M*A*S*H Slash

CLOSURE, pt 1/7

    Dearest Beej,

    Greetings from Cove, Crabapple, Army Issue, (gee ma,
I wanna go home) , and all her sons and daughters and her rain and fog and
wet and cold and bigotry and racism and Frank Burnses. Ah, how war casts shadows
on the sun. Alas and alack! Aye me, those rose-tinted glasses of home have
aged and become... well, not so rose-tinted...

    "Things do not change... we change," quote somebody.
Yeah, yeah...

    This place isn't the one I knew, but it's not like
you can actually hear my heart breaking over the noise of the traffic. There's
a shipload of rich Joes flushing out our lobster, all wearing bright shirts
and cheap hats and filthy, baggy, stinking clothing (some of them I think
must have raided our old wardrobe)... about two-thousand people here now in
Crabapple Cove, and paved roads and two+ story buildings and I can't even
find the hill where I used to go sledding, and got lost trying to sniff out
the house where I grew up (if those are the right words, har har). And that
was two years ago! How time flies when you're not bobbing for brutality in
the melting pot of everything horrific and... Jesus, I've got to stop this.
Two years, and still...

    I'm sorry that I didn't write you sooner... it's been
hell. I guess it's no big deal that I lost my practice. I couldn't operate
without my bones melting into my patient and my sanity trying to eat its way
out of my skull if my life depended on it. Oh, and did you know I can't eat
chicken anymore? Or be around babies? Or stomach blood? Or cry?

    Beej, I need to escape this place. It's not a comfort...
it's as if the Cove is a reminder, proof that everything has changed, and
I don't want it to. I need stability, familiarity... I'm lost in my own town,
lost in my own head. I'm going to travel abroad (please no puns, I'm trying
to be maudlin here)... visit Sidney, maybe... Col. Potter, Radar, Father Mulcahy,
Margaret, Klinger... I honestly don't think I can handle Charles, Frank,
the then welcome antagonists of this little `trapped-in-war mode' world I'm
slumming around in. What about Trapper, perhaps...? I can't imagine... to
see him... we were... well, you know what we were all too well. And I apologize
for bringing that up, I know how uncomfortable it makes you... Can I visit
you, perhaps?

    I need closure.

    Snax and pax,

    Hawkeye



P.S. My father called me Ben the first time I saw him after... it all...
I didn't know who he was talking to. I still hear shelling at night.



P.P.S. Rereading this, I realize that it is rather bereft of funnies.
What can I say... like all great (you know I kid) writers, I just write what
I know.







    B.J. gently sets the letter on the night stand, beside
the framed photograph of Peg and Erin making daisy chains in the sunshine
on a sweet summer day; over the picture of himself with Him... with Hawkeye
the Irreverent. B.J.'s eyes rake over the lanky frame in the photograph --lying
loose and frameless (just the way Hawkeye would like it) on the dresser and
fading with age, dug out of khaki cloth with old memories-- the casual drape
of an arm over a shoulder, the barest shadow where a fingertip brushed against
his chest, creasing

his jacket. He's still there, in Korea; Hawkeye, lost...

    He feels Peg's breath on his ear as she whispers that
Hawkeye can wait for tomorrow, that B.J. ought to tell Erin a story before
she falls asleep, so he does. Erin's eyelids flutter shut to the tune of a
war story, with a gallant doctor named Hawkeye and his trusty sidekick named
B.J., and how shining Hawkeye in armor saves nurse after nurse from the perils
of boredom. She feels the rumble of his voice, the warmth of his words, and
the peace of his heart as he talks to himself about the man who was so flip
at a glance, but so little to most... a word and a grope and he's gone.

    Two years, and not a word.

   That night B.J. dreams of an invisible man lost in a minefield
in Korea, and the only proof that the invisible man was there were his footprints
in the dirt.