Now and Again

by Charlotte Rogan

  12.7 Maggie

  Maggie was glad to see the bicycle leaning against the shed. She had left her empty duffel in the house, but she kept her backpack with her as she mounted the bike and started pedaling. The crunch of the gravel beneath the tires brought to mind the free, almost floating feeling of heading off to Phoenix all those months ago. This was entirely different. With every revolution, the front tire rubbed against the fender, which was rusted and bent, and the brakes squealed whenever she slowed down. Even the wind generated by the bicycle was dusty and seemed to suck at her rather than blow. But the tires were new, and they bounced obligingly over any potholes or stones they encountered.

  When she turned onto Main Street, she kept her head down in case there was traffic, but even though it was nearly lunchtime, everything was quiet. It was as if the town had shrunk in her absence, or she had somehow grown. She passed the town’s lone office building, although now, from the looks of things, they were getting another, and the Main Street Diner had a freshly painted sign indicating it was now called the Main Street Café. She peered at the window as she went by, but the glass storefront only reflected her image back at her, and if any of the customers were watching her from the leatherette booths, she couldn’t see them. She thought of eating dinner there with Lyle and Will and wondered if she was having a memory of the past or a happy premonition of the future.

  An oil truck whizzed past, frightening her because she hadn’t seen it coming. It was as if the film of her life had been spliced, leaving out the vehicle’s approach and also its departure, for just as suddenly, it was gone. Even the air seemed jumpy, as if it were attached to her nerves and images were painted on it in thin colors rather than seen through it, or as if the town she had lived in for her entire life was only a mirage or an elaborately constructed set that could be changed at the whim of an unseen director, someone she envisioned smoking and laughing at her from a canvas chair with his name stenciled on the back or flirting with a winsome assistant rather than caring about what was taking place on stage.

  She recognized the feeling as a combination of apprehension and loneliness, and then she realized that the apprehension was turning into full-blown fear. Where was Lyle? She passed the turnoff to the Church of the New Incarnation and thought of going there to seek refuge in its sparkling vastness. She missed having the shell of a church around her, and if she went there, she could ask the pastor for advice. She could ask God to forgive her for reneging on her promise. But all she could think about now was finding Lyle.

  The bell on the Catholic church was chiming the hour when she turned the corner by the muffler shop. A group of men were sitting outside smoking cigarettes and drinking Dr Pepper. She wondered briefly what their lives were like, whether the good in them outweighed the bad. Now she could see the bus station far ahead. It was little more than a storefront with a park bench outside for waiting. An old metal awning and a thin tree provided a stripe of shade, and just beyond was a chain-link enclosure for long-term parking. She thought she recognized Lyle’s truck at the end of a short row of parked cars, but the glare of the noonday sun made it difficult to tell. She paused for a moment at the top of the hill before pedaling forward again.

  The truck’s window was open, and as she got closer, she could see that the driver of the truck was wearing aviator glasses and a blue shirt and a baseball cap that she imagined—no, she knew!—was made of crushed red felt with the letters OU stenciled on the front. Lyle! He was looking in her direction. He was looking and she knew in her heart he had recognized her. But even when she took one hand off the handlebars and held it up in joyful greeting, causing the bicycle to teeter dangerously beneath her, Lyle didn’t wave back. Worse than that, he turned away. Of course he was angry with her. Anyone would be.

  Anyone, she thought, except for Lyle. Lyle didn’t get angry.

  Maggie pressed her sneakered foot on the brake just as the truck lurched through a gap in the chain-link fence, wheels spinning. It careened sideways into the road and gained momentum before slamming up on the curb, across the sidewalk and into the bench and the spindly metal stanchions. He had seen her! He was warning her away! A side street was coming up. As Maggie skidded into it, the bicycle’s tires shimmied and slipped in the gravel. She almost lost her balance, but then the tires bit, and by some saving miracle, she didn’t fall.

  12.8 Danny Joiner

  —The what? I can’t hear you, soldier. You’d better speak up.

  —The dust. Just there…in the distance…eleven o’clock…

  —What dust?

  —About three or four klicks up the road.

  Danny could see Kelly crouching now, lowering himself on strong arms. And Le Roy, who only that morning had laughed for the first time since anyone could remember, was flattened in a patch of striped light from the barred window, muttering, “Fuck this shit,” over and over to himself. He looked from the shiny barrels of the guns to the FBI logos to the laced and polished boots and tried to decide if he was experiencing a flashback or a dream or just a particularly vivid scene for the epic. It seemed very real, but all of the scenes had seemed real before he turned them into words and wrote them down.

  By the waters of Babylon…

  —Get going. You should have left when it was dark.

  —Just let Pig Eye stay. He was supposed to go home last week.

  —We were all supposed to go home.

  —But Pig Eye.

  He got slowly out of his chair, adjusting the blue mechanical pencil so it was horizontal now rather than vertical, the plastic barrel of the body arranged so that it lay just underneath the last words he had written—words that might make a fitting last line, which would make his epic shorter than he had imagined it, but lots of things were either longer or shorter than he had thought they would be—the war, for instance, and innocence and life. He felt sharp and clearheaded, if somewhat unhinged, and then not unhinged, but brittle and coldly righteous. Strong. A bell was ringing. It was the bell at the railroad crossing. He felt a bullet of comprehension click into its chamber. That’s all it was—the train! But a train didn’t explain the guns and the boots and the voices that were finished shouting at Le Roy and had started shouting at him. One of the agents took a step forward, and through the thick plastic visor, Danny saw Harraday’s eyes staring at him, the hollow eyes of a natural killer.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m writing a rap epic.”

  By the waters of Babylon,

  A soldier makes a lucky shot…

  —Tell them who you are.

  —I am an American soldier.

  —Tell it to them, and say it like you mean it!

  He turned to face the door. The perfect word was out there. It was somewhere between his ear and his eye. He could feel the guns aiming at it, and then it shifted ever so slightly until it was dead center, right in the middle of his forehead. Help, he thought.

  Le Roy had his eyes closed. Kelly was moving his mouth, but no sound was coming out. Or, if sound was coming out, he couldn’t hear it. Maybe he was deaf. He didn’t think he was deaf, but he couldn’t absolutely rule it out. Where was the captain? The captain should be there to tell them what to do. Or his recruiting officer or the doctor or the sergeant who had always smoked him in basic training but who had taught him everything he needed to know. He straightened his shoulders.

  By the waters of Babylon,

  He stood with his head up and his feet squared.

  We sat down and wept.

  —Tell them who you are!

  “I am an American soldier! I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough!”

  “On the ground, now!”

  The captain had gone back to Iraq—he remembered that now. But Dolly was coming. Last time they had talked, she had said she would. “Not right away,” she had told him. “Ask me in a couple weeks.” He would call her and ask her to marry him again, just to make sure. He’d plan something special for a celebration. No sp
arklers. No alcohol. No tablecloth with stars and stripes. “I will never accept defeat!” he shouted, this time a little louder, just in case. Then he looked into the middle distance and thought of Pig Eye and also of Joe Kelly the day the two soldiers had stood together like brothers on the Toyota—and then he rammed his right fist into the air.

  It was as if he had punched through a sound barrier, for as he did it, Kelly shouted, “Hit the deck, Danny! Hit the deck!” and the bell stopped ringing and the train blasted through right on schedule or even a little early for once, rattling the glass in the barred windows. But then Kelly was drowned out by a deafening crash, as if the train had jumped its tracks. Danny saw stars, and among the stars, a planet—Mars! At first it was the barest pinprick of light, and then it became big, blood-red, and molten before it exploded the way Pig Eye had exploded, into a thousand new pinpricks as everything disintegrated and settled into a kind of shrouded, starstruck peace.

  12.9 Maggie

  The side street intersected with an alley that ran behind the bus station, and as she tore past it, Maggie could see three squad cars and the sheriff’s big pickup parked there, gleaming in the sun. She gripped the handlebars as tightly as she could. Sweat pooled in her armpits and dripped from her brow. Were the police after her? Had they found the stolen documents? Was she a fugitive from the law?

  She sent a prayer into the ether and hoped Lyle would hear it. And then she thought about the army and the war and how she had taken her eye off the ball, but was the ball the depleted uranium munitions, or was it Tommy and George, or was it her poor, neglected family? Please, God, she thought, take care of Will!

  She was pedaling as hard as she could, keeping her head down and taking back roads to a track she knew of that followed Ash Creek from the park with the baseball field where the summer league games were played all the way to the Church of the New Incarnation, where the narrow trickle of the creek widened out into a glassy man-made reflecting pool before meandering through the fields and eventually into a concrete culvert that funneled it beneath the highway. When the undulating form of the church came into view, Maggie was already tiring. How would she make it the hundred miles to Oklahoma City? How would she make it to wherever she was going with only a rusty bicycle and scarcely a dollar to her name? Almost of its own accord, the bicycle turned up the long driveway toward the twin domes of the church, the domes that made the church look like a female torso toppled over on its back.

  As Maggie entered the vestibule, she could hear music emanating from the nave: the big pipe organ accompanied by what sounded like the full choir. It was Saturday. It must be a special holy day, but she couldn’t think of which one it might be. Just as she was tiptoeing forward to peek through the double doors, the pastor’s wife burst through them and almost knocked into her. “Maggie!” she cried. “Whatever are you doing here?”

  Maggie was taken aback by the perfectly waved hair and the made-up face and the tightly wrapped summer dress and the air of voluptuous good will. When Tiffany put out her arms, Maggie allowed herself to fall into the softness and burst into tears. “I’m tired,” she said. “I’m just a little tired is all.”

  “Of course you are,” said Tiffany. “Let me get you a glass of water and a bite to eat.”

  It turned out that the producers had wanted to film some background segments for the television show, so for the previous week, a camera crew had been shadowing the pastor and his wife. Today was the day to shoot the choir and the interior of the church. “The show’s going national,” said Tiffany. “They even want to do a segment on me.”

  She led Maggie to where a tray of fruit and sandwiches had been set out for the camera crew. She poured two glasses of water and took Maggie to an inner room where they wouldn’t be disturbed. “I heard you talking to Houston the day you and your husband came to him for advice,” she said. “I heard you talking about the prisoners, and I haven’t been able to forget what you said. As you know, I lead a group called Mothers of Mercy, and you inspired me to take on something more significant than providing school supplies for the prison and sewing quilts for wounded soldiers.”

  The backpack was still cutting into Maggie’s shoulders, and now she took it off, reminded of the day she had met the representative from PATH. A lot had happened since then, but what had she accomplished?

  As if she were reading her mind, Tiffany said, “Long story short, the MoMs group has recently received some money, but we don’t have a mission—not a real one, anyway. If I’m going to be on television, it would be nice to have something important to talk about.”

  Maggie recognized the tone, the set of the jaw, the refusal to be dissuaded. Don’t do it, she wanted to say. She wanted to warn Tiffany about all she stood to lose, but the sensation that she was looking at a younger, better version of herself destroyed her ability to speak.

  “I’m thinking…well, I’m actually thinking two things,” said Tiffany. “The first is that there is some money—quite a lot of it, actually—in the MoMs account. And the second thing is that you might have a few ideas about how that money can best be spent.”

  “You have to focus in,” said Maggie. “It’s easy to get distracted if you take on too much at once.”

  Maggie wanted to ask how a person chose just one thing in a world where so much needed doing. She wanted to warn Tiffany that progress on any one of the items was impossibly slow. She wanted to say that there were sacrifices involved. Instead, she said, “Tomás is getting a new trial, so it would be wonderful if you could send something for his legal fees. And I’ve completely neglected George…” She held out the backpack with the same mixture of reluctance and relief with which the PATH woman had passed her the quilted bag with the name GEORGE appliquéd on the side, and the woman in front of her took it with the same eager confidence Maggie had once had. It was as if Maggie were both staying and leaving, both giving the prisoners up and holding them close. When the pastor’s wife transferred the files from the backpack to a locked drawer of her desk, Maggie noticed that there were no other papers in the drawer. The surface of the desk was clean too, arrayed only with a set of matching implements, no doubt purchased from the office supply depot in town but never used.

  Tiffany went to the donation closet and filled a small duffel with clothing. “What size are your feet?” she asked. She repacked the backpack with food and money and gave Maggie the telephone number of someone she knew in San Francisco. “I’ll be sure to give the same telephone number to Lyle,” she added. “And don’t you worry, I’ll check on him as soon as I’m finished here.”

  “And Will,” said Maggie. “Can you find out where Will’s unit is stationed and give him the number too?”

  “Of course I can. Don’t you worry about a thing. And don’t forget to call me now and then to let me know how you are.”

  Tiffany gave Maggie her cheerleader smile and accompanied her to where the bicycle was tipped over beside the reflecting pool. “This is just between us,” she said. “Not that the pastor wouldn’t fully support everything we’re doing, but he has a lot on his mind right now. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true,” said Maggie with some of her old fire. “But of course, my lips are sealed.”

  “If he has a problem with it, I’ll just tell him it’s my one crazy thing.” When Tiffany laughed, Maggie felt a burst of joy, and better than joy, she felt hope—for herself, for the prisoners, and for the world. Where would she go if she could go anywhere? She’d stay right there in Red Bud, of course, but life was a narrowing down as much as an opening out, and for now Red Bud was the one place on earth she couldn’t be.

  She wheeled the bicycle to the top of a low rise and looked around her at the green fields of wheat waving gracefully in the breeze. Please take care of Will, she thought again, but this time it wasn’t so much a prayer to God as to the other people out there, people who might lend a hand to a stranger in time of need.

  In the distance, a st
raight ribbon of highway stretched all the way to California. On either side of it, a flock of oil derricks bowed and preyed on the rich Carboniferous sludge deposited millions of years before, when Oklahoma was a steamy and suppurating swamp. Behind her, the double-domed Church of the New Incarnation had doubled again—it was sprawled on its back giving comfort to the sky and it was also flipped upside down, drowning in the reflecting pool. As she surveyed the familiar landscape, she wondered again if she had done any good at all, and if she had, had she done right? When she had started down this path all those months ago, she had assumed that things would be clearer than they were and that she would be able to look back on her choices and accomplishments with certainty and satisfaction. Partial knowledge, she thought. It was all anybody had. Overhead, a plane tipped its wings at her, filled with people who had other problems and other destinies awaiting them. As she watched it disappear into the distance, a hawk plummeted from the heavens and rocketed up again with a field mouse in its talons. She was sorry for the little creature, but there was nothing she could do for it. Even she knew that saving too many mice would doom the hawk. The world was paradoxical, and if there was a solution to the paradox, it wasn’t for her to know.

  13.0 BABYLON

  People have been at war for all but twenty-nine years of history. What makes anyone think we’re going to stop now?

  —The Professor

  I learned that there’s a heck of a lot of mom power out there, and if you just figure out how to harness it, there’s no telling what you can do.