Chapter Text
December 1, 1969
“You should’ve seen the other guy,” Buck says, more cavalierly than he feels, experimentally wiggling his fingers beneath the bag of ice Steve had placed over his sore hand. Nothing broken, he can tell, but he’ll probably have a nice bruise come morning.
“Where’d you get him?” Steve asks, unbuckling Roz’s harness and easing the prosthetic arm off his left shoulder.
“Clipped his jaw, I think,” Buck says. “Got him in the nuts, too. That felt good.”
Steve chuckles, though Buck can tell he doesn’t find it all that funny.
The fight had been a stupid one, but one he’d been spoiling for since he arrived at Empire State University the year before on the GI Bill. At 27, he’s eight years older than the rest of the sophomore class, with two years in Vietnam under his belt, a prosthetic arm named after Rosalind Russell, a Purple Heart, and a Bronze star he’s never told anyone about.
Suffice it to say, he’s got no patience for the Ivy League student activists protesting a war they don’t know a goddamn thing about. Buck thinks the war’s bullshit too, but at least he earned his perspective the hard way—all these kids know about it they learned from Life Magazine.
And he can ignore a lot—being called a baby killer, being told he deserved to lose more than his arm for what he did over there—but even he hadn’t become cynical enough to stand by while the kids decided the most effective way to change the course of the war they hated was to set fire to the ROTC building on campus. What they don’t understand—what they would never understand—is that even bad wars are usually fought by good men.
Or that’s what he tries to tell himself, anyway.
Sometimes it even works.
So yeah, he’d thrown a punch; the kid had grabbed Roz, Buck had panicked and punched him in the groin to make him let go, and that ended it fast. Except that the kid hadn’t let go of Roz right away, and when he buckled over and stumbled back, he’d given her a good hard yank as he fell, leaving her hanging limp and useless at his side.
“You keep any replacement parts around?” Steve lifts an already-fraying end of loose cord up for him to see. “Looks like you snapped a cable.”
“Both of them, I think,” Buck says glumly. “The hooks are dead, too.”
Steve swears softly and locates the other loose cord and deems it too fine to splice. “I don’t suppose we can jerry-rig something to get you through the weekend, can we?”
“No, don’t mess with her. I’ll make an appointment at the VA on Monday,” Buck says. “And don’t worry about me. I can manage for a few days.”
“I know you can,” Steve says, placing the dead arm on Buck’s tiny kitchen table between them. “You want to talk about it?”
“He deserved it,” Buck says flatly. To be honest, it had felt pretty damned good to know he could still get the better of someone. “I’m not sorry.”
“Buck.”
Buck scowls and slides his hand out from under the ice pack, taking the dripping bundle to the sink to drain. “You want some coffee?” he asks to make nice, spooning the grounds into the percolator before Steve even answers, because he already knows he’ll say yes. Steve’s a security guard on the graveyard shift at the Red Hook shipping terminal, and Buck had hated to wake him up when he called this afternoon, but his fingers had been too stiff after the punch to get Roz’s buckles undone and honestly he didn’t know who else to call.
It’s been three months since Steve first took Buck home after work one night, and they’d been together ever since. He’s never met anyone like him. Courtly, sensitive, and artistic, Steve has a calm steadiness about him, as if there’s no situation he can’t handle, and in bed, Buck’s been delighted to discover, that translates into an unflappable curiosity about the many permutations of pleasure available between two men.
They’ve never labeled what they have—they don’t call it dating, don’t call each other boyfriends—but he’d known in his bones that it meant he could call Steve for help and that he’d roll out of bed on four hours of sleep and come all the way up to the Upper West side from Brooklyn without question.
Buck’s just setting the mug of coffee on the table when the phone rings, and he sighs. He knows he should have stayed for the police to arrive, but he was afraid that if he’d stuck around any longer, he would have hurt that boy a lot more than he already had. Still, there were plenty of people who could have identified him.
He braces himself and then answers the phone.
“Jimmy?” his sister Rebecca says, her voice shaking, and Buck’s blood turns cold.
As best as anyone could tell, George Barnes had a heart attack while feeding the pigs that afternoon. He’d died instantly, Becky says, but he’d lain out there for nearly three hours before Buck’s mother got home from her job at the library to find his half-frozen body lying next to the trough. If there was any blessing at all, it was that he’d died on the outside of the fence because if he’d been inside the pen, it was unlikely that there would be much of his body left to bury.
The whole of Moscow, Indiana, would likely turn out for the funeral, Buck thinks, for though George was a lousy farmer, he’d been a good, well-liked man—a deacon at church, president of the local VFW, Boy Scout troop leader—and a decent husband and father, too. George wasn’t an affectionate man, but Buck had always gotten along well with him before their falling out, and in his more reflective moments Buck would admit that all he’d ever wanted to do was make his dad proud.
And now all Buck can think about is how badly he’d failed.
Steve leaps into action, taking the phone from him and ordering Buck to pack and change into traveling clothes. Buck doesn’t question it, just goes into his bedroom and does as he’s told, only vaguely aware that he can hear Steve calling the bar to let them know that he won’t be able to come into work this weekend, calling airlines about evening flights to Indianapolis.
Meanwhile, Buck packs his things carefully and methodically, grateful that the added complication of folding his clothes without Roz requires just enough concentration to keep him from falling apart right then and there. He packs too much—shirts and sweaters and corduroys and jeans and the new dark gray suit he’d splurged on that summer and the navy tie because it’s the soberest one he owns—and when he’s done he has to put a knee on his suitcase to buckle it shut.
He’s just pulling on a fresh shirt when Steve comes into the bedroom to inform him he’s found a direct flight leaving in two hours, but his hand’s shaking so hard he can’t button it.
Wordlessly, Steve steps forward and buttons it for him, planting a small kiss on his forehead when he reaches the top. He gathers Buck’s loose left sleeve in his hand.
“Pins?” he asks.
Buck nods toward a dusty dish of diaper pins on the dresser. He almost never uses them anymore—he hasn’t left the house once without Roz since the day he got her, and at home he usually just knots up his sleeve to keep it out of the way. But he can’t get a coat on over that, and Steve knows it.
Steve carefully folds Buck’s sleeve up and pins it at the shoulder, then plucks and smooths it so it lies neatly over his stump. Buck turns to look at himself in the mirror to inspect Steve’s work, disoriented a little by the sight of it. There’s no hiding Roz’s hook—no pretending that arm is real anymore—but at least with her he’s still got two of them. She’s nowhere near as good as a real arm, but he can do most everything he needs to with her, and knowing he has to go out into the world—to go home to bury his goddamn father—without her feels like going into battle with an empty gun.
“Thanks,” Buck says, surprised by how strangled his voice sounds. And then, balling his hand into a fist: “Fuck.”
“Hey,” Steve says, reaching for him and drawing him into a hug. “Come here.”
“Don’t,” Buck says, backing away because he can’t bear to be hovered over right now. “I mean, thank you, but I have to—I just have to get home, okay?”
“Okay, Buck,” Steve says softly. “Whatever you need.”
It’s only Buck’s third time flying and his first trip on a civilian plane. He finds it unexpectedly pleasant in a banal sort of way—just a bunch of ordinary citizens on an oversized bus casually overcoming the laws of physics to get where they need to go. It’s oddly soothing.
He tries to distract himself by rereading the Hemingway novel he needs to write a paper about for his American Modernists final, but his eyes keep sliding aimlessly over the words and out the window, lingering on the bright speckled spatter of cities and towns and the smaller flecks of farms gliding past below them in the darkness.
His father had worked so hard to keep the tiny spark of their own farm alight, somehow managing to break even most years but never able to get enough ahead to make the kind of improvements or hire enough people to help the operation grow into something profitable. All he needed was one really good year, he liked to say, but the good years never came. And then the very bad year came, and that was the year they never did manage to recover from. In one of the last conversations they had before Buck reported for duty, when they split a bottle of Jim Beam on the back porch after his last dinner at home, he admitted that he wished he could have stayed in the Army, that he’d always been a better soldier than a farmer.
George had enlisted after Pearl Harbor, knowing full well it might be the last time he saw his wife of less than a year, that he might never meet the baby she was already carrying. He spent the next three years in North Africa and Italy before being transferred to France and Germany for the last 11 months of his war.
He would have stayed in the Army after the peace if frostbite hadn’t claimed most of the toes of his left foot toward the end of February of ’45. Instead, he’d come home with nightmares and a limp to a wife whose voice he’d forgotten the sound of and a son he’d never met, and tried to remember exactly what it was he’d been fighting for. He got to work on making a daughter and took over his father’s farm the year after that.
He never spoke of his time at war, but three times a year—Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Veteran’s Day—Buck’s father and his buddies from the VFW put their uniforms back on and marched in the parades before regrouping at the veterans’ cemetery outside of town with their rifles to honor the men who’d died in service to their country. The town would gather to watch the men fire a three-volley salute while one Boy Scout from the high school lowered the flag to half-mast and another squeaked out Taps on a trumpet. As a child, Buck loved to watch his dad get ready for these parades, watching in rapt awe as his father solemnly buttoned up his jacket and straightened his service pins, and for most of his childhood was convinced his father was the reason they’d won the whole war.
Sometimes when his father wasn’t around, he’d sneak into his parents’ bedroom and put on his father’s service cap, balancing it carefully on his little head so it wouldn’t fall over his eyes, and stand up straight as he could in the full-length mirror so he could practice his salute. (His father had taught him how—shoulders back, chest up, chin out, elbow at 45 degrees, wrist straight, hand flat, thumb tucked.)
He’d planned to join the Army himself after high school—motivated equally to live up to his dad’s legacy and to get his queer ass the hell out of southern Indiana—but that was the year a tornado tore the roof off the pig barn and killed almost half their stock. So he’d stayed home instead, thinking it would only take a year or two to help his father rebuild. Five long years later, they were still in the red and Buck had made peace with the fact that the farm would always have to come first when he got his letter from the Draft Board.
He’d talked to his father about requesting a hardship deferment on account of the farm—and God knows one look at their ledger would have been all he needed to get it—but his father wouldn’t hear of it. With deadly seriousness, he told Buck it was an honor and a privilege to serve one’s country, that duty always demanded sacrifice, and that if it meant he’d have to shoulder more of the load at home while Buck was away, it was a small price to pay.
Of course, it wasn’t until he got to Vietnam that he came to understand how much of the virtue of war had just been rationalization in disguise. It was true he had witnessed acts of bravery and heroism that no one at home would ever truly understand, but those bright flashes of humanity were easily swamped by the relentless waves of blood and brutality that threatened to drown them all.
And, well, if duty demanded sacrifice, she sure got one.
When he got off the plane from Hawaii in California after his discharge—his stump still bandaged, his leg still a little numb from the surgery on his spine—he discovered that his father had taken a bus all the way to Los Angeles to meet him so he wouldn’t have to fly the rest of the way home alone. George had tried, not all that successfully, to conceal his shock at Buck’s appearance, but the only thing he said about it out loud was a gruff joke about them having matching limps. Buck was grateful for that—he didn’t want to talk about it and wasn’t sure he ever would, and going out for a supper of burgers and milkshakes before turning in early to drink cheap bourbon and silently watch the Cubs on the fritzy television in their motel room was exactly what he needed.
That night, though, he’d woken with a start around three to the faint sound of crying, and simultaneously realized that his father’s bed was empty and that the sound was coming from the bathroom. It was too much to bear, knowing his father was sobbing on the other side of the wall, so Buck had pulled on a t-shirt and shuffled painfully out to the balcony to smoke cigarette after cigarette until he heard his father go back to bed. Neither one of them spoke of it in the morning.
And for months afterward, he gravitated to his father’s silence as a way to escape his mother’s incessant fretting over him. Most days, he just followed his father around like a duckling as he did the chores to build back the strength in his weak leg, doing what little he could to speed the work, only speaking as much as was necessary to get the job done. But sometimes they would talk, in the quiet of the barn when the pigs were out, and George would tell him a little about his war and Buck would tell him a little about his—the good parts, mostly, the funny moments in camp and the close calls they could laugh about later. Only once, not long after Buck got Roz and was still learning how to use her, did George speak of the grief he’d felt when he first saw his foot after the frostbite had been cut away. Buck had said nothing in reply because there was nothing that could be said that they both didn’t already know, but it had made him feel a little less lonely about it all the same.
They had fallen out slowly over that spring, between the day Buck realized that he was never going to be able to return to farm work and the day George finally accepted it. By the time he did accept it, it was too late—his denial had seeped too deep into the cracks and pores of their bond to repair.
What George never did accept was Buck’s decision to go to a fancy private college in New York when the state university at Bloomington was perfectly good, and so much closer to home.
And Buck had made the mistake of telling them the real reason why: that he’d never wanted to stay in Indiana to begin with, and that the GI Bill was his best ticket away from a life he’d never intended to lead. By the time Buck boarded the bus for New York that August, the resentment was so thick between them that he and his father could barely look each other in the eye.
Buck hadn’t been home in the year and a half since, not even for holidays. He called home once a month, but had only spoken to his father a handful of times, mostly to reassure him that school was going well and that he had enough money. The last time had been Thanksgiving, a week and a half before.
He wonders which cluster of lights is Moscow, which tiny spark down there is the farm. How long it would take to go out, he doesn’t know.
He’s pretty sure it won’t take long.
Buck’s little sister Becky picks him up at the airport, and by quarter after eleven, they’re pulling up to the weathered two-story house they’d grown up in. A faded and mildewed yellow ribbon still flutters on the big tree out front, first tied there when he was shipped overseas. Why his mother never took it down, he doesn’t know.
There’s a strange car parked next to his father’s truck in the yard and most of the lights are on.
“Who else is here?” Buck asks.
“I don’t know. Martha Phillips was here when I left,” Becky says, taking Buck’s suitcase from him. His back’s starting to scream from the fight and the long day of travel, and there’s not enough chivalry in the world to help him object. “Come on,” she says. “Everything’s more or less exactly where you left it.”
When he steps on the bottom stair to the porch and hears the familiar squeak, it feels like he never left. The last time he felt time vanish like that was when he’d come home from the war, and a jolt of pain judders through his back and down his leg as if to remind him that it wasn’t really all that long ago.
He grits his teeth and adjusts the strap of his backpack, and presses on.
“Momma?” Becky calls as they drop the bags in the front hall. “We’re home. Jimmy’s here.”
Buck hears a light quick step approaching—decidedly not his mother’s—down the upstairs hall toward the stairs, and Buck’s heart pauses when he realizes it’s Natalie Romano.
“Hi Jim,” she says softly as comes down the stairs. She’s hardly changed in the five years since he saw her last—her hair is still as vibrantly red as ever and there’s still a puckish glint in her eyes as she spots him.
They’d begun dating their senior year of high school, and even after she moved to Bloomington for college, Buck would drive out on Saturday nights, where they’d go to the movies or go dancing or anything else that caught their fancy. He didn’t mind kissing her, but the rest—well, he’d tried, he really did, because the things he wanted seemed impossible, and he knew he wasn’t getting out anytime soon. He’s not sure how convincing the act was, but if she was disappointed, she never let on.
His reprieve came during her junior year, when she met Alex Schuster. Alex was handsome and charming and intelligent, a licensed pilot and cadet major in the Air Force ROTC, and honestly, neither one of them could keep their eyes off him.
Alex was a kind man, one who respected Natalie’s wit and intelligence, who rightfully understood she would always be twice the man he could ever hope to be. And it was good, and they were happy, but that didn’t stop Natalie from calling Buck one night and offering to marry him instead. She was a little drunk and Buck knew it, but the offer had itched in his mind a lot longer than it should have because he knew she meant it.
He knew they could never give each other what they needed, but he wondered how bad it would be if they tried. They’d always had fun together, at least, and that was more than a lot of couples ended up with. And it wasn’t like there were men lining up to suck his dick in southern Indiana. At least with her he wouldn’t be alone.
But she deserved more than just not being alone, and he knew it.
Alex and Natalie got married in June of ‘65. Alex had already been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Air Force by then, and instead of a honeymoon, they’d packed up their car and moved to Texas. It was the last time Buck saw her.
Until now.
She pauses at the foot of the stairs, her eyes briefly ghosting over his left shoulder before reaching out to hug him. She’s not wearing her ring. “Hey, stranger,” she says.
“Nat,” Buck says, holding her tight and kissing her cheek. “You’re back.”
She nods but doesn’t elaborate. “She’s upstairs. Dad gave her a pill, so she won’t be awake much longer. We can talk afterward.”
“She moved back after her husband died,” Becky says softly as they climb the stairs. “He was killed in the war. I thought you knew.”
“Oh,” Buck says, for some reason feeling more grief for Natalie’s loss than his own. “No, I didn’t know.”
Buck tries not to look at the family photos lining the wall on the way to his parents’ bedroom—the baseball and ballet photos, the birthday parties and the graduation pictures—but he stops for a moment in front of one taken when he was about nine years old, and Becky just four. It had been an unusually good year and Buck’s father had surprised the family with the only vacation his family ever took. They’d rented a cabin on a lake in Michigan, and to Buck it had seemed like the ocean—he’d never seen water that big. For one glorious week, he’d just run himself ragged in the sun till he burned red, swimming till he wrinkled like a raisin, hunting bugs in the woods until he was polka-dotted with insect bites.
On their last day there, his father had posed the family in front of the water and set the timer on his camera so they could have a souvenir. Becky was squalling and his mother’s eyes were closed and his father was reaching up to catch the fisherman’s hat a gust of wind had knocked off his head with a sneeze-like grimace of surprise on his face and Buck was silly-faced, his eyes crossed and tongue out and making bunny ears behind his sister’s head. They’d laughed so much when they saw it that they’d decided to frame it.
“Jim,” Becky says softly, urging him forward.
Winnie is sitting on the side of the bed in her nightgown, her book of Gospels open on her lap. Buck freezes for a moment in the door: His mother looks as though she’s aged a decade since he saw her last and from the slackness in her jaw he knows she’s already half-stoned out of her mind.
“Momma?” Becky says softly to get her attention. “Jim’s here.”
“Jimmy,” Winnie says blearily, looking up at him with a dazed smile. Whatever Dr. Romano had given her was strong. She reaches vaguely toward him. “Come let me see you.”
“Hi, Momma,” he says, leaning forward to kiss her. “I’m so sorry.”
“He didn’t suffer,” Winnie says, then reaches out to take his hand. “That’s all we can ever ask for.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Buck agrees.
She finally manages to focus her eyes on him. “Where’s your arm?”
“In the shop for a tune-up,” he says.
“Maybe we can borrow another while you’re here,” she says faintly, and behind him Buck hears Becky swallow a surprised giggle.
“Let’s get you in bed before that pill starts to work, Momma,” she says. “We’re both staying here tonight. You come find us if you need anything, all right?”
Winnie nods. “All right. Yes,” she says, looking around the bed. “I think I should rest a while.”
They help her into bed and tuck her in, taking turns to kiss her on the forehead before turning out the light, as if they’re the parents and Winnie their child. She’s snoring gently by the time they pull the door closed.
“We got anything to drink in this house?” Buck mutters as they head back down the stairs, and Becky laughs softly.
They find Natalie in the kitchen, washing dishes. There’s a half-full bottle of Jim Beam on the table and she nods toward it, inviting him to help himself. He doesn’t want to wrestle with the ice tray in front of her so he pours three glasses, neat, and hands them around.
“To the old man,” Buck says, and they drank.
Becky glances back and forth between Buck and Natalie and then clears her throat. “It’s been a long day. Think I’ll turn in.”
“’Night, Becky,” Natalie says. Then, to Buck: “There are some sandwiches in the fridge if you’re hungry.”
He suddenly realizes he’s starving—he hadn’t eaten since lunch, and it’s nearly midnight. He piles a few on a plate and Natalie joins him at the table while he eats.
“Thank you for doing all this,” he says.
“It’s nothing,” she says, waving his gratitude away. “I know what it’s like.”
“Becky told me. I’m sorry.”
Natalie flashes a tight smile. “We were in Texas so long we were starting to think he wasn’t going to be invited to the dance, but he finally got his orders in May. Didn’t last three months, it turned out.”
“I knew a boy who didn’t last three days,” Buck says, realizing even as he’s speaking that it’s cruel to one-up her like this. He can’t even remember the kid’s name, just how surprised he looked when the bullet went through his throat. He’d been younger than Becky. Still had zits on his chin.
“But you came home,” she says, gesturing toward him with her drink.
“Most of me did.”
“Enough of you did,” she says, kicking him lightly under the table. “Self-pity doesn’t suit you.”
“It’s gallows humor, Natalie. There’s a difference.”
“Can I ask you something?” she asks. “Do you regret going?”
“I don’t know,” Buck says honestly. “Sure as hell wouldn’t go back, though.”
“He was proud of you, you know?” Natalie says. “Every time I saw him at church he’d go on about how hard you were working in New York, how busy you were studying that you didn’t have time to visit, how you were going to be the president of a big company one day.”
Buck swallows. “He did not.”
“I wouldn’t lie about that.” Natalie carries her glass to the sink to wash. “He thought the world of you.”
“He might have thought to say something about that.” He refills his glass and pushes his plate away. Natalie leaned over and hugs his shoulders from behind.
“He did,” she says, kissing the top of his head before reaching around to take his plate to the sink, too. “He told everyone who would listen.”
A few minutes later, he follows her out onto the porch as she leaves, and lights a cigarette as he watches her pull out and turn down the long drive toward the road. He reaches up to his chest reflexively as he’s been doing all night to run his thumb under Roz’s harness, and shakes his head. Roz is heavy and uncomfortable and only good for half of nothing, but Christ, he feels naked without her right now.
He shivers coatless against the cold but doesn’t go inside—instead, he goes out into the front yard and looks up. After a year and a half in New York, he’s forgotten just how many stars the sky can hold. The bigness of the sky, the emptiness of a landscape devoid of any other buildings besides the hulking dark of the pig barn and, almost on the horizon, the lights of the Phillips house, feels like drowning.
Steve’s already at work by now, but Buck wishes he could call him, thinks he could use a bit of that steadiness right now. He wishes he’d let him give him that hug. Wishes for a lot of things, to be honest. Wishes he could be here somehow, while he’s at it.
He flicks his cigarette out into the gravel of the driveway and goes to bed.