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“Can’t sleep either?” Lou said.
Bucky shrugged. “I don’t know how Dugan does it.”
Lou struck a match and held it to the tips of their cigarettes. His cheeks hollowed as he took a long initial pull of them both, then handed Bucky’s Lucky Strike back to him.
“Thanks,” Bucky said.
“Di niente,” said Lou, who was the one who did the translating for them with the locals. “Never thought I’d dream of being back at Basic. But they kept us busy, at least. This is bullshit. Making us wait like this. Operation FUBAR is what they oughtta call it.”
“You probably just can’t sleep without a stink over you, Jersey boy.”
“Please, I’m next to Billie Do tonight. There is no lack of stink.”
Bucky snorted. “After the kinda eggs the Heinies been dropping on us, I find the sort he lays almost refreshing.”
Lou didn’t laugh. He didn’t laugh at most of Bucky’s jokes. “You always talk like you’re looking on the bright side, Barnes,” he said, tipping his head up to the sky, then back down. There were stars up there; lots of stars, only partly obscured by the distant hanging remnants of battle smokescreen and the closer cloud of cigarette smoke.
“It’s a talent,” Bucky said.
“You talk like that,” Lou said. “And yet, here you are.”
“Maybe I got me a sugar report to read,” Bucky said. He did, in fact, have Steve’s letter and the drawings he’d sent neatly folded up in his front pants pocket.
“All that reading in the dark you do, you’re gonna go blind,” said Lou. “Perfect vision or not.”
“Better than perfect,” Bucky said. “You’re just jealous.”
“Yeah, real jealous of you pissing down your leg up a tree shooting pigeons.”
“I think you only call them pigeons in the city. I think out here they’re doves.”
“La colomba,” said Lou. “Well, they’re still pigeons to me when you make me boil ‘em to get the feathers off. Talk about fuckin’ duck soup.”
Bucky shrugged. “It’s called delegating. I shoot, you pluck.”
Lou wasn’t listening. “Dio santo. What I would not do for a piece of colomba Pasquale, like my nonna used to give us. A nice fluffy piece of colomba Pasquale to steal and go eat on the fire escape. City boys like us. What’d we do to earn this shit?”
“Aw, Lou.”
“Don’t aw, Lou me.”
“Tell it to the Chaplain, Lou.”
Lou cut a glance sideways at Bucky and elbowed him. Bucky elbowed back.
“Hey, did I show you the picture my friend Steve sent of the Chrysler building?” Bucky said.
“Only fourteen times.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“You artistic types. Getting all carried away,” Lou said, dropping his cigarette into the wet grass. He didn’t step on it. Bucky watched it smolder and wink out with a tiny, faint hiss.
“Screw you, Lou.”
“Not just artistic; poetic, too.”
“It’s a talent,” Bucky said.
“You’ve got talents coming out of your ears, don’t you?” Lou said. “But some of us can’t see in the dark. Show me the damn picture in the morning.”
“Okay,” Bucky said.
His cigarette had burned down almost to the filter paper, and he’d barely taken a puff.
“I’m gonna go for a walk,” he told Lou, who threw him a lazy arcing salute and tipped his head up to look at the stars. Probably imagining the iron grating of a fire escape around him like the comforting bars of a cage.
The cigarette had woken him up, even as little of it as he’d had. He breathed in the cool sharp air while he walked around the perimeter of the camp, nodding at sentries, at the poor guys who’d pulled guard duty for some small infraction or just been unlucky. The quietest darkest part of the camp was the closed-down mess tent, and he headed back that way, navigating by the distant spears of a stand of cypress. He moved through the closer trees, which had thicker trunks and spreading branches. He didn’t know the name of them. He had climbed more trees than he knew the names of. He had at one point thought he might die up a tree he didn’t know the name of; back home maybe he’d get a book on arboreal studies or something.
The moon was almost full, and the quality of light here was so much different from back home. Back home it was all blurry with reflected streetlights. Here it was blurry with a heavy hanging natural darkness, the lack of streetlights.
Steve would’ve loved to draw this. He loved light and darkness, maybe because he couldn’t see color so well. He always drew pictures as if they were set in the crepuscular hours when he tried to use colors, checking in with Bucky to see if he’d picked the right ones. A little fuzzy. A little dim. A little bit intimately blurred: the world seen through eyes that weren’t only his own. Bucky figured his better than perfect vision was a kind of compensation, when he tried to help out. But then he wondered if it weren’t a kind of blindness too.
These were late-night thoughts. These were the Midnight Blues. The Moonlight Serenade you got from the echo of shells and machine guns.
Go tell it to the Chaplain, he told himself, wondering what in the hell would happen if he did.
I admit, I like it when you get poetic, Steve had written in his last letter.
He’d written about getting drenched by runoff in Chicago. Bucky pictured it, Steve with his hair all damp and plastered to his face and his shirt stuck to his skinny body, like when they’d opened up fire hydrants in Brooklyn last summer in the heat.
Bucky didn’t picture, and tried not to remember, the cold-hot spray of blood on his own face when he’d sliced through that German soldier’s jugular. The spray like a fire hydrant screwed open in the summer. How it slowed to a gurgling trickle pretty soon.
He’d wound up behind the mess hall and for a second, lost in the snarl of his own thoughts, he didn’t recognize what he was seeing. Bucky took a quick step back once he had.
It was a shape, moving in the darkness. About sixty yards away. An undulating moving shape. A man, shoulderblades pressed back up against a tree and legs braced, shoved out, head flung back so Bucky could see the clear pale line of his throat, the bob of his Adam’s apple, the glint of his gritted teeth in moonlight.
The figure at his feet was just a jumble for a moment. Sprawled limbs. Dark. Bent-forward. Then Bucky’s eyes adjusted and he saw it was a man, also in uniform. He had his knees splayed out awkwardly, and his body was undulating, too, in time with the standing men’s thrusts. He must be tall, because he had to hunch over and put one hand down on the ground to get the right angle. His long back twisted under his jacket. Bucky saw the way his head tilted, straining upward. One of his fists bunched in the grass for traction. His other hand was braced on the standing man’s leg, tight, fingers dug into his thigh.
The first guy, the one standing, reached down and Bucky saw long pale fingers twist into the kneeling man’s hair. Then they released, just cupping his skull, resting on the top of his head like a blessing.
Bucky sucked in his breath so hard he didn’t even notice until he’d bitten his own bottom lip. He took a quiet step back, trying to fade into the trees.
Should he be watching this?
Well, no.
He couldn’t look away.
He’d already been thinking about Steve’s letter, gonna go blind that way. So his mind had already been drifting a little, drifting on sleeplessness and pent-up energy from a body used to the march or long hours of steady focus behind his rifle.
He stared toward the two figures and the hand he’d had in his pocket, where he had Steve’s letters, dug deeper in. Deeper in the front of his pocket, touching his cock through the fabric down near the pocket seam. He was getting hard, burning through his pants. Sticky with sweat and heat already. Slick. He could almost reach himself, dug in through the fabric of his pocket; almost but not quite.
He watched the faster and faster movement of the one guy’s head, up and down, and the other one’s hand clenching in and out on his hair. The standing man had the insignia--Bucky squinted--on his sleeve--of a First Sergeant; the insignia that looked like a little eye staring back at him, chevrons on rockers. His face was all twisted up. He had fine combed-back hair, he was clean-shaven and big across the shoulders, bunched up with power. Like an ox, a bull, strong-jawed. The kneeling man he couldn’t see as well; he wasn’t in the light.
The eye on the standing man’s sleeve watched Bucky back. He felt his own mouth open and close.
If it was him and Steve he’d have to kneel like that, legs splayed open, because he was taller, too, though not as lanky as the guy sucking off the First Sergeant.
Why’d he always picture himself the one on his knees?
His hand had wormed its way into his pants somehow, under the waistband where it had gotten loose. He had dropped some weight in the field again.
He thrust against his own hand, leaning his other hand on a tree. Like the standing man whose big frame braced against the tree, legs dug in and straining, and Bucky must have made a noise, then, because the standing man snapped his head down and stared.
Straight at him.
It wasn’t just the diamond eye of his First Sergeant’s insignia looking at Bucky now, it was the man’s big stern face, eyes dark under his lowered brows, and Bucky whipped his hand out of his pants. Felt himself going soft, though he thought he had been pretty far gone. He stared back. The First Sergeant bared his teeth at him in the moonlight. Gritted them. And he dug his hands in hard to the kneeling man’s hair. The kneeling man had not looked around at all, had kept up his avid sucking.
The First Sergeant dug his fingers into the kneeling man’s hair and jerked his hips forward, slamming into the guy’s mouth, and his whole animal-muscular body gave a thick shudder. There was just a little moment where Bucky considered backing away and running for it. But he couldn’t make himself move. He watched the First Sergeant pull out of the kneeling guy’s mouth, stuff his limp wet cock back in his pants, and then shove the kneeling guy over. There was a quiet word between them and then the First Sergeant dragged the other man up by the collar and wound up and punched him in the jaw.
The man who had been giving the suckjob stumbled back. He really was very lanky, put together out of straws and pins. He had one hand up to his mouth, spitting, hair all in his face and disheveled where the First Sergeant had been gripping it, and he went sprawling down backwards again after he’d taken the punch, tripping over his own twisted feet in the dark.
The First Sergeant said something Bucky couldn’t make out and leaned over and spit at him, then looked back toward Bucky.
Bucky found he had taken a couple of steps forward, out into the light so they could see him. At least, the First Sergeant could. The other man was still on the ground with his hand on his face, but he was clambering up. He hocked up white and red strings of spit and semen and blood.
“Hey,” Bucky said, sharply, though the First Sergeant outranked him, because he couldn’t just watch this. “Hey, cut it out.” The First Sergeant just glared at him and turned his back, walking purposefully away. He was bigger than Bucky. A lot bigger. And Bucky wasn’t like Steve. What was he gonna do? He was dazed; it was dark.
“Don’t,” said the kneeling man, brokenly, pushing himself up, holding his lip.
“I’m sorry, are you all right?” Bucky said.
“Don’t--” The man hadn’t been talking to him, Bucky realized. He watched the man gather himself, his gawky limbs shaking, and hurry off after the First Sergeant, who had disappeared around the corner of the mess hall, striding big and purposeful as a rolling tank.
Bucky recognized him across the mess hall the next day at breakfast. How could he not? There weren’t that many tall lanky guys with split lips and black eyes and downcast expressions wandering around. He was a private, he saw, but he had the insignia of the Engineering Corps right beneath. Which might explain why he carried himself not at all like a soldier. He slouched, for one thing, all bones and drooping chin like a sad puppet. He was sitting alone, poking at his food.
Bucky slid in across the table, bumping his own plate down. Eggs and potatoes. Powdered eggs, but somehow they were still too wet.
“Hey,” he said.
The guy across the table started. He looked like he’d been dozing off, or maybe been about to start crying into his food.
“Sergeant,” he said back cautiously, squinting at Bucky like maybe he’d faked his way through the eye test to get into the damn Army. He winced when the motion tugged at his bruised eye.
“Raw meat,” Bucky suggested, pointing to the eye. “Which,” he added, realizing it, “we can’t get here.”
“I have arnica, but thank you, Sergeant.” He was looking at him warily, now, and Bucky thought he saw a flash of recognition in his face.
“You know,” Bucky said, looking studiously down at his plate, “I have a buddy back home who’s always getting himself punched, too.”
He glanced up. The skinny soldier across the way was looking at him with that little squint. He had faded-brown hair swept back from a widow’s peak and a small nose and a prominent round chin. He looked like he’d been assembled hastily out of spare parts. But his eyes were level and clever. “I can take a punch,” he told Bucky. “I mean, it’s happened before.”
“That’s what he says,” Bucky said, “But you shouldn’t have to. You need a guy to watch your back.”
“I know that.”
Bucky blinked, surprised at the calm, given the guy’d looked like he was about to crack about a minute before. He’d rallied. Maybe it was the lousy coffee. Bucky said, “What’s your name?”
“John.”
“Bucky. I mean, James; but it’s Bucky, and don’t you forget it.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
They shook hands over the breakfast table.
“Well, how about I watch your back for a little, John?” Bucky said, as they picked their forks up again.
“It’s rather my job to watch yours,” John said, taking a forkful of egg and frowning at it, then looking back up at Bucky. He had a little smile on his face now, one it looked like he’d had to think some to put there. “What I mean is, to make sure the enemy can’t.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“52nd Chemical Division, at your service. I’m the one who sent the first real smog up over the San Fernando Valley.”
“Neat! Really?”
John tilted his head. “We hadn’t gotten the particle size testing accurate enough at that point, so unfortunately the smoke settled into everyone’s homes and lawns. We did get some pushback from that. But we ran more tests; we got in touch with a couple of guys in New York, too. It turns out the optimal particle size for smoke screens is point-six--I’m sorry,” he said, blinking bemusedly at Bucky. “I’m sure I’m boring you.”
“No,” Bucky objected, “No, I’m serious, I think this stuff is really neat. I mean, I haven’t been to college or anything, but I read about it. I read a lot about the Stark Particle, and all. It’s--it’s electrical charges, right? That changes how stuff… spreads out?”
“Yes!” John said. He appeared to have entirely forgotten his food. “Yes, that’s it exactly. We had a lot of men who worked on cloud seeding. We could never create a cover quite as lasting as the Tule Fog we get back--”
“Tule Fog?”
“It’s, well, I’m from San Joaquin, so I grew up with it. It’s a very heavy, clinging white fog, but it happens to be the product of the particular atmosphere there. It’s somewhat similar here, especially near Etna, so we thought we might be able to replicate it, but so far we’ve had to use the thicker petroleum fog; it’s very crude.”
“Crude oil,” Bucky said, making a pun, and he grimaced, “Tell me about it, cleaning that stuff out is a drag.”
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s fine. It’s amazing. I’m amazed, keep going.”
“Are you…?”
“I’m not kidding. I’m. I try to take an interest. I have to take barometer readings a lot too for shooting, you know, so I can see how air pressure really… I feel it. I feel it how it works on the bullet drop, when I shoot.”
“You’d have to be shooting from rather far for the difference between 29 and 30 inches of pressure to have an effect,” John said, with that squint again.
“Try nine hundred yards.”
“Oh,” John said, quiet.
“I’m sorry,” Bucky said. “I’m bragging because. Because you’re a real scientist.”
“I hardly am,” John said awkwardly. “I’ve just been Infantry here for awhile until they called me up to do the smoke for you.”
“Why?”
“Some…” He paused. “You’re from the East Coast, right? I can sort of hear it in your accent.”
“Brooklyn,” Bucky said.
John sighed. “Yeah, back home in training… it’s the Southerners, I don’t mean to sound… it’s just different; I had a fella--I had a friend, a black soldier, and he was studying chemistry too, and so I thought I’d recommend him to work with me, but.” He bit at his already-bitten lip. “Not so much. I almost got a court-martial.”
“Southerners,” Bucky said. He reconsidered. “They’re not all bad, but wow. Lousy. You’re all right now?”
“Mostly,” said John.
“If you need someone to watch your back,” Bucky said.
“Same to you,” said John. He hurried on. “Not that I mean anything by it. I just meant the smokescreens.”
“Oh, yeah. Me too.”
They were quiet for a little while, eating. It looked like it hurt John some to chew. Bucky winced, watching him. Maybe it was a good thing the eggs were runny.
“It’s crazy,” Bucky said later, since he’d finished eating first and John was still looking down at his plate, one hand on his cheek and the other on his fork. “The idea of it. That the air has weight. Pressure. That there’s all this stuff in it, weighing it down.”