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The sun is warm on Eugene’s face when he wakes. He opens his eyes to watch the dust motes swirl and dance in the rays spilling over the chipped window sill. Snafu stirs in his sleep behind him, mumbling softly and grunting as he tugs at the sheets.
Eugene turns and looks in awe, watches his face: the circles under his eyes the color of nightshade, complimenting the blue and lilac veins on his lids; his dark feathery lashes, the lines around his mouth, around his eyes, between his brows. Warm from the sun, Snafu kicks the covers off in his half-sleep. He lays there, face upturned, looking peaceful. Loose curls, dark and soft looking, spread across his forehead. Those lilac lids begin fluttering and Eugene, as he often does, wonders what they see. Some nights Snafu sleeps like the dead, some nights he screams until Eugene can wake up him, and some nights he doesn’t sleep at all, electing to spend the rest of the worlds’ sleeping hours out on the ledge of their chipped window sill, feet dangling 50 feet in the air as he goes through cigarette after cigarette.
-
Eugene recalls one particular evening he had woken up, alone and chilled, to a soft thumping sound. He had turned to find Snafu sitting in the window with a burnt-out cigarette dangling between two fingers; a familiar sight, but this time his stomach had knotted itself.
“What you doin’?” He’d mumbled into the dark of the room, nearly recoiling when his bare feet touched the cold floor as he stood. He didn’t get a response, but the thumping continued as if he hadn’t spoken at all. Crossing the room in a few strides, Eugene could see Snafu shaking, and his leg was swinging against the outside of the bedroom window, making the thumping noise every time his heel came back.
“Hey,” he said again softly. “you’re gonna freeze your ass off over here. Come to bed.”
Snafu’s eyes were wide and glassy, staring down at the empty sidewalk below but his gaze was about seven thousand miles east. The moment Eugene’s palm touched his shoulder, the shaking subsided. They sat, and stood, like that for a while, somberly looking on as the clouds move across the half-moon, watching the smoke billow into the air from chimneys across the city. The dark, cold as it had been that night, felt like a blanket, cloaking them from the rest of the world for just a little while, so that they could have that fleeting moment of closeness in such an open area.
“Sometimes... they wake me up.” Snafu had said finally, his blue lips barely moving.
“Who wakes you up?”
Snafu leaned back into Eugene. “The toothless men.”
“They can’t get you.”
“No… not anymore…”
“You know I’ve got you, right?” He brought his arm around Snafu and brushed the hair out of his face.
“Sometimes they’d still be ‘live… when I… when I-” Snafu drawled, then stopped and sucked in a breath as he brought the unlit stick to his mouth. When he blew out, it was only his breath mixing with the cold air, but his hands were shaking.
Their bad days come and go like the tide; sometimes it feels like things are getting better, but the farther the tide goes, the sooner it will come back. There are nights where the tide comes back as a tsunami, but he’s getting better at dealing with the aftermath of those; he’s learned that building the foundation of a home is no use when what he really needs is a boat. A big one.
-
“Won’t you kiss me, darlin’?”
“Snaf, you’re drunk. You have never once called me that.”
“What’f I say… pretty please?”
Spaghetti sauce simmers on the stove, currently being blocked off, and the pasta water is hissing as it begins to boil over the edges of the pot. Eugene’s got his wooden spoon in one hand and the other is suddenly full with his very drunk Cajun husband. Boyfriend. Partner. The mental slip distracts him for the second Snafu needs to pull the spoon out of his hand and wrap his arms around his neck.
“C’mon,” he drawls lowly, looking up at Eugene with a mischievous sparkle, “m’cherie. Give me the honour of a kiss.” He tilts his chin upwards, pursing his lips as he smirks. The smell of alcohol comes off him in stale waves, but tonight is not a bad day for either of them so Eugene carefully puts aside his beratement and shakes his head with his own smile.
“Oh, you are very drunk, Snaf. Besides, ain’t no honour in kissin’ me. Now go wash up, dinner’s almost ready an’ you stink.”
Snafu laughs, a big belly laugh that startles both of them and fills their small apartment with a noise they don’t come by as often as they’d like. The sound of Snafu’s laughter follows him as he makes his way to the bathroom. It causes something in Eugene’s stomach to clench fondly, and he can feel the warmth spreading across his chest real slow when he goes to turn the boiling water off and take the sauce off the flame.
“Looks delicious.” A voice behind him appears when he’s serving their portions.
“It’s not exactly how my Ma used to make it back home.” Eugene says nervously. “She tried to teach me, but I wasn’t really into all that cookin’ stuff way back then, y’know. Just hopin’ it tastes half as good as hers.”
“Wasn’t talkin’ ‘bout the food.” Snafu slurs with a wide smirk across his mouth. He sets the plates in Eugene’s hands back onto the counter with a gentle clatter and pulls his mouth down to meet in a kiss. They make a humming noise at the same time, complacent as Snafu deepens the it after a few moments. It’s quiet in the kitchen, save for the sound of their lips moving and soft sounds of contentment. These are his favorite kind of kisses. After a few more tender minutes, Eugene pulls back all slow, taking an extra moment to open his eyes. He meets Snafu’s under their dim light overhead and sees the sparkle, then he thinks, by God has he ever got me good.
-
As the daylight hours grow shorter, Eugene spends more time thinking about the holidays. By the time Christmas starts to roll around, he’s figured out what he wants to get Snafu as a present. The moment it comes to him, he beams, feels that familiar warmth come to him like most things that have to do with that man do.
-
The commute from the college is a long one. Some days he can’t make bus fare and has to walk, but Eugene’s trying to make every day a half-decent one, and every day that takes him farther from the shit stinking days on those islands in the Pacific, the better.
He’d invested in a nicer second-hand pair of shoes and a warmer coat, but he still finds himself shivering uncontrollably by the time he gets home. Snafu is scraping ice off the window in their living room with his fingernail, sitting with his knees pulled up to his chest on their ratty green recliner. He’s humming an old Cajun tune, only half-heartedly as his eyes are miles away. In the background, the radio plays. Eugene goes five minutes before being noticed, only breaking Snafu’s humming with the clunk of his shoes hitting the floor after he takes a seat.
“Gene?” Snafu asks, turning sharply with a wild look in his eyes. It settles the moment his gaze falls on Eugene’s half-smile. “When the hell’d you get home?”
“‘Bout five minutes ago.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really. What were you singin’?” He knows the answer to his question already.
“You know I don’t sing, Eugene.” Snafu’s tone is serious, that accent ironically stringing his words together into a lilting, familiar song-like structure. He’s always liked the way Snafu says his name, like it’s too alien for his mouth to say it without looking uncomfortable, like his own name isn’t Merriell Goddamn Shelton.
The smile that had slowly seeped into the corners of his mouth fades a little as Eugene watches him lean back into the recliner and pull his hand away from the window. He wonders how long he had been sitting like that, knows that Snafu only turns on the radio when the quiet becomes too much to bear, and only hums like that when he’s lost in his own thoughts. Behind every door in that man’s head there’s a skeleton and another door without a key, he thinks. So he says, “Sure.” and drops it. “Anything good on the radio?”
Snafu laughs and rubs his eyes, pressing the tips of his trembling fingers into the corners for a moment. “Nah. Ain’t never anythin’ good on that box.” He lights a cigarette and continues to look out the window.
-
Christmas Eve finds the two of them sitting on the floor next to the smallest tree Eugene’s ever seen. It leans to one side, the tips of the branches going brown because neither of them know know how to properly care for the poor thing, but it’s theirs, and he has never seen Snafu so proud of his terrible decorating.
“Gene, for the love of God, just tell me what it is.”
“It’s tradition to wait until Christmas mornin’, Snafu.” Eugene says.
“An’ I’m sayin’ fuck that.”
After a few more minutes of badgering, Eugene finally gives in. With a great sigh, he grabs the envelope he’d taped to the back panel of their dresser and then sits next to Snafu on the floor again. The sides of their knees touch when he gives the envelope over to eager hands.
“Better not be somethin’ stupid.” Snafu says around a cigarette, blowing smoke out the side of his mouth as he speaks. He tears the paper open unceremoniously and peers inside. At his suspicious glance, Eugene just smiles.
“C’mon then,” he laughs, “open it.”
“I swear, Gene, if it’s somethin’ goddamn stupid I’ll kick your ass.”
“You wouldn’t.”
Snafu pauses, fingers in the envelope, and gives Eugene a calculated look before agreeing, “Nah. I wouldn’t.”
When he pulls the two train tickets to Louisiana, he stares for longer than Eugene knows it takes him to read the blocky black letters. He stays that way for what feels like forever.
Eugene smiles and says finally, “How you feel about spendin’ New Years showin’ me all your old haunts?”
Snafu slides closer, pushing his shoulder into Eugene’s chest. He doesn’t have to say what isn’t already known. When he first met Snafu, the very idea of this same man looking up at him like he is now with that soft look on his face, coloring his tone, making him tilt his head up the way it is would have been the most absurd thing. Merriell Shelton has always been, and will most likely remain to be the most confusing person Eugene has ever met. Some days he lets Eugene peek into the windows of his glass house, lets him marvel at all his closed doors and long, empty hallways, and some days he closes all the shutters and blinds without so much as a warning. It’s a constant two steps forward, one step back sort of deal, but Eugene has quite literally gone through all seven layers of hell and back with this man at this side; not even the war could get him to abandon his faith. Nothing can change his mind about Snafu, and the way he sees it, their dance is one he likes.