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Every time Eugene leans down into the belly of the barrel the world tilts crazily, as if threatening to upend itself and pour him inside: to leave him swimming in the dregs of dirty oil and everything it’s managed to catch. Insects, fallen leaves, grit and sand and dirt. And him, almost. Sweating, red-faced him, sunburn already prickling at his bare skin. He’s always been a little delicate when it comes to the sun, though the sun on Pelielu feels like a different beast entirely from that at home.
He rights himself, the world swinging back into place lazily, unhurriedly. Eugene can practically see the smear of it: brown land stained onto blue sky, white sand marring white sun. He presses the back of his hand to his forehead, closing his eyes as he lets the world sink and settle back into place. His raw fingertips pulse in time with his heart. From nearby comes a familiar drawl: “Hey, did I tell ya to stop?”
Snafu Shelton has been watching them scrub dirty oil drums like a mean little prince: perched up high on a stack of wood, bony limbs all loose like a puppet with its strings cut. Bare feet dangling, cigarette wobbling between his teeth as his eyes land on Eugene, and he adds, “Won’t get away unless they’re all done, boot.”
Eugene thinks about saying something biting back. Or about throwing down his brush and leaving, retreating to the stuffy, hot tent where at least the sun won’t be able to reach him. His brain feels like an overcooked egg: hard and rubbery. Snafu wouldn’t be able to do anything about it if he did — or would he?
As if sensing the turn of Eugene’s thoughts, Snafu’s mouth curls into a smirk. His heavy-lidded eyes slide away.
Eugene goes back to scrubbing.
Oil has a particular smell to it — stinking, cloying, some unnamable primordial smell. Eugene’s so deep in the drum he can smell the dinosaurs that it’s made from. So deep in the drum all he can hear is the scrape of the bristle brush to the walls of it; his own breathing bouncing off the metal. Rasp rasp rasp. Pant pant pant. Sweat stings in his eyes, right alongside the sting of the fumes the brush is lifting off. Jesus, he thinks, but doesn’t have the energy to finish the thought, so it just becomes that. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, spinning around his oil-drunk head until he heaves himself the right way up to gasp in hot, muggy air.
His hands itch and throb and sting. Without looking, Eugene knows Snafu is staring at him: can feel the pressure of his eyes on the sunburned nape of his neck. Like being prodded, pushed, elbowed. Playground flirts. Eugene doesn’t have the energy to care about it. The sun is pressing its thumb to his head, making a fiery groove right down the middle of his brain. When he bends over the drum, the lip of it presses hard into his chest. Searing hot, like a mouth, like teeth, like rusty metal, like —
He throws up a few feet from the tent: hands braced to his knees as he spits and coughs, as the world wobbles and melts around him. Shimmering flecks of light are dancing across his vision, bobbing and weaving in front of him as Eugene stumbles to the tent. Hands finding wood, finding canvas, knotting in filmy mosquito netting. Inside is hotter than out: no breeze, no air, just a thick fug of heat lying low to the ground like a beast. Eugene sucks in a lungful of it. After the stink of the oil drums, the stale air inside the tent is as fresh as anything.
Eugene’s had sun stroke once before: when he was thirteen, fourteen — old enough to know better, but young enough still to be stupid. He and Sid had spent the whole day out at the creek, fishing in the water, fooling around on the banks. Nothing to drink, no shade to speak of. The shivery, all-consuming nausea is the same now as it was then. The headache, as though the sun has fried the contents of his head up in a sizzling cast iron. Butter, onions, garlic; Eugene swears he can almost smell it as he collapses down onto his bunk.
The room tilts crazily. His throat sticks as he swallows. Through the mosquito netting the world outside looks gauzy and unreal, all chopped up into a million neat little squares. Am I gonna die? he thinks. Am I gonna die because some asshole made me scrub drums in one-hundred-twenty degree heat? He can still smell the oil on himself: dirtying the front of his shirt, streaked up his forearms and blackening his hands. He pushes his face into his bed roll to escape it, to give his eyes a rest from the glare of the sun through all those microscopic holes. The mosquitos still get in. Eugene’s calves have bloomed with a path of itchy red lumps. He can feel them throbbing now, right along with the pulse of his headache and his scraped-up hands. Pain beating like a tattoo right behind his eyeballs.
————
He must sleep, because the next thing Eugene knows he’s blinking his eyes open and the tent is blood-red, awash with sunset. The evening full of the scream of cicadas, their cries overlapping and blending until the air throbs with sound. Eugene screws his eyes shut, trying to swallow over and over as his dry throat protests against it. He feels like he’s boiling in that hot red light: trapped like a bug in bubbling amber, like a dinosaur sunk so its knees in sucking quicksand. Like — shit. Like something giving itself up to the inevitable, is what he feels like. Feverish and sick and woozy, head swimming when he props himself up on his elbows, only to flop back down onto his back to curse at the shadowy apex of the tent.
His calf itches. His headache is so intense that it feels like the fillings in his teeth are gonna unscrew themselves and embed themselves into the ridges of his soft palate, where they’ll eventually drive themselves into his brain and out the other side. He imagines it, lying there with his eyes flickering restlessly behind his eyelids. The guys finding him later with five perfect tiny holes in the top of his head, leaking boiled-over blood. Would the fillings lie next to him, or would they leave: use the momentum that carried them through his head to go somewhere else? He wouldn’t blame them if they did. Right now he’d like to be anywhere but here as well.
I’m gonna die from this, he thinks. How fitting. How apt.
He doesn’t know how long he languishes there, soaked in the heat of the dying day, wishing desperately for water, and then after that for the energy to go get water. He can almost taste it. Lukewarm and metallic from the beaten canteen he was given alongside the rest of his kit. All of it looks second-hand, which doesn’t bode well. He wonders whose tongue used to press to the spoon that’s now his. Whose mouth drank from the lip of the canteen, whose shoulders hefted the weight of the pack, fraying hairily at each point where strap meets bag. Did that man die from scrubbing drums? Did he die before setting foot into war?
There comes a rustling noise: the sound of canvas being drawn back. Eugene shifts his eyes up just in time to see Snafu ducking through the entrance, an unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth and his bare chest gleaming in that red sun. It catches in his dog tags, slides like syrup over every little ball that makes up the chain. They’re designed like that so they snap easy. Can be pulled from a corpse without having to lift its dead head. Eugene wonders if Snafu is here to yank his tags from his chest: to leave him in his cot with nothing but a few inches of ball chain to show they were ever there in the first place.
But then he says, “Gene, you seen my lighter?” His pale gaze swinging around the small, dim tent, all his curls standing on end from the humidity and the way he’s running his hands through them. “I swear, if I find out Leyden’s took it —”
Their eyes meet in the shadowy tent. Snafu’s hand still frozen in its unconscious patting of his chest, as if he’s wearing a shirt to have a pocket to lose a lighter in. Eugene watches his fingers flex, those big square things out of place on his thin, delicate wrists. Then his gaze swings away. He doesn’t hold eye contact well. It’s something Eugene’s picked up already, among other things.
“You feelin’ okay?” he asks, already distracted. He takes a step toward one of the wonky shelves that erupt like splinters from the tent side, and begins to rummage through its contents. Eugene watches him peer into a toothbrush cup, shift aside a disorderly stack of books, hold a bank note of some indeterminate currency to the thin red light the mosquito netting lets through. The space between his question and Eugene’s lack of answer blooms bigger and bigger, until Snafu goes still, and glances over his shoulder. “Sledge?” he asks, and in the dim light all Eugene can see is pale eyes and a sheen of sweat; the light they cast smudging and smearing behind Snafu as he turns to fix Eugene in his sights.
When Eugene had gotten heatstroke that time at the creek, his momma had laid him on the cool kitchen floor in nothing but his underwear. He remembers the tile under his back, its glorious chill. Then she’d laid kitchen cloths over him, soaked in the sink by Rose and then transferred to his mother’s waiting hands. The tiles speckled with water, his skin goosepimpling under the cotton cloths as his momma mummified him right there on the kitchen floor. He’d been so thirsty he would’ve drank from the speckled tiles. But his momma had sat there on the floor with him and propped his head in her lap. Told him just how stupid he was to be a redhead out in all that sun as she held a glass of cool water to his lips, and made him sip.
There’s not enough water to do the same now, not on the whole of Pavuvu. Not unless Eugene wants warm seawater, or the brackish runoff from the showers. Still, he parts his lips to croak, “You got any water?” all the same.
Eugene can see all the whites around Snafu’s eyes. It gives him a hunted, doggish look: eyes alighting on Eugene, and then on the wall of the tent, finally veering off to peer at his own bunk. “No,” he says, not sounding very sorry about it. His thumb rubs absently at his bony sternum, hand still settled on his chest. His eyes come back. “You’re not doin’ so good, huh?”
Eugene snorts, buries his face back into his pillow. “No, I’m not doin’ so good.”
There’s no silence on Pavuvu. What floods in to fill the space between their disjointed, dragging conversation is mindless noise: the chatter of ten dozen men, the rush of distant boiling sea, the scream of cicadas and grasshoppers and whatever foreign bugs make a living out here. Eugene has stopped sweating altogether. His thoughts have turned into syrupy nonsense. When he raises his head to look over to Snafu, it’s to find him already looking. Chewing on his bottom lip, eyes fixed and steady for the first time in the short while that Eugene’s known him.
When their eyes meet, he nods. A short, bird-like movement. “Alright,” he says, that drawl of his dragging the word out long past its natural death. “Alright, you stay right there, Sledge.”
As if he could go anywhere. As if Eugene’s body isn’t an overheated lump of sunburned flesh. As if he hasn’t become intrinsically fused to the scratchy woollen blanket under him, and to the thin mattress pad under that. All he can do is watch Snafu leave, ducking out of the tent the same way he came in: furtive, distracted, fingertips on the twitch for a cigarette.
In his absence, the tent seems bigger. Eugene closes his eyes. Shivers once; hard. His calves are cramping. The red sunlight feels like its soaking into him, like he’s a sponge to its light, until all he can taste is it. When he blinks, when he swallows, between his molars, on the back of his tongue; cloying and hot like the half-melted hard candies his gramma always had swimming in the depths of her purse. He swallows it down. Thinks of cool running water, of an ice-cold glass of orange juice, of rain on his face and the way sweat tastes on a man’s throat. If he had half a mind, he’d be embarrassed about Snafu seeing him in this state. But one half of his mind got blown away by oil barrel fumes, and the other half got fried and then scrambled with bacon and onions and plenty of garlic.
The tent flap rustles. Cigarette smoke on the air. Eugene rolls his head to the side, and croaks, “Did Leyden steal it?”
“Ha,” Snafu says, and doesn’t elaborate. Eugene watches the glowing end of his cigarette move through the tent, and then startles when cool fingers touch the overheated skin of his cheek. “Easy,” Snafu murmurs, like someone might say to a flighty horse. His fingertips lift away, only to be replaced by his knuckles. Cold, slightly damp. For one mad moment, Eugene thinks about having them in his mouth, about turning his face, letting Snafu touch his cracked lips, his dry tongue, his —
Snafu adds, “You’re burnin’ up, huh?”
Eugene’s madness retreats with the hand Snafu pulls away. Like sea drawing away from sand. Remember who this is, he thinks. Mean old Snafu who won’t stop pullin’ pigtails. He manages a low, “I’ve never done good in the heat,” to which Snafu snorts.
“No shit.” The cherry of his cigarette swings in a half-moon. Eugene tracks it dazedly until Snafu says, “C’mon, sit up. I got you somethin’ to drink.”
There comes the sound of sloshing water. Eugene sits up so fast his head spins: the tent and its red sun and Snafu’s red-lit, teasing smile all tilting and smearing before him. “Shit,” Eugene mutters, putting a hand out and finding first bare, hot skin, and then cool fingers, cool metal. Dented, second-hand kit: a dead man’s water canteen. Eugene is taking a long, breathless pull on it before he can even register taking it from Snafu’s hand. His thirst is overwhelming, throat hurting from how hard and fast he’s swallowing the metallic water down.
It’s only when Snafu’s fingers catch at his wrist does he slow; water escaping the side of his mouth to skate down his chin when Snafu knocks the canteen aside and says, brusquely “You’re gonna make yourself sick.” And then, “You’ve gotta sip.”
Eugene presses the back of his hand to his mouth, smearing the spilled water across his cheek. In the dim tent, Snafu comes through only in fragments. Setting sun catching in his curls, in his teeth, in the sweat on his sternum and on his top lip. Making crimson specks in his pupils. The back of his hand presses briefly to Eugene’s forehead, and then skitters away. Shy like his eyes.
“You should lie down,” he says.
Why do you care? Eugene thinks. But then he lies down all the same. Being upright is fucking with him; at least the room spins less when he’s laid on his side, sipping gingerly at the water and watching the cherry of Snafu’s cigarette flare and then shrink. Over and over, until Eugene has timed his breaths with it. Snafu’s one of those guys who tear through a cigarette like they would a good meal: smoking it down to cold ash in the time it might take another man to light his own. It lends him that rasp to his voice. Velvet with a snag in it: a thread caught and pulled. By a cat’s claw, a dog’s tooth, an errant moment of passion. When Eugene finishes the water Snafu takes it from him and goes wordlessly to refill it. Eugene flirts briefly with the idea that Snafu might feel guilty for the state he’s in. Then he muses for a little longer on whether Snafu is looking after him to avoid getting reamed out for sitting on his ass to let the new boots do the dirty work. One is more likely than the other. Eugene’s too heatsick to work out which.
Snafu drags a crate up to the side of Eugene’s cot when he returns, eyes downcast as he toys with a fold of cloth; his big hands folding it neatly in half, and then in half again. Eugene knows it’s wet before it even touches his brow. He can just make out the dark, blurry splotches it’s making in Snafu’s faded dungarees. It reminds him of speckles on vinyl, of his mother’s cool hands on his face, her gentle voice admonishing him. Snafu wrings the cloth out. There comes the sound of water dripping onto hard dirt floor.
“Here,” he says. “Close your eyes.”
Eugene closes his eyes.
“Stay still,” Snafu says. The cloth lays itself over Eugene’s burning brow, over the slow-moving brain beneath.
He stays still.
A beat of silence, punctuated by the flick of a lighter. Then comes the sound of an inhale. “You should get some rest.”
The tent is muggy and airless. Outside is noisy: the din of suppertime, of men with a lukewarm beer and a lukewarm meal in their immediate future. Eugene can smell Snafu’s sweat. He feels too exhausted to argue.
He gets some rest.
————
When Eugene first arrived on Pavuvu, he hadn’t been able to sleep a wink. He’s never been very good at sleeping in beds that weren’t his own — used to cry all weekend whenever he had to stay with his grandparents as a child. Red-faced, bawling, crying over the injustice of being taken away from home, from his parents, from all his familiar things. His grandpa usually settled him down well enough with something sweet, and eventually Eugene grew out of it. But still, things like that from childhood cling. So when he’d arrived and found himself sleepless, the feeling had been familiar. He may not have been crying and kicking up a fuss, but his body was rebelling against the change in its own adult way.
It was the heat, the bugs, the noise. The stink of the place. Of ten dozen strange men with only half a shower between them. The trash, the rotting coconuts, the faraway latrines. He’d been sick to his stomach. Sleeping in snatches, the whine of insects worming into his dreams; not allowing him even a moment’s respite. And then of course, he’d settled. Adjusted. The body is accommodating like that.
But the body is also untrustworthy. In his illness, Eugene has found himself back to square one: back to fitful sleep, shallow dreaming, tossing and turning on the narrow cot. The camp moves around him, full of chatter and movement; loud conversation and laughter, the smell of cigarette smoke and sweat. The sea crashes on the distant shore, the sun a blood red hole in the ruddy sky above it. Eugene dreams of giant mosquitos, proboscises trembling and salivating as they take in the soft bared flesh of an inner thigh, the ditch of a knee, all the places where blood pounds the fastest. Insectile hands rubbing and knotting and reaching. He dreams of swimming in the sea, opening his mouth until salt water invades. He dreams of home, speckled tile, sunlight falling over the unmade sheets of his bed. When he wakes, Snafu is gone.
The tent is still and dark. His face feels hot and tight; body aching as he rolls over to face the distant beach. Through the netting the world looks cool and blue, the shrill whine of grasshoppers rising and falling on the breeze. Eugene blinks sleepily at it for a while, his thoughts sticky and small and not bothering him much. It doesn’t sting to be left alone. Snafu has always had an air of impenetrable distance to him, a sort of aloofness so natural that it couldn’t be contrived. It’s there in his darting eyes, the drag of his voice, the way his body stiffens up and makes itself small when threatened with touch, even accidental. Eugene’s seen him flatten himself against tents to avoid bumping shoulders, seen him step neatly from half-hugs and bicep-punches and a companionable arm around his shoulders. The touch of his hand to Eugene’s brow had been a surprise. He’s never seen Snafu go out of his way to make contact with anyone before.
He slips back into a doze, lulled there by the movements of the waves; the sea made dark and granular by the mosquito netting. It’s a shallow, false sleep; the kind of sleep that makes reality and dreaming hard to pry apart. He’s aware of people coming, people going. Of low voices, the shuffle of fabric against skin, someone whistling a tune that seems to bend and warp through the air. At some point, the cloth is lifted from his brow — now dried-out and stiff — and when it’s replaced it’s cool and damp once again. Fingers touch his cheek. When Eugene opens his eyes, he’s alone, but a figure is lingering in the doorway to the tent, nothing more than a dark suggestion against the dusky blue sky beyond.
Eugene blinks, mind slow. The figure shifts its weight from one foot to the other. Snafu, judging by the set of his shoulders. Something loose and tightly wound all at once. He’s always given Eugene the impression of something made up of odd ends and loose parts: a scarecrow in straw-stuffed fatigues, clothes hangers all strung together in the shape of a man, an umbrella caught and broken by the wind. Eugene can’t tell whether he’s looking out or in. The light is too low, the darkness inside the tent textured and thick. He thinks about saying something, but can’t find the words. Can’t find his tongue to speak them even if he could. So instead he lies there and he watches Snafu, who is either watching the sea or watching him right back.
Why are you being so nice to me? Eugene thinks. Against the late evening sky, the silhouette half turns. Eugene sees the high curve of a cheekbone, the errant curl of his hair. Looking out, then. Eugene isn’t sure whether he’s supposed to be disappointed or relieved.
At some point, he drifts off. When he wakes the tent is still and the doorway is empty, and his head is pounding; that dull dehydration throb. Heaving himself up on his elbows makes the tent spin, but it’s worth it for the full canteen he finds by his cot. He gulps the water down mindlessly, paying no mind to his uneasy stomach. Drinks deeply until the canteen is empty and he feels more water than man, at which point he flops back onto the cot. Feels his pulse beat behind his eyes. Despite the headache, he feels more alert. Less mired in sticky, nauseous heat-sickness as he had been before. The night is cool and breezy; Eugene can smell the sea.
With some effort, he strips himself of the t-shirt he’d been wearing since that morning. It stinks of oil and acrid sweat as he pulls it over his head and then pitches it away from himself, but with it gone he already feels miles better. Like he can breathe easier, the last of that stinking oil gone — save for that which is still worked under his fingernails and into the lines of his hands. He can smell it when he presses the back of his wrist to his forehead, feeling hot skin and dried sweat, his hair stiff with it.
From across the tent comes a whispered, “Gene?”
Eugene startles, probing at the velvet blackness that’s pooled in all the corners of the tent, trying to seek out the source of the voice. Beyond the netting the moon is a sliver, a silver suggestion, barely casting any light down to see by. Eugene spots a pair of eyes, glassy with tiredness. Leyden, unless somebody else is sleeping in Leyden’s cot.
“You ain’t dead then,” the voice says, and Eugene rolls his eyes. Leyden.
“If I’m dead you’re dead too,” he replies, laying himself back down. The blanket underneath is itchy against his overheated skin, and Eugene shifts, pushes it aside.
From the other side of the tent comes only silence. Eugene rolls onto his side, eyes on the empty entrance to the tent, on the sea beyond, the slip of a moon reflecting onto the gentle waves. Tries not to pay any attention to the pulse of disappointment that slips through him, as raw and aching as the pounding of his head and hands.
———
Nights when you’re unwell seem to last longer than the average night. From the moment Eugene laid in his bunk, feverish and sick, time slowed and became unreal. It’s the waking, the drifting off, the endless cycle of wakefulness and shallow sleep. He comes awake several more times throughout the night, with no real clue to what’s woken him. Leyden or someone else shifting on their cot? Some animal nosing outside their tent? His sunburn, his headache, his worked-raw hands? The nighttime chorus of grasshoppers and bull frogs, and whatever else chooses the cover of darkness to creep around in? Eugene can’t know for sure. But each time he wakes, some foolish and unconscious part of him looks toward the doorway. Toward the crate Snafu had pulled up to his bedside.
It’s not like him to be like this, but Snafu captured his attention the moment they met, and has held it. Up until tonight, Eugene hadn’t been able to kid himself that it could be anything more than that. Him, looking. Snafu, looking away. But then cool fingers had touched his cheek. Had laid a cloth over his forehead, had fetched him water and checked his temperature.
Two days ago he’d bumped his elbow to Eugene’s in the line for chow. So hard that it knocked Eugene’s dented secondhand plate from his hands, sent it skittering across the packed dirt floor. Eugene stared after it, and then looked to Snafu, who was grinning so widely his eye teeth caught the late afternoon sun. The day was so hot that Eugene had spent most of it chasing shimmering water on the horizon. Every time he looked at it dead on, the water vanished. He remembers how he looked at Snafu. Remembers how Snafu’s grin wobbled, and then his eyes had flicked away.
“Go pick your shit up,” he said, that drawl of his thicker than usual. He jerked his chin towards Eugene’s tin plate, forlorn on the floor a few feet away. The blue shadow of his stubble shone in the harsh sunlight. “Don’t just stand there.”
Eugene went, and he picked his shit up. Felt eyes boring into the back of his head with every step he took. His momma used to say, you meet all sorts. He’s never come across anyone like Snafu before.
But war is looming. Their first campaign. These long, simmering days on Pavuvu are soon to be far behind them, and Eugene may not know much about war but he’s sure that his attraction to Snafu will soon be the furthest thing from his mind. It doesn’t pay to linger on things that just aren’t meant to happen. And besides, Snafu will probably be back to his usual difficult, mean self by the time Eugene wakes. Back to bossing him around, back to insults, back to heavy-eyed glances that skitter away as soon as Eugene finds them.
He rolls over in his cot, onto his back. Blinks sleepily up at the shadowy ceiling of the tent, and lets thoughts of Snafu’s strange, tender side run from his head like water.
————
In his dream, Eugene is burning.
Not a harsh burn; not a burn that demands to be stopped. It’s a cold, periodical thing. Like a flame if it wasn’t very invested in being a flame. A flame that needs a career change; a flame suffering from a case of the blues. Cool and prodding and weak, Eugene shakes his hand to try and banish it. But it clings on, stubborn; far more stubborn than a weak little flame should be. A flame with its notice handed in, a flame that wears its shoes to bed, ready to bolt —
He comes awake all at once. The kind of wakefulness which is only really an inch from sleep. Temporary, elusive, easy to let slip through your fingers. And Eugene almost gives over to it: almost lets his heavy eyelids droop, lets his sticky brain melt back down into sleep. But there comes that cold, burning feeling again. Stinging, now that he’s awake to really feel it.
He frowns. Swallows against his dry throat. Rolls his head to the side, and then stills. The burn comes again.
Snafu, he murmurs, “Are you awake?”
By the pre-dawn gloom, Eugene can see the curve of his cheek, the hard line of his jaw. The bony jut of his shoulder, pulled-together scarecrow of spare parts that he is. Eugene’s knuckles are resting on Snafu’s knee. Palm up, wrist up. Unconsciously, Eugene’s fingers twitch, half-curling in to the palm that Snafu hasn’t lifted his eyes from.
“What are you doin’?” Eugene whispers, aware of the sleeping bodies around them. A heavy hush lies over the tent, punctuated only by the rush of waves on the beach, and the occasional low snore. For some reason, he doesn’t dare move. Just lies as still as a caught rabbit, and watches Snafu press something white and soft to the crease of his palm. That cold, stinging sensation follows the path it makes: Snafu an oddly soft touch as he swipes it over the raw skin there.
“Cleanin’ your hand,” Snafu answers, as if it’s obvious. His eyes lift for just a second, just long enough for Eugene to see in them what Snafu must think the cover of darkness hides. Then they drop. His shoulders hunch higher. Eugene thinks, dreamily, his hands make mine feel small…
Snafu’s thumb presses at Eugene’s wrist, right there over his pulse. He knows it because he can feel it thrumming away, moving a little more quickly as if it knows. Very quietly, Eugene asks, “Why?”
Snafu doesn’t glance up. Doesn’t answer. Eugene can smell the antiseptic now that he knows that it’s there. Sharp and astringent, out of place amongst the smell of sweat and sleeping bodies. He breathes it in slowly. Watches the way the grainy half-light catches in the sweat at the hollow of Snafu’s throat, the sheen covering his brow and his top lip. A thousand questions are clamouring at Eugene’s throat, but he swallows them down, content to share the silence for just a little while. Before the camp wakes up and the day comes with it, washing them over in cold reality.