Le Roy hurdled the guardrail and rolled down the bank. He sprang to his feet and then he was running again. It felt good to run, with the motel shimmering in his imagination and then rising before him as if he had conjured it up and, when he got there, his buddies sitting on the couch drinking beer just like he could have predicted. They all jumped up when he walked through the door and said they were glad to see him in a way that made time slow down again, just for an instant. He was glad to see them too, but he didn’t think to say so.
“Did you get arrested?” asked Danny.
“No,” said Le Roy. “Did you?”
“Nah,” said Danny. “But Kelly’s still unaccounted for.”
“I guess we’re not cut out for demonstrations,” said the captain. “We’ll have to think of something else.”
“What kind of something else?” asked Le Roy after chugging a can of beer.
“The sky’s the limit,” said the captain, handing Le Roy his computer, which he had put underneath the bed so no one would step on it. Le Roy’s heart was still beating double time, but with his computer in his lap, he started to calm down.
“Who else is hungry?” asked Danny. “I’ll order a pizza and some more beer.”
It sounded good to Le Roy. Meanwhile, he put on his headphones and started working away at some code. By the time the pizza came, he had found some photographs of the demonstration that other people had posted online, and by the time everyone finished eating, he had uploaded them to a website he’d created for Watada. He liked having all of the photographs in one place where he could access them or even delete them with the tap of a finger. Tap, there were the police on horseback. Tap, tap, they were gone.
8.4 Danny Joiner
Danny wanted to borrow the computer so he could email himself some notes for the television pilot he was working on, but each time he asked, Le Roy said, “Just a sec,” and then ignored him. A few minutes would pass and then Danny would ask again and get the same response, which was why he was sitting next to Le Roy when the captain said they needed a different outlet for their efforts. Protests didn’t seem to be their thing.
Le Roy was flipping through YouTube videos from Iraq and saying, “Sweet. Swee-eet,” whenever he found one he liked. Danny looked over to see an explosion, and when Le Roy noticed him, he rewound the film to show a road-clearing crew setting a charge and unrolling wire from a spool until they were at a safe detonation distance. “That’s what Pig Eye needed,” said Le Roy. “That’s what Pig Eye needed in his kit.”
The season was changing, and the light outside the dingy motel room window was already thick and fading. When Danny was a schoolboy, autumn had always been rich with promise, as if the bus he and his friends boarded every morning would blow right past the school with the chain-link playground patrolled by grim disciplinarians and deposit them in other lives. But lately it seemed that possibility was a thing of the past, that what lay ahead of him was dark and dreadful. He didn’t know if he would ever shake the sense of impending doom he had brought home with him from the war. “Can I check my email?” he asked again, but he wasn’t in a hurry yet. Urgency was something that waxed and waned in him, something he could no longer predict, so when Le Roy said, “Just a sec,” Danny was happy to wait a little longer, happy to look over Le Roy’s shoulder to see a tank mowing down a row of trees, happy to see Pig Eye unrolling a spool of wire and this time surviving the blast, although he knew from experience that patience could evaporate and become impatience in the blink of an eye.
After a while Kelly came in and said, “Fuck you,” to the captain for taking his wallet, but he was in a good mood.
“We could interview soldiers and write a book,” suggested the captain. “We could work for anti-war political candidates. We could…”
They talked about it for a bit. Kelly made another beer run, and pretty soon they were whooping and laughing so hard that beer was spraying from the cans and the people in the room next door started banging on the walls, and pretty soon after that the motel manager knocked on the door. “Can you keep it down?” he asked. “You’re not the only ones staying here.” The captain tossed him a beer, and before too long the couple next door had joined them too.
“Hernandez should be here,” said Kelly. “Let’s get him on the phone.”
“What are you all doing in town?” asked the wife from the room next door while the captain took out his cell phone and started dialing. “Are you here on business?”
“We’re here to protest the war,” said Le Roy.
“You’ve come to the right place,” said the wife. “The national cemetery is right across the street. Seeing all those graves always makes me wanna cry.”
“But we kind of suck at protests, so we’re trying to figure out what to do instead.”
“You should start a blog,” said the wife, tapping a red fingernail on the computer screen. “A memorial or something — kind of like the cemetery, but on the Internet.”
“Yeah,” said Le Roy. “A blog would be good.”
While the captain tried to reach Hernandez and Le Roy showed the wife videos of the war on his computer, the husband turned to Danny and asked, “Did you kill anyone? In Iraq, I mean.”
“That’s none of your business,” said Danny.
“Sure,” said the husband. “But did you?”
Of all the answers Danny could give to that question, the simplest one was both a lie and the truth. “I was in a forward support unit,” he said. And there he was again, riding the train of thought that always ended in watching Pig Eye explode.
“I heard that about two percent of people — of guys, anyway — are natural killers,” said the husband. “The kind who can kill without feeling any remorse. Did you run into any fellas like that?”
“Hey, Captain,” said Danny, thinking of Harraday. “Rube here wants to know if we’re natural killers.” Once Harraday’s switch got flipped, it was like he couldn’t turn it off. Danny’s switch was different, but he couldn’t turn his off either.
“No, no.” The man laughed, deep in his throat — a genuine laugh, Danny thought at first, but then he changed his mind. There was something not quite right about him, like he was laughing to cover up how deadly serious he was.
“That’s not what I asked,” said the husband slowly. “I just asked if you knew any. And my name’s not Rube.”
“My mistake,” said Danny.
“I’m wondering if I’d be a natural killer, that’s all.”
“You are, honey,” said the wife. “You’ve been killing me for years.”
“In a good way, I hope,” said the husband. Then he turned back to Danny and said, “I’m just wondering if it comes more naturally to some people than others and if those people make better soldiers and if I’d be one of those.”
“They teach you what you need to know,” said Danny.
The husband was leaning forward now, a little too close for Danny’s liking. Over by the window, Kelly was talking to Hernandez on the captain’s phone. “I love ya, man. Wish you were here.”
“How do they teach you?” the husband wanted to know.
“They teach you to work as a unit. They teach you to be really good at what you do.”
“I heard they teach you to hate people,” said the wife, who had plopped down on the bed beside Le Roy, her mouth open and her eyes wide.