Now and Again

by Charlotte Rogan

  “That’s none of your business,” said Danny.

  “Sure,” said the husband. “But did you?”

  Of all the answers Danny could give to that question, the simplest one was both a lie and the truth. “I was in a forward support unit,” he said. And there he was again, riding the train of thought that always ended in watching Pig Eye explode.

  “I heard that about two percent of people—of guys, anyway—are natural killers,” said the husband. “The kind who can kill without feeling any remorse. Did you run into any fellas like that?”

  “Hey, Captain,” said Danny, thinking of Harraday. “Rube here wants to know if we’re natural killers.” Once Harraday’s switch got flipped, it was like he couldn’t turn it off. Danny’s switch was different, but he couldn’t turn his off either.

  “No, no.” The man laughed, deep in his throat—a genuine laugh, Danny thought at first, but then he changed his mind. There was something not quite right about him, like he was laughing to cover up how deadly serious he was.

  “That’s not what I asked,” said the husband slowly. “I just asked if you knew any. And my name’s not Rube.”

  “My mistake,” said Danny.

  “I’m wondering if I’d be a natural killer, that’s all.”

  “You are, honey,” said the wife. “You’ve been killing me for years.”

  “In a good way, I hope,” said the husband. Then he turned back to Danny and said, “I’m just wondering if it comes more naturally to some people than others and if those people make better soldiers and if I’d be one of those.”

  “They teach you what you need to know,” said Danny.

  The husband was leaning forward now, a little too close for Danny’s liking. Over by the window, Kelly was talking to Hernandez on the captain’s phone. “I love ya, man. Wish you were here.”

  “How do they teach you?” the husband wanted to know.

  “They teach you to work as a unit. They teach you to be really good at what you do.”

  “I heard they teach you to hate people,” said the wife, who had plopped down on the bed beside Le Roy, her mouth open and her eyes wide.

  “Nah,” said Danny. He was thinking he might hate the husband. And he might hate the wife. Her hand was on Le Roy’s thigh, and Danny could feel the heat of it just by looking.

  “To be honest, I’m kind of jealous,” said the husband, ticking down a level in intensity. “Sure, I have a family and all, but I don’t have any buddies anymore.”

  “I can believe that,” said Danny. On a whim, he thrust his face forward so that he was almost as close to the husband as the wife was to Le Roy. “I did kill someone,” he said, trying it on. “I wasn’t going to tell you, but you seem like the kind of guy who can handle the truth. Do you want to hear about it?”

  The husband dipped his chin in a wary nod.

  “This is something I haven’t told anyone else.”

  The husband took a sip of his beer and nodded again, his slack lips flapping a little against his teeth.

  Danny was about to say something about shooting the driver of the pickup, but then he was overcome with a wave of nausea and changed his mind. “There were these two Iraqi boys,” he said. “They were throwing stones into the long grass below a bridge near where we were on patrol, trying to make us think there was something there. Could be there was, I don’t know. But we were jumpy and those boys were annoying the hell out of us.” Danny tried to recall what he had heard about the incident. Then he tried to imagine what he might have done if he had been there—if he were Harraday, for instance, instead of who he was. He could feel the tense ratcheting up as Harraday’s knot of irritation gave way to fear and the fear gave way to anger. He could see the clobbered look on the boys’ faces as they realized what was happening, the panicked flailing of their arms as they jumped, the one boy slipping beneath the oily surface of the water and the other boy reappearing again and again, fighting against the current. And then the water was sliding up Danny’s nose and pouring down his throat as surely as if he were imagining he was one of the boys instead of imagining he was Harraday, who was standing on the bridge and shooting into the water—just for fun, he bragged, but it was never just for fun. Because of the 360 degrees and because a person’s eyes couldn’t be everywhere at once and because maybe there was something hiding under the bridge and also because maybe was the same as maybe not. The words came easily to him, and he could see the gears grind behind the couple’s eyes as they tried to make sense of something that was senseless. “But you were frightened, right?” asked the wife. “And they were the enemy. They might have killed you.”

  “Maybe I was,” said Danny.

  “Of course they were the enemy,” said the husband. “These guys here could have been killed at any moment.”

  “I guess we’ll never know,” said Danny. “But they were teens—fifteen or sixteen years old.”

  “Teenagers can be vicious,” said the man. “You did what you had to do.”

  Over by the window, the captain grabbed the phone away from Kelly. The plate glass was a sheet of orange now, the dust refracting the last rays of light and obscuring the view of the highway.

  “Their brains haven’t developed yet.”

  “Yeah,” said Danny. Harraday had been hardly more than a teenager himself, and it was mostly because of him that more of the unit hadn’t died after the IED attack.

  “Hey, Hernandez,” said the captain into the phone. “You should be here with us. We’ve got something going. We’re not sure what yet, but whatever it is, it’s going to be great.” He was silent for a minute, listening to Hernandez, and then he said, “Hernandez wants us to know he’s on an emergency diaper run and Maya is waiting for him at home.”

  “Pussy,” said Kelly, looking the man from next door up and down.

  “Do you want to see something really sick?” Le Roy asked the wife, who was almost draped across him on the bed, clutching a pillow to her chest. Her blouse and jeans had separated to reveal JESUS tattooed in muddy ink on the small of her back.

  When Le Roy opened a video clip showing hooded American soldiers getting their heads cut off, she let out a puff of air as if she had been punched in the gut, quietly, through the pillow. “Those are the guys we were fighting,” said Le Roy.

  “That’s crazy,” said the wife, and the husband said, “Makes me want to join up right now and kill those motherfuckers with my bare hands.”

  “Rube here wants to know if we killed anyone,” said Danny, looping the captain and Kelly into the conversation now that they were no longer talking to Hernandez. “He wants to know if he’s a natural killer.”

  “How about we find out,” said Kelly, rising from his chair and blocking the window so that the room became a shade darker and a size smaller because Kelly was pretty tall.

  “Whaddya mean?” asked the man.

  “There’s a way to test for it,” said Kelly. “We get the guy in a chokehold—like this—and another guy punches him in the gut and we see what he does about it, right Danny?”

  “Right,” said Danny.

  Kelly had the man’s neck in the crook of his elbow and was hauling him to his feet and the captain was tipping his head back to drain his beer and Le Roy was tapping his computer screen and saying, “You can check your emails now,” when the urgency kicked in. Danny landed a punch in the softness of the man’s abdomen and then he wound up for another one as Le Roy and the wife rolled onto the floor and the captain dove across the room so that the four men were thrashing around on the bed and it was unclear who was fighting whom. Someone was screaming in the background. Then the fight went out of Danny as suddenly as it had come.

  “Sorry, Rube,” said Kelly. “You didn’t pass the test.”

  “What the hell!” cried the husband, jumping up from the tangle of bedcovers and rubbing his neck and looking around for his wife, who had flung herself into a corner when the fighting started. “What test? That didn’t seem like any kind o
f test!”

  “The natural killer test,” said Kelly. “You’re not a natural killer after all.”

  “Jeezus,” said the husband. He and the wife and the motel manager had succeeded in getting the door open, and now they were backing out of it into the hallway. “What the hell,” the husband said again, and the motel manager said, “You all keep it down in here. Other people are trying to sleep.”

  8.5 Penn Sinclair

  Penn followed the manager into the hallway and tried to smooth things over.

  “I’m only letting you stay because you’re soldiers,” said the manager. “But no more trouble. If you promise to check out first thing in the morning, I can probably convince that couple not to call the police.”

  “Thanks,” said Penn. “I owe you one.”

  When he returned to the room, Danny and Kelly were laughing over the incident and Le Roy was posting links to some protest videos onto the website he was in the process of expanding.

  “It almost wasn’t funny,” said Penn. “It still won’t be if they file a complaint.”

  “Natural killers,” said Kelly, which set Danny laughing again.

  Le Roy said, “The wife suggested we make a website dedicated to the soldiers. Some kind of memorial or blog. That way we could support the protesters from afar.”

  “The wife suggested that?” asked Penn.

  “Yeah,” said Le Roy. “The husband was an asshole, but the wife was okay.”

  “Here’s to the wife,” said Danny, draining the last of his beer.

  “What will we call it?” asked Le Roy.

  Danny suggested wartruth.com, and the captain asked, “Shouldn’t it be dot o-r-g instead of dot c-o-m?”

  “We want to make money,” said Kelly. “Whatever we do, I don’t want to take charity.”

  “How are we going to make money on a website? We’d be doing it more because it’s a good thing to do than because it would pay anything,” said Penn.

  Kelly said he didn’t know anything about websites, but he knew that some of them paid off. Le Roy said he didn’t know about money, but he knew about websites. Danny talked about bringing their brothers home and helping with their transition to civilian life. “I could have used something like that,” he said.

  Penn was more and more excited by the idea. “Everybody’s bringing something to the table,” he said. Then he gave a speech about how it had taken Odysseus ten years to get home and how Agamemnon was murdered by his wife’s lover when he finally returned from Troy.

  “Not that that’s relevant,” said Kelly, but Danny wanted to know what had taken Odysseus so long.

  “It’s not that he couldn’t get home,” said the captain. “It’s that he didn’t want to. He knew he couldn’t be a hero sitting around at home.”

  On the drive north the next day, Penn was acutely aware of the three big men with him in the van—of the body odor and the restlessness. It was as if the vehicle contained live but quiet rounds. They had been driving for an hour when Kelly asked where they were going.

  “We’ve got to establish an outpost,” said Penn. “The question is, where should it be?”

  Instinct was taking him north, toward Louise in New York and his family in Greenwich as if that was his destiny, but he couldn’t decide if he was trying to become something he wasn’t or trying to avoid being something he was. Then Le Roy was hungry, so they stopped and bought sandwiches, and then they stopped for gas, and a little while after that Danny said he wanted to get out and walk around. Kelly wanted to keep going, but Le Roy had to take a leak.

  “We were just at the gas station for Chrissakes,” said Kelly. “Why didn’t you do whatever you had to do there?”

  “Anybody got an empty bottle?” asked Le Roy, which caused Penn to declare, “We’re almost there,” even though he still had no idea where they were headed.

  WELCOME TO NEW JERSEY said a sign. “New Jersey,” said Penn. “Why the hell not?”

  He parked the car on a street lined with dilapidated buildings, which, on closer inspection, showed small signs of improvement: a repaved driveway, windows with yellow stickers in the corners, a fresh coat of whitewash on the brick, a woman pushing a stroller along the sidewalk, a sign that said GROW WITH TRENTON! LOCATE YOUR BUSINESS HERE!

  “This could be it,” said Kelly, and Penn agreed that it could be. It was as if Louise’s magnet had been turned around and what he felt now was its strong repellent force, a sensation that caused him to view the railroad tracks that divided the neighborhood and the litter caught in the uncut roadside grass and the boarded-up community pool and the men loitering on the corner as selling points, at least in an enemy-of-my-enemy kind of way, so that even if Louise was hardly his enemy, he knew that by saying yes to the neighborhood, he was taking a stand against some of the things she stood for—unearned privilege, for instance, and willful ignorance of how most people lived.

  They spent the night at a motel near the highway, and the next day Penn rented space on the first floor of a warehouse and the group dug in. In anticipation of winter, they purchased a portable space heater and weather stripping for the windows. They bought a mini fridge and a microwave from Best Buy, cots and plastic storage lockers from Target, and heavy-duty sleeping bags from REI. They arranged the cots and lockers along one wall and set up folding tables and chairs and computers from an office supply store along another. They bought desks off of Craigslist and argued about who was responsible for which chores and what were the consequences for laziness or dereliction.

  “This ain’t the army, man,” said Kelly.

  “I know, I know,” said Penn, backing off.

  But a natural discipline seemed to take hold of the men according to their interests and abilities. Penn went out early and came back with breakfast. Then he set to work identifying donors to solicit and causes to promote. Danny installed the weather stripping and cleaned because he had the strictest standards for how those things should be done. Le Roy ran five miles every morning before gluing himself to his computer for the rest of the day. And Kelly set up the office space and worked the longest hours, making spreadsheets and organizing files and researching how Internet advertising worked. “Who said I can’t be a businessman?” he asked when the first check arrived in the mail. “Who said we can’t make this sucker pay?”

  The room had barred windows on three sides, and to the north, it looked out onto a railroad track. Every hour or so a train rumbled through, shaking the glass in the windows and causing Danny to dive for cover behind a couch they had found discarded on a curb.

  “Hit the deck, Danny!” Le Roy would say if Kelly didn’t say it first, and then Kelly would say, “New Jersey! At least it ain’t the fucking Bronx.”

  The neighborhood was just squalid enough for Penn to imagine that they were still fighting for their country—particularly at night, when the businesses were shuttered and feral cats ransacked the garbage cans and the only light came from a lone streetlamp halfway down the block. Every now and then Penn would shout, “Into the breach, boys. Let’s stop the goddamn war!” He was mostly play-acting, mostly putting on a personality he had first observed in his father at the yearly picnic he held for the families of his employees on the sweeping grounds of the Greenwich estate. “Who’s ready for the sack race?” the old man would call out. “Who wants to win a prize?” And the children would flock to him as if he were good with children, which, on that one day of the year, he was.

  One evening, something unusual in the cocoon of nighttime stillness drew Penn outside, where he walked up and down the block, checking that the grilles on the ground-floor windows of the businesses were secure and across the tracks to a dilapidated apartment house where a woman was sitting in the darkness smoking a cigarette and sobbing.

  “I thought I heard something,” said Penn.

  “It’s just them cats,” she said.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Ever’thin’s okay.”

  �
��We’re just down the block if you need anything.”

  “I’ll remember that,” she said, but she never came asking for anything, only waved at Penn when he walked up the street now and then on what he called “patrol” or when he went the long way around on his morning coffee run so he could see her sending her three kids off to school. Each time, she waved to him before going back inside the building, and one day Penn realized that what she needed wasn’t him patrolling the streets at night. What she needed was a job. “Hey,” he called out the next time he saw her. “You don’t know anybody who wants to cook and clean for a bunch of ex-soldiers, do you?”

  “I jes might,” she said. “I jes might know someone like that.”

  Meanwhile, the upstairs tenants clomped up the warehouse stairs to their office in the morning and down again in the afternoon in pursuit of their own entrepreneurial dreams, and now and then they said, “How ya doin’?” when Penn ran into them on the front walk, where some faded hydrangeas from an overgrown bed spilled onto the pavement. Across the street, a car parts salvage business had taken over an empty building, and two months after the soldiers moved in, a commercial laundry service opened up. In the white-gray light of early morning when he was on the breakfast run, Penn allowed himself to think that something good was starting up—the website of course, but also the little neighborhood near the tracks.

  8.6 Joe Kelly

  The first thing they put up on the site after the pictures from the protest was a schedule of other protests. Then they created a message board where returning soldiers could post their stories of the war. In the back of his mind, Kelly was wondering how they were going to make a bunch of stories pay, but for the time being he was happy just not to be living with his folks.

  “I’m going to post something,” said Danny, who had put aside the television pilot and was working on an epic poem. “Think of the Odyssey—if it was written by Eminem.”