Free Now and Again by Charlotte Rogan

mean? What do you mean by that?”
    Harraday walked over and cast a shadow on the letter, which was smudged and wet where someone had put his lips to it and tongued it. His eyes were puffy and his breath was as rotten as if he had just rolled out of bed after a night on the town. “He means your friend Earl’s porking your wife and now you’re stuck here and there’s nothing you can do about it,” he said.
    “What do you mean?” asked Pig Eye again.
    “Handling,” said Harraday. “Your partner is handling things at home.”
    “The letter doesn’t say ‘handling,’” said Pig Eye.
    “But you did. You wouldn’t have said it if you didn’t suspect something was up.”
    “Don’t listen to Harraday, man,” said Danny. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
    But Pig Eye didn’t have to listen to Harraday to know he didn’t trust Earl worth a damn. It was all he could think about when he was checking the fuel. He overfilled one tank and forgot to replace the cap on another. “Jeezus, what’s wrong with you?” asked Betts when he hurried past to see if the orders had come through.
    “Nothing,” said Pig Eye, but he could tell that Betts was down too when he walked past thirty seconds later muttering that he couldn’t find his cargo manifest even though he was holding it in his hand.
    Pig Eye found a detonator on the ground and slipped it into the pocket of his uniform where he kept what he called his escape kit. Now and then he stroked his thigh to make sure the kit was still there or adjusted the Velcro closure to make sure it was secure. He had made the mistake of telling Hernandez and Le Roy about the kit, and now and then Le Roy would say, “Stick with Pig Eye in case you’re captured. He’s got a magnifying glass that can burn through rope or zip ties using solar energy.”
    “You don’t use a magnifying glass to escape from zip ties. You’d burn your arm!” said Pig Eye before he realized it was a joke.
    Pig Eye didn’t mind the teasing until Harraday joined in. “Anybody need a tampon, Pig Eye’s your man. He’s got emergency supplies.”
    Pig Eye tried to laugh it off because nobody wanted to get crosswise with Harraday, but sometimes he imagined revenge scenarios where Harraday’s fate was in his hands and he could save him or not. In the scenarios he always ignored Harraday until he was crying and pleading for his life. “Die, motherfucker,” a tougher version of himself would say in the fantasy, but then Harraday would beg for forgiveness and the tougher Pig Eye would soften and do whatever needed doing to set him free. Thinking about Harraday gave Pig Eye a pain in his gut, so it wasn’t always worth it to picture him crying in the desert. Sometimes it was better not to think of him at all.
    “Hey, man, you’re riding with me,” said Danny. He slapped Pig Eye on the shoulder, and together they walked to where the trucks were waiting.
    2.8 Le Roy Jones
    L e Roy could smell Pig Eye’s sweat. He had noticed it earlier, when they were checking the load. Pig Eye’s going to be a problem, he thought, and when Joe Kelly walked up with a map of their route, all he had to say was “Pig Eye” for Kelly to frown and nod as if he was thinking the same thing. But because it was more important to make sure the radio was operational and to identify danger spots than to confirm each other’s worries about Pig Eye, they didn’t say anything out loud.
    “Do we have maps of both routes?” Le Roy asked Pig Eye, who was standing around patting his pockets and fiddling with something he had picked up off the ground.
    “What do you mean, both routes?”
    “Christ,” said Le Roy. “Didn’t you hear the captain say we might be redirected? And locate Sergeant Betts while you’re at it. Tell him it’s SP minus five. And Rinaldi—where’s he at?” Rinaldi was one of their gunners. He and Le Roy, who was the radio operator, would be riding in a converted Humvee with their