The Cajuns
Title: The Cajuns
Author: someonesgrlbomb
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Pairings: Roe/Snafu (friendship at best!), Sledge/Snafu (but barely)
Summary: What it might have been like for Roe and Snafu to bump into one another after the war in their hometown
The weary, always weary, Merriell “Snafu” Shelton just wanted to get the job done. He wasn’t gunning to get done and get home. Rather, he just really wanted a moment of competent completion. Such moments, even if just in lumber delivery, had to suffice for life satisfaction.
No such luck today.
"Don't care who signs, just so long as ‘dey can pay," he drawled to the near-useless kid called Jack overseeing the other kids pulling the two by fours off his truck. This house site was out on a half-acre property on the boonie edge of town. The site was crawling with "kids," as in, two-three years younger than Merriell and with no war service, or, none that showed. Not their fault the war ended a couple of years ago. Even so, the generational divide was already gaping from where he stood.
Jack-in-charge, as he claimed, wasn't too clear on paperwork-type stuff and Shelton continued his stance of just letting him know he wasn’t leaving till payment was cleared up. The kid ran off for higher authority.
Shelton lit a cigarette and sighed. He had become so hardened, but the world at peace offered nothing solid enough for him to rail against.
After a while, Eugene Roe walked confidently toward Shelton's truck, Jack at his heel, trying to keep up. Roe was squinting at the lowering sun, holding the clipboard with the paper from the lumber guy that Jack, his younger cousin, had handed him. "Hey! This didn’t get squared away before?" he called ahead, identifying the delivery guy. He was the one guy he didn’t recognize standing at the end of the truck bed. Also he was pointing and ordering Roe’s guys around, it seemed. Some were getting up onto the bed and some were gathering around the lumber guy’s position standing on the ground, getting the unloading going. Roe was heartened to see this, as he knew the guy was apparently not going to refuse to leave the materials. This was perfectly in line with Roe’s goal of getting that lumber and then efficiently winding down operations for the day. He was aware daylight was smoldering away and his crew would knock off soon without light to work by.
Sunset or no, Roe always felt urgency to get houses built. He worked diligently on job after job. His part was mostly about doing the framing and wall work and coordinating with other craftsmen who added electrical and plumbing as they went. He loved the constant flow of work. There was more to do than he could manage and keeping busy this way felt just fine to him. He loved the creation process, the clean new materials and square corners and straight lines. He was assembling and making functional the skeleton and guts of a home, getting it all ready for a hardworking, deserving young family. Probably the husband had been away for at least a little while, or maybe a long while, to fight. They could move in, get their little slice of heaven, the whole she-bang. They were doing God’s work - going forth and multiplying, breathing life into the structure. Roe was long gone before all that happened, but he liked to imagine all of this, and he drove by places he’d built when they were on his route and he could see his musings coming true.
Shelton didn’t hear Roe’s calls. At the back of the truck where he was trying to direct the unloading, lumber was clattering around. For Shelton, the unloading was going intolerably slow and incompetently, if left just to those kids. But then, he saw the right guy approaching. He had the build and the walk of the right kind of man to come square things away. Shelton knew it was just a matter of time before he had the information he needed and could wrap this transaction up.
Roe kept his quick pace and could tell the guy probably didn’t hear his calls. He persevered trying, but his eyes were more on the clipboard as he strode, trying to get all the details of the transaction into his head to be sure he was up to speed on the situation. Then, there was a startling sudden quiet compared to the buzz of activity that had been going unloading the truck. A split second later, from the distance Roe was at, he could hear distressed calls: "Oh shit! Sorry! Oh shit, oh shit!"
All of this sound-based alerting got Roe looking up from the clipboard to just catch the end motion of the lumber delivery guy snapping into a forward lean, as if to protect himself. He was sheltering his right hand into his chest, left hand covering it. Though he was making no sounds, his body language was as clear to Roe as if he'd been hearing, "I'm cut and it's bad!" in either of Roe’s two native tongues.
"Jack, run and get my medical kit," Roe said with measured alarm. That turned out not to be enough to mobilize his cousin adequately, even though Jack had observed the same scene. Roe spared a sigh and realized he needed to kick it up a notch. "Presser!" he yelled over his shoulder as he himself started running toward the scene.
Jack was startled into breaking off and dashing toward Roe’s truck parked closer to the worksite.
Shelton squeezed the outside edge of his right palm, from which blood was flowing down his forearm and dripping off his elbow. He staggered back a little, instinctively getting away from danger - the kid up on the truck bed who was still holding the knife to cut the twine holding the lumber bundles. The kid was not moving much now, other than his lips. He seemed stunned and like he wanted to shrink into himself. He’s stopped yelling and was now muttering, “Oh, shit…oh shit…” Everyone near the scene was frozen, looking around, unbelieving it might be as bad as it looked, not questioning whether their incapacity meant anything
As he slowly backed away, Shelton encountered Roe, the only one moving toward him. Roe had his eyes glued to the wound. “Hey. Lemme see,” Roe commanded from his few inches of height advantage, and he reached for the bloodied hand.
Shelton, still mostly just experiencing his baseline numbed disappointment with the world, was entertaining for a flash of a second that his right hand seemed pretty injured, and what was he gonna do now at night? He chuckled on the inside, and the barest of grins crept to the corners of his mouth as he stared at his hands, the one holding the other. And then, he reckoned with this guy who was grabbing at them, whom he’d barely sized up yet, other than having given him some credibility owing to how he carried himself. Shelton oddly found himself willing to comply. A certain type of obedience had been activated, like a switch, somehow, with how this guy spoke and moved. But the pain he was finally registering was adding a bit of resistance to the idea of letting his hands wander too far from his chest where he held them. Shelton had some sense of holding himself together and it was, of course, winning out.
Roe was pulling a handkerchief from his back pocket and repeated more slowly and gently, “C’mon, lemme see,” and he pulled at the well hand just the right way to get it to stand down, then coaxed the cut hand to get some distance from the chest it pressed against. Smoothly, as Roe replaced the left hand with the handkerchief for pressure, he gathered a glance at the large gash running through the meaty outer edge of the palm. Roe then moved with assurance and method, dabbing with the cloth, looking, pressing, and looking again.
Shelton surmised this guy was adept and he started feeling relieved, possibly even taken care of. He wouldn’t have said he was worried about his hand, so what he was relieved about, he didn’t know. It was a deep relief, like some distant place inside of him had been hobbling along and given up hope, but then just got handed a crutch.
Shelton could scarcely keep up with all of this going on inside himself, but he could certainly hide that it was happening. “Ain’t so bad,” Shelton figured to say, though not trying to stop Roe. He didn’t wince at all no matter what was happening. It did hurt. It was becoming a throbbing kind of hurt.
Roe glanced away from the hand briefly to look Shelton in the eye and say, “I’ve seen worse.”
‘Yeah?” Shelton said, but he believed him.
“Still,” Roe continued, “You’re gonna need this stitched up. Damn, where’s Jack with my kit?” Roe muttered, glancing behind them.
The kid who’d sliced Shelton guiltily whined as if anyone was concerned about him, “I don’t know what happened. I was just cutting the lines and didn’t know…”
“You keep your fucking eyes to the fucking front when you’re swinging around a big boy knife like that, shithead,” Shelton responded, mild venom in his tone, exasperation more than anything. His eyes stayed fixed on Roe, who was continuing engagement with his wounded hand, not in any way disturbed or unsure what to do at any moment. Handling it. Just...handling it.
Roe let Shelton dress down his employee at first out of fairness - made sense the injured guy would want to vent a little, and Roe knew he had some guys in his crew who were works in progress, especially when it came to understanding safety. But once this lumber guy got to speaking, Roe was even more ok with it. He wasn’t just a victim expressing frustration. It was clear he knew something about danger and about teaching the management of it. Roe gave the guy a mild nod after he was done speaking then said, “Leroy, hand the knife to Jim - butt first huh? - then take off. Come back less stupid tomorrow.” Then, Roe spoke upward into the air, “The rest of you, get the wood off that truck on the double. Finish up where ever you were. Then, everyone, just go home.”
Glancing at the man whose name he still didn’t know, Roe raised his eyebrows and gestured they should sit on the ground, at the curb. As he held pressure on the wound and had little else to do for the time, Roe’s assessing eye was drawn to the dozens of scars scattered this way and that along both of the man’s forearms, exposed by his short sleeves. Roe said, “Sorry bout this. We’ll figure out paying for the wood. I haven’t forgot about that. But let’s take care of this cut. What’s your name?”
Shelton's lips were puckering to offer his surname, but at that moment, Jack ran up with the olive drab bag with its telltale white circle and red cross connecting all the dots for Shelton. “Army?” Shelton exclaimed accusingly, unable to repress the knee-jerk response.
Roe gave a sideways head nod, mildly surprised at the hint of contempt, though he was not slowed down one bit in his moving forward, digging into the bag to continue ministering to the wound. In a beat, Roe figured it out and uttered, “Ah. Some problem with that, Marine?” He glanced at the man as he said the last word.
Unapologetically, Shelton nodded sideways then answered Roe’s question. "Mmm. Nah. Force of old habit. I’m not gonna bark at ya or nothing. Sorry 'bout that. Doc."
Roe winced a bit. He swallowed. "It’s Roe. I'm Eugene Roe."
Roe’s wince snapped Shelton out of his compliance mode. Other instincts started kicking in. Roe's discomfort and full name offering…they were a redirection, but a failed one. It was a shiny red button Shelton could not resist. Innocently he said, "Well, thanks for this, and I won’t remember that. So, just, thanks for this, Doc."
"Just Eugene is fi-.”
"Can't call you that," Shelton interrupted more viciously than he meant, more instincts kicking on, defenses summoned to hold against feelings he did not need to add to the throbbing hand pain. Wanting to compose himself, he shifted tone, lobbing a convenient, dangerous smoke bomb: "But you know what you can call me? Snafu."
Roe was a little snapped out of his identity fight by that. “Snafu? That's a good one," he snorted and pursed his lips. He kept cleaning the wound and found he needed to dig in his bag some more. Old training, very old training, took over, and told Roe to dig further. "Ok, Snafu. But, what'd your momma name you? Who does God know you as?" He code switched into a modest Cajun accent as he lightly invoked the H/holy with a wide margin of interpretation available in his tone, aware this fellow veteran might have not left war on good terms with H/him. Nor entered it that way.
Snafu was unsure but answered, "Momma named me Merriell, and saw fit to match it up with her husband's name at the time, Shelton. Merriell Shelton," he said, thinking about it that way for roughly the first time. “Best you just call me Snafu.”
Roe wasn’t sure what the answer was to his key question, but a comfortable space was established, Roe was working in his zone. "Shelton, nice to meet you. We're already shaking hands, huh? Look, if you want, I can put you back together here. Sorry about my boy. Here.” He opened the top of a flask he had in his bag and set it next to Shelton.
"Well, thank you, Doc," Snafu said deliberately, emphasis in every syllable as he reached and swig of the flask. The offering sealed Snafu’s satisfaction with this guy. He knew what he was doing.
And yet, there was a different unease creeping into Snafu as Roe worked. The whole scene was unearthing old habits of compliance he loathed, and it was provoking something waiting, all coiled up, just under the surface, and it grew tighter and tighter as Roe pulled out more and more military surplus medical supply. Along with seeing all that stuff, there was the sound of ripping open little packets, the smell of the iodine, the feel of blood on himself, and everywhere - the ground, on Roe. It was all taking Snafu back to a thousand memories he'd rather not have.
Snafu needed a smoke.
He reached awkwardly but successfully into his shirt pocket to get one with his left hand. Roe helped with working the lighter. They agreed to their roles in the moment, Shelton aware of the fucked-up throwback of it, Roe expertly holding off that awareness, as that had always been part of this kind of job.
"What islands?" Roe asked, habitually making distracting conversation, confident now in his knowledge of the basic realms of experience those his age had lived through. The scars were a sure sign this had been no light duty rear echelon guy. It really should not have been the topic of choice to distract from pain, but Roe was flowing with it, followed the dark lead that it seemed the very name Snafu threw out there. To Roe, it was clear they had achieved that understanding so dear to come across, knowing the other to have been the real frontline deal. And as such, they were allowed to ask each other these things, especially if no one who wasn’t there was listening. They were far enough from the workers, who were peeling off anyway.
"A couple few,” Shelton said with mild annoyance.
Snafu seemed stuck in his thoughts, so Roe moved it along. "And your MO?"
"Mortars. First Marines, to answer that one before you bother. So what bout you? What action you see? Pacific, too?"
"Just Europe,” Roe said. “Jumped into France, moved eastward till it was over.”
There was silence for a moment. "What outfit?" Snafu sounded interested, crediting the guy for not offering too much detail.
Roe nodded and grinned, surprised at himself for his pride in managing to impress a Marine, or this Marine. “Airborne. Hundred and first."
Shelton swigged again from the flask and felt himself let go a little. "You made it out, patching up the boys."
Roe gave another eyebrow raise as he kept working.
Shelton noted Roe was diligent, careful, and kind about the pain. Roe held the weight of the hand as much as possible for him, never asking him to rotate his palm or wrist in directions that would stretch the wound. "I mean, sometimes, they kept me away from the line when they could. That probably made some difference.” Rose started to forget himself a bit. “They kept me back for a spell now and then. Till after the shit was over and then I had to run up. Some job.” He snorted. Thought a bit. Slowed down what he was doing to Snafu’s hand. “I was lucky. Not bad at digging holes, either, I guess," he chuckled, meandering through the memories.
Snafu could see the movies playing behind Roe’s eyes as he worked on the hand. Snafu would have to be a lot drunker to miss such a display of vulnerability. Snafu had an instinct to pounce, but with his hand still in Roe's care and control, he didn’t. His hand was under Roe’s care and control, and is wasn’t just anyone that could hold onto Snafu. "Yeah. Holes. Digging ‘em, hiding in ‘em, peering down into them, torching 'em…war does seem to be a lot about god damned holes, huh. " He grinned weakly.
Roe shook his head as if to loosen something between his ears. He sniffed. "Ready for the stitches?”
Shelton nodded and kept holding his hand out in compliance.
"You know, you could go into town and get it done with some better -“
"You’ll do," Snafu said firmly.
“OK,” Roe said, present in the moment again now that it was pretty real what he needed to do. “We better move to my car, though. I need better light.”
Once arranged on the bench of Roe’s truck, the stiches procedure got started. Snafu was very, very still for the first stitch. Roe looked up, and Snafu looked dead into Roe's eyes with no sense of having registered further damage to his flesh. The sadness of that, the admirability of that - all put together - transfixed Roe. He didn't like it, but he could not look away. Parts of him wanted to get away. Parts of him needed to understand this numbness.
"I'm fine, Doc," Snafu finally said softly, allowing a little mocking mercy to alight his eyes and unstick Roe. Roe glanced down at the wound to break out of the moment.
Roe smiled sheepishly and said, “Ok, here comes the next one.” In glancing at Snafu again, now past his fear about how this whole thing might go, Roe could see this man he was with more clearly. And he saw plenty there that was, despite what he had said, not fine. There was a darkness, a shadow settled across Snafu's face, or maybe had always been there and Roe was just getting to where he could see it, or was being shown it. In any case, Roe knew how to proceed, even when things all around were not right. He went back to work, adding 5 more stitches.
Snafu handled it. The whisky was helping enhance his usual numbness. But really, he was also in a well inside himself, screaming for no more, usually safely far from the light and from anyone hearing. Snafu wasn’t nearly as aware of that screaming as he was of the way it seemed Roe was just about to be able to hear it, too. But above all else, Snafu’s attention was glued to Roe as he completed the job.
After Shelton's hand was patched up, Roe exhaled. It like he did a fair bit more than stitch up a cut on a hand. It’d been awhile since he did something like that, he figured. Maybe that’s why it seemed that way. “Ok, that should do,” he said once done. Roe was just drained and drank from the flask, too. "You’ll want to keep pressure on it." he advised as he saw Snafu going for a smoke.
After lighting up, Snafu said. "Whatever you say, Doc.” He exhaled smoke out his nostrils, feeling loose from the whisky. “My first island was Gloucester, and last island was the last island, Okinawa.”
Roe's eyebrows raised, doing the math. “Mortars in an infantry unit?”
Snafu drank again and blew smoke out, looking over the construction site from their view of it on the road.
"Some luck you got there, Shelton," Roe reported back Snafu’s prior comment, but with a great deal more bewilderment. But also some sense of understanding.
"It’s Snafu. Yeah, some luck. Some fucking luck."
"You ok to drive home?" Roe asked.
"Think so, yeah," he nodded and headed for his truck. Many would not be ok, but he was. “Thanks, Doc.”
Roe felt haunted till he fell asleep that night, and as he would have predicted had he let himself think about it, he had one of his dreams:
His grandmother sat in her wooden rocker on her porch and he sat on the short three-legged stool made of a disc sawed off a stump. She was as raspy as she'd become at the end of her years from smoking her pipe and drinking her whiskey and talking for hours with God, whether in the parish church or while sweating and cooking in the kitchen for her useless husband and two grandkids she was raising and which ever combo of other kin showed up that evening from around the neighborhood.
Young Eugene always waited till the kids were in bed, Granpapa was passed out from his moonshine, and the other kin had their fill and left. Then Grann would take to the porch like this, like she knew he needed her to. He was desperate to find out what God had told her that day, and help him know if God said anything to him he might have missed. These moments on the porch were his only chance to feel normal, to not feel cursed, to openly acknowledge that it happened, and then to learn where he was supposed to put all the pain that absorbed through his skin from other folks. It wasn’t supposed to go right into his. He knew this and sometimes it was harder than other times. Some people made it harder. He was learning.
"I know you gon wanna stay 'way away from dat one," she reflected his thoughts. “Mon dieu, mmm-hmm.”
She was right. And she continued.
"You done right to take care of your business. God knows, God knows, that’s a good start. But God brought him, now, din He? Think about that. You thinking you don want it. But God, oh yes, He put it in motion. More to come. You may not want it, but it come."
"I took care of him."
"Mmmm. But what’s not set right yet? And how is it you forgot to find what name God calls him by? How you gonna get anywhere any other way?”
“I know his names.”
“But not which one God knows him by,” she repeated. “If any?”
Roe didn't dare answer and woke up with a shudder.
Roe had put in a series of wood orders for his next several weeks’ work from the supplier who sent Snafu to drop it off. When he came, Roe would drop what he was doing, had to get out there and check Snafu’s hand (as there was no way this guy was gonna seek follow-up with any doctor to make sure he healed properly without infection). Then, they would stand and observe the working crew scrambling around them. They were aloof in the most literal sense while also still being there on the ground at the construction site. They didn’t talk about much. The businesses they were in. Trucks. The mosquitos. Mostly, after a spell, it was quiet between them.
Snafu came to look forward to it. He didn’t have anyone he was standing around with whom he respected nearly as much, or who could stand next to Snafu and his biting intensity. It was a relief to see Roe speak to his men the way he did, running an operation pretty competently
Roe dreaded hanging out with Snafu at first. He could feel Snafu’s darkness trying to get in. And maybe it was. But Roe kept it to a slow trickle and if it absorbed into him, he put it somewhere else, eventually, every time. He kept counsel with Grann in his dreams on it.
At the last delivery, Roe looked under the gauze and Snafu tossed a “How’s it looking, Doc?” at him.
“I told you I’m Eugene. And it’s looking fine, luckily, even though you didn’t change this like I told you to.”
“Mmm hmmm. I hear ya, Doc.”
"Look, everybody calls me Eugene. It’s my God-given name. What's the problem?"
Snafu blew smoke out his nose and considered Roe and what he owed him. "I’ll tell ya after we finish off that flask I know you refilled.”
Roe grinned a little and nodded sideways, acknowledging it was true, shuddering inside. He understood he had to stay to listen.
Later, when they had finished the flask, sitting on the truck bed, listening to the wildlife chorus as the sun went down, Roe said, “OK, now you tell me. What’s the problem with calling me Eugene?”
“Well,” Snafu said, leaning back, winding up, “it’s taken.”
Roe shrugged, not understanding.
Snafu exhaled and knew he had to explain more. “Shit.” He looked around, took a deep breath, looked elsewhere as he explained. “You know how the war…well, when you're in it, day after day, it’s not all that big, after awhile. You know? It’s just the size of you and your unit. Your guys. Nothing else, other than the other side trying to kill you.”
Roe shook affirmative very minutely, not sure he was proud to admit it, caught off guard to hear it said so plainly, aware he should never seem too off guard around Snafu. But he let his understanding break through because he was so relieved - just endlessly relieved - whenever he got to relate with someone about the war at this level. It seemed off limits so much of the time otherwise, so everyone could survive. It nearly made all the time he’d spent taking Snafu’s dark energy worth it. He could go there right now with the whiskey in him and after whatever it was they’d built up between them making it possible.
Snafu continued, "Well, it got to where, for me, the war was so small, it was mostly about him."
"One guy?"
Snafu remained patient. Took another deep breath. "Yeah. One guy. Just about the last guy whose fucking name I bothered to learn. Smartest thing I did toward the end, there, stopped learning names. Not that I knew it was getting to be the end."
"Ok, so he was your good buddy, Eugene. Alright. Wait, hang on, you, Snafu - your buddy was just ‘Eugene’? Not FUBAR or something like that?" Roe kidded, but half hoping to get his name back in this way.
Snafu smiled a downright proud parent smile. "Called him Sledgehammer. Name is Eugene Sledge. Sledgehammer."
"Is? So, he made it?"
"Yeah."
"Huh." Roe was stumped but quickly corrected himself. "Well, that's good.”
Roe was not entirely sure what Snafu was telling him, but it felt heavier than it ought to. Roe tried to reason with Snafu. “The world’s got lots of people with the same names. I don’t see how you’re gonna-“
"Eugene’s taken,” Snafu sniped, but somehow did it slowly. Then he softened, had sympathy. “Not sure what else t’ tell ya, Doc."
Roe just looked outward across the horizon again. He heard. He wasn’t gonna win this one. He would be Doc to Snafu. Roe didn’t know if God would know him, or would see they were talking. Did God know/see “Snafu and Doc”? He didn’t know.
As opposed to what he thought as a kid. Roe now knew God might or might not bother. He’d been to places God had clearly stopped looking into with any thoroughness. Grann’s ideas about getting names - that knowing the name of someone that was God-given might matter - seemed questionable.
Roe didn’t know which name God knew him by either.
Snafu puffed a bit more and could tell he’d won. “Gotta get back,” he said, and got his truck keys out of his pocket. Roe moved aside. Snafu could see it was a little disappointing to Roe, and Snafu got a little sympathetic. As he got into his cab, he asked through the window, "Ever get to where you just didn't want to know anybody's name?"
Longingly, Roe replied, "No. No, not really."
Snafu started up the truck, and said, “See ya next season, maybe.”
Roe nodded.
Roe’s dream that night:
Grann sat rocking on the porch as always. Roe was his adult self and stood with his back to her, leaning on the post at the top of the stairs of the porch. He knew Grann was talking with God behind him, just muttering away.
He was content looking at the trees. He felt no urgency to talk to her, nor did she try to talk to him.
********************************************************
Author's note: This could have been chapters upon chapters of struggling with healing, struggling with building houses, with God...and I probably WANTED it to be Roe/Snafu but I could not get them to want it, too. I was never a Babe/Roe shipper, and Snafu would not budge from being Snafu/Sledge, so this is what we got. Just - what if they met, and the version of that I could manage in the time I can stand to give it. At least I finally wrote Roe, who was always my favorite BoB character by A LOT. Apologies to anyone who has factual information about the real Roe and Snafu that this doesn’t jive with, or any other elements of reality. I wasn’t going for that. This is fiction. Thanks for reading!