I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them

by Jesse Goolsby

  Dax travels more now: outside the local rounds, he’s gone a week every month. When away, he calls home at 6:30 Knoxville time every night. Emma has normally finished her bath, and Nicholle puts the phone up to her ear so she hears her daddy’s voice. Emma is eight months old and already she plays with her first steps.

  Whenever he’s in Memphis he plays cards a couple blocks off the strip in a brick basement where there’s a password. This is his trivial thrill. He recognizes most of the participants. They aren’t thugs, at least in his opinion—when they lose money, it hurts. They have polo shirts and middle-class mortgages.

  One day after he negotiates the sale of ten new blood-sugar monitors at St. Jude Hospital, he showers and heads to the card game. The password is sycamore, but Dax says live oak, last week’s password. They let him in anyway.

  Five hands in and Dax spies his flush and a story starts up around the table about a guy who had his dick put in a vise. The poor genital-squeezed guy owed money to the wrong people. There is laughter. Dax stares at his spades, organized and lethal. He reaches for chips.

  “Named Sim,” says Brent, the organizer of the game.

  “Sim?” someone says. “Deserved it.”

  Jordan, a banker with nervous hands, asks if people can die from that—a dick in a vise.

  A new guy, Ian, quiets everyone with his monotone.

  “Yes,” he says. “If you leave ’em there, eventually they die of hunger.”

  “You could rip your dick off,” Jordan says.

  “I guess you always have a choice.”

  Dax thinks of what he’ll say to Nicholle. How many Sims can there be? What do I ask? Water moccasin Sim, snapping turtle Sim. Torture. Dax remembers Sim laughing in the muddy water as Dax dried off on the bank, unable to get his knees to stop shaking. Where else do you want it to go? This is where it lives.

  Dax waits until the next day, 7 P.M., to call home. He has spoken to Emma, and Nicholle explains how she is considering going back to work, just part-time, over the summer, then how she’s struggling to lose the last ten pounds of pregnancy weight.

  “I need something to do,” she says, “outside the house.”

  “When’s Sim going to come visit his niece?” Dax asks. It’s the easiest lead-in.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “He’s not coming with money, if that’s what you’re asking. He called last night. Said he was in international waters. Probably the Mississippi.”

  Sim rolls his truck four times outside Mobile on a Monday at 3 A.MHe’s drunk and his face and chest bruise up good. Nicholle’s parents call—her mother asks for their prayers. Nicholle prays and Sim stays in critical condition for eighteen hours, but he pulls through. Nicholle’s mother praises God and his mercy and his comfort. Glory and grace is all she talks about for a month. Sim drank a bottle of Jack and got behind the wheel; he forgot to put his seat belt on; he was ejected from his rolling vehicle and landed on his back in a patch of grass, looking up at the stars. Dax wants to ask Nicholle’s mother whether sobriety or buckling in is the devil’s work. Do we praise Jesus if Sim impales himself on a mile marker? He doesn’t say any of this. When he finally talks to Sim, he says, “I’m glad you’re with us.”

  Two months later Sim shows up at the house twenty pounds lighter, hands shaking. He smells like cabbage and urine. He says he’s been in the same clothes for a week, sleeping during the day, driving at night. He’s out of money and in trouble. He says this is the kind of trouble you don’t wake up from.

  “Got to stay out of ’bama,” he says.

  Before Dax can wrap his head around the situation, Nicholle has invited Sim in and shown him to the guest room. He showers upstairs while Nicholle and Dax cuss and stomp. Before the shower water turns off they’ve reached a compromise. Sim has two weeks; he doesn’t leave the house, his truck stays in the garage, he gets no calls, and he’s gone, cops called with any weird stuff. After that he’s on his own. Dax knows Nicholle won’t kick her brother out at the deadline, but he’ll let himself be surprised.

  For two weeks Dax finds himself in pleasant shock as Sim sleeps for two days, then cleans up and helps around the house. Gently enthusiastic and outwardly caring, he plays dolls with Emma, plays horse with Emma, helps feed her, bathe her. Just finding her walking legs, Emma trails Sim around the house, almost pronouncing his easy name, and he, nervous of possible falls, protects her from the brick fireplace, a backward tumble from the stairs, three inches of bathwater. His unexpected involvement frees Nicholle to extend her work hours, Dax to make a few more phone calls without a screaming child in the background. On the last night of Sim’s allotted live-in time, Dax and Nicholle crawl into bed with each other. No one has talked about Sim leaving the next day. They both know it’s his agreed-to time to depart, but he’s volunteered to wake up early with Emma, to take her to the park if they need some quiet time at the house. Dax leans over and kisses Nicholle, and for the first time in two months they make love.

  A week later Dax makes the morning hospital rounds in Little Rock. He isn’t scheduled to leave until the following day, but he considers changing his flight to get back to the girls and Sim that night. He hustles back to the hotel and picks up the ringing hotel room phone just before he leaves for the airport. Nicholle’s nervous voice. She asks why Dax isn’t answering his cell phone, but before he can answer, she says that there are two men, a tall one at the front door, the other standing at the side of the house. She’s ignored them, but the man at the front door has stopped knocking and is peering into the long, narrow window to the left of the door. Emma sleeps.

  “Am I crazy?” she asks.

  “Wait a minute,” he says. “Are they in uniform?”

  “No,” she says. “Why? Did you schedule something?” But she doesn’t let him answer. “Because it’s been far too long. They’ve been here five minutes.”

  She tells him that she can see the one at the front door glancing around, not into the house, but around at the other houses in the neighborhood. He hears Sim in the background.

  “Put Sim on.” Dax waits for Sim’s voice, and the pause stretches. Dax forces himself to breathe.

  “Not lying. There’s some shit,” Sim says. “Damn. Damn. Nothing is gonna happen, man. Trust me.”

  “You son of a bitch. Handle this, Sim.” No reply.

  “Hello?” It’s Nicholle. “The one on the side moved into the back yard,” she says. Dax pictures the spacious yard and medium dogwoods. It’s 3:15 his time, 4:15 there. “Sim pulled the damn truck out into the driveway a few days ago. Listen to me. Something’s not right here.”

  Dax stands in the hotel room, packed suitcase at his feet.

  “Go get Emma,” he says.

  Nicholle breathes heavily into the phone and says, “My God.”

  Dax traces her path in his head, down the long second-floor hallway, through the white door into the baby’s yellow bedroom with block pink letters above the crib: EMMA.

  “We’re back in our room. Emma’s—they’re in,” she says, interrupting herself. “The other one’s in the screened porch and the man at the front door, he’s knocking again.”

  “Lock the bedroom door and call 911,” Dax says. “Do it now.”

  “But Sim—” she says.

  “Lock it now. Call 911.”

  “Don’t hang up, damn you.”

  “I don’t hear Emma.”

  “She’s here.”

  “Where’s Sim?”

  “He’s down there. They’re screaming.”

  It was twenty bucks a month for the alarm whose wires probably dangle unconnected. Dax pictures its white box under the stairs. Then the blue safe under their bed.

  “Get the gun,” he says.

  “I’m putting the phone on the bed.” Over the line Dax hears Emma’s labored breathing. It sounds like she’s trying to put the receiver in her mouth.

  “I have it,” Nicholle says. “Okay.” A pause. “They’re fighting. God, they’re fighting.”


  “Like we practiced. Put the magazine in. It should have rounds in it.”

  “Crashing downstairs.”

  “Pull the hammer back,” Dax says.

  “What? What’s the hammer?”

  “I mean the slide. Shit, the slide. We’ve practiced this. The top part, throw the slide back.”

  “It’s sticking. On the stairs now.” She whispers. “Up. The. Stairs.”

  “Yell out to them, ‘I have a gun.’” She does.

  “And again,” he says.

  She says it again, and “I will shoot you.” He hears her say the words, and she says “motherfuckers.” Emma cries.

  “It’s sticking,” she says to Dax.

  “Do you remember?”

  “Yes,” she says. “I know what to do, but it’s sticking.” Her pitch rises. No one is on their way to them.

  “Got it,” Nicholle says. “They’re talking on the stairs.” Her voice lowers even more. “They said Sim. My God, they know us.”

  “Say it again.”

  “What?”

  “The gun,” he says.

  “I’ve got a gun,” she yells.

  “If they open the door, you shoot until the gun stops firing and then load the next magazine.”

  She hears the finality in his voice, because she says, “No. No.” Dax hears her right before he hangs up and dials 911. He slings information as fast as he can to the operator and pictures the safety tab on the gun Nicholle holds, turned down, the red fire dot hidden. His sight goes wavy, the ceiling lowers on him, and he thinks of the locked trigger. He hangs up, calls his home phone, and the metallic tone pulses off and on until the answer machine engages. It’s her morning voice: “You’ve reached Nicholle and Dax Bailey,” and his voice in the background, “and Emma,” she squeaks. “We’re not in right now, but please leave a message and we’ll get back with you. Thank you.” He listens to the entire thing, thinks about leaving a message, his voice loud on the machine, but hangs up. She won’t be able to hear him, no matter what he says into the phone. He calls her cell phone, and when he gets her cell-phone message—just her voice—he hangs up immediately. He stares at a dark stain on the hotel carpet. Someone’s on the way. Someone’s on the way. He calls the home line again. This time he lets the whole message play and stands with the phone in his hand, a beam of light from the hotel window now shining through. Dax closes his eyes. The muffled near-silence records him listening, and he thinks there’s a chance, if he’s loud enough, Nicholle might be able to pick up one word, through the drywall and beams and carpet, past Sim’s body, past the men knocking on the locked bedroom door. He breathes in through his mouth and nose and screams “Safety,” over and over and over, until there are no more words, just his machine now recording his empty lungs.

  11

  Resurrecting a Body Half

  IN HIS HOTEL ELEVATOR Armando fingers the executive-level key card and stares up from his wheelchair at the four-inch screen showing the Israeli prime minister at a podium with the red breaking news headline “Israel Prepares for War with Iran.” The screen flashes to a police sketch of someone Chicago authorities search for. Armando wonders how one slides into the position of sketch artist. His local police department—where he volunteered briefly—lacked the money, so when necessary they would bring in the high school art teacher, Trent Kellogg. He would show up with his charcoal set and pound the paper. He wasn’t an accomplished artist, and most of the time the department would be embarrassed to put the sketches out, but what Armando remembers in detail is Kellogg’s face while he drew, the bundled forehead and contorted mouth, saliva leaking out.

  This sketched suspect on the elevator screen is a white or Hispanic male, twenty-five to thirty years old, five-foot-eight to six-foot-one. A moment passes before Armando recognizes the absurd range of people who fit this description, but when he does, he recalls the details he slung at Kellogg: a red-haired female in a blue sweatshirt. At least he could describe the car, the brown Buick LeSabre that ran the stop sign on his early-morning jog and smashed him. A day after his spinal surgery Kellogg came in and they walked through it—the thin nose, the haircut, the chin—and Armando realized he didn’t know as much as he thought, but he overheard himself dealing out a description that barely registered, and before he knew it, he and Kellogg had created someone. Kellogg was into it big-time, shaking and groaning, using the side of his hand and fingertips, whipping the charcoal lump like a madman. He finished and Armando sat up in the hospital bed and studied the bust of a woman he half recognized, so he nodded and sent Kellogg on his way and returned to the dreaded wheelchair catalogue.

  In this elevator, on the small screen, the artist has conveyed an androgyny and universality that denote everyone and no one. Armando considers his own features, and someone softly touches his shoulder, then his neck. He twists around awkwardly, and a smiling, attractive woman brushes his cheek with her hand. She leans back and settles comfortably against another woman. The space is packed, and Armando turns back to face the front, trying to neutralize the confusion that erupts. What just happened? In his dreams he has neared this experience and he always has something witty to say, but here, in the moment, he freezes. Pity? Desire? My cheek? His fingers throb, and in what appears to be a miracle, he feels a twinge in his groin for the first time since his accident. He tries to summon the courage to acknowledge the feeling, to turn back to them, but what would he say? Thank you? Let’s go? I’m married, but she’s lost interest? The problem is, he wants everything to be easy: no stories. He wants one of them to invite him to her room, where they’ll undress him and lick each other before they take control and use him, but as he imagines the scene he has already lost their faces. There was a time when this squeeze and cheek brush was all his body needed to respond with an uncontrollable erection, but tonight a twinge means more than anything in his past. He smiles and a surprise desire fills him. He’s uncertain where to reach or how to breathe. Chatter fills the elevator: a feminine voice murmurs of a bad back to a friend, two teenagers about Derrick Rose and the upcoming season for the Bulls. He has three floors to go, with no plan, no idea of what he’s capable of, and then he’s at his floor. The doors open. He takes one look back to get the faces and they look right back, and seconds before the doors close on his healers, one of them nods and smiles. The elevator doors close, and he turns to watch the numbers scroll upward, noting the pauses (23, 27), until the elevator starts back down.

  Two months after the accident, at the official lineup, he saw her, the woman in Trent Kellogg’s drawing. He knew that there was no such thing as closure or justice, not when you lose your legs and spine to a person driving and texting. He picked her out, said, “That’s her.” In the end his eyewitness testimony was important, but less critical than the woman’s dented LeSabre, previous driving convictions, and eventual confession.

  On the way home, Anna drove—has, from the moment of his accident, always driven—and held his hand in the car.

  “May she rot in hell for what she did to us,” she said. “Fuck her. They should cut her hands off.” Armando didn’t say anything when the obscenity left her mouth, but the word us haunted him instantly. What she did to me, he thought. What she did to me.

  The hotel’s handicapped-accessible room is smoke-free, but Armando smells the dirty cigarette smell in the walls. He sits in his wheelchair, naked, the shower warming up, television tuned to the first presidential debate:

  MODERATOR: But if I hear the two of you correctly, neither one of you is suggesting any major changes in what you want to do as president as a result of the financial bailout. Is that what you’re saying?

  OBAMA: No. As I said before, Jim, there are going to be things that end up having to be—

  MODERATOR: Like what?

  OBAMA: —deferred and delayed. Well, look, I want to make sure that we are investing in energy in order to free ourselves from the dependence on foreign oil. That is a big project. That is a multiyear project.

&nbs
p; MODERATOR: Not willing to give that up?

  OBAMA: Not willing to give up the need to do it, but there may—

  Armando turns away. Poor McCain, he thinks. No matter what Obama says, you got no shot.

  In the spacious hotel shower Armando turns the temperature way up and lets the steaming water drench him, and he sits on the specially equipped shower seat and touches his wet body. He feels his chest and face and hair. He rubs at his eyes. He pinches the skin at the elbow without nerve endings. He thinks of how his spoiled body retains his healthy name.

  He soaps his arm and touches his biceps scar, then reaches down and soaps and rinses his feet, a raised scar on his left foot. He recalls a photo taken two days before that jog. In it he stands in their living room in a bathrobe he hates. He poses for Anna, sticking his belly out in between the crossing flanks of cotton, patting it. After she took the photo Mia screamed from her bedroom, and in his rush to her he cut his foot on the doorstop to her room before calming her down from a nightmare. All of that action he has to create from a photo where he stands frowning at his body. He considers sliding out of the shower, but the hot water keeps coming and he feels like he breaks even with the pricey room when he drains an extra five minutes from a steaming cleanse.

  Armando scoots to the edge of the plastic seat and caresses his testicles and fingers the space beneath them, pressing hard. He searches for the twinge that receded after he returned to his room. He tries to convince himself of the miracle in the elevator, that it actually occurred, and he knows that the only proof is to feel it once again. Once is a mirage. Although he has washed himself already, he again soaps his penis, testicles, groin, inside his ass and he dreams up images of the women’s mouths on him.