Chapter Text
Sometimes, the war reminded Hawkeye of New York City.
When he was just a boy, his mother’s younger sister had lived in a skinny Brownstone somewhere in Greenwich Village. It was an otherworldly place to Hawkeye, who’d grown used to the stillness of Maine, and the city had seemed like an alien planet where oak trees grew out of sewer grates and rats lived in train cars and people moved in hordes by the dozen. Right up until the balmy June his mother died, she’d take him away from his easy life in Crabapple Cove and down into the heart of New York to spend a week visiting Aunt Tabby and her six aging cats, who were all named after famous people Hawkeye had never heard of.
He’d dreaded the interruption in his life — he was nine on their last trip, and as he’d seen it, he had very important nine-year-old business he ought to have been tending to at home. Frogs weren’t going to catch themselves, and someone had to keep a record of the stars just in case something fishy was going on. And who was going to fetch Dad’s newspaper from the front porch?
Yes, he’d dreaded the interruption, and he dreaded the candy-apple red kisses Aunt Tabby would pepper on his cheeks. But most of all, he’d dreaded the gaudy apartment that Aunt Tabby kept in that skinny Brownstone somewhere in Greenwich Village.
She was a painter, whose work had seemed to Hawkeye a flurry of harsh reds and sharp yellows, a smattering of shapes and strange faces with eyes that appeared to shift when he wasn’t looking. He hadn’t liked them, and he’d had the strangest feeling that they didn’t like him much, either.
“Who are they?” he’d ask her, and she would take a while to answer, but finally, she’d say, “I think they’re different parts of me.”
“What do you mean?” Hawkeye was nine, and he did not yet understand how one person could have so many faces, and how every face could be so very different. He’d thought it was a bad answer for how long it had taken Aunt Tabby to think of it.
Aunt Tabby would pause again and smile in a way that didn’t quite seem happy, but Hawkeye was nine, and he did not yet understand how not all smiles were happy — in fact, few really were.
“You’ll understand when you’re older,” she’d say, and Hawkeye had thought that answer had been a cop-out, too. But sure enough, Hawkeye got older, and Hawkeye understood.
Aunt Tabby had dreamt of seeing the world, and so in her den, she’d kept a wall of clocks that told the time in different cities, each diligently labeled — Paris, Munich, London, Seville, Tehran, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Vancouver, Moscow, Cairo, and Rome. (The only place left unrepresented, it seemed, was New York City itself, and as a result, Aunt Tabby was almost always late.)
But nevertheless, the ticking used to keep him awake on those summer nights. If it wasn’t the ticking, it was the stale city heat and the eerie thought of rats living in subway cars. But mostly, it was the ticking that all but drove him mad. He’d dream about it, and he’d dream about time bombs and tiny tin armies marching in rhythm; tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. He’d dream about the strange faces in her paintings blinking their acrylic eyes on the beat, and he’d dream of her cats, with their grey whiskers and twitching tails. He’d awake in a cold sweat, and he’d wonder what time it was.
Later in his life, he’d think back on those nights and he’d find it a little bit funny in life’s humourless way — a boy in a room of clocks having no way of knowing the time. It was like a man dying of thirst at sea. It was the kind of tongue-in-cheek smugness of the universe that would become a theme in his life.
But all that wasn’t the part that reminded him so much of the war. What reminded him of the war was the poetic injustice of it all, the way a life can be so filled with unique odds and ends and yet build up to a reverberating nothing, a silence, a stillness.
When the stock market had crashed in ‘29, Aunt Tabby had spent every last cent on a plane ticket to Paris. It had been her dream for as long as she’d known how to dream — she’d painted the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe so many times the shapes of them had become second nature to her, a seamless and fluid flick of the wrist. Eleven years later, in June of 1940 — around the same time Hawkeye would’ve visited her in New York if his mother hadn’t croaked and his father hadn’t hated the city so much — Paris was bombed by the German Luftwaffe. Aunt Tabby died, probably in her sleep, probably surrounded by walls of ticking clocks that never told her she was fresh out of time.
Hawkeye often wondered what would’ve become of her if she’d stayed in New York, if she might’ve still been alive, if she might’ve married, if she might’ve ended up with a painting in the MoMA or the Met, because as strange as her work was, it was beautiful in a way Hawkeye had simply been too young to comprehend. But all that wondering meant very little, because all those maybe’s and what if’s and could’ve been’s had died in Paris, too, probably in their sleep, probably on fire or crushed beneath the weight of the world.
Funny, Hawkeye had thought once, how a decision you make now can kill you later.
That part reminded him of the war, too. Death, as it hides in corners and under beds and in closets and sometimes in open fields and atop numbered hills in South Korea, waits patiently but never leaves. You have to make decisions. Some of those decisions are right, and save your life. Some of those decisions are wrong — even if they seem right at the time — and people die. And death, waiting patiently but never leaving, understands this very well. Hawkeye thought he did, too.
He sat cross-legged on his cot, writing these thoughts in a journal. He thought the whole thing was sort of silly, and he figured he’d end up burning the journal sooner or later, because he really didn’t like the thought of someone going through his stuff, if he ended up getting blown to Kingdom Come or shot in the face or something equally possible, and reading a book full of his secrets, fears, memories, and wants. But silly as it was, it passed the time. His thoughts started off feeling awfully important, but halfway through writing, part of his brain always whispered, “Who the fuck cares?” and he’d shut the journal, toss it in his footlocker, and bury it beneath a few dog-earred copies of Nudist Weekly and a folder filled with letters from home.
That’s exactly what he did.
Stretching out, he sighed and cracked his knuckles, yawned and rubbed his eyes. He checked his watch. It was almost midnight, which meant he was almost due to relieve BJ in Post-Op.
He sighed again, and from across his tent, Charles groaned.
“Can’t you do that any more quietly?”
Hawkeye blinked. “What, breathe?”
“If that’s how you breathe, Pierce,” hissed Charles. “Then I fear someone might have replaced you with a pug. Not like there’s that big a difference. Drooling, ill-bred miscreants. I suppose that’s why you haven’t noticed.”
“I love it when you talk sweet to me,” replied Hawkeye, sitting up with a louder and far more theatrical sigh. He clicked his teeth and hummed a tune — I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy — tapped his feet and rattled his dog tags.
“Do you mind!?” cried Charles. “If I don’t get exactly eight hours of sleep, I’m liable to become brash and unseemly.”
“Is it possible you’ve just been sleep deprived this whole time?” Hawkeye mused. “Is it possible that you’re really a swell guy?”
“Ha, ha,” grumbled Charles. He rolled over and hit his knee against the frame of his cot, cursing. Hawkeye didn’t believe in karma, but there were certain little wonders that happened at almost midnight in the wilds of Korea that might’ve made a believer out of him yet.
“Well, you may not be swell,” remarked Hawkeye, trying not to sound too smug. “But at least you’re swollen.”
Charles groaned. “Will you shut up!?”
“I enjoyed our conversation.” Hawkeye shrugged on his coat.
“That makes one of us.”
“I’d love to keep chatting, but I’m due in Post-Op.”
“I don’t care.”
“I’ll send you a Post-Op postcard, post haste!”
Charles flung his pillow at Hawkeye right as he slipped out the door, and the pillow clattered against it and plopped to the ground. As he walked toward the hospital with a swagger in his step, Hawkeye stuffed his hands into his pockets and grinned at the mental image of Charles peeling himself out of bed to retrieve the dusty pillow, grumbling to himself and then being karmatically unable to fall back asleep. In war, it was sometimes the meaningless little victories that mattered most.
***
It was a cold night — one of many — and BJ Hunnicutt was starting to feel it.
He never had much of a problem staying awake. In fact, staying awake was far easier a task than falling asleep when the world was blowing itself up around you. But on cold nights like this, he thought about how warm his bed would be back home, how in San Francisco, the cold wasn’t as sharp. It was a more rounded-off kind of chill, more bracing than numbing and almost pleasant, in a way. But the distance between him and his bed back home was greater a distance than he could ever really fathom — an ocean and a lifetime. And so he busied himself checking IVs and redressing wounds, humming quietly and thinking about how much he hated war.
Hawkeye entered post-op with a gust of chilly air behind him, but his presence brought BJ a certain warmth that he’d come to expect, almost like his warm bed back home, or like a new kind of home entirely. Strange, he thought, how things like that worked out.
“The doctor is in,” grinned Hawkeye, and BJ handed him a clipboard and a file.
“And this doctor is out,” BJ yawned. “We’ve only got two patients. Private Ian Santiago over there has some nasty burns on his legs, but they’re healing nicely. And wait till you hear this one, Hawk — Private Ben ‘Lucky’ Waters over there almost drowned.”
Hawkeye snorted. “A kid named Lucky Waters almost drowned!?” It was one of those things that was only funny in wartime, when the rest of the moral world felt far away. “Better change his name to Unlucky Waters. Or Lucky Land.”
“Sounds like a theme park.”
“Or like Tokyo, if a GI plays his cards right.”
BJ laughed. “Says one GI who’s never even been to Lucky Land.”
“Hey!” barked Hawkeye, suddenly quite serious. “Have to! And who are you calling G-I? I’m a D-R!”
BJ clapped him on the shoulder and grinned. “Alright, lover boy, whatever you say. I’m off to get some sleep. Holler if you need anything. Margaret should be here in a few minutes, too. But I have the feeling she might be late.”
“Yeah?” Hawkeye asked absently.
BJ looked around to make sure no one was listening, and then he learned in close and whispered in Hawkeye’s ear.
“Between you and me, I set her clock back a few minutes.”
Hawkeye let out a guffaw of laughter. “I love it! Why?”
“Just killing time,” BJ shrugged. “Besides, remember last week when she replaced my body soap with Nair? My chest is still as smooth as a baby’s rear end, and so I’ve decided to launch a campaign to systematically make her think she’s losing her marbles.”
“You, my friend,” Hawkeye grinned. “—are a menace to society.”
“You’re too kind,” BJ curtseyed. “Don’t tell her it was me.”
“My lips are sealed.” Hawkeye pretended to zip his mouth shut and then opened it wide to swallow an imaginary key.
“Good man.”
Hawkeye watched him leave, and faintly wished that he didn’t have to. BJ was the type of person that you’d want around, no matter who you were or what you were doing — unless, of course, you were Margaret Houlihan and had just escalated a prank war you wanted no part of. But BJ was funny, and he was kind — not always nice, but always kind — and he was clever and mischievous in a way that Hawkeye found charming.
It seemed that BJ knew the world intimately, whereas Hawkeye considered himself to be acquaintances with it at best. He and the world might exchange Christmas cards, but only out of sheer politeness. BJ knew his place in the world, too — a doctor, bound by oath, and a lover, bound by obligation — but Hawkeye often found himself bouncing manically from one place to another, toeing a thin line between an inflated sense of self-importance and an infinitesimal smallness, sometimes both at once. BJ, on the other hand, had been granted the serenity to accept the things he couldn’t change and the courage to change the things he could — and the knowledge to know the difference. Father Mulcahy had said something like that once, and so Hawkeye figured it was probably from the Bible. Or a boxing match. But the latter seemed somewhat unlikely. Sugar Ray Robinson was no Ezra Pound.
Hawkeye flipped through the clipboard and examined BJ’s meticulous patient histories. Most doctors had terrible handwriting, but BJ had delicate handwriting, and delicate hands, and delicate eyes that were the same blue-grey color of razor blades, and twice as sharp. They were the kind of eyes that could cut into you, right into your soul, the kind of eyes that were so sharp it barely hurt, except for when it did.
Hawkeye decided that was a strange thought to have, and so he pushed it away to the place in his brain where he buried all his strange thoughts. He cleared his throat and thought about how Lucky Waters almost drowned, and how the universe loved to play practical jokes but really couldn’t take one itself. He’d met plenty of people who were funny but had no sense of humor. The universe was like that too, he figured.
He glanced back at the beds. Private Ian Santiago slept soundly, his wounds freshly dressed and clean. Lucky Waters sat awake, reading an old paperback with a missing front cover. Hawkeye strolled over to him and took a seat in the chair at his bedside.
“I’m Dr. Pierce, but so is my father, so they call me Hawkeye,” he shook Lucky’s hand. “I hear they call you Lucky.”
The boy grinned. He had a gap in his front teeth and freckles on his cheeks and a fire in his eyes. He looked like the kind of a boy a mother might call “a handful.”
“Sure do,” he boasted. “Once, a live grenade landed right in my foxhole, but the thing was a dud — it never went off! Another time, I was out on patrol and some North Korean spotted me. He went to take a shot — would’ve killed me, too — but his gun jammed, and I got away. And to boot, I’ve never once lost a game of poker.”
Hawkeye laughed. “Remind me to never bet against you!”
“Bet with me, Doc, and you’ll always win!”
“Pretty rotten luck, though, that they sent you over here to fight.”
“They didn’t send me here!” Lucky corrected. “I wanted to come. I signed up the day I turned 18!”
“How many days ago was that?”
Lucky grinned. “I may be young, Doc, but listen, I don’t regret coming here. My first tour of duty is almost up, and I even plan on re-enlisting. I’ve seen some wild stuff — stuff like nothing none of those boys I grew up with have ever seen. I’ve seen cherry blossoms blooming in Tokyo on R&R, and the sunset over the beach of Haeundae in Busan. I’ll be goin’ home with enough stories to write one of those books people write about themselves. The world is my oyster now.”
Hawkeye laughed again, quieter, fonder. Yes, Lucky seemed like the kind of boy a mother might call “a handful,” but also seemed like just that — a boy. A child playing soldier. The war, to him, was a game, because recognizing it as a reality was the kind of thing that turned boys into men too soon, and Lucky Waters wasn’t ready for that just yet.
“I’m going to listen to your lungs,” Hawkeye told him, sticking his stethoscope into his ears. “Take a deep breath?”
Lucky breathed in, and then out, and his lungs sounded fine.
“You know what’s funny?” said Lucky, putting his book aside. “This isn’t the first time I almost drowned. When I was a kid, I was fishing with my old man off the coast of Rhode Island, and I caught some really big fish on the line, right? I’m talkin’ real big, you know? Like, the kind of thing that would get your picture in the papers. Well, the damn thing pulled me right off the boat and into the Atlantic! My dad jumped in and saved me.”
“It’s lucky he was there,” teased Hawkeye.
“Sure was. That’s how I got my nickname, actually. The doctor came by and told my old man I was lucky, because if I’d been under for another minute, I would’ve been belly-up for good.” Lucky rolled up his sleeve to reveal a crude tattoo of a four-leaf clover. “Just in case my luck starts to run out,” he added.
Hawkeye thought about telling him that he’d almost drowned once, too, on a fishing hole in a little place called Crabapple Cove, Maine, where the air smelled like honeysuckles and the people were just as sweet. But the thought of it made his skin prickle a bit, like a cold wind or a touch on the back of his neck. He remembered the way the water had tasted like the color green, and the way it burned when it filled his lungs, and the way the sunlight seemed to vanish entirely, taking his sense of direction with it. He remembered being lost. He remembered being so sure he was going to die, seeing his little life flash before his eyes in clear technicolor. Everyone he’d ever met, and everyone he hadn’t met yet, all standing there together on some distant shore. He remembered thinking that his mother would be angry that he’d gotten his clothes so wet. He remembered his cousin Billy, and his clammy palms, and his wrinkled shirts. He hated him. He’d hated him before that, too, but hate and love were twins, not opposites. When you’re nine, it’s sometimes hard to peel them apart.
He decided not to tell Lucky any of these things, because Lucky was just a boy, and Lucky had his whole life ahead of him to sort out his own demons.
“You’re from New England?” Hawkeye asked him instead.
“Yeah!” cheered Lucky. “Born and raised in Portland, Maine.”
“Get out!” Hawkeye laughed. “I’m from Maine!”
“Where at!?”
“Crabapple Cove! Outside of Portland! My dad, he worked at Portland General.”
“I was born at Portland General!” Lucky laughed. “Gee, Doc, what a small world.”
“I’m about to make it even smaller,” Hawkeye beamed. “Your real name’s Ben, yeah? My real name’s Ben, too. Two Bens from Maine meet in a tiny army hospital in Nowheresville, Korea! Sounds like the start of a bad joke.”
Lucky laughed and shook his head in disbelief. “The only person who called me Ben was my Ma, but she died when I was a kid.”
“Mine, too!”
“No way!”
“This is getting scary!” Hawkeye giggled. “I guess you’re pretty close with your dad then, too, huh?”
“Oh, sure,” Lucky’s smile softened from amusement to affection. “He’s really swell, you know? I’m his only child, and we’re all we’ve got. He writes to me all the time, telling me about business at his seafood restaurant — he owns one, and it’s real nice, too. He makes the best New England clam chowder you’ve ever had. It’s his secret recipe. Nobody else in the whole world knows it but him. He says he’ll teach me how to make it someday, so that once he retires, I can take over the business. And I think I’d like that, too. I wanna see the world when I’m young, so by the time I’m older, I can settle down. Work the restaurant. Get married, have a couple of kids, you know.” Lucky glanced over at Hawkeye. “You married, Doc?”
It took Hawkeye a moment to respond, because he was thinking about the way war steals futures like the one Lucky was talking about. But he shook the thought out of his head.
“Nah. Only to my work. But my work’s a good partner! Doesn’t complain when I’m working late.”
Lucky snorted. “You’re a funny guy, Hawkeye.”
“Don’t inflate his ego,” came a voice from behind him, and Hawkeye turned to see Margaret standing there with her arms crossed, but her stern facade didn’t fool him.
“You’re late, Major,” he teased.
“Only because some buffoons set all my clocks back ten minutes!”
Hawkeye laughed, and Lucky joined in.
“Time waits for no one, Margaret.”
Margaret took Hawkeye by the arm and guided him out of the chair.
“I think it’s time we let Private Waters rest.”
“Aw, c’mon, Nurse,” complained Lucky. “We were just getting to know each other.”
“She’s right, Lucky,” Hawkeye gave his shoulder a pat. “It’s getting late, and you oughtta rest up. That luck doesn’t replenish itself, you know. Besides, I’ll still be here in the morning. We can talk about our first names and dead mothers more then.”
Lucky grinned. “Alright, Doc.”
“Alright, kid.”
Hawkeye followed Margaret like a puppy follows its owner, eager and not quite housebroken enough to know when to bark and when to go lay down.
“It’s remarkable, Margaret!” He gushed. “He’s from Maine. I’m from Maine. His name’s Ben. My name’s Ben. He was born in Portland General, my father worked at Portland General my whole life! Probably was there the day that kid was born. Isn’t that funny, Margaret? How the fishing lines of peoples’ lives can sometimes cross like that.”
“Fascinating,” said Margaret absently.
“Hey, c’mon!” lamented Hawkeye. “I happen to think it’s a pretty crazy coincidence!”
“My father used to say there was no such thing as coincidence.”
Hawkeye pouted. “I bet he also used to say there was no such thing as a free lunch.”
“Look, Captain, I think it’s nice that you can bond with the boy, but you know what they say. It’s the first rule of war medicine: Don’t get too close to your patients. They’re never around for very long, and if you see them again, they might be in pieces.”
Hawkeye’s stomach gave a nauseous pang, and he sat down on one of the empty beds.
“The kid’s got wicked luck. He’ll make it home. And I’ll have to look up his father’s seafood restaurant. BJ and I can go there when BJ comes to visit me, and I can show him why the east coast beats the west anyday. No contest.”
Margaret made a humming noise, and Hawkeye groaned.
“What does that mean?”
“What does what mean?” She glared at him. “I’m not allowed to hum?”
“You’re humming sounds awfully humbug.”
“I stand by what I said, Doctor. Make your friends someplace else. We’re a M*A*S*H unit, not a playground.”
“Then why do they keep sending us kids, huh?” Hawkeye stood up and approached her. “I mean, honestly! Either I’m getting older or they’re getting younger, and if I got any older than I feel, I’d be dead!”
“I know how you feel about the Army.”
“I hate it. I think it’s lousy, and I think it’s cruel.” Hawkeye sat back down and leaned back on the bed, rubbing his eyes tiredly. “I’m gonna talk to Lucky tomorrow, and I’m gonna try to talk him out of re-enlisting.”
“Why don’t you just leave him alone!?” Margaret found an old piece of paper, balled it up, and tossed it at Hawkeye. “Look at Colonel Potter! He’s been in the Army since he was 18, and he’s done just fine.”
“Potter’s the exception that proves the rule, Margaret,” Hawkeye insisted. “For every Colonel Potter, there’s probably 50 wooden caskets and 50 twenty-one gun salutes, 50 empty seats at the table for Christmas and 50 fatherless children — or childrenless fathers.”
“That’s war,” said Margaret, and Hawkeye couldn’t help but notice that she didn’t disagree with him.
“War’s lousy,” he said, and Margaret didn’t disagree with that, either.