It was funny until a current of something that wasn’t quite so funny ionized the air around him. It was what his girlfriend E’Laine would have called paranormal because she believed in electromagnetic fields and how energy was neither created nor destroyed, which meant that when people died, their life force had to go somewhere — and where it went, she insisted, was either into other people or into the atmosphere, so that at any given time a person might be surrounded by a hundred souls or blobs of plasma and electrons or whatever it was that hadn’t yet found a new body to inhabit.
So it was natural Le Roy thought of E’Laine when the current made the hairs on his arms stand up, for even though he considered E’Laine’s energy conservation theory to be superstitious and probably false, he couldn’t deny that the tremor coursing through him was more than an idle premonition. It was as if the mood of the world had changed or the air molecules were bunching up and crowding in on him. He’d felt that way before — in moments of despair, but also in moments of wild but unrealistic hope. Like the time his computer science teacher had asked, “Have you ever thought about college, boy?” The question had caused the atmospheric molecules to shift and part, and Le Roy had seen a path to a different future, a path that lingered in his imagination long after the teacher forgot all about the college talk. He didn’t meet anyone so optimistic about his future again until that army recruiter had said, “You interested in computers, son? Damn right we can teach you that.”
It was better to laugh it off. It was better to say, “Fuck that shit” and go about his business. It was better to be the one who said the words that got other people all riled up than to be the one who took the words on board and started to hope. Meanwhile, he had E’Laine, who was a whole hell of a lot steadier than Pig Eye’s wife, even if Pig Eye’s wife was smoking hot. E’Laine would be there for him when he got home. One hundred percent she would be there waiting. Whether it was tomorrow or a year from tomorrow or a year or two years after that, she’d be waiting for him with one of her special recipes sizzling on the stove and a cold beer in the fridge and an eternal flame of love for Le Roy Jones keeping vigil in her heart. Meanwhile, he didn’t mind finding his fun where he could get it. Meanwhile, he told Hernandez he’d better get someone to check on Maya and his little boy, and then he whispered, “Slave labor” into Garcia’s ear.
“It sure don’t seem fair,” said Garcia.
“Now we’ll see who the real men are,” said Harraday, who, along with Kelly, had transferred in from a combat unit and who never smiled except when he was telling stories about his old team and the fun they’d had until he’d gotten into trouble for something he said he preferred not to talk about but hinted at anyway now and then. But now even Harraday’s shoulders sagged, and suddenly Le Roy’s heart wasn’t in it. Still, he passed the news to a few more men and had to laugh at how their eyes went dark and their faces started to smolder. He had to fucking laugh because it all depended on what you meant by “fair.” And then he was thinking about E’Laine again and seeing her as she would be when he told her he wasn’t coming home, not yet anyway. She would cry. He could see it clear as the dragon tattoo on his arm: the softening of her features, the downturn of her mouth, the leaking of her eyes the way they had leaked the day she drove him to the airport, acting like it was his last day on earth.
And then his heart was in it, even though it wasn’t funny anymore—because it wasn’t funny and because he was feeling the rage spiking out of Kelly and the panic from Pig Eye and feeling a slow, sure burn in his own guts as well.
2.5 Pig Eye
When the commotion broke out, Pig Eye had been thinking about his wife Emmie. He alternated between thinking she was unfaithful to him and thinking she wasn’t — but if she wasn’t, why not? She was beautiful, while he was short and funny looking. Even though Emmie had only had drug-dealer boyfriends before meeting Pig Eye three years before, he knew he didn’t deserve her. But whenever he said, “Why do you love me when you could have anyone?” she would reply, “You might be small, darlin’, but you’re all muscle.” Or she might say, “Every girl needs a superhero, and baby, you’re mine.”
Pig Eye ran a car repair shop with his buddy Earl, and when he left, Earl promised he would prioritize diligent bookkeeping and quality control exactly the way Pig Eye always had, but now he wondered if Earl was cheating him moneywise or if he was prioritizing Emmie behind his back. In her most recent letter, Emmie had written, “Earl is taking care of business.” Pig Eye’s eyes stuck on that line like it was glue. He had to read it over and over, and still he wondered if she had left out the word “the” on purpose or if it had been a mistake — or if it was just a casual way of writing, kind of like a person would talk. And if it was a mistake, was the letter telling him a bigger truth than Emmie meant to tell?
Kelly’s gesture released something that had been trapped in Pig Eye for a long time, something to do not only with skin color but also with the fact that he had round cheeks and small eyes and a drop-dead gorgeous wife. He didn’t stop to think before stepping up on the truck beside and slightly behind Kelly — he knew not to stand right next to him, of course he knew that — and putting his arm in the air too. It felt good to glare out over the heads of the men and women who paused as they went about their duties to look at him with surprise and new respect. It felt good to stare straight at Kelly without looking away first. Now he knew what it was like to be tall and powerful, not just because Kelly was tall and powerful and anybody Kelly liked shared in that power, but because he was acknowledging something about himself, freeing some un-free thing that was the reason for his insecurity and stepping beyond his short, awkward exterior to show who he was deep down inside.
It only lasted a couple of seconds, but afterward, people thumped him on the shoulder or made a point of knocking into him in a friendly way, and he knew he had done the right thing in stepping up beside (and a little behind) Joe Kelly. After marrying Emmie and opening the car repair shop, it was the most right thing he had ever done.
2.6 Penn Sinclair
Sinclair followed Velcro out of the office to where a commotion was brewing in the yard. A few minutes earlier or later and he would have missed the whole thing, but he didn’t miss it, and it worried him. It wasn’t only that the men looked angry and inscrutable and that anger was catching. It wasn’t only that he and the colonel had known for two weeks before springing the news on them that they wouldn’t be going home, though of course that added to his sense of complicity and guilt. It worried him because he was losing control — not only of his troops. He too wanted to go home. He too had a girlfriend who loved him and a future to plan.
“Should we put a lid on it?” asked Velcro.
“They’re just letting off steam,” replied Penn, even though he knew that something little could easily turn into something big and that it was up to him to stop it. The little things are the big things, the colonel had said.
“We’ll give them the rest of today,” he told Velcro, remembering the colonel’s advice. He walked farther out into the yard. “Listen up,” he barked. “You have the rest of the evening to let off steam, and then I want your heads back in the game.” The mere act of shouting relieved a little of the tension that had built up inside him ever since the stop-loss order was announced. “Convoy briefing at zero seven hundred hours,” he added.