concerned Mildred patting her back. Hawkeye had thrown himself back in his chair laughing, making the backrest creak loudly in protest. It had not been Margaret's most dignified moment, that was for sure, but a cherished memory anyway.

"Truth is," Hawkeye continued, "I was never sure either."

"I'm still not," Margaret said and shook her head.

"I know. Keeps me on my toes." He chuckled again. "Do you want me to drive for a while?"

"No, it's fine, I like it. You drove almost all the way yesterday."

He had, the entire afternoon, actually. Margaret had spent the hours dozing in the passenger seat, the movement of the car and the hum of the engine so restful, the passing time slow as molasses. It had been almost like a trance. Not real sleep, more like her mind breaking free from her body, moving into a place somewhere just below the surface of consciousness, where reality and dreams blended together. She had looked out the window every now and then, her eyelids had felt so heavy, like they went all the way from her hairline to her cheeks, and she had never been really sure of what she was looking at. Where or when she was. She saw cars and trucks, but somewhere among them, she was sure she caught a glimpse of an army jeep, or a rickety wagon carrying a family of Koreans. Among the billowing rows of crops, there were shadows. Shadows of men in uniforms and helmets, with rifles over their shoulders, walking out into the fields. It had been strange. Surreal, like a fever dream, but not frightening, strangely enough. More than anything it had made her feel melancholy.

"Good." He yawned, big and loud. "I hope we're gonna get to that Inn soon, I need to stand up. We should buy a bigger car; this one is starting to feel like a cage."

He arched his back and stretched his arms out in front of him. His hand found its way back to her thigh. A tiny bit higher up this time, he obviously had high hopes she wasn't going to strangle him that day either.

The car kept rolling through the sea of green slowly turning brown. Each passing mile brought them closer and closer to the goodbye, and the thought of it made Margaret's shoulders tense up even more. In the back of her head, though, she could still hear Colonel Potter's laugh, so she tried to focus on that and tune out everything else.
She thought of his laugh, and if she tried really hard, she could almost feel the burn of wine shooting up her nose.