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

by Jesse Goolsby

  Before she leaves the auditorium, her aunt hands her a letter.

  “From your parents,” she says. “Please don’t be mad, but I’ve been keeping them up to date.”

  Later that night she opens the letter. It’s her father’s handwriting.

  Mia,

  Mom and I are so very proud of you. It’s impossible for me to tell you how much. You are a great example for Taylor. Aunt Kathy tells us of your success, how Taylor is the smartest and most beautiful girl in the county. I should have written this letter years ago. You are always welcome here. You are wanted here. Things are different from what you remember. Better. Much better. There’s not a right or appropriate way to say we’re sorry. We regret a lot. We also remember our greatest joys are when we had you close. What I’m trying to say is that I can understand why you’d be angry. Rightfully so, Mia, but I hope the time will come when you will let us back into your life. You need to know your mother isn’t well. I don’t want to say too much, only that she may not have long to live and I wanted you to know. Her health has me thinking a lot about my life, about our family. Things I’d change and things I wouldn’t. Mia, I know it was tough for you that I was gone when you were young. I’d like to think that my time away was worth it somehow, but I’m not sure I’ll ever get there. I used to think that my choices weren’t about loyalties. That’s what I’d tell myself, but I know that’s not true. There are only choices, and I chose a job that took me away from you, your mother, and your sister, even after the accident. I don’t know what that says about me, or the old me, but I want you to know there was an honest belief in what I was doing. It may not make sense to me now, but it did then. Mia, that may not make it any easier for you, but it is what keeps me from heading back to some dark places. I don’t know if I ever was a soldier or a father. With every day that passes I feel I know myself less.

  Mia, your mother and I are back at church and it’s helping in the ways we’ve needed for a long time. I am more like my father than I care to admit, and I hope that in moments of happiness you find some connection to me or your mother.

  Mia, this is the most important part—we love you. Please, when the time is right for you and Taylor, please come and visit.

  Dad

  One summer, a couple months after Mia hears that her mother has died, she decides to drive east across the state with sixteen-year-old Taylor to visit her father during Fourth of July weekend.

  When Mia tells Kevin about the trip, he asks to come along—he expects to, as they’ve been together four years—but Mia tells him no, and after a couple days of pouting he comes around to the idea and helps them pack their Honda.

  Mia and Taylor leave on a Saturday, and an hour out of Cortez, Mia chooses to take a back way, and when they arrive in Woodland Park, she turns the car north on Highway 67 toward Deckers.

  Taylor has been unusually silent, so Mia puts on some country music and daydreams about her father, but all that comes to her is his wheelchair, memories of a green army uniform with shiny pins, and disappointing departures.

  Their route soon takes them along a small roadside stream. Mia remembers this place, and she tells Taylor about coming up here, describing the time she saw a bear, then the rock dam, and something moves in her, and she slows down at every turnoff, searching for her pile of rocks, her ninety-percent dam, but after a number of frustrating slowdowns and pull-offs, she keeps the car on the pavement, and she asks her quiet daughter what two things she would grab from a burning house, and Taylor takes a breath, then brings her hands to her face.

  Before Taylor can answer, Mia considers her own response, imagines their Cortez apartment on fire, the two-room place alight, and she watches herself rush into the home to save Taylor, but when she enters, the place is empty, only fire and smoke.

  Mia hears Taylor’s voice, hears the words I’m pregnant, but nothing happens for a while, just the mountain road in front of them, leading them both to a place and a father Mia used to know.

  15

  Wyoming Is a Gun in His Waistband

  WINTRIC HOPES IT’S the girl who arrives. Let it be the girl. Let her walk the dirt road. Put her in pink pants. Put her arms up in a V. Put her in skin. Give her bones and blood. Give him her chest to target. Let him see the line of the bullet all the way through her heart. Scope that chest. Breathe that power. Squeeze that trigger.

  The tomatoes are wrapped in a plastic bag on the seat next to him. He feels the onset signs—the skull-pounding pressure and muscle lock—here in the parking lot of the Holiday market. The anxiety and warped recall are near. He’s long forgotten the moment, years ago, when the memories joined the physical pain. He reaches beneath his seat and uncaps the plastic bottle. Although he has two pills in his system, he slips four more into his mouth. They’ll take a while to work, so he waits.

  He doesn’t have a choice of scene, but the girl he’ll be able to process. He can tap into the decades-old mayhem and the I-die-or-you-die judgment. He can access his flurry of decisions—to squeeze the trigger, to raise his rifle, to don his uniform, to sign up for the army, to leave his hometown. Let it be the girl. Even though she’ll puncture the peace of a Wednesday afternoon, he can deal. With the drugs he can deal with a silver vest and pink pants. He was a boy then. He’s convinced himself of that. It should matter that he was there to deliver justice for attacks on American soil, but outside of a few crazies, all he saw were people searching for food. His mind grinds as it has for years: What do you call someone who kills? Murderer. What do you call someone who kills a girl? Hero. Let it be the girl. He attempts to guide his horror there, but he can’t conjure the dirt road, Big Dax and Torres at his side.

  No matter what comes it won’t be easy, but the girl is easier than the darkness, the smell of burning trash, a push in the back, ripping flesh. Wintric won’t close his eyes. Darkness takes him there. He attempts to focus, to stay here in the parking lot, in Chester. The tomatoes are next to him. He’ll wash them when he gets home. The steering wheel is in front of him. He grabs it. A bread truck pulls to the back of the store for delivery. Kristen is in the store working. It’s almost time for her to come home.

  Wintric sits in the tenth and highest row of Chester High School’s bleachers and wonders if Daniel will throw the next pitch at the batter’s head. Since the time Daniel started Little League, Wintric has preached that he should throw a couple wild pitches each game to keep the batters nervous about where the next one might end up. This method worked well during Little League, but Daniel, now seventeen years old, with a fastball that reaches the low eighties, has the control to aim his “wild” pitches, and when appropriately pissed off, as he is today, down 4–0, the heaters come in high and tight. Just last week Daniel cracked a kid’s helmet.

  The batter digs his back foot in, and Wintric senses the energy in the afternoon, unsure what to do with it. Back from rehab and clean for a month, he rubs his hands together, still acclimating to the sharp sensation of unmedicated touch. The feeling keeps him busy, his hands moving from his pockets to his hips to the back of his neck, from sitting to standing to sitting to walking, nothing ever comfortable or calm enough. The acupuncture, meditation, and aspirin do nothing for his bad back and right hip, although they have helped decrease the frequency of his devastating memories. Most of his waking hours his bones feel misplaced and heavy. The counselors told him that this was what recovery felt like, that the promise of sobriety isn’t about comfort, it’s about being present, facing the moment aware, but Wintric is convinced that awareness isn’t worth the price of pain, at least not yet. It’s not like the drugs make him blind. He could be here, at this exact spot, present but pain-free, and still watch Daniel drill this kid with the next pitch.

  Wintric stands and pockets his hands.

  In front of him, the outfielders shade in a bit too much for the three-hole batter from Greenville. The infield grass is mostly yellow, and along the outfield fence thin pockets of April snow melt. Several of the town’s homes sti
ll have their fireplaces going, and the smell of burning wood mixes with early pollen.

  Daniel adjusts his cap low, then spits. A few inches short of six feet and thick across the shoulders, he readies himself on the mound and peers in at the catcher. His windup is slow and compact, his hands waist-high as he starts his move, rocking back, then upright, left leg rising, right arm reaching back low, then whipping forward, the baseball delivered hard and cutting inside, the batter turning just in time, turning his back toward the sting, the flat smack of a fastball to the kidneys and the collective groan of the thirty people in the stands. The batter feels the pain, arches his back, and his hands go there as he falls to his knees.

  Wintric studies Daniel, who has taken two steps toward the plate. Straight-faced, he runs his pitching hand along the side of his thigh and studies the batter, who fights to hide his distress. Wintric searches for the slightest smile on his son, a glance his way in the bleachers, but Daniel stands still, now chatting with the catcher while the batter rises slowly and twists and trots down to first.

  Wintric wasn’t surprised when it was Daniel who picked him up from rehab down in Sacramento. Kristen’s threat to leave had forced him to go in the first place, and the threat still retains its tangible power as he curses the aspirin bottle three times a day. She hasn’t asked a single question about his time with the counselors or what he confessed or learned in the small group sessions. All she cares about is that he’s clean, that he’ll stay clean. On the way home from Sacramento, Daniel was exuberant, and he flung questions at Wintric one after another: How was the food? Not bad, actually. What was the worst you saw? Meth—never screw with meth, son. Did you catch any Giants games on TV? God, no power in the middle of the lineup. How do you feel? Hollowed-out but happy. We going deer hunting this fall? We’ll put in for out-of-state, get us a big one.

  Daniel drove and they rode 99 up through Yuba City, Gridley, and Chico, through the miles of almond orchards, before they turned northeast on 32 into the mountains. Wintric listened to his son go on and on, asking questions, then shooting off on tangents about his ex-girlfriend, about an English teacher who had it in for him, about maybe becoming a firefighter after finishing school. Wintric realized that he knew so little about his son and finally wanted to know everything. He understood then that his son had always worshipped him, and still did at seventeen, that there was no justice or redemption in that. His son didn’t know him at all—he loved the idea of a dad and not the father that Wintric had been. It was pathetic and beautiful and easy. Sitting next to Daniel, Wintric was suddenly grateful and scared that Daniel would forgive all of his future sins.

  In the stands Wintric rubs his hands together and hears a logging truck downshift beyond the outfield fence. His fingertips and scalp ache, and he shakes his head at the thought of forty tiny needles pressed into the skin along his vertebrae. Will he always yearn for the drugs? Even now, watching his boy play ball? If he could only leave his body somewhere else for a couple hours and come back to this place. He fights the thought, but he knows he can get the pills a quarter mile from the bleachers where he stands. He remembers the address. He saw the guy at the gas station two days ago. He has enough money in his wallet.

  From two rows down, someone from Greenville says, “The kid meant to do it. Look at him. Didn’t even say sorry.”

  The mother of Chester High’s third baseman says, “Come on. It slipped,” and glances back at Wintric and grins.

  One of the counselors had bright orange hair, which annoyed Wintric, but the guy, Jeff, had been to the far bottom of heroin and back up and he talked straight and cussed, so Wintric listened. Jeff took Wintric on walks down to the American River, where they’d watch the whitewater rafters and where Jeff repeated his sign-up message: “Pain isn’t a fucking choice. Neither are the flashbacks. They’re there. Comfort, happiness, all that weird shit we say when we mean ‘not in pain,’ that’s a choice. A hard choice. If you ever stop choosing it, you’re fucked. Optimists are deluded but sign up. You want in that club. Whatever it takes, sign up.”

  To Wintric, Jeff’s speeches came off as too simplistic, even juvenile, but the guy was adamant and would occasionally sneak him a Lucky Strike. Wintric didn’t notice anyone else getting the American River treatment, and Jeff kept reminding Wintric that he was one of the blessed ones: a family waiting for him, not suicidal, no heroin or meth.

  On the mound, Daniel wears his baseball hat low on his forehead as Wintric used to do when he was a boy playing Little League centerfield. Daniel licks his fingers and twists the baseball in his hand. The crowd has settled down, but everyone is anxious for this first pitch after the wild pitch. Was it really an accident? Has the pitcher lost control?

  When Wintric returned home, Kristen told him to come to her at the supermarket and interrupt her whenever he needed help, but he holds on to the beginning of newfound pride in not having gone to her once since his return to town. If Kristen ever does ask him, he’ll tell her why he’ll never relapse. He’ll tell her about his small group sessions, how he saw the whole spectrum from lifelong fucked-up meth heads to three-drinks-a-night country-club housewives. It didn’t matter whose turn it was to speak; the stories all ended up at the same fear—being alone.

  When he thought about what he would say to the group when it was his turn to speak, he expected to bring up the war, how much of the war he wasn’t sure, but as he sat silently in the folding chair day after day, it dawned on him that his time in Afghanistan was nearly twenty years past. Something about the number twenty jarred him: twenty years of waking up, living, sleeping, repeat and repeat. Maybe it wasn’t the war or the girl he shot or the rape or the foot, or maybe it was that, but twenty years of other shit as well. Maybe it wasn’t cumulative, not twenty years, not even one year, perhaps just twenty-four-hour segments as they passed. Maybe an hour or a second or how he felt right then. How was he supposed to know? Where’s the turn? The bottom? The point where things start getting better and always get better? Twenty years later and what’s new? The hundreds of roofs he’s nailed down, shingle by shingle. A son that’s not like him in any meaningful way. A wife he loves threatening to leave him—he was at the sink washing tomatoes when she grabbed his arm, gently at first, then harder. Still in her Holiday market clothes; her mascara had run, and she wouldn’t let him look away as she spoke.

  The next batter, the cleanup hitter, a muscled boy who hit a double his first time up, walks to the plate and pauses outside the batter’s box and studies the third-base coach. If Daniel hits this kid, there will probably be a fight.

  When Wintric rose to speak to the small group in rehab, he didn’t know what he’d say, but Jeff was there, and that helped somehow, and he heard himself confess: holding his son for the first time after his birth while high on Percocet. Loading up on Oxy before going to a party for Kristen when she was promoted to general manager at the Holiday market. Dropping pills before sex with her. These were moments when elation should have been enough, and may have been, if he’d just let them happen. As bad, he didn’t know what hurting meant anymore. Sure, his back and hip had been giving him problems for years, even after the foot stopped, and sure, the flashes of war hit hard and unpredictably, but what was legitimate pain versus haunting versus routine? And he loves his wife more than anything, more than drugs or pain, and maybe it was only now that he understood that they were all linked, that he should have understood long ago. And he knew he was talking a good game in Sacramento, hours from home, coming clean, promising the world, but he feared what all of them feared. He now knew that the pain of the war, of the past two decades, of yesterday, would never recede all the way; the hurt simply finds new things to infect, things he has always loved—Christmas lights, interstate signs, hunting campfires, baseball games—but happiness and release also live somewhere among these things. He knew it was just a matter of finding them.

  Wintric moves down the bleachers over near the Chester dugout and fingers, then squeezes, the chain-l
inked backstop. The outfielders have moved back, and the bruised boy at first takes two steps off the bag and waits.

  Someone yells, “Throw strikes.”

  The cleanup hitter steps into the batter’s box and toes his Nike cleats up close to the inner line, right next to the plate, but then, in short scoots, works his way back, further back from the plate than the first two times he was up.

  Wintric sees it: this boy on his heels, the horrible recognition that he’s not in control, the safe space on the outer edge of the plate. And Wintric looks out to his son and wonders what he knows.

  Where’s the next pitch going, Daniel?

  The good nerves in Wintric’s body spark, and he doesn’t question whether he’s choosing this or how long it will last. He squeezes the fence and brings his face close and looks through the holes. He is close enough now to see Daniel’s eyes underneath his hat, close enough to see Daniel pause and look at him. There’s no nod or wink, only three seconds when his son’s eyes meet his.

  Northbound on Highway 32, two miles past Potato Patch campground during the summer season, Wintric and Daniel stare at an injured, thrashing deer blocking the road. Its back haunches smashed, the panicked doe scratches at the double yellow lines with her front legs, but she can’t stand.

  The man who hit the deer sits in his car with the windows up. The front left bumper is dented, but it’s drivable. He rests his forehead on the steering wheel, unable to look.