There's a fat bead of blood on the tip of his finger. He notices the blood
before the sting, which doesn't come until he puts the finger in his mouth
and sucks on it.
On the kitchen floor is a star-pattern of shattered glass, one big shard
tinged with red along a sharp edge. Dick shakes his hand and goes for a
broom and dustpan.
He's been dropping things lately. He'll be standing in front of the sink,
doing dishes, and the movement of the clouds through the window will catch
his eye, and the next thing he knows there's a china teacup in pieces that
probably could have paid a semester of his college tuition.
Nix doesn't let him apologize. Nix doesn't care.
The china and glassware came back from Nixon's penthouse in New York. It's
the former Mrs. Nixon's penthouse now, but she didn't want the dishes, or
the dining room table, or a few other items. Nixon traded her the Art Deco
living room set in exchange for the liquor cabinet.
Dick grew up with farmhouse furniture, solid inelegant wood things his
grandfather made, slept in a bed that creaked and cramped his legs as he
grew too tall for it. He sleeps in a four-poster now, with a feather
mattress. Everything in this house is beautiful, and, unlike Nixon, he
doesn't know how to take it for granted.
He can still taste the blood in his mouth as he sweeps the floor, and it
takes him back to the crossroads outside Nijmegen, Nixon handing him a
canteen, realizing as the water washes the coppery taste out of his mouth
that somewhere along the line he'd bitten his tongue.
He's standing perfectly still in the kitchen with the broom in his hand when
Nixon touches his shoulder lightly.
Nixon's hands close over his, and he hears him say in a low voice, almost a
whisper, "Go sit down. I'll clean this up."
On weekends he gardens, and dusts, and cooks, sometimes. He tried to
negotiate half the rent on the big forty-year-old brick house in the
Victorian manor district of Nixon, New Jersey, but Lew wouldn't let him pay.
So, cleaning and tending the garden is his way of compensating Nixon for his
room and board. They've had a dozen friendly arguments about it, but Dick
refuses to leave the housework to hired help.
The chores relax him. He can't deal with disarray.
He goes into the living room and sinks into a wingback chair, feeling dizzy
and unsettled. He hears the broken glass clink as it falls into the garbage
bin, and then Nixon appears in the doorway.
"I'm sorry about the glass, Lew," he says.
Nixon crosses the floor and leans over the back of his chair, stroking the
sides of his neck and parting his collar to massage his shoulders. "It
doesn't matter. It didn't matter last week, and it won't matter tomorrow. Do
you need me to write this down for you?"
His fingertips trace the rim of Dick's collarbone.
"I'll replace it."
"Like hell you will," Nixon says, pressing his lips to the top of Dick's
head. Dick doesn't argue. But someday, he reminds himself, someday when he's
got the money he'll replace everything of Nixon's that he's broken.
The taste of blood takes him back to the crossroads; the taste of coffee
sends him to the Ardennes forest. The mere aroma of it makes him shiver. He
drinks tea and orange juice instead.
Nixon is still drinking, but not as heavily as he was during the war. "I'm
not about to give it up completely, so don't get your hopes up," he says.
"But I don't need it like I used to. Not as long as I've got you around."
His voice is a low burr, hot as he kisses Dick's shoulder. "You're
intoxicating enough."
This is the part that's good, and it's very good indeed.
Nixon's asked him time and time again if he wants to go back to
Pennsylvania. He gets the sense that Nixon's curious to see the place where
Dick was young, the way he was curious to visit Nix's old haunts in New York
City. Ever since they met, they've been gradually learning everything about
each other that can be learned.
But he doesn't want to take Nix back to Lancaster County, not now, not yet.
He was in the minority there--not an Anabaptist, not a son of the German
lowlands, a fact proclaimed to the world by his name and the color of his
hair. The Mennonites he knew were strange, dour, joyless people. Their
daughters didn't stay pretty long; the corners of their mouths were dragged
inexorably down, their bright cheeks hollowed-out, the richness going out of
their brown hair. They never would dance with him.
When he thinks of Pennsylvania, he remembers bewilderment most of all. As a
teenager he got up before dawn to watch the sunrise, watched in awe the
hills tinged gold, stood perfectly still, his whole body singing with
passionate love for the place where he lived--and then went into town and
looked in confusion at the drawn weary faces, and wondered if he was the
only one who recognized how the hand of God had shaped their land, made it
verdant and fertile and beautiful.
He felt alone in that place.
He promised himself--God, so long ago--that if he lived he'd go back to
Pennsylvania, and he will. But not to Lancaster County.
There are good days and bad days. On good days he comes home from the
nitration plant and Nixon takes him out to dinner. When he wakes up with
Nixon snoring in his ear, one arm flung over his chest, then it's been a
good day.
And on the bad days--he goes off by himself, not speaking for fear he'll say
something nobody should hear; and on the bad nights he lets Nix sleep, goes
downstairs, turns on the radio and walks the floor.
It's a slow shedding of his skin, and it hurts, sometimes. But he knows
every man from Easy Company who came back is going through the same thing.
He has to remember, it's his duty, every face, every name, the cold and
artillery thunder and the taste of burnt black coffee and the smell of blood
and the pain of the shrapnel in his leg, and Eugene's hands, and Shifty's
eyes, and Guarnere's rage and Lipton's loyalty and Popeye Wynn's apologies
and how fast Speirs could move, the taste of the girl who kissed him in
Eindhoven, he has to remember everything, because he's here, now, and not
still there in the gardens of white crosses.
And Lew says, "Dick, come home."
Nixon's touch helps him remember other things. Austria, their first chance
to really take time with each other. The air had been warm, but still he'd
shivered as Nixon peeled off his wet swimming trunks.
Neither of them know how long this arrangement will last. Not forever, he's
sure of that.
Sometimes he looks at the sky, and it's not the same sky he left behind in
Pennsylvania, not the same sky he dropped out of over France and Holland.
And sometimes Nix catches him when he's somewhere else, and brings him back;
and sometimes it takes a crash, and blood on his fingertips.
