Now and Again

by Charlotte Rogan

  —Le Roy Jones

  So it was still us versus them, but now “them” was the politicians. “Them” was the employers and the bureaucrats and the doctors at the VA hospital and sometimes just the regular people on the street.

  —Joe Kelly

  After the trip to Washington, everything happened really fast.

  —E’Laine Washington

  8.1 Le Roy Jones

  Le Roy liked to find clues in his environment for where he was and what he was doing there. Now, he was surprised to see so many people with missing limbs. Some stomped haltingly on artificial prostheses, while others occupied wheelchairs or hobbled along with the assistance of friends. He looked down at his own feet just to make sure, but they were laced up in their imitation Ice-Ts and he could wiggle his toes just fine.

  “What are you protesting?” asked a bystander who was wearing a souvenir T-shirt with a silkscreen of the Lincoln Memorial on it.

  “The war,” said Le Roy. “We want the president to stop the war.”

  Penn Sinclair was there, and so were Danny Joiner and Joe Kelly. It seemed like an astonishing coincidence until the captain reminded him they were staying together at a motel out by the airport. Of course he remembered that. Of course he remembered the trip down in the minivan and the free Wi-Fi at the motel. “Oh, yeah,” he said. The moments after he hit his head could get mixed up, but the moments from before were crystal clear. He could picture himself riding in the truck with Rinaldi and Summers and their medic, Satch. He remembered trying to get the radio to work and telling the recruiter he was good with electronics and waking up in the hospital with bandages around his head that felt like reinforced concrete. He remembered the blood pounding in his ears and the doctor saying, “Hey there, cowboy. You’ve got a pretty hard head,” which was what the doctor said every time he saw him. He remembered the rehab guy hauling him out of bed long before he was ready. He remembered fiddling with the volume on the radio and the captain saying the convoy was doubling back and heading west and someone asking how much farther to the school, and then the blood was pounding in his ears and the doctor was saying the thing about the hard head and the rehab guy was hauling his ass out of bed.

  “Let’s all stay together,” said Danny. “But just in case we get separated, do you still have the address of the motel?”

  “Twenty-two twenty-one Arlington Boulevard. Room two-thirteen,” said Le Roy, tapping his pocket. He could remember certain things just fine. “But yeah,” he said. “I have the card.”

  “If you lose us, just go to that address.”

  Le Roy liked to have a routine, but not having a routine could be good too, so long as he felt safe. He felt safe when he saw the captain and Danny, but he didn’t feel safe when someone in the crowd started shouting and two officers on horseback started to ride straight at a group of people holding placards. He liked horses, but he didn’t feel safe when one of the big animals got too close to him or when the policeman waved his baton or when the Lincoln Memorial T-shirt guy was knocked to the ground.

  Le Roy helped the man to his feet and said, “Fuck this shit.” He solved the horse problem by turning his back to it—out of sight, out of mind—before flipping the bird at the yellow police tape and the official-looking signs that said PROTESTERS HERE. Then he turned his back on those too and walked up to a man with a megaphone and then to a police officer and then to someone wearing a Ranger beret, and each time, he looked the person in the eye and said, “Fuck this shit.” Soon he and the Ranger had a small following and he had forgotten to remember about Kelly and Sinclair. The group walked as a unit when the crowd began to move down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol building—except for the guy in the wheelchair, who wasn’t technically walking. Le Roy put his hand on his heart and gaped at the majestic building with its iconic marble dome gleaming in the sun. A flag streamed out from its pole. “This is Washington, DC?” he asked, even though he knew it was.

  “Yeah, man,” said the Ranger. “This is it.”

  Le Roy stood with his hand on his heart until the officers on the horses told them to move along. Le Roy wanted to stand just a little longer, so when the horse shouldered into him, Le Roy shouldered back, but the horse easily stood its ground. He liked horses. He didn’t blame the horse, but what the fuck? The Ranger put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Chill out, man,” but Le Roy couldn’t process what he was saying because the officer was shouting into his other ear. Easy does it, he thought. One at a time. He wished he had his computer, but it was back at the motel. The motel card was in his pocket, but he didn’t need it because the address involved numbers. Numbers and codes—that’s what he was good at.

  The Ranger had taken one of the signs that had been planted in a soft patch of ground and was thrusting the rough wooden stake in front of him like a sword. When someone grabbed his shoulder from behind, he reacted the way he had been taught to react, and soon his assailant was on his back, head lolling like a football in the gutter, which was all it took for the policemen stationed at the perimeter of the zone to pull Tasers and pepper spray out of their belts.

  “Stop right there!” shouted one of the officers, and the other fired his pistol into the air, which caused most of the assembled veterans to dive to the ground and two of them to storm a row of metal barricades and tear away the yellow tape.

  “Halt!” shouted the police, but they didn’t halt, so the mounted officers rode forward into the crowd, knocking down anyone who was in their way. Le Roy was in their way, and he fell to the ground just inches from a big black hoof with a cleated iron shoe. He turned his head slightly and forgot about the horse, but blood was trickling from his forehead into his eyes and spattering the back of his hand. What the fuck? Where the hell was he, anyway?

  “Follow me!” shouted the Ranger, dragging Le Roy to his feet. “Run!”

  Le Roy started running. He ran and ran and didn’t stop until his lungs were on the verge of collapse, and then he ran a little farther, even when the reason for running got lost somewhere far behind him. He had gotten soft and, he had to admit, a little flabby, but he hadn’t forgotten how to find escape routes and assess a crowd for potential threats. He hadn’t forgotten how to stick to the shadows and double back on his trail. He hadn’t forgotten to be suspicious of males with skin that was darker than Danny’s skin but not as dark as his own, of people in flowing clothing, of people wearing backpacks, of people in beat-up cars.

  As he ran, a space in his brain opened up, and he remembered something he’d forgotten—E’Laine lacing up her jogging shoes and shouting, “Come on, track star. Catch me if you can!” It was a small thing, but it served to power one last burst of speed.

  8.2 Joe Kelly

  Kelly had expected something more dramatic than running away from the police. He’d expected a mission-accomplished sense of satisfaction or at least some outlet for the tension that was mounting in his brain and muscles and demanding some sort of release. He’d like to have sex with a girl. He’d like to have sex with a girl he didn’t know—not the kind of sex where they lit candles or talked before and after or fit it in around a practical activity like cooking dinner or gassing up the car and not the kind where he had to take her out to a nice restaurant and feign interest in her life goals. Kelly no longer had any life goals—if he had ever had them—and the idea that other people might want to talk to him about theirs made him want to smash his fist through a piece of glass. “I’ll see you back at the hotel,” he said, but the captain put a hand on his shoulder and said, “How about we all stay together?”

  Kelly twisted his body out of reach and thought about slugging the captain in the face. “Who’s coming with me?” he asked. But Le Roy had run off somewhere and Danny would only slow him down.

  “I think we’ve had enough excitement for one day,” said the captain, but Kelly said, “I’m just getting started,” and slammed his shoulder into the captain’s as he walked past him and felt the captain slam back. “Why isn’t
Hernandez here?” he asked, but he knew where Hernandez was. Hernandez was home in Texas with his wife and kid.

  Kelly started walking. He passed a lot of official-looking buildings and restaurants—nice enough, but the exact wrong kind of nice. He checked for telltale bulges in people’s clothing. He watched a nondescript car drive slowly up the block. He envisioned a beautiful girl, one who would take pity on him, but not the kind of pity where she felt sorry for him. Maybe “pity” wasn’t the right word for the attitude she would have. Empathy or respect would be better, or, best of all, she wouldn’t have any kind of attitude toward him, just some inscrutable need of her own, a need he didn’t want to hear about but that would sync her up with him in just the right way.

  After a while he came to a strip of trees, and beyond the trees, a river, and there, standing on a bridge over the river, were two teenage boys. There was Harraday, aiming his rifle at them. There were the boys, stepping into thin air. Nah, he was just imagining it. No boys, no Harraday, just a bridge over a river, and on the bridge, a stream of shiny late-model cars.

  The good news was that he found an area of seedy bars and restaurants on the other side of the bridge that were just the kind of nice he had in mind. He went into one of them and ordered a beer, but when he put his hand in his pocket, he drew out his cell phone and some loose change, but not his wallet. It was then he remembered knocking into Sinclair. The captain had picked his pocket. Jeezus, he thought. Christ.

  He put the change on the table and counted it by separating the coins into little piles depending on denomination. Then he knocked them over and arranged them again, this time where each pile equaled twenty-five cents. “Shee-it,” he said out loud, just as a smoky voice said, “Don’t worry about it. The beer’s on me.”

  It was and wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted the beer, but he didn’t want the charity. He wanted the smoky voice, but he didn’t want the intelligence behind the eyes. He wanted the female body, but he didn’t want the pity or the story the woman would be making up to explain the piles of coins to herself. He should be buying her a drink. He should have a wallet in his pocket and a nice car parked outside. But the deck was stacked against him. War or no war, he was never going to have those things. His father hadn’t had them and his father’s father hadn’t had them, so why should it be any different for him?

  “Okay, thanks,” he said.

  The woman smiled again. The bartender thunked the mugs on the table. Kelly could feel the anger clenching up inside him. His hands were shaking, so he took a quick slug of beer before hiding them in his lap. “Shit,” he said again, and then he gave the girl a friendly smile. When she smiled back, her face caught the light from the beer signs hanging above the bar and he noticed her eyes had a hint of yellow in them. “Why didn’t you warn me you were part tiger?” he said.

  8.3 Le Roy Jones

  When Le Roy finally stopped to rest, he was surrounded by unfamiliar buildings and the members of his impromptu unit were nowhere in sight. He ducked into an alley and hunkered down against a grimy wall. All he could see from there were the back doors to a row of commercial buildings and a clutch of rusting dumpsters, and when he put his hands over his eyes, he couldn’t even see that. Every now and then he would peek out at the changing color of the clouds as the sun shifted in the sky, and then the world would stop spinning and his heart rate would even out. A flock of birds startled and then went back to scavenging for garbage. He liked birds. He liked birds even more than he liked horses, and he liked horses quite a lot.

  After watching the birds he started walking again, now and then picturing the map he had seen over the captain’s shoulder and adjusting his course accordingly until the only thing that separated him from 2221 Arlington Boulevard was a six-lane highway. Hernandez had taught him a trick for making time slow down. “Guaranteed,” Hernandez had said, so Le Roy decided to try it. But first he tried the rehab guy’s checklist trick. He visualized success and thought, I am an American soldier. I will not accept defeat. Then he crouched at the side of the road in starting position, watching for a gap in the traffic. “Okay, Hernandez,” he said aloud. “I hope the fuck you’re right.”

  He pushed off with his right leg, aiming for the gap, dodging through it, breaking and dodging again before diving left-then-right, behind a shiny panel van. The trick almost didn’t work, but instead of hitting him, the car in the last lane swerved and almost hit the guardrail. It was quite a sight to see the look on the driver’s face as the car fishtailed and almost spun into oncoming traffic before straightening out again. “Hey!” shouted the driver from behind the glass. “Hey, you!”

  Le Roy hurdled the guardrail and rolled down the bank. He sprang to his feet and then he was running again. It felt good to run, with the motel shimmering in his imagination and then rising before him as if he had conjured it up and, when he got there, his buddies sitting on the couch drinking beer just like he could have predicted. They all jumped up when he walked through the door and said they were glad to see him in a way that made time slow down again, just for an instant. He was glad to see them too, but he didn’t think to say so.

  “Did you get arrested?” asked Danny.

  “No,” said Le Roy. “Did you?”

  “Nah,” said Danny. “But Kelly’s still unaccounted for.”

  “I guess we’re not cut out for demonstrations,” said the captain. “We’ll have to think of something else.”

  “What kind of something else?” asked Le Roy after chugging a can of beer.

  “The sky’s the limit,” said the captain, handing Le Roy his computer, which he had put underneath the bed so no one would step on it. Le Roy’s heart was still beating double time, but with his computer in his lap, he started to calm down.

  “Who else is hungry?” asked Danny. “I’ll order a pizza and some more beer.”

  It sounded good to Le Roy. Meanwhile, he put on his headphones and started working away at some code. By the time the pizza came, he had found some photographs of the demonstration that other people had posted online, and by the time everyone finished eating, he had uploaded them to a website he’d created for Watada. He liked having all of the photographs in one place where he could access them or even delete them with the tap of a finger. Tap, there were the police on horseback. Tap, tap, they were gone.

  8.4 Danny Joiner

  Danny wanted to borrow the computer so he could email himself some notes for the television pilot he was working on, but each time he asked, Le Roy said, “Just a sec,” and then ignored him. A few minutes would pass and then Danny would ask again and get the same response, which was why he was sitting next to Le Roy when the captain said they needed a different outlet for their efforts. Protests didn’t seem to be their thing.

  Le Roy was flipping through YouTube videos from Iraq and saying, “Sweet. Swee-eet,” whenever he found one he liked. Danny looked over to see an explosion, and when Le Roy noticed him, he rewound the film to show a road-clearing crew setting a charge and unrolling wire from a spool until they were at a safe detonation distance. “That’s what Pig Eye needed,” said Le Roy. “That’s what Pig Eye needed in his kit.”

  The season was changing, and the light outside the dingy motel room window was already thick and fading. When Danny was a schoolboy, autumn had always been rich with promise, as if the bus he and his friends boarded every morning would blow right past the school with the chain-link playground patrolled by grim disciplinarians and deposit them in other lives. But lately it seemed that possibility was a thing of the past, that what lay ahead of him was dark and dreadful. He didn’t know if he would ever shake the sense of impending doom he had brought home with him from the war. “Can I check my email?” he asked again, but he wasn’t in a hurry yet. Urgency was something that waxed and waned in him, something he could no longer predict, so when Le Roy said, “Just a sec,” Danny was happy to wait a little longer, happy to look over Le Roy’s shoulder to see a tank mowing down a row of trees, happy to see Pig
Eye unrolling a spool of wire and this time surviving the blast, although he knew from experience that patience could evaporate and become impatience in the blink of an eye.

  After a while Kelly came in and said, “Fuck you,” to the captain for taking his wallet, but he was in a good mood.

  “We could interview soldiers and write a book,” suggested the captain. “We could work for anti-war political candidates. We could…”

  They talked about it for a bit. Kelly made another beer run, and pretty soon they were whooping and laughing so hard that beer was spraying from the cans and the people in the room next door started banging on the walls, and pretty soon after that the motel manager knocked on the door. “Can you keep it down?” he asked. “You’re not the only ones staying here.” The captain tossed him a beer, and before too long the couple next door had joined them too.

  “Hernandez should be here,” said Kelly. “Let’s get him on the phone.”

  “What are you all doing in town?” asked the wife from the room next door while the captain took out his cell phone and started dialing. “Are you here on business?”

  “We’re here to protest the war,” said Le Roy.

  “You’ve come to the right place,” said the wife. “The national cemetery is right across the street. Seeing all those graves always makes me wanna cry.”

  “But we kind of suck at protests, so we’re trying to figure out what to do instead.”

  “You should start a blog,” said the wife, tapping a red fingernail on the computer screen. “A memorial or something—kind of like the cemetery, but on the Internet.”

  “Yeah,” said Le Roy. “A blog would be good.”

  While the captain tried to reach Hernandez and Le Roy showed the wife videos of the war on his computer, the husband turned to Danny and asked, “Did you kill anyone? In Iraq, I mean.”