Now and Again (41 page)

“What effect is that?”

“Exactly the effect it's having. It's causing us to turn against each other. What if it was Falwell who sent it? What if it was from someone who wants this site to disappear? Whoever it is sent it to sow the seeds of discord. If they know you, they know exactly what buttons to push—hell, it was right there on the first film clip they sent you. You don't need to be a genius to figure out it's pretty easy to tick you off. Did you ever think of that?”

Kelly hadn't thought of it, and he didn't want to think of it now.

“Or maybe it came from someone who is trying to find out who we are, which you very obligingly told them.”

Kelly wanted to let the steam rise up in him. He wanted to take something gigantic and make it broken and small. But then he found himself remembering how Pig Eye had stepped up onto the hood of the truck beside and a little behind him and how he had liked it that way. If Pig Eye had stood right next to him, he would have stepped forward a little, just enough to preserve the front-and-center position he had thought of as his due.

“If the supply convoy was going west, what about the road-clearing crews?” asked Danny. “Were those moved, and if so, when?”

“I was curious about that too,” said Penn.

It was Kelly who said what they all were thinking: “That would have made the northern route even more dangerous than usual. It would have raised our chances of being hit.”

P
enn was at his desk, but his mind was elsewhere. Falwell hadn't changed the date on the AAR just to give Penn a second chance. He was covering up his own mistake too. He hadn't passed on critical information, information that would have caused Penn to make a different call about the convoy and the school. But whenever he started to get angry at Falwell, he remembered that Falwell had told him to hold the convoy, and the bottom line was, he hadn't.

When the phone rang, he rushed to answer it, hoping, suddenly, it was Louise. He hadn't talked to her in weeks, but now he realized he was missing something and maybe it was her. Halfway to the phone, he stopped. Why would Louise be calling him out of the blue? It was his responsibility to call her first, and he would. He'd call her that evening, after she got home from work. Meanwhile, what if it was Falwell on the phone? Let Kelly answer it. Ever since the meeting in DC, Falwell had been silent, and even though no news was better than bad news, something told Penn the silence wasn't entirely good. Almost two months had passed since then—more than enough time for Falwell to have investigated the website and discovered Penn's involvement in it. More than enough time for him or one of his subordinates to come up with a plan for shutting the website down. Miller, thought Penn. I'll bet Miller's the one who sent the tape.

“Danny,” called Kelly, rapping on the windowpane. “Dolly's on the phone.”

A late-season storm had blown in overnight, and they had awoken to find the ground covered with snow. “What happened to spring?” Danny had asked before going with his notebook to sit on the stoop with his head resting on his hands and his elbows on his knees and tiny flakes turning his hair white. He'd been sitting in the snow working on what he was now calling his rap epic, but he was no longer there. An hour earlier he had stuck his head in through the door to ask, “Anyone have a synonym for ‘help'? I have ‘help' in there now, but it's missing the connotations I want. I want it to say ‘solidify the position of.' I want it to hint at ‘aggrandize' and ‘enrich.' I want there to be an undercurrent of corruption, where one person helps another only because he thinks it's going to pay off for him personally. I want the emphasis to be on the subject, not the object of the verb. Altruism laced with greed—that's what I want. Nothing to do with helplessness. Maybe there isn't a word for it after all. Or maybe there is, but it's in a language I don't speak.”

“Where's Danny?” Kelly asked, and then he told Dolly that Danny would have to call her back.

The snow was coming harder now, slanting down and swirling where the wind eddied around the building. Penn and Kelly put on parkas and gloves and headed out the door, one going left and the other right, their movements perfectly in sync as they canvassed the neighborhood, up one street and down the next, meeting in front of the railroad crossing and then continuing together past the squat building where the single mother lived with her three kids before turning back across the tracks, which is when Penn noticed footsteps going toward Bridge Street and the river. The footsteps were just faint impressions, mostly filled with new snow, as if a ghost had passed through, only touching down lightly now and then.

“Over there,” Penn said. Kelly followed Penn's gaze to where the prints left the road and plunged down the steep embankment to the railroad bed. The two men started down after them, stumbling at first and then getting their footing and doing what they had been taught to do—no words necessary, only gestures and bodies and eyes. Penn's adrenaline was pumping now. Inside the parka, his core was heating up. And then they were at the trestle bridge and the river, with the straight shot of the tracks over the gray-black water and, on the other side, Pennsylvania. He caught Kelly's eye. Cross?

Kelly nodded: cross. He held up his watch for Penn to see. It was ten minutes after the hour. “When does the train come through?” he asked.

Penn shrugged. He didn't know the schedule. Danny was the only one who paid attention to that.

Kelly nodded again, and they started across, sprinting now, legs working in a steady rhythm, eyes sharp and wide-angled, ears straining and sifting through the muffled sounds and slotting them into categories: interesting but irrelevant, pay closer attention, ignore. Penn paused to take in the ribbon of black water, made gray by the cross-hatching of snow, but Kelly didn't break his stride. And then they were on the other side, with better options for avoiding a train should one come through.

“Hey, Captain,” said Kelly, motioning to the disturbed snow of an equipment yard where a row of open sheds housed lumber and lengths of PVC pipe and sheets of corrugated roofing. “He could be in there.”

Penn nodded and circled left while Kelly circled right, each man ducking into the first shed he came to before shaking his head and moving down the row, sliding in and out with his back to the wall and now and then checking the other man's position and scanning left and right, alert not only for signs of Danny, but also for signs of anyone else who might be hiding there with less-than-benign intent. Their paths met at the far end of the yard, and they circled back toward the tracks, this time drifting silently between the buildings, quick and catlike in the snow. But Danny wasn't there.

The tracks curved behind the last of the commercial buildings before one set veered west toward the rail yards and one cut south along the river. Kelly pointed to some footprints going south. Above them, the clouds were low and shredded. On one side of the spur, a marsh. On the other, the steely expanse of the river, with the far bank only a faint pencil sketch of rocks and trees against the snow. They found Danny sitting on an embankment one hundred yards farther down the tracks, his eyes closed and his hands folded on his lap.

“Hey, man, what're you doing?” asked Kelly.

“Come on,” said Penn. “You're coming back with us.”

It took a long time for the words to sink in and for Danny to nod in their direction. But then Danny heaved himself upright and stood tall and straight, hands extended as if he were welcoming them to his white and blanketed kingdom.

“Dolly called,” said Kelly. “She wants you to call her back.”

Now it was the three of them moving abreast—Penn on the right and Kelly on the left, with Danny between them, eyes sharp, ready to dive onto the snowy verge if and when a train came, half-jogging so as to limit their exposure on the tracks.

“When does the next train come through?” asked Kelly as they passed the place where the spur joined the main line.

“East or westbound?” asked Danny.

“Either one will kill us.”

“Two or three minutes,” said Danny, “but the snow will make it late if it hasn't been canceled.”

They walked a little farther in silence. Then Penn said, “We'll wait for it here. We can cross the bridge once it passes.”

Danny stopped and turned, and the men on either side of him stopped and turned too. They stood side by side but not quite touching and waited, gazing out over the frozen river as if they were protecting it, listening to the silence and blinking their eyes against the snow, which was coming at them horizontally now, propelled by a stiff wind shooting off the water. They sensed it before they saw the light, a humming vibration that felt and sounded like a giant was running his violin bow across the tracks, with the faintest of bass notes resonating up from the earth's core. Then a bright smudge in the surrounding whiteness, a whitish-yellow halo, small and indistinct, but steadily growing in size. Penn couldn't tell how close it was. Everything was muffled. There was no depth to anything, no clear waves of sound. Just the three of them, arms linked now, surrounded by the pelting snow.

“Come on,” said Kelly. “Let's get off the tracks.” But Danny's feet were planted, and when Penn pulled on his arm, he encountered an equal and opposite resistance.

“We don't go until Danny gives the signal,” said Penn. He held his right hand up, gloved fingers spread. “Count it out, Danny,” he said. “Count it right on out.”

But Danny was silent, immovable.

“I'm not going until you do,” said Penn, and Kelly nodded in agreement. “All for one and one for all, man.”

“One for all and all for one,” echoed Penn.

The train was closer now, the smudge of light dead center in the white-on-white hollow of the tracks, the engine the barest silver with a streak of red. It was the whistle that seemed to have force and mass, though, and Penn had a vision of being destroyed by a thick and lethal blade of sound.

Danny opened his mouth, but it took another second for any words to come out. “Five,” said Danny. Then “Four,” then “Three.”

With each number, Penn closed a finger against his palm. First the thumb and then the pinkie and then the ring finger, until he was making the peace sign—or perhaps it was the V for “victory.” But even when the middle finger protruded alone—even when Kelly said, “Fuck you, Danny” and Danny finally said, “One,” Penn wasn't sure if he would give the signal. And he wasn't sure if Danny would jump even if he gave it.

The tracks were screaming beneath their feet now, the train a silver tear in the softness. Stretching left to right was the water, and across the river, spread out for miles in every direction, substandard housing and urban decay laced with pockets of modest but vital renewal. None of it was visible in the snow, but Penn saw it because he knew it was there.

There was a long pause. Danny's mouth opened wider, but whatever he said was devoured by the cacophony of the train, and then they were tumbling down the bank, laughing with relief and shouting, “Oo-rah” and scooping up handfuls of snow and throwing it at each other and Penn feeling considerably more alive than he had when he had rolled out of bed that morning.

It suddenly seemed so simple. He'd make sure the men were all right, and then he'd take Falwell up on his offer. He would marry Louise and they would buy a house somewhere, with mourning doves roosting in the hemlocks and swallows flitting between a little meadow and a pond. In the summer he would stand on the porch, looking on as Joseph and Jules tumbled down a new-mown hill. In the winter he would festoon the house with colored lights and the kids would ride down the hill on toboggans and then Louise would make hot cocoa while he lit a fire. Every year he would hold a picnic with races and games just the way his father had done. It could happen eventually, even if it didn't happen right away. He'd call Louise. He'd ask her to marry him as soon as his next tour was over, or maybe he'd marry her before he went.

S
pring came, and with it came new disagreements. Now that they had their heads above water money-wise, the captain kept talking about “visions” and “goals.”

“Advertising dollars,” said Kelly, sounding like a broken record even to himself. “Donations are fine, but if we went after advertising dollars, I could definitely get me a car.”

“It's not about money,” said the captain, and Danny said, “Do you realize that if we actually stop the war, all of this goes away?”

“Fat chance of that,” said Kelly. The week before, sixty-five people had died when two suicide bombers attacked a crowded Baghdad market, and just that morning, someone had forwarded him a link to a site that made a case for perpetual war. Not that perpetual war was good, but that it was inevitable.

One day in early May, Kelly received another email, and instead of sparking an argument, this one made the room go quiet. Someone wanted to buy the site.

Kelly was the one to break the silence. “If we sell, we'll have money for pretty much anything we want to do. We can have our cake and eat it too.”

The captain asked what would happen to the stories people had trusted them with. “And the documents you can't find anywhere else—what will happen to those?”

“I assume the new owners will carry on with it,” said Kelly.

“Assume,” said the captain. “Ass. U. Me.”

“Will they have the necessary programming skills?” asked Le Roy.

“I assume they'll keep some of us on,” said the captain. “And our volunteers—they'll certainly need those.”

“Assume,” said Kelly. “Ass. U. Me.”

“Doesn't it worry anyone that the site isn't worth a fraction of what they're offering?” asked Danny.