Charlotte Rogan - Now and Again

— If you hit him, they’ll arrest you, asshole! Now tell him to stand the fuck up.

“Stand up!” shouted Danny, and the doctor stood up, holding the keys he had dropped and pressing a button on his key ring that started a horn blaring.

The commotion scared Danny so much that he raised the broom handle and brought it down on the Mustang’s fabric top as close to the doctor’s shoulder as he could without touching him. The breeze from the stick riffled the doctor’s hair. The sound made him jump and his eyes popped open, bugging out almost comically as the car’s emergency horn ripped through the sultry air until someone shouted at the doctor to shut it off and Pig Eye exploded in the distance for the thousandth time.

“I don’t make the rules,” said the doctor in self-defense, but the words sounded as puny and untrue as the doctor himself.

— Yes he does!

“Yeah, you do,” said Danny.

“I don’t. I swear to you I don’t. There are rules and regulations.” The doctor looked hopeful now that they were talking and the physical threat had receded somewhat.

Danny thought about using the broom handle to wipe the look off his face after all.

“There’s a rule book,” said the doctor, “but there are also monthly updates. My folder of updates is this thick.” He stretched his thumb and fingers to illustrate.

— Tell him he’s a fucking liar.

Danny was tired. The notebook was in his pocket, along with a mechanical pencil that had a reloadable cartridge for pencil leads and a retractable eraser. They all thought words could acquit them, when Danny knew that words could also be used to trick people and to control their thoughts. For instance, Danny had always considered America a place of equal opportunity because of words that had been drilled into him, not because of anything he observed. There was probably an evolutionary reason for this, but he didn’t know what it was.

— Repeat after me, asshole. Say “equal opportunity.” Fucking say “American dream.”

Danny raised the broom handle in the air and brought it down again. “American dream,” he said, but his heart wasn’t in it. He was tired. He wasn’t a violent person. “Here,” he said to the doctor. “Take this stick, and next time you want to destroy someone, be honest about it and use this.”

Then Danny sat on the curb and took out the notebook and wrote down what he could remember of the encounter. He didn’t look back at the doctor, but he could imagine him taking up the broom handle and holding it over Danny’s head.

— Never take your eyes off the enemy.

“Who’s the enemy?”

“I don’t know, but it’s not me,” said the doctor. “I hope you can find what you’re looking for somewhere else.”

The somewhere else was the army recruiting station where Danny had enlisted almost three years before. The soldiers there joined the chorus of voices shouting, “Who the fuck do you think you are?” at Danny. They must have called the police because a squad car roared up, followed by what seemed like a whole squadron of cars with sirens and loudspeakers.

“Come out with your hands up!” roared the speaker, but Danny’s voices laughed and turned their venom outward.

— Who the fuck do they think they are!

For one blissful moment, Danny had the illusion that he was leading his old company in a daring attack against the enemy. Armed with nothing but a U.S. Army ballpoint pen he had picked up off the counter, he charged at the first policeman to come through the door. He held his pen like a rifle, took aim, and then he tossed the pen to the officer and laughed.

BE ALL YOU CAN BE, said the pen.

6.8 Joe Kelly

Kelly’s parents had moved to New Jersey while he was overseas, and even though they greeted him with a banner over the door and arranged a gathering of neighbors, Kelly knew he didn’t belong there and the sooner he left, the better.

“I’ll bet you’re glad to be home,” said the people who came in the door carrying fragrant dishes and bottles of beer, and Kelly nodded and said he was.

“I’ll bet you’re glad to be home,” said a strong-looking girl who lingered in the entry, primly settling a cardigan around her shoulders and assessing the crowd.

Kelly was about to say he was, but then he changed his mind. It was one thing for a bunch of old people to drop by to have meaningless conversations with him, but the only reason a girl like that would do it was because someone had told her to or because she was desperate. He kind of liked the desperate ones. They made him feel like a trained sniper at an arcade game. When she started to walk off, he said in a low voice, “Scared of soldiers?”

“Not really.”

Game on, thought Kelly. “Well, I’m scared of big girls,” he said, smiling to show he was playing with her, drawing it out a little — respectful, but sure of himself, like if she didn’t want him now, he hoped she would change her mind. If he brought his A game, she might even end up thinking it was her idea. But where Kelly used to like to play the game straight through from “Hi, my name is Joe” to “Why didn’t you warn me you’re part tigress,” an inner restlessness prompted him to make the game more challenging by cutting right to the chase. He couldn’t see himself asking about her job or her family situation or giving her a bunch of meaningless compliments or making up some bullshit about his ambitions and goals, so he said, “You must be bored. Can I get you a drink or do you want to get straight to the sex?”

“What do you say we skip the drink and the sex and the wedding and the two kids,” said the girl, “and we go straight to where I run off with another man.”

“Shee-it,” said Kelly. She wasn’t desperate after all. “I must be losing my touch,” he said. He smiled, and the girl cracked a smile too, at first like she was humoring him according to the rules of her own game, but then with her eyes too, smiling for real. Just when they were beginning to understand each other, Joe Senior limped over with a bowl of chips and introduced them.

“This is Rita. She works down at the U-Haul with me. Her uncle runs the dealership.”

It was more than Kelly wanted to know. “Rita,” he said. “Ri-ta.”

“Joe,” she said.

Now that she had a name and a family and a reason for being there, the game was less interesting, and he started marking the exits and keeping his back to the wall just in case. Just in case a firefight broke out. Just in case insurgents stormed the living room. He laughed and said, “For a minute there, I thought I was back in Iraq.”

“That must be kind of weird,” she said.

It was the conversational cross talk that did it, and the crowded room, and his father, who was wobbling around grinning and making sure people were enjoying themselves. And it was New Jersey, with its potholes and smokestacks and rows of shabby brick houses, one of which was his home now even though he had never been there before in his life. Even the army was better than New Jersey. Even the fucking Bronx.

“I see you met Rita,” said someone Kelly didn’t know, and Kelly said he guessed he had.

“She works down at the U-Haul with your dad.”

A few minutes later someone else came by and said, “Say, Rita, have you met Joe?”

“What’s your name again?” asked Kelly, leaning in close enough to smell the musk of her hair. They had been introduced three times and he meant it as a joke, but Rita backed up a step and regarded him as if he was slow on the uptake or dangerous or possibly both, which was when he noticed she was marking the exits too.

“This isn’t a required event,” said Kelly. “Feel free to leave if you want to.” He had to admit he said it a touch brusquely, so to make up for it, he blurted out, “It’s just that you’re very, very hot.” But the sentences were out of sequence now, and lines that had always worked to flatter and spark now came off as aggressive and a little, well, desperate. “I knew I shouldn’t have worn the uniform,” he said in an obvious play for sympathy. “It changes things. It changes how people look at me.”