NEW FIC: "Marigold Wine" 1/? by Aura218

[aura218.livejournal.com]

Title: "Marigold Wine" part 1/?

Author: aura218

Pairing: Hawkeye/Trapper, Hawkeye/others

Genre: Drama, romance, longfic, postseries, 60s

Summary: In the 60s, Trapper visits his old army buddy at a hippie commune, where Hawkeye has retreated to find peace.

Rating: R/M

I knew you were coming so I baked a cake, my proofreader and encourager Todash

.

Notes:

For the math geeks: By book/movie canon, Alda et al were playing far younger characters than themselves. According to M*A*S*H Goes to Maine (e.g., Wikipedia), Hawkeye Pierce was 31 in 1954. Now, I'm no arithmatist, so let's keep it loose and say that this story takes place in the mid-60s, putting Hawkeye and Trapper in their mid-40s.

 

"Marigold Wine"

Part 1

"Hawkeye says you and he are old friends," said his adolescent chauffeur.

Trapper glanced at him. A particularly aimed rut on the dirt road caused the ATV to lurch and his stomach to leap into his throat. He snapped his eyes onto tree-lined road ahead of them.

"Dr. Pierce and I were in a convenient little war together."

"Sorry, man. You were like, totally tools of the rich man's war."

Can you come for a visit this summer? Hawkeye's letter had said.

I sure as hell would like to get out of Dodge for a week or so, he'd written back.

The claustrophobic trees lining the mud road opened up to a clearing. A wooden archway painted in multicolors welcomed Trapper to the Sitsips Commune Experience. This was it: Trapper was approaching his first counter culture immersion. There was no turning back, unless Trapper stole a VW bus.

"Um,  hope you, y'know, like it here," the kid said. "Maybe you can find that source of your anger and disengage it from your personhood."

Trapper hopped out of the clunky, muddy vehicle. "Just take my bags, kid." Punk.

The kid drove off down one of the forest paths, taking Trapper's gear with him. Apparently Hawkeye didn't live in downtown Mudpuddle.

Birds chirped. Trapper could hear a hum of a motor in the distance and the pounding of some equipment. An older man and two little girls sat on the porch of one of the cabins, shelling beans. The girls stared at Trapper warily; the old man ignored him. A large carved statue poked up between some flowering bushes in the distance, hung with what looked like ribbon or yarn and hundreds of little somethings-elses that Trapper didn't look too closely at. One long, tin house flanked to his left, and some cabins went off behind that. A few paths ran into the woods.

Trapper began to feel itchy and wondered what to do with his hands. Leather shoes were a stupid thing to wear to a commune. His sneakers would have been comfortable, he supposed, though he'd have felt foolish wearing them out in public all day like a kid. His punk chauffer had worn blue jeans with a patch like a bird track on the seat, and the old man over there was wearing basketball shoes. Where was everyone?

A door banged. Trapper whirled, sliding a little in the mud but catching himself. The door slapped back on its hinges and someone whooped. ("Wounded in the compound!") A long, tall glass of familiarity was running from the tin building with the corrugated roof. Panic bubbled between Trapper's heart and spine, but he turned off the ears that were in his brain and didn't listen for choppers. The man with more grey than black in his hair was Hawkeye, civilian doctor.

"Trapp-err!"

Hawkeye grabbed him around the waist, all grins, and they spun in the mud like drunken ice skaters. Hawkeye didn't hug so much as pull the life out of him, feeling Trapper down as if to be sure he was real, whole, with no parts missing. Trapper held him back, feeling stupid but also relief from the worse stupidity he felt a moment earlier. He was in the right place with the right person. Things would be easier here.

Trapper felt himself kissed on the corner of his mouth. He gave Hawkeye a shove, playfully.

"You nut, what is this showboat?" Trapper said.

"This is a great experiment!" Hawkeye crowed, proud as punch.

Trapper held his friend at arm's length, getting a good look at him for the first time in ten years. They met up once after the war, at the reunion, but it hadn't been the same.

"This is our third summer," Hawkeye was saying. "My second. Lena is just over the way . . ."

Hawkeye seemed taller now, but perhaps that was the difference of real life versus a claustrophobic army camp. His hair was almost all grey and even silver, but it suited him. He still had the posture of a gargoyle but had filled out a bit; Trapper could feel a muscle or two under his button-down work shirt.

Apparently Trapper had just missed lunch. As people streamed from the metal longhouse, Hawkeye snagged idlers and made much of Trapper as his best war buddy. Introductions abounded, and Trapper was surrounded by people in gypsy garb, others in 'normal' stuff, lots of blue jeans in various states of decoration. He shook hands with Moonbolt and his musician wife, who were working on a "concept" album. She carried on her hip their baby, whom Hawkeye had delivered, a tiny thing Trapper could hardly believe belonged to such young, longhaired people. Trapper was well welcomed by Mr. and Mrs. Robinson, an elderly poet couple up for the summer. A Santa Claus looking man who was responsible for the cabbage farm had lived "over yonder" for decades. Hawkeye pointed out a gaggle of college kids loafing around a radio, who were volunteering to pull in the harvest in exchange for room and board.

"We're building an enclave of creativity here," Hawkeye explained, leading Trapper by the elbow.

"And they needed a doctor?"

"A bit," Hawkeye said. "Lots of babies, the occasional farm accident. Mostly, I needed them. I'm writing a book," he said proudly.

"No kidding? That's great."

Hawkeye shrugged. "I'm on sabbatical for two years. It'll be something to tell the grandchildren, huh?"



They approached a blonde woman was watching them as she stacked bricks around an outdoor grill. One of the kids, a Black boy with green eyes, ran ahead of them to the blonde's side. She spoke to him and waved to Hawkeye. The boy took off with a few other children about his size. When the woman stood, she easily hefted a baby strapped to her front in an Indian print blanket.

Hawkeye kissed her on the rise of her cheekbone. "And this is the lovely Lena."

"Can you take him?" she said to Hawkeye. "Hello, Dr. Trapper John. I've heard so much about you."

"Just say it 'Trapper', beautiful." Trapper took her hand and kissed her cheek.

Hawkeye's wife was tall and had the look of someone whose body had just incubated a whole human turkey for nine months. She had a bit of an accent, something precise like English but not quite. Her cheekbones were broad and her nose freckled, and her brow high over bright, blue eyes. She looked like she was born into her long skirt, her leather hair thong thingy at the nape of her neck, and the tied blouse that the baby kept pulling at. Frankly, she looked the opposite of the type Hawkeye usually went for, or used to go for.

"Hawkeye has told me many things about your unit in Korea," Lena said.

"I hope not too much," Trapper said.

Lean smiled. "Only the parts that tell me I shouldn't trust him with you too long, at least not around flammable materials."

Trapper laughed.



Trapper watched the kid watching him as it haughtily tolerated the indignity of being destrapped from one parent to restrapped to another. Hawkeye's last letter contained a blue watercolor card of a sleeping infant, with the usual stats in pen-and-ink. Not something you usually see as a birth announcement, but it was cute. Minimalist. It said the kid was born over a year ago.

Hawkeye adjusted blanket, grimacing as the buckle cut into his neck. Lena turned away from him, stacking bricks at the bar-be-que. Trapper flicked his gaze between them. Something was up. Something weirder than Hawkeye being responsible for the existence of a human carpet shark. On purpose. It goggled at Trapper with curious blue eyes. Trapper looked away.

Hawkeye smiled broadly. "And this is Sunny."

"I read your letter," Trapper said. "He's beautiful, Hawk. Looks just like you."

"It's the eyes," Lena said. "Everyone says so."

"And the hair," Hawkeye said, smoothing the baby's dark capped crown.

"I was sure you pickled all your parts long ago," Trapper said. "So you went with 'Sunny'?"

"Because on the day he was born," Lena said, "the first time I saw him, the sun shone on his face and he smiled."

"I told her those bubbles of amniotic fluid come up from time to time," Hawkeye said. "The name the government knows him by is David Sebastian Franklin Klein-Pierce."

Trapper touched his mustache. "That's a mouthful."

"We figured we'd give him options," Hawkeye said.

"No kidding," Trapper said. Hawkeye probably agonized over it and then threw in everything but the kitchen sink.

Trapper took one of the chubby little fists hesitantly. Sunny gripped it hard and pulled it in for a gnaw, but Trapper didn't want to give him any germs. Louise let the girls put anything in their mouths; no wonder they still bit their fingernails, psychoanalytically speaking. Trapper could see mostly Lena in the shape of the face, although Sunny's eyes were Hawkeye's clear blue, rather than his mother's darker shade. Despite Lena's bone structure, something about the stubborn set of the jaw a the kid sized Trapper up seemed to say, 'I know what you're up to, and I want in on it.'

"I think I could get to like this kid," Trapper said.

"We've grown fond of him," Hawkeye said.

"He's a very good baby," Lena said.

"If only we could teach him not to pet kitty's eyes," Hawkeye said.

"He loves animals," Lena said.

"Especially the squishy parts," Hawkeye said.

"That's very advanced," Trapper marveled.

A bell tolled behind them.

"Ship come in?" Trapper said.

"My students!" Lena said. "Trapper, I want to hear all about you and Hawkeye's time together, the happy and the challenges. We learn as much from both, no?"

Trapper scuffed the gravel. "Yeah, sure."

Lena nodded to Hawkeye. "Dinner?"

"Chicken or pasta?" Hawkeye asked the question a bit overly seriously, Trapper thought.

Lena fussed with Sunny in his sling, making him wibble.

"I think I could do chicken," she said.

"Are you sure?"

Trapper wandered to the tin building, feeling put in the middle of this very intimate dinner conversation. Maybe money was an issue and they were embarrassed. He certainly didn't care if they fed him steak or peanut butter, he'd had a bachelor's meal of hot dogs and tinned beans for three nights last week. He hoped he wasn't making his friend feel he had to impress him just because he, Trapper, had been going to international conferences while Hawkeye had become a mountain man.

Trapper noticed that the tin longhouse was sort of the multipurpose room, not just a mess tent as he'd originally assumed. There was a potbelly stove in the middle and long tables in a rectangle around it. Near as he could guess, one whole long wall was on hinges and could be opened with a winch in summer. Interesting engineering, considering it looked to be made of a former bus married to an airliner. Inside, some little girls were doing one another's hair near the opposite window while a few older kids were clumped near the stove for probably no good reason. Lena's class, one assumed.

He felt he ought to do something before someone set themselves on fire. He turned to call Lena, but she was already bustling past him, exuding teacherly reliability.

"Er, there's some kids in there --"

"Burning bugs on the stove, I know," she said. "I've told them no eating in class, but they like them crispy."

The door banged shut before Trapper could wipe the expression off his face.

He heard boots crunching up behind him. No, he thought, not boots, wood bottomed hand-cobbled clogs, at the bottom of a pair of corduroys with a paisley denim patch on the thigh.

"You never had a chocolate ant?" Hawkeye said. Sunny had his fist wrapped around his father's shirt and was working it into his mouth.

Trapper looked him over with care. "No, but I had a very vanilla uncle."

"C'mere." Hawkeye beckoned Trapper to follow him. "Help me carry the clay oven up from the bar-be-que pit? We need it for dinner."

The thing was a sixteen-inch diameter clamshell in terra cotta, big enough to swallow a whole roast. It looked revolting on the outside but, when Trapper turned the lid inside-out for ease of carrying, he found it scrubbed and shiny inside.

"You bury it in the fire," Hawkeye said. "Slow-cooks things, it's great."

Trapper grunted. It must have weighed fifty pounds. The best way to carry it was to put one half on each bicep like some sort of Ptolemaic cabana boy. And so, with their burdens, they started up a steep and rocky path to the cabin Hawkeye called home.

The clamshell oven was communally shared, Hawkeye explained reverently, like the bar-be-que pit and the ATV and other large, expensive items that everyone used but not every day. Trapper had no idea how they kept track of it all. Was there a little corporal running around with a clipboard and an inventory sheet? He'd taught Cathy and Becky to share their toys, but the fun of being an adult was buying the stuff you wanted and keeping the Frank Burnses of the world from breaking it.

"By the way," Hawkeye said as they left their muddy shoes on the porch of his small cabin, "her name's Klein, not Pierce. She's her own person."

They stepped into the cabin and Hawkeye groped for a light.

"I thought you were married." Trapper sniffed. Woodsmoke, meals, summer. A window was open somewhere to let the dew-damp forest smell in.

"We are. . . . More or less." Hawkeye clicked on a light and was bathed in a yellow glow. "Just set that on the hearth. Just because you're married to someone doesn't mean you owe your whole life to them. She didn't give up her personhood to become my wife and I didn't swallow her up."

"There's that word again." Trapper thunked the awful pot onto an overturned crate and sank into an old, soft chair by the fireplace. The cabin didn't seem to have a real kitchen, but one could call the table and hotplate a breakfast nook. The back of the rectangular room was divided by a curtain, where Hawkeye indicated the kid on the ATV had left his bags on the bed back there. Another mattress had been hauled in, but Hawkeye insisted Trapper would have the bed. There was a loft above the back third, but it seemed to be storage. No indoor bathroom, but then, having the shitter away from a small living space had its benefits.

"How d'you mean, 'more or less'?" Trapper asked.

Hawkeye shrugged. "It's nothing. We just needed some space. For the past four months."

Trapper stared. "You've been sleeping on the couch for four months?"

Hawkeye picked up a dish towel and folded it half to death. "No, I slept on the couch for a month. Then she moved into the women's house and, well, what do you know about free love?"

Trapper raised his eyebrows. "She's cheating on you?"

"Of course not," Hawkeye said. "We're very open. Very, very modern . . . I'm so modern it makes me want to turn caveman sometimes."

Trapper looked around. So Hawkeye got the man cabin and she got the man. Some swarthy earth-pirate, no doubt, a nice blonde biology post-grad.

"We're still married," Hawkeye said. "We're in love and care about each other. I like her guy, he's not some secret she's keeping from me." Hawkeye raised one finger and spoke with the wisdom of Tevye. "Always honesty. Some things just came up that we have to work through together. It's not like you and Louise."

Trapper left that alone. "And you still have to babysit?"

Hawkeye smirked. "What babysit? Sunny's my kid too."

Trapper harrumphed. He knew a man quoting a woman when he heard it.

Hawkeye lowered Sunny onto a blanket on the floor. "Look, Trap, I know this is weird to you. It's a different kind of life here. I didn't get it at first, either -- I put my name on my bike, just because I brought it with me!"

"No kidding."

"But it makes so much more sense when you think about it. When you can trust the people you live with, you don't need all that macho B.S. That's just make-believe we use to keep up our egos, but it just makes us miserable, and invalidates the people around us."

Trapper sighed and leaned back, closing his eyes, blacking out the cabin and this weird, pontificating version of Hawkeye. Maybe if he bumped him on the head he'd go back to the alcoholic degenerate he left in Korea. It worked on The Flintstones. Behind his eyelids, he heard Hawkeye entertaining the kid with some rattely thing.

"It's funny," Trapper finally said. "That's sort of what Louise said. Or what she meant, or something. I don't know."

"What did she -- Trap!!"

Trapper was saved from answering by the loudest, driest wood crack he'd ever heard. His eyes snapped open. Hawkeye was moving but his path was blocked by Sunny. The crate was splintering, Trapper realized. So what? It's just a stupid -- oh. Before Hawkeye could prevent it, but long after Trapper could have moved his leg, the stupid awful clay oven slid off of the crate. It didn't crack because something soft broke its fall. Namely, Trapper's shin.

Well that was dumb.

The baby was crying. The pain was intense but Trapper didn't really feel like reacting. Tears rolled up in the corners of his eyes. It really hurt.

"You stupid idiot!" Hawkeye shouted, finally ambulatory. "Why didn't you move?"

Now he felt like moving.

"Ow ow ow friggin ow ow ow goddammit!" The pain was trapped in his chest and he had to yelp it out.

"Lena's going to let me have it," Hawkeye said. He was at the sideboard digging through a toolbox, pulling out bottles and reading them. "You, get over there!"

He pointed Trapper onto the tiny sofa. Having some doctorin' skills himself, Trapper sensibly elevated his leg on the arm. Hawkeye brought Trapper two tablets and a cup of water.

"Didn't you see it falling?" Hawkeye said.

Trapper shook his head. "I wasn't paying attention."

Hawkeye knelt by the leg dangling off the sofa arm. Trapper lifted up with a wince so Hawkeye could roll up his pantleg.

"I thought you seemed out of it," Hawkeye said. "What's with you?"

Hawkeye's hands smoothed over the bump. Trapper let his head fall back against the rough cushions. The beams of the ceiling crossed far up over his head and seemed very far away, hidden in shadows. Hawkeye rubbed the spot gently, cupping the area that was clearly getting a goose-egg.

"I don't have any ice," Hawkeye said from the floor.

"It's okay," Trapper said. "That feels nice."

Hawkeye always had a nice touch, a reassuring presence. He was a tactile sort of person. Trapper remembered that time in Korea when there had been no heat oil and they had all bunked together in one tent. They'd been so cold they shared the blanket for warmth, just as some of the other guys had. It just felt right to push his back against Hawkeye's whole warm back. Comforting. Not sexual. There was a lot of times when a little touch from Hawkeye had made his day a little brighter, a little easier. He'd missed Hawkeye when the supply truck came and they'd gone back to sleeping in their own bunks. Did Hawkeye remember that?

Trapper said, "She called me a machoistic piece of shit."

"Huh?"

"Louise."



Hawkeye didn't laugh. He gazed at Trapper steady on with nothing but concern and sympathy.

"Was that the last time you talked to her?" Hawkeye said, rubbing his leg in a sympathetic way.

"More or less," Trapper said to the ceiling, fingers laced over his eyes. "We had words at the settlement, but they weren't worth anything. She got the house. I got out."

Trapper dropped his arms and let his head droop onto his shoulder. His skeleton felt too heavy to support. There was a spring poking his liver but he couldn't care much.

Hawkeye squeezed Trapper's forearm, caressing the underside with his thumb. Hawkeye had the longest fingers Trapper had ever seen. He had forgotten how all of Hawkeye's parts seemed lopey, like they were held to the bone with stretched out rubber bands. He wondered if a lifetime of a floppy body like that made it easier for Hawkeye to be affectionate with anyone. With men.

"I'm really sorry, Trap."

Trapper scrubbed at his eyes. There must be a lot of dust in here.

"So why'd you pick this crazy camp?" Trapper said.

Hawkeye smiled. "You mean why'd I find my own little corner of Korea in the backwoods of Maine?"

"I didn't say that."

"But you were thinking it."

"Maybe I did find a certain similarity," Trapper said.

"Believe me, it's not at all how I saw it. This place is paradise compared to Uijeongbu or even Orcotuna."

"Where's that?" Trapper jammed his arm under his neck to prop his head up.

"Peru, where Lena found me. I was there with IMPAct for the TB outbreak --"



"What who?"

"IMPAct. International Medical Personnel Action corps."

"Government?"

Hawkeye feigned the vapors. "You think so little of me?"

"Certainly not."

"Lena was setting up a Head Start program in the same village, you know, get some grassroots education going. We realized a lot of our goals overlapped. You could say she rescued me, put up a mirror of myself so I could see all my anger from the war was, well. Sometimes anger is good, it makes a person want to take action. But sometimes  . . ." Hawkeye looked past Trapper out the window. "She's a very understanding woman. So she tolerated me for a disastrous stay in Connecticut, and then I followed her back here to write my book."

Trapper understood about a third of what was coming out of Hawkeye's mouth. Despite his international conferences, in very pretty hotels where he never had to learn a foreign language, he felt very sheltered. Hawkeye seemed to have been sleeping in every cot in every fleapit in the third world. So why did he start writing Trapper out of the blue? Hawkeye's eyes glittered, and he leaned forward while he spoke, hands clasped in front of him, fingers flexing as if anxious to wring the neck of the future. Trapper felt inexplicably jealous.

"I see," Trapper said.

"Does your leg hurt?" Hawkeye said.

"No, it's feeling a lot better, thanks."

Trapper was putting this all together in his head. How does a guy talk about a woman like that, knowing she's cheating on him?

"I'm sorry it's not working out, then," Trapper said.

"What's not working out?" Hawkeye said.

Trapper shrugged. "Well, you said --"

Hawkeye waved a hand. "Lena and I are doing fine. I've just got to work through some stuff. It's all about me, really, not about her and me."

Trapper rubbed his mustache. "Seems to me, that's what a guy says when the girl side of the 'he said she said' is saying it's all his fault. I mean, she went and got a new guy. That can't feel too good."

"Well, no, we both did."

"Huh?"

Hawkeye blinked at him. "You said you knew what free love is."

"Yeah, it's when you've got permission to screw around."

Hawkeye shook his head. "Look, first there was Lena plus Hawkeye, okay? Then we met Siva and he was having a bad time, he was a single father at age twenty-four. Then it was Lena, Hawkeye, and our adopted family. Then . . . things happened. But now . . .  that's sort of all over again."

Trapper stared through him. "What're you telling me?"

"I'm telling you Lena doesn't have a boyfriend, she's got an ex, at least in the romantic sense. And he's my ex too. And we're all one big happy family who isn't sleeping together anymore."

Trapper wished for a scotch. "I don't get it."

"Trap . . . It doesn't matter, okay?"

"You're telling me you've got a -- that you're a --"

"I'm telling you that this is the sexual revolution and we're two adults and I know you, Trapper John McIntyre, former patron of the Missy Mushroom Geisha House, and this not as confusing as you're making it out to be."

Trapper pressed his lips together. "That was a long time ago."

Hawkeye sighed. He leaned back against the couch, away from Trapper. He began stacking the shattered bits of the stool into kindling for the fireplace. Trapper felt a little guilty, which reminded him of another, similar incident with his friend, almost as long ago as that night in Tokyo with those geishas who had a few things the typical geishas didn't. . . .

"Look, I'm sorry, Hawk," he said, "I'm just a little confused."

"I didn't expect to tell you right away," Hawkeye said. "I didn't think it would be a big deal."

Trapper watched his old friend's familiar gentle, dexterous hands, stack the wood into a careful pyramid so air would get up under when it was lit.

"Because it's not a big deal to you," Trapper said.

"I guess it is to you," Hawkeye said. He didn't sound angry. Maybe a little disappointed.

"It isn't," Trapper said. "It's, I mean. I just got dragged through a divorce where more than two people in a relationship is a big, expensive deal to some low lives who get paid more per hour than the most talented plastic surgeon in my entire hospital. And you're telling me that love can be a three way street?"

Hawkeye turned, his expression turning soft from memory. "You'll meet them at the party tonight. Siva, his son Jeremiah. He's like a nephew to me -- Lena gets to see him every day in school. He's so smart, Trap. They're Black and they both have these gorgeous green eyes."

Trapper smiled. "How old is he?"

"Seven, going on fifteen. He's the reason I wanted one of my own."

Trapper reached over and clapped Hawkeye on the shoulder. "I guess I'll believe it when I see it."

~*~