love song from a dog - Chapter 2 - Swifty_Fox (2024)

-*~*-

When Bucky Egan met Gale Cleven in flight school he’d taken one look at him and thought that’s what the princesses in his heroes tales were supposed to look like. If they had short hair and broad shoulders and a long square-jawed face that could be on movie screens across the country. If princesses came with deep midwestern voices and a habit of saying Ma’am like John Wayne and had hands with callouses from working horses and oil fields. Princesses weren’t men so Buck couldn’t be one, but it was close. It was close.

So that’s what cornflowers look like , he’d thought to himself about those blue eyes.

He’d given Gale his name because he didn’t know how else to make him his friend other than by force. Named him Buck because John was Bucky and because the Buck he had known as a kid had that same look in his eyes.

Like he knew someone was chasing him, but was too stubborn to look behind to see who it was.

Buck from Manitowoc; who was actually a very simple boy named Albert Green. Who tried to go by Albie but was stuck with ‘Buck’ due to unfortunate dental circ*mstances and the poor imagination of seven-year-olds. He had worn the name with pride either way, delighting at any attention at all.

Bucky had always pitied him, in some faintly disgusted way. He was different, albeit kind, and Bucky feared catching whatever it was that made him so.They hunted crawdads together because they were both there at the same times, but Bucky gave him little attention around school. He certainly never invited him to come play heroes and knights with the rest of the boys.

But Buck Cleven was a hero all on his own. He needed no invitation from Bucky, he didn’t need much of anyone if his initial protests were to be believed. Nonsense , Bucky had told him with a bold grin and a wound that still gaped raw in his chest, everyone needs someone. Even pretty boys like you .

He was quiet and humble in a way that John couldn’t be even if he wanted to be. He flew a ship like some men touched a woman’s body, all grace and confidence and wild desperation. He held himself above the rest of their men with easy aloofness without coming across as cold or arrogant. Buck challenged Bucky at every turn, matched him step for step, and nipped at his heels all the way. John had never met a man so thoroughly his equal and he sunk his claws in deep as they would go.

Buck Cleven was a real deal hero; not some little boy in a cape and a tin can crown. Unwaveringly brave, steady except when it was just the two of them. Steady when John no longer could be.

Knowing now, that the tie the two Bucks shared went beyond name and a hunted air. John wonders if it means something bigger than just happenstance.

The look Gale had given him in that train, a look of such infinite grief and tenderness had made something spark in his chest. He’d seen that look many times before, when he was very little, and exchanged between his parents. When his Father would have one of his moments and emotion so strong on his Ma’s face it might as well be spilling over her blouse in great rivulets of feeling.

He didn’t want to name it, because if he named it then he would have to acknowledge it. And if he acknowledged it he would have to do something about it.

That thing continues to follow him around. No , he thinks, if I pet you I will have to take you home with me and give you a name. There’s no room at the foot of my bed.

Things had gone wrong on that march, wronger than they’d planned and plotted for. The doorway of a cold apartment building yawns in front of John.

He rolls onto his side, crossing his arms across his chest, and squeezes his eyes shut. He’d begged an afternoon nap, complained of sore fingers from all the kitchen work. Ma Egan, clearly willing to indulge him anything after five years of silence, had sent him off with a kiss on his cheek and a cucumber sandwich he insisted she needn’t make.

It sits on the bedside table, grainy bread turning damp from the sliced vegetables and cheese.

He rolls to face the wall, settles further into the pillow, and squeezes his crossed arms together. The wood is cool against his forehead, sheets tangled around his feet because the peak of summer heat is beginning to creep across the Midwest

He thinks about calling Gale, dialing the digits he’d scrawled on a slip of paper shoved in his duffle bag and listen for the ring and click that meant connection. Gale’s familiar voice, disembodied as if he were a ghost tunneling into John’s ear. Curling up between his ears smokey and warm and chewing on toothpicks.

Well, I’ll be.

In John’s mind's eye, he would be fresh in from working the horses, tanned and relaxed and softly golden from the sun. Pleased to hear John calling, he’d greet him fondly, ask how homecoming has been.

“ Been a dream, Buck. Ma’s beside herself and Ed’s trying to catch me up on five years worth of town gossip and you know my Pops isn’t an emotional sort but he seems happy enough. Wants me to start working down at the radio station, can you believe that?”

John rolls on his back, drags a hand through his hair, and exhales out through his nose heavily.

“ I feel like I’ve been put back in a life I no longer am meant to live. I think it hurts my parents to look at me because I’m not the child they last saw. I don’t know who my sister is, she was only half-formed when I left and now she’s mostly grown. My dog isn’t my dog anymore.”

He sits up, presses the heels of his palms to his eyesockets, and circles them furiously until spots dance behind his lids.

“ Did you kiss your not-fiance when you got off the train, Buck? Do you two do that, just to keep up appearances? Do you feel anything from it, anything at all; is it possible to fake feelings for someone until you believe it?”

Ma Egan is in the kitchen when John shuffles in to ask for the keys to the truck. The urge to kick his feet is overwhelming. How many times had he had this exact interaction, eager to impress a girl or join his friends; promising to be back before dark and yes ma’am not a scratch on it I swear . Yes sir I’ll behave in a manner befitting this family.

He’s flown planes and saved boys from dying and he’s thirty goddamn years old.

His Ma doesn’t ask where he’s going, and that at least is different from being a child. He doesn’t offer the information but promises her anyway, not a scratch on it, Ma. She smiles at him, pinches his cheek, and tells him to be back for dinner.

It takes him a bit of driving, unfamiliar with this particular area of suburbs, to make his way back to his old stomping grounds. The patronage of his favorite bar is about the same; blue-collar workers and the occasional businessman looking for rougher fare, the same grouchy bartender and his wife who served the same menu they always had since they stopped kicking him out at sixteen. The same old men gathered around bottles of beer talking about the war. There’s new boys now, too. Scarred and battered and blind and limping and talking about their war too.

John’s not in uniform but he’s a hometown boy and there's a chorus of cheers when he’s recognized, round after round of slaps on the back and jests about his combat effectiveness and just how badly they whupped those no-good Nazis. He bears it because he knows how to work a crowd. He bears it because nobody’s going to want to bring the mood down, not even himself. Some of the boys get it, he can see it in their eyes.

The quiet ones, the hurt ones. The ones who lost, even if it was a victory on paper.

Nobody mentions his captivity.

They shove a beer in his hand, then a whiskey, then another beer, and then he’s somewhere close to buzzed and the smile on his face feels more like a blanket than a mask and he’s telling tall tales about wheelless landings and dogs ten-thousand feet in the air and Unicorn horns. He sings them Billie Holiday and Al Monroe and teaches them the Irish ditties he’d learned by heart. He doesn’t sing Fitzgerald.

Up at the wood bar polished by years of elbows and dirty rags, he orders a whiskey neat and a ginger beer and it’s not until both drinks are in his hand and he’s looking to his left that John remembers he’s drinking alone tonight.

He’s drinking alone from now on.

No Gale to his left, no Curt on the other side of him. Curt’s dead, has been dead for years now which is a jarring realization. Years . He would continue to be dead for years, and ‘Years’ would become longer and larger and more weighted with every passage of the sun. And someday instead of years John would measure his boys being gone in decades.

Grief was supposed to fade, but this one John thinks may only build.

Curt with his pale eyes that were always watching six different things at once. An eye on Bucky’s shenanigans, an eye on Buck’s quiet moods. Looking out for any discord amongst the men he could nudge Bucky to fix, an eye on John Brady who was as stickler as they came until someone got a couple of gins in him. Carrying Crosby back to base when he’d had one too many and was about the only one who could attempt to coax Jack Kidd to laughter with some guarantee of success.

John downs the whiskey and leaves the ginger beer on the bar top to weep condensation onto the stained wood.

He should call Gale tonight. He’d promised, the moment I’m back, Buck . But Buck has family, friends. A fiance even if it was mostly in name. He’s surely busy, loathed idleness in any form unless it was being a layabout with John. And even then, John had always been able to hear the inner cogs of his brain turning furiously, working over some thought or another with precision efficiency.

Gale should be at his elbow, in this sticky corner booth scrawled with names and dates and stained over stains with the bottom of glasses. Sipping his ginger beer quietly, leaning over to murmur in John’s ear now and then. Funny , so painfully funny if one knew to pay attention.

Bill Davis just struck out again , he’d maybe murmur in John’s ear, made a joke about birds that was so horrible she couldn’t even pity laugh. What man doesn’t know the difference between a pigeon and a duck?

“Got something on my face, pal?” a navy-dress soldier asks him and John realizes his staring into space had turned into staring absently at a stranger.

John grins, “Just a lot of Ugly,”

-*~*-

He licks the blood from his lips as he drives home, trickling from his already-swelling nose where the Navyman had landed a solid hit. The barkeep had thrown them both out, ordered them home to sober up and John had shook the man's hand before weaving back to the truck. It’s well past dinnertime, and he can hear his parents murmuring in the living room. Fitzgerald is playing from the quiet radio and he considers apologizing for missing dinner but his face hurts and his head is pounding and a set of sheets and pillows is beginning to feel like necessity rather than just something nice.

He’s not hungry, anyway.

-*~*-

“What’s flying like?” Edie asks him while they sit out in the sun. She’s taking in several skirts of their Ma’s that she’d handed down, colorful fabric splayed across her lap. John’s holding the pincushion so she doesn’t lose it, reading a Western paperback with one hand and retaining none of it. John fiddles with the dangling strawberry of the pincushion, turning it round in his fingers and hissing when he pricks his finger on a stray pin.

What was flying like?

Wonderful, breathtaking, unlike anything else you could imagine. Feeling the ground rush away, earths gravity desperately trying to hold you down where you belong but not strong enough in the face of sheer human ingenuity. The way clouds were wet and damp and cold and filled the cabin when they opened the bomb bay doors. How you could see the curve of the earth on the horizon line. How it could be night above the clouds and sunset below them and sometimes great towers of shadow would spread across a fluffy landscape, cast by a cloud bank miles higher than the rest. Like a mountain in the sky.

What was his flying like?

Terrifying if they were lucky, deadly if they weren’t. Screaming boys, dying boys, blood that froze in sheets that he slipped on if he wasn’t careful. Crosby’s vomit on his flight jacket and bullets clattering by his head that he can’t bother to dodge because what’s the point? If a shot is going to find him it’s going to find him. Fire and blood and ice and any ounce of luck they could claw and scrape together with trinkets and baubles.

Buck was at my wing and Curt at my six.

“I can’t describe it,” he says.

He thinks there must be something awful on his face, something accidentally too honest, because Edie’s neat brows draw together and she just nods.

“I had- I have. A friend named Buck Cleven,” he says because it feels to big to keep inside him. There’s an odd part of him that balks at speaking aloud, some inner voice that wants to keep Gale all to himself, locked behind stone walls and catapults and a drawbridge. This is mine, it’s mine and it’s not for anyone else.

“From Wyoming. He’s a Major like me,” he says.

“Is he handsome?” Edie asks, eyes sparking.

“He’s too old for you. And engaged,” He rolls his eyes in a move that feels authentic, “And what the hell do I know about something like that?”

“If he’s engaged he’s handsome,” Edie lofts, tossing her curls over her shoulder and somehow managing to speak around six pins between her lips.

It’s something he’s watched his mother do for years. It was something that always made him nervous and he watches her now out of the corner of his eye, expecting blood to well any moment. It never has and never does.

“Well there you have it, he’s handsome then.”

“What’s he look like? Sinatra? Carey Grant? Oh, tell me he’s the spitting image of Monty Cliff.”

John plucks a cigarette from his breast pocket, lights it, and blows the smoke out his mouth opposite of Edie, “Veronica Lake,” He says then shifts slightly, “But, y’know, a man.”

He watches Edie squint down at her lap, nurtures his nicotine itch, and taps his foot impatiently on the grass. He isn’t sure what he’s waiting for.

“That’s pretty handsome,” Edie concludes.

Shrugging his shoulder John flops back onto the grass, inhaling its sweet scent, and stares up at the sky. It would be cold up there, colder than it was hot down here by leaps and bounds. Froze blood to his face, sealing cuts closed before they could hardly even leak anywhere. Clouds would be wet heavy things that hid enemies and friends alike, not fluffy cheerful whisps drifting innocently by.

“Like I said, don’t know anything about that.”

His hand on Buck’s chin, stubble scraping callouses, skin soft underneath. The faint hint of smiling anticipation before John even reaches out to squeeze his friend’s chin. Cornflower eyes, carefully coifed hair and high round cheeks. Aftershave and the glint of a metal oak leaves

“S’cute”

“I’m thinking of inviting him to stay for a bit,” He says aloud, feels uncomfortable leaving it at just that so he hunts around for something else to add. “I’m going to be best man at his wedding next year, figure I might show him a few last-ditch options before he’s tied down.”

“That’s a horrible way to talk about someone marrying the love of his life,” Edie says dryly, cutting the thread with her teeth and holding up the skirt for John’s approval.

He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be judging so he just nods with a hum and encouraging raise of his eyebrows.

“What do you know about love?”

“I know if my fiance were even joking about looking at other options he wouldn’t be my fiance for a second longer.”

John can’t help but smile at her, the sharp brow furrowed in conviction and the mouth they both got from their father twisted with moral judgment, “People don’t always marry someone ‘cos they love them dummy.”

“ You’re dumb. And that’s dumb.”

The earnestness, the steadfast belief in fairytales, and the power of affection. It’s childish and hopeful and unjaded in a way John has forgotten how to be. He’s struck with a rush of affection for her so strong it chokes his chest with terror. The awareness of how fragile a human life was, how quickly and easily it could be snuffed out follows quickly. As easy as a piece of flak to the chest or a shovel to the skull. As easy as idealism.

Pressing a hand to the pressure at the center of his chest, he sits up, rubbing firmly and plucking the cigarette from his lips to try to capture a real breath. Finds his lungs able to move. He coughs, braces his other hand on the ground and hardly notices when burning ash falls onto his splayed fingers.

“John?” Edies hand is on his shoulder, pressing over his own hand as if she could find the hurt there herself, “John you- oh crumb, Dad! ” a sharp inhale and then a louder more piercing pitch, “ Daddy! ”

He tries to tell her he’s fine, he’s fine is she okay? He just needs his oxygen mask he’ll be fine . The words won’t come, escape as a ragged gasp and another choking attempt at an inhale. There’s broad hands on his back, smelling of dipping tobacco and fresh cut grass, on his face lifting his head up to John Sr. can get a good look at his expression.

John can hardly see him, black spots in his eyes as he fumbles for his oxygen mask, tries to bring his cigarette to his lips because maybe that will jolt his lungs into working. John Sr. says something to Edie, voice garbled through the rushing in John’s ears, and he feels the warm presence of her vanish from his side. His father slots into the empty space, long arm wrapping around John’s shoulders and squeezing.

“I’m with you, Bucky. It’ll pass.”

Grunting in acknowledgment, the most he can manage, he shoves the cigarette between his lips and sucks on it until his lungs begrudgingly expand. Chokes again on the exhale but it’s an exhale all the same so he takes another hit. His father prompts him to follow his breaths so he matches his pace the best he can and is shamed to find his hands trembling even as his breathing slowly rights its rhythm.

“‘M alright,” he finally grunts. “I’m fine.”

“It happens,” His father says, “Think nothing of it. They stop eventually.”

A glass of water, condensation thick on the outside, is shoved in front of his face and he looks up into Edie’s face pinched with worry. There’s two spots of color high on her cheeks like she’s fighting back tears and he downs the glass in one gulp, fighting the wave of humiliation.

Here he was, hero come home, panicking in the dirt because he remembered all the little girls he probably has dropped bombs on.

Brushing off their helping hands he stands and marches himself inside the house and right to his room. It feels a bit like the Stalag, before that second winter, before that march. He thinks maybe he should call Gale, because probably Gale would have something helpful to say. But there’d be no way to talk freely, not with his family hovering with badly hidden worry.

Tomorrow, tomorrow , he assures himself as he settles on his back above the sheets, stares up at the ceiling and tips Four Roses into his mouth.

It tastes like cobblestones and rain mist and Curt’s awful clove cigarettes. He’s been home for three weeks and he still doesn’t know what to say to Buck Cleven.

-*~*-

He doesn’t take the radio job. He doesn’t do much of anything, really. Mostly he fills his days with helping around the house; fixing the roof, and helping his father repair the dated plumbing, and driving his mother to the grocery store, or book club, or church. The latter of which he’s been gritting his teeth through so far with dogged determination.

He helps Edie with her summer prep classes, drives her to the movies, and drives himself for the late-night matinees.

Smokes like a chimney, drinks like he’s got no liver to damage, and learns the boys down at the bar will keep buying him drinks if he tells the same war stories over and over until he tastes clouds on his teeth once again. He thinks about calling Gale. Can’t think of what to say into a plastic receiver and tries to write a letter instead.

It’s no more successful.

-*~*-

“Say, Ma,” he says one morning, nursing a cup of irish coffee and hoping it’ll cure his stubborn hangover. He’d stayed out too late the night before, well past respectable for civilian life, and his father had been cutting him disapproving looks all breakfast, “Do you remember Albie Green? Lived a few doors down from us, you played bridge with his Ma on Sundays.”

Ma Egan hums in acknowledgment, scrubbing out the dishes and swaying her hips to Perry Como serenading them from the radio.

“Any idea if he’s back yet? Was thinking I’d call him up, catch up on things.”

Ma Egan stops her swaying, setting down her sponge and draws a long steadying breath.

John’s stomach drops down to the floor, and he drains the rest of his coffee in one go, the whiskey hitting his belly like a bowling ball, “Got it. Send them my condolences.”

“It’s been years,” Ma Egan says, “A few months before you – before you left.”

Gale’s snapping blue eyes, lips curved in a confident gentle smirk that John didn’t know would be his last time seeing it. Marge slips out from being tucked under his arm where they had painted a pretty gold picture, all Midwestern American charm. John oft told them they’d make a perfect War Bonds poster and Gale would scoff at him in that way that mean he was too stubborn to laugh.

“Don’t you die on me before I get over there”

John goes to pour himself another cup, curves his body to hide the flask he tips into it, and uses a finger to swirl the scalding liquid, “Is there anyone not dead?”

Richard Warner, Max Wilkinson, Roland ‘Twocent’ Wood, Bennie Caldwell, Darrell Farmer, Donald McIntyre, Frank McIntyre, Carl Bowen, Tony Simpson, Adrian Glenn

All the boys John grew up with, all the ones he used to flirt with girls with and trade baseball cards and play pick-up games of hockey with. His fellow knights and sheriffs and Heroes on their noble steeds with their shining armor and glorious capes. The boys he scraped knees with and fought with and rescued all their damsels in distress with.

Dead and gone. Shrouds laid, swords placed upon their chests, passed on to legend and family photo albums.

“Ah,” He hears his Ma clear her throat a few times, wondering if she’s also remembering all the children who used to come knocking every afternoon asking if Bucky could come play, “Robbie. Robbie Pesci got back a few days ago.”

John smothers a snort. Of course that big-talking yuck would make it when the boys of real worth got sent home in boxes. The good ones, the brave ones. The ones who were never his best friend because only Buck had shown him what that meant, but the ones who were his constants.

And all of them laughed behind their hands at little Albie “Buck” Green who couldn’t swim and wasn’t much of a fighter and turns out never would be.

“He was always an odd duck,” Ma Egan sighs as she returns to the washing up.

-*~*-

Quickly, John learns that while out in public and on paper John Sr. was proud of his Pilot son who fought in and helped win a war. He accepted congratulations and praise of his own involvement in raising such a good stock American Soldier – assumed by virture of John’s stature and his smile and the swagger of his gait rather than any personal knowledge of his battle capabilities – with perfect quiet humility. Yes, he was hero, yes it was a hell of an adjustment having Bucky home again, yes his medals made them all very proud. He’d say it and toss a smile John’s way as if this were something they were both suffering through.

At home, in quiet private and around the dinner table, John Egan might well as simply been asleep for the last five years.

It was a sliding measure of tolerance. Outright acknowledgment of his service was allowed, impossible to avoid for how his uniform sat in the closet and his medals on the dresser. Discussions of Basic Training and Flightschool were tolerated with minimal reaction beyond silent disapproval, while harmless but rather ridiculous tales of off-base hijinks were met with a warning stare but would, occasionally, pull a chuckle from his father. Combat talk wouldn’t be welcome, even if John had the stomach to speak on it. And discussions of imprisonment, though he was more willing to indulge in were met with sharp reprimand.

Mostly, he talks about Gale.

He’s just beginning to describe the particularly ugly resemblance between one SS Guard, who always seemed to have it out for the other man, and his canine when his father snaps.

“I don’t like that talk.”

John’s grin freezes on his face and he flushes ice cold then burning hot. His chest locks up tight and he understands with an absent kind of helplessness he’s about to do that thing he does where his mouth moves six times faster than his preservation could ever hope to. He turns to John Sr, meets blue eyes the same shade as his own, and tilts his head.

“What? Criticize Nazis?”

His father sighs but says nothing, shoulders slumping. His mother reaches out to take the older man’s wrist.

“So, that’s it, we’re gonna just keep acting like I didn’t do what I did for the last five years?”

“It’s over . It happened, Johnny, and now it’s over. You can’t go back.”

“You think I want to go back ?”

There’s cold wind in his throat, ice-crusted picture frames, and a gun between his shoulder blades.

“I’m saying focus on the forward instead of ghosts,” His father says firmly.

“They’re not ghosts . They’re my men.”

“And they’re home with their loved ones wanting to put it all behind them too. I don’t want this poisoning the whole family.”

Mouth twisting, John tosses his napkin onto his plate and shoves away from the table, “Right.”

“You didn’t ask to be excused–”

“I’m thirty years old,” he snaps, striding out the front door.

-*~*-

“I don’t mean to argue,” John Sr. says later that night, blowing smoke from between his lips and passing it back by the filter.

“I know,” John takes it, pressing the flowing cherry between his lips and inhaling.

“It’s a father’s job to guide his children.” John Sr. takes the cigarette back, loosens his tie and breaks the gel seal on his hair with a tired sigh “I don’t have my own to ask for help, I was younger than you when I lost him.”

“You don’t talk about him.”

His father shakes his head, “I don’t talk about any of it. It’s best.”

John drags a thumb across his mustache and nods.

It’s been a month and a half and he’s gone through more bottles of Four Roses than he could admit to counting and he still doesn’t know what to say to his best friend.

-*~*-

“How would you feel about guests, Ma?”

Me Egan puts down her knitting, tilting her head at him with a puzzled, fond smile, “Well you’d have to take the sofa but we can make room. Is there someone-”

“A buddy of mine, from over there. I told him if we made it out he had to try your cooking.”

Humming, Ma Egan’s hands resume their movement, “I think that would be nice for you. Did he already agree?”

John’s never been a stupid man but he’s also never been one to do things with restraint.

“Sure did.”

-*~*-

The house has good bones.

It’s what his father might say, when they used to drive through the nice neighborhoods just to look and dream and enjoy the summer air. It’s got good bones, it’s got potential, there was love in this home once and there could be again if only given a chance.

Sitting on what could be considered a hill only for how flat the surrounding prairie was, it had once maybe been a light blue in color. Now, bleached by the sun and paint flaking away, the house was powdery, greying shingles peeking through here and there and a porch in need of repairs wrapping around the first level like a scarf. Here and there were signs of careful fixing, freshly turned dirt in some semblance of a vegetable garden and new windows.

But the house was old, and it was tired, and it looms over the figure in front of it like an ancient protective beast and John can’t blame the domicile a single bit.

Gale looks awful.

Hair falling over his face, skin drawn and pale and bruised where shadow caught. What little weight he’d begin gaining after the Stalag seemed to have plateaued right on the cusp of healthy, leaving just a faint savage sharpness to his cheekbones and shoulders. He stands in front of his farmhouse, arms held at his sides like he’d not quite remembered what to do with them and staring at the approaching vehicle

There’s mud, caked dry and crumbling to his clothes like he’d been rolling around on the ground.

“You been fighting mud monsters out here Major?”

Gale sits down hard and blinks up at John.

Eyes blue like cornflowers.