Work Text:
trinket
/ˈtrɪŋkɪt/
noun
1. a small ornament or item of jewellery that is of little value.
By February, he and Snafu have gotten into a comfortable routine of fighting, making up, and then gearing up for the next fight. It lends the weeks that pass a rhythmic, wave-like sort of quality. The ebbs and flows of their temper. And in between, they drift through their postwar life in twin bubbles that grow further apart by the day.
Snafu tends to wake at dawn, tends to pad around the house and do small, anxious little tasks with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. Eugene finds ash in the folds of all Snafu’s clothes; the loose sweaters he pulls on when it’s chilly, his t-shirts, his night clothes. Absent-minded cigarette burns in the fabric. That’s another fight, resolved within a couple days after Snafu brings home a Bakelite ashtray from the thrift store, and takes to carrying it around with him for his morning anxieties. He’s never slept right since the war. Waking up to reorganised cabinets and pulled-apart furniture is a small thing, if it means Snafu doesn’t sit alone and pull his cuticles apart like he did before.
Unhappiness makes him doe-eyed and spiky. He’s always been a lesson in extremes. Now Eugene spends time waking alone and falling asleep staring at his back, wondering just when a man like that is supposed to settle and find equilibrium.
Never, possibly. Maybe it’s too late for Snafu. Maybe by twenty-four the body and the mind has settled and fused, and whoever you are then is you for life. Eugene isn’t sure he believes it, but Snafu has always defied expectations. He goes to work before Eugene gets up. Spends his late afternoons trawling every thrift store on the way home from the garage, brings home armfuls of things they don’t need and don’t have space for. Secondhand paperbacks are a particular favourite, as well as novelty ashtrays, strange mugs, and plates that remind him of a set his mom owned.
“I’m sorry,” he says to Eugene, one night in which they’re stood together at the kitchen sink. He’s washing away the dust from the inside of a tall thrift store vase. Eugene is cutting flowers, dipping them in hot water, trying hard not to look at their reflection in the window they’re facing.
Eugene waits a beat. Eyes on the stems, the squeeze of green fluid that comes up when the scissors sink into them. When Snafu says nothing more, he murmurs, “Sorry for what?”
Silence. Snafu is a man of few words, and when pushed for more tends to clam up entirely. Eugene watches his hands, the careful way he cradles the bowl of the vase, the suds running down the sides catching the light in shiny, iridescent clumps. The night is hot and noisy outside: full of the sounds of bull frogs calling to each other through the darkness. Sometimes, when they’re silent, Eugene can close his eyes and pretend he’s back in Vietnam. The only thing standing between him and insanity is those goddamned frogs.
Snafu dips the vase under the running water. Eugene watches the suds get washed down the dark eye of the plughole. Then he says, “I’m just sorry.” A pause. His hand reaches out to turn the faucet off. In the sudden silence, his words seem very stark: “I don’t like being like this with you.”
The cyclical fighting, brooding, making up. Both of them caught in the sway of something they can’t get a grip on. The house feels heavy with their irritation, their moodiness, their unhappiness. Eugene sighs. Sets the flower he’d been holding down, and turns to look at Snafu, who is staring down into the belly of the sink.
“I know you don’t,” Eugene says, softly. Snafu presses his thumb to his forefinger, his fingertips pruned from the water. He adds, “What would make you feel better?”
Snafu’s eyebrows raise, mouth twisting into something darkly amused. “I don’t know,” he says, in a tone that tells Eugene he knows exactly. Eugene remembers meeting Snafu for the first time, getting to know him, becoming struck by how hard of a read he was. It’s a testament to what they have that he can see through his half-truths now.
Eugene shifts closer. Puts his arm around Snafu’s shoulders, and after a moment brings the other arm around his chest. Holds him tightly in that strange, sidelong hug until Snafu goes limp and sags into the touch. His wet hands pat at Eugene’s, knotted together at his bicep.
“I think we need to move,” he says, sounding weary; exhausted down to his bones. “We need to go anywhere but here.”
—————
Their first night in San Francisco, Snafu and Eugene abandon their new apartment. The boxes waiting to be unpacked, the empty refrigerator, the unfamiliar creaks and groans of the old house settling around its new inhabitants. Instead, they step out into the night: nothing but empty stomachs and a few dollars in their pockets to guide them. San Francisco glitters in the nighttime; its streetlights and open storefronts, people milling on the sidewalks outside of lively restaurants and neon-lit bars. The sweet smell of marijuana on the air. Snafu keeps pressing his face close to Eugene’s. Keeps catching hold of Eugene’s fingers, their interlinked hands swinging between them as they wind down through the city. It makes Eugene feel hot, electric: like a glowing live wire. For the first time in a while, he feels hopeful.
New Orleans became unbearable towards the end. Snafu’s midnight wanderings, the cigarette holes in his clothes, his red-rimmed eyes. Eugene’s own nightmares, his jumpiness, the irritability that they both lapsed into as easily as breathing. But San Francisco is a new chapter; one that they’re free to shape into whatever they want. Tonight, Eugene feels like he’s on the cusp of the rest of his life. Judging by the shine in Snafu’s eyes, he feels it too.
They eat burgers straight from their wrappers on the pier, legs swinging out over the black rocks and black water below them. Knees bumping, lips shining with grease. Snafu talks about a sofa he spotted as they were driving in; burnt orange cord, sitting out on the kerb like it was waiting for him to pick it up. Eugene wonders out loud about buses, about the neighbours, about the coming winter and the tens of tiny dead ladybugs they found when they cracked open the bathroom window.
“D’you think it’s infested?” he asks Snafu, who is smoking a cigarette, eyes faraway and trained on the distant lights of the wharf.
He says, “Ladybugs are good luck,” and, “You think we can get a beer over there?”
Eugene glances over, toying with his empty burger wrapper. He can hear it from where they’re sitting: loud music being piped from bars, the hubbub of the crowd. “Shit, it’s worth a try,” he mutters, and Snafu nudges at him with a conspiratorial smile.
The wharf is boiling with bodies. Tourists, locals, new transplants like themselves. Eugene feels Snafu tense up at his side; finds his hand clammy when he reaches out to take it, to draw him through the worst of the crowd until they find a quieter part. A few couples are eating and talking, sat along the wall. An arcade nearby washes everything over in a thick daub of pink neon light, the music coming from its speakers tinny and old-fashioned. Eugene and Snafu buy a beer and gravitate towards it, wandering through the pinging, whirring, flashing arcade games until Snafu begins to look less pinched.
“Sorry,” he says, after a few minutes. His eyes are fixed on the machine in front of them; a coin pusher that Eugene is feeding sporadically. Coloured lights flash across his face, are reflected in his eyes. “Just new places to get used to.”
Eugene slips a penny into the machine. “Nothin’ to be sorry for,” he murmurs, and watches the shelf slide forward, slide back, watches all the coins and little baubles wobble at the very edge of it. He slips another penny in. “Y’know I don’t like crowds neither.”
Snafu’s hand settles at the small of his back. Apart from them, the arcade is empty. Too late for teenagers to haunt it; too early for the nights’ drunks to find it. Their beers wobble on top of the machine as Eugene presses another coin in. Snafu’s hand is a broad, firm point of heat: comforting in its familiarity. In Vietnam, little touches like this were all they could get away with. Eugene can’t be blamed for feeling nostalgic, in the moment.
“It feels good here,” he says, and glances sidelong at Snafu. The pink neon light slides through his hair, the chain around his neck, around the slim hoop in his ear. Just looking at him, Eugene feels himself ache. Detaches from the machine for a moment, just to touch his face; just to feel his stubble and his skin, the heat of him.
Snafu, he leans into the touch. Smiles. “I think so too,” he murmurs. His eyes flicker away, alighting on something over Eugene’s head, and then to the right of him, finally laying themselves down on Eugene’s chest. He touches the bump of the dime charm through Eugene’s t-shirt. Says, “You ever think we’d make it this far?”
Eugene huffs. “Maybe. Most of the time, sure.”
Snafu smiles, opens his mouth to say something — at the exact moment that he props his hip on the machine, and all the coins and little pieces of tourist tat come pouring from the shelf into the hopper by Eugene’s thigh. Music rings out: a cheerful little blare of trumpets that make Snafu flinch. “Jesus,” he mutters, eyes wide in his face, a rueful grin pulling at his mouth as he realises what spooked him — and that Eugene is laughing at him, so hard he has to press his palms to his cheeks to ease the ache there.
“Is that cheating?” Eugene asks, breathlessly, stooping down to watch Snafu scoop their ill-gotten gains into his now-empty beer cup.
They rattle into the dregs there; pennies, dimes, quarters, a couple dollar bills that Eugene plucks out to straighten against the glass-domed face of the machine as Snafu says, “You fed that thing enough pennies, we got this fair and square.”
From the hopper, he plucks a little rubber dinosaur; a plasticky piece of costume jewellery; a toy car with stuck wheels and a red racing stripe down the middle. And then, fishing around in the last of it, Snafu produces a small egg-shaped container: shiny hard plastic in sky blue that he opens up to reveal a cheap metal ring. The arcade lights glance off the glass set into the face of it: gaudy blue and red and green. He grins. Eugene groans, just as Snafu tosses the egg aside to present the ring to Eugene.
“Eugene Sledge,” he says, mock-serious. A smile is tugging the corner of his mouth, eyes bright and playful as he begins, “Will you —”
Eugene shoves at him, laughing, knocking the beer cup full of loose change askew so a few spill from over the lip. “Don’t you dare,” Eugene tells him, as Snafu laughs and tries to catch hold of his hand. “Don’t even think about it.”
Still laughing, Snafu’s arm slung around Eugene’s shoulder, they leave the arcade; their beer cup of coins clutched tight in Snafu’s hand. The night has turned darker and noisier in the time they spent in the arcade, and without having to say anything they both turn for home. For the dark, quiet streets away from San Francisco’s lights. Heads ducked together as they pass the ring back and forth, Snafu doing his best impression of a jeweller by tilting it toward the light of a storefront they pass and saying, “Judging by the stamps on the inside, pure silver…”
“Pure bullshit,” Eugene interjects, skirting away from the elbow Snafu tries to drive into his side in retaliation.
“You wound me,” Snafu tells him, and then they duck into a convenience store and buy candy with their winnings. Red liquorice for Eugene; jelly beans for Snafu, the two of them counting foamy small change out onto the counter while the city exhales and shifts all around them. When they step back out into the street, Eugene is struck all over again by that feeling of newness that San Francisco holds. The smell of the sea on the wind, ruffling at Snafu’s curls and making the trees over their heads whisper in their wake. Down in New Orleans, Eugene always felt mired by the heat. Now he draws in a deep lungful of the fresh air, and lets it whoosh out when Snafu grabs him around the middle and pulls him close.
He tastes like candy when he kisses him: artificial strawberry, tangerine, blue raspberry. Sweet like sugar. When they get back to their new home, Snafu goes around and turns all the lights on. Shakes the shadows from the corners. Pours them both a whiskey, which they drink sat on the floor in their outside clothes, smoking cigarettes and picking up on their talks from earlier: what colour they should paint the bedroom, what furniture they could thrift, how exactly they were going to turn this empty, echoing apartment into their own space.
“We should get plants,” Eugene muses, eyeing the deep mantel above the fireplace. “Candles, or —” A lightbulb goes off in his head, making him grin. Snafu, seeing the shift of his expression, throws him a curious look.
“What’re you thinking?” he asks, and then laughs as Eugene descends on him: patting at the pockets of the jacket he hadn’t taken off, dipping his hands inside and pulling out cigarettes, lighter, hanky —
“These are perfect, right?” In his hands sits the collection of little toys the coin pusher had spat out. On wobbly, half-drunk legs, Eugene stands and begins to arrange them on the mantel. “It’ll remind us of how we felt this first night here. So we won’t ever forget.” He lays the ring down, and pivots it until the overhead light catches it; makes it cast three little pools of coloured light onto the wood it sits on. Electric blue, blood red, lime green. “Don’t you think that’s perfect?”
When he looks over his shoulder, it’s to find Snafu looking at him. Smiling, something soft and fond in his eyes. The light overhead catches him beautifully; so handsome that Eugene wishes breathlessly for the ability to freeze time, to capture the moment, to cement Snafu forever in his mind like that. Happy, relaxed, a cigarette smoking away between his knuckles, curls in disarray, his shirt collar pulled askew from Eugene’s pawing at him.
“Don’t you think?” Eugene asks again, softly. Snafu’s smile grows.
“I think so.”
They sleep on the mattress on the floor that night; Snafu’s arms thrown around Eugene, snoring gently. Just on the edge of sleep, something occurs to Eugene: something that has him turning his face into Snafu’s skin, tucking away the smile that’s pulling at his mouth. Over their shoulder the moon is a sharp, white slice; the street below just noisy enough to be comforting. Eugene hasn’t thought about Vietnam all night.