Out Out

346

He goes home because he’s a good son. He goes to war because he’s a coward.

---

Hutch is less than a week into his temporary job on the killing floor of the slaughterhouse when his draft papers arrive.

He takes an extra-long shower that day, digging his fingernails into his scalp. The smell of blood and dead flesh is ever present.

He leaves a note for his mother, saying he’ll call. He doesn’t tell her where he’s going. It’s possible she’ll know anyway.

**

It feels like betrayal, to stop at the cabin his father and grandfather had built together. It’s only two and a half hours from the Canadian border. Hutch has buried both of them, but he feels the weight of their disappointment on him nevertheless. It feels like cowardice, to assert that this is, in all the ways that matter, not the war that his father fought, nor the one that his grandfather fought.

It doesn’t make it any less true.

After three days, he drives home.

He goes home because he’s a good son. He goes to war because he’s a coward.

**

Hutch was less than a week into his temporary job on the killing floor of the slaughterhouse when the struggle to silence his doubts about medical school became weightier.

Cutting into people can’t be that much different. Not when it turns out that death is not the worst thing that can happen.

**

David Starsky has almost spent more of his life in southern California than in the Brooklyn neighborhood in which he was born. This is why the others rib him about the accent, the speech patterns, and the slang that marks him as East Coast.

“You should never forget where you came from,” is Starsky’s easy reply.

Hutch thinks Starsky might be the bravest man he’s ever met.

**

It’s mud and sweat that that don’t wash out now, the scents lingering nearly as hauntingly as the changes in the eyes of the soldiers. Only Starsky doesn’t seem to change. His eyes waver sometimes, but steady themselves, and whenever they fix on Hutch’s own, Hutch thinks that maybe he’ll make it out of the jungle alive.

**

“It’s a good kill,” Colby says. “Don’t worry yourself about it. If he’d seen you first, he would have killed you.” Hutch could take the words as reassurances if he didn’t feel like shivering in the sweltering heat. Colby’s words are tinged with admiration, even jealousy. Colby has changed most of all.

Hutch swears there’s blood and flesh beneath his fingernails.

Hutch knows that he’ll never go to medical school. And it’s not the sight of death that will haunt him, but the knowledge that death is not the worst thing that can happen.

“What’ll you do Starsk? If you get out of here and go home?”

Starsky doesn’t flinch at the way Hutch doesn’t use the word ‘when.’ “I’m going to the police academy,” he says.

It’s dark, but Hutch swears he can make out the steadiness of Starsky’s gaze. “Why?” he asks. He doesn’t expect the answer he gets.

“Because the only thing that’s worth getting up for every morning is knowing you’re at least trying to do the right thing.”

**

Hutch doesn’t think the filth and the stench will ever go away, but when he stops trying to scrub himself clean, his skin starts to heal.

Actions