Free Now and Again by Charlotte Rogan Page B

Hernandez might want to know, “When is the best time to escape?”
    “Right away,” Pig Eye would say. “Your first opportunity is always the best one you’ll have.”
    On patrol the previous evening, Hernandez had taught him a time-slowing trick that involved imagining he could throttle down the surrounding action so it played at low speed, giving him more time for whatever he was doing, and Pig Eye had imagined a scenario where barbed wire figured in. So that morning he had switched out the cigarette lighter for a pair of wire cutters he had won off another soldier in a poker game. “Just in case,” he had said when Hernandez caught his eye, and Hernandez had said, “Yeah, man, just in case.”
    The only book Pig Eye had ever read voluntarily was The Things They Carried, and the idea that what a man carried with him said something profound about who the man was had stayed with him. He had come to disdain the sentimental and useless treasures most of his comrades pulled from their own pockets to moon over at night. A letter from his mother wasn’t going to save his life. A picture of Emmie wasn’t going to get him home. Still, among the things in the cargo pocket was just such a picture. He knew it said something about him, and what it said was that he was irrational and soft. It was awareness of his weaknesses that made him extra meticulous in his plans for escape, even though he also knew that escape was impossible, for let’s say he could get away from his captors, where would he go in that forbidding and alien land?
    One of Pig Eye’s most shameful secrets was that his escape fantasies didn’t always entail escaping from Iraqi captors, but from his unit. When he had thoughts like those, he felt like a traitor. But even when he closed his eyes and forced himself to imagine he was being held hostage by both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, he couldn’t always get the bad kind of fantasy out of his head.
    “What are the two most important things in any escape?” asked Pig Eye, trying to start a conversation with Danny, who was sitting next to him in the front seat, alternately scanning his sector and siting down the barrel of his M4.
    “A howitzer,” said Danny.
    “No. These things are commonplace and they don’t take up so much room.”
    Danny thought for a minute and then said, “Water.”
    “I’ll give you a hint,” said Pig Eye. “I don’t have either of them in my kit.”
    “Why the hell not?” asked Danny. “If they’re the most important thing.”
    “Because everyone has them and no one does.”
    “Okay, riddle man, what are they?”
    “Time and opportunity,” said Pig Eye. “Opportunity and time.”
    After that Danny fell silent again and Pig Eye went back to thinking about Emmie and how because of Harraday “taking care of” had morphed in his mind into “handle” and “handle” had morphed into “pork.”

3.0 PRISON
    It didn’t take her long to get a job up at the prison. She told me being around criminals day after day didn’t bother her, but I wonder if it did.
    —True Cunningham
    She said her eyes were finally open. She said saving someone else’s son was the only way to save her own.
    —Tiffany Price
    I like fairy tales as much as the next gal, but Maggie actually believed she could change things. She wanted to save them all.
    —Valerie Vines
    I think there was another side to her. I’m not saying she didn’t love Lyle. I’m just saying that he was her ticket out of that house way back when, and maybe she was looking for another ticket now.
    —Lily De Luca

3.1 Maggie
    H urry, Maggie said to herself as she rushed down the prison steps in the evenings, and then she said it again as she took the bus to the shopping plaza to buy something for dinner, after which she waited impatiently in the parking lot for Lyle or he waited impatiently for her. Mornings, it was the same thing in reverse. She would arrive at the prison breathless, her head spinning with