Charlotte Rogan - Now and Again

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.

10.8 Joe Kelly

Spring 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.

“You know what it’s worth?” asked Kelly. “Exactly what someone is willing to pay.”

Every day they were popping open the beer a little earlier, but when the purchase offer came in, Kelly made a case that noon was not too early. “Noon’s normal,” he said, and the captain laughed and replied, “I’ve been wondering what normal is. Now I finally know.”

“I just don’t know why they’re offering so much for it,” said Danny. “I can’t make the numbers add up.”

“Money’s money,” said Kelly. He was picturing himself in a convertible like the one in the coming-home parade. This time, though, he’d be driving, with a pretty girl beside him in the passenger seat.

“True enough,” said Danny. “True enough.”

“That’s two hundred fifty thousand each,” said Le Roy.

“Three hundred thirty three,” said the captain. “I don’t need the money. Which isn’t the reason I think we shouldn’t sell.”

“Whatever’s fair,” said Danny. A few minutes later, though, he was back to worrying. “The numbers don’t add up,” he said. “Even if there was some way to get advertisers, it would take them years to earn that money back.”

“Unless that’s not the point,” said Penn. “Unless they only want to shut us down.”

Outside the warehouse window, two teenagers threw a rock at a stray dog. The dog yelped and ran off just as the third beer was sliding down, causing something to catch in Kelly’s throat so that some of it came up again.

“Jeezus, Kelly, be careful of the keyboard,” said Le Roy.

When the captain went outside to talk to the teenagers and recruit them for his patrol, Kelly stumbled after him and sat on the stoop thinking of the day he had lurked on a street corner while Joe Senior was stopped and searched, eyes down, arms out, compliant and sacrificial. The sight had filled Kelly with a bottomless swamp of bitterness and sorrow. When he had a son of his own, he wouldn’t send him off to school telling him to keep his head down or to smile and make new friends. He’d send him with the name of a lawyer in his pocket and a checklist of do’s and don’ts: do be polite, don’t make furtive movements, do ask if you are free to leave, don’t tell the cop to fuck himself. But you can think it, son, he’d say. So far they haven’t made thinking illegal, and you can think any damn thing you want.

The dog was back, eyeing him warily from across the street. Then it tucked its tail between brindle haunches and slunk into the bamboo that ran along the railroad tracks. “Hey, dog,” called Kelly, but by then, the dog was gone.

“Any luck?” he asked when the teenagers got into their car and drove off.

“They’ll come,” said the captain. “If they don’t, I’ll track their asses down.”

The magnolias were in bloom, and up the street, the single mother was digging in her garden. Kelly thought about the convertible he was going to buy. He told himself he hadn’t made the world the way it was and he wasn’t responsible for human nature, not even his own. If they sold the site, he could do anything he wanted, but what did he want to do? He seemed to have a head for business — he could make something of that. He could find a nice girl and get married. He’d figure it out once he had the money, but they should definitely sell the site. He’d call Hernandez and get him to come to New Jersey to help with whatever they did next, or maybe he’d go to Texas and Hernandez could give him advice about settling down. He dialed the number, but Hernandez’s voice was guarded. “What?” he asked. “What do you want?”