Now and Again (6 page)

“I said it, and you can quote me. I'll let you know about the school.”

The colonel squinted at something over Penn's shoulder. Then he signaled the driver and shouted above the noise of the revving engine, “The stop-loss is bound to hit some of the troops pretty hard. Don't let them sit around bemoaning their fate. Don't let them skimp on safety. Tell them they have the rest of today to get it out of their systems, and then you expect them to buckle down. I'll let you know where to send the convoy. And give any troublemakers something to do!”

The wheels of the colonel's Humvee dug in and then spun free, causing it to buck forward while the wind sent a column of dust spiraling across the yard. Sinclair stood watching the vehicle drive off and trying to get the grit out of his mouth and eyes and deciding he'd continue with the convoy briefing just in case they got lucky and were able to finish the school and also trying to ignore his father's voice, which suddenly intruded on his thoughts.

“You make your own luck!” his father liked to say, as if luck and opportunity hadn't both come up sixes for him and his children, all boys, all athletic, all destined to follow the trajectory of Sinclair success—all of them quick to shout out “Buy!” or “Sell!” or “Anti-fragility!” which was an investment strategy that not only withstood a turbulent market but performed better under such conditions, just like the Sinclairs. Of the four brothers, only Penn had no interest in finance or the family business, but he had internalized the lessons about running down the hall and shouting, “Follow me!” What he had learned was that people tended to do it without asking where they were going. It was a useful skill for a leader, although unlike his brothers, he had a tendency to overthink things, the way he was doing now.

Facta, non verba,
he reminded himself. Deeds, not words.

This led to a thought about how the word “fact” was more closely allied with actions and fabrications than with bits of discoverable truth and how words sometimes contained elements of their opposites, which was the kind of insight he loved and the kind his father hated. “Interesting thought,” his old man would say. “But who's going to pay you to think it?”

Deeds, not words, Penn reminded himself just as Velcro came up and said, “I'm a little worried about the troops.”

T
heir tours were being extended. That's what the colonel's long-winded meandering had been about. That's what the muffled grumbling in the front rows and the funny silence meant. The news reached Danny Joiner where he was sitting in the shade of a makeshift shower stall taking his weapon apart in order to clean and oil the action for the third time that afternoon. He had been absorbed in this task and only realized something was going on when Pig Eye ran around the corner of the yard shouting, “Can they do it? They can't do it, can they?” As if somebody had a definitive answer as to what the U.S. Army could and couldn't do.

Pig Eye was desperate to get home, and with each passing day, new fantasies about his wife's infidelity blossomed in his brain. “Extending our tours would be illegal, wouldn't it?” he whined. But they were talking about the people who both made the rules and interpreted them.

“What planet you livin' on, man?” asked Specialist Le Roy Jones, and Staff Sergeant Mason Betts, who was their squad leader and who happened to be walking by just then, batted the side of Pig Eye's head with an open palm and said, “Toughen up, man,” before he disappeared into the shower stall.

Everybody had some factoid to contribute, some phrase from their enlistment papers, some personal theory of right and wrong honed on the steel of their childhoods, some favorite chapter or verse guaranteed either to make sense of their personal situations or to start an argument if not a war, until Le Roy got everyone's attention by whispering, “Slave labor, that's what it is!”

The whisper passed through the unit like a pressurized stream of combustible gas. Le Roy kept whispering, “Slave labor,” over and over again to anyone who came within earshot. He said it to Danny just as Danny was trying to convince himself that the trickling sound of water from the shower stall was rain. What he wouldn't give for a downpour—send in fucking Katrina if that's what it took to break the heat that sucked the spit from his mouth and the sweat from his pores and the glaze from his ever-aching eyeballs.

“Jeezus, Le Roy,” he said. “Can't I have some peace?”

“You heard, didn't you?”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“Then why are you just sitting there?”

“What am I going to do about it? You tell me that and I just might consider it. Meanwhile, I'm oiling this rifle so if I ever need it, it doesn't jam.”

Le Roy ran off to find someone more excitable to talk to. When Betts emerged dripping and the water sound abruptly stopped, Danny tried to sustain the daydream—wet dream, he thought—ha! That brought to mind his girlfriend Dolly, who was waiting for him at home just the way Emmie was waiting for Pig Eye and E'Laine was waiting for Le Roy and someone was waiting for all of them: girlfriends and parents and wives.

Or not waiting. The women back home were always posting pictures of the fun they were having on Facebook, where anyone could see them in their low-cut dresses, raising their glasses and blowing kisses (“This one's for you, honey!”), which made the men crazy because it was hard to tell the difference between passing-the-time-'til-you're-home-baby prowling and a full-bore, cat's-away, see-ya-later-buster hunt, and anyway, what were they going to do about it here?

Danny wiped his fingerprints off the barrel with a ragged chamois cloth, the sweaty skin of his massive forearms shining more brightly than the metal of the gun, and then he ambled around the corner into the yard just in time to see Corporal Joe Kelly climb up on the hood of a Toyota flatbed pickup and bow his head as if in prayer. But something about how Kelly's muscles were twitching told Danny that prayer was the last thing on his mind. Even when Pig Eye climbed up beside him, Kelly faced ahead and slightly down, not turning the way Pig Eye turned to check on who was watching and not smiling or catching anyone's eye before ramming his fist into the bone-dry air just as Captain Sinclair opened the sagging canvas door of his office and stepped out into the yard, followed by Velcro, whereupon both men jumped down, but not before a television crew that was passing through camp on its way to Tikrit caught the incident on tape and afterward went around asking the soldiers what the stop-loss orders meant for them.

Having an audience fired Le Roy up again, and he repeated his incendiary message into the microphone and also to a truckload of new recruits who drove up looking both shocked and optimistic. But by dinnertime, the furor was dying down and the men trooped off to eat, anger already giving way to resignation.

Danny watched the scene unfold from a corner of the yard, trying to remember the last lines of a Shelley poem that might sum up what he was feeling, if a creeping sense of desolation and inadequacy shot through with a deeply percolating anger was even subject to summation. He knew that most anger was born of misunderstanding, and he wanted to understand. More than that, he wanted to fit in. But he had never fit in, not in school, where he had wanted to study literature, and not in the army, which was why he had been transferred to the logistics unit and why, if he had asked Kelly the proper technique and thrust his own fist into the air and called him and Pig Eye “brother” or whatever the proper word was in order to let them know he shared their disappointment, they would have stared at him without a speck of comprehension. He understood that their identity in a funny way depended on his, and his was alien to them, which was just the way they wanted it. Men like Kelly wanted solidarity and separateness at the same time. It would have filled him with sadness if it hadn't first filled him with other things, one of which was anger, but another of which was something he couldn't quite put his finger on.

“It's not good enough to be an American anymore,” he said to Harraday, who was standing near him.

“What?” asked Harraday. “I'm with them. This stop-loss bullshit really sucks.”

Harraday spat and walked off, and Danny would have given anything to have an exclusive hand gesture to wave in Harraday's face, a gesture that defined the knife-edge of identity and proved to Harraday that, whatever Harraday was, Danny wasn't that.

Instead of going to dinner, Danny made his way to the latrine, where he took off his uniform jacket and carefully rolled the sleeves of his T-shirt in overlapping folds, which made his bulging biceps look almost as big as, if a little softer than, Kelly's biceps looked when he rolled his sleeves the same way. Danny glanced behind him to make sure he was alone, listening carefully for the sound of footsteps on the packed earth outside the door. But most of the troops were in the DFAC and all was quiet. He stood at attention in front of the rectangular sheet of metal that served for a mirror and searched his face for signs of what he was thinking and was glad when he couldn't find any. Then he took a deep breath and thrust his fist into the air. The exposed ridge of arm muscle hardened, and for a moment he didn't recognize himself. His gray eyes darkened a shade closer to black, and his brows soared above his nose like the wings of a raptor.

Danny was startled to find that the gesture had both an outside and an inside. All he had known of it before was what it had looked like when someone else did it and also that it had worried him, the kind of worry that turned to anger before you knew it was really fear. But now, standing in the latrine where the only observer was a tinny mirror image of himself, he felt the adrenaline rush and almost understood what Kelly and Pig Eye had been thinking when they had practiced the gesture on the rest of the battalion. He could almost feel, rising within him, a big Fuck You to the war.

L
e Roy had to laugh. All he had to do was say “slave labor” and everyone's panties were in a twist. He had to laugh at the fresh, unbaked faces of the new recruits, who didn't know the first thing about war but were about to find out. And there was Pig Eye, waving a torn envelope and wondering now that the US of A had them in Iraq, was it allowed to keep them there?

“Shit, man, they can do anything they want,” said Le Roy. “Isn't proving that the point of the war?”

“But,” said Pig Eye, and then he just stood with his mouth open and his eyes bugging out and the letter hanging limp at his side.

“Slave labor,” he said to Kelly, and it was a beautiful thing to see that man's muscles tense and his eyes become hard and dense, like if you touched Kelly's trigger, they'd come shooting out of their sockets straight at you. Kelly could be a politician, the way people automatically looked in his direction—if he could control his temper, that is. If he could control his mouth.

Velcro said, “Nobody here cares what color you are, Jones. You have to go back home for that.” But Velcro was like an android, strictly by the book. If something wasn't written down in a manual, Velcro didn't know about it. So Le Roy said, “Slave labor” to the new recruits, and he laughed to see their jaws drop open and their eyes go wide. Jeezus, it was funny. What did they think they were getting into? What did they fucking think?

It was funny until a current of something that wasn't quite so funny ionized the air around him. It was what his girlfriend E'Laine would have called paranormal because she believed in electromagnetic fields and how energy was neither created nor destroyed, which meant that when people died, their life force had to go somewhere—and where it went, she insisted, was either into other people or into the atmosphere, so that at any given time a person might be surrounded by a hundred souls or blobs of plasma and electrons or whatever it was that hadn't yet found a new body to inhabit.

So it was natural Le Roy thought of E'Laine when the current made the hairs on his arms stand up, for even though he considered E'Laine's energy conservation theory to be superstitious and probably false, he couldn't deny that the tremor coursing through him was more than an idle premonition. It was as if the mood of the world had changed or the air molecules were bunching up and crowding in on him. He'd felt that way before—in moments of despair, but also in moments of wild but unrealistic hope. Like the time his computer science teacher had asked, “Have you ever thought about college, boy?” The question had caused the atmospheric molecules to shift and part, and Le Roy had seen a path to a different future, a path that lingered in his imagination long after the teacher forgot all about the college talk. He didn't meet anyone so optimistic about his future again until that army recruiter had said, “You interested in computers, son? Damn right we can teach you that.”

It was better to laugh it off. It was better to say, “Fuck that shit” and go about his business. It was better to be the one who said the words that got other people all riled up than to be the one who took the words on board and started to hope. Meanwhile, he had E'Laine, who was a whole hell of a lot steadier than Pig Eye's wife, even if Pig Eye's wife was smoking hot. E'Laine would be there for him when he got home. One hundred percent she would be there waiting. Whether it was tomorrow or a year from tomorrow or a year or two years after that, she'd be waiting for him with one of her special recipes sizzling on the stove and a cold beer in the fridge and an eternal flame of love for Le Roy Jones keeping vigil in her heart. Meanwhile, he didn't mind finding his fun where he could get it. Meanwhile, he told Hernandez he'd better get someone to check on Maya and his little boy, and then he whispered, “Slave labor” into Garcia's ear.

“It sure don't seem fair,” said Garcia.

“Now we'll see who the real men are,” said Harraday, who, along with Kelly, had transferred in from a combat unit and who never smiled except when he was telling stories about his old team and the fun they'd had until he'd gotten into trouble for something he said he preferred not to talk about but hinted at anyway now and then. But now even Harraday's shoulders sagged, and suddenly Le Roy's heart wasn't in it. Still, he passed the news to a few more men and had to laugh at how their eyes went dark and their faces started to smolder. He had to fucking laugh because it all depended on what you meant by “fair.” And then he was thinking about E'Laine again and seeing her as she would be when he told her he wasn't coming home, not yet anyway. She would cry. He could see it clear as the dragon tattoo on his arm: the softening of her features, the downturn of her mouth, the leaking of her eyes the way they had leaked the day she drove him to the airport, acting like it was his last day on earth.