Charlotte Rogan - Now and Again

4.2 Pig Eye

Pig 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.

4.3 Pig Eye

Pig 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.