Now and Again (15 page)

Penn said, “Yes sir.” He moved the untouched coffee from his knees to a table.

“You're like me, Sinclair. The army needs us, but we need the army too.”

As Penn left the hut, the weight that had been pressing down on him since the afternoon before left his shoulders, but it settled somewhere deep inside his rib cage. When he got back to his quarters, he deleted his confession, but only after emailing it to his civilian account and only after enclosing a printed copy in an envelope and addressing it to himself care of his mother, who would recognize the handwriting and wonder vaguely why he was writing to himself. Then she would carefully sort the envelope from the bills and invitations, and the next time she went upstairs, she would put it in the top drawer of the antique chest that stood in the hallway underneath the Sinclair family crest with the rooster on it and the words they repeated at holiday gatherings but otherwise forgot:
COMMIT THY WORK TO GOD
. She would recognize his handwriting, but she wouldn't open the envelope the way Louise would open it if he sent the letter to her.

I
should have been a priest,” said Falwell before the door closed. “I should have been a fucking priest.”

He'd been told to cancel all logistics missions until after the meeting at HQ, which he had done. But now he had five casualties to explain in an incident where supplies were being skimmed off for an unauthorized school and who knew if that was just the tip of the iceberg as far as the supplies went, not to mention that certain road patrols had been temporarily pulled, which is a detail he had known but hadn't passed on in a timely fashion because he'd thought canceling the missions was enough. If he had, though, Sinclair would have made a different decision when it came to disciplining his men, and this rat fuck could have been avoided. It was ultimately his fault. Something like this could stall his career. Now he'd have to change the date on the incident report. Or fudge the time line. Hell, he'd figure it out. At HQ he'd talked to combat commanders, and all of them had reported that insubordination among the troops was on the rise, as were visits to mental health personnel, as were IED attacks, as were demands on soldiers to do things for the Iraqis that the Iraqis should be doing for themselves, as was the belief in counterinsurgency of exactly the school-building kind, and as was the inability to tell who was the enemy or where he was hiding. The war was 360 degrees with surround sound, so how were he and his officers supposed to make good decisions when either way they were fucked.

“Lessons learned” had been the catchphrase of the meeting, and now Falwell had to submit yet another after action report that would be scoured for useful observations, information, and lessons—OIL. The report would trigger still other reports and analyses that would be sent up the command chain, where new policies would be crafted and handed back down with the hope that past mistakes could be avoided. Ha!

He winced at the AARs already littering his desk—the one where the lesson learned was about keeping engines from overheating in this blast furnace of a country and the one where it was about destigmatizing mental health care and the ones about combatting complacency and up-armoring cargo trucks and conserving water and building trust and preventing rape and recognizing likely ambush points. And now the one about how the light footprint strategy had been a—well, people had started to use the word “fiasco.” Just thinking about the piles of paper and analyses one more incident would spawn was enough to make him weep.

And yet, the optimism he had brought back with him from HQ hadn't completely dissipated. There was something about tragedy that strengthened resolve and annealed the soul, and there was something about the surge that spelled “Fresh Start.” A new strategy always conjured up in his mind a pristine set of pages, ones with that fresh-ink smell and the lines not yet filled with fuck-ups and confusion. He called his CSM and said, “Everyone in the DFAC in thirty.” Then he spent a few minutes pondering the HQ briefing and deciding what to pass on to the troops. He'd keep it short.
In war, only the simple succeeds,
he told himself, quoting Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. He liked the words “simple” and “focused” and “decisive.”

By the time he was walking across the yard, optimism was tugging his center of gravity by its string. The men were sitting quietly this time, waiting and wary, but they snapped to attention when he entered the room. As he spoke, he amped up his speech a little, and instead of “attempt,” he said “high-octane effort,” and instead of “senseless deaths,” he said “magnificent contribution.” And then he talked about balancing kinetics with human intelligence and diplomacy. As he spoke, he saw that there were valuable lessons to be learned after all and that he was articulating them forcefully. Fuck the papers and reports. It was he, along with the men and women arrayed before him, who would make the difference in this war.

“There is nothing you cannot do,” he said, and he saw his belief reflected in the faces in front of him. The troops who had been sitting back leaned forward, and the ones who had been leaning forward squinted and tensed their jaws.

“If you fall,” he said, “you will pick yourself up and do your job. And if the enemy pushes you down, you will pick yourself up and you will push back harder, and then you will do your job. But if he pushes you down and steps on you…”

Now the colonel was feeling the old sort of ecstasy, the kind that could only be forged of forces that were nameless and primal. He thought of quoting General Patton, who had said,
We will twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him,
decided not to, and then the words burst past his lips and had on his own mind the effect he hoped they would have on his troops. And for an instant, in spite of everything that had happened before that moment and everything that was to come, he felt pretty goddamned ready for the surge.

S
oon after taking the SAT, Will had fractured his wrist sliding home. He had gone for x-rays and a cast, which is what he was thinking about as he filled out a questionnaire aimed at getting the juniors to consider college and the future. For many of them, that meant following their parents into local jobs, with the more adventurous signing on to an oil rig or enlisting for the war if it wasn't over by graduation, which was still a year away. Will was picturing the curvy nurse in the tight white uniform who had pressed up against him as she set his arm and remembering how the word “x-ray” sounded like “sex-ray” when the nurse mentioned retakes to the technician. The long, thin bones of Will's arm stood out in sharp relief, edged by shadowy soft tissue, and nestled into the radius just above his wrist was the BB that had been there since the day he'd gone rabbit hunting with Tyler Hicks and Tyler had gotten angry about something and banged his air gun against the ground, causing it to catch on a root and go off as it fell.

“Is that an old war wound?” asked the nurse in a gravelly voice.

“Yeah,” said Will. “I guess it is.”

“Tough guy, huh?” said the nurse, and the way she said it still set Will's heart racing whenever he thought about it.

Will's test scores surprised everyone. Because he was quiet in class and so was a relative unknown, the doctor idea caught hold among the teachers, who were eager to have a story of unexpected success to put in their end-of-year report. Even Will was not immune to the fiction, and the day the report came out, he sat for a while in an echoing stairwell as students flowed past him like a river around a sturdy rock. He started to see paths and possibilities. He started to wonder if he actually was becoming the person profiled in the report, if a shifting idea of who a person was could change things about the person himself. Just that morning, the principal had stopped him in the hallway and put a hand on his shoulder. All he had said was, “Well done, Will,” but the words carried a freight train of meaning, as if Will and the principal had many such conversations behind them and many more ahead. He felt like Bon Jovi for a moment, or Spider-Man, or Barry Bonds. He wasn't arrogant, just newly aware that packed within his body and brain was something unusual, something most people only recognized in others and wished they had.

But then Tyler Hicks thumped into him and said, “Jeezus, Rayburn. What's up with that report?”

“Anybody can fool some of the people some of the time,” said the boy who was with Tyler. “Even Rayburn.”

“I guess they can,” said Will amiably. But then he muttered to Tyler's retreating back, “Why the hell not!” He could do anything if he put his mind to it. He took a sharpened pencil out of his backpack and pressed the point against the skin of his arm until it went in a little way. He had a high pain threshold, and now that he had proved he was smart, he wanted to prove the nurse had been right when she had called him tough. Tough enough to kick Tyler's ass if he wanted to, but smart enough to leave it alone.

That's what he was doing when Tula Santos appeared in the stairwell and said, “Hello.”

“Why hello, Tula,” he said, without hesitating and without putting his hands in his pockets the way he would have done only the day before.

To his surprise, Tula paused with her hand on the railing even though they were blocking the way for the other students. When one of them muttered, “Move over. Can't you see you're in the way?” Will glared at him in a way that made Tula laugh.

“I've got to get going anyway,” she said. “I don't want to be late for class.”

“Can you meet me later?” asked Will. “I could use a little advice.”

“I guess so,” said Tula. “Is tomorrow okay?”

Will sat for a little while longer contemplating how one thing led to another in the chain reaction of cause and effect. When he finally got up to change into his practice uniform and make his way down the hill to the ball field, he could feel his aura moving with him, perfectly in sync with the movements of his muscles. The cast on his arm was due to come off in another week, but now it seemed like an enhancement rather than a deficit. It felt sturdy, like the arm of a cyborg, and the scrawled signatures of his friends seemed confirmation of his new status despite the fact that most of them had been written before any mention of doctoring or college had been made:
WAY TO GO, GENIUS
and
SEE YOU AT STATE
.

“When's that cast coming off, Rayburn?” asked the coach. “We need you back at third.”

“Next week,” said Will. “I'll only miss one more game.” He had missed four games already, and he was worried about losing his position to a skinny freshman.

The next day Tula was waiting for him after practice in a grove of apple trees that had been an orchard way back before the school was built. Will settled himself beside her and pulled the most recent letter from the state university out of his pocket. It was crumpled, but the words hadn't changed even though he'd practically worn them out by running his index finger over the lines of text, something he did again as he read the letter aloud. All the while his aura stretched and flexed, and occasionally it intersected with Tula's aura, which retreated slightly in deference to their comparative forces, but advanced too, in response to the magnetism that had an attractive as well as a repelling force. The letter talked about his accomplishments and test scores and indicated that the college gave generous scholarships to promising student-athletes like Will.

“Why, Will! That's wonderful news!” exclaimed Tula. Her eyes shone, and when she looked at Will, he saw himself reflected in her expression of surprise.

Will rested the dirty cast on his knee and said that college was only the first step, that after that came medical school. The notion that the idea had been planted there by the headmaster's report landed briefly in his consciousness before taking off again.

Tula didn't blink as she asked him what kind of doctor he was going to be.

“An orthopedic surgeon,” replied Will.

“I volunteer at a health-care clinic!” exclaimed Tula. “I've already gotten all seven Rainbow merit bars, so I'm working on getting my service jewel. You could come along with me some time if you want.”

This was an unexpected invitation, and Will readily accepted. It wasn't a date, exactly, but it was the next best thing.

O
ne morning, apropos of nothing, Valerie stopped what she was doing and said, “Of course people make mistakes. We're only human, after all.”

Since there was no one else in the room, Maggie assumed Valerie was talking to her. “Excuse me?” she said, but Valerie just snapped her gum and made little huffing sounds as if what she was doing was physically exhausting.

Maggie spent the rest of the morning pondering Valerie's strange outburst. Had she been talking about the justice system or about something else? Did she know more than she was letting on about prisoners who had been wrongly convicted? If so, why was she so glib in denying it whenever Maggie brought the subject up? And what had made her mention it on a quiet day when the director was out of the office?

When Valerie went on her break, Maggie sat in her co-worker's chair and flipped through the neat stacks of papers on her desk, but she found nothing out of the ordinary. Then she prodded Valerie's computer to life, but she didn't have the password and wasn't able to get past the log-in screen. By the time Valerie returned, Maggie's curiosity had gotten the better of her. “What mistakes?” she asked. “A few minutes ago you said something about mistakes.”

“Oh,” said Valerie. “DC's in a twitter because he can't find a top-secret report some muckety-muck sent him. I'm sure I don't know where it is, but you know DC. It's always someone else's fault.”

Ever since taking the document from the munitions plant, the word “top-secret” had held a special meaning for Maggie, and she hoped she didn't look as eager and unsettled as she felt. Now she wondered if she was being accused of something. She had copied Tomás's file, but she hadn't really taken it, and as far as she knew, it wasn't secret. “What's so top-secret?” she asked as casually as she could.

“Lord if I know,” said Valerie. “I just push the papers, I don't read the damn things.”

Maggie had begun to notice how importantly Valerie presided over the office and how quick she was to pass the boring or unpleasant tasks on to Maggie. “You don't mind if I delegate, do you?” Valerie would call to DC through the glass partition of his office, and mostly he would wave his hand dismissively. “Just so the job gets done, I don't care who does it,” he would tell her, although now and then he would shake his head and say, “I want you to handle this personally. Give it that special Vines touch.” Then Valerie would laugh knowingly and pass something more menial on to Maggie. It wasn't as if Valerie was shirking, for even though she left every day at exactly five o'clock, she worked hard and often arrived half an hour early. Lately, though, she seemed to be going out of her way to make it clear to everyone what the pecking order was.

A few days after telling Maggie about the missing report, Valerie wore a blouse that was so sheer in the back that the black hooks on her bra were entirely visible and anyone standing behind her could read the writing on the label that said
36 D
. The front panel of the blouse was made from a respectable navy fabric and from that angle, Valerie looked proper and businesslike, but from behind, she looked like a slut. The blouse bothered Maggie out of all proportion to what it was, for it seemed to say something not only about how Valerie had hidden sides to her, but also about how everyone did.

All morning, Maggie kept sending irritated glances in her co-worker's direction, but mostly Valerie ignored her, answering the phone and making neat stacks of documents for DC to review or for Maggie to cart down to the file room. It was almost as if someone had snuck up behind her and altered her blouse without her knowledge. At one point, the lanyard that held her ID badge looped over one of her breasts in a way that would have embarrassed Maggie, but Valerie did nothing to fix it. She only stretched her arms above her head when DC walked by, further emphasizing her anatomy before getting up and walking to the hallway alcove where the copy machine was kept. The director had his head down, but if he had looked up just then, he would have been treated to a view of the see-through part of the blouse and the thick elastic of the bra. Maggie could stand it no longer, and when DC went off to an afternoon meeting, she cried, “Valerie! Your blouse is completely inappropriate!”

“And what are you, the clothing police?” Valerie smiled and coughed out a hoarse little laugh.

Maggie immediately regretted her outburst. In an attempt to cover up her disapproval, she said, “It looks great on you, don't get me wrong. I just wouldn't have worn it to the office.”

“You wouldn't have worn it at all,” said Valerie. “Frankly, you don't have the body for it—but no offense.” She didn't sound at all like Misty when she said it. Misty would have added, If you've got it, flaunt it. Or she would have said, Hell yeah, it's inappropriate. I'm trying to shake things up a bit. It's high time we had a little fun around here.

But Valerie wasn't Misty. For the first time since quitting her job at the munitions plant, Maggie thought about her old life and wondered if she had made a mistake. Of course people make mistakes, she thought, and when she realized those were the very words Valerie had used that morning, she wondered if someone was using Valerie to send her a message the way Pastor Price said Jesus sometimes did.

Just before she left for the day, Maggie tried to patch things up with Valerie. “I'll walk out with you,” she said. “Will has a game this evening, so I can't stay late.”

The two women gathered up their things, but just as they were going out the door, Valerie said she had forgotten something. “You go on. I'd forget my head if it wasn't screwed on.”

“Okay, see you tomorrow,” said Maggie, but a niggling suspicion made her loiter in a dark elbow of the hallway to see what Valerie would do. Instead of retrieving some forgotten item, Valerie took a piece of paper from her purse and tucked it into DC's locked bank of files before closing everything up again, hiding the key in her desk drawer, and breezing down the corridor in a whirl of efficiency and Shalimar perfume. Maggie followed quietly behind. It was only when she got to the parking lot that she discovered the reason for the charade. Valerie didn't head toward her own parking space at all, but walked the entire length of the asphalt lot and got into a car that was waiting at the far end. Even though the car was too far away for Maggie to identify, she knew it belonged to DC. She should have known it all along.

Everybody has secrets, she thought. She found the idea both comforting and disturbing. It made her own transgressions less unusual, but it also suggested that if the law took an interest in a person—Tomás, for instance, but also Valerie or DC or even Maggie herself—it could probably find evidence that that person had done something wrong.

Valerie's attitude toward Maggie changed after the blouse incident. She still snapped her gum and made jokes, but she no longer went out of her way to include Maggie in the gossip sessions she presided over during breaks. She no longer showed Maggie a new eye shadow color and said, “This would be perfect for you.” Being ostracized emphasized to Maggie that she wasn't and couldn't be on the side of things where Valerie and the others were, where gossiping and comparing notes on clothing and men provided satisfaction and where morality was elastic, if it came into things at all. She pretended not to notice when Valerie stood sternly under the fluorescent strip lights and watched Maggie walk past as if Maggie were the one with the see-through blouse, but it always made her feel self-conscious, just as she knew Valerie knew it would.