Chapter Text
“God entered into my body, like a body my same size. Like me floating into you or you floating into me.”
–Bob Hickman, Bob Hickman is the only living angel because God entered into his body and he is walking in Indiana! (2017)
_______________________________
Much like the Depression, the Blitz or most Christmases in Manitowoc, there comes a sunny day in October when John Egan’s future shutters like a window in front of him.
Shutters is maybe the wrong word. His future narrows into an infinitesimal pinprick, like he’s looking down a telescope the wrong way – all of the world reduced to that one phone call and the rotting anger that cleaves his chest in two like a bullet, dull and burning, delayed, like he doesn’t even feel it until it’s pierced through his back and gone – and then the cool tide of clarity that comes and washes it out of him like a spring storm, calmly, almost peacefully.
He’s going to Thorpe Abbotts, and he’s going to crawl into the mouth of a Fort and drink until she takes him to Münster in her stomach; and he isn’t going to come back until he has either found Buck Cleven or blown apart every Kraut son of a bitch responsible for making him unfindable.
There’s a righteous sort of tirade attached to the notion – one final stand by Maj. John Egan against the supreme injustice of the Nazi regime – fascists and baby-killers, sick bastards who he’ll rake off the face of the planet with nothing but a B-17 and a crew to arm and fly her.
But it’s not like that, not really. He’s always been too selfish for it to be like that.
He lets the hotel desk know that he’s checking out early, packs his barebones bag, and gets on a train back to base with two glasses of whiskey already in him.
And just like Christmas in Manitowoc, John lets his nails pierce the skin of his palm until he doesn’t feel a single goddamn thing.
_______________________________
At about three-fifteen PM the day prior, the time John Egan would be checking into his hotel in London, England, Gale is four thousand feet above Bremen with a burning one-winged Fort and white-hot acid rising in his throat at the thought of the Krauts, himself – even his crew – and God, he wants his crew to live, he wants them to run and he wants them to live. He’s shaking so hard that he can barely get the parachute on. Jesus Christ, if his father could see him now, running from this, taking the easy way out.
Gale jumps at two-thousand. He’s alone in the plane.
The Fort slips away from on top of him like a hand whipped away from his eyes – past the black spots the sun has long since burnt into them, he sees the sky from the bottom up, mountains towering into the depths, and for a single dizzying moment he begins to fall down into it – into that blue mouth that’s taken so many planes and men already, that endless devouring basin, deeper than any war-wound or trench. In that moment the Earth leaves him, and the sky wraps its teeth around his ankles to drag him into a kiss or a hanging, and he thinks, with all his battered heart, thank God.
And then his parachute snaps open, and the breath is punched of his chest in a way that makes him remember John.
“Shit,” Gale breathes – it’s ripped into the wind before he can even hear it, knocking him around like a fist. He sways uncontrollably as he dangles from the chute, trying to realign his vision with his brain, make sense of the jumble of green and brown set ahead of him. Trees, a given – A field – A river? – A garden – A house.
“Shit,” says Gale again. He’s headed towards a goddamn house.
He knows the pillars of parachute operation as a chalkboard list in his mind, crisp and clear, like every good airman should — the raw experience is something else entirely. They’d never done practice jumps in training. Didn’t have the damn time. Gravity wages vicious war with his stomach and his head — he’s a thousand feet up, five hundred, two hundred. The farmhouse barrels towards him like a loose train.
After everything, he’s still a prisoner of reflex: Gale shuts his eyes and holds his breath.
Through the turbulence and the wind he hears an awful grating shriek, like furniture being pushed across a wooden floor – his side connects with something and twists him around, shoving his back into the floor. When he forces his eyes open, struggling to breathe in – God, he must have broken a rib – the sight that greets him is almost enough to make him shut them again.
At first he thinks he must have hit his head, or else flown in so hard he slipped through a crack in the floorboards and ended up straight back in Wyoming, so ordinary and unexpected is the interior of the house. And then he blinks again, and there’s a man standing over him, the cold prongs of a pitchfork pressed flush to his chest. A woman – The man’s wife? – Is shrieking somewhere nearby – Gale doesn’t know if it was her noise he heard coming in, or if he knocked something around when he tumbled past the threshold.
He licks his lips, trying to decide what the hell he’s going to say. The sudden ridiculous urge comes over him to try for a gallant smile, like he’s impressing a girl’s parents over at dinner. He vetoes that one before it can act upon him.
“Terrorlfieger,” spits the farmer at him, which is really all he needs to say. Hearing the other man speak finally twists the ignition-key in Gale’s hindbrain that starts him realizing he actually is lying in a German farmer’s kitchen, still tangled in his chute, and that he had flown straight in their goddamn open back-door.
Hell, God must love me, he thinks wildly, and then out loud he says, “Ich – uh, Ich bien der – guter Mann – Ich möchte dich – “
“Halt’s Maul,” snaps the farmer, and calls something to his wife too quick for Gale to follow. He watches with a strained neck as she runs across the room to pick up the telephone and starts to dial in numbers with shaking hands. Terrorflieger, she’s saying to the other end, Luftgangster!
“Ich will dich nicht stören,” Gale tries again, which only prompts the pitchfork to dig into his chest painfully.
“Sei still, Terrorflieger.”
A muscle in Gale’s sore neck spasms, and he lays his head back on the floor. Christ almighty, how the hell did he end up here? He listens to the farmer’s wife talk in panicked bursts of German over the telephone and finds himself wondering, inexplicably, if John has checked into his hotel yet – he can picture it vividly, the way he’d look getting into the room, how he’d flop down bonelessly on the bed, stretching, timeless for a bare moment with his black hair dyed mahogany in the sun from the window, before stacking himself back upright again and brushing his coat off to head to the first open bar he could find.
If Gale was in London he’d be sitting in the corner of that same bar nursing his ginger ale, watching John charm a pretty lady, watching him dance with her.
John is in London. He doesn’t know the fate of the mission, not yet. Nobody at base will for another few hours. They won’t tell John until he gets back. A sudden bolt of deep nausea washes over Gale for thinking about John Egan now, John, four hundred miles west, when he just saw nine of his own men jump with nothing but German land to catch them. Nine men, his crew, his goddamn friends, dead or captured. It’s like a cactus spine stuck in his heel, the way Bucky gets into his head without him noticing – he can never tell what’s causing the pain until he slows down to look.
The farmer barks at him to get up, prodding at him with the pitchfork.
Gale stops thinking about it.
_______________________________
John, drunk as he’s ever been and sitting in the driver’s seat of his own coffin, has begun to draft the letter he’s going to write to Marge.
There’s a handful of hours left ‘til wheels-up, long enough for him to pen something down and tell Jack where to send it when he doesn’t come back. Dear Marge, he thinks, then with a bout of bitterness, just Marge, then Majorie; then he regrets it and goes back to Dear Marge. He still hates her, sure, but a little part of him stuck in the back wishes he didn’t. Sunshine and roses the whole world ‘round, if ever John Egan didn’t hate a good woman who’d done nothing but her due.
But the problem is that he does hate her. He hates her with a feverish passion that runs through him like arsenic, crawling over his limbs and sickening him with jealousy so bitter and vile he feels like choking on it some days, like it’s going to spill out of him in welling black vomit, splattering the walls in his heartblood, ugly and incriminating. He’s going to stumble into hating her out loud, uncontrollably, and Buck will look at him and know why, because it’s never been about her, it’s about Buck, Buck, Buck. Buck in the sunlight spinning gold from his hair, because God loves him so fucking much; Buck with his hands on the stick of a B-17 like he was made just to sit in that chair; Buck in the morning, jostled and shirtless, smiling at John like he’d hung the goddamn sun in the sky just to wake him up. Buck in his wedding suit. Buck with half his ribcage bent through his skin, sleeping in the cradle of a shattered cockpit.
So, really, he hates Marge like a woman.
John plucks the last of his cigarette out of his mouth and snuffs it out on the back of his wrist. All of the hairs on the back of his neck stand straight up at the pain.
Dear Marge, he writes an hour before wheels-up, on the back of a little sheet of paper he’d found floating around in Buck’s footlocker:
When we were in Africa after Schweinfurt–Regensburg one night he came up to me and told me Bucky, if I ever go down I want you to write Marge and tell her. And I said Buck, if you go down, I’ll be in the copilot’s seat, so get Jack or someone to do it. And he smiled like I’d just asked him to prom or something. Does he ever do that to you?
Then he rips that part off and writes,
Dear Marge,
Your Gale was the best man I ever knew.
He rips off that one too, so hard that the paper crumples under his hand, his jaw clenched like it's caught in a wire snare.
For a minute he tries to sit still and thank God that there isn’t a body. At least, at least. The Forts are butchers, straining men through sieves into ash; bloody smears, charbone. Nothing that could be considered a person anymore.
Buck is not dead. He doesn’t die like that.
Again, John writes, Dear Marge:
I don’t know what to say.
I should have been there when he
I was in London when
Fuck you, Marge. Fuck you and your letters and your dress. I hope you never get to forget about him just like I
Marge, I wasn’t there when
I’m sorry that he didn’t
I’m sorry that you
A pause.
Dear Marge,
And then someone calls “Egan!” from a place far away, and John startles, looking up, and crumples the whole ink-stained sheet into a ball before swinging himself upright. His heart is made of burning black antifire, like the core of a howling engine, eating everything it touches. Taking him right down with it.
It’s wheels-up, and he writes nothing and sends nothing.
It’s wheels-up. He’s going for broke.
_______________________________
Gale finds Murph and Crank on the train, shoved into the same rickety foul-smelling car as him. They tell him Hambone was hurt, bad, that the Krauts took him somewhere — A hospital or to kill him, they don’t know. They can’t know; maybe not ever. Gale’s chest boils. He nods once.
“How long did you spend in interrogation?” Crank murmurs over the low noise of the tracks.
Gale opens his mouth, closes it, flexes his hands compulsively. He doesn’t know. Every useless word the thin, neat interrogator had said to him went in and out of his brain like creek-water through rocks. “Maybe a week?”
“Christ,” says Crank. “They only kept me in there for three days.”
“Guess the press gets around,” says Gale. “You seen anyone else from the Hundredth?”
“Not yet,” says Murph. “A lot of Forts went down, Buck.”
“Yeah,” Buck says.
Stupidly and painfully, he thinks about John again. If John had gone down with him, if the Krauts had gotten their hands on him — he’d be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Gale now, probably as beat to hell and just as desperate, but saying something about baseball or gambling or beating the odds that Gale never, in his lifetime, could ever be persuaded to personally come up with.
It sits tucked up against his ribcage like scraping hunger, high in his belly, the feeling of wanting John there when he’s already surrounded by men he knows and leads and trusts. He doesn’t know what to do with it, the hunger. He has nothing to eat.
“We’ll get outta here,” he says. “You boys know that.”
Nobody responds to him.
Gale flexes his hands again.
He wishes he’d taken his box of toothpicks with him. Usually piloting was a full-time enough job that he stopped needing them — he’d never really known why he started, with the toothpicks, other than it seemed appropriate, and he’d seen other men do it in lieu of a cigarette, usually dealers or bartenders. Always the guys on the house’s side. It slowed the rest of his body down, somehow, quieted it, to have the wood to grind between his molars, something sharp and hard to tongue around without thinking.
It had always been kind of a paradox, the way the guys in the service ribbed him — Buck this, Buck that, you’re a statue, Buck, you’re quiet, Buck, what are you thinking? Growing up he’d always moved too much and been too loud; or, by his father’s rule, he was too much at the wrong times, too loud about the wrong things. He wasn’t calling the shots. He wasn’t putting his money where his mouth was. He certainly wasn’t a man. It wasn’t until he joined up that he found out he was apparently very good at being a man, to anyone who wasn’t his father. At first it got him promoted; then it got him sent to England. Strong and clean; an impossible picture.
Gale had tried drinking, once, when he was eighteen, just to see if it was really so bad as his father made it. Maybe to test himself, indulge some terrible instinct to prove that he could resist the poison that had dragged his father down to his ruin and his grave. When Gale swallowed it, the alcohol warmed his throat down to his stomach and made the world soft and globular and easy, all the lights spinning in comforting orange. He liked it so much that he’d broken the bottle over the river and never tried it again.
“Where do you think they’re taking us?” asks Crank quietly, cutting apart the distorted silence. He’s looking at Gale: Buck should know. Buck will know. Buck is there to keep them all in check.
Gale’s eyes go up, up, up to the bent ceiling of the car, cheap molding planks of wood. He thinks about what he’s supposed to say.
“A Stalag, I hope,” is all he comes up with. “I think we’re out of the game.”
_______________________________
When John jumps he feels like he’s spent his entire life waiting to do it. He screams at the Kraut planes that buzz him, swinging in the air, a sickly hope somewhere deep down that one of them will gore him and save him the journey to the ground. None of them oblige.
Five thousand feet up he stops looking at the planes and starts looking at the ground. Farmland, wetland, forest – where the hell is the rest of the crew gonna end up? How fast will they get captured, shot?
When he hits a thousand, he stops thinking about the crew and starts thinking about himself. He’s headed for a field if the wind keeps steady. He needs to get his parachute out of sight, and fast. He needs to get cover and check his gun. He needs to disappear. He’s been planning to go down since London and he didn’t even think about the landing. The freefall sent it all out the fucking window – there wasn’t any world up here, no love or crime or people, just John and the sky and the war holding him like a net.
John’s knees buckle when he hits Earth. White pain twinges up his body, feet to hips to neck; it flares and diffuses as he pushes himself upright. Nothing broken. Nothing broken. He feels like there’s an anvil pressing on his chest, forcing the breath out. His parachute goes in a haybale. Nothing broken. He’d gambled and he’d gotten lucky.
A gun clicks. John stops.
He turns to see the farmer, who barks something in German that John never learned but the sentiment gets through just fine: move.
John moves his hands up beside his head with the speed of an icicle dripping. Christ, he thinks, and then stops thinking, because he doesn’t have anything to say to Christ. His heart deafens him as he stumbles forward with the farmer’s shotgun kissing his shoulderblades. He has a pocket of smokes in his boot that he thinks might have gotten crushed when he landed.
The walk to the farmer's house takes two seconds and two million years. The panic building in John’s chest wells and crackles up until hoarfrost fills his throat. He feels dizzy, lightheaded, a buzzing in the back of his skull like he’s going to pass out. His head pounds even though he didn’t hit it.
When they go through the door the inside is dark: the farmer doesn’t turn on the light. His bayonet stings through John’s leather jacket. If he turns around now, he thinks, he isn’t going to see a farmer. He’s not going to see a person at all. The lights aren’t on. The furniture is covered like someone just died. He’s going to kill me, John thinks. I’m dead and he’s going to kill me. The thought bursts into his head with such clarity that he knows it like he knows the sky is blue or blood is red. He’s going to shoot me and I’m going to die.
Whatever’s behind him says nothing at all when they get to the next doorway, swinging open in a god-awful sweet breeze that comes from down the black stairs within.
The gun nudges his shoulders once, and then something impacts him so quickly and viciously that by the time John feels it he’s halfway down the stairs smashing his face into the banister, his shoulder into the steps, his knee on the ground; finally he crumples to a stop, still spinning so viciously he thinks he might puke. He coughs and gags, involuntary noises of pain escaping him. Agony flames behind his broken face like someone’s blown up a balloon between his skin and skull, pumping a bike tire tight with every heavy throb of his heart. The room is so sweet and so dark. The wind is louder down here, stronger than a breeze, howling through the whole space. He landed on something softer than concrete or dirt – he almost vomits again, from the smell and the feel. His skin crawls over his body in huge spidery sheets. His hair stands on end. He can’t see anything.
He’s in a room full of airmen.
“Help,” John manages, in something between a whisper and a squeal. It goes so far beyond anything he is that it must be sheer instinct, like a child crying for help in the night. But nobody can hear him over the screaming wind. Nobody is moving. His hands skitter over a leather jacket just like his own.
“Help,” gasps John again. “Please. Please.” He inhales and gags on the stench again.
It takes him an eternity to remember his goddamn lighter. The Kraut farmer hadn’t searched him – hadn’t taken anything from him. He doesn’t have a gun. He finds the lighter and scrambles to keep from dropping it, so badly are his hands shaking. He breathes through his mouth as he flicks and flicks it, cupping his hand up against the freezing wind, until, finally, miraculously, it lights.
And John looks up.
Buck’s empty stare puts a bullet wound through him. There’s brown-black blood caking his nose and mouth – he’s dressed like a pilot, oxygen mask hanging off the side of his jaw. Someone’s taken a saw to his chest. Flak or bullets.
His heart’s still there in the middle of the carnage, poking out, red and beating even though he’s all gone. Greedily, desperately, John reaches out to touch it.
The wind screams like a choir. There’s a pinprick of cold sunlight in the distance, at the end of the room – the view through a cockpit window – they’re not in a room; they’re in a Fort. Someone is beating his face. Someone is yelling. They’re in a Fort and Buck is dead. Just let me touch him, John pleads, humiliated. Just let me touch him again.
He wakes up staring into the bare ceiling light of his cell. His head throbs; his vision doubles. His nose had started to bleed again in his sleep.
An hour later, they take him to see the interrogator.
_______________________________
The camp, Gale thinks, really isn’t all that different from bad days at Thorpe Abbotts, or worse days snowed into an old house in Wyoming, ‘fore the bank took it away.
The new guys are angry and the old guys are bored; the new guys talk about women, the old guys talk about food. Just like the army, probably. There’s only so much that men can do when they’re set out to starve. Gale’s used to leading and he retains his role easily – there’s an art to keeping them in line, teaching the new ones how things are done. At the very least, it keeps him busy, keeps him from thinking too much.
Gale himself picks up the ropes quick. The Stalag is almost shockingly humane – food, water, mail; firewood and electricity, even books and classes, sports – but the guards bark and bite worse than their dogs when they feel like it. Their lenience is mostly dictated by their moods: the Krauts lose a big battle, someone gets shot. The wrong guy gets a Dear John letter, someone gets shot. The men are gettin’ loud and goons are too damn hungover to hear it? No prizes for guessing.
Scuttlebutt’s all over the place on if they can ever be bribed out of it, or what with. Gale’s heard that some of ‘em don’t have to be bribed at all – that they hate the Nazis as much as any Allied soldier. That they want to help. He tries to keep a close eye out for those ones, remember their faces and who they talk with the most.
There are only two things that really break through the monotony of the Stalag: new arrivals, and mail. Gale hems and haws for five nights, shaving wood off his bunk to make toothpicks out of, before he finally sits down and writes a letter to Marge – he scraps the first three attempts until Crank gets pissed at him for wasting paper.
Darling,
I don’t know if the letter is arrived or even sent yet, but at some point the Air Force will probably mail you to tell you that I was reported missing in action. On the raid above Bremen my Fort got shot up to hell (we had no engines and one wing left) and we all had to bail. I landed in a German farmhouse – I blew in through their back door! Marge, I thought I was dreaming. I cracked two i didn’t break any bones, thank God.The farmer pinned me down with a pitchfork while his wife called the authorities. Then they picked me up and took me to a POW camp run by the Luftwaffe which is where I am now. I am safe and fed and a number of my men are here. I don’t know how long I’ll be here for.
Bucky was in London for the weekend when I went up. That was about two weeks ago. I don’t know where he is now. We keep getting new guys in but I haven’t seen him.
I hope that he If he I hope I don’t
I miss you always, Marge. I think about you every day and night. When the war is over I’ll come home and I’ll stay with you until the sky goes out. I’ll even dance if you want if I can manage without tripping.
With all my heart,
Gale
He reads the letter and reads it again, biting on his newest toothpick until it cracks. It’s short. Too short. She’ll write back with a million questions – questions anyone would ask, in their right mind, who cared about him.
He tries to piece together how he feels about it. He should be happy, for starters. He should be relieved. He should be looking forward to it, and sad at Marge’s absence, and missing her. He should be looking forward to her next letter and her million questions, so that he can sit down and pour his heart out about the crash and the war and the camp and if Bucky’s alright; about the pitchfork and the near-concussion and the slimy, polite way the interrogator spoke to him, about the smell in the train, about choosing – choosing to bail, to run – and Marge, Marge has been sitting in a house in the States and she’s a world away from all this, and it’s inhumane the way he has to keep telling her about it, dredging up his bloodsoaked memories to piece them together on paper, deciding what to take and what to keep and what will make her worry for him and what won’t. It’s insane, and promiscuous, to share Marge with the war like that. He needs a white veil to hide her behind, a hand-quilted blanket to keep her underneath. He needs to grip by the throat the hazy dreams he has on nights when he isn’t neck-deep in terrors, where he’s eighteen years old in America with her, drinking soda, and he doesn’t know a single thing about how to pilot an airplane.
But Gale’s just so fucking tired. He hasn’t had a dream like that in months. He barely remembers the color of her hair in the sun.
It’s easier to not think about it at all.
It’s still October, and the kriegies who were there last winter waste no time instilling a sense of urgency in the rest about the kind of conditions the cold will bring. Gale chops and hauls firewood for the better part of a week, teaches the men from warmer places how to keep pails of water unfrozen at night. It’s not freezing yet, but it will be. The days are getting shorter.
The goons never bring men in past sunset, but sometimes Gale goes out to the fence alone and watches for them, in the empty trucks, a new crowd of bruised ghosts come to Asphodel.
He stands there breathing fog into the dark until some guard snaps at him to get back inside. It’s not until he’s trudging back in and hauling himself onto his bunk that he starts to realize he was looking for Bucky out there, searching for his outline in the treeline far past the fence. Like even if he was dead he’d be out there, his face white and red; like the Krauts had strung him up and pumped him full of flak and bullet-casings ‘til he was bloated into a scarecrow.
The worst part of it is that even when his brain force-feeds him that image and refuses to let him replace it with anything else, shaking and sweating in the small hours, Gale still wants viciously to meet John again, in that terrible state, emptied out; just to see a sliver of the face he smiled with and the throat he used to sing. He’d sit by the jagged scarecrow’s side and talk to it until he went hoarse, if that’s what it took – John and him, him and John, they were in the war together, and the war was in them, their skin and eyes and rotten tongues. To see John consumed by it wouldn’t be so different, Gale thinks. He imagines seeing a black crow undeterred, sitting on John’s shoulder and nipping hungrily at his face, his cheek, his mouth – John is still bleeding, still soft: the crow gets little prizes from him, pinpricks of red. He imagines John jolting at it, gasping in pain, his eyes bright, his lips flushed.
Suddenly the grotesque vision feels more real and visceral, more evocative than anything of Marge he’d thought in weeks, and that’s what finally scares him so badly that he shuts his eyes and blocks it all out.
Someone moves to shake him awake around 0600.
“I’m up,” he says, and the figure goes away with an indiscriminate mumble.
Gale lies there blinking, a headache nested behind his eyes, and thinks about making a radio.
_______________________________
On the long train to Stalag Luft III, John thinks about the sky.
More specifically he thinks about the Forts – their coughing engines sputtering smoke, hemorrhaging fuel; beautiful shuddering monsters carving though the big, big blue, too dark and messy to be the smiling kind painted on bond posters, too sharp and dangerous to be from anywhere else on Earth. The same type of shit that had been going through his head the first time he broke through the cloud layer and saw white mountains from the cockpit, and he had squinted and grinned, laughed along with the crew’s chatter. Someone – not Buck, but someone else, John can’t remember who – said it must’ve been what Heaven looked like. And John had looked around, twenty-four years old and an idiot, and thought hell, maybe, doesn’t seem like a longshot.
It had taken about two weeks and two missions for the war to teach him better than that. The war had eaten God out of his head and vomited up cheap whiskey and drunken sex to fill the gaping wound left behind. Christ, John thinks, if Heaven were in the sky, they would all have one hell of a noise complaint coming their way, courtesy of St. Peter, and he wouldn’t give a single damn what color uniform they wore.
John thinks about the sky because if it’s not the sky, it’s the ground, and if it’s the ground it’s mud, and if it’s mud it’s a dead man’s weight pressing down on him, a dead man muttering – Our Father, Who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, On earth as it is in Heaven; and then the ringing silence, with his blood wine-red on John’s ruined face.
On missions John always wore two rosaries, and when he kissed them he felt like a girl writing letters to someone who didn’t love her anymore, or someone who had died too soon to love her at all. He’d thought he could never be farther away from God than when he was up in the air – then he saw the men digging holes in that forest in Germany and knew that if he died there, God wouldn’t even know where to start looking for him.
Neither would Buck, and John gave a lot more of a damn about that.
It’s not as if he hasn’t thought of dying before. When he isn’t dreaming about Buck ripped to pieces in a Fort, it’s usually the other way ‘round – Buck holding his broken body, cold and white, his chest ripped open down to the heart. Buck rocking him gently back and forth like he’s lulling him to sleep, and he’s just calm, not sad, and John isn’t sad, because they always both knew he was dying. Sometimes Buck trails a tender finger across the raw flesh, bloodying himself, so gentle that it makes John shiver and retch. In those dreams he wants to tell Buck to leave, to clean himself off. Stop letting John stain him like that. But Buck just looks and touches and hurts, so effortlessly, and then he brings the finger to his mouth and starts to lick off the blood, his tongue pink like his lips, and John wakes up in a shuddering cold sweat, tangled in his thin sheets, his heart outpacing every jackrabbit in England.
So he thinks about the sky. He does. He tries. The cart and the mud sink into the cracks between the clouds like water pouring down a drainpipe, the stench of soaked bodies that had been men an hour ago, the way he’d felt when the adrenaline had worn off, like someone had scraped out his lungs with a skinning knife and all the cold air was just meeting the empty flesh. He’s been hollow for a while, he thinks. The residue of his night in London could only cling to him for so long – as long as it took him to find a newspaper and be told by a tinny voice in a phonebox that he was going back to Münster to die.
He hadn’t thought about much since Buck went down, not really. Everything from the train back from London to his stumbling breakneck landing in Germany had just been some kind of sleeping punishment; his brain finally given out. Just another dream, after all that time spent dead awake.
And when John flew without Buck he dreamed about Heaven.
The train rattles on the tracks, jarring John out of his fugue. Something happened to his left knee that he can’t remember – maybe the landing – and it aches and shudders under his weight. The stench of sweat and blood and God knows what else in the air would be gag-inducing if his sinuses weren’t near swollen shut from the walloping his face had taken. Terrorflieger! they’d been yelling, Terrorflieger! He was. He lived because the guard was out of bullets. Dumb fucking luck, after all the shelled-out houses he had made and never seen, after he had gone up without wanting to come down, after he had given the deuce to Buck and the sheepskin to Jack and thrown everything he had to the wind screaming me, take me, I’m over, I’m gone already.
God is betting on a losing hand, and John Egan has stopped bluffing. He doesn’t believe in God, anyway, but he believes wholeheartedly that he’s paying for his sins in the only way the world knows how – the only way he won’t spit in its face and enjoy it: by making him keep on living without Buck Cleven.
In Thorpe Abbotts, when they were together, John used to stare at him too long, lick his teeth, rubbernecking at his own damn car crash. In the back of his mind he was daring Buck to furrow his brow, look away, hit him, hurt him. It was almost the same game he’d played with boys back in Wisconsin a decade ago – half the time he’d gotten a shiner and the other half he’d gotten laid, and either way it went he’d wake up the next morning feeling like dirt.
It was almost the same game because unlike the flushed schoolboys in Manitowoc, Buck never, ever joined in.
Pathetically, it was maybe the lack of interest itself that had done it for John, at first. A perfect movie-star boy, fresh-faced from the cowboy state, with a girl and a dream and a future. Uncatchable bait. A north star that never moved. Repetition turned it into a compulsion, and then a vice, and then an addiction. John had never really been good at compulsions, vices, or addictions: he certainly wasn’t good at Buck.
But Buck had never walked away and never hit him, not for that. And there were times in the night or early morning when he’d wake John with a hand on his shoulder, and John would see him in the sunlight and that painful warmth would swell up like a beating songbird from his chest to his face, and Buck would blink at him like he was seeing John for the first time, like he was a girl in a bar who’d charmed him straight off his two left feet just by saying hello.
It had to’ve been the sickness talking, anyway, because the first thing John had ever learned about Buck was that he didn’t gamble.
He’d make a damn good Catholic, John thinks. Doesn’t gamble, doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t fuck around – hell, he doesn’t even swear that much. Three years waking up next to him in barracks and it’d taken a goddamn air raid for John to learn the reason why; it’d inspired some miniature reenactment of the airspace over Bremen up high in his chest, with one side played by bright nauseating resentment and the other by the insatiable idea that he’d been let in on a secret nobody else could know. He had dealt with the problem as he did all others – knocking back scotch ‘til the bombing quieted and his heart stopped screaming at him like freshly trampled earth, bruised cherry-black, weeping blood.
And it had worked, for a while. Like it usually did.
And now here he is, in five-fucking-star accomodations, headed straight to the dugout to sit out the ninth inning; wishing to hell every day and night that he’d never gone to London, that he’d never joined up at all, that he’d died in the cradle or gotten himself shot before he ever had a chance to lay his eyes on Gale Cleven.