Now and Again (12 page)

“No good reason,” said Maggie. “We had a big ol' cat once, but it ran off.”

“If you had a dog, what would you name it?”

Maggie told him she neither had a dog nor wanted one, so any name she came up with on the spur of the moment wouldn't mean anything.

“Don't you like dogs, then?”

“I like dogs as well as I like all God's creatures.”

“So you like me,” said Tomás.

“Of course I do!” Maggie exclaimed, but she was beginning to wonder if she did.

“If I could change into a dog and go home with you, I would. I'd do it this second. I wouldn't even think twice.”

“No you wouldn't,” said Maggie cautiously. She was already aware that she had begun to think of Tomás as not quite human, but this was her first inkling that he thought of himself that way. “To be perfectly honest, I don't really like dogs,” she said.

“Go ahead, tell me to sit,” said Tomás. “Go ahead and tell me to stay.”

He was like a dog with a bone, and he wouldn't let it drop. “I'd do it. I'd do it for you,” he said a few minutes later, but she didn't want him to do it. It was the last thing in the world she wanted. “Just give me any command you want,” he said, loudly enough for the whole class to hear.

“You're not a dog, Tommy!” The instant the diminutive left her lips, she wished she could take it back. A look of triumph spread over Tomás's features, and he rocked in his chair, leering stupidly at her. All Maggie could do was repeat, “You're not a dog, and you shouldn't say you are.”

“But I can be loyal. I can be loyal and true.”

She told him sharply to act like an adult.

“Okay, so then I won't be loyal if that's what you want.”

“It's not about what I want!” cried Maggie in exasperation. It wasn't Tomás, she knew, but the prison. Still, it was hard to be kind to him after that.

“Well, it's certainly not about what
I
want. I want to go back to my girlfriend. I want to live in a little cabin in the mountains. A little cabin with pine floors and a fireplace and maybe a river outside the door. What I want is to be free.”

“Do you Tomás? Do you really?” Maggie was leaning forward now, and Tomás was leaning back. “Then why did you wind up in prison? Why were you wandering around on the streets that day? Why weren't you in school or at a job?”

“A job,” said Tomás. “Do you really think jobs are so easy to find?”

“And why did you get kicked out of your foster home?”

Tomás had the hangdog expression again, his eyeballs settled in their sockets, his chin tucked, his brow slightly furrowed, and a quivering half-smile tugging at his lips as if he was trying not to cry. But then a light flickered and caught behind his eyes and he said, “How did you know that? How did you know about the foster home?”

Maggie couldn't have known unless she had read his file or asked some questions about him; either way, it was evidence that she had shown more than the usual interest in him. She ignored the question—what was there to say? Instead of answering, she strode to the front of the room, snatched up the bag of candy, and then marched up and down the rows of desks, passing it to everyone, Tomás last. By the end of the hour, she had recaptured enough of her earlier high spirits to smile and say, “If you really wanted to be free, Tomás, you'd start taking responsibility for yourself. You'd buckle down and use these sessions to pass the high school equivalency test.”

“But how did you know?” asked Tomás again, sucking his yellow teeth as if they were lumps of sticky caramel.

“I only wanted—” But then Maggie stopped herself. Why admit to anything? Why awaken in Tomás something he couldn't have? She wondered if she was turning callous, like Valerie and the other volunteers, all of whom wore friendly masks and unwavering robotic smiles. What was she supposed to say to someone who couldn't be free for over two decades even if he got time off for good behavior?

But she was starting with the conclusion. If Tomás was telling the truth about his innocence, it would lead to a different conclusion altogether. “Why did you run from the police, Tomás? Why in God's name did you run?”

But Tomás was celebrating his little victory over her by smiling and drawing hearts in the margin of his book.

D
anny raised his binoculars to his eyes and peered up the road, searching for the rest of the convoy. “We should have caught up with it by now,” he said.

“You're sure this is the right road?” asked Pig Eye.

Danny pulled out the strip map and said it had to be, because of the canal that was visible down a slope to their right. But just in case, he radioed up to Betts, who was in the second vehicle.

“Affirmative,” said Betts. “This is it.”

As Pig Eye drove, Danny fingered his weapon and scanned the roadside from eleven to three o'clock and back again, looking for shadows or movement, but all he saw was an endless expanse of brown-upon-brown that faded to blue at the horizon but was greener down by the canal. Now and then they passed a burned-out vehicle or a ramshackle farm or a farmer and, once, a kid on a bicycle who stopped and waved at them as they passed and then a group of kids who didn't wave, and through it all, the dusty and colorless road.

He wondered vaguely what Dolly was doing now. It was very early at home, so she was probably still in bed wearing the animal-print nightgown or the one with the hearts on it. He wondered if she had rubbed lotion onto the calluses on her feet and if it was the almond-scented lotion or the stuff that smelled like milk. He wondered if she had replaced the torn coverlet or gotten new curtains for the windows the way she kept talking about.

Then something wasn't right—a shift in the color spectrum, an eddy in the shimmering air. He scanned the road for the hundredth time: left to right, then right to left, then a glance at the driver's side. There! Movement behind the low wall of an animal enclosure. A glint of metal by the side of the road. The lead vehicle slowing down. It was probably nothing, but a prickle of alarm jumped across the synapse separating him from Pig Eye.

“What is it? What is it?” asked Pig Eye, twisting toward him from the driver's seat. Danny saw a wrinkle of worry cross his brow just as the lead vehicle exploded and the next one swerved into a ditch. Pig Eye slammed on the brakes, causing the top-heavy cargo truck to wobble and roll and catapulting Danny forward while Pig Eye fell away and down, as if he had pulled a rip cord or performed a trick and disappeared. Before he lost consciousness, Danny heard a daisy chain of detonations. He tasted cordite and heard the beginning of a shout just as he remembered the last lines of the Shelley poem:
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

P
ig Eye was thinking about the day he had first met Emmie. He hadn't been called Pig Eye then; he had been called Nerf. And she hadn't been called Emmie. She had been called E.Z.

It was back before he had joined the army, back before the two big guys came looking for him and before the altercation in the bar when one of the guys insulted Emmie and grabbed her by the hair. Back before Earl had said, “I'll take care of things here if you need to get out of town for a while.” And it was before, just when they were getting the repair shop on its feet, the landlord raised their rent. He cited improvements in the property even though Pig Eye and Earl had been the ones to improve it. They had converted a corner of the shop to a convenience store, and the neighbors were grateful because the nearest grocery store was two miles away, right smack next to a second grocery and a Walgreens and a Stop-N-Go and a bank, but too far away for them to easily get to. The landlord cited the new laundry and the Dollar Mart, despite the fact that without the convenience store, the laundry and the Dollar Mart would never have opened. Instead, the crack dealers would have moved in and property values would have gone down, not up. Now there was talk of a bus stop and a school.

Pig Eye had arrived one morning to open the shop and found Emmie passed out in a corner of the second bay, blood on her clothing and a pool of vomit crusting over on the concrete slab. With a high forehead and tangled hair and knobby knees that stuck out from underneath her satin dress and, he found out later, slanted eyes with a hint of green in them, she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

“What kind of a name is E.Z.?” Pig Eye asked her after she had been there a week and had started to smile.

“I'm from New Orleans,” she said. “The Big Easy is too long for a name, doncha think?”

“But you're not big,” said Pig Eye, not putting two and two together about her name because that was when he was noticing the slanted eyes and the dimples in her cheeks and the hole in her earlobe where something had ripped clean through.

“And you're not a Nerf,” she replied, so even though Pig Eye kind of was a Nerf back before he had joined the army and muscled up, it seemed to him like the nicest thing anyone had ever said to him.

“I'm going to call her Emmie,” he told Earl when she had been there a month and Earl had started asking when she was going to leave. “She's going to stay for a while, and I'm going to take care of her.”

“She's not a pet,” said Earl. “Are you going to teach her to fetch the coffee in the morning? Are you going to teach her to roll over on command?”

That was the first time Pig Eye laid Earl flat, and Earl let the subject drop until the day a couple of big guys who seemed to know Emmie showed up.

“She's going to cause trouble,” Earl said, and Pig Eye laid him flat again.

“They don't call her E.Z. for nothing,” Earl said when Pig Eye announced that he and Emmie were getting married and if Earl didn't like it, he could be the one to find other accommodations.

And she had caused trouble, but she hadn't meant to. Trouble followed Emmie, and after she moved with them into the apartment over the shop, trouble seemed to follow Pig Eye too. It followed him in the form of the two big guys and the raised rent and the expensive things Emmie needed and Pig Eye wanted her to have. Even so, the vision he had of Emmie was one of near perfection. He thought of her as flawless and still, like the exact center of the universe, like the shining point around which the stars and the planets and even the truck he was riding in were spinning—spinning and veering out of control.

P
ig Eye thought he was having one of his escape fantasies. He was face down in the dust, pinned by a force he couldn't name. Situational awareness was a prerequisite to forming any plan of action, but he couldn't turn his head far enough to see more than a patch of what looked like earth from a distance but was, up close, a mix of powdery dust and desiccated vegetable matter and glittering crystals mixed with stones of various sizes and also unidentifiable bits of garbage and ash and, for all he knew, bleached and pulverized bones from the years of strife and fighting that had taken place in that desert since the dawn of civilization. Gradually he realized he was stuck underneath the truck, and all that kept him from being crushed was a shallow depression in the earth.

As a precaution, he took an inventory of his body parts as if he were doing a vehicle pre-check or filling out a spreadsheet of parts for Earl to order. He could wiggle his fingers and toes—check. He could move his legs—check. And although his right arm was lodged beneath him and starting to go numb, his left hand and arm were free—check. When he raised the arm as far as it could go, he could feel a flange of hot steel, but whether it was hot from the explosion or hot from the sun, he couldn't make out. He pushed against it and it moved slightly, but his arm was weak in that position, so he scrabbled in the dirt until his right arm was free too. This opened up another inch between his shoulders and the metal above him, which he now suspected was the heavy armored door of the truck. He thought of his escape kit and recognized the folly of believing that a few miniature tools would help him against all of the machines of war. A spool of wire, for Chrissakes. A powerberry protein bar. A tiny slingshot and a miniature frigging clock. Even if he could have reached the cargo pocket, the things it contained were useless for raising the reinforced slab of metal that was holding him down. Still, he despaired that he couldn't reach the pocket. He despaired until he remembered what the colonel had said about his center of gravity, which wasn't the pocket after all. The most useful part of his escape kit was his body, and the most useful part of his body was his wits.

He inched his fingers into an indentation in the edge of steel, and instead of pushing, he pulled at it with all his might. And miracle of miracles, it shifted slightly. He pulled again, and it shifted more—he gasped to feel the pressure on his legs and would have cried out if his mouth hadn't been pushed into the dirt and if he hadn't now been able to engage both of his shoulders with the metal, so that when he heaved up against it, the pressure eased slightly, allowing him to maneuver in a way that gave him even better leverage. Then he adjusted the left side of his body, and again he could shift his legs a fraction of an inch. By working within the narrow range of available motion and space, he positioned his hands more solidly underneath him. With a mighty heave, he pushed upward and then from side to side. The metal rocked and shifted until finally he was free to shimmy backward into a deeper part of the ditch.

He sank exhausted into the dirt, depleted and disoriented and slightly afraid, but then he remembered something else that was tucked into the bottom of his kit, and the fear was replaced with jubilation. He rolled onto his side and carefully extracted a tiny foil-wrapped package containing two pills Joe Kelly had given to him after the black power salute. “For when you want to really escape,” Kelly had said. And then Kelly had winked at him and slipped him the pills.

Pig Eye unwrapped the package and studied its contents—one bullet-shaped capsule and one baby blue disk. He tried to decide which one to take. Then he put both of them onto the sandpaper of his tongue and wished he had a drink of water before pulling himself up just high enough to peer into the front of the destroyed truck, where Danny was slumped against his seat belt. “Hey, man, you okay?” Pig Eye whispered. He could tell Danny was breathing, but his eyes remained shut, so Pig Eye slid his knife from its sheath and cut the strap of the binoculars that were still hanging around Danny's neck. As he was searching for his weapon, which had been stowed behind his seat, a spray of bullets pinged metal, and he dropped down behind the heavy shield of the truck door that had almost killed him. Using the wire cutters and spool of wire from his kit, he looped some lengths of wire around his arms and legs and neck and then tucked bunches of weeds and grasses into the loops before raising his head out of the weedy ditch that bordered the east side of the road in order to assess the situation.

D
anny forced himself to open his eyes. He remembered going over the equipment list. He remembered Kelly going on about the water and Tishman about the time, everybody focused on the one or two details they could actually control—or not focused, just shuffling through the motions, their thoughts on how they weren't going home after all or on the endless stretch of weeks that lay ahead. But something else tapped at the door of his consciousness. Something he should be noticing but couldn't quite grasp. He could see that the front of the truck was tilting strangely, and he understood from a stray flap of canvas that the top had ripped loose despite the double- and triple-checked fastenings—triple-checked because that's the way Danny did things.

Gravity pulled his body against the seat belt, and his legs were angled toward the steering wheel as if the truck had been reconfigured. He could taste the dust and smell the acrid odor of explosives, which is when he realized that the top-heavy cargo truck had rolled and that the thing he should be noticing was the silence, the complete absence of sound except for a muffled ringing in his ears. And he understood that Pig Eye wasn't slumped on the seat beside him and that his helmet had come off and that he had hit his head and that his weapon was wedged between the gearshift and his knee.

IEDs were deadly, but they weren't precise. Shouldn't the men from the other trucks be scrambling around and shouting? Shouldn't they be calling out for survivors and coming to find out how he was? His instinct was to assess the situation without moving—the condition of his body, the position of the enemy, the status of the other men—but he couldn't get his thoughts together because of the ringing and the thick, mashed ache in his head. He remembered climbing into the truck beside Pig Eye, who wasn't slumped beside him, who wasn't anywhere that he could see. He remembered reaching over to beep the horn of the truck as the convoy rolled out that morning. He remembered checking the straps on the canvas that covered the cargo, and he remembered helping Kelly stow the extra cases of water even though Tishman kept chasing at his heels like a terrier and saying, “Hurry up. We should have left when it was dark.”

He remembered Kelly asking for the updated strip maps, and even though checking the vehicles had been Tishman's job, Danny had double-checked everything himself. Then Harraday and Rinaldi and Finch had climbed into their turrets—most of the vehicles had crew-served guns, but not the long cargo truck—and Danny had climbed in beside Pig Eye and tooted the horn just as they pulled into line behind Hernandez and Harraday and Betts and in front of Tishman and Kelly and Finch, who were bringing up the rear. He remembered tooting the horn, but he didn't remember anything after that.

It was too quiet. Could he have gone deaf? He wanted to test his hearing by saying something, but he thought he should wait until he knew exactly what was what. Meanwhile, the silence pressed in on him, but little by little, his vision cleared. He remembered checking the cargo straps and reaching over to beep the horn. But where was Pig Eye? Not on the seat next to him. And where were the men in the two vehicles in front of him and the one that had been behind? As he struggled to free himself from his seat belt, a volley of gunfire broke through the silence and he hoped it was Rinaldi or Finch or Harraday, giving the bastards hell.