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Henry was going home.
All three of the doctors, Henry included, had told Radar he needed to drink a lot of water for his hangover. He’d gotten a little water in him that he hadn’t thrown up, he thought. But then he’d passed out, only to wake up just after dawn with Henry hovering over him with water and aspirin. Radar still felt muzzy and half-drunk underneath his pounding headache and a whirling vertigo that he swore whirled in the opposite direction to his usual vertigo and made him feel a little like he was being twisted in half. He’d never in his life consumed more than one drink in a night. Alcohol didn’t really taste that good, and it tended to make him queasy and dizzy faster than it made the rest of the guys—and it let his imagination run away with him.
Henry was going home, and Radar was lost without him.
His ma would say it was selfish to wish that chopper would turn around, that the orders were changed. He started for the hospital complex to grab another glass of water and sneak a nap. Henry should be in Seoul within a few more minutes. His plane wasn’t leaving for Tokyo for several hours, so he’d planned to do some shopping and visit his old haunts . Radar chugged a glass of water at the sink, then refilled it and took it to the radio room. The door handle slipped from his still clumsy fingers and instead of slipping in silently, he managed to slam it.
Maybe Major Burns wasn’t here. He dropped into his desk chair, rested his cheek on his hand, and had just closed his eyes when Burns blew into the room like an angry fart. He dropped a heavy binder on the top of the file cabinet by the door with a bang that shot through Radar’s head back to front, leaving a virtual exit wound between his bloodshot eyes. “On your feet, soldier!” he shouted.
Radar scrambled out of his chair and made a game attempt to stand at attention. “Sir, yes sir!” he said.
“That’s more like it.” Frank wrinkled his nose. “And send that uniform out to be washed. You stink.” He paced around Radar, feeling his power with each footstep. Radar wilted on the inside while trying to maintain his stiff posture. “I want these files in proper order today. Colonel Blake left his office in a shambles and it’s not my job to organize it for him. Hop to it.”
“Yes, sir.”
He followed Burns into the main office. Burns had cleared a space in the center of Henry’s desk by pushing the papers to the sides. He sat down, leaned back in the chair, and put his feet up on the desk, hands laced behind his head. Radar started cleaning up by taking everything off the desk and piling it on an already covered table. He hated to turn his back on the Major, who could respond with anything from a barked order to a mean spirited prank.
He started with the pile on top of the file cabinet nearest the door. About a minute in, he’d thrown away five pieces of out of date paper and filed another seven when Frank said, “Go down to the mess and get me a cup of coffee.”
“Yes, sir, coffee,” he said.
“Gotcha!”
Radar whirled around. “Sir?”
“I’ll have no more of that funny business out of you. You will wait until I have finished saying something before you respond. Is that clear?”
Radar hunched his shoulders a little. “Yes, sir.”
“Stand up straight, Corporal.”
“Yes, sir.” He stuck his chest back out.
Burns stepped forward until they were nose to chest. “I still want that coffee!” he barked, and this time Radar was looking up to be sure his lips moved.
“Yes, sir!” Radar leapt away and through the swinging doors, out into the yard and toward the mess tent at a fast jog.
Halfway to the mess tent he caught the feel/sound of approaching wounded and stopped in the middle of the yard to yell, “Choppers!” before running back to get on the PA.
Burns met him at the door, mouth open to ask where his coffee was, but the chopper blades became audible at that moment and Radar squeezed past him to get on the PA. “Incoming wounded!” he shouted into the mike. “All shifts to the choppers, we’ve got a bus coming right behind these guys.”
Once the message was sent, he pushed the mike aside to run for the choppers. Burns, to his credit, ran right behind him.
*
The wounded who survived to make it to pre-op numbered eleven. Radar ran for blood and gloves, bandages and silk and tried to stay out of the way otherwise. Something he couldn’t quite identify crawled into his gut and up his back, leaving him struggling to stand still. Henry would be getting on the plane to Tokyo about now. His chest burned with anxiety. He scrubbed at it, feeling confined by the warm room, stinking with the residue of one GI’s perforated bowel. He couldn’t breathe. He needed the mask off or he was going to lose it all over the operating room and even Hawkeye would probably yell at him if he did that.
He slipped out the door, past pre-op, then ripped the mask off and tucked it into his pocket the moment he was outside. The air was blessedly cool against his damp nose and cheeks. He walked away from the surgery, needing to stretch his legs, needing to work off this crawling energy that weighed him down and compelled him to move at the same time. He shadow was so long it grew and faded, merging with the shadows of the tents around camp instead of stopping at his head. The sun was large and orange, low enough to nearly touch the horizon. He had to move. If he could move he could escape the looming anxiety that made his skin crawl and his hands sweat. His feet led him to the edge of camp, and he kept checking over his shoulder as if he were being pursued. As if there were Communists crawling through camp, keeping to the indistinct shadows of the tents, knives between their teeth.
The sun sank lower until it was bitten in half by the horizon. Henry’s plane was, Henry’s plane would be over the South China Sea, being tracked by communist planes, caught in their sights, dodging and--stop. Stop imagining such horrible things, he told himself. He jammed his hands in his pockets, came up with the little silver case Henry had given him, the glass thermometer tinkling gently against the sides in the evening quiet. His feet stopped. He stared at the case, breath coming fast. The ghost of bullets ripping through a fuselage, the scent of fuel and a bright blossom of orange flame caught him like the memory of a nightmare. Not yet, then. Not yet and maybe not ever. He wanted not to think about it. He wanted not to think about Henry and planes and fire, but the thought of Henry pulled at him. He couldn’t look away from the silver pen case and it was like Henry was there, right next to him, scared as when the shelling was bad and they crouched in the office together, but he wasn’t, he was in a plane and the bullets were tearing through the fuselage and hitting the men around them. Henry unhooked his harness to crawl toward a soldier bleeding through his uniform. Something burned through Henry’s leg and Radar fell down onto the tramped flat grass, the silver case popping open and the thermometer spilling onto his lap. He picked it up to stuff it back into the case and flames wrapped around him, orange for an instant, then everything when dark and his entire world narrowed to pain and the dim impression of weightlessness.
He must have passed out or something. He would definitely never, ever drink like he had last night again. He sat up. He felt like there was a cold, hollow space in the middle of his chest, or the back of his mind, he couldn’t really place it. His hand hurt. He looked down, saw the thermometer broken into three pieces in his bloody palm and he knew that Henry Blake was dead.
Radar hauled himself to his feet. Henry couldn’t be dead. He’d just imagined the whole thing. Carefully, gingerly, he tucked the silver case between his knees, open side up, then carefully picked the pieces of broken thermometer out of his palm and dropped them in. The sun had vanished over the horizon and it was rapidly growing dark. He found the top of the case by dumb luck when his foot caught it as he tried to stand. He picked it up, then screwed it on tight. The thermometer pieces rattled inside.
His meandering walk back to the radio room, to his room, took long enough that it was dark when he arrived. He piloted his body to the sink in the dressing room and ran water over his hand until the water ran mostly clear, just a fine ribbon of red mixing with the clear water where the deepest cut refused to stop bleeding. He wrapped his palm tightly, if awkwardly, then thumped onto his cot, stuffing Tiger up under his chin.
He ought to tell them.
He ought not to tell them. He was ridiculous, and in a couple of hours, morning at the latest, there would be a call from Tokyo and Henry would let them know he was all right. He tasted ashes. He ought to do something, keep busy but stay nearby in case a message came through.
He grabbed the stack of papers off the filing cabinet in Henry’s—Major Burns’—office, took them to his desk beside the radio, and looked at them without reading them. He couldn’t make his eyes follow the lines of text.
He put on his headphones and fired up the radio. “Hey, Sparky?” he said. There was a long silence on the line.
Finally the familiar voice said, “Hey Radar, who do you need?”
He swallowed. “Hey Sparky, do you know what flight Colonel Henry Blake was on?”
“You sound awful, Radar. You all right?”
Radar groaned. “I just drank too much last night. Can you just check on Colonel Blake’s flight?”
“Sure, yeah, I can check on it. Call you right back.”
Sparky signed off and Radar was alone again, still feeling as if there were a hole in his chest big enough he could stick his fist in it. He lost the battle with the urge to pat his chest. He undid his shirt to look down at the smooth, pale, chickenish skin, then patted and pinched it to prove to thimself that he was whole. He went back to his cot, still dragging Tiger with him, clutched in his bandaged hand. When he switched hands he noticed a dark, damp patch in Tiger’s fur and realized he’d bled through the bandage. He took Tiger with him to the dressing room, rinsed him thoroughly first so the blood wouldn’t dry, then squeezed his wet fur to dampness with a towel. Once Tiger was clean he rebandaged the hand. He should get Captain Hawkeye to look at it, it looked like it might need stitches, but if he did, Captain Hawkeye would ask him how he cut it and he couldn’t figure out how to tell him without saying something about Henry and the plane.
And that wouldn’t be fair. Captain Hawkeye didn’t need to have more to worry about.
He walked back to the radio room and sat back down on his cot hunched over Tiger and rocking just a little. Why hadn’t Sparky called back yet? It shouldn’t take this long for him to look up a flight number and call Tokyo. Should the plane have landed by now?
He sat on his bed, feeling small and lost and wanting nothing so much as for his ma to hold him tight—or failing that, Hawkeye. His heart had already given Henry up for lost, even though his head told him he was being childish. He wrapped himself in his blanket to hold off the growing chill in his limbs. He ought to go back to the operating room. He ought to make himself useful. He didn’t move. Time must have passed.
Sparky was on the radio. “Radar, hey, Radar,” he was saying.
Radar tripped on his blanket on the way to his desk. He jammed his headphones onto his head. “Sparky. Is there word?”
There was a long silence at the other end, broken only by crackling static. Sparky sighed, a long, slow exhalation that sucked the air right out of Radar’s lungs. “I have a message for you. You should write it down. Do you have a piece of paper?”
Radar flipped over a requisition form and scrounged a stub of pencil.
“Radar, do you have paper?”
“Yeah, Sparky.” The pencil stub fell out of his fingers. He chased it down, picked it back up.
“Here goes. Flight Nine to Tokyo from Seoul--Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake’s plane—was shot down over the Sea of Japan. It spun in. There were no survivors.” He paused. “I’m so sorry, Radar.”
Radar’s face contorted into a grimace. He tried for a moment to hold back the sobs, but he failed, and he sobbed, low and keening, into his folded arms, tears running from his eyes and out of his nose, pooling in his glasses until they slid off his face and clattered to the desk above his arms. Static still hissed on the other end of the line. “I gotta go, Radar. I’m sorry,” Sparky said.
The static cut to a silence as complete as the silence in that spot in his heart, in his soul, where Henry used to live. He shoved his glasses back onto his face. He made himself stand. He crossed the room to the door that led, with another room between, to the dressing room and past the sink, into the corner of the operating room behind the off white curtain and through it.
“Radar put a mask on,” Trapper said, barely looking up from the patient on the table.
Hawkeye kept his eyes on his own patient. “If that’s my discharge,” he quipped, “give it to me straight.”
Radar plowed forward. “I have a message.”
He hardly heard his own voice reading off what Sparky told him. When he finished, he felt like he’d discharged his final duty. Something inside him started to unravel. He staggered back through the dressing room and into his own room, where the radio hunched along its wall like a sullen beast. By the time he reached his bed, the tension that had kept him speaking, walking, standing left him and he stumbled and fell onto his bed. His numb fingers struggled to pull the blanket up around his body. He lay down with his boots still on his feet. It was so cold.