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In Zell Am See, the war was over, but Grant still had a hole in his head from one of their own, and even though Gene and Spiers had gotten him to a surgeon in time, the whole thing left an awful taste in Babe’s mouth.
The others wanted blood. They wanted that I Company fella to die. Babe understood, he got it, but standing in that room watching Liebgott and Popeye take turns knocking the guy’s skull around, Babe couldn’t help but look at the dog tags danglin’ from the man’s neck. It ain’t right, he’s a good guy, he’s one of us, this wasn’t supposed to happen. But it did happen, and so Babe stood there and grimaced and said nothing.
When Spiers let the man go, Babe felt relieved, and then, he felt like a traitor.
“S’alright, ya know.” Later, Gene had found him, tucked away in one of the double bed rooms in that fancy Austrian resort, wide awake only hours from dawn. The medic dropped to the floor, his body falling in a way that was somehow graceful and exhausted, simultaneously. Elbows on his knees, Gene sat with his back to the bed, his head tilted skyward to rest on the mattress. His eyes were closed. Babe studied the way the medic’s long, dark eyelashes kissed the top of his gaunt cheeks.
“What?”
“To have some reservations…’bout what was goin’ down tonight,” Gene explained, eyes still closed, his voice a sleepy, mumbled mess. “—s’alright.”
“No, it ain’t, Doc.” Babe heard the thickness in his own voice, the resolution of his words. He tried not to look at the dried blood—Grant’s dried blood—underneath the medic’s fingernails. Tried not to imagine what Gene must have seen that night, their friend’s brains and blood scattered all over the place because some new G.I. couldn’t handle his goddamn liquor.
Gene sighed. It was a deep, hollow sound that echoed in the silent bedroom.
“I know…but…just ‘cause we’re at war don’t mean you gotta go outta ya way to be cruel. We’re all just human.”
Babe slammed his eyes shut. He wanted to be cruel. Or rather, he wanted to want to be cruel. To be so full of anger and rage and fury, like Liebgott, like Spiers, like Cobb. To push that wrath out onto the world, drawing blood, causing pain, so that he didn’t feel so goddam hurt all the time. He was sick of it. He couldn’t take it anymore.
“Doc, I—” He registered the dampness on his cheeks only seconds before the bed shifted under the medic’s weight, the shorter man coming to rest beside Babe, shoulder-to-shoulder, with their backs against the ornately carved headboard.
“How come I gotta call you ‘Babe,’ but you ain’t gone call me ‘Gene’?”
The question startled a laugh from Babe, and he was utterly consumed with gratitude in that moment, thankful that the medic hadn’t pointed out his tears and had, instead, given him an out with a little levity. Babe cleared his throat, nudged Gene’s shoulder with his own. “Ya don’t eva call me ‘Babe.’”
Gene yawned. “I do, too.”
“Yeah, sure, one time maybe.”
The medic made a show of rolling his eyes, the move exaggerating the purple bags of unrest beneath the dark orbs. “Fine.” Then, to make his point, he drawled, exaggeratedly, “Babe.”
The slight smile that pulled at the redhead’s lips was genuine, and up close, he came face-to-face with Gene’s exhaustion and the medic’s own grief over what had transpired that night. But with hands still warm from Grant’s blood, there Gene was, comforting Babe—and didn’t that make him feel like a bit of a shithead?
Without thinking, Babe reached to take Gene’s hands in his own. Though a little confounded, the medic did not resist. He allowed Babe to take his hand and turn it over, palm down against the olive green of the redhead’s army-issued pants, and only breathed softly as Babe began to use his pocket knife to clean beneath the dirty nails of Gene’s fingers.
“It may be war, but you don’t gotta be cruel.” The redhead repeated the medic’s words, as if to himself, studiously focused on the task at hand, and when he was finished with the left, he reached for Gene’s right hand. Shoulder-to-shoulder, the position caused Gene to stretch over his own lap, the shorter man’s head nearly resting on Babe’s shoulder. Gene watched the redhead focus, saw the concentration bundled behind his eyes and settled in the set of his mouth, and when the job was complete, Gene straightened and looked at the hands in his lap.
“Thanks, Heffron,” he murmured, then corrected himself, “Babe.”
Babe pocketed his knife and nodded, seriously. “Ya welcome, Gene.”
And they didn’t talk after that. They didn’t muse about the existentialities of life and war and the universal concept of fairness and fate. They didn’t exchange platitudes about causalities, or reassure one another about Grant’s eventual recovery. Rather, the men sat together in a companionable silence, the weight of the war, of the evening, of life and death, hovering over them, muted.
When Spina wandered into the room early the next morning searching for the senior medic only to find the little Cajun sound asleep, his cheek pressed into the curve of a certain redhead’s shoulder, well, no one talked about that, either.