Fandom: M*A*S*H.
Author: Epigone.
Pairing: Potter/Trapper.
Rating: PG-13, for the sake of caution.
Warnings: Sexuality, infidelity, dark subject matter.
Archivists: Ask first.
Summary: Two strangers meet in a bar after the war ends.
Date Written: July 2003.
Author's Notes: My response to my own random-pairings challenge. I terrify myself.
Feedback: Can be sent to kmaru1701 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com, and is much appreciated.
You Can't Go Home Again
One Wednesday, Mildred packed her bags to visit her sister Bertha for a week. Sherman had also been invited by that faintly shrill voice on the telephone, but as he told Mildred, she wasn't his sister. He wasn't obligated to see her. Mildred kissed him goodbye on Thursday morning, standing inside the doorway in a faded sundress that was still flattering, and then she was gone. In some small guilty part of himself, Sherman expected the solitude to be welcome; a time to break through the wartime fog still hovering just behind his eyes, to remember how to live life as though it were something permanent.
By Friday evening, he had come to notice how the house stood open and empty and echoing with strangeness. The things he had seen, three wars' worth of things, built upon each other like sap and crusted in crystalline images, and above all there was Korea, Korea in its leaden and indecipherable vastness. Korea, where Radar lay in post-op bleeding out his innocence, where Father Mulcahy's knuckles over the pulpit grew whiter with every passing Sunday, where BJ learned to hate what he loved best, where Hawkeye's eyes finally flared and went dark one afternoon in the O.R. Korea, where people died from the inside out.
Sherman let himself through the front door at a little past nine o'clock, tucked the key under the welcome mat, and strode briskly into downtown Hannibal. He didn't know why -- the local country store was always comfortable and full of familiar faces -- but he walked the nameless streets illuminated eerie blue-white by the streetlamps, his breath blooming with the light. He entered the first bar he found and let himself dissolve into the dimness, surrounded by people who had hardly even heard of Korea.
There was an empty stool at the counter across the room. He made his way to it and waited patiently for the bartender, who was nowhere in sight. A few minutes passed, and then he heard a broad, amused voice say, "He's downstairs."
Sherman turned on his stool and discovered that he had completely overlooked the man to his right. He seemed relatively young, although his exact age was difficult to pinpoint; he had one of those faces that could last for decades. It was the eyes that caught Sherman's attention: muzzy from drink, but caught by an occasional flickering wince, a flash of something old and faraway that Sherman wouldn't even have noticed if he hadn't recognized it.
"Who is?"
"The bartender," said the stranger, and with that word betrayed himself as an out-of-towner. Sherman failed to stifle a smile at the accent; it could almost be a cruder, less self-conscious version of Winchester's. The stranger caught the smile and returned it. "I've drunk him outta house and home. He had to go down to the cellar for more beer."
"I see," said Sherman, and he did: the man had a neat little row of glasses standing before him on the bar. As if on cue, the bartender emerged from a nearby door with a keg.
"How about I buy you one?" offered the stranger.
"All right," said Sherman. "Why not?"
"Name's Trapper."
"Sherman."
"Sherman," said Trapper, handing him a tall glass with a laugh, "I don't know who the hell you are, but I don't really give a damn."
"You here on vacation, son?" asked Sherman evenly, seeing that flash in his eyes again.
"This whole country's a vacation!" exclaimed Trapper, and took a gulp of his beer. This seemed to calm him. "Um, yeah. Taking the wife and kids on a cross-country trip. We're going to Rushmore next, but Kathy had to stop at Mark Twain's house. Loves those books -- Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn."
"Most kids do," said Sherman.
"They're -- we're staying over at the Stone School Inn. Except I guess I'm not tonight, if I'm here." He finished off his beer. "Bartender, two more."
"Thanks, but I'm fine here," said Sherman. Trapper gave him a lopsided grin.
"Those're mine," he replied. "But you could use another, too," and over Sherman's halfhearted protestations, he motioned the bartender to pour a third drink. "To life," he said after a moment, speculatively, raising his drink. "Who'd ever believe it could mean something again?" Sherman looked at him sideways, and he laughed sharply and said, "L'chaim: bottoms up from right to left."
Under the lights, his face shone with perspiration. Under the lights, his hair looked sleek and bright as flame -- and Sherman thought--
In the Great War, across the desolate field from Belleau Wood, the cavalry members crouched in the reserve trenches, down where the mud clung intimately. Horses were of little use here; they were alone. At intervals, there was a ragged phosphorescent flare in the sky that broke like a wave around them. The rattle of the machine guns was hollow and brittle, a bone-like sound, and Sherman was too young, painfully aware of being too young and helpless in the in-between dark. One night, when the shelling was heaviest and the sky was red, an older soldier -- Jerry Patton -- put a hand on his back and told him to think of it all as Fourth-of-July fireworks and go to sleep. His red hair had a brightness backlit by the flares, and he touched Sherman's back and said, Go to sleep. He came from the East Coast and he was smart-mouthed and smooth and beautiful, or so said the French girls who called like birds to the soldiers on their marches through town, beau, and he was all of twenty-one and saying, Go to sleep. When his hand shook on Sherman's back, it was not fear of the guns, but something else, and later they would not speak of it. They would not speak of how one night in war-torn France, under a burning sky, they lay too close and touched too softly and did not sleep.
"I was with a girl, the other night," said Trapper.
Sherman put his glass down.
"What?"
"My wife knew. She didn't say, but she knew. I was with a girl in another hotel. Another town." He shook his head and smiled ambiguously. "You know, that's all it's ever been. Just a lot of other towns, all my life. Sometimes I think I haven't been in town since we got married."
Sherman averted his eyes, resting one hand on the rim of his glass.
"I thought maybe if I took her on a road trip, something would be different," Trapper continued. "But there's always somebody in the hotel lobby, or at the next table at dinner...." He noticed that Sherman was avoiding his gaze. "Sorry. You wanna talk about something else?"
"I think you should go back to your room, Trapper."
"It's kinda late for that," said Trapper. "I can't sleep, anyway. Two an' a half goddamn years, and I still dream about the war sometimes."
Sherman looked at him -- at that brief pain that swelled and ebbed like a tide in his eyes -- and felt something catch and hold between them. He returned to his drink, and momentarily he asked, "You cheat in Korea?" No need to confirm it was Korea -- it was in both of their faces.
"She knew," said Trapper fiercely. "It was all right. She had things here, too, and she knew. That's not really cheating."
"Of course it is," said Sherman, but gently. Trapper, his mouth set in a fine, distinct line, waited for more -- condemnation? --, but it didn't come. The light didn't reach his eyes, but that was all right, because they weren't all there anyway; it played in his hair and it was dangerous as an enemy flare, foreign and brilliant and beau-- "Another beer, please," said Sherman. The bartender slid it to him.
"Thought you didn't want any more," observed Trapper.
"This is the last one." Sherman downed it quickly and climbed off of his stool. "That should be your last, too. Go back to your room, why don't you?"
"I can't find a strange hotel drunk in the middle of the night."
"I'm just down the road," said Sherman. "I'll show you the way."
"All right," said Trapper, that grin touching his lips again. "For that, I'll take care of the bill."
Once he had paid for them both, they made their way to the door, where Trapper fell a step behind Sherman, following his lead. The darkest hour of the night had come and gone; now the sky was touched in places by diffuse light, and the streetlamps blurred gray. The storefronts were gray as well -- everything was gray but the horizon and Trapper's flushed face, sliding from shadow to light when Sherman glanced back over his shoulder.
They stopped at a street corner, and Sherman pointed to the building across the intersection.
"That's it."
"Thank you," replied Trapper quietly.
Sherman pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead for a moment, closing his eyes.
"I'm going to regret this in the morning."
"What, that third drink?" Trapper was laughing, almost at his ear, and Sherman swung around and caught the laugh between his lips, softly, putting a steadying hand on Trapper's elbow. The kiss was brief: two seconds at most, clumsy and cold and almost motionless, and then it was over.
Trapper stepped back and scrutinized Sherman, his face carefully expressionless.
"You heard what I said, didn't you? I've got a wife."
"So do I," said Sherman with strange dignity. "Go home to yours. And stay in town."
They left each other in the grayness. Trapper would drive away with his family in the morning and find Mount Rushmore, and Mildred would come home four days later with souvenirs in her suitcase and family gossip on her lips. That night, though, Trapper returned to a darkened room and his side of the mattress, and Sherman let himself back into his house and found his empty bed without the light. They lay too still and too quiet, under the echo of old shellfire, and they did not sleep.
On Friday, Sherman spoke to Radar on the telephone. Radar always had all of the news, somehow: Father Mulcahy's trying to have his hearing treated, sir; Major Houlihan's settling in at her new hospital; Soon-Lee's pregnant; Major Winchester got another article published in The New England Journal of Medicine; BJ's Erin is saying whole sentences now; and Hawkeye -- barest pause, an answer to a question not yet asked -- isn't taking calls yet... I'll talk to BJ again.... It was more or less what Sherman had expected to hear, until Radar said something in an offhand way: maybe Trapper knows what Hawkeye's up to. They... they were close, too.
A stray thought shifted then, like water settling obscurely into the lowest point in his mind, and he knew why he had recognized the name, even if it didn't matter any longer. Sherman had come home, and in time he would tell Mildred what she needed to know; Trapper had come home to live like an out-of-towner and would never tell any of it; but they were the same, at base, drawn together in their sameness. Even in the middle of the night in a crowded bar in Hannibal, Missouri, they couldn't entirely forget those private but shared things half a world away.
In the end, it's true, in the way all clich�s are true, discredited because no one wants to believe that humanity is so predictable:
You really can't go home again.
~Fin~
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