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

by Jesse Goolsby

  The elevator doors open to his floor and he starts out, but something in his arms fails him and he pauses in between the closing doors. They close and open, close and open around him—chewing. He ponders the worst thing that could happen if he gets back in the elevator, but before the doors close for the third time he’s back in, pressing the 23 button. Something in his working bones tells him that Courtney’s room is on the twenty-third floor.

  He rolls off the elevator and takes his place beside two fake leather chairs and a granite console table with a gold-faced lamp. He stares at the two elevator displays, digital red numbers stuck on L. One of them moves to 4 and down again. Another begins its ascent, and he’s stuck in this miracle lottery. The number climbs above 17, stops, and starts up again. His seat creaks as he adjusts. He isn’t sure how long he can last, if he has enough resolve to stick this out, but as he looks down at his bent legs in his wrinkle-free slacks, he feels a warming in his gut and begs it to lower. He understands the astronomical odds, but he has faith that the elevator doors will open to him and for the first time in years he’ll feel his pants slide down over his knees before they fall to the floor. Ms. Starlight was right, he’s a believer, he has to be, and tonight there will be a reckoning, a savagery, enough passion and blood and faith to resurrect the universe at one in the morning, but as the elevator doors open and he sees Courtney’s smeared makeup, he wonders if he has enough of anything.

  12

  No Doorbell

  TWO HOURS BEFORE showtime in his army dress uniform at the Fourth of July parade, Wintric lounges on his living room couch, fingering a recently purchased pocketknife as his three-year-old son, Daniel, tries to balance on one leg. Daniel teeters on his right foot for three seconds before losing his balance.

  “Put your arms out,” says Wintric, miming the arm movement from the couch.

  Daniel glances at his father and raises his arms out to his sides. He lifts his left foot a couple inches off the living room floor and wobbles, then stomps the foot down. He tries again.

  Wintric’s left foot rests on the carpet. His only remaining toe on the foot—his big one—brushes at the light-pink remnants of an old cranberry juice stain he recently gave up on. His big toe has done this minor back-and-forth dance as long as he can recall, but the involuntary movement has become even more noticeable since the other digits disappeared.

  Five years since he last wore his uniform. Wintric steals a mental picture of the green army getup in his closet, sucks in his belly, and wonders if the few extra pounds he carries will be problematic come zipper and button time. The parade organizers have asked him to walk in the patriot group each year since his return to Chester, but this is the first year he has agreed, largely to appease Kristen’s pleading, her insistence that their son would be proud to see his father walk down Main Street with the other veterans who have returned to their California mountain town.

  Wintric ignored her requests for years, claiming that he was no longer a soldier, that he had despised his time in the army, that the single reason he kept his uniform was to remind himself of what he so gladly gave up, but the truth is harder for him to reconcile—the rage at his uniform, at hearing the words army, sacrifice, honor, the anger and pride he feels when someone thanks him for his past service or when he sees a map of Afghanistan or photos of flag-draped caskets or White House Medal of Honor receptions on the Internet. He can’t list all the reasons that he said he would wear the uniform this year, and his son may be one of those reasons, but he knows that if he can get it on and walk through the fury and the Main Street chaos, he may just snuff out some of his attacking memories.

  The living room smells like bacon from their earlier breakfast, and Wintric hears Kristen’s shower singing from the back bathroom of their two-bedroom home.

  On television Rafael Nadal is in the athletic throes of destroying Tomáš Berdych in the 2010 Wimbledon men’s final. NBC’s sports announcers talk over the action, belaboring the fact that England’s queen personally graced the tennis event earlier in the week for the first time in thirty-three years, but what gains Wintric’s full attention—as a man who has never watched or even considered watching tennis—is a point-winning roar from the muscled, animalistic Nadal.

  Wintric focuses now on the Spaniard as he moves angrily across the court, stomping, hurling his sculpted body at every shot. There is little grace, but Nadal’s ferocity has Wintric entranced. The ball shoots off Nadal’s racket as if stunned into velocity, into impossible angles that ride the white out-of-bounds lines. After each winner Nadal flexes his bricklike biceps and stares into the stands. During volleys Berdych can only guess where to move next, and when he guesses correctly, his luck prolongs the point a mere few more seconds. Even when he wins a game, only minor fanfare arrives. The battle seems more like boxing than tennis, and although the match just started, Wintric knows it’s over, and he can tell Berdych knows it’s over. Wintric understands that one of the most difficult things is to finish the fights you’re supposed to win, and this is ultimately why he falls for Nadal. Because although the Spaniard is heavily favored, he appears not to realize just how good his odds are, so all of this will end quickly.

  After one of the commercial breaks, the commentators interview Monica Seles, a player Wintric has never heard of, and a moment before he changes the channel the television screen cuts to a video: 1993 in the lower left-hand corner, a young Seles, an orange clay court, and a man walks onto the court, then chaos as security grabs the man, and Seles, now curled on the clay, reaches to her back, wincing in pain. Wintric turns the volume up and the words jumble: stabbing, nine-inch boning knife, two years before she came back, never the same player. Wintric thinks of how easy it is to hurt—just walk out of the stands with a knife, simply veer your car a couple feet to either side; he exhales and a memory arrives, his childhood bedroom.

  Wintric was twelve, asleep in the room he had wallpapered with posters of NBA basketball players, when his father shook him awake, handed him a revolver, and snap-whispered, “If something happens, shoot for the body.” He was all nerves in their narrow, predawn hallway and scooted forward, left hand on his father’s back, right hand gripping a heavy gun—a loaded gun—and as they glided past his infant sister’s bedroom, Wintric heard knocking. The whole scene cluttered within him: shoot for the body, murderer, knocking, Are we shooting through the door? What criminal knocks? I don’t have shoes on, How big is a bullet? His father disappeared, so he crouched down on the floor in a flood of fear and closed his eyes, then opened them, but there was no difference in the darkness, and still that feverish knocking. He waited for the shot, for his name in the night, and the carpet was cool on his feet. The standoff was taking too long, and then a slurring voice filtered through the door; the voice hurled his father’s name—John—and then lights on, door open, and their drunk neighbor spit out, “Your back yard’s on fire.”

  Then dawn, and Wintric watched his father direct the water stream from their garden hose onto a smoking pile of leaves they had left for Glad bags later that day. They would never discover what lit them, and he didn’t know why, but his father still gripped his gun, and so did Wintric. He inspected the silver gun, the bullets’ brass backings. He was unsure whether the revolver’s safety was on, and that was something he should’ve known. It was the kind of thing his father expected him to know when he gave him the combination to the safe in the bedroom. Wintric performed a slight tug on the trigger and watched the revolver’s hammer start its backward ride, but he stopped early and everything slid back into potential. Another tiny tug, and the minuscule movement of the hammer shocked him. His father shook the morning cold out in his shorts, nightshirt, and old slippers and stared mesmerized at the water flow, and Wintric realized then that he could shoot him. Not that he wanted to, only that he could, with minimal effort. He could kill him if he aimed straight enough. Without prompt he stroked this strange charge of power and alarm that people must feel when they realize they can do absolu
tely anything they want if they have the nerve.

  Wintric turns the tennis match off, runs his fingers through his shoulder-length hair, and watches Daniel—the one-legged balancing act now over—bang his fist on the wooden coffee table.

  Daniel, short for three, wears a 49ers shirt and Lightning McQueen underwear. His son smiles at him, and the genuine expression wrenches Wintric and the familiar pit inside him opens, the competing hate and desperation and care for this child, an accident, an “orgasm gone wrong” he told Kristen upon hearing the news of her pregnancy. On the days he feels something for the boy it angers him that his son resembles Kristen more than him. Especially lately, Daniel’s large nose and brown eyes feel like a cruel betrayal. Wintric has had a harder time lately fighting off the days that circle in upon him, the logging town he swore he would escape, the girl he thought he was leaving forever as he headed off to basic training, the half a foot that slices him with shame.

  Wintric stares at his left foot, and even after all these years, it seems more a sad prop than part of his body. He taps into the hate, how in his entire life he has really wanted to kill only one person—even counting the war, just one—how he has failed to act on that constant desire, how each day he continues to fail, how the girl he did kill has nothing to do with this focused resentment.

  The man Wintric wishes dead is Derek Nelson, once Sergeant Derek Nelson, one of the men Wintric believes assaulted him. There was another person, perhaps two, but Nelson is the one name that pierces and haunts him. Wintric has no proof, save for an incredible moment before being airlifted out of Bagram Airfield. He sat off in a corner of the rudimentary passenger terminal with his carved foot elevated when a solider he’d never met approached him and said, “It was Nelson,” nodded, and walked away.

  Wintric knows that Nelson lives in Green River, Wyoming, in a yellow mobile home on Davy Crockett Drive. He has a black Lab and a beat-down Tacoma missing a tailgate. He leaves for work with the gas company around 7:30 A.M. and gets home around 5 P.M.Wintric knows this because he has sat in his car on Davy Crockett Drive with a loaded .44 and watched Nelson leave and arrive at his home multiple times. The closest he ever came to fulfilling his revenge wish was in the middle of June two years ago, his second trip to Green River. Deftones blasted from the speakers, and Wintric opened the car’s door and walked halfway across the street before turning back, closing the driver’s door, sobbing, then pointing the car back west, all the way home to California.

  “I’ll get it,” Daniel says, and leaves the room. He returns gripping a Nerf dart gun that Wintric bought him for his birthday. Daniel has recently got the hang of the play weapon: pushing one of the thin suction-cupped darts down the muzzle, pulling hard on the rear plastic tether until it locks back in place, now ready with enough pressure-build to launch the dart on a line across the room. Daniel has been taught not to aim at people, but Wintric has told him that he can shoot his daddy every now and then for practice, an act that draws Kristen’s complaints and an encouraging “Nice shot” from Wintric.

  Wintric thumbs the pocketknife in his hand. He opens up the three-inch blade, locks it into place, places the knife on the coffee table, and leans back. His big toe digs into the carpet, and he thinks about the upcoming parade, meeting up with other vets, the hot day, thousands lining the street, gawking. His neck tightens. Daniel stops pounding the table and points the gun at the blank television and shoots a dart at the screen.

  “Nice,” Wintric says.

  “I shoot it,” Daniel says.

  Wintric glances at the ceiling—an intricate corner cobweb—and back down to the coffee table.

  Through three walls, Kristen sings a Whitney Houston ballad in the shower.

  “Knife,” Daniel says, pointing.

  Wintric watches Daniel’s hands. One stays at his side with the toy, the other points at the knife.

  “Knife,” Daniel says, staring at Wintric. Daniel lowers his hand to the table a few inches away from the knife. Wintric’s body warms, and he sees his son’s eyes widen and his back straighten, and Wintric gives his son a nod and watches Daniel’s hand slide the last three inches to the black handle and grip down.

  “Know what you have there?” Wintric asks.

  “Knife,” Daniel says, eyes down.

  “Whose knife?”

  “Daddy’s.”

  “That’s right.”

  Daniel releases his grip on the knife and stands quietly. He searches for another dart, but none are nearby.

  “You can play with it,” Wintric says, then nods. “Play with it.”

  Daniel considers the knife, then Wintric, and pauses. He steps toward the coffee table, places his hand on the knife’s handle, and glances back up at Wintric.

  Wintric sees his son’s small fingers on the black handle. He inhales and holds the air in. The room comes alive, brighter, the same peripheral illumination Wintric encountered once while bathing Daniel as a newborn. He let Daniel slip under the water, and for a few seconds he left his helpless son there, submerged and floundering, while the air lit up around him. He struggled to name the rush he felt that day in the moments before he saw his hands reach down into the sink and lift his son upright. Now, with Daniel’s grip on the knife, no words arrive, only this tragic high.

  Wintric’s temples pound and his eyes lose focus. He envisions his son picking up the knife and digging the blade into his own hand, the blood there, holes in hands, crucifixion, nails, roofing, falling from the McIntires’ roof last fall, how he had time to think before crashing down onto the cinderblock fence, how the back brace pressed him tight. He had to explain to people that the brace wasn’t from his time overseas but his foot was.

  Daniel holds the knife straight out now, a miniature sword. He stabs a half foot of air and looks at Wintric.

  “Walk around,” Wintric says.

  Daniel strides to the window and surveys the street, then turns and points the sharp blade at the television, then the rocking chair—he grins—then at a honeymoon photo of Wintric and Kristen at Lake Tahoe, then back at the wooden coffee table. Daniel sticks the knife’s point into the wood, enough to catch, then pushes down, leaning with his small shoulder, and abruptly loses balance; his hand slips forward, running down the knife’s handle and the blade’s safe backside.

  “You slipped there, son. Watch. You’re learning the wrong thing.”

  Wintric picks up the knife and holds the blade toward his son.

  “This is sharp. Sharp means hurt.”

  Daniel turns away.

  “You don’t care.”

  Daniel turns back, blinks, and Wintric grabs his son by the back of the neck, yanks him forward, lifts his chin up, and forces the blade to the front of his son’s neck.

  “Daa,” Daniel moans, stiffening.

  Wintric moves the blade over to the flesh above his son’s collarbone and places the tip’s razorlike half inch over his son’s carotid. He closes his eyes and tries to ignore the white light filling in around him, attempts to feel his son’s pulse through the blade and handle. Nothing. Daniel gasps, and the slight jerk of his body wakes Wintric, now opening his eyes and repositioning the knife where Daniel’s Adam’s apple will grow in, now guiding the blade up and down, shaving at the thin skin there.

  “Sharp,” Wintric says, then nabs his son’s left wrist and flips his hand over. “Sharp,” he says, and he pushes the tip of the blade into his son’s palm. Daniel falls to the floor, crying.

  “Calm down,” Wintric says, and he rises, strides to the kitchen, and returns with a Band-Aid. The rush of guilt assails him, then backs off, and his hands shake. “Daddy loves you,” he says to his son, and he licks the small drop of blood away and attaches the Band-Aid. “Play with knives, but be careful. Understand?”

  Daniel looks away.

  “Say yes,” Wintric says, tightening his grip. He grabs his son’s ears and squeezes.

  “Daa.”

  “Say yes,” Wintric says, nodding up and down. “Ye
s?”

  Daniel nods.

  “Good.”

  The seven veterans stand and spit and scratch in their military uniforms at the Collins Pine lumberyard parking lot, waiting for the Fourth of July parade to begin. They touch and straighten their pressed uniforms, and after a truck backfires one veteran successfully fights off a flashback to the past by imagining a nude Angelina Jolie. Here in this northern California small-town haven, there are no mortars, no IEDs, no bullshit commander, no Arabic. Those days are long gone for them, passed to others crouched on the other side of the world, waiting for someone to say stop, to come home, and to walk in their own parades.

  One young soldier is missing both arms, her sleeves hanging flat and pinned to her sides. She nods at her new boyfriend and he swigs a Coors Light and tosses the silver can to the ground. Wintric and an airman in the group will soon showcase their limps as they stroll along the straight avenue.

  Each of the seven is a recent veteran, not long back from Afghanistan or Iraq, save one Vietnam-era graybeard who hasn’t missed a Chester independence parade in twenty years. Their group is sandwiched in front by a flatbed truck carrying the high school’s small jazz band and behind by a dozen 4-H kids holding photos of fattened-up cows, goats, pigs. The sky is clear, except for a single line of clouds that could pass for a contrail. Douglas firs and cedars surround the paved lot, and a paramedic kneels off to the side in the summer grass. He rubs his face, then squints.

  A pair of old, smiling women wearing T-shirts with a cursive Lake Almanor on the front walk up to the group and pause.

  “When do you go back?”

  “We’re all veterans.”