Now and Again

by Charlotte Rogan

  Kelly was still working out the angles of the site. “How do we know if the stories are true?” he asked.

  “What’s true?” countered Danny. He stood up in the open space between the desks and read from his notepad:

  News, news, fact or ruse,

  Raise the flag and light the fuse

  “I’m not sure the personal stories need to be true,” said the captain. “The idea is for soldiers to share their experiences. It’s how they see what happened that counts.”

  “The documents don’t need to be true either,” said Le Roy. “They only need to be authentic, so I’m studying up on that.”

  At a pause in the conversation, Danny continued reading.

  “The war will be over before it starts,”

  Goes the official pronouncement

  (While PhDs using proven marketing techniques send

  Catchy slogans into the ether)

  And military contractors ramp up production,

  Turning depleted uranium and enlisted men

  Into dollars and cents.

  Coincidentally, it is the Congressional naysayers

  Who receive anthrax-laced letters in the mail.

  Meanwhile, by the waters of Babylon,

  A car laden with explosives

  Approaches a convoy on a lonely desert road.

  A soldier makes a lucky shot, and…

  The train went through, blaring its whistle at the crossing and startling even Kelly. “Man, that sounded like incoming artillery fire,” he said.

  When the glass had settled back into its wooden frames, Danny climbed out from behind the couch and said, “Anyway, I figured that since it’s impossible to forget, maybe I should be trying to remember.”

  “You didn’t know about the grenade,” said Penn. “There’s no way you could have known.”

  “That’s the point,” said Danny. “What do any of us know—me or anybody else? We run around with guns and battle plans and grandiose statements about liberation, but we might as well be kids running around in the dark. So now we post the stories and we write the poems and we dig through the official record for shards of truth or evidence of wrongdoing—and what? It doesn’t change anything we did. The damage is done.”

  “The blast was going to kill him anyway,” said Kelly. “Even if you hadn’t stopped the truck.”

  “He might have had a chance,” said Danny. “He might have had a fighting chance.”

  “He had zero chance,” said Kelly. “Not even one in a million.”

  “And those shards of truth might change things,” said the captain. “Not the past, but the future.”

  “What’s true?” Danny asked again.

  “I’m thinking it’s all of the personal narratives together,” said the captain, “each of them a tiny pixel in the bigger picture of what is what. And then the documents tether the narratives into some kind of objective framework. They allow people to look behind the personal accounts and the news stories to see if what we’re being told is true.”

  Le Roy was still going on about authentication. “I’ve got a good guy working with me on that, but he tells me we need some kind of anonymous drop box. People can’t just email us top-secret documents. And we don’t want to know who the leakers are—we need a system where they can’t be traced.”

  Kelly noticed how everyone occupied his own boxcar of thought: The captain had some theory of journalism in mind. Le Roy was obsessed with the mechanics of collecting and disseminating information. Danny was interested in stories as catharsis and art. Kelly wasn’t sure yet what he was interested in, but money was never far from his mind. “Speaking of stories,” he said, but just then the single mother from down the block arrived with the dinner she had cooked for them, and Kelly didn’t finish what he was going to say.

  “You boys are in for a treat,” she said, putting a pan of lasagna on the table. “Mmm-mm. I outdid myself today!”

  The first document to go up on the site was Penn’s old email to himself describing what had happened with the convoy and the IED, juxtaposed to the official version of events.

  “Are you sure you want that up there?” asked Kelly.

  “Yeah,” said the captain. “I do.”

  “Kind of like a confession?” asked Kelly.

  “Yeah,” said the captain, “kind of like that.”

  The captain was headed out on his evening patrol, so Kelly pulled on his jacket and followed him down the walk, kicking at the hydrangea heads, which had turned brittle and brown as the season deepened. He was surprised to see that night had fallen and the cloud cover had given way to a clear blackness that dissolved at the edges where lights from the city center fought back the dark. “I was thinking,” he said. “Could be it’s better to leave the ghosts alone.”

  “How does that help?” asked the captain. “Ghosts are creatures of darkness. They might not ever disappear completely, but they lose some of their power in the light.”

  They walked across the tracks and turned down toward the river, past the boarded-up community pool. “We should get that pool reopened,” said Penn. “That’s something the neighborhood kids would like.”

  “Every kid should know how to swim,” said Kelly, but he wasn’t thinking about the neighborhood kids, he was thinking about the two teenagers on the bridge. Danny hadn’t been there, but he had. “The thing is, those boys didn’t do anything but throw some rocks into the weeds, but it didn’t matter. I remember saying, ‘Wait a minute,’ but I wasn’t thinking, Let’s not hassle those kids. I was thinking, I hate fucking hajis. And I was curious about what Harraday would do and also kind of detached, as if none of it was really real.” And then he laughed and said, “What’s real?” the way Danny would have said it.

  “Let it be, Kelly,” said Penn. “Whatever it is, there’s no sense dredging it all up again.”

  “I thought you wanted to let the ghosts out.”

  “Only if it helps, man. Only if it helps.”

  “They wanted us to be afraid, and so we wanted them to be afraid too.”

  They stood smelling the coming winter and listening to the wind moving through branches that still held a few papery leaves and watching the river roll underneath the railroad bridge. Then Sinclair said, “What’s to say that the stars above us aren’t the bright points of swords aimed at the earth by alien forces.”

  Kelly thought he was joking, but the captain just eyed him in the steady way he had when he was being serious or when the joke went over his head. “Hey, man,” said Kelly. “We’ve got scientists ’n’ shit, so we know those are stars, not the points of any swords.”

  “We had scientists,” said the captain. “We had weapons inspectors. We had the biggest intelligence agency in the world. Anyway, I’m just saying that if they told us those stars were cosmic swords hurtling toward us ready to attack the earth, we’d man the rockets and blast the stars to smithereens.”

  “If,” said Kelly. “If that’s what they told us, I guess we would.”

  “I’m just saying that we wouldn’t know not to. I’m saying that once you believe certain things about the world, other things become possible, even inevitable.”

  Kelly didn’t say anything.

  “I guess my point is that we all did stuff over there. We all did stuff we’re proud of and we all did stuff we regret and maybe you don’t get one without the other in this life. It was stubbornness and vanity that made me send that convoy…I wanted to finish the school. I wanted to be in charge and to think I could know what the best course of action was, given the circumstances. Danny’s right about that—none of us knows shit.”

  “We regret it, but that’s only because we’re back here. If we were over there, we’d do it all again.”

  “Could be,” said Penn. “Could be you’re right.”

  The two men stood for a while contemplating the night sky before resuming their patrol. Kelly said, “The other thing I think about is if Pig Eye killed himself on purpose. The blast was going
to get him whether or not Danny stopped the truck. So my question is, did he sacrifice his life for ours?”

  “Knowing him, he probably thought he’d come through it just fine. He liked to imagine escape scenarios.”

  Kelly laughed. “Yeah. He prided himself on that.”

  They had circled around past the car parts shop. Penn went back inside, after which Kelly spent a little longer mourning Pig Eye and the other men and what he had always thought of as stars but now imagined were swords from a murderous extraterrestrial race. And then for some reason he was thinking there must be pretty girls in New Jersey, girls who wouldn’t fall apart too easily when things got rough. He didn’t know where to find them, but somewhere out there, the love of his life was standing in the moonlight wondering what was taking him so long to find her.

  9.0 FREEDOM

  And then one day she was gone. We found out later that she got a job in Phoenix, but Lyle wasn’t talking. He said she disappeared and he didn’t know where she was.

  —Jimmy Sweets

  I think she fell in love with another man. Why else would she run off like that? And then Lyle started sniffing around Lily De Luca, and the son had that little dark-skinned girl. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, if you know what I mean.

  —Mrs. Frank Farnsworth

  When DC started saying Maggie’s prisoner friend might be innocent after all, you could have knocked me over with a feather. Of course, that didn’t make stealing his records right.

  —Valerie Vines

  People started using Maggie as an example. They started asking themselves, What would Maggie Rayburn do?

  —Lucas Enright, proprietor of the Main Street Diner

  It was like trying to put out a brush fire. You’d stamp it out in one place, only to turn around and find some other parent using her as an example to her kids.

  —Pastor Houston Price

  What did she think she was saving us from? She was the threat to our way of life.

  —Mrs. August Winslow

  Without the plant and the prison, Red Bud would dry right up and blow away. And if there were no jobs for us, we’d probably be the ones breaking the laws and going to jail.

  —Hugo Martinez, Prison Security

  9.1 Maggie

  Maggie pulled a map of Phoenix out of its cellophane pouch, and after consulting it, she headed north. The bus station was located next to a busy airport. Planes were skirling overhead, and cars rocketed in all directions on roads that hadn’t been built with pedestrians in mind. When she finally succeeded in detaching herself from the airport’s grip, it was the pedestrians who surged around her with nearly lethal force, who knocked into her as they chased after unruly children or shouted into their cell phones or waved placards in her face and hissed, “Why are we rescuing animals when so many babies are being killed?”

  Oh, for heaven’s sake, thought Maggie. Why can’t people get along!

  A red-faced woman thrust a pamphlet into her hand. A bearded man stood on the corner shouting, “Half the people entering an abortion clinic don’t come out alive!” Someone else said, “Let the baby choose!” while across the street, an equally enthusiastic band of counterprotesters carried competing signs and shouted slogans of their own.

  A smile is like a rainbow, Maggie told herself. So she smiled at the bearded man. She smiled at the red-faced woman. She smiled at a girl who rushed after her spouting a complicated story and causing a narrow miss with a panel van. “I’m sorry!” Maggie called out to the driver, who waved a fist at her. It didn’t help that she hadn’t slept in over a day. It didn’t help to be sweaty and hungry and short of breath or that the heavy backpack was cutting into her shoulders and neck.

  When a man in a Hawaiian shirt called out, “This way, this way,” she allowed herself to be swept up in a swarm of cheerful vacationers and into a large arena that smelled of freshly dug garden soil and sour beer and doughy concoctions frying in deep cauldrons of hydrogenated fat. Instead of asking to see her ticket, the ticket-taker opened the gate for her when her duffel caught on the turnstile. “Come on, come on,” he scolded. “You’re holding up the line!”

  Inside the building, people were crowded around a railing stuffing food into their mouths and cheering on a pack of frantic-looking dogs that were racing around a wide dirt track. Maggie bought a cheese sandwich and ate it as people holding winning tickets elbowed past her to a row of cashier windows. Then she wandered around in search of a restroom and found herself in front of a long, skirted table covered with glossy brochures.

  “Do you want to adopt one of the dogs?” asked a large woman who straddled a stool that was pushed back from the table to accommodate her paunch. “This is our annual adopt-a-thon.”

  “No, no, I can’t,” said Maggie. “But why are they for sale?”

  “They’re not for sale,” said the woman. “They’re free to a good home if you pay the veterinary charges and adoption fee and make a donation to the rescue center.”

  Maggie picked up one of the brochures. Inside it were pictures of big-eyed dogs with bony faces and names like Little Bo’s Majestic Queen. Apparently the dogs, which had been bred for speed, were not young enough or hungry enough for victory, and their owners didn’t want them anymore. “I couldn’t give it a good home,” she said, putting the brochure back on the table.

  The woman handed her a thick stack of photographs. “The dogs are in cages now. I’m pretty sure you could give it a better home than that.”

  “At least they’re safe,” said Maggie.

  “Actually, they’re not. The ones that aren’t adopted will be euthanized.”

  Maggie riffled through the stack of photos she was holding. A dog’s name was written in black marker across the bottom of each one. “Dancing Dinero,” Maggie read from the top card. “That’s kind of a fancy name. What would you call him for short?”

  “What about Dino? Dino is cute. But feel free to look through the entire stack. You might find a dog you like better.”

  “I don’t really like dogs,” said Maggie.

  “That’s like saying you don’t like babies,” said the woman, but all Maggie could think of was Tomás. She pictured him trotting along the sidewalk behind her or scratching at the screen door, hoping to be let inside the house.

  “We take credit cards,” said the woman. “And debit cards and, of course, cash.”

  Maggie had a pocket full of rainy-day money, but taking the animal was out of the question. “I don’t live in Phoenix,” she said. “I don’t even have a place to stay.”

  “Then you can really empathize with these dogs,” said the woman. “Imagine that you not only didn’t have a place to stay, but that someone was waiting to haul you off and jab you with a lethal dose of pentobarbital if you couldn’t find someone to take you in.”

  Maggie was silent. The woman beamed out her disapproval from across the table, while Dino stared mournfully up at her from the photograph.

  “I’ll tell you what. If you adopt one of the dogs, I’ll tell you where you can stay for free. You’ll make back the adoption fee in just a night or two.”

  When Maggie still didn’t say anything, the woman said, “So Dino is the one you like?”

  “Isn’t it more important that the dog like me?” asked Maggie. “It wouldn’t seem right to send him home with someone he isn’t comfortable with.”

  “Not that you’re headed home,” said the woman. She rang a little bell that sat on the table in front of her and added, “The dogs are all very friendly. If they weren’t friendly, they wouldn’t be candidates for adoption.”

  “What happens to the unfriendly dogs?” asked Maggie.

  “Most of the dogs are friendly,” said the woman. “Really, almost all. But where is Peggy?” She rang the bell again, and this time a person with an oily ponytail and frizzy bangs entered the room holding a nylon leash. “It’s been wonderful chatting with you,” said the large woman. “Now, if you’d like to meet Dino, I can have Pegg
y introduce you.”

  Maggie followed Peggy through a door into a room lined with tiered rows of steel cages. As soon as the women entered, the dogs in the cages started to bark and pace back and forth in the tiny space allotted to them. Maggie was immediately reminded of the prison. “Oh my goodness!” she exclaimed. Suddenly it didn’t seem right to leave Dino in a cage when she could so easily do for him what she might never be able to do for Tomás or George. She mentally added the vet bill to the adoption fee to the donation and came up with sixty-five dollars. Dino was a mere sixty-five dollars from being free—she couldn’t turn her back on him now!

  “Don’t look straight at him,” instructed Peggy, handing her a bone-shaped biscuit. “He will interpret that as a threat.”

  Maggie turned sideways and stretched out the hand that held the treat. “Hello, Dino,” she said, but just as Peggy was trying to coax the dog out of his cage, a logical corollary occurred to her: the same could be said of all the dogs incarcerated there. Sixty-five dollars would free each and every one of them, and there was nothing, really, to distinguish Dino from the rest of them except that his card had been on the top of the stack. What if some of the other dogs were more deserving? She should probably choose the one that was poking its nose out between the bars of the cage rather than slinking into a corner the way Dino was doing. Or the one that was happily wagging its tail. But then she stopped herself. She had already exhausted the subject of merit and rights in thinking about Tomás. A creature shouldn’t have to earn its freedom, so being more or less deserving didn’t come into it. Besides, what if Dino’s card had been on top for a reason? But still she stood paralyzed by the grooming table, and only when Peggy called out, “Here he is!” did Maggie close her mind to further thought.

  “Crouch down like this,” said Peggy, dropping to a squatting position. “And hold out your hand for him to sniff.”

  The large woman trundled into the room with some paperwork for Maggie to sign. “The Catholic Charities is in an old church,” she said. “I’ve written down the address right here on your adoption agreement. If they don’t have room for you tonight, at least you can get on their list for tomorrow. And here is a starter kit with some dog food, a complimentary water bowl, and, of course, a leash.”