Now and Again

by Charlotte Rogan

  Gravity pulled his body against the seat belt, and his legs were angled toward the steering wheel as if the truck had been reconfigured. He could taste the dust and smell the acrid odor of explosives, which is when he realized that the top-heavy cargo truck had rolled and that the thing he should be noticing was the silence, the complete absence of sound except for a muffled ringing in his ears. And he understood that Pig Eye wasn’t slumped on the seat beside him and that his helmet had come off and that he had hit his head and that his weapon was wedged between the gearshift and his knee.

  IEDs were deadly, but they weren’t precise. Shouldn’t the men from the other trucks be scrambling around and shouting? Shouldn’t they be calling out for survivors and coming to find out how he was? His instinct was to assess the situation without moving—the condition of his body, the position of the enemy, the status of the other men—but he couldn’t get his thoughts together because of the ringing and the thick, mashed ache in his head. He remembered climbing into the truck beside Pig Eye, who wasn’t slumped beside him, who wasn’t anywhere that he could see. He remembered reaching over to beep the horn of the truck as the convoy rolled out that morning. He remembered checking the straps on the canvas that covered the cargo, and he remembered helping Kelly stow the extra cases of water even though Tishman kept chasing at his heels like a terrier and saying, “Hurry up. We should have left when it was dark.”

  He remembered Kelly asking for the updated strip maps, and even though checking the vehicles had been Tishman’s job, Danny had double-checked everything himself. Then Harraday and Rinaldi and Finch had climbed into their turrets—most of the vehicles had crew-served guns, but not the long cargo truck—and Danny had climbed in beside Pig Eye and tooted the horn just as they pulled into line behind Hernandez and Harraday and Betts and in front of Tishman and Kelly and Finch, who were bringing up the rear. He remembered tooting the horn, but he didn’t remember anything after that.

  It was too quiet. Could he have gone deaf? He wanted to test his hearing by saying something, but he thought he should wait until he knew exactly what was what. Meanwhile, the silence pressed in on him, but little by little, his vision cleared. He remembered checking the cargo straps and reaching over to beep the horn. But where was Pig Eye? Not on the seat next to him. And where were the men in the two vehicles in front of him and the one that had been behind? As he struggled to free himself from his seat belt, a volley of gunfire broke through the silence and he hoped it was Rinaldi or Finch or Harraday, giving the bastards hell.

  4.5 Pig Eye

  Pig Eye crab-walked backward, trying to see around the carcass of the truck. Because it was too risky to raise his head very high, his eyes had to burn through a jumble of brush and spiky grass in order to assess the status of the convoy: the blackened husk of the lead vehicle, the second Humvee swerved into the ditch, his own rolled truck, and the rear vehicle, which had been hit but not destroyed. It made sense now. There had been a series of explosions, explosions that must have come from IEDs wired in a daisy chain. It was an increasingly common tactic. A purposely ill-concealed decoy bomb would stop a convoy, putting the line of vehicles in position for a buried chain of smaller bombs that were then detonated by trigger men—men who were probably still hunkered down somewhere not too far away, ready to take potshots at anything that moved. From the sound of sporadic gunfire, Pig Eye guessed the hide position was a low wall that formed part of an animal enclosure about one hundred meters off the road.

  Just as Pig Eye was wondering what had happened to the other men, Finch stood up in his turret, his face bloody and his helmet skewed. C’mon Finch, get down, he thought. Then a spray of bullets and Finch was reeling drunkenly in a slow collapse. After that the guns were mostly silent and everything was mostly still, but Pig Eye knew the Iraqis were out there waiting, invisible behind the wall.

  Where the hell were the other men? The same marine who had taught him about using vegetation for camouflage and moving through the landscape undetected had said, “If you don’t fight back, you die.” But they were mechanics and drivers and communications specialists. Still, they couldn’t retreat, so why the hell wasn’t anybody firing?

  Pig Eye tried to recall what his truck was carrying. The tables and chairs and sheets of galvanized metal had been unloaded at the school, along with a toilet and sink and the books they had collected. If only he had studied the cargo list as carefully as Danny had studied it. There had to be something he could use to lay a trap for the insurgents the way the insurgents had laid a trap for them. But if he stood up to look for it, the men with the guns would see him. He was bellying back toward the bed of the truck when he saw it—a hand grenade nestled in a patch of brown weeds like a prehistoric bird’s egg in a nest.

  4.6 Joe Kelly

  Waking up was like coming up from the bottom of the creek in Wimberley, up from the deep pool where the creek bent around a grove of cypress trees, like coming up through the muck and the slime and over a slick of limestone rock, up through the fronds of light that penetrated from the surface like bendable knives, up through the heavy quiet, measured not in decibels, but in pounds per square inch or atmospheres. It was like breaking through the tensive surface to the air above, and once the broken water had healed itself, it was like seeing the trees soaring up toward the clouds and also down through the glassy water and not knowing which set of trees was real.

  Kelly could hear his mother calling to him: “Joe, honey, you still asleep?” Her musical voice echoed off of what he presumed to be bathroom tile. He tried to swim up and out so he could answer her that he had been awake for a long time, but it was hard to call out from down at the bottom of wherever he’d been—where he still was. He could measure it in atmospheres, but not in seconds, not in inches or miles or feet.

  He must have gone back to bed, which is why she thought he was sleeping when he wasn’t. He couldn’t be sleeping because he heard her talking to his father, who everyone called Joe Senior even though he kept saying, “Call me Dad, son. A boy should call his father Dad.”

  “Okay, Dad, okay.” He was awake. It was the month they had moved to New York, the week he had started his new school. “Whatchu you lookin’ at?” asked a police officer who had been staring at him from the opposite corner as Kelly crossed the street. “Whatchu lookin’ at?” he asked again as Kelly mounted the curb and headed toward the brown brick school building with plywood still nailed over the window where a rock had been tossed through.

  “Keep your head down,” Joe Senior was always telling him. “Don’t act like you know everythin’. When I was your age, I thought I knew everythin’, and nothin’ good ever came of it, so however you act, don’t act like that.” His hair was grizzled and his face was gaunt, and it was hard to believe he had ever been young.

  “Okay, okay,” said Kelly.

  “I walked around like I was king of the world, but I wasn’t king. I wasn’t nothin’, and then I went to prison, and I was less than nothin’. So keep your head down. That’s the way to stay out of trouble.”

  But that day in the Bronx, Kelly’s head was up. He was looking around at the other stragglers, who were loaded down with satchels full of books or not loaded down and kind of slinking in the shadows as if they too were deciding whether to go to school or bolt. He was looking at the blinking traffic signal and at the passing cars, at the way the morning sun painted the bricks the color of dried blood and at the cop who was kind of snarling at him and rocking back on his heels with his thumbs stuck in his belt.

  “Smile,” Kelly’s mom had told him. “That’s the way to make new friends.”

  “You hard of hearing?” asked the cop.

  Kelly gave the cop a neutral smile. He didn’t want new friends. He wanted his old ones, but they were back in Wimberley, probably still lolling around in bed because of the time difference.

  “Answer me when I ask you a question, boy!”

  “I’m lookin’ at you ’cuz you’re lookin’ at me.” Even thoug
h it was true, Kelly suspected it was the wrong thing to say.

  Kelly’s head was up when he looked at the officer, and it was up when he climbed onto the Toyota and rammed his fist into the air the way Tommie Smith and John Carlos had done at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City the same year the Reverend King was assassinated in Memphis and Bobby Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles and anti-war activists seized five buildings at Columbia University to prove the people were ready to take their country back, all of which Kelly knew because it was also the year his father was born, and his father liked to talk about those things as if his lowly birth to an unwed teenager was part of some grand and inspiring civil rights trend.

  In Mexico City, the two track champions had stood shoeless and determined on the podium, fists thrust into the air and heads bowed prayerfully while “The Star-Spangled Banner” played and while the Australian silver medalist stood beside them in silent support for which he was later ostracized at home. But first, Carlos and Smith were evicted from Olympic Village and suspended from the U.S. team. “But they stood up for themselves,” Joe Senior said every time he talked about them. “They stood up for themselves and eventually their medals were returned.” There was a lesson in it, that’s the thing he wanted his children to remember. “What’s the lesson?” Kelly wanted to know. “Justice prevailed,” his father always replied. “Don’t you forget that justice prevailed.”

  Kelly heard his mother calling him to come for breakfast and then it was his father, reminding him to vote. “I lost that right when I went to prison, so you have to vote for the both of us,” he was saying. “Every Election Day, you make sure to get up early and exercise your constitutional right.”

  For some reason, one of their new neighbors started a rumor that Joe Senior had killed a man back in Texas, which is why he’d come to New York. “It explains a lot of things,” the neighbor would say, and the other neighbors would nod sagely to each other. “That would certainly explain it,” they said.

  Kelly preferred to believe his father had been locked up for killing a man than for bungling a robbery, but either way, Joe Senior hadn’t been home much, and then, suddenly, he was. He was home and they were moving across the country for a fresh start and a job. Another story went around that Kelly was the one to throw the rock through the school window. What would you expect from a boy whose father was a killer? They were only rumors, but once a story took hold, it didn’t matter if it was true. So Kelly started to say, “I’ll set my old man on you,” whenever anyone gave him trouble, and whether it was that or the fact that he grew four inches over the course of that first year in New York, no one gave him trouble anymore. He didn’t need his old man to handle things. He could handle them himself.

  It was handling things that led to his first night in jail. It was a minor scuffle over a girl that did it, but Joe Senior sat up late, wringing his hands. “They’ll take away your vote if you’re not careful,” he said. “You ain’t a real American if they take away your vote.”

  The night in jail had scared Kelly. He had looked out through the bars at the dog-faced deputy and realized something about the world and also about his place in it. But then he had gone back to being angry, and after a couple more years of barely scraping by at school, he had given up and joined the army.

  And then his mother called out again, “Joe, honey, I’ve saved two big ol’ pancakes just for you. That’s surely worth waking up for.”

  Kelly thought about telling his parents that sleeping was something he hardly ever did these days, but then it seemed not to matter anymore, so he sank back down to the quiet place, the place where the frogs were buried in the silt and the tadpoles slid on their bellies across the stones, smooth as coins, turning inexorably into frogs, their slippery skin evolved through eons of living in water, which surged relentlessly over them, oblivious to all of the life that depended on it in its search for the lowest point.

  4.7 Pig Eye

  Just as Pig Eye was worrying he was out there alone, Hernandez started gunning the motor of the second Humvee, rocking it out of the ditch and repositioning it up the road, farther away from the insurgents’ hide position. Harraday got his .50-cal. going, and Betts joined in with his M4, holding the triggermen down and forcing them to fire mostly blind, which meant Pig Eye could move more freely. Now you’re talking, he thought. Now they had a fighting chance! He held his breath, fondling the grenade and thinking that if Harraday could keep the Iraqis occupied, he might be able to get close enough to lob it over the wall of the animal enclosure, which would fix the triggermen once and for all.

  The plan he settled on was to move twenty or thirty yards back along the ditch before cutting away from the road and making a run to the east side of the enclosure, out of the line of fire. He stuffed some more brush into the loops of wire, hoping to blend in with the landscape and counting on the others to keep the Iraqis busy. Then he bellied along the ditch, cradling the grenade in his hands and every now and then raising his head slightly to check on Tishman, who had gotten Finch back inside the vehicle and was now wrestling with the .50-cal., which seemed to be jammed or broken.

  How close should he get before he tossed the grenade? What if his aim was bad and he missed? What if his aim was good, and one of the hostiles caught the grenade and threw it back at him? As he pushed himself nose-first through the dust, Pig Eye thought about all the hours he had spent working through various scenarios, none of them remotely like the one in which he found himself. Danny had been right about the howitzer—that’s the thing he needed now—that or aerial support.

  Thirty seconds more, and he’d leave the road. Once he pulled the pin and threw, the grenade’s handle would fly off, releasing a spring that would throw the striker against the percussion cap, igniting the fuse. The fuse would take about four seconds to burn—more or less depending on variables in the design of the device that Pig Eye had no way of assessing. Then the detonator would ignite, setting off the main explosive charge. He imagined the blast wave and the fragments of casing ripping through anything they encountered and, if he was lucky, slicing the hell out of whoever was hiding behind the wall.

  Everything was set. The only thing left to do was to run and aim and toss—or it would have been the only thing if one of the triggermen hadn’t peered over the wall and pointed his weapon down the road at a distant puff of dust that signaled a vehicle approaching from the direction they had come. Through the binoculars, Pig Eye made out a small pickup truck, a Toyota HiLux, he guessed. It seemed to be riding low, which meant there were probably people in it, but he couldn’t see any people, only the driver, so there was no way of telling how many others might be hunkered down in the back of the truck and if whoever it was were insurgents or civilians. So far, Harraday and Betts had the triggermen mostly pinned, but a truck full of reinforcements would drastically lower their odds. He calculated the Toyota was three or four klicks away. If it was traveling at forty miles per hour, he would have between three and four minutes to do something that raised their chances of escape. If it was moving more slowly, he would have longer. He refocused the binoculars, which was when he noticed that, in addition to riding very low to the ground, the approaching truck was old and had black temporary plates—all signs that it was filled not with passengers but with explosives.

  4.8 Pig Eye

  Kelly’s pills worked even better than Hernandez’s time-slowing trick. They brought everything into sharp focus so that Pig Eye had a chance to appreciate the shimmer of the pebbles under his hands and the rustle of dry grass and the scratch of the spiny seed heads against his skin as his mind squeezed off a round of calculations: thirty miles per hour, he decided, but gaining speed, which meant that in approximately two minutes the pickup would reach the Humvee that contained Tishman and Kelly and Finch. It was a bomb and it was going to blow the Humvee to kingdom come, killing the men it contained and lowering the odds for the rest of them.

  “Never change the plan at the last minute unless you have to,” t
he marine had told him, but what if he had to? He had to neutralize the truck.

  Once he understood the situation, his indecision and doubts vanished. Unless it was the pills that chased them, for suddenly he wasn’t worried anymore. Suddenly he felt like Superman, drenched in a downpour of rightness and karma and luck. Above him, the sun was a hot lid on the day. The earth embraced him from below as if he were not quite separate from it, as if he were poised somewhere between what he had been and what he would become. Then he pulled the pin on the grenade, holding the handle tightly in place and tensing his muscles for a run.

  He couldn’t slow time down, but he could speed it up. He could speed it up by running toward the truck, which floated soundlessly toward him on its cloud of dust like a low-flying desert-colored bird. He couldn’t stop the bomb, but he could detonate it prematurely, before it reached the Humvee. And he could improve his accuracy by tossing from close range into the truck bed, where he figured the explosives were packed. In his imagination, the vehicle would sail by, continuing on for another three or four seconds while the fuse burned and while he kept running another three or four seconds past it, putting him outside the primary blast zone if he was lucky and exploding the truck before it reached his buddies. It was the best he could do, given the situation and the fact that he didn’t have any more time to come up with a better plan. Time and opportunity were the two most important elements in any escape kit—he had them, he just didn’t have enough.