Chapter Text
For every letter he writes to DeEtta, Dick knows that there are about a thousand more between the lines, but he comforts himself with the sound advice that folks ought to leave something unsaid every day. He finishes up this latest one:
Love,
Dick
And seals it in an envelope, knowing it’s a lot heavier than it feels. Lewis Nixon has been on his last nerve, but he knows better than to fill up a whole sheet of paper with how much he dislikes somebody. Not pleasant to write about and certainly not pleasant to read. He has this latent desire to make his accounts something that DeEtta likes to get beyond the simple joy of receiving word from a friend. They deserve to have some kind of entertainment value.
All the same, he walks across the Fort Benning fields in the newfound heat of April to the post office and lets himself just think for a second what he might say to DeEtta if he wasn’t worried about being a bother.
Dear DeEtta, it might go.
Today Lewis Nixon came into the mess hall either hungover or still drunk, and I can’t decide which is worse. He was followed quite faithfully by a couple of privates who seemed to think he was the funniest thing since Jack Benny even if he couldn’t seem to give a darn about what any of them were saying to him. He shuffled over to my table and took the seat across from me without so much as a word and waved off his hangers-on who all disappeared with their tails between their legs when they realized there wasn’t an open seat for them.
He asked me who I was even though I’ve already introduced myself to him at least once before, and when I answered he didn’t seem particularly interested. He just said, “Oh, yeah, that’s right,” and proceeded to describe his weekend to a party who couldn’t possibly understand that kind of easygoing, free-living lifestyle or therefore care (yours truly).
DeEtta, you’ve got to understand that it's not that Nixon isn’t likable. There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, from what I can tell just by observing. In any case—
The letter in his head comes to a halt when he passes through the doors of the post office and sees the man in question hunched over an envelope, scribbling out the appropriate addresses. Nixon throws him a glance from under notably dark and thick brows before shaking his head. “Twice in a day,” he mutters as he dots his i’s and crosses his t’s. “Following me, Winters?”
It’s a good thing he’s got the presence of mind to recognize a joke for what it is. He presses his lips into a thin smile as he moves to get a stamp from the desk. “I was about to ask you the same thing. Nixon, isn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“Who are you writing to?” he asks, more in the spirit of being friendly than being truly interested.
Nixon looks down at his letter. “Oh, just my wife,” he says. “Kathy. She’s all up in arms about me passing up leave again. She’d make a damn good soldier if she could get half as mad at the Nazis.”
“Well, why don’t you just go see her if it would make your life easier?” Dick questions.
“Because it wouldn’t,” he says, passing the envelope through the slot. “What does it matter to you, anyway, Winters?”
Dick lets his eyes flick over Nixon’s form once, just to get a bearing on his stance. The angle of him is all defensive—that much is so obvious that it makes him wonder if Lewis Nixon is one to project everything he’s feeling to the world in flashing lights. If that’s the case, he’ll never make officer or, at least, won’t ever make a decent one. “I guess it doesn’t,” he says.
Nixon hums and stands around for some reason as Dick puts his own letter to DeEtta through the slot. “And who’s that for?” he asks.
“Just a friend,” he answers.
Nixon whistles. “Richard Winters with a friend? Say it ain’t so.”
“I have plenty of friends, Nixon,” Dick tells him without shifting a muscle of his face though he has every desire to furrow his brows. But he’s not like Nixon. He doesn’t have flashing lights.
With both of their letters shipped off, there’s no reason for either of them to hang around a moment longer, but Nixon (for some unknown reason) leans closer. He doesn’t smell as strongly of alcohol as he did this morning, but the scent has been replaced with the punch of tobacco. Not that it should matter to Dick. Most of the men smell the same. “You write letters that thick to all of them?” he asks.
He doesn’t think Nixon has much room to comment on thick letters when the one for his own wife was thin and wobbly, but he doesn’t say so. Instead, he smiles like a friend might and says, “Well, sure, why not? If there’s enough to say that they’d be interested in.”
“Interested in… at OCS?” Nixon questions flatly.
If he said something wrong, he doesn’t know what. “Sure,” he repeats.
Nixon stares at him, dumbfounded, and it’s several beats before he speaks again. “When was the last time you took a weekend pass, Winters?” he asks.
He’s not oblivious enough to be ignorant of what Nixon is getting at. There’s nothing wrong with a mild reputation, regardless of what the other men say about him behind his back and in front of his face. So, even though he took a pass not two weeks ago to Columbus for dinner and a show, he says. “Geez, I dunno. What’s a weekend pass?” Without giving Nixon any time to answer, he brushes past him and straight out of the post office. He marches over to his next assignment with a rigid posture like Ike himself is inspecting him and resumes his mental letter:
Sorry, DeEtta, I was interrupted.
As I was saying, Nixon isn’t unlikable. He’s just downright difficult to get along with. I guess that probably doesn’t make any sense to someone who hasn’t met him, but you can guess it all comes down to one’s own reactions to him. Mine are a struggle to keep under control, if I’m honest. There’s something to be said about the biblical principle of being wise as serpents and harmless as doves, which I think more than anything means you ought to get along with folks without being a sucker. Well, I’m not a sucker, and there should be no problem between me and Nixon.
If I could say one ugly thing to him without causing some unnecessary rift, I would just say, “Quit looking at me like that.” That’s a phrase that keeps coming up the more encounters I have with him, which will become more frequent the longer we’re here. I’m not even entirely sure what that means, myself, or how I would have him change if he even could. All the same, if he keeps stumbling into the mess smelling of booze, though, I may not have to put up with it much longer.
Oh, well. No need to worry about it, since this is a letter you’ll never get. When I’ve actually got something to say to you that you’ll be interested in hearing, you’ll know it.
Your friend,
Dick