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The slap of water outside, the gentle rock of it, draws out the worst of the panic from him like poison. The warm body sprawled beside him drives the job home. Through shuttered blinds, the sky is glowing pink above dark waters.
Pink skies at night, sailors delight, Hawkeye recalls, pink skies at day, sailors . . . behave? Be gay? He would have paid more attention to the expression had he known his fate. He lays back down.
“Nightmare?” comes the sleep-roughened mumble from B.J.’s slackened face. His eyes are still closed.
Hawkeye kisses his eyelids, as he likes to do when the opportunity presents itself, and then his mouth which presses back in a sloppy purse. “Nothing worse than your morning breath.”
B.J. cracks open an eye. “Is it morning?”
“Only thing I’m mourning is the wonderful sleep-in that you're about to ruin.” Hawkeye yawns, his nightmare fading as he settles back into the considerable warmth of B.J.’s side.
“Peggy’s dropping Erin off this afternoon,” B.J. reminds him through a yawn of his own. “We should clean up.”
Hawkeye glances around the darkened room, the clutter and dirty ashtrays, haphazard photographs and books piling haphazard high as Babel. The mini-fridge covered in gaudy magnets presented to them from all over the country. They stocked up on food during a late night run to the grocery store, pajama clad, B.J. dumping Erin’s favourite cereals and snacks on top of Hawkeye who attempted to luxuriate in the cart as B.J. pushed him along.
Hawkeye tuts, burrowing closer. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that it’s no good lying to your kids. Erin should know her father lives in filth and squalor on a horrible little house boat; better she finds out now than be disappointed later.”
“You make a good point,” B.J. hums.
“Boy, are you easy.”
“Would you prefer me hard?”
Hawkeye chuckles sleepily as B.J. snuffles into his hair like a particularly affectionate dog. Early into their newly christened foray, Hawkeye picked up on this quirk—B.J. could nuzzle, cuddle, and coddle within an inch of any reasonable man’s sanity. It’d only be natural to make fun of B.J. for it, he even thinks that B.J. might take the teasing in stride, but Hawkeye is too terrified by even the slightest possibility of relent to make a token protest against it.
“What’re you thinking about?” B.J. asks.
“I’m working up the energy to deliver you your namesake for breakfast,” Hawkeye tells him.
B.J. huffs. “If you want to get as much mileage out of that joke as you seem to, you should really slow your roll.”
“I’ll slow your roll for breakfast.”
“Doesn’t make any sense,” B.J. giggles and Hawkeye curls into him. “You smell like oysters, by the way.”
“I,” Hawkeye mumbles, “did not make the executive decision to buy a boat instead of a reasonable slice of real estate.”
“Watch it or I’ll make you walk the plank.”
“If you want to get as much mileage out of that joke as you—” he’s muffled into silence by B.J.’s own lips, getting a mouthful of mustache for his trouble. “If you think you can distract me with sex, then you’re absolutely right.”
“Sex later, sleep now,” B.J. suggests.
“Sleep now, sex later,” Hawkeye concedes.
He’s just drifting off again when B.J. nudges him. “Hey, Hawk?”
“I thought you said sex later,” Hawkeye murmurs.
“If you don’t love the boat, we can find somewhere else, you know? I don’t mind as long as we stick together.” B.J. shifts up onto one elbow, letting a chill flood the space between them to Hawkeye’s chagrin. “Happiest two days of your life are the day you buy your boat and the day you sell your boat, apparently. Whenever you want a pick-me-up, we can sell.”
“If you pick me up any higher, I’ll crash right into space,” Hawkeye tells him and reaches up to touch B.J. temple before pulling him back down. B.J. kisses his chest. “I’m the happiest sonuvabitch alive.”
*
It’d been roughly halfway through their esteemed stay at the Swamp when it first came up during a round of sharing fantasies.
“I’d like to be a captain of the sea for a change,” Hawkeye had announced apropos to little else than the weather. It had either been a smothering heat or a bone chilling cold.
B.J. had laughed from his cot, lulling his head over to grin at him.
“I’m serious,” Hawkeye insisted. “Picture it, Beej: you and me, the open sea and a setting sun, a martini in each hand . . . .”
“Oh, am I there, too?” B.J. coaxed him on.
“Of course you’re there. Who else would be my first mate?”
“Sounds like a demotion to me.”
“Alright fine,” Hawkeye threw the ball of yarn he’d been utilizing in a pretty good pursuance of a new pair of socks at B.J.’s head. B.J. caught it, laughing, and started work on unraveling and untangling a good length for Hawkeye. “You be master and I’ll be commander. Happy?”
“As a clam,” B.J. quipped with a grin. “Never took you as a seafaring type, though.”
“Are you kidding me? Day drinking, sunning, and fooling around on the open sea?” Hawkeye raised his eyebrows. “That’s the dream.”
“Alright, then, that settles it,” B.J. told him. “You and me, Pierce, retired captains with new careers as captains.”
Hawkeye smiled around the twinge in his heart, the same pinch he felt whenever B.J. played along with his future hypotheticals. It was almost as cruel as it was irresistible. “What’ll we name our vessel?”
But as much as he’d spoken wistfully of the elaborate palate combination of shit gin and the briny air of the sea, the reality was a much more convoluted hodge podge of cheap wines, whiskeys, and on one retched, retrospectively hilarious, occasion: schnapps. With growing frequency, they cashed in on half a dozen jokes regarding scurvy prevention while drinking screwdrivers with their feet kicked up on the railing and the sun glinting off their shades as the breeze tussled their hair.
But no martinis.
*
When Hawkeye had first settled back in at Crabapple Cove, after he’d kissed his dad on both cheeks and lugged his stuff to the guest room, showered and eaten, it had started, then, in that first lull: all he’d wanted was a God awful martini.
So together he and his dad walked down to the local bar. It was a nice night, a peaceful night, but Hawkeye’s skin still itched. He ordered his martini with a chill of anticipation, caught his father’s eye and grinned, before swallowing the thing down whole.
And then he promptly rushed to the restroom to vomit it back up.
In the dreadful, wonderful, blissful, tortuous weeks that followed Hawkeye tried over and over to make his own drink, try again at the bar, and even take a cab to the next nearest bar. Each time, he had to choke his drink down. Each time, still after, he craved a martini even more. As it turned out, he apparently fucking hated martinis now.
A horrible thought: maybe this had been what Trapper had felt. Maybe he had missed Hawkeye, maybe he’d even tried to write, but each time he tried it’d been like downing a recollection laden drink. Wretched with remembrance but sore for the cause of the symptoms.
Well, not Hawkeye. He could take the good and leave the bad; he’d show Trapper.
He wished he could call B.J. and ask if he was having the same problem but at that point it’d only been three months: he didn’t want to seem too eager even if the first thing he had wanted to do upon returning home was to call B.J. immediately. He bashed down the want effectively and miserably by imagining B.J.’s distracted tone of voice drawn away from him, that beautiful glowing attention drawn towards his newly reunited wife and kid. It would break his heart in two.
Wife and kid. Peggy and Erin. It was too easy to demote them to faceless entities, rivals in gravitational pull where they were the sun and Hawkeye was but a lowly moon.
It was important, he instructed himself sternly as he gagged on another miserable drink, to let B.J. enjoy his happy ending. A fairy tale knight returned from the far, far away land of the eastern hemisphere. When he wanted nostalgia, then he would call Hawkeye.
But all night, all day, during long strolls and lazy chess matches with his dad, waking from screaming nightmares and sleeping for luxurious hours on end: the craving was still there, a desperate itch inside him tirelessly scratching away like a dog desperate for a bone.
“Pavlovian reaction. Or else a psychosomatic change in palate,” his dad deadpanned, one night on the porch over the chessboard. Nearly four months on, now.
Hawkeye snorted. “Is that your professional dismissal, Doctor Pierce?”
“Well, what’s your prognosis, Doctor Pierce?” He captured Hawkeye’s rook. Hawkeye frowned.
“Death,” Hawkeye said, squinting at him through the golden light of the setting sun, “by sobriety.”
His dad quirked a half smile at him. “You know why you’re no good at chess, Hawk? You’re always trying to save all the pieces.”
“I’m sure your patients would be charmed to know how willingly you surrender your weakest,” Hawkeye said as he captured a pawn.
“Boy, you really are distracted,” his dad said and moved his piece with a flourish. “Checkmate.”
“I surrender,” Hawkeye held up his hands and fell back in his seat with a sigh. “Learned something from the army, after all.”
His dad studied him to a disquieting length. “I hate to see you like this.”
“Well, we’re in the same boat, then.”
His dad snorted. “Do you remember when you were little how much you wanted to be a pirate?”
Hawkeye smiled, a little, and thought fleetingly of B.J. Little didn’t make him think of B.J. “I remember.”
“You know,” his dad said. “If you want to go—”
“Go where?” Hawkeye interrupted. “I want to be with you in your old age, pops.”
“I’m barely sixty, you kook,” laughed his dad, “and you're really weighing me down in my glory days as a bachelor. Don’t you have some sweetheart you ought to be reuniting with? Some army boy who broke your heart?”
“Aw, dad, you know I’m no good at chasing. I like to be wined and dined,” Hawkeye joked along, but somewhere along the course of the exchange he’d caught his father’s eye and seen the glimmer of genuine tenderness. Hawkeye swallowed hard.
After a while, his dad asked, softly, “You called your friend yet?”
He didn’t have to ask what friend. “I’m waiting.”
“You already spent more time waiting than any soul ever should,” his dad shook his head. “Don’t wait on this. Every day, I think about your mother and I—”
“Dad,” Hawkeye interrupted, alarmed.
“Don’t wait too long, is all I’m saying,” his dad summarized, blessedly, before he could get choked up and therefore choke up Hawkeye in the process. Hawkeye looked away.
*
In retrospect, if B.J. was a knight in shining armor then that made Hawkeye a princess in the high tower of Maine. Five months of silence, nightmares, and a good deal of pacing. Choking down piss poor martinis that were not piss poor in the way that he desired. He grew more at ease in his skin but more agitated under his father’s concerned eye. He started picking up clinic hours at his dad’s place but never stopped waking up looking towards where B.J.’s side of the tent would be. The ring of the telephone no longer lit his insides up with queasy hope. He wallowed. He settled. The air in the army had stifled him but in Maine the air was thin and scathing.
And then, nearly half a year home, just as dusk fell on the last cool day of spring the whistle of a boatswain’s call pierced through the gentle breeze passing through the open windows of the house.
Hawkeye jumped. He looked at his father, and his father looked back at him. The whistle sounded again. Hawkeye frowned and stood.
He went to the front door, opened it, and felt his guts drop from him. Gravity relinquished. His jaw hung stupidly agape.
For lack of a horse, Beej had come riding up in a rented truck toting a gloriously battered renovated boat.
B.J. was grinning, one foot still in the truck. Clad in the world’s fruitiest, ugliest Hawaiin shirt known to man and looking stunningly gorgeous set against the purpling sky, B.J. also donned an antiquated sailor’s hat. In his other hand he grasped a second hat as he threw the whistle back into the truck and hopped down to stride up the drive.
“Captain Pierce,” B.J. greeted, still beaming, marching up the steps to the porch.
“I sure hope you’re real,” Hawkeye said, faintly, “because if you aren’t, I’m pretty sure I’m having a stroke.”
And B.J. was real: flesh and blood and in Crabapple Cove, where he’d spent so much of his time trying not to imagine this very moment even before, he suspected, he’d met B.J.; as though he’d been waiting for a B.J. shaped puzzle piece his whole life. Even as a boy, even before the war, and even if he thought fleetingly that he’d found that in Trapper, it never could have been anybody else but B.J.
They embraced. They clung to each other. It seemed as though they’d been clinging to each other for years and in a way they had. Hawkeye was laughing hysterical tears into the stubbled cheek. They pulled back and reeled each other back in. B.J. smacked a kiss on the side of his face, a gesture he’d only done a handful of times before.
It was a long time before they let go of each other.
*
When they did, B.J. thrust the second captain’s hat towards Hawkeye. B.J.’s own hat had fallen to the ground in the excitement and now he dusted it off before placing it back atop his own head.
“I was going to get flowers originally but I figured that was more of a first date thing, and we’re kind of past that,” B.J. laughed. “Plus, there was a boat sale right by the florist, go figure.”
Hawkeye blinked over at the boat in the fading light, uncomprehending. “Boat trumps flower, sure,” he responded, easily, still without understanding.
“Right. Plus, I’m technically homeless. So.” B.J. shifted, grin faltering. “What do you think?”
“Me? Think?”
“Yeah, Hawk,” B.J. pressed Hawkeye’s hat towards him again. Their hands overlapped, warmly. “What do you think about making me the happiest high-functioning alcoholic army doctor in the world and coming back to California with me? Do me the honor of being my co-captain?”
While Hawkeye’s brain worked overdrive to dissect the emotion and meaning from the joke, his mouth said, “Sap.”
“I’ll show you sap as soon as we’re somewhere private,” B.J. rejoined, rocking up on the balls of his feet with a grin.
Hawkeye forced a laugh. It sounded strained even to his own ears, and B.J.’s smile dimmed.
From the next room, his father shouted, “Hawkeye, are you going to introduce me to your friend or what?”
Hawkeye twitched. “It’s just a Jehovah’s Witness, Dad! Sorry, he’s converted me—I’ll see you after the judgement day!” He took B.J.’s arm and tried to tug him away with a hissed, “Hurry!” but B.J. was already peeking into the house.
His father had wandered closer by this point and Hawkeye bit back a groan.
B.J. took off his sailor’s hat, respectfully. “B.J. Hunnicutt, sir, at your service.”
His father snorted. “At ease, soldier.”
They seemed to size each other up. Hawkeye felt ill prepared for this confrontation.
“I already like you a great deal, B.J., I can’t be bothered to pretend that I don’t,” his father announced, at last, “When you made that hell bearable for my boy, you made mine bearable for me.”
Hawkeye dragged a palm over his face, aghast.
“I—” B.J. stuttered. “I should be thanking you. Hawkeye was—”
“Oh, my God,” Hawkeye begged. “To survive war only to be killed by my own father.”
His father ignored him. “I’m sure you won’t mind sharing the guest room with Hawkeye. He’s too long for the couch, and I’m too good of a host to let you do it.”
“I’ll manage,” B.J. said, and followed him into the house. “Shouldn’t I go park somewhere else? Won’t the neighbors mind the boat?”
“They can mind all they want, what are they going to do?”
Hawkeye stood in the doorway for a long moment, breathing in the smell of the honeysuckle bushes lining the porch. He pinched himself, then he went inside.
*
It was exactly like he’d imagine. It was nothing like he’d imagine.
They ate leftovers with Hawkeye’s father and told him the best of their stories. Once they seemed to figure each other out, B.J. and his dad got on like a house on fire. The knowledge burned him to his core.
After his dad went to bed with a stern warning to keep quiet, Hawkeye and B.J. took to the porch with a case of beer to keep talking. And boy, did they talk. Six months is a long time apart when you’ve spent years on end living out of each other’s pockets. Not long enough to unlearn each other, but enough time to be starved of each other’s company.
Crickets trilled away through the warm night, as B.J. was saying, after a few hours of swapping stories, “I wanted to talk to Peg straight first before I saw you.”
Hawkeye nodded, not sure why that was even a question.
“I mean,” B.J. continued, lounging back with his beer dangling thoughtlessly between his fingers. Hawkeye fixated on this thoughtless relaxed pose, longing to press the silhouette of it in the moonlight to memory as you might a flower. “There’s only so much you can put in a letter. The divorce just got finalized.”
Hawkeye started. Alarmed, he cried, “Divorce?”
B.J. shushed him. “Yeah, divorce.”
“God,” Hawkeye said, hollowly, “I’m so sorry. What happened?”
B.J. cast him a bemused look, shaking his head. “She and Grace can’t wait to meet you. Erin, too.”
“Grace?” Hawkeye asked, struggling to accept this apparent non-sequitur.
“You know, Peggy’s friend ,” B.J. emphasized.
Hawkeye blinked. “Oh.”
B.J. hummed and took a drink. “Peg and I—we were best friends first, before anything else, and we were so young when we weren’t. Then, of course, Erin which was the best thing to happen to either of us. We’re going to co-parent, tag-team it,” he smiled and glanced aside at Hawkeye. “You know something? I’ve been so happy to see them these past months, but all the time I kept looking over my shoulder to talk to you. All that time at camp, I kept on missing Peggy and Erin only to get home and miss you just as much.”
Hawkeye swallowed, hard. “I missed you, too.”
He thought of the rush of their earlier conversation, muddled now by the joy of the past few hours. A dream. This was as he had imagined, precisely: stories of the recent past with no mention of plans for the future.
But it was nice, Hawkeye had to remind himself, it was nice to see B.J. again.
Hawkeye glanced over at the boat. He stomach leapt like he’d missed a step in the dark. The fly in the ointment.
He took a sip of his beer and froze.
“What?” B.J. asked.
Hawkeye blinked. “You know what?”
“What?” B.J. repeated, propping his chin up on one hand with an amused expression.
“I’ve been craving one of our lighter fluid martinis like crazy this whole time,” Hawkeye gestured in vague disbelief. “And now: nothing. I lost the itch.”
B.J. raised his eyebrows. “Maybe the real lighter fluid martinis are the friends we made along the way.”
And, as intended, Hawkeye laughed.
*
Hawkeye loaned B.J. a tee and some sweatpants. Their talk diminished to whispers as they re-entered the house, then grew even quieter and more sparse as they got ready for bed. Well past midnight, they lay like corpses beside each other, a warm six inches separating them.
He had just resolved to rehash the blur of the front stoop debacle in the morning, when B.J. broke the silence between them.
“Hawk,” B.J. whispered.
“Beej,” Hawkeye answered.
“Look,” he sighed and rolled over.
Hawkeye’s heart stilled.
“If you want to stay here, I’ll understand,” B.J. said, at last. “I’ll call. Visit. Write twice a day. Schedule a time to look at the moon at the same time as you. It’ll be hell, but once Erin’s older . . . then we’ll reassess the situation.”
“I don’t get it,” Hawkeye rolled over. “B.J., can you be frank with me?”
“Only if you’ll be Margaret,” B.J. responded and Hawkeye let out a shocked bark of laughter before clapping a hand over his mouth. B.J. cracked up at the gesture. Hawkeye shoved him.
The bed shook with B.J.’s suppressed laughter as he mimicked Hawkeye. Hawkeye hushed him, desperately, only to dissolve into giggles himself. They weren’t even tipsy. Hawkeye laughed harder, collapsing back.
They calmed, then looked at each other, and began laughing again. All the years they spent shushing each other, keeping desperate silence for the sake of their lives, had all amounted to doing the same thing for fear of waking Doctor Pierce the Senior.
Hawkeye caught his breath, still laughing lightly and turned his head to watch B.J.’s own laughter petter out. When B.J. looked back, they smiled at each other. B.J. reached out and touched Hawkeye’s stomach, softly, where it still lilted with laughter, as though he was feeling out the source. He touched Hawkeye’s chest. Then his neck. Hawkeye stopped laughing. B.J. touched his face and when he squirmed closer, Hawkeye still thought he must be misunderstanding things, and he thought that right up until B.J. kissed him.
B.J. pulled back.
“Oh,” Hawkeye said. “You’re in love with me, too.”
B.J. smiled, wryly. “Does that mean you’re going to kiss me back this time?”
“Does that mean I’m going to . . . .” Hawkeye faltered and then pounced, rolling a top his best friend and clutching his face in both hands before laying one on him.
B.J. let out a startled sound. Hawkeye shushed him. They started giggling again, and B.J. wrapped his arms around Hawkeye, pulling him down flush.
Hawkeye pushed himself up an inch. “Hey, wait. You’re telling me we could have been doing this the whole time?”
B.J. raised an eyebrow. “And here I thought you were being respectful of my marriage.”
“I was being respectful of your marriage,” Hawkeye protested. “I just didn’t know that you were.”
B.J. pinched his derriere and Hawkeye yelped. “You know what I mean,” Hawkeye protested.
“I never know what you mean,” B.J. told him and kissed his cheek.
Hawkeye melted, a bit. “You always know what I mean,” he told him, without much intent. There was not quite as much blood in the northern regions of his body as there used to be with B.J. so warm and there. It didn’t matter. He didn’t have to be clever with B.J.
As if hearing his thoughts, B.J. rolled them over and pressed Hawkeye down against the bed. “You’re going incoherent on me, Pierce.”
Hawkeye bit back a sound and kissed the first part of B.J. he could get at: his forehead. “That one is on you, Captain.”
“If you say so, Captain,” B.J. grinned at him and growled in a playful sort of way that clearly was meant to make Hawkeye laugh, which it did, but at the cost of his pride in admitting that the sound got him a little hot, too.
“Beej,” Hawkeye muttered. “You’re going to have to cool it, or—”
“Or?” B.J. asked and moved down lower. And lower. And—
Hawkeye bit into his fist and clenched his eyes shut.
It was over embarrassingly quick, with a muffled name and tears stinging his eyes. B.J. grinned smugly up at him, but faltered when he saw Hawkeye’s face. “Hey—”
Hawkeye grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him close. Closer, still.
“You really didn’t think I was coming,” B.J. whispered after a long while.
Hawkeye sniffed. “It’s not you, it’s me.”
B.J. pressed a kiss to his head. “I’m sure that’s what you tell all the boys.”
“There hasn’t been any,” Hawkeye told him, in a blind stumble of honesty. “Others, I mean.”
B.J. stilled. “You’re kidding?”
“Real funny joke. Ha, ha.”
Immediately, B.J. was blurting, “But, what about—” and then seemed to think better and shut up.
What about Trapper? Hawkeye heard, anyway. Well, what about Trapper? Hawkeye waited for the anger to rush through him, and yes, it did twinge his heart a little, but to his shock the next words out of his mouth were in the key of elation, “Beej, were you jealous of Trapper?”
B.J. tensed.
Hawkeye burst out laughing.
“Shhh,” B.J. hissed and tried to smother his face with a pillow. “Shhh.”
“You!” Hawkeye gasped. “You!”
“Shut up,” B.J. begged, but he was starting to laugh, too, burying his face in Hawkeye’s chest. “Please.”
“Oh, God,” Hawkeye said. “Oh, you beautiful moron. You specimen of glorious idiocy.”
B.J. peeked up at him. “I love you, too, Pierce.”
“I love you, three,” Hawkeye said and kissed him again, smiling the whole time.
*
Their first time on the water is a raucous disaster, at first, but slowly eases into the best afternoon of Hawkeye’s life thus far.
After the extended tour across the country with frequent pit stops to see friends, the hustle to find semi steady job positions in San Francisco ahead of time, and family introductions, in contrast to the slow passing six months, this one flies by with exhilarating speed.
They’re docked locally, settling in. It turned out that Peggy’s Grace is a regular seaman herself which Hawkeye is infinitely delighted by. The four of them figured it out together in long summer stretches while Erin basked in the joy of, after so long with only one parent, finding that her supply had somehow quadrupled.
She calls Hawkeye, Hawk in a bright voice. Mommy, Daddy, Ma, and Hawk . Hawkeye has never had so much love in his heart. He doesn’t know what to do with all of it.
But that first time cutting through the water, just the two of them, Hawkeye had turned to B.J. and called over the wind. “You know, I heard somewhere that sea captains can officiate weddings.”
“Oh, really?” B.J. had said, and grinned.
*
Hawkeye dreams about the MASH a lot. Mostly nightmares but there are a few, still, that are just regular dreams. Eating in the mess hall or drinking in the Swamp. In those dreams, Hawkeye will look around and he’ll turn to his friends and smile and say, “Can you believe this nightmare?”
And when they really are nightmares, he wakes up and remembers. He wakes up, and B.J. is still there.
*
When they finally emerge to see the light of day, B.J. has a sudden change of heart and nearly kills himself running around cleaning up the innocuous messes they’ve accumulated on the boat by sheer force of life. Hawkeye makes fun of him but helps anyway. They smile at each other, call each other names, make plans to see friends soon, and discuss the future Pierce-Hunnicutt Clinic. B.J. pulls Hawkeye back inside by the loops of his pants for a quickie, and they finish cleaning up afterwards.
It’s midafternoon, the sun high, when Peggy’s car pulls up at the end of the dock.
Light leaps and refracts off the water as they abandon the Dirty Martini. It’s a beautiful day, bright and clear, and B.J. wraps his arm around Hawkeye’s waist. Hawkeye wraps his around B.J.’s shoulders. They meet Erin halfway down the dock, together.