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ravenI have written elsewhere and at length about this, but a long time ago, I watched Sidney Freedman on television say: "Actually, Hawkeye, I think you're the sanest person I've ever known."
At this particular moment, it seems a good place to have come round to again. Although there are some complete sentences in this story that were written eleven years ago, thankfully not very many.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gamesiplay betaed this with a great deal of kindness.
A brief content note, that should not be much of a surprise: (skip) This is a story about recovering from mental illness.
(As usual, please feel free to contact me if you would like more detail before reading.)
fic:: what is living is fugitive
by Raven
10,000w, M*A*S*H, gen, Hawkeye and the whole ensemble. How Hawkeye went home, and all the people, things and acts of kindness that got him there.
In early August Dickie Barber, who runs the town hardware store, and did not at any point, no matter what he says, lend Hawkeye thirty-seven dollars, discovers a cache of fireworks in his basement that somehow got forgotten on the fourth of July. He calls around some guys he was in grade school with, including Hawkeye, and they sit out in folding chairs on the edge of the town where the sloping land curves down to the shore, watching the fireworks explode over the water, green then violet then red.
“Shame you missed the fourth,” says Lily Petersen, who married one of those same guys Hawkeye was in grade school with, while he was away. He remembers her from school as a mousy little girl with pigtails, her face shining in the surface of the apple she brought to class every day. “We had a clambake and there were fireworks just like this. It’s a pity you couldn’t have come home earlier.”
“I don’t mind,” Hawkeye says quietly, his eyes on the sky. “At least I got home in the end.”
“You had a pretty rough time out there, huh?”
Hawkeye glances at her, takes in the uncomplicated sympathy on her round and open face. “Yeah,” he says after a minute, and yawns hugely, his jaw cracking. “Sorry, I normally give a girl a better time.”
She chuckles. “You gave me plenty of a good time in senior year round the back of the soda shop the night school let out.”
He’d forgotten about that, and his laugh vanishes into the general satisfied aaaaah at a particularly spectacular burst of green and orange light. “Yeah. Listen, if you want to” – he can’t help himself – “come renew the good times?”
“I’m a married woman, Hawkeye Pierce,” she says, mock-reprovingly, wagging a finger. “I’ll come out for a milkshake. Maybe a lunch date, it seems like you need the sleep. ”
Hawkeye, mid-yawn again, waves his apology. He's been sleeping ten hours a night since he got back, a weary deep sleep that gives him dehydration headaches when he wakes up. His father asked him once what drugs he was given when he was an inpatient, and after that, let the subject go and left coffee and warm bread out for him in the mornings, waiting. Like everything else, it takes time.
“A milkshake, then,” he says. “Strawberry.”
"Strawberry," she agrees.
The next firework twists and whistles into the sky, and he flinches at the noise. He goes still as the rain of stars comes down with a feeling of calm settling inside his body, somewhere around his diaphragm.
*
After Henry died, and Frank was in command, Hawkeye made a decision halfway through the mid-afternoon lull. Through the double doors in the OR, some of the enlisted men had their mops and buckets out, scouring the floor, sluicing down the surfaces, ready for the second wave.
"Come on then," Hawkeye said, coming through the door with his mask still tied around his neck and something loose and unfocused about him.
Radar looked up at him, not understanding. After a moment he said, "Captain Pierce, sir?"
Hawkeye sat down on the edge of Radar's cot and said, "Frank's really getting to you, isn't he."
"Sir," Radar said, a little desperately. "Sir" – and Hawkeye clasped his hands and got down to his knees and said, "Radar, call me Hawkeye, please. Now pack up, the van won't wait all day."
"What van," Radar said, helplessly, so Hawkeye and Father Mulcahy went around the tiny space, picking up discarded clothing and comic books and pairs of boots and the teddy bear and putting them in the cardboard box. They carried it between them across the compound and started unpacking while Radar watched, and they had been doing it for five minutes when Radar asked, "Ah, sir, what are you sirs doing?"
"We're moving you into the Swamp," Father Mulcahy said, gently. "Hawkeye, didn't you explain…"
"I tried," Hawkeye said, waving his hands around, blurry with tiredness. "I tried. Radar, you can't just keep – not with Frank in that office, and he's not living here any more – look, I'm not a farm boy. And not normally a fruitcake, but. I don't know what you do with injured lambs or rabbits or whatever, I can only do people. What do you do when you find something, when something's hurt, Radar?"
"Take 'em home with me," Radar said, and sat down on Frank's empty cot, and took his glasses off and scrubbed his eyes.
*
The first time a car backfires Hawkeye hates himself and everything else just for the sheer broken-down mundanity of it, this little scene that is replaying itself over and over in small towns and suburbia across America, the car speeding away, the man who still dreams in khaki green and red suddenly balanced on the balls of his feet with his breath coming in short gasps through his mouth.
He mentally catalogues the hormonal response and the neurotransmitter release, observes the tachycardia, and once he's done that he's a little calmer, still breathing heavily, in, out, in, out, surrounded by trees in full summer leaf. His father turns to him and says, quietly, "Are you all right?"
It's not one of his father's bedside manners, the taxonomy of which was just another part of his training, and for that he's thankful. "Fine," Hawkeye mutters, "by which I mean, not fine at all, no, can we…"
"We can go home," his father says, and grips Hawkeye's wrist with thumb and forefinger for a moment. Somewhere else and from someone else, Hawkeye thinks, that might be another trigger – another visceral jolt back to pain, restraint, fear – but right now it just takes him back to childhood, to holding hands when he crossed these same streets, on the way down to the ocean, and on the way home.
*
Radar being Radar, he had the plank procured and the end sharpened to a point and a fresh pot of black paint waiting by the time Potter came to take a pleasant springtime walk around the camp and stopped, admiringly, by the sign. "Toledo," he said, "that's Klinger, and Ottumwa, Iowa – you, Radar? Who's Crabapple Cove? And where is it?"
"Me, sir," Hawkeye said, from his deckchair outside the Swamp. BJ had gone to beg or borrow a checkers set and Hawkeye had been dozing in the meantime, listening to the birds sing and the nurses clink morning cocktails in the next tent over. "It's a little place up in Maine."
"Maine, huh? Known a few men from New England in my time," Potter said. "Good men all, tend to go doolally for foliage the way other men get their heads turned by a pretty nurse, but you can't have everything."
Hawkeye nodded. "I resemble that remark, sir."
Potter laughed. "Fair. What is it, Radar?"
"What about you, sir?" Radar asked, a little anxiously. "We had one up for, um…" He hesitated.
"For Colonel Blake," Potter said, gently. "I understand, son. It's mighty thoughtful of you to worry on my account."
"Where do you hail from, Colonel?" Hawkeye asked with interest, surprised he hadn't thought to ask before now.
Potter chuckled. "I'm an army man, Pierce. Have been since I lied about my age the first time. I lived on base Stateside. I guess if anywhere's my home, it's in khaki."
Hawkeye smiled wryly. "Must be nice," he said, after a moment, "to carry home around with you."
"Never thought about it like that," Potter said, "but I suppose it is. All the same, home's always people, not just a place. What's to look at in Crabapple Cove?"
"Foliage," Hawkeye offered. "The two-dime soda shop. A nice view down to the ocean. Best seen from the window of the house I was born in."
Potter chuckled. "There you are."
"Uh, Colonel Potter, sir?" Radar still looked anxious. "So where should I get Klinger to write on the sign?"
"You could put Hannibal, Missouri," Potter said, thoughtfully, "because that's where Mildred is, right enough. But you don't want to have to change it every time she goes to visit her sister in Pensacola for a month. I tell you what, son. Where did Colonel Blake hang his hat?"
"Bloomington, Illinois," Radar said, very quietly.
"Bloomington," Potter said. "They've got good people there. Why don't we just keep right on pointing the way?"
"Thank you, sir," Radar said, so quietly Hawkeye almost didn't hear. "That'll be-"
"That'll be all," Potter said, and stood still by the sign, watching Radar walking back towards the company clerk's office, carrying his pot of paint.
"That was nice, Colonel," Hawkeye said, gently.
Potter smiled at him. "You nearly said it yourself, Hawkeye," he said, equally gently. If home's people, might as well start building it where we are. We're here for a while, yet."
He walked on after that, still on his slow circuit, past each tent and supply building, taking a moment to speak to each person he met, his route marked out behind him in the scuffs in the dust. Hawkeye watched him go.
*
The promised strawberry milkshake has turned into dinner, because it turns out Hawkeye's talent for offering hospitality in a canvas cesspool scales beautifully when he has an entire kitchen at his disposal, and Lily seemed pleased by the invitation. Hawkeye said, magnanimously, that her husband could come too, but Art Petersen is six feet tall and six feet wide and isn't afraid for his wife to have dinner with any old childhood friend she wants, no matter his reputation. With a sigh for his reputation, Hawkeye has enjoyed dinner, dessert and being caught up on two years' worth of who kissed whom at the Crabapple Cove annual lobster festival, and now he's making coffee, standing in front of the window looking down towards the water.
Through the sound of water bubbling he hears a small clink of metal and turns around slowly, with a choking feeling like dust gathering in his throat.
"Were these yours?" Lily says. She's picked up the set of dogtags lying on the table.
"Yeah," Hawkeye says, more shortly than he meant to, carrying the coffee mugs across.
"Pierce, Benjamin F.," she says, still holding the tags, and Hawkeye shudders unaccountably as he sits down. He can remember every occasion during his time in Korea when someone else touched them: there were the nurses, dragging him by the neck, knowing he liked it; there was BJ, who touched Hawkeye's shoulder and his dogtags and ruffled his hair and steered him bodily when he was too tired to walk. There was the time a shell hit the centre of the compound where he was holding down a pressure bandage on a wounded man's chest, so they were both sent rolling into the dirt, entwined like lovers, a medic pulling the tags and supporting Hawkeye's head and shouting no match, no match.
"No match," he says aloud, suddenly, and she looks startled.
"I'm sorry?"
"One time," he says, "I got in an accident and got all mixed up with the guy I was working on at the time. They pulled my tags, they had to make sure none of my blood got into him and vice versa."
She just looks at him, and Hawkeye freezes. "Sorry," he says, quickly, "not everyone wants to hear, ah – war stories."
"You don't tell them," Lily says. "Not like some guys – I mean, you know Ned Oliver who works down in the drugstore, he came back about a month before you did and to hear him tell it he single-handedly blew up half of North Korea before breakfast every Sunday. But you don't do that – not at all."
Hawkeye laughs at that. "I didn't blow up anything, I was in a medical unit. Mostly I looked after people."
"What was that like?" she asks.
Hawkeye considers. "We were about three or four miles from the front lines. It was… exhausting, mostly. Crazy. And there are a hundred ways they teach you to look after people, when you're a doctor, and the hundred and first thing you learn is that sometimes none of them work."
"Was it scary?"
"I wore these," he says, gently taking his dogtags from her, letting the chain slip through his fingers, "so that if need be, they could identify my body. And" – he hesitates – "in the end, I was a casualty of war, too. I did a couple of crazy things I didn't quite mean to do at the time, and my friends… well, they looked after me as best they could."
She stares at him. "People in town are saying…"
"I know."
She digests that for a moment. "I'm sorry you had to go through that," she says, and again, Hawkeye is impressed by her straightforward kindness. "Benjamin F. Pierce," she goes on, thoughtfully. "It's Benjamin Franklin, isn't it? I remember the stink you raised in kindergarten when Mrs. Murphy tried to call you that."
Hawkeye smiles, remembering. "My name is Hawkeye," he says, slowly, as though it's something, like the alphabet, like talking someone down from a high place, that he can learn aloud.
*
"Hawk, wake up. It's your shift." BJ sat down on the edge of the cot and felt Hawkeye move under him, retreat into a messy nest of blankets flattened against the tent wall.
"I don't wanna, I called in dead. Leave your wreath and get out of here."
"Well, you've got to," BJ said, insistently, with a sudden image of himself talking to Erin like this, perhaps in ten or fifteen years' time. "Hawkeye, get up."
Some muffled words emerged from the bundle, and BJ sat back. "Hawkeye, you talk to your mother like that when you had to get up for school?"
"Mom wasn't a morning person," Hawkeye said through the layers, startling BJ with the immediacy of confession. "She liked to sleep. I take after her."
It seemed a soothing thought; there was no more movement. BJ regarded him for a long moment, thinking of Erin: of her mother, who also wasn't a morning person; of her first birthday, that he hadn't seen; of her tenth birthday, that he might never see; and of her father, who might be hit by a shell tomorrow, here in this festering place, and stay here under its dirt. With his eyes still tiredly fixed on the middle distance, BJ shook Hawkeye under the covers. Hawkeye evaded him, pulling away, and then without thinking BJ reached in and grabbed Hawkeye's dogtags, yanking upwards, not letting go when he heard Hawkeye whistling pain through his teeth. The blankets pooled on the floor and Hawkeye held himself still, hands hanging limply by his sides, suspended by the chain cutting into his neck.
"My, and you say I'm cranky in the mornings," he said, conversationally; he sounded quite awake.
Abruptly, BJ came to himself, looked at Hawkeye and the dawn filtering through the tent canvas behind him. It was early morning, the sky still stained with pink; he could see Charles's sleeping form on the other side of the tent, and the flood of light creeping to his own bedside and the family portrait on it. He let go and Hawkeye dropped back to his pillows. "Hawk, I’m so sorry, I don't know what I was…"
"Wasn't me you were trying to hurt," Hawkeye said, still conversationally, sitting up again. "Mom never did that," he added, sounding a little peeved, rubbing at his neck.
"Hawk," BJ said again, and stopped, breathed in, went on: "I was thinking about how maybe I might never get to go home" – and he stopped again, thinking confusedly that confession might stand for apology.
"It's okay," Hawkeye said, and for some reason, at that moment Hawkeye with his red robe and blue eyes and dirty mouth reminded BJ of Peg, capable of nothing but gentleness. "It's okay, BJ. Just say next time, when you need me to stand in for something."
BJ nodded, not able to speak; Hawkeye got up, movements neat and controlled, as though rising to a civilised breakfast and civilian practice, pulled the robe around his shoulders and went out into the morning light.
*
His first week back in Crabapple Cove, Hawkeye got a postcard with no message, and noted the address in familiar handwriting, the California postmark. He didn't reply, and now, on this cool morning in late summer, with the dew shining on the long grass and the telephone bell echoing through the house, he knows, without knowing how he knows, that this is it.
"I'll get it, Dad," he calls, trots down the stairs and rolls out the wire, settles himself on the bottom of the steps where he can feel the morning breeze, before picking up the receiver. "Hello."
There's a pause, then BJ says, "Hawkeye."
"Hi."
"You didn't write," BJ says, hesitantly, and then: "Did I wake you? It's coming on seven, right?"
"Six," Hawkeye says. "Dad's not sleeping, he's waiting for someone to come get him for the Macauley baby. And I was just…" He waves a hand before realising BJ can't see him. "You know."
"You didn't write," BJ says again, and then there's a pause. Hawkeye looks out through the open front door, staring at the beautiful cast of the sun through the trees.
"Yeah," Hawkeye says at last. "I didn't write."
"Hawkeye," BJ is saying, and Hawkeye cuts him off.
"What did you want me to say?" He's raised his voice without quite meaning to, letting words spill out that feel like they've been lingering, unsaid, long enough to sour. "I got home safe, I sleep too much or not at all, the night's too quiet and I keep listening for shelling, the whole town thinks I'm a fruitcake but what else is new, I jump at loud noises and it seems like it's always the fucking fourth of July but I'm still here, I'm still here?"
"I wanted you to say you got home safe," BJ says, unhurried, calm. "I wanted to hear how you were. If you didn't want to talk to me, I wanted you to know that's okay, and I'm here. I wanted you to know I was there, too."
The wind stirs into the passageway from the yard, the sunlight scattering through the dust motes. Hawkeye sits absolutely still and listens to BJ listening to him, from three hours behind him across all the continent's great spaces, looking out over a different ocean. He understands, all at once, why the postcard had no message on it.
BJ says, very quietly, "Hawk? You still there?"
Hawkeye breathes out and lets out a shaky laugh. "I'm an ass," he says, after a while.
"Yeah, you are," BJ says, comfortably. "So it's three in the morning and I've just got back from the night shift and I'm too tired to sleep, you of all people know what that's like, so I'm going to tell you about my daughter, now, and how perfect she is in every single way, and how sorry I am that I missed so much, and you, you're going to shut up and listen."
"Erin!" Hawkeye says, pleased. "Does she call you 'daddy' now?"
"Yeah, she's the best. Shut up, now, listen."
Hawkeye shuts up and listens. By the time Rafe Macauley comes to the door, too out of breath from running to speak, Hawkeye has replaced the receiver, still sitting on the bottom step bathed by morning light, feeling calm. "You okay, Hawk?" his father calls on his way down the stairs, trailing his bag.
"Fine," Hawkeye says, breathing easily, getting up to close the door.
*
Potter left first, pausing on the threshold. "Out of those scrubs, Hawkeye, or I'll get you out of them myself."
"Gotta buy me dinner first," Hawkeye said, without lifting his head.
"And, finally." Sidney had been last dealer. "Still owing to the man of the cloth – twelve thousand, five hundred and sixty-seven dollars."
Margaret looked up. "And if the world doesn't end tomorrow?"
"Twelve fifty. There you go."
Mulcahy pocketed the IOU and Sidney took in all the cards and chips, putting them in piles out of habitual neatness. Outside, a sharp gust of wind ripped across the compound, making the light flicker; Hawkeye murmured something and turned over. It was late, but none of them made any move to the door and after a minute, Margaret mutely offered up the pitcher. Mulcahy nodded, holding out his glass, and Margaret filled Sidney's too without asking. The wind was picking up steadily now, batting the tent flaps and lifting gravel, making a sound like the ocean. In this tent with its lonely light, Mulcahy was thinking, they might be adrift in the darkness without knowing it, tacking towards some distant shore.
"Hawkeye," Sidney said, presently, "if you want to sleep without being disturbed, you can have the VIP tent. As you can see I'm not currently using it."
Hawkeye sat up for a moment, rubbing his eyes. "Thanks but no thanks, Sidney. I like the noise." He seemed to think about that for a minute, then lay back down. "I guess when I finally get home it'll be too quiet to sleep. Do you ever think that?"
The inquiry seemed directed at the world at large, rather than any specific person, which might mean Mulcahy was the best-placed to answer; he was thinking of Philadelphia on hot nights, sirens and laughter echoing off slow-cooling sidewalks. "I grew up in the city," he said. "Then I did some work out in a rural parish before I was ordained and every chirping cricket woke me up."
Margaret laughed, very softly. "I grew up on an army base. I can't sleep past reveille."
Sidney grinned, too. "I used to wait," he said, deliberately, "for the last subway train of the day to rattle through. I watched my glass of water shake every night. That was it – enough studying, time for bed."
Hawkeye rolled over in one direction and then the other, thumped a pillow and sat up again. "I guess you'd tell us, Father," he said, worrying the fraying edge of the blanket between his fingers, "that God is in all those places, and in the small towns and open spaces, besides."
There was nothing scathing in the remark; Mulcahy nodded and murmured, "I would, my son."
"I'm not familiar with all your newfangled stuff, Father," Sidney said, with a smile, "but if we're made in the image of God, then God is in us, everywhere we are."
"Even here?" Hawkeye asked, his hands shaking. "I've looked inside them, and I've never found…" – and Mulcahy was thinking, suddenly, of a pilot shot down and choppered in, telling him with impossible youth in his face that he'd flown as high as he could, up there with the birds and the clouds, Father, and I never saw heaven.
Surprising himself, he set down his glass and stood up, took two shaky steps across the tent and waited for Hawkeye to move, obligingly, to give him space to sit. This close, Mulcahy could smell the blood and alcohol on him. He reached across and picked up Hawkeye's left hand, using two fingers to trace the line down from the thumb to the wrist, as Margaret had taught him; it took him a few seconds to pick up Hawkeye's pulse under his skin. Seventy-two beats per minute at rest, Margaret had said. If drawing only on his own training, he should have merely sat on the other side of the tent, across the continental open space of the poker table, and said: pray for guidance, Hawkeye.
"Made perfect," Mulcahy said, counting beats. "In the image of God."
Hawkeye looked up at him and said nothing, lips parted. Mulcahy breathed, then turned around to look at Sidney, who was peering across at them with interest.
From behind his head, Hawkeye said, casual and intimate, "I guess if I wait for that to stop, I'll always be waiting for the last train."
"I'm sorry," Mulcahy said, low-voiced, feeling a little more sober and awkward, but Hawkeye gripped his hand before letting him go.
"Think you can sleep?" Sidney asked, because in the end, Mulcahy thought, they only had their training: what they'd been taught, with liturgical precision, to say. Hawkeye nodded.
"Thanks," he said, again to the world in general, eyes out of focus.
Margaret stood up and set the pitcher on the side, picked up the cards and chips and glasses, pushed the tent door open against the rising wind.
*
"I got used to flying solo, Hawk," his father says, apologetically. There aren't enough white coats any more – only the one draped over his father's arm, and the rest in various stages of laundering, thrown in the basket or strung over the line with sycamore keys falling cheerfully around them. "I'm sorry."
He looks really worried; as though, Hawkeye thinks, understanding, he wanted this first day out to go exactly right.
"I can do without till we go fishing for new ones. It's not like I liked these pants all that much." He pauses, opens the drawer and pulls out a clean white nurse's apron. "No one using this?"
"Judy doesn't come in till Tuesday," his father says. "Antenatal, phlebotomy. That kind of thing. Hawkeye, I'm really…"
"This will do fine," Hawkeye says, and gets the strings tied around his neck in time for the first patient, a sardonic eight-year-old with a painful ear.
"You look like a girl," he says, a little too loudly; Hawkeye tests his hearing by tapping a spoon on a glass.
"One time," he tells the kid, speaking slowly and clearly, "actually lots of times, I operated on people while wearing a khaki-green uniform, that's green pants, under a red robe under a jacket with a scarf and a hat and white surgeon's gown all over that."
"Did you look like a girl then?"
"Turn your head to the left. That's it. I think I did a little," he says, considering, as he sets down the glass and makes notes. He pulls the apron forward and the strings cut into his neck, a familiar sensation. "I mean, I did, but mostly I looked like someone who was very cold and got dressed in the dark a whole lot. And," he pauses, thoughtfully, "I worked with this guy who wore floor-length evening gowns. Whatever I could do he could do better."
"Floor-length evening gowns?" the kid repeats, wonderingly, and his mother starts to get a look on her face like she's understanding the news filtering through the town, about Dr. Pierce's son and the something so terrible and bloodless that happened to him in the war. But the kid's starting to smile. "Like, you mean dresses?"
"Beautiful ones," Hawkeye says, and twirls so the apron flares out. "Down to here. I guess I don't mind looking like a girl. Some of the finest people I know are girls." He thinks briefly of Margaret, gets a focused dose of eight-year-old disdain, and laughs out loud.
He's writing up the kid's prescription – olive oil to be diluted with warm water – and adjusting the bow in his apron strings when he becomes aware of a gaze on him.
"Hawkeye…" his father says, and stops.
"Famous in song and story," Hawkeye says, reflexively, and looks up. "What is it?"
"Nothing," his father says, still looking at him with that tiny smile.
*
"No, you see, this is the problem." Margaret gestured wildly, then looked around at the deserted mess tent, at the couple of guys who'd drawn kitchen duty, at the guards coming off the night patrol, the elder of the two carefully mentoring the one on his first time out. Head nurse and chief surgeon, his controlled little gesture was saying, they're not just a couple of – look, you gotta understand something about this outfit, kid.
"The problem," Hawkeye repeated, obligingly, when she looked like she was going to slip head first into her coffee.
"I like military men." She looked up and blinked. "Why are you being so nice to me, Pierce?"
"What, I can't see a friend and comrade through the night?" he demanded. "'sides, I don't have to get you all the way to sober. That's Penobscott's job."
"He'll be here to get me at, at, eight o'clock!"
"I know," Hawkeye said, drowsily. The gin had started to slop its way out of his bloodstream about an hour earlier, leaving him boneless and punch-drunk with tiredness. Margaret had drunk until he took the glass out of her hand, smashed it with small-hours bravado and brought her across the compound for the first sitting at breakfast.
"And then, Tokyo!" A sparkling, brittle smile. "Where he cheated on me with Nurse Franklin. Who knows how many others."
"I know" – this with an inarticulable weariness. "I'm sorry, Margaret. I really am."
She nudged him. "You know what the problem is?"
"Lieutenant-Donald Colonel Penobscott?"
"Military men," she insisted, slumping against his shoulder. "I like them."
"Hey, me too," Hawkeye said, shifting to let her get comfortable. "Especially when they make me scream."
"Shut up, Pierce. I like men who can – who can take orders. Not just stand there, expecting me to – to change." She slipped all the rest of the way down to the table, her cheek resting on the wood. "Look at me, I'm pathetic."
"Yeah," Hawkeye said, suddenly going from punch-drunk back to drunk to fingers curling into fists, "fourteen hours of surgery on top of no sleep on top of days and weeks and months and years of surgery and no sleep, and five martinis, a ninety-seven percent efficiency rating, a beating heart and human fallibility, and nothing will do except personal and universal perfection: the inimitably pathetic Major Margaret Houlihan!"
She looked up at him, eyes bright, as though seeing him for the first time. "You're pretty nice, you know."
"I know," Hawkeye said. "Come on, I'll walk you back to your tent. He'll be" – this with a helpless gesture - "here soon."
"Another drink," she said, sharply, and over his not-quite-voiced complaints, "I outrank you, soldier."
He got the drink for her out of the officers' club, leaving the money next to Klinger asleep on the surface of the bar, and they walked back across the compound arm-in-arm, Hawkeye singing under his breath, Margaret in harmony, I don't want no more of this army life, gee, Ma, I wanna go home.
*
On an overcast day about four months after he came home from Korea, Hawkeye wakes up in the morning and goes outside barefoot to get the mail. On his way back to the house, across the grass freezing his feet, between fog-wreathed branches, he realises he can see his breath.
In the afternoon, there are several patients – some coughs, some colds; a kid with a nail gone through the webbing between thumb and index finger; an elderly woman he doesn’t know, who's starting to feel arthritic at the change in the weather – and when he’s done he goes out into the purple twilight for a while. The air feels like frost, autumn stealing close, but there's some residual warmth left, in the ground, in tree bark that he rests his hands against. When he goes back into the house it's with fingers clenched into fists and an awful creeping under his skin. His father is on a late-night call, a farming accident somewhere far out of town; Hawkeye turns around in the empty space of the house and is uncomfortably aware of his own heart beating in the silence.
At eleven o'clock, when the moon is shining down pale and full, Hawkeye walks down the steps in his bare feet and finds a bottle of store-bought gin. He lifts the kitchen window sash as far as it will go and sits on the ledge with his knees drawn up, halfway to outside, halfway to putting his hand through the glass, threads of nameless panic unravelling under his skin.
Several hours later a distant sound wakes him and his muscles are aching and his eyes are burning and from under the haze of sleep he can feel the same fear sharing his body like a ghost. In this room it's cold like breaking and he's aware that he's not alone in the house any more, listening to the front door rattling in the distance and footsteps coming to rest in the doorway. His father steps into the room without turning on the lights and says, “Hawkeye.”
It’s not said in a questioning tone, nor an exclamation; it demands nothing from him. It’s been a comfort to him all of his life, not to be plain Benjamin, or John, or Charles, but Hawkeye the storybook ridiculous, carrying around the whimsy of someone who loves him more than anything. It’s a comfort now.
"Hi," Hawkeye says, crossly, and his father gets across the room in three strides, puts an arm around him and says, simply, "Breathe."
As prescriptions go, Hawkeye thinks, it lacks style. But he obeys orders, each breath a small victory, in and out, in and out, under that moon bright enough for helicopters to fly.
*
“No offence, doc,” the private said. “But I gotta ask. Why do you twitch like that every time I call out to my buddy? Should we not be talking in here or something?”
“If only,” Charles declared from the other side of the room. “I for one would endorse a collective vow of monastic silence in post-op.”
Hawkeye smiled and sat down on the edge of the man’s bed. “Don’t mind Charles, he’s kind of a fruitcake short of a tea party. Private Adams, isn’t it?”
“Tom,” he said, eagerly. “I figure you and me, we should be on first-name terms, seeing as how you cut off my clothes and dug around in me some.”
Hawkeye laughed. “I didn’t do the first part – and when you meet Major Houlihan, give her a kiss from me – but mea culpa for the rest. Who’s your friend?”
“Private Mason,” Adams said. “But you know in basic, the rest of us were hefting our pieces around like coal sacks – I mean I’m from Chicago and I didn’t know which end of the thing was which. But him” – he motioned to the man in the opposite bed, sleeping now – “he’s a country boy and his family got hit pretty hard in the Depression, he put meat on the table that way. Put a rifle in his hands, he could shoot an apple off your head. So, we got to calling him…”
He waved a hand, struggling a little for breath, and Hawkeye placed a gentle hand on his arm. "Easy."
Adams nodded, not trying to talk for a moment.
"No one lasts in the army long without a rechristening,” Hawkeye said, almost clinically. “It’s all so crazy, you’ve gotta start again as a crazy new person before you deal with it. But I had my name before I came.”
Adams paused, confused for a moment, then got it. “So you’re Hawkeye, too?” Another pause. “Your folks actually named you that?”
Hawkeye smiled. “Called me that, which is better. All right, Tom, Hawkeye” – this to the man in the other cot, who came awake for a moment, eyes blurred by morphine – “get some rest now. I'll see about getting you two moved next to each other so you don't have to yell."
"Thanks, Doctor," Adams said, still eagerly. "That's real nice."
"Talk to him about Chicago," Hawkeye said. "Talk to him about any damn place where they've got two chickens in the pot."
"Oh, hurrah," came Charles's voice, "more sociability."
"In the meantime, if you need anything, ask Dr. Winchester over there.” Hawkeye inclined his head. "Call him Chuck, he just loves that."
He moved along the ward, then turned back, looked down at the soldier sitting up in bed, watching his friend sleep.
"You can talk all you want," Hawkeye said, and went out.
*
Hawkeye comes awake like being pulled from drowning, inarticulable threads still holding him down in sleep. He tips forwards and then back, letting the rocking-chair carry him into consciousness, forwards and backwards, forwards and backwards, listening with his eyes closed to the low buzz of crickets, the dusty warm sound of a car’s engine idling nearby. He’s out on the porch. Presently he gets up and walks down the front steps, still in his bare feet, to see who it is.
The car door opens as he approaches, the woman inside breathing heavily and perched on the seat pushed as far back as it will go. She looks him for a moment and says nothing, her face contorted with pain, her hands placed protectively over her round belly. It’s hot, too hot, haze shimmering over the deserted road and summer's last gasp of humidity casting a dizzying spell. “I can help you,” Hawkeye says, abruptly. “I’m a doctor.”
“Doctor?” The woman’s voice is weak and strained. “They said there was – can you…”
Hawkeye opens the door fully, reaches in and puts an arm around her shoulders, feeling her relax as she realises he can take her weight, and slowly he helps her stand up, leaning on him and the side of the car for support. “There,” he says, gently. “My name's Hawkeye."
“I’m Cally. They said…”
“Probably sent you for my father,” Hawkeye says, still gently, “but he’s out on a call. I’m a doctor, too. How far apart are your contractions?” At her look of confusion, he amends, “How long, between times?”
“It hurts now,” she says, and tries to move and her knees begin to give way. Hawkeye tightens his grip, helps her forward a few steps, and when it becomes clear that walking is beyond her, takes a deep breath and lifts her up, taking careful steps down the sidewalk, small pieces of gravel cutting into the soles of his feet. “Let’s get you inside,” he says, soothingly. “Can I call someone and tell them where you are?”
She tenses in his arms and he risks a look at her left hand, reads perfectly the panic in her eyes. “Maybe your mom,” he says, quietly. “Maybe a friend, a sister?”
“My sister,” she allows, after a moment. And then: “Doctor…”
“Shhh.”
“No – Doctor, I think my waters are breaking.”
Hawkeye knows that, the liquid already slick between her body and his skin. At the twist in her expression, he chuckles. “Cally. I was in residency in Boston and then I spent two years as a front line army surgeon. I swear to you, this is not even in the top ten of most revolting things that have ever happened to me.”
Incredibly, she smiles a little at that, and he picks up the pace, carrying her carefully up the steps and into the cool of the house, through to their one properly-equipped consulting room. As he walks towards the bed, he hears footsteps behind him. “Hawkeye?”
“We’ve got a patient, Dad,” Hawkeye says, laying Cally down in the dimness and turning around. “Soon we’re gonna have two. I just want to switch on the lights, see what I’m doing.”
“Hawk!” his father says, and Hawkeye steps in front of the window and looks down at himself, at his shirt and hands and bare ankles and feet, soaked and dripping with blood.
"Cally," he says, without turning back around. "Cally, we're going to look after you. Stay right there, okay, honey, and try not to shift around too much."
And then he's moving, pushing his father towards the telephone to call the cavalry and closing the front door and stripping off his own clothes, because if Cally sees him like this one or both of them is going to start screaming and never stop. "We've got to be quiet," he says, conversationally, to no one, and finds his way to the deep sink, the still water, to scrub.
*
Earlier in the day Hawkeye had had a disagreement with a gurney and a corpsman and a jeep being driven slightly too fast over a bump in the road down from the pad. BJ had heard the bitten-off cry, come running to meet Hawkeye rolling over and getting back to his feet. "I'm fine," he said viciously, tried to take a step and BJ broke his fall.
"Okay," BJ said, "you're fine, absolutely" – and they stumbled into the compound together, the choppers coming down from above them and the ambulances shrieking past them and the yelling of triage below them, as though this, BJ was thinking, were all the backdrop to a musical comedy, and for our first number Captains Hunnicutt and Pierce do the three-legged race, against a chorus of percussive shelling. When they reached the OR BJ was trying not to let out a hysterical laugh and Hawkeye was pale but upright and Klinger was there, solemn as a pack-mule, to be leaned upon. After the fifth or sixth patient, when Klinger was tired and Hawkeye was snapping, BJ sent for Radar, a barstool from the officers' club and several buckets of boiling water. After the forty-sixth patient, BJ took on Hawkeye for his forty-seventh, did the X-ray, diagnosed a soft-tissue injury, found a crutch, prescribed gin and little white pills, and they returned the barstool together, still in that rocking-horse rhythm. "Because that's the problem with this war," BJ said, "not enough dancing."
And now it was late, and getting cold, the wind sweeping in from the east and making the tent flaps flutter, and they were on their way back to the Swamp, Hawkeye not so much drunk as unglued, painkillers reacting with alcohol in his blood, and BJ exhausted and inebriated but still listening to Hawkeye muttering under his breath, under the steady tap of the crutch on the dirt.
"Adrenaline," BJ said, abruptly. "It's wearing off and you can feel the pain. Here." He offered an arm, and Hawkeye took it, limping onwards with smaller steps, letting BJ shoulder some of his weight.
"There was this one time before you came," Hawkeye said, "I got… kinda stuck in a rut. Choppers, more choppers, more adrenaline, no sleep, I got a little weird. They told me afterwards I, ah, tried to take a latrine to North Korea."
BJ snorted. "Did you get there?"
"Trapper and Radar bombed me with chloral hydrate before I got that far. I woke up a day later thinking I'd dreamt the whole thing and then I saw the tracks left by the latrine."
BJ laughed and said impulsively, "Hawkeye, I love you" – and then tensed for a moment, bringing them both to a standstill, teetering in the centre of the compound, deserted and dark.
Hawkeye steadied the crutch and turned to look at him. "I know," he said, clipped with pain. "You sterilised a barstool for me today. Got me down from the pad. Did eight hours of surgery on top of it. My mom carried me in from the yard when I hurt my ankle once, but she was my mom. You're – some guy who kinda got drafted."
"It's amazing," BJ said, not knowing if he meant Hawkeye or himself or both of them, "what you can do. When you have to."
"With some help from your friends," Hawkeye said, slurring his words, taking BJ's arm again, and they went on.
*
Darkness falls pretty late this time of year, this far north. Hawkeye has opened the window to let in the last of the day's light, scrubbing yesterday's clothes and sheets at the sink, watching the red staining around the plughole. He puts his head under the water and works his fingers through his hair, bracing himself for the awful, sick-making smell of the dried blood washing out. He breathes in and it's replaced, slowly, by soap and clean water and the heady evening air.
"Hawkeye," his father says, coming into the room. "You want any help?"
"I got it," Hawkeye says, and shakes the water off himself like a dog. His father clucks and helps him anyway, helping him lift the things out and hang them up. They work in silence for a few minutes, Hawkeye still dripping all over the floor, leaving kidney-shaped bare footprints in the damp. He lifts the window open another notch so it will all air-dry, and waits for his father to say whatever it is that's on his mind.
It takes another minute. Hawkeye perches himself on the edge of the sink with his hands clasped in his lap.
"You knew what to do," his father says, at last. "I think if the girl had come in with a gunshot wound to the chest or a leg hanging on by a thread, you would have known what to do." He seems to recollect himself all at once, his eyes taking on a wariness as he realises what he's saying. That look of caution makes Hawkeye feel tired.
"Not just some girl, Dad," he says, mildly. "Her name is Cally. Actually, I had to write it down in full when I handed over to the attending, her name's Calliope. Guess her parents named her out of a book. She says she won't decide on a name for the baby before she gets out the hospital, but she likes 'Louise'. I suggested 'Polyhymnia' but for some reason she thought that was a stupid idea."
Daniel Pierce is shaking his head in wonderment. "Hawkeye," he begins, and stops. "You knew what to do," he says again, sounding helpless.
Hawkeye frowns. "I was chief surgeon at a MASH unit," he says carefully. "We had the best efficiency rating in Korea. If a soldier made it to the 4077th alive, he had more than a ninety-seven percent chance of making it out of there that way."
He's spouted those statistics before, usually to idiotic generals or jackasses from I Corps, but it sounds different here, this clear recital in this room washed clean. Abruptly, he sighs and swings himself down. "Guess I should get some sleep," he says, and yawns. "I'll go up and see Cally in the morning. Someone's gotta give her back her car keys."
"Hawkeye," his father says, holding up a hand. From the way he straightens up, it seems like he's arrived at some new resolve. "Hawkeye, you are… well." He smiles and pushes a hand through his hair in one of their shared gestures. "I missed you more than you can know."
Hawkeye smiles back, a little shyly. "You too."
"Come back here whenever you can," his father says, still sounding determined. "This will always be your home."
Hawkeye stands there, still barefoot and not understanding. Like everything else, it takes time.
*
"Before they came to take me," Hawkeye said, and Sidney turned towards him, peering across the late-evening twilight in the Swamp. He had thought Hawkeye was snatching a few minutes of sleep, still wearing bloodstained scrubs, his limbs thrown loosely across the cot.
"Yes?"
"Stop your ears pricking up like that," Hawkeye said, irritably. "Before they came to take me away. Back in the mess tent-that-was. Remember? On the floor. Don't you want me to go on? Chicken."
He looked up at Sidney, eyes flashing. Sidney felt a sudden, not-unexpected wave of affection for him, admiration for that brittle willingness, even now, to fight. Sidney had had the story, tearfully from Margaret, wearily from Potter, Hawkeye on the ground in the remains of the tent, leaning against the wall with BJ beside him, his head on BJ's shoulder, listening to BJ say, quietly, Oh, shit, Hawk. Oh, shit, oh shit, oh shit.
"Do you believe in nominative determinism, Sidney?" In his voice, Sidney could hear anger before it transformed into something else. "I told a girl I was in love with once that a hawk is kinda like a cute vulture. That Americans are funny about birds. I told her I'm lucky I'm not named after a turkey. Maybe I should have said chicken."
"Hawkeye," Sidney said gently.
Hawkeye shrugged. "I don't live here any more, Sidney."
"Hawk," Sidney said, taking his time, a conscious naming. "You do know you're going to be fine, don't you?"
"Yeah?" Hawkeye looked up at him. "You made me into a doctor again, Sidney. I'm grateful. I'm useful. But I'm still…" He waved a hand. "Oh, what the hell does it matter."
"You have been," Sidney said, "and you are, my friend. You always will be." He paused. "And in civilian life you wouldn't have been my patient. "
"The words 'conflict of interest' had crossed my mind," Hawkeye said dryly. "But you know what I'd do, if you got shot right there where you stand?"
"Get up," Sidney said, definitively. "You'd get up."
Hawkeye gestured mutely. Sidney took a breath and went on, "And this is where I tell you that you may benefit from long-term, intermittent psychiatric care, as and when you need it. That's true, by the way. This is where I tell you that, with care and thoughtfulness, you could live an ordinary life. But that's not true. You'll live an extraordinary life, Hawkeye, you always have. Come on now, break's over."
Hawkeye said nothing, but took the outstretched hand, let Sidney pull him back to standing.
*
Hawkeye gets on a bus south on a crisp day in the winter, with a few dollars in his pocket and his medical bag thrown over his shoulder, a few days short of thirty years old. He's whistling as he walks through the familiar city streets, takes turns right and left that his feet still know. He walks into the office of Charles Emerson Winchester III, chief of thoracic surgery at Massachusetts General, just as that eminent gentleman is about to embark on his morning round, with a nurse and resident in tow. The resident scuttles away at the sight of a stranger; Hawkeye nods politely at the nurse and leans against the doorway, bathed in the morning light, his fingers curling around an invisible martini glass.
Charles gets up from behind his desk. "Hawkeye? Is that you?"
"Guilty as charged." Hawkeye steps forwards and frowns. "After everything, now you call me by my name?"
Charles regards him steadily. "Doctor, if you insist. But we're not…"
"In the army now," Hawkeye finishes, satisfied, and there is a moment's silence as each of them takes the other in, against the new background. Charles looks well, less drawn and tired than he did six months earlier, but there are no pictures on the walls of this office.
"How are you?" Charles asks, still with that steady gaze, calm and a little unnerving. Ever the diagnostician, Hawkeye thinks; no jumping to conclusions for him.
Hawkeye tips his head. "Charles, you get put in a mental institution one time..."
The nurse steps backwards involuntarily; Charles gives him a sudden, genuine laugh, and Hawkeye wants for a moment to go over and kiss him on his stupid wonderful bald head.
"Quite," Charles says. "And yet, I ask."
Hawkeye waves at the window, trying to indicate everything, the beautiful Boston day, the glittering sunshine, the passage of time, clasps his hands in a helpless gesture, and Charles nods. "Yes. Likewise."
"Who are you?" the nurse asks, as though just discovering her voice. She's pretty, Hawkeye notes absently; a brunette with lips like strawberries.
"Whoever you want me to be," he says, grinning, and Charles rolls his eyes heavenwards. "Must you bring your infernal libido…" he's saying, as Hawkeye begins, "Charles, can I help liking people, you know, people, the things with the faces that make all the noise" – and then they both break off suddenly, both taking a step back from the space they were closing between them.
"Nurse Jeffries," Charles says, carefully, "this is Dr. Pierce."
"It's a pleasure to meet you," Jeffries says, but Charles isn't finished.
"He has the proud distinction of being the worst person I have ever known," he goes on, with such vivid fondness that this time Hawkeye does kiss him, grabbing his outstretched hand and brushing his lips across the fingers. "Pierce!" Charles howls, and Hawkeye laughs and Jeffries grins delightedly.
"I'll go," she says. "I'll tell them you'll be a while, Dr. Winchester."
After she disappears, they both fall silent again, still with that steady, wary gaze upon each other. "All right," Charles says, abrupt. "What can I do for you, Doctor?""
Hawkeye holds up his hands, turns them palm-up, the bright light picking out all the old tiny cuts and scars, the surface of the skin worn from years of scrubbing. "A job," he says.
Charles looks at him and nods, slowly, considerately. "Yes," he says. "Yes, that's right." After a pause, he says, "There will be blood, and pain, and death. Are you…"
"Yes," Hawkeye says. "No. Yes. You know."
Charles smiles, briefly, unscrews his fountain pen and begins writing. "I'll need to make a recommendation to the board." He pauses. "Weren't you going home to be a country doctor?"
Hawkeye nods. "I will. There's time."
"Time," Charles echoes, and goes on writing. In the hard, brilliant sunshine, Hawkeye raises that invisible glass.
*
For years afterwards, the journey stayed in his memory as a sequence of Technicolor snapshots. The red and white cross painted on the hospital roof, getting smaller and smaller; the rich dust falling in swathes from his boots as he jumped down from the chopper; the warm wind from the north blowing through the airport at Kimpo, stirring his hair, lifting his dogtags, churning up more of that dust, filling his mouth and nose with the taste of grit and iron. The guy sitting next to him on the plane, saying, "Hell, now I gotta go home and do my taxes" and Hawkeye's genuine, unexpected laughter.
"Better than death," he said, and the guy looked at him with perfect understanding.
Then the sight of the Pacific, hundreds and thousands of feet below; the strange jet-accelerated night, sleeping with his head resting on the window, sleep without dreams; the momentary tremors in his hands when he reached for a bottle of water; then the coastline spread out below as familiar as the lines of a body. The guy next to him, looking at him with interest before they landed, asking, "Hey, what the hell kinda name is 'Hawkeye', anyway?"
Hawkeye said, "It's from The Last of the Mohicans. It was my dad's favourite book."
The summer night in late July, so far north there was still light in the sky, near the horizon; the warmth of the space where he was standing, leaning against the doorframe in this house he was born in; the way down towards the ocean.
"Hawkeye," his father said, and Hawkeye was still on the threshold, just for this moment occupying the same space as his body, exhausted and calm and conscious of the shifting earth beneath his feet, spinning him on to morning. A sudden desire to feel that earth, cool and clean against the soles of his feet.
"Come on in, Hawk," his father said. "Put your things down."
The sound his dogtags made when he threw them on the hard wood table; the smell of salt; the sound of the sea. A glass of cold water in his hands. The closing door; the open window.
end.
Notes:
-This story owes a great deal (not least Hawkeye's unprecedented tendency to talk about his mother!) to, and certainly exists in the same universe as, Epigone's The Dawn Don't Rescue Me No More. It's a beautiful story; you should read it.
-"What the hell kinda name is Hawkeye, anyway?" is close to the first thing anyone ever says to Hawkeye - not in the TV show or the movie but in the book, 1968, forty years closer in time to the Korean War. I guess if this story is about anything, it's that.
At this particular moment, it seems a good place to have come round to again. Although there are some complete sentences in this story that were written eleven years ago, thankfully not very many.
gamesiplay betaed this with a great deal of kindness. A brief content note, that should not be much of a surprise: (skip) This is a story about recovering from mental illness.
(As usual, please feel free to contact me if you would like more detail before reading.)
fic:: what is living is fugitive
by Raven
10,000w, M*A*S*H, gen, Hawkeye and the whole ensemble. How Hawkeye went home, and all the people, things and acts of kindness that got him there.
In early August Dickie Barber, who runs the town hardware store, and did not at any point, no matter what he says, lend Hawkeye thirty-seven dollars, discovers a cache of fireworks in his basement that somehow got forgotten on the fourth of July. He calls around some guys he was in grade school with, including Hawkeye, and they sit out in folding chairs on the edge of the town where the sloping land curves down to the shore, watching the fireworks explode over the water, green then violet then red.
“Shame you missed the fourth,” says Lily Petersen, who married one of those same guys Hawkeye was in grade school with, while he was away. He remembers her from school as a mousy little girl with pigtails, her face shining in the surface of the apple she brought to class every day. “We had a clambake and there were fireworks just like this. It’s a pity you couldn’t have come home earlier.”
“I don’t mind,” Hawkeye says quietly, his eyes on the sky. “At least I got home in the end.”
“You had a pretty rough time out there, huh?”
Hawkeye glances at her, takes in the uncomplicated sympathy on her round and open face. “Yeah,” he says after a minute, and yawns hugely, his jaw cracking. “Sorry, I normally give a girl a better time.”
She chuckles. “You gave me plenty of a good time in senior year round the back of the soda shop the night school let out.”
He’d forgotten about that, and his laugh vanishes into the general satisfied aaaaah at a particularly spectacular burst of green and orange light. “Yeah. Listen, if you want to” – he can’t help himself – “come renew the good times?”
“I’m a married woman, Hawkeye Pierce,” she says, mock-reprovingly, wagging a finger. “I’ll come out for a milkshake. Maybe a lunch date, it seems like you need the sleep. ”
Hawkeye, mid-yawn again, waves his apology. He's been sleeping ten hours a night since he got back, a weary deep sleep that gives him dehydration headaches when he wakes up. His father asked him once what drugs he was given when he was an inpatient, and after that, let the subject go and left coffee and warm bread out for him in the mornings, waiting. Like everything else, it takes time.
“A milkshake, then,” he says. “Strawberry.”
"Strawberry," she agrees.
The next firework twists and whistles into the sky, and he flinches at the noise. He goes still as the rain of stars comes down with a feeling of calm settling inside his body, somewhere around his diaphragm.
After Henry died, and Frank was in command, Hawkeye made a decision halfway through the mid-afternoon lull. Through the double doors in the OR, some of the enlisted men had their mops and buckets out, scouring the floor, sluicing down the surfaces, ready for the second wave.
"Come on then," Hawkeye said, coming through the door with his mask still tied around his neck and something loose and unfocused about him.
Radar looked up at him, not understanding. After a moment he said, "Captain Pierce, sir?"
Hawkeye sat down on the edge of Radar's cot and said, "Frank's really getting to you, isn't he."
"Sir," Radar said, a little desperately. "Sir" – and Hawkeye clasped his hands and got down to his knees and said, "Radar, call me Hawkeye, please. Now pack up, the van won't wait all day."
"What van," Radar said, helplessly, so Hawkeye and Father Mulcahy went around the tiny space, picking up discarded clothing and comic books and pairs of boots and the teddy bear and putting them in the cardboard box. They carried it between them across the compound and started unpacking while Radar watched, and they had been doing it for five minutes when Radar asked, "Ah, sir, what are you sirs doing?"
"We're moving you into the Swamp," Father Mulcahy said, gently. "Hawkeye, didn't you explain…"
"I tried," Hawkeye said, waving his hands around, blurry with tiredness. "I tried. Radar, you can't just keep – not with Frank in that office, and he's not living here any more – look, I'm not a farm boy. And not normally a fruitcake, but. I don't know what you do with injured lambs or rabbits or whatever, I can only do people. What do you do when you find something, when something's hurt, Radar?"
"Take 'em home with me," Radar said, and sat down on Frank's empty cot, and took his glasses off and scrubbed his eyes.
The first time a car backfires Hawkeye hates himself and everything else just for the sheer broken-down mundanity of it, this little scene that is replaying itself over and over in small towns and suburbia across America, the car speeding away, the man who still dreams in khaki green and red suddenly balanced on the balls of his feet with his breath coming in short gasps through his mouth.
He mentally catalogues the hormonal response and the neurotransmitter release, observes the tachycardia, and once he's done that he's a little calmer, still breathing heavily, in, out, in, out, surrounded by trees in full summer leaf. His father turns to him and says, quietly, "Are you all right?"
It's not one of his father's bedside manners, the taxonomy of which was just another part of his training, and for that he's thankful. "Fine," Hawkeye mutters, "by which I mean, not fine at all, no, can we…"
"We can go home," his father says, and grips Hawkeye's wrist with thumb and forefinger for a moment. Somewhere else and from someone else, Hawkeye thinks, that might be another trigger – another visceral jolt back to pain, restraint, fear – but right now it just takes him back to childhood, to holding hands when he crossed these same streets, on the way down to the ocean, and on the way home.
Radar being Radar, he had the plank procured and the end sharpened to a point and a fresh pot of black paint waiting by the time Potter came to take a pleasant springtime walk around the camp and stopped, admiringly, by the sign. "Toledo," he said, "that's Klinger, and Ottumwa, Iowa – you, Radar? Who's Crabapple Cove? And where is it?"
"Me, sir," Hawkeye said, from his deckchair outside the Swamp. BJ had gone to beg or borrow a checkers set and Hawkeye had been dozing in the meantime, listening to the birds sing and the nurses clink morning cocktails in the next tent over. "It's a little place up in Maine."
"Maine, huh? Known a few men from New England in my time," Potter said. "Good men all, tend to go doolally for foliage the way other men get their heads turned by a pretty nurse, but you can't have everything."
Hawkeye nodded. "I resemble that remark, sir."
Potter laughed. "Fair. What is it, Radar?"
"What about you, sir?" Radar asked, a little anxiously. "We had one up for, um…" He hesitated.
"For Colonel Blake," Potter said, gently. "I understand, son. It's mighty thoughtful of you to worry on my account."
"Where do you hail from, Colonel?" Hawkeye asked with interest, surprised he hadn't thought to ask before now.
Potter chuckled. "I'm an army man, Pierce. Have been since I lied about my age the first time. I lived on base Stateside. I guess if anywhere's my home, it's in khaki."
Hawkeye smiled wryly. "Must be nice," he said, after a moment, "to carry home around with you."
"Never thought about it like that," Potter said, "but I suppose it is. All the same, home's always people, not just a place. What's to look at in Crabapple Cove?"
"Foliage," Hawkeye offered. "The two-dime soda shop. A nice view down to the ocean. Best seen from the window of the house I was born in."
Potter chuckled. "There you are."
"Uh, Colonel Potter, sir?" Radar still looked anxious. "So where should I get Klinger to write on the sign?"
"You could put Hannibal, Missouri," Potter said, thoughtfully, "because that's where Mildred is, right enough. But you don't want to have to change it every time she goes to visit her sister in Pensacola for a month. I tell you what, son. Where did Colonel Blake hang his hat?"
"Bloomington, Illinois," Radar said, very quietly.
"Bloomington," Potter said. "They've got good people there. Why don't we just keep right on pointing the way?"
"Thank you, sir," Radar said, so quietly Hawkeye almost didn't hear. "That'll be-"
"That'll be all," Potter said, and stood still by the sign, watching Radar walking back towards the company clerk's office, carrying his pot of paint.
"That was nice, Colonel," Hawkeye said, gently.
Potter smiled at him. "You nearly said it yourself, Hawkeye," he said, equally gently. If home's people, might as well start building it where we are. We're here for a while, yet."
He walked on after that, still on his slow circuit, past each tent and supply building, taking a moment to speak to each person he met, his route marked out behind him in the scuffs in the dust. Hawkeye watched him go.
The promised strawberry milkshake has turned into dinner, because it turns out Hawkeye's talent for offering hospitality in a canvas cesspool scales beautifully when he has an entire kitchen at his disposal, and Lily seemed pleased by the invitation. Hawkeye said, magnanimously, that her husband could come too, but Art Petersen is six feet tall and six feet wide and isn't afraid for his wife to have dinner with any old childhood friend she wants, no matter his reputation. With a sigh for his reputation, Hawkeye has enjoyed dinner, dessert and being caught up on two years' worth of who kissed whom at the Crabapple Cove annual lobster festival, and now he's making coffee, standing in front of the window looking down towards the water.
Through the sound of water bubbling he hears a small clink of metal and turns around slowly, with a choking feeling like dust gathering in his throat.
"Were these yours?" Lily says. She's picked up the set of dogtags lying on the table.
"Yeah," Hawkeye says, more shortly than he meant to, carrying the coffee mugs across.
"Pierce, Benjamin F.," she says, still holding the tags, and Hawkeye shudders unaccountably as he sits down. He can remember every occasion during his time in Korea when someone else touched them: there were the nurses, dragging him by the neck, knowing he liked it; there was BJ, who touched Hawkeye's shoulder and his dogtags and ruffled his hair and steered him bodily when he was too tired to walk. There was the time a shell hit the centre of the compound where he was holding down a pressure bandage on a wounded man's chest, so they were both sent rolling into the dirt, entwined like lovers, a medic pulling the tags and supporting Hawkeye's head and shouting no match, no match.
"No match," he says aloud, suddenly, and she looks startled.
"I'm sorry?"
"One time," he says, "I got in an accident and got all mixed up with the guy I was working on at the time. They pulled my tags, they had to make sure none of my blood got into him and vice versa."
She just looks at him, and Hawkeye freezes. "Sorry," he says, quickly, "not everyone wants to hear, ah – war stories."
"You don't tell them," Lily says. "Not like some guys – I mean, you know Ned Oliver who works down in the drugstore, he came back about a month before you did and to hear him tell it he single-handedly blew up half of North Korea before breakfast every Sunday. But you don't do that – not at all."
Hawkeye laughs at that. "I didn't blow up anything, I was in a medical unit. Mostly I looked after people."
"What was that like?" she asks.
Hawkeye considers. "We were about three or four miles from the front lines. It was… exhausting, mostly. Crazy. And there are a hundred ways they teach you to look after people, when you're a doctor, and the hundred and first thing you learn is that sometimes none of them work."
"Was it scary?"
"I wore these," he says, gently taking his dogtags from her, letting the chain slip through his fingers, "so that if need be, they could identify my body. And" – he hesitates – "in the end, I was a casualty of war, too. I did a couple of crazy things I didn't quite mean to do at the time, and my friends… well, they looked after me as best they could."
She stares at him. "People in town are saying…"
"I know."
She digests that for a moment. "I'm sorry you had to go through that," she says, and again, Hawkeye is impressed by her straightforward kindness. "Benjamin F. Pierce," she goes on, thoughtfully. "It's Benjamin Franklin, isn't it? I remember the stink you raised in kindergarten when Mrs. Murphy tried to call you that."
Hawkeye smiles, remembering. "My name is Hawkeye," he says, slowly, as though it's something, like the alphabet, like talking someone down from a high place, that he can learn aloud.
"Hawk, wake up. It's your shift." BJ sat down on the edge of the cot and felt Hawkeye move under him, retreat into a messy nest of blankets flattened against the tent wall.
"I don't wanna, I called in dead. Leave your wreath and get out of here."
"Well, you've got to," BJ said, insistently, with a sudden image of himself talking to Erin like this, perhaps in ten or fifteen years' time. "Hawkeye, get up."
Some muffled words emerged from the bundle, and BJ sat back. "Hawkeye, you talk to your mother like that when you had to get up for school?"
"Mom wasn't a morning person," Hawkeye said through the layers, startling BJ with the immediacy of confession. "She liked to sleep. I take after her."
It seemed a soothing thought; there was no more movement. BJ regarded him for a long moment, thinking of Erin: of her mother, who also wasn't a morning person; of her first birthday, that he hadn't seen; of her tenth birthday, that he might never see; and of her father, who might be hit by a shell tomorrow, here in this festering place, and stay here under its dirt. With his eyes still tiredly fixed on the middle distance, BJ shook Hawkeye under the covers. Hawkeye evaded him, pulling away, and then without thinking BJ reached in and grabbed Hawkeye's dogtags, yanking upwards, not letting go when he heard Hawkeye whistling pain through his teeth. The blankets pooled on the floor and Hawkeye held himself still, hands hanging limply by his sides, suspended by the chain cutting into his neck.
"My, and you say I'm cranky in the mornings," he said, conversationally; he sounded quite awake.
Abruptly, BJ came to himself, looked at Hawkeye and the dawn filtering through the tent canvas behind him. It was early morning, the sky still stained with pink; he could see Charles's sleeping form on the other side of the tent, and the flood of light creeping to his own bedside and the family portrait on it. He let go and Hawkeye dropped back to his pillows. "Hawk, I’m so sorry, I don't know what I was…"
"Wasn't me you were trying to hurt," Hawkeye said, still conversationally, sitting up again. "Mom never did that," he added, sounding a little peeved, rubbing at his neck.
"Hawk," BJ said again, and stopped, breathed in, went on: "I was thinking about how maybe I might never get to go home" – and he stopped again, thinking confusedly that confession might stand for apology.
"It's okay," Hawkeye said, and for some reason, at that moment Hawkeye with his red robe and blue eyes and dirty mouth reminded BJ of Peg, capable of nothing but gentleness. "It's okay, BJ. Just say next time, when you need me to stand in for something."
BJ nodded, not able to speak; Hawkeye got up, movements neat and controlled, as though rising to a civilised breakfast and civilian practice, pulled the robe around his shoulders and went out into the morning light.
His first week back in Crabapple Cove, Hawkeye got a postcard with no message, and noted the address in familiar handwriting, the California postmark. He didn't reply, and now, on this cool morning in late summer, with the dew shining on the long grass and the telephone bell echoing through the house, he knows, without knowing how he knows, that this is it.
"I'll get it, Dad," he calls, trots down the stairs and rolls out the wire, settles himself on the bottom of the steps where he can feel the morning breeze, before picking up the receiver. "Hello."
There's a pause, then BJ says, "Hawkeye."
"Hi."
"You didn't write," BJ says, hesitantly, and then: "Did I wake you? It's coming on seven, right?"
"Six," Hawkeye says. "Dad's not sleeping, he's waiting for someone to come get him for the Macauley baby. And I was just…" He waves a hand before realising BJ can't see him. "You know."
"You didn't write," BJ says again, and then there's a pause. Hawkeye looks out through the open front door, staring at the beautiful cast of the sun through the trees.
"Yeah," Hawkeye says at last. "I didn't write."
"Hawkeye," BJ is saying, and Hawkeye cuts him off.
"What did you want me to say?" He's raised his voice without quite meaning to, letting words spill out that feel like they've been lingering, unsaid, long enough to sour. "I got home safe, I sleep too much or not at all, the night's too quiet and I keep listening for shelling, the whole town thinks I'm a fruitcake but what else is new, I jump at loud noises and it seems like it's always the fucking fourth of July but I'm still here, I'm still here?"
"I wanted you to say you got home safe," BJ says, unhurried, calm. "I wanted to hear how you were. If you didn't want to talk to me, I wanted you to know that's okay, and I'm here. I wanted you to know I was there, too."
The wind stirs into the passageway from the yard, the sunlight scattering through the dust motes. Hawkeye sits absolutely still and listens to BJ listening to him, from three hours behind him across all the continent's great spaces, looking out over a different ocean. He understands, all at once, why the postcard had no message on it.
BJ says, very quietly, "Hawk? You still there?"
Hawkeye breathes out and lets out a shaky laugh. "I'm an ass," he says, after a while.
"Yeah, you are," BJ says, comfortably. "So it's three in the morning and I've just got back from the night shift and I'm too tired to sleep, you of all people know what that's like, so I'm going to tell you about my daughter, now, and how perfect she is in every single way, and how sorry I am that I missed so much, and you, you're going to shut up and listen."
"Erin!" Hawkeye says, pleased. "Does she call you 'daddy' now?"
"Yeah, she's the best. Shut up, now, listen."
Hawkeye shuts up and listens. By the time Rafe Macauley comes to the door, too out of breath from running to speak, Hawkeye has replaced the receiver, still sitting on the bottom step bathed by morning light, feeling calm. "You okay, Hawk?" his father calls on his way down the stairs, trailing his bag.
"Fine," Hawkeye says, breathing easily, getting up to close the door.
Potter left first, pausing on the threshold. "Out of those scrubs, Hawkeye, or I'll get you out of them myself."
"Gotta buy me dinner first," Hawkeye said, without lifting his head.
"And, finally." Sidney had been last dealer. "Still owing to the man of the cloth – twelve thousand, five hundred and sixty-seven dollars."
Margaret looked up. "And if the world doesn't end tomorrow?"
"Twelve fifty. There you go."
Mulcahy pocketed the IOU and Sidney took in all the cards and chips, putting them in piles out of habitual neatness. Outside, a sharp gust of wind ripped across the compound, making the light flicker; Hawkeye murmured something and turned over. It was late, but none of them made any move to the door and after a minute, Margaret mutely offered up the pitcher. Mulcahy nodded, holding out his glass, and Margaret filled Sidney's too without asking. The wind was picking up steadily now, batting the tent flaps and lifting gravel, making a sound like the ocean. In this tent with its lonely light, Mulcahy was thinking, they might be adrift in the darkness without knowing it, tacking towards some distant shore.
"Hawkeye," Sidney said, presently, "if you want to sleep without being disturbed, you can have the VIP tent. As you can see I'm not currently using it."
Hawkeye sat up for a moment, rubbing his eyes. "Thanks but no thanks, Sidney. I like the noise." He seemed to think about that for a minute, then lay back down. "I guess when I finally get home it'll be too quiet to sleep. Do you ever think that?"
The inquiry seemed directed at the world at large, rather than any specific person, which might mean Mulcahy was the best-placed to answer; he was thinking of Philadelphia on hot nights, sirens and laughter echoing off slow-cooling sidewalks. "I grew up in the city," he said. "Then I did some work out in a rural parish before I was ordained and every chirping cricket woke me up."
Margaret laughed, very softly. "I grew up on an army base. I can't sleep past reveille."
Sidney grinned, too. "I used to wait," he said, deliberately, "for the last subway train of the day to rattle through. I watched my glass of water shake every night. That was it – enough studying, time for bed."
Hawkeye rolled over in one direction and then the other, thumped a pillow and sat up again. "I guess you'd tell us, Father," he said, worrying the fraying edge of the blanket between his fingers, "that God is in all those places, and in the small towns and open spaces, besides."
There was nothing scathing in the remark; Mulcahy nodded and murmured, "I would, my son."
"I'm not familiar with all your newfangled stuff, Father," Sidney said, with a smile, "but if we're made in the image of God, then God is in us, everywhere we are."
"Even here?" Hawkeye asked, his hands shaking. "I've looked inside them, and I've never found…" – and Mulcahy was thinking, suddenly, of a pilot shot down and choppered in, telling him with impossible youth in his face that he'd flown as high as he could, up there with the birds and the clouds, Father, and I never saw heaven.
Surprising himself, he set down his glass and stood up, took two shaky steps across the tent and waited for Hawkeye to move, obligingly, to give him space to sit. This close, Mulcahy could smell the blood and alcohol on him. He reached across and picked up Hawkeye's left hand, using two fingers to trace the line down from the thumb to the wrist, as Margaret had taught him; it took him a few seconds to pick up Hawkeye's pulse under his skin. Seventy-two beats per minute at rest, Margaret had said. If drawing only on his own training, he should have merely sat on the other side of the tent, across the continental open space of the poker table, and said: pray for guidance, Hawkeye.
"Made perfect," Mulcahy said, counting beats. "In the image of God."
Hawkeye looked up at him and said nothing, lips parted. Mulcahy breathed, then turned around to look at Sidney, who was peering across at them with interest.
From behind his head, Hawkeye said, casual and intimate, "I guess if I wait for that to stop, I'll always be waiting for the last train."
"I'm sorry," Mulcahy said, low-voiced, feeling a little more sober and awkward, but Hawkeye gripped his hand before letting him go.
"Think you can sleep?" Sidney asked, because in the end, Mulcahy thought, they only had their training: what they'd been taught, with liturgical precision, to say. Hawkeye nodded.
"Thanks," he said, again to the world in general, eyes out of focus.
Margaret stood up and set the pitcher on the side, picked up the cards and chips and glasses, pushed the tent door open against the rising wind.
"I got used to flying solo, Hawk," his father says, apologetically. There aren't enough white coats any more – only the one draped over his father's arm, and the rest in various stages of laundering, thrown in the basket or strung over the line with sycamore keys falling cheerfully around them. "I'm sorry."
He looks really worried; as though, Hawkeye thinks, understanding, he wanted this first day out to go exactly right.
"I can do without till we go fishing for new ones. It's not like I liked these pants all that much." He pauses, opens the drawer and pulls out a clean white nurse's apron. "No one using this?"
"Judy doesn't come in till Tuesday," his father says. "Antenatal, phlebotomy. That kind of thing. Hawkeye, I'm really…"
"This will do fine," Hawkeye says, and gets the strings tied around his neck in time for the first patient, a sardonic eight-year-old with a painful ear.
"You look like a girl," he says, a little too loudly; Hawkeye tests his hearing by tapping a spoon on a glass.
"One time," he tells the kid, speaking slowly and clearly, "actually lots of times, I operated on people while wearing a khaki-green uniform, that's green pants, under a red robe under a jacket with a scarf and a hat and white surgeon's gown all over that."
"Did you look like a girl then?"
"Turn your head to the left. That's it. I think I did a little," he says, considering, as he sets down the glass and makes notes. He pulls the apron forward and the strings cut into his neck, a familiar sensation. "I mean, I did, but mostly I looked like someone who was very cold and got dressed in the dark a whole lot. And," he pauses, thoughtfully, "I worked with this guy who wore floor-length evening gowns. Whatever I could do he could do better."
"Floor-length evening gowns?" the kid repeats, wonderingly, and his mother starts to get a look on her face like she's understanding the news filtering through the town, about Dr. Pierce's son and the something so terrible and bloodless that happened to him in the war. But the kid's starting to smile. "Like, you mean dresses?"
"Beautiful ones," Hawkeye says, and twirls so the apron flares out. "Down to here. I guess I don't mind looking like a girl. Some of the finest people I know are girls." He thinks briefly of Margaret, gets a focused dose of eight-year-old disdain, and laughs out loud.
He's writing up the kid's prescription – olive oil to be diluted with warm water – and adjusting the bow in his apron strings when he becomes aware of a gaze on him.
"Hawkeye…" his father says, and stops.
"Famous in song and story," Hawkeye says, reflexively, and looks up. "What is it?"
"Nothing," his father says, still looking at him with that tiny smile.
"No, you see, this is the problem." Margaret gestured wildly, then looked around at the deserted mess tent, at the couple of guys who'd drawn kitchen duty, at the guards coming off the night patrol, the elder of the two carefully mentoring the one on his first time out. Head nurse and chief surgeon, his controlled little gesture was saying, they're not just a couple of – look, you gotta understand something about this outfit, kid.
"The problem," Hawkeye repeated, obligingly, when she looked like she was going to slip head first into her coffee.
"I like military men." She looked up and blinked. "Why are you being so nice to me, Pierce?"
"What, I can't see a friend and comrade through the night?" he demanded. "'sides, I don't have to get you all the way to sober. That's Penobscott's job."
"He'll be here to get me at, at, eight o'clock!"
"I know," Hawkeye said, drowsily. The gin had started to slop its way out of his bloodstream about an hour earlier, leaving him boneless and punch-drunk with tiredness. Margaret had drunk until he took the glass out of her hand, smashed it with small-hours bravado and brought her across the compound for the first sitting at breakfast.
"And then, Tokyo!" A sparkling, brittle smile. "Where he cheated on me with Nurse Franklin. Who knows how many others."
"I know" – this with an inarticulable weariness. "I'm sorry, Margaret. I really am."
She nudged him. "You know what the problem is?"
"Lieutenant-Donald Colonel Penobscott?"
"Military men," she insisted, slumping against his shoulder. "I like them."
"Hey, me too," Hawkeye said, shifting to let her get comfortable. "Especially when they make me scream."
"Shut up, Pierce. I like men who can – who can take orders. Not just stand there, expecting me to – to change." She slipped all the rest of the way down to the table, her cheek resting on the wood. "Look at me, I'm pathetic."
"Yeah," Hawkeye said, suddenly going from punch-drunk back to drunk to fingers curling into fists, "fourteen hours of surgery on top of no sleep on top of days and weeks and months and years of surgery and no sleep, and five martinis, a ninety-seven percent efficiency rating, a beating heart and human fallibility, and nothing will do except personal and universal perfection: the inimitably pathetic Major Margaret Houlihan!"
She looked up at him, eyes bright, as though seeing him for the first time. "You're pretty nice, you know."
"I know," Hawkeye said. "Come on, I'll walk you back to your tent. He'll be" – this with a helpless gesture - "here soon."
"Another drink," she said, sharply, and over his not-quite-voiced complaints, "I outrank you, soldier."
He got the drink for her out of the officers' club, leaving the money next to Klinger asleep on the surface of the bar, and they walked back across the compound arm-in-arm, Hawkeye singing under his breath, Margaret in harmony, I don't want no more of this army life, gee, Ma, I wanna go home.
On an overcast day about four months after he came home from Korea, Hawkeye wakes up in the morning and goes outside barefoot to get the mail. On his way back to the house, across the grass freezing his feet, between fog-wreathed branches, he realises he can see his breath.
In the afternoon, there are several patients – some coughs, some colds; a kid with a nail gone through the webbing between thumb and index finger; an elderly woman he doesn’t know, who's starting to feel arthritic at the change in the weather – and when he’s done he goes out into the purple twilight for a while. The air feels like frost, autumn stealing close, but there's some residual warmth left, in the ground, in tree bark that he rests his hands against. When he goes back into the house it's with fingers clenched into fists and an awful creeping under his skin. His father is on a late-night call, a farming accident somewhere far out of town; Hawkeye turns around in the empty space of the house and is uncomfortably aware of his own heart beating in the silence.
At eleven o'clock, when the moon is shining down pale and full, Hawkeye walks down the steps in his bare feet and finds a bottle of store-bought gin. He lifts the kitchen window sash as far as it will go and sits on the ledge with his knees drawn up, halfway to outside, halfway to putting his hand through the glass, threads of nameless panic unravelling under his skin.
Several hours later a distant sound wakes him and his muscles are aching and his eyes are burning and from under the haze of sleep he can feel the same fear sharing his body like a ghost. In this room it's cold like breaking and he's aware that he's not alone in the house any more, listening to the front door rattling in the distance and footsteps coming to rest in the doorway. His father steps into the room without turning on the lights and says, “Hawkeye.”
It’s not said in a questioning tone, nor an exclamation; it demands nothing from him. It’s been a comfort to him all of his life, not to be plain Benjamin, or John, or Charles, but Hawkeye the storybook ridiculous, carrying around the whimsy of someone who loves him more than anything. It’s a comfort now.
"Hi," Hawkeye says, crossly, and his father gets across the room in three strides, puts an arm around him and says, simply, "Breathe."
As prescriptions go, Hawkeye thinks, it lacks style. But he obeys orders, each breath a small victory, in and out, in and out, under that moon bright enough for helicopters to fly.
“No offence, doc,” the private said. “But I gotta ask. Why do you twitch like that every time I call out to my buddy? Should we not be talking in here or something?”
“If only,” Charles declared from the other side of the room. “I for one would endorse a collective vow of monastic silence in post-op.”
Hawkeye smiled and sat down on the edge of the man’s bed. “Don’t mind Charles, he’s kind of a fruitcake short of a tea party. Private Adams, isn’t it?”
“Tom,” he said, eagerly. “I figure you and me, we should be on first-name terms, seeing as how you cut off my clothes and dug around in me some.”
Hawkeye laughed. “I didn’t do the first part – and when you meet Major Houlihan, give her a kiss from me – but mea culpa for the rest. Who’s your friend?”
“Private Mason,” Adams said. “But you know in basic, the rest of us were hefting our pieces around like coal sacks – I mean I’m from Chicago and I didn’t know which end of the thing was which. But him” – he motioned to the man in the opposite bed, sleeping now – “he’s a country boy and his family got hit pretty hard in the Depression, he put meat on the table that way. Put a rifle in his hands, he could shoot an apple off your head. So, we got to calling him…”
He waved a hand, struggling a little for breath, and Hawkeye placed a gentle hand on his arm. "Easy."
Adams nodded, not trying to talk for a moment.
"No one lasts in the army long without a rechristening,” Hawkeye said, almost clinically. “It’s all so crazy, you’ve gotta start again as a crazy new person before you deal with it. But I had my name before I came.”
Adams paused, confused for a moment, then got it. “So you’re Hawkeye, too?” Another pause. “Your folks actually named you that?”
Hawkeye smiled. “Called me that, which is better. All right, Tom, Hawkeye” – this to the man in the other cot, who came awake for a moment, eyes blurred by morphine – “get some rest now. I'll see about getting you two moved next to each other so you don't have to yell."
"Thanks, Doctor," Adams said, still eagerly. "That's real nice."
"Talk to him about Chicago," Hawkeye said. "Talk to him about any damn place where they've got two chickens in the pot."
"Oh, hurrah," came Charles's voice, "more sociability."
"In the meantime, if you need anything, ask Dr. Winchester over there.” Hawkeye inclined his head. "Call him Chuck, he just loves that."
He moved along the ward, then turned back, looked down at the soldier sitting up in bed, watching his friend sleep.
"You can talk all you want," Hawkeye said, and went out.
Hawkeye comes awake like being pulled from drowning, inarticulable threads still holding him down in sleep. He tips forwards and then back, letting the rocking-chair carry him into consciousness, forwards and backwards, forwards and backwards, listening with his eyes closed to the low buzz of crickets, the dusty warm sound of a car’s engine idling nearby. He’s out on the porch. Presently he gets up and walks down the front steps, still in his bare feet, to see who it is.
The car door opens as he approaches, the woman inside breathing heavily and perched on the seat pushed as far back as it will go. She looks him for a moment and says nothing, her face contorted with pain, her hands placed protectively over her round belly. It’s hot, too hot, haze shimmering over the deserted road and summer's last gasp of humidity casting a dizzying spell. “I can help you,” Hawkeye says, abruptly. “I’m a doctor.”
“Doctor?” The woman’s voice is weak and strained. “They said there was – can you…”
Hawkeye opens the door fully, reaches in and puts an arm around her shoulders, feeling her relax as she realises he can take her weight, and slowly he helps her stand up, leaning on him and the side of the car for support. “There,” he says, gently. “My name's Hawkeye."
“I’m Cally. They said…”
“Probably sent you for my father,” Hawkeye says, still gently, “but he’s out on a call. I’m a doctor, too. How far apart are your contractions?” At her look of confusion, he amends, “How long, between times?”
“It hurts now,” she says, and tries to move and her knees begin to give way. Hawkeye tightens his grip, helps her forward a few steps, and when it becomes clear that walking is beyond her, takes a deep breath and lifts her up, taking careful steps down the sidewalk, small pieces of gravel cutting into the soles of his feet. “Let’s get you inside,” he says, soothingly. “Can I call someone and tell them where you are?”
She tenses in his arms and he risks a look at her left hand, reads perfectly the panic in her eyes. “Maybe your mom,” he says, quietly. “Maybe a friend, a sister?”
“My sister,” she allows, after a moment. And then: “Doctor…”
“Shhh.”
“No – Doctor, I think my waters are breaking.”
Hawkeye knows that, the liquid already slick between her body and his skin. At the twist in her expression, he chuckles. “Cally. I was in residency in Boston and then I spent two years as a front line army surgeon. I swear to you, this is not even in the top ten of most revolting things that have ever happened to me.”
Incredibly, she smiles a little at that, and he picks up the pace, carrying her carefully up the steps and into the cool of the house, through to their one properly-equipped consulting room. As he walks towards the bed, he hears footsteps behind him. “Hawkeye?”
“We’ve got a patient, Dad,” Hawkeye says, laying Cally down in the dimness and turning around. “Soon we’re gonna have two. I just want to switch on the lights, see what I’m doing.”
“Hawk!” his father says, and Hawkeye steps in front of the window and looks down at himself, at his shirt and hands and bare ankles and feet, soaked and dripping with blood.
"Cally," he says, without turning back around. "Cally, we're going to look after you. Stay right there, okay, honey, and try not to shift around too much."
And then he's moving, pushing his father towards the telephone to call the cavalry and closing the front door and stripping off his own clothes, because if Cally sees him like this one or both of them is going to start screaming and never stop. "We've got to be quiet," he says, conversationally, to no one, and finds his way to the deep sink, the still water, to scrub.
Earlier in the day Hawkeye had had a disagreement with a gurney and a corpsman and a jeep being driven slightly too fast over a bump in the road down from the pad. BJ had heard the bitten-off cry, come running to meet Hawkeye rolling over and getting back to his feet. "I'm fine," he said viciously, tried to take a step and BJ broke his fall.
"Okay," BJ said, "you're fine, absolutely" – and they stumbled into the compound together, the choppers coming down from above them and the ambulances shrieking past them and the yelling of triage below them, as though this, BJ was thinking, were all the backdrop to a musical comedy, and for our first number Captains Hunnicutt and Pierce do the three-legged race, against a chorus of percussive shelling. When they reached the OR BJ was trying not to let out a hysterical laugh and Hawkeye was pale but upright and Klinger was there, solemn as a pack-mule, to be leaned upon. After the fifth or sixth patient, when Klinger was tired and Hawkeye was snapping, BJ sent for Radar, a barstool from the officers' club and several buckets of boiling water. After the forty-sixth patient, BJ took on Hawkeye for his forty-seventh, did the X-ray, diagnosed a soft-tissue injury, found a crutch, prescribed gin and little white pills, and they returned the barstool together, still in that rocking-horse rhythm. "Because that's the problem with this war," BJ said, "not enough dancing."
And now it was late, and getting cold, the wind sweeping in from the east and making the tent flaps flutter, and they were on their way back to the Swamp, Hawkeye not so much drunk as unglued, painkillers reacting with alcohol in his blood, and BJ exhausted and inebriated but still listening to Hawkeye muttering under his breath, under the steady tap of the crutch on the dirt.
"Adrenaline," BJ said, abruptly. "It's wearing off and you can feel the pain. Here." He offered an arm, and Hawkeye took it, limping onwards with smaller steps, letting BJ shoulder some of his weight.
"There was this one time before you came," Hawkeye said, "I got… kinda stuck in a rut. Choppers, more choppers, more adrenaline, no sleep, I got a little weird. They told me afterwards I, ah, tried to take a latrine to North Korea."
BJ snorted. "Did you get there?"
"Trapper and Radar bombed me with chloral hydrate before I got that far. I woke up a day later thinking I'd dreamt the whole thing and then I saw the tracks left by the latrine."
BJ laughed and said impulsively, "Hawkeye, I love you" – and then tensed for a moment, bringing them both to a standstill, teetering in the centre of the compound, deserted and dark.
Hawkeye steadied the crutch and turned to look at him. "I know," he said, clipped with pain. "You sterilised a barstool for me today. Got me down from the pad. Did eight hours of surgery on top of it. My mom carried me in from the yard when I hurt my ankle once, but she was my mom. You're – some guy who kinda got drafted."
"It's amazing," BJ said, not knowing if he meant Hawkeye or himself or both of them, "what you can do. When you have to."
"With some help from your friends," Hawkeye said, slurring his words, taking BJ's arm again, and they went on.
Darkness falls pretty late this time of year, this far north. Hawkeye has opened the window to let in the last of the day's light, scrubbing yesterday's clothes and sheets at the sink, watching the red staining around the plughole. He puts his head under the water and works his fingers through his hair, bracing himself for the awful, sick-making smell of the dried blood washing out. He breathes in and it's replaced, slowly, by soap and clean water and the heady evening air.
"Hawkeye," his father says, coming into the room. "You want any help?"
"I got it," Hawkeye says, and shakes the water off himself like a dog. His father clucks and helps him anyway, helping him lift the things out and hang them up. They work in silence for a few minutes, Hawkeye still dripping all over the floor, leaving kidney-shaped bare footprints in the damp. He lifts the window open another notch so it will all air-dry, and waits for his father to say whatever it is that's on his mind.
It takes another minute. Hawkeye perches himself on the edge of the sink with his hands clasped in his lap.
"You knew what to do," his father says, at last. "I think if the girl had come in with a gunshot wound to the chest or a leg hanging on by a thread, you would have known what to do." He seems to recollect himself all at once, his eyes taking on a wariness as he realises what he's saying. That look of caution makes Hawkeye feel tired.
"Not just some girl, Dad," he says, mildly. "Her name is Cally. Actually, I had to write it down in full when I handed over to the attending, her name's Calliope. Guess her parents named her out of a book. She says she won't decide on a name for the baby before she gets out the hospital, but she likes 'Louise'. I suggested 'Polyhymnia' but for some reason she thought that was a stupid idea."
Daniel Pierce is shaking his head in wonderment. "Hawkeye," he begins, and stops. "You knew what to do," he says again, sounding helpless.
Hawkeye frowns. "I was chief surgeon at a MASH unit," he says carefully. "We had the best efficiency rating in Korea. If a soldier made it to the 4077th alive, he had more than a ninety-seven percent chance of making it out of there that way."
He's spouted those statistics before, usually to idiotic generals or jackasses from I Corps, but it sounds different here, this clear recital in this room washed clean. Abruptly, he sighs and swings himself down. "Guess I should get some sleep," he says, and yawns. "I'll go up and see Cally in the morning. Someone's gotta give her back her car keys."
"Hawkeye," his father says, holding up a hand. From the way he straightens up, it seems like he's arrived at some new resolve. "Hawkeye, you are… well." He smiles and pushes a hand through his hair in one of their shared gestures. "I missed you more than you can know."
Hawkeye smiles back, a little shyly. "You too."
"Come back here whenever you can," his father says, still sounding determined. "This will always be your home."
Hawkeye stands there, still barefoot and not understanding. Like everything else, it takes time.
"Before they came to take me," Hawkeye said, and Sidney turned towards him, peering across the late-evening twilight in the Swamp. He had thought Hawkeye was snatching a few minutes of sleep, still wearing bloodstained scrubs, his limbs thrown loosely across the cot.
"Yes?"
"Stop your ears pricking up like that," Hawkeye said, irritably. "Before they came to take me away. Back in the mess tent-that-was. Remember? On the floor. Don't you want me to go on? Chicken."
He looked up at Sidney, eyes flashing. Sidney felt a sudden, not-unexpected wave of affection for him, admiration for that brittle willingness, even now, to fight. Sidney had had the story, tearfully from Margaret, wearily from Potter, Hawkeye on the ground in the remains of the tent, leaning against the wall with BJ beside him, his head on BJ's shoulder, listening to BJ say, quietly, Oh, shit, Hawk. Oh, shit, oh shit, oh shit.
"Do you believe in nominative determinism, Sidney?" In his voice, Sidney could hear anger before it transformed into something else. "I told a girl I was in love with once that a hawk is kinda like a cute vulture. That Americans are funny about birds. I told her I'm lucky I'm not named after a turkey. Maybe I should have said chicken."
"Hawkeye," Sidney said gently.
Hawkeye shrugged. "I don't live here any more, Sidney."
"Hawk," Sidney said, taking his time, a conscious naming. "You do know you're going to be fine, don't you?"
"Yeah?" Hawkeye looked up at him. "You made me into a doctor again, Sidney. I'm grateful. I'm useful. But I'm still…" He waved a hand. "Oh, what the hell does it matter."
"You have been," Sidney said, "and you are, my friend. You always will be." He paused. "And in civilian life you wouldn't have been my patient. "
"The words 'conflict of interest' had crossed my mind," Hawkeye said dryly. "But you know what I'd do, if you got shot right there where you stand?"
"Get up," Sidney said, definitively. "You'd get up."
Hawkeye gestured mutely. Sidney took a breath and went on, "And this is where I tell you that you may benefit from long-term, intermittent psychiatric care, as and when you need it. That's true, by the way. This is where I tell you that, with care and thoughtfulness, you could live an ordinary life. But that's not true. You'll live an extraordinary life, Hawkeye, you always have. Come on now, break's over."
Hawkeye said nothing, but took the outstretched hand, let Sidney pull him back to standing.
Hawkeye gets on a bus south on a crisp day in the winter, with a few dollars in his pocket and his medical bag thrown over his shoulder, a few days short of thirty years old. He's whistling as he walks through the familiar city streets, takes turns right and left that his feet still know. He walks into the office of Charles Emerson Winchester III, chief of thoracic surgery at Massachusetts General, just as that eminent gentleman is about to embark on his morning round, with a nurse and resident in tow. The resident scuttles away at the sight of a stranger; Hawkeye nods politely at the nurse and leans against the doorway, bathed in the morning light, his fingers curling around an invisible martini glass.
Charles gets up from behind his desk. "Hawkeye? Is that you?"
"Guilty as charged." Hawkeye steps forwards and frowns. "After everything, now you call me by my name?"
Charles regards him steadily. "Doctor, if you insist. But we're not…"
"In the army now," Hawkeye finishes, satisfied, and there is a moment's silence as each of them takes the other in, against the new background. Charles looks well, less drawn and tired than he did six months earlier, but there are no pictures on the walls of this office.
"How are you?" Charles asks, still with that steady gaze, calm and a little unnerving. Ever the diagnostician, Hawkeye thinks; no jumping to conclusions for him.
Hawkeye tips his head. "Charles, you get put in a mental institution one time..."
The nurse steps backwards involuntarily; Charles gives him a sudden, genuine laugh, and Hawkeye wants for a moment to go over and kiss him on his stupid wonderful bald head.
"Quite," Charles says. "And yet, I ask."
Hawkeye waves at the window, trying to indicate everything, the beautiful Boston day, the glittering sunshine, the passage of time, clasps his hands in a helpless gesture, and Charles nods. "Yes. Likewise."
"Who are you?" the nurse asks, as though just discovering her voice. She's pretty, Hawkeye notes absently; a brunette with lips like strawberries.
"Whoever you want me to be," he says, grinning, and Charles rolls his eyes heavenwards. "Must you bring your infernal libido…" he's saying, as Hawkeye begins, "Charles, can I help liking people, you know, people, the things with the faces that make all the noise" – and then they both break off suddenly, both taking a step back from the space they were closing between them.
"Nurse Jeffries," Charles says, carefully, "this is Dr. Pierce."
"It's a pleasure to meet you," Jeffries says, but Charles isn't finished.
"He has the proud distinction of being the worst person I have ever known," he goes on, with such vivid fondness that this time Hawkeye does kiss him, grabbing his outstretched hand and brushing his lips across the fingers. "Pierce!" Charles howls, and Hawkeye laughs and Jeffries grins delightedly.
"I'll go," she says. "I'll tell them you'll be a while, Dr. Winchester."
After she disappears, they both fall silent again, still with that steady, wary gaze upon each other. "All right," Charles says, abrupt. "What can I do for you, Doctor?""
Hawkeye holds up his hands, turns them palm-up, the bright light picking out all the old tiny cuts and scars, the surface of the skin worn from years of scrubbing. "A job," he says.
Charles looks at him and nods, slowly, considerately. "Yes," he says. "Yes, that's right." After a pause, he says, "There will be blood, and pain, and death. Are you…"
"Yes," Hawkeye says. "No. Yes. You know."
Charles smiles, briefly, unscrews his fountain pen and begins writing. "I'll need to make a recommendation to the board." He pauses. "Weren't you going home to be a country doctor?"
Hawkeye nods. "I will. There's time."
"Time," Charles echoes, and goes on writing. In the hard, brilliant sunshine, Hawkeye raises that invisible glass.
For years afterwards, the journey stayed in his memory as a sequence of Technicolor snapshots. The red and white cross painted on the hospital roof, getting smaller and smaller; the rich dust falling in swathes from his boots as he jumped down from the chopper; the warm wind from the north blowing through the airport at Kimpo, stirring his hair, lifting his dogtags, churning up more of that dust, filling his mouth and nose with the taste of grit and iron. The guy sitting next to him on the plane, saying, "Hell, now I gotta go home and do my taxes" and Hawkeye's genuine, unexpected laughter.
"Better than death," he said, and the guy looked at him with perfect understanding.
Then the sight of the Pacific, hundreds and thousands of feet below; the strange jet-accelerated night, sleeping with his head resting on the window, sleep without dreams; the momentary tremors in his hands when he reached for a bottle of water; then the coastline spread out below as familiar as the lines of a body. The guy next to him, looking at him with interest before they landed, asking, "Hey, what the hell kinda name is 'Hawkeye', anyway?"
Hawkeye said, "It's from The Last of the Mohicans. It was my dad's favourite book."
The summer night in late July, so far north there was still light in the sky, near the horizon; the warmth of the space where he was standing, leaning against the doorframe in this house he was born in; the way down towards the ocean.
"Hawkeye," his father said, and Hawkeye was still on the threshold, just for this moment occupying the same space as his body, exhausted and calm and conscious of the shifting earth beneath his feet, spinning him on to morning. A sudden desire to feel that earth, cool and clean against the soles of his feet.
"Come on in, Hawk," his father said. "Put your things down."
The sound his dogtags made when he threw them on the hard wood table; the smell of salt; the sound of the sea. A glass of cold water in his hands. The closing door; the open window.
end.
Notes:
-This story owes a great deal (not least Hawkeye's unprecedented tendency to talk about his mother!) to, and certainly exists in the same universe as, Epigone's The Dawn Don't Rescue Me No More. It's a beautiful story; you should read it.
-"What the hell kinda name is Hawkeye, anyway?" is close to the first thing anyone ever says to Hawkeye - not in the TV show or the movie but in the book, 1968, forty years closer in time to the Korean War. I guess if this story is about anything, it's that.
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