it is impossible to imagine our own deaths,
he told us, this may be the secret of heroism.

Andrews Gulch, Montana
August 1948

Ray feels his lungs closing up, his eyes watering as the flames crackle across the gulch and the ashes swirl past him. Over the roar of trees exploding—again, jesus fucking christ—and the harsh rasp of his own breathing, Vecchio's voice echoes, screaming at them to run faster, harder, to drop their tools and the packs and run, goddammit, run.

And Ray runs, throws himself past the other guys and forward up the slope heedlessly until his foot twists, cracks sharp and red as his ankle breaks and he lurches sideways onto his knees.

Fraser's hand wraps around his arm, drags him upward until Ray is limping again, always forward, always away. He's got one arm wrapped over Fraser's shoulder as Fraser half-drags-half-carries him a few feet further. Vecchio turns frantic, circles closer as he calls them bastards in every language he knows. Fraser responds in Italian, his words clipped, ordering Vecchio to keep going, telling him that they'll catch up, promising that they'll see him on the other side of the reef.

Ray is slumped against Fraser, but he coughs a couple of times and does his best to look confident, grins at Vecchio like they've got all the time in the world. Vecchio swears at them both and takes off to shepherd the younger guys along. Ray watches him through the thickening smoke. Vecchio pushes the boys to their feet, scares them into running harder, looking every bit the sergeant he used to be.

When Fraser suddenly lets go, Ray slides to the ground and there's the flash of pain again, hot and bright like flames. He hopes Vecchio makes it. This is a shitty way to die, but Ray figures he and Fraser have been living on borrowed time since Belgium, if not earlier, so he tries not to mind too much. At least his parents will get the death benefits. At least he's not alone.

Fraser lights a match.

Excerpt from Robert Fraser's diary: I don't understand why Benton is being so stubborn about this. He belongs here. He'll be miserable anywhere else.

Yellowknife, Northwest Territories
March 1940

His father had wanted him to join the RCMP, or even the Home Guard. It was the last conversation they had, the day before Benton shouldered his rucksack and started hiking south.

Until then, he'd always listened, even when he disagreed. It was simpler to let his father decide things, and although Benton sometimes longed for the chance to prove that he, too, knew the proper thing to do, the correct decision to make, he hadn't yet found the words to argue with Robert Fraser's pronouncements.

And so one morning, long before the sun had tipped above the horizon for the brief hours of the day, Benton ate a bowl of oatmeal and banked the fire. He packed up his extra clothing and a book of Hopkins poems, because it was small and his father wouldn't miss it. He called for Meighen, who didn't come to see him off, too busy gallivanting through the woods with the rest of the pack. He wrote a note for his father and left it under the salt cellar. He visited his mother's grave to say goodbye.

And then he left.

Francesca Vecchio: I was in catechism class when we heard. The nuns sent us home, told us to pray and I knew then that my brother was going to join up. There wasn't anything we could say that would stop him.

Chicago, Illinois
December 1941

They turned off the conveyor belts in the middle of the afternoon to make the announcement, machines stuttering silent around the guys on the weekend shift, money down the drain. Ray took out his earplugs and wiped his hands on a towel, bumming a cigarette off Leo DaMicci as they waited to find out what was going on. A few minutes later, the Old Man came on the shop speakers to read off the wire reports. Ray's fingers smarted as his cigarette burned too close, and at the end the voices around him murmured, guys praying in Italian and Yiddish and Polish and English.

There was a line for the telephone, so Ray didn't bother to call home and check on Frannie and Maria, who would be home from church and probably throwing fits that he wasn't there. It wasn't that he didn't want to be with his family, but with Pop gone he knew what would happen if he went home and told them what he was going to do.

And after that conversation, there'd be the one with the shop foreman, and the one with his priest, and, if he made it through those, he'd still need to take Angela out and maybe she'd be proud but maybe she wouldn't, maybe she'd agree with his mother. Maybe they'd all try and talk him out of it, even though he'd already decided that this was something he needed to do.

Ray was content to wait a few hours for that first conversation, because it wouldn't be pretty and he hated seeing his mother cry. It wouldn't change his mind. But for a little longer, he wanted to ignore the people he might hurt, and focus on the possibility that he could do some good, maybe set something right. He'd go to Japan, and he'd fight and they'd win and he wouldn't have to feel guilty about the things his father had said about Mussolini before the heart attack took him. He wouldn't have to wonder if he was still some wop kid from the neighborhood, or if he was an American, instead.

It never once occurred to him that he might end up fighting in Italy. Later, he'd wonder why it hadn't.

At the end of his shift everyone shuffled out quietly, some of them muttering about plans, but most focused only on getting home, back to the neighborhood where there would be family and news and a radio.

Ray Kowalski: I didn't finish high school until after we got back. My parents knew that I wanted to go, and my dad, he never said anything. I told them I was eighteen, but I turned seventeen the second week at Toccoa. None of the guys ever said anything about it. The only thing that mattered was whether you could handle the training. We all trained together, basic through jump school, and by the end you knew every guy in your company. You would do anything for them, as long as they wore those wings.

Camp Toccoa, Georgia
March 1942

It had seemed like a good idea when he signed the forms, that he could get better training and be part of a better regiment, and get paid better on top of everything else. Ray couldn't figure out why anyone would turn an offer like that down, but after the first week he wised up.

Training wasn't worth the extra fifty bucks. Ray didn't care how much his parents needed the money. He didn't care about how proud they'd been when he told them he was heading out to join the parachute troops, that they only took the best. His mother had cried, but she'd been smiling.

He didn't even care that Stella was putting some of that extra money away, taking it to the bank every month and depositing it for the wedding they were going to have in a couple of years, when he got back. Stella wanted a small wedding, but Ray sent enough home every payday that they could have a church wedding if they wanted one. He kept some for cigarettes and the army kept some for his board, but it wasn't like he had time to spend any of the rest.

Ray didn't care that he had new uniforms, and new shoes that didn't give him blisters that were replaced by jump boots that did, or a rifle that he could put together blindfolded. He didn't care that the guys with weekend passes told stories about the girls in town, girls who thought they were the toughest men they'd ever seen and showed their appreciation in lots of ways.

He didn't care that Hitler had occupied his father's hometown. There were moments that he wasn't even sure he cared that they hadn't gotten a letter from his grandmother in months, and even though Ray was sure he was going to hell for that, it didn't make the feeling any less true.

Because not one of his important reasons was worth the training. It wasn't worth being awake at five in the morning and nothing but cold showers. It wasn't worth bitter coffee and PT every minute that he wasn't in class or standing in a row with twenty other guys, pretending that he knew what he was doing. It wasn't worth being screamed at for an hour over his bootlaces or the second, fourth, and seventh times he ended up in the infirmary. It wasn't worth the thirty-five mile marches in the dark without his canteen.

It definitely wasn't worth running up that damn mountain every day and twice on Tuesdays.

Jimmy called it a hill, said he had to climb one twice that big to get to school every day back home in Colorado. Ray, though, he was from Chicago and in Chicago the hills didn't look like that. They weren't covered in trees and slick with mud when it rained and studded with sharp rocks when it didn't. The hills in Chicago didn't loom over him, and there was nobody screaming about how he'd never make it as a trooper when he reached the top of them. The hills in Chicago weren't tougher on the way back down, his feet skidding ahead of him and not enough air in his lungs. Jimmy, though, he laughed when Ray called it a mountain and told him about how back home, they had real mountains, with snow on the top.

Ray told Jimmy to shut it and saved his own breath for running up the damn mountain.

Three weeks in, Jimmy packed his stuff and dropped out, along with half their bunkmates. Three more had been transferred out for infractions, stuff like stealing from the mess and failing drills and quitting halfway up the mountain. Others were hanging on, but they looked beaten, like they just needed someone to tell them not to show up for drill, or an excuse, any excuse, to give up and go home.

The next week, Ray started getting up early, before even the hint of morning hit the camp, and ran Currahee on his own. He did it even though he had never been so tired in his life. He did it, and so did a lot of the other guys who were still around, and it only took him ten days to figure out why.

He wasn't going to write home and tell his parents he'd quit something else. He wasn't going to go back to sitting in Algebra class with the other kids, wondering if they'd ever be old enough to fight. He wasn't going back to nights out on the stoop, or a place on the line next to his dad, knee deep in scrap and sawdust. And, most important, Ray wasn't going to drop out and go drag himself through Europe in the infantry. Being a grunt was for suckers.

Ray was going to fight on his own terms. He was going to do it with these officers, who called him Kowalski and never meant his father. He was going to do it with his platoon, who called him Ski and envied him his Stella and watched out for him, just like he watched out for them. He was going to cross an ocean and he wanted to know that next to him in a foxhole would be a guy who refused to quit.

If he was going to go to war, and he was, Ray was damned well going to get there with a parachute strapped to his back.

Benton Fraser: I had a friend in my first regiment, and we went overseas in 1941. He used to share his mother's packages when they arrived, and talk about how he was going home to join the RCMP. We ran onto the beach at the same time and he—I don't want to talk about it.

Dieppe, France
August 1942

What had seemed like an excellent plan in July bordered on ridiculous in August.

They'd boarded ships in early July, meant to follow the RAF and paratroops to France, but the Luftwaffe saw fit to cancel their plans while the ships bobbed low in the waters of the English Channel. Benton wasn't alarmed by the screams of the men around him, or even by the knowledge that, should he hit the water, the weight of his equipment meant that no amount of swimming expertise would save him. He was worried, certainly, but mostly he feared that the cancellation meant that he'd once again be trapped on base, waiting and waiting and waiting for the chance to see action. Benton wanted to make a difference, and he doubted somehow that running drills and marching about the village was doing much to further the war effort.

Steve was less eager to cross the channel, and Benton frequently found him outside the barracks, lying on his back and watching the sky. They would lie there together, quiet and pensive. Benton wondered if he'd ever see the aurora again; he had no idea what it was that Steve thought about. Steve smoked pack after pack of cigarettes, both his own and Benton's ration.

In July the generals tried again. Everyone wrote letters home, said goodbye to the locals, packed up their gear and loaded it onto trucks. Briefly free of constant drill and bad mess hall meals, they marched to the staging area and boarded the boats again. This time, there was no turning back. The weather was choppy and men were green with seasickness, some of them heaving onto the deck where the salt water sloshed everything into a mess. Hours later, Benton checked his equipment and looked at the sky one last time, hoping that he'd have time to see it again later.

And then he turns toward the beach, and he thinks that he's ready for this.

The approach to the beach is deafening. The waves crash over the bow, soaking Benton to the skin and leaving him with the taste of salt on his lips, a stinging in his eyes that he blinks away over and over again. The Germans know that they're coming, and the firing starts so early that most of the ordnance hits the water in front of the boats.

Benton can swim in his gear now, but that doesn't mean that he wants to.

They hit the beach and it takes an eternity for the gate to drop, days, hours, minutes when all Benton can do is stand there and flinch as the bullets fly over his head and men begin screaming for medics and their mothers. Once it finally hits the ground, he's out and running up the sand toward town. Benton can hear Steve beside him, shouting at the rest of the squad. "Run! Come on, get out of there!" but he doesn't think they can hear. There's a flash of pain as his leg is clipped by something hot and sharp, but Benton doesn't think the bone is broken.

He and Steve keep going, staggering over the barbed wire toward the relative safety of the brush and the bluff. They crouch there for a moment, panting and fumbling with fresh rifle clips. A few more men join them, but of the forty who climbed into their boat, Benton sees less than a dozen standing before him now. He checks his leg, but the wound is little more than a crease, a gouge of red a few inches long. He pours on some sulfa powder and shoves a bandage onto it, waving off offers of help.

Steve wastes no time in organizing a patrol for town, ignoring the continuing explosions and screams that surround the squad that used to be a platoon. They head uphill with Steve on point and Benton at the rear. Ten men are arranged between them, and there is an entire regiment of Germans at the top.

Benton tries to take a moment to think, to assess the situation and determine the best course of action, but there isn't one. All he can do is react, duck the bullets and stumble upward and keep Steve in his sight, keep running forward. This, these moments crawling through sand and climbing the crumbling bluff and watching all the men before him twitch and tumble down at his feet, these are what he has. They're everything, and when Steve disappears over the top of the bluff Benton's heart stutters and he runs harder and faster and when he clambers the last few steps and looks up he's already firing, wildly and knowing that there isn't anything to strike except the enemy. He doesn't need to think, all he needs to do is load another clip and pull the trigger.

He's the only one left, he and the Germans except—except that he's not, Steve's still there, Steve's shouting something—Benton doesn't even realize that he's still firing as he turns to Steve, doesn’t think until suddenly red blooms in front of his eyes and he really is alone, because Steve is toppling before him and Benton closes his eyes at the sight but he can still see it behind his eyelids. He can still see it, and he staggers and drops to the dirt and vomits, his rifle hot in his hands. Steve gasps, and Benton crawls to him, tries to lift him off the ground, but Steve shakes his head and grabs onto Benton's arm.

An eternity passes in a few seconds, while Steve coughs blood and Benton watches him die, frozen into a Pieta on a French footpath.

By the time another clump of fellow soldiers arrives, Fraser has gathered up his equipment and his emotions and is ready to organize the hasty retreat. Steve is left behind on the bluff, and Fraser won't look back.

Ray Kowalski: We had to march all the way to Atlanta, because of some article in Reader's Digest or something. It was supposed to show how ready we were for combat, but we really weren't. We were ready for it physically, but mentally? No way.

By the end, guys were getting dragged by their buddies, stumbling along without their gear, practically hallucinating with fatigue. We only had twelve drop out, though. Twelve men in the whole damn battalion, and not one of them was from my platoon. Stupidest thing I've ever done, and that's really saying something.

Atlanta, Georgia
December 1942

If Ray ever found out who gave Sink that article, he was going to throttle him. Bad enough that they had to leave Toccoa to go play soldiers in the woods while other guys shipped out. But the decision to get them there by marching, by lining everyone in the battalion up and pointing them toward Atlanta and saying, see you in 118 miles, boys, that had to be somebody's fault.

He didn't throw anything at the trucks roaring off carrying everyone else, but only because he was carrying every single item of his gear, plus all of the stuff from his footlocker that he didn't want stolen, plus it was his turn to heft the MG instead of the bipod. He couldn't really move his arms all that well, not enough to get off a rock or a gesture.

And yeah, fine, at that point Ray was still a little proud, glad that they were the best of the best, the ones that Sink trusted to beat the Japs at that record and show the world that when it came to pointless actions and wasting time, Americans were tops. He was whining and sweaty and his pants were so full of rations and supplies that they were sliding off his butt, but he was thinking of the whole march as more of a boy scout trip than a real challenge. He'd topped Currahee in forty-two minutes, and at 0630, nothing was going to stop him from making it all the way to Peachtree Avenue, just like Sherman.

Twelve hours later, when he was trying, and failing, to set up a tent in the freezing rain, mud squelching into the tops of his boots, with Corporal Franklin standing over him and shaking his head, Ray mostly just wished he hadn't thought a couple of extra packs of cigarettes would be more useful than four pairs of socks and a handkerchief.

And the worst part was that the smokes were too wet to light, and so he was left with no socks, nothing to wipe his face but a smelly undershirt, and not even a cigarette before he finally collapsed to get a few hours sleep.

The next morning, it was the same thing all over again. Ray was lucky, because he'd fallen asleep before he got his boots off. That meant that in the morning his feet were still in them, instead of having swollen until they wouldn't slide in, not even with the laces loosened. Two of the guys in his platoon had to cut the leather to make it back into formation, and they spent the whole day glaring at everyone else and trying to take their turn carrying the MG.

When they finally staggered into the city on the third day—or maybe the fourth—Ray tried to figure out if he was proud that they'd made it, or just numb and bruised and angry and ready to smother anyone who got between him and a hot shower and a bed, any bed, even the rickety one in Stella's attic, the one that squeaked and smelled of camphor and dust, where she'd sometimes let him kiss her but never any more than that.

Benton Fraser: Ray Vecchio called Africa the dustiest place he'd ever been. When I met him, months later, he'd complain about finding sand in his socks. His wife said that after he returned home he refused to leave the house without taking a shower, sometimes taking two or three each day. That was probably left from those months in Tunisia.

Ray Kowalski: Or maybe he was that weird to begin with. Ever think of that, Fraser?

Casablanca, Tunisia
May 1943

They stepped off the ship with duffle bags full to bursting, hit with a wave of dust and heat that was only barely better than the stink of the bunks. Ray took a deep breath, glad to have enough room to stand upright, and then started coughing at the smell of latrines and farm animals and something he didn't want to think about too hard. Cordite, too, and Ray quit craning his head around to see everything and got into line behind a couple of other guys from his platoon. If they just followed the smell of bullets and high explosives, they'd hit the base soon enough. He got really sick of sand and sun and even of beaches, because beaches with land mines weren't any good for sunbathing.

***

Ray almost didn't drop into Sicily. He was in the infirmary, sick with some idiotic desert bug that wasn't that bad, not bad enough to keep him grounded once the doctors figured out that if they didn't release him he was going to go AWOL as soon as he got the chance. Most of the hospital staff were learning fast that there was no point in arguing with parachute troops. If they weren't unconscious, they were picking a fight with a pilot, or a nurse, or each other. It wasn't worth the effort of keeping them in the beds.

Plus, and Ray wasn't going to complain about this if it got him out of the hospital and back with his company, everyone seemed vaguely sure that parachute troops were chosen for their lack of sanity. He wasn't sure if that was deliberate on the part of the Army, or just something that got around after they were stationed somewhere, but Ray didn't see any harm in behaving a little less rationally than he would have otherwise. Whatever worked, and crazy seemed to be the right technique for getting sprung from a field hospital as quickly as possible.

So Ray got out just in time to grab his gear and climb on a plane, although it was more like crawling onto a plane with the help of three other guys in his platoon and the jumpmaster. And once he got on, he puked into his helmet and passed out, but by the time they started weaving through explosions and coming in fast, too low and with the sky lit up, he was awake again.

Ray finds out later that it's their own ships firing, but at the time it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the red light going on, and then the green, and then he's out, drifting down through the night toward Sicily, sideslipping onto the beach at an angle before he winds up his chute and unhooks the lines and grabs his rifle, runs up the beach to the rocks.

Ray hates this part. He's good at it, good at getting the men in order and storming the enemy and taking them out, one shot at a time, bangbangbang you're dead, just like playing cowboys and Indians. He has a talent for quiet deadly maneuvers that work even when they shouldn't, and Ray tries not to think about how he'll explain all this, either to the folks back home or his priest. He just rummages around under his uniform for his rosary and prays that his shots will be straight and true, and leaves out the rest. He'll have time enough for religion when the artillery stops.

Ray Kowalski: I had a sweetheart, nice girl, Stella. She was a Gold Coast girl, and she was the one thing I missed back home. Well, her and my mum's pierogies. You ever eat military chow? It's like being hit in the stomach with a moldy cement block. I'd rather eat mud.

Fort Benning, Georgia
June 1943

Ray did fine on the rifle range, because once he'd figured out where the target was, he could fire off as many rounds as they wanted. He'd never be a sharpshooter, but he did well enough. He qualified.

He tried not to think too hard about what he'd do once he got into combat and no one would give him the time to sight in before he chambered a round. Instead, he volunteered to train on the machine gun, because it wasn't as if he needed to aim with a machine gun. Machine gunners just sort of got the general direction down and waited for the enemy to run into the bullets. Any idiot could do that, even without a pair of glasses.

He didn't run into trouble until Benning, when for some reason his sergeant decided they'd all been goldbricking on maneuvers and scheduled extra range practice without telling anyone. Again, no problem, Ray had his MG and all he had to do was get close. Except that the sergeant, who Ray could stand to never see again, because he was an asshole and didn't know his shit, wanted everyone—mortar guys, machine gunners, even the scrawny kid from Younkers who got slotted in as an orderly—to qualify for rifle duty.

Fucking army and their fucking rules had Ray out on the range at ass-o-clock in the morning, pacing off the distance and the angle for later in the morning. And that was why, when the mail came round that afternoon, Ray was fast asleep, head under his pillow and dreaming when the letter from Stella showed up.

If there was anything worse than waking up from a sound sleep to find out that your girl isn't your girl anymore, Ray couldn't think of it.

He got a lot better at firing his rifle after that., practiced it whenever he god a spare minute that he didn't need to spend writing his girl back home anymore. He did a lot of cold sighting, learned to figure out how to angle the barrel based on how far he knew something was, whether or not he could see it. It was all about distance, not about what you could touch or taste or see in front of you. After a while, Ray barely had to look before he took the shot, could snap off a round faster than anyone else in the platoon. The sarge took to calling him a sniper, but Ray knew better.

Ray Kowalski: Fraser and Vecchio were over there a long time before I was, back when nobody knew what to do with parachute troops, when it was all trial and error. By the time I was in training, they had a lot of that stuff figured out. I had it easy, not that I knew it back then.

Ponte Dirillo, Sicily
July 1943

During resupply they'd taken his rifle away. Fraser didn't argue, because what point was there in complaining about being weaponless? He was back in England, and he'd already cleared the revolver and pinups and awkward letters out of Steve's duffle so that his parents wouldn’t have to unpack them and wonder. He wanted Steve to have been right in trusting him with those small details.

He'd sat in the tent for an hour, spinning the chamber and thinking, before throwing it into the river that ran on the edge of the camp. Fraser put the bullets into his musette bag and forgot about them, and about reclaiming his own weapon.

Besides, it wasn't as if he intended to fire the rifle at anyone else, and although he didn't ask, he suspected that Nurse Thatcher had spoken to someone about his hospital stay. She'd watched him as he paced the floors, as he stared silently at the doctors, and hadn't tried to pull him into pointless conversations about how his leg was healing or how he felt. His best friend was dead. How did they think that felt? How could he possibly explain how that made him feel?

***

Fraser returned to his battalion with a red cross on his armband and a musette bag of medical supplies instead of ammunition. His unit had long since shipped out for Italy, and so Fraser found himself slotted into whatever platoon had an opening, shifting through the ranks with his rucksack and his medical supplies, never settling long enough to form attachments to the men he patched together and sent to the rear.

He didn't regret it, but there were moments when he wondered if the numbness would ever fade, if he'd be able to look another man in the eye without seeing Steve in those last moments, that last time.

Ray Kowalski: We took the train north, and it didn't take long for everyone to figure out that meant we were headed for Europe. I always thought I'd end up on some island, with native girls and coconuts, but no such luck. When we hit the docks in New York, I was still hoping that the British girls would turn out to have grass skirts and tans.

Benton Fraser: Ray, you don't even like coconut. You always complain about it in desserts. Francesca made that lovely cake for our—

Ray Kowalski: Yeah, but this would have been coconut on a beach. That's different.

Benton Fraser: His logic is sometimes rather idiosyncratic.

Ray Kowalski: Did you just call me an idiot? You did, didn't you? You just called me dumb in Fraser-speak. And people say Canadians are polite.

New York City, New York
September 1943

New York smelled funny. Ray climbed off the train before his lieutenant could see him, desperate to get out of the stuffy car and onto the platform so he could take a deep breath, maybe even stand up straight for a minute while he smoked a cigarette. Everybody else had exactly the same idea, so instead of a nice quiet moment in a corner, Ray found himself wedged up against three other guys who needed showers and maybe a stick of chewing gum. He couldn't even lift both his elbows to use his lighter, so he waited until Sam Franklin got his out and then tried to look pathetic and threatening at the same time.

Sam snickered at him, but he flicked the wheel and held it out so that Ray could get a drag of smoke. They stood like that, Sam's shoulder up against Ray's chest, until it was time to find the rest of the guys and head for the docks. Eventually Ray landed in a line of guys with paper tags on their gear, shuffling slowly up the gangplank with his duffle on his shoulder and the guys behind him pushing, always shoving gently against Ray's back as he shifted slightly on his feet to keep his balance. When he heard a splash below and leaned down to see some kid flailing in the river, sputtering as his buddies stood around the edge and snickered at him, Ray was grateful he'd spent all that time down at the gymnasium learning Queensbury rules and how to keep his feet at all costs.

He kept walking, up the ramp and onto the deck, all his gear in a bag at his feet as they sailed out the harbor. Ray didn't push to the railing, because he was tall enough to see things without it and it was too windy out on the rail to light a cigarette. He watched the city slide away in the distance, though, fading into a dark shadow on the horizon, before he heaved his gear to his shoulder and pushed his way down into the berths, searching for something open in the half-dark and the gathering stuffiness of thousands of guys crammed together into a space not meant for half that many.

It was his first time crossing an ocean, and it felt like forever. Ray wished, not for the first time, that he could be in an airplane and above all the shit the army expected of him when he was on the ground.

Francesca Vecchio: My brother used to write letters home, but then when he was in Italy, we stopped getting them. Ma was terrified, started going to Mass twice a day. There was never a letter in the mailbox when she got home. But we didn't get a telegram, either, so we waited and waited, and when the letters started up again Ray didn't say anything about where he'd been.

Salerno, Italy
September 1943

The first time Ray saw the kid, the Canuck with a buzz cut and a hollow-eyed stare, he thought he was hallucinating. No way was that a real uniform.

For one thing, it was too clean. Didn't matter how recently they'd had showers and new O.D.s, the damn things always looked like they'd been dragged over a dirt road and then soaked in a mud puddle. This kid, his uniform was not only spotless, but there were what Ray could only describe as creases in it.

He was pretty sure that was impossible; as far as Ray could tell, they didn't even have creases when they were issued. Just crumpled bits where they'd been rolled against each other to fit in the crates, and the occasional loose thread. The kid didn't have any loose threads. Loose threads would probably take one look at him and stitch themselves back into place.

Plus, he wasn't carrying a rifle. Which, admittedly, was probably because he was dressed as a medic. And a medic with no blood on his uniform? Definitely not normal. Ray had seen medics, and they all had bloodstains and other stains that nobody talked about.

After two months in the field, Ray had almost forgotten the color that uniforms arrived in. It was still queer, something that was out of place. The shine on the kid made Ray's eyes hurt.

Just as Ray was considering a quick trip to get checked for a concussion or maybe a head wound, the kid ducked out of the path of a careening jeep and started walking toward him. Ray pulled out a smoke and lit it, waiting to see what would happen.

Something interesting was bound to be next. And it had been three whole days since Ray's life had been in danger, so he was due for an improbable event of some kind.

Rumor was that they had hot showers in the next town over, but Ray held off, waved his guys onto a truck and leaned up against what was left of a farmhouse to see what the kid wanted. He didn't have to wait very long.

Telegram addressed to Cpl. Benton Fraser, Italy: RCMP REGRETS TO INFORM THAT ROBERT FRASER FOUND DECEASED DURING PATROL IN YUKON STOP DETAILS TO FOLLOW INQUIRE AT NEAREST CANADIAN EMBASSY RE RETURN PASSAGE STOP DEEPLY SORRY FOR LOSS STOP YOUR FATHER WAS A GREAT MAN AND WILL BE MISSED STOP BUCK FROBISHER RCMP STOP

Anzio, Italy
January 1944

They called it the swamp. Fraser didn't know why they called it that, until he spent a night there and woke up to water four inches deep in a puddle in the bottom of his foxhole. Sergeant Vecchio squatted next to him, offered a damp cigarette and a match, rain dripping off his helmet as he grinned at Fraser and kidded him. Vecchio insisted that this was, the high life, see the world and get some culture. Doesn't this look like culture, kid? Who needs frescos when we've got the wonders of nature all around us?

Fraser would have responded, but just then the shelling began again and he was busy running through it, patching up men whose faces were a blur, equally muddy and exhausted and set with pain. It was six days of that, Fraser's mind vibrating between the blur of his job and the grin on the corporal's face, his insistence that this was, just the introduction, Benny-boyo, wait'll we get to the main event. It's like the Fourth of July once the Krauts get their range.

Sergeant Vecchio insisted on being called Ray. He called Fraser Benny, or Frase, or Captain Canuck, or any number of things that seemed to occur to him rather randomly at various points of the day. Fraser didn't argue, just smiled and continued with whatever job he'd been assigned.

Ray was nothing like Steve, and Fraser was happy for that, glad that they were so very different that he could watch Ray without seeing anyone else hovering near him. He was glad that, when the letter announcing his father's death reached him, Ray Vecchio hadn't heard any stories of Fraser's childhood, hadn't ever heard of the exploits of Robert Fraser, didn't know anything more than that Fraser was an orphan and half a world from home.

Ray Vecchio brought him coffee scrounged in ways that Fraser didn't want to know, real chocolate, a pack of cigarettes. He brought Fraser comfort, and then Ray left him alone to grieve in his own way. Fraser supposed that was what friendship meant, and he was appropriately grateful for the kindness.

He only smokes half a cigarette as the artillery starts again. When it quiets for a moment, he's somehow managed to crush the pack, and the chocolate is ground into a grayish mess in the bottom of his musette bag. The coffee has vanished completely. Fraser climbs out of this hole in the ground, the size of a grave, and ducks between scattered return fire looking for men to bring back from the borderlands.

Excerpt from letter, Raymundo Vecchio to Francesca Vecchio: Haven't gotten to London yet, but I'll buy you a postcard when I do. I hear they've got awful food, but it can't be worse than that stuff the nuns served us at lunch. But I gotta tell you, the coffee my buddy Fraser makes would peel paint. He's a Canadian, no idea how he got into this unit, but nice enough kid. Maybe I'll bring him back with me, introduce you.

London, England
February 1944

The lights were out. Ray, back when he was still Stanley and reading fairy tales, always thought of Europe as being lit up like Christmas, like holidays and excitement and Michigan Avenue, only with castles. And better accents.

So far, he'd been in Europe for months and months, and Ray hadn't seen any castles and the lights were out. Twilight hit and everything went dark and Ray was vaguely disappointed that the cobblestones weren't shining with the streetlights in the rain, because even though there was plenty of rain, there weren't any streetlights.

He went to see a show, but the show was too cheerful, cheerful in the way his mum had been cheerful those months between Pop's jobs, when they'd be eating leftovers and casseroles from the church relief kitchen and maybe not eating at all that night. It was cheerful but the glamour was pasted on, like glitter on a war notice or the ice cream before a long run up Currahee. The show made Ray nervous, and he left early.

There was dancing at the USO, but Ray wasn't in the mood for dancing. Instead he sat in a corner and watched the couples glide around, none of the girls as pretty as Stella and none of the boys entirely comfortable with their uniforms, with the music, with the dance steps.

Ray could do a better job than most of them—he'd learned from Stell, who came home from her expensive lessons and waltzed him around her backyard, teaching the steps until he was almost as good as she was. But he didn't feel like dancing with anyone else, and so he didn't. Ray wasn't in favor of doing anything he didn't want to do, these days. Unless it was a direct order from Franklin, and even then it pissed him off.

He'd thought, when he joined up, that the military would have more actual shooting at bad guys, and less running around in the rain in the English countryside, pretending to attack villages and startled sheep. The sheep didn't do anything to Ray, and he preferred to sleep in and leave the poor things alone.

Francesca Vecchio: We went to confession every Saturday as kids. Ray, too. You had to say the penance in Latin back then, but we used to confess in Italian, because that was what the priest spoke. He was this old, old guy who was a little hard of hearing, and he pretended he heard you even when he didn't, so sometimes I'd whisper the really bad things, because then he'd pretend he heard but he wouldn't add any more to my penance.

Ray quit going to confession when Pop died. I think he decided he didn't need to tell God how he felt. Or maybe he didn't want to have to say that he was grateful or something. It was hard to tell.

Netley, England
March 1944

First thing Ray did, when he got back off the continent and hit the shores of England in a medical transport—full of guys from the 82nd who'd zigged instead of zagged once too often—was go looking for someplace to confess. He thought it'd be a lot easier than it was, but it turned out the Brits had kicked most of their priests out a couple of hundred years before, and they hadn't been too punctual about letting the Church back in.

Even with that, he thought he'd manage to find somewhere, until he figured out that the nurses in England weren't keen on letting their patients out to wander around the countryside on crutches. It took three weeks and a case of whiskey that Ray got—never mind how—from a nice Scottish girl who came through looking for her brother, but he finally cadged a ride from one of the pilots who was feeling guilty about Sicily. Ray didn't quite say that he'd been wounded there, but he didn't exactly say otherwise. One more sin to add to the list.

But there was a chapel in Hampshire, a quiet little place that wasn't anything like the grand, gutted cathedrals that Ray had avoided in Italy, and the priest didn't ask why he was there or what he needed. English priests listened, and Ray could talk to this one in English which made it easier to say, somehow. Not using his parents' language made the words less terrifying.

He left with enough Our Fathers to sink a battleship, lighter and relieved that there was a war on, so most of his sins didn't count. The ones that did—that girl in Naples, the nights he woke up wondering where Fraser was and reached out, wanted things he shouldn't—weren't the ones Ray regretted, anyway.

Benton Fraser: Commander Eisenhower issued a memorandum that was read out that afternoon. We got extra servings at the mess, and a lot of the men went to church services, wrote letters home, got into wrestling matches—there was a rumor that one lieutenant broke a man's back, but I don't know if that was true.

Interviewer: And what did you do to prepare? You'd never jumped into combat before—was the training in England really enough to make you ready for the jump into Normandy?

Benton Fraser: I—I don't remember. I suppose I went for a walk. I may have written to Ray Vecchio, who was in hospital recuperating from a compound fracture. It was a long time ago.

Normandy, France
June 1944

They were calling it Operation Chicago, and every time he heard the name, Ray laughed. He had laughed in the briefing, with dozens of guys straining to hear Lieutenant Nixon tell them that it would all be fine, as long as they memorized the maps and kept their signal crickets on them, because they were the best and that meant something. He laughed in the muster camp, as he cut the patches off his uniform and ignored orders, stowed them in his jacket pocket for later. He laughed on the tarmac, when he was too top-heavy to stand up and instead laid on his back like a turtle, waiting for Sam to grab him by the hand and haul his ass upright so that Ray could push another guy into the plane and be shoved up after.

He even laughed as they rattled over the English Channel, wind whipping through the C-47 and the engines roaring so loud that when he closed his eyes he could almost believe he was Dorothy headed home. He couldn't sleep, so he counted sheep as he squatted against the too-hard bench and smiled as they started jumping Normandy hedges rather than British fences. He laughed, to himself, a little overwhelmed and a little scared and little crazy, maybe, at the thought that the code words were already sounding off, flashes of tracer rounds shadowed by the thunder of ackack, the flash of a plane on fire and the boom of it hitting the ground. Europe knew they were coming, but the joke was that the Krauts had no idea just how many of them there were.

Ray was even laughing as he clipped on his static line and stepped out the door, laughing as he fell through the night surrounded by a sky lit up like a deadly Fourth of July barbeque, laughing into the darkness and the lights because if he was going to die, there was no better way to go. No better time than that perfect moment when he wasn't touching the ground at all, was falling so fast he was flying. It wasn't funny, none of it was even remotely funny, but he laughed anyway. And then he got close enough to see the ground.

Ray isn't laughing now.

Instead he's tangled in his risers, trying to get at his harness release and getting stung by tree branches for his trouble. He's panicking, because any minute someone's going to notice and he's going to be dead, gone in a clatter of rounds, and where the fuck is the clasp, dammit, or anything that'll break—no, he's forgetting his knife, he can get to his knife, it's on his leg strapped to his boot right there where he can reach—and Ray's swinging his arm around, slicing through the risers with one stroke and then he's falling, crashing through the tree until he hits the ground with a thump and rolls, twists over his musette bag, splashes into a ditch.

And that would be better except that Ray can't swim and he's wearing a Mae West but he can't hit the cartridge because he's still wearing his fucking harness after cutting himself loose, and now he's going to drown in a goddamn ditch in France and how the hell will that look on the condolence letter, we're sorry sir or madam, but your kid was too stupid to crawl out of a ditch and now he's belly up in a location we can't disclose, hope you enjoy the ten grand, so Ray, he kicks his feet and he waves his arms and his boots hit mud because it turns out the ditch is only about three feet deep.

Ray feels a little dumb, but he stands up and at least he's not dead. Yet. He gets to work keeping things that way.

***

A couple of days later, Maloney came through the aid station, handing out last rites like they were going out of style. Ray was fine, just got a ding from a ricochet, and Maloney nodded at him and moved down the line. Maybe when he came back, Ray would ask if he'd seen Sam since the landings.

Ray was sitting there in a haze of morphine and sun, dry for the first time in what felt like a month of Sundays, when he heard somebody shouting.

"Get lost, I said! Goddammit, cut that out!" Ray blinked his eyes open, and saw Jimmy Mahan swinging his arm at Maloney. "I ain't dying, and I ain't Catholic, now buzz off!"

Maloney just grinned and turned to the next guy. Ray figured anyone who jumps had to be a little cracked, and that went double for chaplains and medics, jumping without even a rifle to keep themselves alive. No wonder Maloney wasn't scared of Jimmy, who was laying there with a hole in his leg and another in his shoulder, and who wasn't that scary to begin with, even before he washed out of the airborne and ended up back in the infantry.

He only weighed about a hundred pounds soaking wet, and Ray knew for a fact that Jimmy only made it to Toccoa by lying about the color blindness test.

He knew it because they made a trade, and Ray told Jimmy which colors came in what order so that Jimmy's buddy George would tell Ray the letters on the eye chart. Ray didn't ask what George got out of the deal, because it wasn't any of his business. And even if he wanted to ask, he couldn't. George hadn't made it onto the continent, got dropped somewhere in the Channel by an asshole pilot who was too busy saving his plane to notice that he gave the green light too early, a light that George could see just fine and followed right into the waves along with half his stick.

Ray closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep, ignored Maloney when he came back with comfort and apologies and prayers. Ray didn't need any of that. What he needed was a bandage and a clean bill of health and directions back to his battalion. He wasn't done fighting yet.

Francesca Vecchio: We were worried that Ray was in the big invasion, that he'd gone AWOL from the hospital again. Ma cried when she found out he'd be coming back to the States instead. We felt a little guilty, but he'd been there for so many months. He did his part, and we all wanted him to come home.

Netley, England
July 1944

It wasn't like he was angling for more service stars on his ribbons. Or even more stars on his wings. It was just that, after over a year of jumping and fighting and slogging his way north from Africa, Ray wasn't entirely happy about being left out of the biggest invasion they'd ever attempted. It was like being the warm-up for a football game. Ray just wanted somebody to give him the ball and let him run, because he knew the plays a damn sight better than those boys in the 101, the ones who still had a shine on their jump wings.

But no, the nurses and doctors in England were a lot better at ignoring a guy who wanted to get out of the hospital when, yes, he wasn't entirely recovered from getting shot in the leg somewhere in a valley near, but not within sight of, Rome. Ray was pretty sure that he could still shoot, it was just the marching that could be a problem. And possibly the landing, because it was surprisingly difficult to land in the dark on only one leg. Not that he'd bribed his way onto one of Fraser's training flights to try it or anything.

Ray argued that he'd just hop into wherever they were headed next, but it didn't work. Instead, he was lying around a ward while the rest of the guys shipped to the departure camp. Fraser stopped by to bring him a few magazines and letters, but he didn't admit where they were headed and Ray didn't ask, even though if anyone could figure it out, it would be Benny.

But no dice, no more information for Mama Vecchio's only son, and even though he'd put in for a transfer to the 101 when they announced that his old regiment was being split up, nobody got back to him. Ray figured later that he probably shouldn't have put his return address as Ward 12, Royal Victoria Military Hospital.

It was the damn morphine, kept him from thinking straight.

He should maybe have just routed the transfer through Fraser, but then he'd have needed to explain why he was doing it, and the Canuck always looked so disappointed when confronted with the fact that people—other people, because Ben Fraser would never, ever lie—other people sometimes shaded the truth a little tiny bit to get what they wanted.

Ray would rather eat glass—hell, Ray would rather eat c-rations for another six weeks, including the shitty lemonade powder—than be responsible for Fraser's disappointment.

And so Ray was still in the hospital, and Fraser was headed out to jump training with the 101 and then everyone was gone, the halls were empty as everyone who could get a ride and stand on their own two feet took off for France. But not Ray, because according to the doctors, if he tried to walk on his leg he could cripple himself for life, not that they were trying to scare him. They were simply trying to lay out for him, the potentially serious repercussions of disobeying medical advice, Sergeant Vecchio, and really, being in traction isn't so bad.

Instead of conversations about Canadian poetry and philosophy, or Fraser's weird lectures while they waited for new orders, Ray got a chaplain named Renfield Turnbull who had a seemingly endless supply of anecdotes about curling matches and beavers.

Ray was beginning to suspect that all Canada was completely batshit insane, and they hid it really well by being polite and living in a place where it was too cold to stand still and think about the completely ridiculous things they said with perfectly straight faces all the damn time. Either that, or way back in the history that Ray didn't listen to in grade school, there was a section on how England sent all the criminals to Queensland and all the mental cases to Newfoundland.

Chaplain Turnbull was well-meaning and friendly and kind, and whenever he showed up Ray contemplated hiding under his bed until the end of visiting hours. Because there was nothing worse than being trapped in a bed while Turnbull—and what kind of person names a kid Renfield, when that was liking taping a sign to his back that said kick me, thank you kindly—while Turnbull detailed the rules to his favorite sport, a sport that involved, as far as Ray could tell, cleaning supplies and geology and some stuff about angles that was most of the reason Ray failed Geometry class two years in a row. Unless it was the day that Turnbull showed up with his favorite book, instead.

Ray was pretty sure that forcing a guy to listen to chapters from Arctic Fowl and their Migratory Patterns: A Statistical Analysis was against the law somewhere. Maybe not in Canada, but someplace more civilized.

Ray Kowalski: I've still got a piece of my chute from that one. Best jump I ever made, throwing myself out into the air over Holland. One that I'd tell my kids about, if I had some. One I tell Frannie's kids about, when they ask.

Eindhoven, Holland
September 1944

The drop into Holland was a cakewalk, like a training jump only better. Sure, there was some random gunfire, but the sun was shining and the drop zone was open and Ray landed on his feet, just because he could. Because he wanted to. Because it was a nice day and he could see the ground coming at him, watch the trees and sideslip away from them. Because this might be his last combat jump, and that was enough to make Ray think about it a little harder, ignore his training and try to land on his feet.

He hit Holland standing up, and he stooped to cut loose a piece of the chute while he looked around. Then he got the hell out of the way, because there was equipment thudding onto the field all around him, and Ray didn't want to have to explain how he was hit on the head by a crate of entrenching tools and ration packs. This was a new helmet, and Ray was hoping to keep it from getting dented on the first day.

And yeah, the weeks after the drop weren't as much fun—lots of waiting around, and the Brits were moving too slowly so every inch they gained was gone again in the end, and Ray hated wasting his time on a push that went nowhere. On top of that, it turned out that most of Holland was below sea level so that every time Ray dug a trench it filled up with water and mud and he spent most of September damp and sticky and fucking cold, no matter how many pairs of socks he wore. But it was still okay, in random moments.

He got to be friendly with some of the new guys, the ones transferred in from the 82nd and the ones from new training classes. They were all okay, even if they were replacements. Plus his new lieutenant, Harding Welsh, was a gruff older guy who came in from the 509 with sand still in his boots, the kind of guy who wanted results instead of spit shines and rifle drills. Ray liked him, and he liked his squad. Even the mortar guys.

This time around, somebody remembered to mention that the lemonade packets were there for a reason, so nobody ended up with scurvy in Holland. The British rations were crap but the locals had some stuff saved, canned fruit and fresh bread and even milk, which Ray hadn't had since Georgia. Most of the time, they were willing to trade for cigarettes or chocolate or various things that Ray got used to hoarding and hanging onto from his rations.

Ray would look back later at Holland and think to himself, that was the life. That was what soldiering was supposed to look like. It was about the only part of his years in Europe that he told people about, after he got back.

Holland was pretty good, as combat postings went. He liked it there. They even had weekend passes, now that the Germans were being pushed slowly back across Europe by guys who weren't Ray or any of his buddies. Ray could have stayed in Holland for the rest of the war, if it weren't for the damned German army.

Ray Kowalski: I never made it to see the Eiffel Tower. Fraser did, spent a weekend in Paris, but I dunno, it never seemed like the sort of place I needed to see. I suppose I could go now, but who really wants an old geezer like me wandering around the streets? I don't even parley vous any French. Italian, though, that I learned. Not until after the war, though.

Paris, France
October 1944

He is afraid, sometimes, that if he falls asleep he won't wake up.

What's worse, Fraser imagines that he won't die, won't stop remembering. He fears that he'll fall asleep and be trapped there, eyes closed and the things he's seen looping through his mind until there's nothing left of him but the things he's failed to finish and the people he's left behind.

He can't seem to snap himself back out of the roar of combat, and it doesn't help that every time he looks up, turns too quickly, glances across a field or a street or a room, Fraser sees Steve—or the image of him, the space that Steve used to fill—watching him. He hasn't said anything yet, Steve hasn't, because Steve is imaginary. Steve is a figment of Fraser's rather shaky grasp on sanity and truth. Fraser is beginning to worry that as soon as he finds the space to think, that won't be true anymore.

And so he tries to trade away the pass, argues that he's needed too much in the field, but Lieutenant Welsh will hear nothing of his protests and instead sends an orderly for Fraser's dress uniform. He has no choice but to accede, as Welsh is correct in the argument that, should he see Fraser again before 48 hours have elapsed, he is entitled to arrest and sentence him to a week behind the lines, rolling bandages or cleaning latrines or, in fact, whatever the army damned well pleases, is that clear?

Fraser's eyes drift closed as he bounces in the back of a conveniently scheduled deuce-and-a-half, but he immediately jerks himself back awake each time, head snapping up to thud against the canvas walls of the truck. Once he arrives in Paris, he checks into the enlisted men's hotel and avoids several well-intentioned young ladies—and one less-well-intentioned young man—on his way to acquire a cup of coffee and a quiet corner in which to read.

He succeeds in ordering the coffee, at least.

French is the language his mother spoke, although her French sounded very little like the phrases Fraser is surrounded by now. He supposes that he'll need to learn it if they remain posted nearby, and so Fraser listens carefully to the sound of it—like any language, full of new words and things he won't say—and files away some of the more useful terms for later.

His book is by Ernest Hemingway, who used to write for the Toronto paper Fraser's father received months out of date, the one his mother used to teach Fraser to read English so that he'd have a language to take out into the world with him. Fraser isn't thinking of his parents.

The book speaks of a Paris very different from this, from strained laughter and dingy alleys and dark shopfronts. Hemingway's Paris is full of lights and the remains of a war already past, the fading memories of the ways that violence breaks a man and pulls him away from life. Hemingway's cafes are brighter and bolder and it becomes clear that Jake doesn't have a best friend, either. Suddenly Fraser doesn't feel like reading Hemingway's words.

He goes back to the billets and he looks at the bottle of whisky left by another occupant but Fraser doesn't drink it. At some point, he falls asleep but he doesn't remember his dreams when he opens his eyes again just before dawn.

Benton Fraser: Bastogne. Bastogne was—cold. Even for me, even after growing up in the north, Bastogne was difficult at times. It was a failure of equipment, for the most part.

Ray Kowalski: Nearly froze my nuts off. Fraser had this idea, something about sharing heat, and all the guys tried it because when it's that cold? You don't really care what it looks like, you just want to be able to feel your toes again. Getting a little handsy wasn't nothing, if it meant we'd all go home with our dicks still attached. Not that we all got handsy with—oh, never mind.

Benton Fraser: It was standard procedure, Ray.

Ray Kowalski: I just said that, didn't I? I'm trying to explain to the kid, is all. What it was like that winter, when we knew we were surrounded, when we stumbled into the German trenches half the time because we couldn't see a damn thing in all that snow.

Benton Fraser: I'm not certain that it's possible to explain those weeks.

Ray Kowalski: Yeah, Frase, you're probably right. You had to be there.

Bastogne, Belgium
December 1944

As they were marching in, everyone else was stumbling away from the line. Guys who looked like they'd been rolled in a ditch and then hit with a pistol kept staring at them, like Ray and the rest of the 101 were ghosts. Like they were crazy, although that at least was nothing new.

Spend a few months in the parachute infantry, and you were bound to get a few incredulous looks.

Maybe it was the part about jumping out of airplanes. It could have been the landing behind enemy lines, or even the Mohawks and the tendency to bayonet first, ask questions later. But Ray figured most people got to the part about jumping out of C-47s and didn't ask any more questions.

That's what he told himself, as he grabbed ammo from guys headed in the other direction and checked his pockets for grenades and cursed the army for supply delays that left him with two pairs of socks in his kit and no extra woolen underwear. Next time they declared a war, Ray was putting in for duty in the South Pacific.

***

He hated camping. It was stupid, setting up a tent in the woods and hiking around and cooking canned food over a tiny stove and no shower or radio or clean sheets. Camping was boring, with cheery fires and bedrolls and tin cups of coffee with rum in them, like Ray's pop used to make when his mum wasn't looking.

Right now, though, he would have murdered for a tent to curl up in. Or a nice fire, instead of half-frozen c-rations and army chocolate bars. A chocolate bar wasn't food. And after this, if Ray never saw another can of beans or frozen, flat pancake, it would be too soon.

He couldn't feel his ankles. Or his fingers, which made him almost glad that he ran out of cigarettes yesterday, because he was shaking so hard that he'd probably drop his lighter trying to smoke one, and that was just pathetic.

A tent, a fire, and a pack of smokes, then. And a roast beef sandwich, like the one's from Katz's back home, with real beef instead of canned gristly shit with greasy chunks of things that might once have been potatoes. Ray glanced down at the cracker on his plate. Maybe the beef stew wouldn't be so bad. At least it would be hot, or warm, or at the very least not frozen into a bizarre stewsicle.

A flash of red caught his eye, the bright cross on the armband of the new guy, Fraser something-or-other. He'd walked up to Ray the night before, squinted at him, and muttered, "You're not Ray." Which was a strange way to start a conversation, even in the middle of a frozen woods in the middle of some corner of Belgium that nobody really wanted in the first place.

"What? Of course I am. Ask anybody, I'm Ray. Have been since I was twelve." Ray pushed away from the tree stump he'd been leaning on, got in the kid's face a little. "You could ask Stella, but first you'd have to get out of this place. If you think of a way, let me know."

The guy blinked at him. "But you're not Ray Vecchio. They told me I'd find Ray out here, and I assumed they meant—it's not important. We are—were—I'll go check with the rest of the men."

"No Vecchio on this stretch of the line. Just me, and I'm a Kowalski." Ray pulled out a cigarette. "You got a name, or should I just call you Doc?"

"Oh, I'm not a physician, although I did spend a few months living with an Inuit healer as a youngster." Fraser paused. "There isn't much moss around here." Ray blinked at him. "For bandages and such."

Okay, so the new medic was certifiable. Didn't the army check for that stuff, or were they really only taking crazy idiots in the parachute troops? He had thought that was just a joke.

New Medic must have noticed the look on Ray's face. "Fraser, Benton Fraser of the Canadian Medical Corps. I'm currently on detachment with the hospital back in Bastogne, while my unit is being reformed. Apparently things have been delayed by the siege rather more than they expected."

Ray opens his mouth to ask a question—but before he gets a word out, the whistle of incoming fire starts up and the fucking trees start exploding again. Fraser stands there, like he doesn't think any of it can touch him even though it obviously can, it did two days ago to Sam Franklin who had survived D-Day and Market Garden but not this place.

Fraser is a big fucking target standing straight like a ramrod and staring out over the line toward the German guns. Wearing what might as well be a big red bullseye on his chest.

Ray grabs him around the waist and dives for cover, landing on top of Fraser with a thump.

Ray rolls off Fraser and crowds himself down in the corner of the foxhole, hands around his knees as he scans for his rifle. Fraser sits up, starts to climb free, for where Ray can already hear the screams started. Ray grabs the strap of Fraser's musette bag and holds on. "Hey, you idiot, keep down until it stops. You're no good to anyone if you get your head blown off by an 88."

Fraser pries Ray's fingers loose. "We're just as likely to be hit here as anywhere. And it's my job." Before Ray can think of a reply, Fraser is gone. He's left watching over the edge of the foxhole as the earth shoots skyward and the shells screech past, Fraser dodging between bursts like nothing can touch him. Ray's sure he's dead, that Fraser's on borrowed time and just doesn't know it yet.

***

But Fraser lived through it, they both did, because it was hours later now, and Fraser was headed in his direction. Unless Fraser was a ghost, in which case Ray was crazy because only crazy people see ghosts, and Ray was not thinking about the possibility of being crazy. Ray didn't have time to be crazy, because people were trying to kill him. Being crazy would make that a lot easier, because crazy people were bad at self-preservation.

Ray's self-preserving sense was just fine. He did not want to be dead, therefore he wasn't crazy, and so he comforted himself by thinking about the way that when he got back to London, no one would be shooting at him. Sure, it had bombs and the occasional threat of being run down by a car with no headlights, but no one in England would be actively trying to end Ray's life. No one in London, and possibly no one in all of England, was currently hoping to shoot him in the head.

Ray, though, wasn't in London. All the wishing in the world couldn't get him out of Bastogne.

A few days later, Fraser had shifted his worldly possessions into the other end of Ray's foxhole and started telling stories about his buddy in Italy, a Chicago kid coincidentally also named Ray. Just as Ray started to think that maybe it would be okay after all, the fog rolled in and it started to snow. So much for wishes.

***

There's no present, no past in this place. Ray's not sure how to explain it, but Bastogne just—is. He's not getting out, none of them are getting out, they just don't know it yet only Ray does, he knows he's not going home and that's how he figures out that time is broken, that it isn't working right, because he can see the future lined up next to the right-now-right-here and there's nothing there. It's like Normandy all over again, just now and now and now and Ray's maybe, a little bit, crazy.

Fraser shakes his head no, says, you're just hypothermic, Ray, drink some of this hot coffee, and Ray's teeth aren't chattering like they were before. He's tired, tired all the way through to his bones, but Fraser is a bastard and won't let him sleep. He's not friends with Fraser, not anymore, because Ray is tired and Fraser won't let him close his eyes, not even for a couple of minutes just to catch his breath, that's all he needs. Fraser hates him and wants Ray to stay awake but awake is cold and Ray is so very, very tired of the cold. He's so tired of the cold that it's starting to feel warm, almost, and Fraser won't let him sleep now that he's finally warm and Ray hates Fraser, hates him more than anyone because he wants to sleep.

Ray tries anyway, but he's just drifting off when Fraser's back, Fraser's sliding his hands under Ray's clothes and Fraser's hands are scorching, hot, burning a path along Ray's spine. Fraser's hands are fire-sharp and he's got a blanket—Ray doesn't ask where the blanket comes from, it just appears like magic—and he's wrapped around Ray, hands rubbing along Ray's skin and Fraser's not wearing a coat. Ray asks where's your coat? Didn't you have a coat? It's too cold— but Fraser doesn't answer, just grabs tighter around Ray and holds on.

It's light again, when Ray's teeth wake him up by chattering together. He tries to sit up but Fraser's wrapped over him like a shroud, and Ray wants to push Fraser away, because he's not—they're not—this isn't strange, exactly, but it's a lot closer than other guys and Ray doesn't know what to make of that, what to make of the way that it isn't as wrong as it should be. When Fraser blinks awake, he looks confused for a second, and then relieved, so fucking relieved that Ray wonders what happened, what he missed.

And then Ray looks down, to where Fraser's hands are still wrapped around Ray's back, and he clears his throat and raises an eyebrow. Fraser mutters something about standard procedure and crawls off Ray. He straightens his uniform and hisses something under his breath and climbs out of the foxhole, off to check on some other poor slob in J Company.

Ray shivers a little and hunches under the blanket, wishing for a moment that he wasn't quite so warm.

Excerpt from letter, Raymundo Vecchio to Francesca Vecchio: Stuck in a Brit hosp., nothing to worry about. They winged me in the leg, cracked it a little bit, and it looks like I'm headed home. Tell Ma I want linguini for dinner when I get back to Chicago. And keep sending the packages—the boys in the ward love them, I'm the most popular guy on the floor.

Netley, England
January 1945

He got a letter from Fraser in the middle of January. Ray had been listening to the radio, and he figured out pretty quickly that Fraser was stuck in Bastogne all month, from things he wrote and things he didn't.

Ray thought Fraser would write long letters, letters that read like his conversations, letters full of tangents and stories and names that Ray wouldn't even try to pronounce. Instead, he got cramped little notes, abbreviations and words crossed out and written over. He read about how brisk the weather was, how the men were in good spirits, how Fraser had shared a foxhole with another trooper from Chicago, another Ray, this time a Polish meatpacker's kid.

Ray didn't have the heart to feel jealous, not when he could tell from the things Fraser didn't say that it was worse than anyone said. Kowalski sounded like a good guy, maybe he could keep Benny from getting his idiot head blown off. If he pulled it off, he was fine in Ray's book.

Even if Fraser did write an awful lot of stuff that sounded like poetry when he mentioned Kowalski. Maybe they did things different in Canada.

Ray Kowalski: Belgium sucked. I think that's the only thing I remember about the winter of '44. Belgium is a great place, I'm sure the people there are nice and all, but I spent three months in that damn country and I hated every damn minute.

Haguenau, Alsace
February 1945

The 506 ends up on the river, staring over the ice-choked water at a place that is still German, for now. There are patrols to be sent, and intelligence to gather, and Fraser often spots Major Winters and Captain Nixon standing on the banks, watching the water flow past. He doesn't interrupt, but Fraser suspects that they're looking for the same answers from the grey river, the frost-coated banks and sudden pops of gunfire.

It's the middle of February, and there are real showers and cold-weather gear and Ray is livelier, bouncing on his heels a little as he piles his equipment on the table and sorts through it, sends his rifle off for repair and sights in another over the long evenings in their billet. The other men are laconic, bored with the everyday terror of life on this frontline, but Ray seems to be trying to prove himself to someone, something.

Neither of them gets enough sleep. Fraser is too busy watching Ray, waiting for something he can't define. Ray is too busy—being himself. He volunteers for a patrol and Fraser isn't allowed to go along; Welsh keeps him back, claiming that it's routine, that they'll have no use for a medic and he'll only slow things down.

Welsh is rarely mistaken, but he isn't perfect. Fraser's running for the bank before the second of the grenades goes off, equipment bag banging against his hip, his breath choking and steaming as he rounds the corner and tumbles down into the cellar that they've been using as a command post.

He has his hand inside Fallon's chest, searching for the place, the point to push that will keep him alive, and the whole time the refrain repeats in Fraser's head. Not Ray, not Ray, not Ray.

That's the moment Fraser knows that he needs to end this. Whatever this is, and he doesn't look too closely at the options included in that pronoun, it is more than his duty to his country, than his duty to the rest of the men, and there is no room in this place for playing favorites. Fraser recognizes that such a prayer is akin to playing God, and he cannot allow that to happen.

When he tries to explain, standing on the bank of the river that divides them from Germany, Ray doesn't agree. Instead, he punches Fraser in the mouth and stomps off, shaking his hand and muttering about shell shock. He doesn't look back, and when they move out a few days later, Ray finds a spot on a deuce and a half and doesn't look up when Fraser settles in across from him. They sit like that, ankles bumping, for the four hour ride, and at the end, Ray jumps down from the truck and walks away without a word.

When Fraser bunks down that night, alone after falling asleep to Ray's snores for months, Steve is there. For the first time, Fraser listens.

Benton Fraser: Germany was a beautiful country, but we spent most of our months there waiting to be reassigned. It was a difficult time.

Düsseldorf, Germany
April 1945

Fraser got himself transferred to a different unit. Welsh did the paperwork; he didn’t ask what happened and it didn't really matter, because Fraser was never supposed to be assigned to the 506 in the first place. It turned out that the orders got turned around in Ottawa and Fraser had been assigned to the infantry the entire duration, and somehow nobody had noticed.

Figured, that the whole mess was because somebody somewhere in Canada filed a piece of paper wrong. Fraser always did have a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, usually dragging Ray with him.

Not that Ray had been keeping tabs on the whole mess or anything. It was just that people told him stuff, assumed that he wanted to know where Fraser was and what he was doing and whether he was eating right and making friends and doing okay in his new outfit. People started conversations with him, they gave him little bits of information, and Ray didn't ask for it.

Not all of it, at least.

But Fraser wasn't his problem any more. Fraser's buddy Vecchio sent him a letter, a long one on the thin paper they used for overseas mail, a letter full of questions and barely-veiled accusations that he'd somehow failed, that it was Ray's job to keep an eye on Fraser and he'd fallen down on the job. Ray ignored it, because Fraser wasn't his problem to solve. Maybe he was Vecchio's problem, but he wasn't Ray's. Let Vecchio come back and watch the crazy idiot try to get himself a medal and a headstone. Ray would trade him places.

At one point they ended up in the same hotel in some tiny town covered in edelweiss and schnitzel, Ray on one side of the dining room and Fraser on the other. It was just annoying enough that it wasn’t funny. Ray laughed anyhow, because he knew it would get to Fraser. He watched as Fraser pursed his lips and blew out a breath, turned carefully away and said something low to the kid standing next to him. Ray laughed harder, and the next thing he knew he was sitting in a chair, Fraser's hand on his back and Fraser's voice in his ear, chanting quietly, "Breathe, Ray. Deep breaths, one more, inhale, exhale."

When Ray managed to catch his breath and open his eyes, he looked right at Fraser and explained, "Vecchio wants you to write him. He's got this idea that if somebody isn't following you around, you're going to get your head blown off. Tell him to lay off, okay? He's driving me crazy."

Fraser blinked once, turned his head, and muttered to someone who wasn't there, "No, of course he doesn't mean literally. It's a figure of—" He turned back to Ray. "I'll be certain to tell him that we're no longer assigned to the same unit. I'm sure he'll understand."

Ray glanced away and shrugged his shoulders. "Whatever. I just don't want him coming after me with his crutches or a mortar or something." By the time he looked back up from his boots, Fraser was walking away, slipping through the clumps of card games and enlisted men like they were water.

Francesca Vecchio: Ray came back, but he didn't come back. I mean, he was supposed to come back, but something happened to the paperwork and he ended up in Florida instead, in the hospital there. Ma wanted to go down, but we didn't have that kind of money. We had to wait until his discharge papers came through, which wasn't until months later, after the war ended. And then, when he finally did come back, he brought someone with him.

Orlando, Florida
August 1945

Ray spent months living in a hole in the ground in Italy with Germans working to kill him every day. He crawled through mud in the pitch black with only his boot knife, trying to get close enough to the enemy trenches to cut a few throats before he got his head blown off. He was wounded three times, one of them in the chest, and jumped out of airplanes into machine gun fire whenever he was ordered to jump. He dragged himself on his elbows and one leg back to the dressing station when he took a round through the thigh, and he didn't even swear more than a few times. He went through five surgeries, three different field hospitals, two British military hospitals and six separate air raids, the last two without even a helmet.

Ray was a brave guy, everybody said so. He was a guy who knew how to take a hit. And so, he told himself, one tiny blonde nurse with a mimeographed rehabilitation schedule shouldn't be this terrifying.

Too bad telling himself that didn't make Stella any less scary. She seemed all sweetness and kindness, but Ray swore—he would swear on his rosary if he could just find out which mudhole he left it in when they shipped him off the beach in Italy—that she found his pain funny.

Ray spent a lot of time thinking of stories to tell that would get her laughing for other reasons, because she sounded a little like home and a little like the person that Ray had always wanted to be. But she was still really goddamned frightening most of the time.

Ray Kowalski: After the war? Nah, we didn't go back at the same time. I got posted to Berlin for a few months, occupation duty. It was okay, plenty of free time and I learned to polka, which my mum had always tried to teach me. You'd have to ask somebody else what the trip back was like, because I spent most of my boat ride home trying to drink through a case of scotch.

Northwest Territories, Canada
January 1946

There's no one at the dock to meet his ship, or at the station to meet his train. Fraser straightens his shoulders, takes some of his back pay and buys a new sled, along with a team. He's written to Eric, but the letter must have been delayed, because Meighen isn't in Yellowknife, and Fraser sets off for his father's cabin—Fraser's cabin, now—alone.

It takes him two weeks to get there. He spends much of the trip arguing with his father, who shows up as soon as he leaves Yellowknife, and who is remarkably—and volubly—opinionated for a man who is buried in a hole dynamited in the permafrost, still wearing his uniform. Steve is nowhere that Fraser can see.

At the end, Fraser boards the dogs out in town, hikes back to his cabin, and locks the door.

***

He didn't really come out again until the summer solstice, and by then everyone had forgotten he ever arrived. Fraser thought he was better off that way.

Excerpt from letter, Francesca Vecchio to Stella Vecchio: Ray doesn't like corn. Or carrots. Or any vegetables, really, that aren't tomatoes—which I think are a fruit. So I don't know, maybe you should just feed him a lot of fruit? They've got oranges and stuff down there in Florida, right? Ma asked me to give you some recipes just in case, but really, if it's covered in marinara or cheese, everything should be fine.

Chicago, Illinois
May 1946

Ray got back almost a year after the war ended, with a hangover the size of Poland and three dollars and twenty-six cents in his pockets. His parents were gone to Arizona to visit his brother, so Ray picked the lock on their back door and dropped his stuff in the hallway. It wasn't quite a hero's welcome, but at least he didn't have to worry about buying breakfast or finding a place to sleep. Ray'd billeted in worse places.

He slept for two days, and then he took a long shower, with real soap and hot water and nobody banging on the door or throwing snowballs over the curtain or standing next to him, cracking jokes about grenades and pineapples.

None of his old clothes fit—too short in the legs and sleeves, and too small around the collar—so he dug out his spare uniform. It fit fine, but it made him feel like a fake, like a guy trading on stories that shouldn't be told. The guys down at his dad's club loved it. They stood him enough rounds that he couldn't see straight, walked home singing "Blood on the Risers" at the top of his lungs, and got into an argument with Old Lady Leibowicz over whether midnight was the middle of the night. He crawled into bed with his boots still on, and woke up the next day just in time to throw up.

Another long, hot, blissfully quiet shower and a quick trip to the Laundromat to spend some of his money on getting stuff out of his shirt that he didn't remember eating, and Ray was ready to head back to the bar.

By the end of the week it was a pattern. He started a tab that got paid down when his back pay caught up with him sometime in July, but never got paid off. His dad got him a job at the plant, and Ray was good with that, it wasn't what he wanted to do but Ray wasn't sure what that was, so it was good enough.

Somebody told somebody told somebody told Ray that Stella was married, living down in Florida with some GI she met working as a nurse. She'd always talked about going to college, but Ray figured everyone grew up different from what they expected. He was—not happy, exactly, but not as upset as he expected to be. It was probably the low buzz of whiskey and beer that he kept going all the time, making him okay with things that he really should have been pissed about.

All four of his letters to Fraser were returned to sender that summer, and that did get him pissed. Where did Fraser get off, anyway? They were old war buddies now, they were supposed to be hanging out at the damn American Legion together, telling stories of the coldest fucking night in Bastogne and the London girls and sharing feather beds in Belgium and—maybe it was for the best that Fraser wasn't around to share stories with Ray.

Francesca Vecchio: Ray came back for a few months, but he was different, quieter and meaner and we all kept waiting for the old Ray, the one who left, but—that's not who he was anymore. Stella didn't see any difference, because she'd never known him before, but for the rest of us, it was hard. I wanted my brother back, not some strange guy who made jokes and then didn't laugh at them.

On the Road
November 1946

Stella was asleep when he left, but Ray didn't wake her, didn't stop by the house and tell his Ma he was leaving, didn't do anything but leave a note scrawled on the back of his discharge papers and fifty bucks in the savings account.

He hitchhiked to Los Angeles, two weeks of looking woebegone and confident by turns, whatever made someone stop and give him a ride. He fended off an overly friendly encyclopedia salesman in Missouri and a bored housewife outside Phoenix and by the time he got to the ocean Ray was tired and out of cash and being back home didn't seem like such a bad deal after all.

He dialed collect, but Stella didn't accept the charges and Ray didn't blame her. He settled into a job down on the docks in San Diego, hauling crates around and getting paid just enough for a shitty apartment and enough beer that he didn't notice just how shitty it was. He was doing fine, even join the union when they came around, but one of the local Irish protection rackets took exception to that and next thing Ray knew, he was out on his ear.

He headed north, made it to San Francisco—three weeks as a cab driver, two as a dispatcher, and then three days in lockup for breaking his supervisor's nose. After that, he tried Nevada for a while, but there was nothing there but cactus and dirt. Utah wasn't much better, and Seattle was nice—quiet and green and with more hills than he expected—but it rained all the fucking time and Ray was sick of wearing damp shoes by the end of February. He spent March in Wyoming but it was hard to be a cowboy when you couldn't ride a horse.

Pretty much the only thing Ray knew how to do was jump out of airplanes and shoot Germans, and he wasn't allowed to do the second one anymore. When he ran into a guy in Boise, heard about the Forest Service picking up a few C-47s cheap, Ray tagged along to see what was up.

When they asked if he was married, Ray lied. Stella was better off without him.

Excerpt from letter, Benton Fraser to Ray Vecchio: Ray, I hope this finds you well. I realize that I haven't been the most faithful of correspondents, but the situation has been—difficult—and I find that I haven't much to tell. Canada remains, as you so aptly put it, "cold as a polar bear sitting on a frozen lake eating an ice cream cone," although I should point out that polar bears aren't known for their low temperature, nor do they consume ice cream, preferring instead seals and, on occasion—

I'm sorry, I'm rambling. I seem to have lost much of my ability to make my intentions clear to—it doesn't matter. I hope you're well, and your family is, I'm sure, happy to have you home. If you happen to be in contact with Ray Kowalski, I hope you will pass on my lo good wishes to him, as well.

Yellowknife, Northwest Territories
February 1947

He got as far as the RCMP recruitment station, but Fraser couldn't bring himself to walk through the doors. He knew that his father wanted him to follow in the family tradition—as a matter of fact, he'd said so just the day before—but Fraser looked at the men in brightly colored uniforms and all he could think about was that they were blinding, easy targets and a color that wouldn't show the blood, not until it was thick enough to soak the fabric and seep out onto the ground.

He might have still gone in, looked past that, but the pistols on their belts were too much like—Fraser didn't want to carry a weapon again. That wasn't who he was, now.

Instead, he signed on with a logging company for six months labor, and spent his days quietly learning to move in new ways, follow new paths. It was temporary, but the work was soothing and he found himself enjoying it for brief moments. He stayed long enough to realize that the forest he cut was never going to be the same, that it would grow back brokenly, if at all, and more dangerous than it had been before.

In a way, his wanderings after that were a penance. In another, they were a quest.

Francesca Vecchio: Ray—Ray Kowalski, I mean—isn't anything like my brother. But back then, he was a nice kid, and he knew our Ray, at least knew who he was and a little bit about what he'd done, because Fraser had told stories when they were serving together. So Fraser was the—the link, the space between Ray Kowalski and our Ray. It was enough for us, and it wasn't that strange, having him around for dinners and to help out with the house and things. He was a nice guy, and a lot of families had spaces in them where guys were missing. He helped fill that up.

Chicago, Illinois
April 1947

Ray didn't call on Stella when he got back to town. She'd made it clear that they were through, done, over, and anyway when he looked her up in the directory there was no listing. Vecchio's family had a listing, though, and Ray stopped over, thought he might shoot the shit with Vecchio, trade old stories about—training, and things like that. He even sobered up for the occasion, combed his hair flat and put on a clean shirt and when Vecchio's sister Frannie opened the door, he smiled and tried not to look like a guy who really, really wanted a drink.

Vecchio wasn't there. Hadn't been for months, and Ray was going to leave, but the Vecchios all looked at him like he was something good, looked at him like nobody had since Fraser walked away that last time. So he stayed for dinner.

Ray had never been good at letting things go, and this was no different. He visited, did some of the stuff that Vecchio would have done if he'd been home, and Ray spent a lot of time trying to remember the stories Fraser used to tell, the ones that made Vecchio look like a good guy, a guy who people liked and who did his job and made a difference.

Ray hadn't known he was listening to Fraser that much. So instead he asked Frannie to start teaching him Italian, and they spent a lot of afternoons on her Ma's couch, as she chattered about school and he tried to follow along, started telling stories about Fraser that made her eyes light up. There was no way to miss that the kid thought Fraser hung the moon, that Fraser was second only to her brother in Frannie's list of perfect soldiers. Ray didn't even think to wonder where he'd be on that list.

He was running out of stories to tell that didn't make him want things he didn't—couldn't—think about. And Francesca had taught him to say everything she could think of, including, my brother's stuck up blonde wife who's too good for the neighborhood, complete with hand gestures—Ray figured he could use it if he ever made it down to Arizona—when Vecchio wrote home, said he was joining up with the Smokejumpers in Montana.

He didn't say anything about anyone else he might be working with, but Ray was getting tired of jumping at backfiring cars and telling people, yeah, Bastogne certainly was pretty cold, all right. That afternoon, Ray sold his car and bought a train ticket out west, figuring that he was good at making dumb decisions, and this was right up his alley.

Excerpt from letter, Ray Kowalski to Francesca Vecchio: Your brother's fine, quit hassling us. We're cutting down trees and fighting fires and the food sucks, so anytime you want to send us out some of your Ma's cookies, we'll take them. Other than that, yeah, we're both good. It's better than the army, at least.

Missoula, Montana
July 1947

Ray had always figured being in the 82nd was the stupidest thing he'd ever do. It was, too, right up until he got off a bus in Missoula and signed up for the Forest Service. And for a while, that was the dumbest thing Ray had ever done.

Two days into training, he invited Kowalski to bunk in at his place. And that wasn't all that stupid, except that somehow when he'd said his wife was named Stella and they met in Florida, it hadn't occurred to Kowalski—and it shouldn't have occurred to Kowalski, because shit like this didn't happen to either of them when Fraser wasn't around—hadn't occurred to either of them that Ray's Stella was also Kowalski's Stella. And that she was pissed as hell that they were out gallivanting around west of the Rockies.

At least, she was eventually. Kowalski let it slip in a letter home to his Ma that he was working as a Smokejumper and—strange coincidence—getting to be friends with a guy from the 82nd, one who knew Fraser, too. Kowalski's mother said something in a letter to Stella a few weeks later, and then Stella got pissed. Fast. Before that, they'd needed the telephone for calls from the base, but Ray hadn't realized that telephones, well, they could be weapons, too.

Stella's anger was fierce, even over the crackling party line. She thought that Ray was an idiot and Kowalski was worse and the two of them probably deserved to die in a fucking forest fire because men that stupid, dumb enough to leave their families to go play heroes in the middle of nowhere because they wanted to jump out of airplanes in place of taking a nice safe factory job, idiots like that who were somehow always named Ray were better off not contributing to the population.

She phrased it a little more politely than that, but Ray's ears were still ringing by the time he got off the telephone, and Kowalski wasn't looking much better.

They did a lot of looking past each other for the rest of the summer, neither of them willing to admit that maybe this wasn't such a good idea. And in October, when fire season ended, Ray packed up his gear and shook Kowalski's hand and got on a train back east for the winter.

He had to sleep at his Ma's house for two weeks, but by Halloween he was back in Stella's good graces enough to call Kowalski, rub it in a little, say, you wish you were here.

In November, he took off again, but this time he bought a car, took Stella with him. She needed a vacation, and Ray was restless. He was always restless.

Benton Fraser: Chicago was enormous, loud and angry and empty. It wasn't that I disliked it, it was just that—

Ray Kowalski: You hated it. Don't lie to the nice interviewer.

Benton Fraser: I wouldn’t say hate, exactly. That seems too strong a word for it.

Ray Kowalski: Fraser. Come on, this is for posterity. And you're a shitty liar.

Benton Fraser: Fine. I hated it. Chicago was terrible, it was noisy and dirty and rude and you weren't even there, so it was a waste of time.

Ray Kowalski: See? That wasn't so hard, now was it?

Chicago, Illinois
December 1947

Ray wasn't in Chicago.

Fraser wasn't sure how he knew this. He just climbed from the train and took a deep breath and knew, down in the place where his awareness of Ray had always been, that he had come to the wrong place. That Chicago was empty, and whatever it was that he needed to say would remain unsaid.

He still walked to his hotel, checked in, and left his bag. Fraser wrote a list on the long journey down to Illinois, and he didn't trust the feeling, so he started at the top of the list and worked his way down. He had three weeks until he needed to be back in Saskatchewan as a candidate for the new Forest Service School, and that would be plenty of time to search the city for traces of Ray.

He started with Ray's parents, who took one look at him and closed the door in his face. Fraser stood for a few moments, wondering whether he ought to knock again, trying to decide if he could apologize for whatever it was that they though he'd done, but he finally turned away.

His visit with Ray Vecchio's family didn't go any better. Ray's sister was overly friendly, and his mother simply repeated the information that her son had gone traveling again, and she didn't know where. The letters that she dragged out for Fraser to read were postmarked Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Montana. Fraser had never heard of Missoula, but he walked to the library and looked it up. It wasn't a city, barely even a town, and Fraser couldn't imagine what would keep him there.

He was even more confused when he read the letters, found Ray Kowalski's name in them.

Fraser returned to his training with no more understanding of Americans than when he'd arrived. It didn't help that Steve spent the entire return journey humming snatches of 'As Time Goes By" when he wasn't rolling his eyes and asking if he'd be invited to the wedding. Fraser's only consolation was that at least his father was nowhere to be seen. When the two of them arrived together, they made him question his sanity on a regular basis.

Telegram addressed to Raymond Vecchio, Chicago, Illinois: SEASON STARTS NEXT WEEK STOP YOU COMING OUT OR NOT STOP DON’T BE A GOLDBRICK VECCHIO ASK STELL TO LET YOU LEAVE TOWN STOP KOWALSKI STOP

Missoula, Montana
May 1948

Kowalski picked him up at the station in a dusty pickup truck that sounded like it was about to die a sad, painful death, or maybe like it already had and nobody'd noticed yet. He looked good, though, tanned and sober and he'd lost some of the twitchiness that Ray had learned to ignore. They didn't say anything, just nodded at each other and headed out for the base.

The first week of raining wasn't any harder than the year before—lots of instruction, along with some jump training that Ray kept snickering at every time Kowalski made a dirty joke about sitting in a stick with his hips between another guy's knees. They got Pulaskis and spent an entire afternoon bent over at the waist, asses in the air as they chipped at the dirt and practiced fire lines.

They went back to Kowalski's place every night, dead tired and grimy with sweat and dust, and sat around listening to the radio and waiting for it to be late enough to head out to the bar, where Vecchio would have a few drinks and Kowalski would drink soda. Usually they stayed late enough for Bonnie Samuels to get plastered and tip slowly off her stool and onto the floor, waiting so that they could join in when the whole bar yelled timber as she went over. After that they'd get some sleep and wake up the next morning to do it all again.

Fraser showed up on the ninth day of training, and Ray grinned at him and slapped him on the back and introduced him around, told the guys that Fraser had saved his life back in Italy, saved a lot of guys. By the time they got back to where Kowalski was slumped against the wall of the mess, smoking a cigarette, Ray had worked out that Fraser was sticking around, joining up for the season to see how the US Forest Service operated so that he could go back to Canada and start up something similar there.

He didn't know what he expected when they stopped in front of Kowalski, Ray grinning and Fraser quiet, quieter than he'd been even back then, when Ray had first met him in Italy. Kowalski didn't shift, didn't hold out his hand to shake. He just kept chain smoking, his face unreadable. They stood there awkwardly, until finally the foreman called Fraser away.

Ray Kowalski: We didn't work with each other much. Depended on the rotation, and how many guys they needed. Lived together, though, thanks to Vecchio.

Benton Fraser: He was trying to be helpful, Ray.

Ray Kowalski: Didn't say he wasn't, Fraser.

Missoula, Montana
June 1948

They lived together, shared meals and played volleyball on the base with the other jumpers, went out to the bar in Missoula and walked back together, four miles each way in the dark. Ray Vecchio held them together, because Ray Kowalski had yet to forgive Fraser for whatever it was that he'd done wrong, or left undone. It was an uneasy truce, and if Fraser lay awake some nights, staring up at the cracked ceiling and waiting for the whisper of measured breaths, quiet snores, he didn't mention it to anyone else. If he found himself standing in the doorway of the bedroom some nights, watching them sleep—Ray Vecchio on his back, hands folded over his stomach, while Ray Kowalski sprawled over the bed across the room, fingers brushing the floor—he didn't question the reasons.

Fraser took what he was given, friendship and conversation from Ray Vecchio, tolerance and a confusing, uneven belligerence from Ray Kowalski. He did the tasks assigned to him and by the end of June, he had been promoted to foreman. Fraser spent his time choosing drop zones and checking equipment and always trying to fit himself into this space, where he stepped out into air but didn't land in a hail of bullets, where it wasn't men in uniforms trying to kill him but the land itself. A space in which he was expected to do his job, and at the same time remember that the lives of other men, of his friends, hung from the decisions that he made.

Fraser was uneasy with the responsibility of his new position, almost turned it down, but Ray Vecchio gave him warm congratulations and Ray Kowalski looked quietly pleased, until he shook himself and glared at Fraser and walked off to chat loudly with one of the local girls. After that, Fraser didn't have much of a choice but to accept.

Excerpt from letter, Ray Vecchio to Stella Vecchio: I know you said to let them work it out, but they're driving me crazy. Kowalski's walking around madder than a wet cat, and Fraser is—he's too quiet. Even back in Italy he talked more than this. I don't know what happened to piss Kowalski off, but it must have been bad. Are you sure he hasn't said anything to you?

Missoula, Montana
July 1948

Ray couldn't decide if he wanted to punch Fraser or kiss him, and it was the second option that made him furious, because he had loved Stella, even back when they were kids, and now he liked the look of the local girls, the ones who saw war heroes and smiled pretty and touched his arm to get his attention. He wasn't—he didn't—but all the time now, in the back of his head, he was watching for Fraser, trying to figure out if Fraser was watching, if he saw Ray with the girls, if it bothered him at all.

For a few days, he'd thought maybe Fraser and Vecchio had something going on, and that really frosted Ray's flakes, because it would mean Vecchio was cheating on Stella and Fraser was—amenable—but taken. Ray watched them for a week or so, though, and it looked like they really were just friends. Which meant that Ray was back to watching Fraser, who was watching Ray, and Vecchio was standing in the middle, smoothing things over and acting like everything was fine.

It sucked. Ray sucked, because he couldn't seem to get over this—whatever this was—and it was ruining everything. He took a couple of weeks away, signed on to a trail-building detail that kept him out of the house most nights. The work sucked, and it didn't pay anything like jumping a fire, so he was going to have to pick up something come winter to make up the money. But it was a job he could do that didn't require staring at his plate and listening to Fraser and Vecchio talk about old times.

Benton Fraser: It was hard work, dirty work. And dangerous, although at the time, we thought we were invincible. We'd lived through the war, through things that other people couldn't imagine, and all the fires were ten o'clock fires. We thought we'd jump in, put in a night's work, and be down to cleaning up the next morning. We were idiots. Fools.

Ray Kowalski: Fraser. Ben. It wasn't your—

Benton Fraser: We didn't know any better. We didn't know.

Andrews Gulch, Montana
August 1948

He'd flown three fires as a foreman, two of them with Ray Vecchio, when they got the call from Andrews Gulch. It was a routine fire, barely a Class C, a lightning fire that was spreading slowly over fifteen acres of scrub and jack pine. Fraser grabbed the ten men at the top of the list, most of them first year firemen except for Ray Kowalski, and asked Ray Vecchio to suit up as his second in command.

It wasn't an unusual request, exactly. But Fraser had an uneasy feeling about this fire, because the temperature was over ninety degrees in Helena and the winds were weirding, uneven and hollow, even as they stood on the base tarmac and waited for the plane. Fraser wanted the best man he had, someone he could trust, and that was Ray Vecchio.

By the time they circled the drop zone twice and he'd picked a landing spot, Fraser saw that Ray Vecchio had gotten the men to their feet, equipment on and static lines snapped in above their heads. They looked calm, sure of themselves, and Fraser knew that this was a crew ready to meet whatever the fire could give them. He pointed, got a nod from the jumpmaster, and hooked himself up. A tap on his leg, and Fraser was falling, alone in midair and counting silently to himself, one-thousand, two-thousand, three-thousand, four-thousand, five—and the parachute snapped above his feet and Fraser was pulling the risers, drifting backwards while he watched over his shoulder, counting the ground up toward his feet until he hit it running.

It took a few minutes to gather the equipment, and Fraser's uneasy feeling didn't strengthen, exactly, but the gear was more spread out than he liked for a low jump, and he felt the winds gusting and shifting higher. He watched the fire creep slowly down the other side of the gulch, and hurried the men through their meal, assigned tools and headed for the river. They'd flank the fire, instead of meeting it from the front, to have the river at their backs if something went wrong.

His mind made up, Fraser set out, leading the men while Ray Vecchio trailed at the back of the group, watching for problems. It was a good plan, a cautious plan, and it was working well until the fire jumped the gulch and started uphill toward them, spot fires suddenly appearing ahead of it.

The men were still talking and laughing, a few of them snapping pictures as they went, but Fraser saw the fire change, saw it hit the dry grass on their side of the gulch, and when he looked back Ray Vecchio was pointing. He had seen it, too. Fraser nodded at him, and glanced at Ray Kowalski, who was watching the fire start to climb the hill and squinting at the spot fires, then up the slope to the ridge.

He doesn't need words to understand that all three of them are realizing the same thing.

They stand for a moment, and Fraser checks the wind again but he knows already, has felt the fire shift from ordinary to menacing.

The flames whirl bright and sparking suddenly and this is it, it's no longer a question of whether it will crown but when, and if they can get far enough away. Fraser orders everyone to drop their tools and head for the ridge, taking Pulaskis and saws and packs from the men who are too stunned to obey.

Ray Vecchio hesitates, but Fraser orders him forward, and he's the last to turn away from the fire, ahead of Fraser up the hill, toes of their boots catching in the grass and digging into the dirt and gravel as they go.

Fraser is fast, quicker than most of the men, but he holds back and shoves those who hesitate upward. Above him, Ray Vecchio and Ray Kowalski are doing the same, shouting over the roar of the fire coming closer and pushing, giving orders and dragging boys upward by their arms when they must.

They're past it, barely ahead of the fire and nearly to the top, when Ray Kowalski stumbles on the steep hillside and falls. Fraser drags him for a few feet but it's obvious that Ray's leg is broken, that he can't run any further. Ray Vecchio stops to help but Fraser orders him on again, tells him to take care of the other boys. Fraser stops, looks back at the fire, and knows that they won't outrun it, not now, not when he'd need to carry Ray up the slope.

He grabs for his belt pouch and feels around in it, finds a match and closes his eyes for a moment, calculating. He looks upward, measures the distance from the men to the ridge, and thinks, decides it's enough. He steps away from Ray a few feet, and drops the lit match into the scrub.

The fire moves fast, runs away from him upgulch and burns hot and bright and clean, a smooth curve of flame that eventually must merge with the main fire, although Fraser can't see that part. By then, he's already stepped into the burned circle of his own fire, pulled Ray into the blackened smoking space and they've lain down in it, shirts over their faces. He thinks for a moment that he hears Ray Vecchio shouting, but his voice couldn't possibly be louder than the thundering freight train roar of the fire.

When he stands again, Ray has fallen unconscious, but he's breathing steadily. Fraser looks around, and sees nothing but smoke and ash. He spends the next few hours waiting, listening to Ray breathe, waiting for Ray Vecchio to come back and find them.

As he waits, he talks to Steve, who is comfortable and whole and insisting that Fraser has completely lost his mind. Fraser doesn't necessarily disagree.

He looks up from the rise and fall of Ray's chest to see Ray Vecchio, picking his way across the smoking rubble, wearing a set of fatigues that are cleaner than he ever managed to wear while he was alive, and that's all wrong—no one stays clean on a fire line. Even Fraser is sooty and sweaty and covered in sticky ash. It takes everything he has not to run.

Telegram from US Forest Service to Stella Vecchio: REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT RAYMUNDO VECCHIO KILLED IN FIRE YESTERDAY EVENING STOP SACRIFICED HIMSELF TO ENSURE THAT HIS MEN WERE SAFE STOP HE WAS A HERO FIRST AND LAST STOP DETAILS TO FOLLOW STOP WE MOURN HIS LOSS STOP B FRASER STOP

Andrews Gulch, Montana
August 1948

Ray woke up once, his ankle sparking with orange-bright pain as they carried him down to the river on a stretcher. He couldn't see in the pitch black, nothing but the bounce of flashlights and the low hum of voices. When Ray tried to sit up, called frantically for Fraser and Vecchio, someone leaned over and pushed his shoulder back down, tried to reassure him with, you don't need to worry about anyone but yourself right now, which wasn't reassuring at all. Ray tried to protest some more, because where was Fraser? Did Vecchio make it? What about the other guys, was the fire out? He tried to keep his eyes open, focus on something, but he couldn't.

The next time he opened his eyes, he was staring up at the ceiling of the hospital in Helena, scratchy sheets under him and the sound of rain, finally, outside the window. Stella was sitting next to the bed, crying quietly, staring out the window.

It was two days before they told him what had happened, that Vecchio had gotten everyone else over the ridge and onto safe ground before he turned back, tried to find Ray and Fraser in the smoke and gotten lost in a blowup. Ray thought about it for a few minutes and asked where Fraser was, but nobody knew the answer to that. He'd packed up his stuff and picked up his pay and taken off. Hadn't even stopped at the hospital on his way out of town.

Ray didn't go back to the house afterwards—some of the guys packed up his stuff and Vecchio's, and Ray used his pay to ship it all back to Chicago. He was done with jumping; the doctors said his ankle wouldn't hold up to the strain, and Ray had lost the taste for flames and explosions and parachutes. It wouldn't be the same, and Ray felt guilty even considering it.

Stella got $200 in burial expenses and a nice letter from Fraser that Ray couldn't finish reading.

Excerpt from letter, Francesca Vecchio to Ray Kowalski: The funeral was nice, everyone came and brought food and Ma cried but I didn't. I was brave, because Ray would have wanted me to be brave, right? I think he would have. Stella was there, and she's not so bad, I guess. Maria says she's more afraid of us than we are of her.

Ma has some stuff she wants Fraser to have, some of Ray's decorations and a few photos. We don't know where to mail them. But anytime you want to stop chasing after him and come back to Chicago, you'll be welcome.