Now and Again (7 page)

And then his heart
was
in it, even though it wasn't funny anymore—
because
it wasn't funny and because he was feeling the rage spiking out of Kelly and the panic from Pig Eye and feeling a slow, sure burn in his own guts as well.

W
hen the commotion broke out, Pig Eye had been thinking about his wife Emmie. He alternated between thinking she was unfaithful to him and thinking she wasn't—but if she wasn't, why not? She was beautiful, while he was short and funny looking. Even though Emmie had only had drug-dealer boyfriends before meeting Pig Eye three years before, he knew he didn't deserve her. But whenever he said, “Why do you love me when you could have anyone?” she would reply, “You might be small, darlin', but you're all muscle.” Or she might say, “Every girl needs a superhero, and baby, you're mine.”

Pig Eye ran a car repair shop with his buddy Earl, and when he left, Earl promised he would prioritize diligent bookkeeping and quality control exactly the way Pig Eye always had, but now he wondered if Earl was cheating him moneywise or if he was prioritizing Emmie behind his back. In her most recent letter, Emmie had written, “Earl is taking care of business.” Pig Eye's eyes stuck on that line like it was glue. He had to read it over and over, and still he wondered if she had left out the word “the” on purpose or if it had been a mistake—or if it was just a casual way of writing, kind of like a person would talk. And if it was a mistake, was the letter telling him a bigger truth than Emmie meant to tell?

Kelly's gesture released something that had been trapped in Pig Eye for a long time, something to do not only with skin color but also with the fact that he had round cheeks and small eyes and a drop-dead gorgeous wife. He didn't stop to think before stepping up on the truck beside and slightly behind Kelly—he knew not to stand right next to him, of course he knew that—and putting his arm in the air too. It felt good to glare out over the heads of the men and women who paused as they went about their duties to look at him with surprise and new respect. It felt good to stare straight at Kelly without looking away first. Now he knew what it was like to be tall and powerful, not just because Kelly was tall and powerful and anybody Kelly liked shared in that power, but because he was acknowledging something about himself, freeing some un-free thing that was the reason for his insecurity and stepping beyond his short, awkward exterior to show who he was deep down inside.

It only lasted a couple of seconds, but afterward, people thumped him on the shoulder or made a point of knocking into him in a friendly way, and he knew he had done the right thing in stepping up beside (and a little behind) Joe Kelly. After marrying Emmie and opening the car repair shop, it was the most right thing he had ever done.

S
inclair followed Velcro out of the office to where a commotion was brewing in the yard. A few minutes earlier or later and he would have missed the whole thing, but he didn't miss it, and it worried him. It wasn't only that the men looked angry and inscrutable and that anger was catching. It wasn't only that he and the colonel had known for two weeks before springing the news on them that they wouldn't be going home, though of course that added to his sense of complicity and guilt. It worried him because he was losing control—not only of his troops. He too wanted to go home. He too had a girlfriend who loved him and a future to plan.

“Should we put a lid on it?” asked Velcro.

“They're just letting off steam,” replied Penn, even though he knew that something little could easily turn into something big and that it was up to him to stop it. The little things are the big things, the colonel had said.

“We'll give them the rest of today,” he told Velcro, remembering the colonel's advice. He walked farther out into the yard. “Listen up,” he barked. “You have the rest of the evening to let off steam, and then I want your heads back in the game.” The mere act of shouting relieved a little of the tension that had built up inside him ever since the stop-loss order was announced. “Convoy briefing at zero seven hundred hours,” he added.

“I thought we were waiting,” said Velcro.

“We're waiting on the go/no-go, but we're sticking to our established battle rhythm. The more we stick to routine, the better for the troops.”

At the morning briefing, Penn said that the convoy had been postponed and that he'd know more soon.

“So we're going, we just don't know when or where,” said Kelly.

“That's about right,” said Penn.

“Shee-it,” said Le Roy. “That's bad juju right there.”

“The key to survival is the ability to adapt,” said Penn. Then he pulled Staff Sergeant Betts aside and told him to keep an eye on the pre-checks. “Make sure they don't slack off,” he said.

“What are we supposed to do with the stuff for the school?” asked Betts.

“I'm worried about that too,” said Penn. “I should know more in a couple of hours, but meanwhile, put it in the last four trucks. Your squad will take those.”

Sinclair was proud of his men for wanting to help extend educational opportunities to girls.
“
Facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque,”
he had said when the idea had first come to him, and it had become a kind of motto for the men.

“Make free men out of children by means of books and a balance,” said Betts now, but he frowned at Velcro when he said it, and Velcro spat in the dirt.

“Building infrastructure is an important benchmark,” said Penn before moving off toward the communications center for the intelligence update. He was almost out of earshot when he heard Harraday say, “Try books and a bazooka. Maybe that would work.”

The grumbling started up again during the pre-check, and now two of the squads were fighting in the yard. The more restless the men became, the more Penn worried, and the more he worried, the more he thought he couldn't wait for the new orders before he sent the convoy. “Give any troublemakers something to do,” the colonel had told him. Taking the supplies north would be doing something.

“If you're holding a wolf by the ears,” he said to Velcro, “is it worse to continue to hold it or worse to let it go?”

“You've got to kick that wolf in the balls,” said Velcro. “You can't put up with any shit.”

Penn had to agree. They needed a mission pronto, so when he hadn't heard anything by zero nine hundred hours, he released the convoy to start heading north. He told the men to monitor the radio in case the new orders came through, and he told Betts to take an extra gun truck so the vehicles destined for the school could make the short detour while the rest of the convoy continued on to Tikrit. Things would calm down once the men had a mission to focus on. They always did.

“Yes sir. I'm on it,” said Betts, taking the need for further action out of Sinclair's hands.

“You made the right call, sir,” said Velcro. “You're killing two birds with this—giving the men something useful to do and getting the supplies up the road for wherever they're needed.”

“Three birds,” said Penn, thinking of the school and feeling the familiar sense of accomplishment that always accompanied a tough decision.

And then, suddenly, Penn didn't want to go home. He didn't want to go back to a life where nothing he did would matter in the grand scheme of things and probably wouldn't matter in the not-so-grand scheme either. He liked the high-stakes missions and calling the shots when the shots were not easy to call. Sinclairs did better in turbulent conditions! He thought about his place in the continuum of history and how he was carrying on a legacy bequeathed by the ancient Greeks and Romans, who had determined that war and peace were flip sides of a single coin, and by the philosophers and scientists, who had figured out that in some ways people were not much different from insects, with their workers and soldiers and queens, and that in other ways, people were not much different from gods.

T
hings might have settled down if a wispy cloud hadn't obscured the sun just as Le Roy was saying that thing about juju. They might have stayed settled if Pig Eye hadn't shown Hernandez a letter from his wife or if Hernandez hadn't taken it from him and passed it on to Tishman, who passed it to Kelly, each man reading it as if it were his own wife or girlfriend who had penned the description of what she was wearing and how she was going to take the items off one by one once her honey-man was home. Garcia slapped his thigh and said, “Oooeee Momma!” just as Kelly grabbed the letter back for another look. “Wait a sec,” said Kelly. “Who's this guy Earl?”

“I told you about Earl. He's my partner in the shop,” said Pig Eye. “He's handling things while I'm away.”

“I'll say he is,” said Kelly.

“What do you mean? What do you mean by that?”

Harraday walked over and cast a shadow on the letter, which was smudged and wet where someone had put his lips to it and tongued it. His eyes were puffy and his breath was as rotten as if he had just rolled out of bed after a night on the town. “He means your friend Earl's porking your wife and now you're stuck here and there's nothing you can do about it,” he said.

“What do you mean?” asked Pig Eye again.

“Handling,” said Harraday. “Your partner is handling things at home.”

“The letter doesn't say ‘handling,'” said Pig Eye.

“But you did. You wouldn't have said it if you didn't suspect something was up.”

“Don't listen to Harraday, man,” said Danny. “He doesn't know what he's talking about.”

But Pig Eye didn't have to listen to Harraday to know he didn't trust Earl worth a damn. It was all he could think about when he was checking the fuel. He overfilled one tank and forgot to replace the cap on another. “Jeezus, what's wrong with you?” asked Betts when he hurried past to see if the orders had come through.

“Nothing,” said Pig Eye, but he could tell that Betts was down too when he walked past thirty seconds later muttering that he couldn't find his cargo manifest even though he was holding it in his hand.

Pig Eye found a detonator on the ground and slipped it into the pocket of his uniform where he kept what he called his escape kit. Now and then he stroked his thigh to make sure the kit was still there or adjusted the Velcro closure to make sure it was secure. He had made the mistake of telling Hernandez and Le Roy about the kit, and now and then Le Roy would say, “Stick with Pig Eye in case you're captured. He's got a magnifying glass that can burn through rope or zip ties using solar energy.”

“You don't use a magnifying glass to escape from zip ties. You'd burn your arm!” said Pig Eye before he realized it was a joke.

Pig Eye didn't mind the teasing until Harraday joined in. “Anybody need a tampon, Pig Eye's your man. He's got emergency supplies.”

Pig Eye tried to laugh it off because nobody wanted to get crosswise with Harraday, but sometimes he imagined revenge scenarios where Harraday's fate was in his hands and he could save him or not. In the scenarios he always ignored Harraday until he was crying and pleading for his life. “Die, motherfucker,” a tougher version of himself would say in the fantasy, but then Harraday would beg for forgiveness and the tougher Pig Eye would soften and do whatever needed doing to set him free. Thinking about Harraday gave Pig Eye a pain in his gut, so it wasn't always worth it to picture him crying in the desert. Sometimes it was better not to think of him at all.

“Hey, man, you're riding with me,” said Danny. He slapped Pig Eye on the shoulder, and together they walked to where the trucks were waiting.

L
e Roy could smell Pig Eye's sweat. He had noticed it earlier, when they were checking the load. Pig Eye's going to be a problem, he thought, and when Joe Kelly walked up with a map of their route, all he had to say was “Pig Eye” for Kelly to frown and nod as if he was thinking the same thing. But because it was more important to make sure the radio was operational and to identify danger spots than to confirm each other's worries about Pig Eye, they didn't say anything out loud.

“Do we have maps of both routes?” Le Roy asked Pig Eye, who was standing around patting his pockets and fiddling with something he had picked up off the ground.

“What do you mean, both routes?”

“Christ,” said Le Roy. “Didn't you hear the captain say we might be redirected? And locate Sergeant Betts while you're at it. Tell him it's SP minus five. And Rinaldi—where's he at?” Rinaldi was one of their gunners. He and Le Roy, who was the radio operator, would be riding in a converted Humvee with their medic Satch and whoever was driving. “Who's driving this Humvee?” he asked, but Pig Eye was already sprinting back to a row of supply shacks in search of the second strip map. “Anyone seen Harraday or Rinaldi?” he asked when Danny and Kelly came by with the cargo manifest.

“They were with Betts and the captain,” said Kelly. And then he said, “This can't be right—just two cases of H2O? Don't tell me they're hoarding water again.”

“Per truck,” said Danny. “I'm sure that means two cases per truck.”

“Two per truck isn't enough,” said Kelly. “Trucks might run on diesel, but soldiers run on water.”

Kelly went off to see about the water just as Pig Eye came back with the map and said, “Betts says we need to get going. It's getting late. It's only going to get hotter, and they're getting a buzz about some kind of movement up north.”

They were ten minutes late. Then fifteen. Danny was going over the cargo manifest item by item one last time when Betts came up and said, “Five minutes. Tell the others to be ready in five.”