Now and Again (31 page)

D
anny 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.”

“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 of 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.”

P
enn 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.