[angryhaiku] Red-Letter Days, 1 of 2 (13+)

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Title: Red-Letter Days (1 of 2)
Author: Chase, aka Angryhaiku
Pairing: BJ/Hawkeye. Er, more or less.
Rating: 13+
Disclaimer: Everyone’s favorite exercise in futility! I do not own the characters or proprietary ideas depicted here, and any compensation I receive for this story will be strictly non-fungible and monetarily valueless.
Summary: In the States, Hawkeye finds himself at loose ends without BJ.

Previous segments: This story is the third in the series; you can find the first, These Letters, here, and the second, Light Reading, in three parts: Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. I hope you enjoy it!



Going home, of course, was jubilant and wonderful. Dad was – well, not a bit different, except his hair is closer to pure white than silver now and he seems, impossibly, even more taciturn. There’s a party, somewhat to my dismay, but once I let go of the desire to find someplace to lick my wounds in private, it was pleasantly diverting. Dad, who normally goes out of his way to turn a blind eye to my exploits with the majority of Crabapple Cove’s members of the fairer sex obviously went out of his way this time to recruit attractive and single (or willing to compromise; Helen Fisher, who spent the evening glugging cocktails and complaining that her husband doesn’t pay her enough attention, is notoriously happy to accept a suitor outside the confines of her traditional marriage) women. It only took a few drunken passes before they thought of me again exactly in the way they’d thought of me when I left, Dr. Pierce’s boy, which eased the hurts of Korea more than anything, but also highlighted the sense of loss of not having all the people that I loved.

There wasn’t enough business in Crabapple Cove for me to practice along with Dad, but that was alright; I loaded Dad’s massive old car with medical supplies and made house calls in the other two-bit towns in our region of Maine. It was mostly treating summer fevers and sprained ankles, with the occasional mushroom poisoning or fishhook impalement. No surgery at all, beyond helping get the hooks out, which suited me fine. I needed a little time to let meatball surgery get a little hazy before I tried again in a real OR.

Life was exactly what I had envisioned every night in Korea, but, of course, having it there in my hand, I didn’t really want it anymore.

It’s hard to put my finger on the source of my discontent. Crabapple Cove isn’t really the utopia I’d thought of it as being while I was in the army. To be honest, Crabapple Cove isn’t even a one-horse town; Summerhaven up the road has use of the animal Monday through Wednesday and alternate Saturdays. Not that it doesn’t look like a happening metropolis after two years of choosing between risking cirrhosis in the Swamp or hepatitis at Rosie’s, but beyond all the trappings of civilization, everyone seems…dull. Stultifying, really.

So I let Dad make my excuses in a way that I’ve never done before, even as a child: I’m sorry, Hawkeye’s not feeling well, he can’t come out and play or He’s not awake yet; shall I have him give you a call when he is?

Finally Dad got fed up with my attitude. I said before that he ordered me out of Crabapple Cove, but that isn’t exactly accurate; he merely suggested that I might consider looking for work someplace where there might be a few more people, even some other Korean veterans. Of course, Daniel Pierce is not known for his displays of hot feeling; for him, this was the equivalent of a screaming argument in front of the neighbors.

I left. I was glad to go, really. I love my father, but it’s the kind of love that bears up well to seeing each other four times a year. Living in my childhood bedroom was driving the both of us to drink, and the pinched little frown that he got on those occasions I decided to get a little more than tipsy just drove me to drink harder. I went to Boston – I’m not quite sure why, the ashes of my practice were cold and all the patients long since referred to other surgeons.

I wasn’t looking for Trapper; we never even saw each other. I thought I saw Louise in a greengrocer, once, but I averted my eyes quickly and absorbed myself in a display of early season corn until she was gone.

Boston seemed like as good a place to live as any, and it was full of interesting women who were happy to date me for a couple of days or weeks until they realized it wasn’t them I fell asleep thinking of. The One-Letter Women, BJ teased, because every time he got a letter from me the woman’s name was different. Aimlessly, I burned through my savings until I found a position working nights at Brockton Hospital, one of Boston’s less prestigious medical establishments. No glamour surgery; it was a lot of tonsillectomies and hernia repair, and it didn’t pay as much as private practice had, but it was just enough to keep me at equilibrium. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I was keeping my options open, making sure that there was nothing in Boston keeping me from leaving at three days’ notice, in case someone else – BJ, of course, but I told myself that any 4077 alumnus would do – should be discharged.

I did my honest best to fall out of contact with Peg, but she wasn’t having it. She wrote me every week, like clockwork, regardless of whether I had answered her previous letter or not. (I’m not quite sure how she got my address in Boston; BJ says she never asked him for it. I suppose she wrote Dad, though he never mentioned it.) She told me what Erin was doing and asked my opinion on what sorts of things she ought to sent BJ for his birthday and went out of her way to read the Last of the Mohicans so that she could make conversation about it, and when even that failed a reply in the allotted timespan, she solicited and reported the opinions of her neighbors on the book. Her letters had the tone of a zookeeper approaching a nervous, but not particularly dangerous, animal; that is, mostly meaningless prattle designed to reassure the recipient of the sender’s good intentions. It would have been insulting if she weren’t so damnably sincere and fearless about it, but she wasn’t trying to conceal anything in her writing; she was certain that she liked me and was certain that I liked her, even if it took me a little while to come around to knowing it. After a while I looked forward to writing her as much as I looked forward to writing BJ.

And I mailed BJ all of the kinds of things I thought would make life better at the 4077: Hard candy and newspapers, trinkets for the local children, a glass retort and copper piping for the still, and books, dozens and dozens of books. I wonder what Radar thought, when all those packages arrived postmarked Boston but with a Mill Valley return address. If he noticed, he never mentioned it in his letters.

There were days when I lived for the mail; if there wasn’t a letter from Peg or BJ or someone else at the 4077, it slipped, wholesale, from my consciousness; a day that hadn’t happened, a not-day. But for all that, the letters – with both of them – were textually platonic. BJ, once or twice, referred to that asceticism as “celibacy,” which in a way it was, but I simply didn’t want to intrude any further into what BJ and Peg had made for themselves.

It sounds like a chalky, cold existence, bereft of the pleasure of company. It had its compensations, though: Regaining weight lost in Korea, and gin aged months or years, rather than hours, and women – women everywhere, half the population women, and none of them in uniform. Aside from that, I needed to remember what it was that I actually liked about the States, and what was just nostalgia in Korea. I don’t think there was any other way for me to prepare for July 27.

July 27, the day of the best news of my life.

I was asleep, soundly asleep. Working nights at the hospital meant that I could sleep the day away without anyone looking askance. It had taken me two months after getting home to learn how to sleep without listening for helicopters, but I’d done it; consequently, the poor Western Union boy had to knock on my door for a few long minutes before I came to the door, wrapped in a bathrobe.

I blinked in the bright sunlight in confusion. “Are you sure you’ve got the right address?” There was no reason for anyone to send me a telegram; I didn’t have a telephone, but my father and the hospital both knew that my landlady downstairs did have one, and that she wouldn’t be averse to bringing me a message.

“Are you B. F. Pierce?” the telegram boy asked.

“To everyone but my draft board,” I answered. He didn’t laugh.

“Telegram for you, mister,” he said, passing me a yellow slip of paper folded to form its own envelope.

“Uh, hold on a second,” I answered, then fumbled a few small bills out of my wallet on a table by the door. One-handed I opened the telegram:

“HAWKEYE –

TRUCE IN KOREA STOP BJ ENROUTE STOP COME TO CALIFORNIA SOONEST STOP

– P. HUNNICUTT”

I scared the Western Union boy with my whoop, but he didn’t mind so much once I gave him all the money in my wallet – $30, give or take – as a tip.

And it didn’t take three days for me to get ready to leave Boston.

It took one.

***

One day to leave, but two more to get to California: The end of the war triggered all sorts of problems with air travel. A sympathetic ticket girl explained that there was no way for to get straight to San Francisco, but – and she really shouldn’t be telling me this, because she couldn’t make a guarantee that a flight would be available; really, she could lose her job – lots of people had been canceling flights out of Chicago, she supposed changing vacation plans to see returning sons, and maybe if I went there I could get something.

And from Chicago, of course, there were no flights to San Francisco, but this sympathetic ticket girl said if I really wanted, she could get me out to Long Beach, and anyway wasn’t any westerly movement good?

But that is where sympathetic ticket girls ran out, and the irritable man behind the counter wasn’t susceptible to charm or pleading. He, seeing the amount of time and money I had to work with, suggested I hitchhike to San Francisco.

And that is the story of how I came to make the trip from Daugherty Airfield to the Oakland Municipal Airport in a truck full of slightly irregular avocados. The driver, full of nationalist delight at the end of the war and pleased with my gift of ten-year-old scotch (to be enjoyed after I arrived at my destination) wasn’t even angry when he discovered me.

***

No one at the airport could tell me when BJ’s flight would be arriving, of course. No one at the airport was even remotely helpful, as I had no rank insignia and did not appear to be the overjoyed wife I claimed I was. A phone call to Peg – who sounded slightly breathless and faintly annoyed when she answered the phone – revealed that BJ had already arrived, that he had been home for a whole day already, and when was I getting to California?

She laughed hysterically as I explained myself; faintly, in the background, I could hear BJ laughing and demanding an explanation.

And then she passed the phone to him, and I heard his voice for the first time in four months and three weeks; for the first time since his choked farewell in Korea.

I’m not sure what I said, or what he answered; between laughter and poorly smothered tears it all came out as mumbles anyway. Tongue-tied and suddenly shy, I mutter my intention to find a hotel, and maybe take them to dinner tonight, if they aren’t too busy, but BJ roars nonsense, Hawkeye, Peggy, tell Hawkeye he’s gotta stay here tonight.

Peg concurred. They offered to come pick me up, but I told them to finish what they were doing – Peg blushed so hard, I could practically hear it over the phone – and, after being kicked out of two taxis that did not want to go so far out of their usual routes, found a cab driver willing to take me to the North Bay.

BJ waits on the porch for me, with two martini glasses on a low table by a deck swing. Beaming, he salutes with his glass as the taxi pulls into the drive, and pays and tips the driver while I’m still dragging my duffle out of the back.

I drop it again a moment later to embrace BJ. “You look good, Hawk,” he tells my shoulder, hugging me hard. He’s clean shaven and well groomed, with a new haircut and new definition to the muscles in his arms and chest, but I can feel ribs through the fabric of his shirt.

“You look thin, BJ,” I answer. Thin and haunted; for all that he’s beaming, the shadows under his eyes are deep, and I know from experience that they’ll take some time to dissolve. “Did you finally give up on the mess and start eating only what you could grow in the Swamp?”

“What more could a man want than foot fungus and gin?” he asks, grinning. He carries my bag to the porch, then abandons it.

“Hnn, speaking of which,” I said, inclining my head toward the second glass on his end table.

“Of course, where are my manners?” He hands me the glass – it’s a real martini, not just gin masquerading, and complete with an onion; and I sip it and mumble my pleasure. We recline on his patio furniture and sip. BJ’s smirking glance tells me he’s feeling the same sense of déjà vu as I am.

“How was it, Beej, really?” I ask, and he knows what I mean.

“It was – lonely. It was all right.”

“And coming home?”

He just grins at that.

“And the lovely Mrs. Hunnicutt?” I ask, testing the waters.

“In the shower,” BJ answers, a lot of teeth in his grin. I don’t know what he means by it until his knee brushes mine, and the familiar something flares in his eyes. I grin back. “Finished your drink?”

I haven’t, but I do, at a gulp.

He holds his front door open for me, and before it closed he’s kissing me, hard, and pressing me against the wall opposite the slightly ajar door to his coat closet. (Inside the closet I notice, mothballed and soiled, his Army winter coat.)

“God, it’s good to see you, Hawkeye,” he says. He pushes aside my collar so his lips can find the spot where my neck meets my shoulder and, in defiance of all medical expectations, my knees show diminished function.

“You too, Beej,” I mutter fervently, reaching for his lips with mine, trying desperately to clutch him closer to me than physical proximity will allow.

My hands sweep over him, trying to learn again everything that’s the same and discover what’s new. I’d feel self-conscious, stinking of three days of travel and now BJ’s high-class hooch, but he’s seen me worse. I’ve certainly seen him a whole hell of a lot worse.

In spite of that, I feel an odd sense of dislocation; something here still isn’t quite right. BJ kisses me one final time and leans back, draping one arm over my shoulder casually.

I glance up. Standing in the door to the living room, her still-damp hair pinned away from her face and one hand splayed at her throat, is Peg. Her eyes are as big as saucers, and her expression is unreadable. Here we are, it occurs to me, in the very tableau she wrote for herself and BJ; if she is angry about the plagiarism or the adultery it doesn’t show in her face. Nothing shows in her face: There’s not just an absence of anger, but also of amusement, of lust, of surprise or frustration. She stands transfixed for a moment, until Erin shouts some nonsense (or maybe not nonsense; maybe it’s language distorted by the juvenile palate in a way that I don’t understand) in the living room, and suddenly she’s free to move again.

“Hello, Hawkeye!” she says, smiling like a perfect hostess.

“Hello, Peg,” I answer. She steps forward and I lean down and kiss her on the cheek, trying not to feel the surrealism of the moment. Her cheek is hot; up close her face is flushed bright pink. BJ circles her waist with his arm and she smiles at him, almost reflexively.

“Nice trip?” she asks. She smiles when she says it, but the room is full of something dangerous and electric that I don’t like.

***

A/N: Hah, you can really see the Aaron Sorkin-y influence here; even when I’m not actually trying to rip of his dialogue style I rip off his dialogue style. My apologies to that esteemed gentleman for the thinly veiled plagiarism.
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