Jesse Goolsby - I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them

On the eleventh hole of the Broadmoor’s West Course, Armando clips his tee shot off to the left and the white ball splashes into a pond. Early afternoon and the clouds have begun to gather over the peaks. He reaches into his bag for another ball, but he’s out. He’s a poor golfer, which he accepts, but he still waits a second before asking his mother for one of her balls. She used to be a scratch player but now carries a four handicap. “My car-crash four,” she calls it. She still maintains an effortless swing, but there’s a hitch now when the weight transfers to her damaged left leg, as if she tries to stop everything a split second before it happens.

Armando’s mother wears a blue visor and a form-fitting white polo. She is thirty-six years old and attractive, her slim waist and long hair often a target of silent male acknowledgment. Armando notices the minor nervousness of the two strangers who play with them. One wears a bright yellow shirt. The other, he overhears, is a retired Air Force Academy economics professor. Mr. Yellow Shirt shifts his gaze to the sky and smirks each time Armando’s mother flattens her back and sticks out her butt during her preshot routine.

Armando’s parents married when his father was twenty-two and his mother nineteen. He was a return missionary from England, smart enough to showcase a sliver of his bad-boy status by drinking Coke and growing long sideburns. His mother was a sophomore at Cornell. Within a year of their marriage she was pregnant with Armando. His father never finished his studies at Brigham Young, opting for a decent-paying job in the diamond business, but his mother keeps her framed diploma in their study on the wall above their new Apple computer.

While always weary of the attention his mother’s beauty receives, Armando is proud of her golf talent when they are alone on the course, but he’s not thrilled to be humbled in front of strangers — including a stranger who responds to “Colonel”—by asking his mother for a ball, which he knows will be a pink Slazenger.

“Need one, Mom,” he says.

His mother opens the side of her golf bag and reaches in, and he sees a gun among the golf balls — his father’s black 9-millimeter. The Colonel and Yellow Shirt don’t notice, and Armando’s body clenches.

“In the ancient days these used to be made by stuffing goose feathers in a leather pouch,” his mother says, impersonating her husband’s voice. She fingers the ball before tossing it over. “Swing hard.” She grins.

The rest of the round Armando catches himself staring at the Ping logo on his mother’s bag, thinking about the weapon behind the light-blue fabric. He loses two more of his mother’s golf balls and each time watches as she unzips the bag and chooses a replacement.

On the way home he works up the courage to ask about the handgun, but his mother strikes first. “Tell me about Marie. How much should I be worried?”

That night he and his mother sit at the kitchen counter eating chocolate pudding.

“You had a gun today,” he says. “In your bag.”

She swallows a bite, then takes her spoon and swirls the remaining pudding in her bowl. Her elbows rest on the polished granite slab.

“You never know,” she says. The tone in her voice signals the end, but Armando presses.

“For bear?”

“You never know.”

“Where else?”

“Let’s see,” she says. “I carry a smaller one pretty much everywhere. I don’t care if you know, but don’t tell your sister. Got it?”

“To Broncos games? Supermarket?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She spoons up some pudding and eats it.

“I grew up with guns, and you drive around long enough and you see bad situations. It always comes across as this random thing, but it’s not. Do you understand?”

“I guess,” he says, mouth full.

His mother stares above him. “I never want a fair fight. I don’t understand why anyone would.”

“Yeah. That makes sense.”

“Now eat your dessert or I will.”

Armando spoons the pudding to his mouth and peeks over at his now quiet mother. Her face has thinned, and Armando wonders what she’s thinking about: Guns? Fights? Pudding? Although his dad is the talker, almost all decisions for the family end with his mother’s approval: trips, major purchases, allowances, movies. This power enchants Armando and his sister — their father talks and talks and talks, then, in the end, waits for their mother’s nod, smile, or grimace. When she was in the coma the family would encounter unsettling swaths of silence after a debate, no matter how minor, before realizing that her approval was absent. As Armando thinks about it now, he wonders if he’ll always seek her consent, especially in challenging times, and it comforts him to think that he will. He doesn’t yet know what he’ll ask her, or what adult choices he’ll face, but he hears his mother’s confident voice in the space before future difficult decisions. Next to him, she stares beyond her bowl at the gray and white and black swirls of granite. Armando sits and listens to the sound inside his mouth as he swallows his pudding.

Under a cloudy and warm autumn afternoon, Armando and his father rest on the corner of South River Boulevard and West Walnut Street in Independence, Missouri. The manicured grass surrounding them is a gorgeous, shiny green. Armando’s mother and sister are in one of the Temple Lot’s visitor centers.

“We’ll never know if all this is true unless we find out it isn’t,” his father says. “But if we’re right, God is supposed to come down from the heavens and land right here. We’ll get the message, drop our stuff, and congregate at this exact spot. It’ll be busy.” He breathes in. “I tend to believe it. You’d think God would choose Tahiti or the Yucatán. But that’s too easy.” He scratches his forehead. “Missouri. Damn, it’ll take God coming down here to get me to relocate. Lots of fat people running around.”

“What about Jerusalem?”

“Jerusalem sounds more important, but it’s not. You know, someone in Jerusalem right now is high on dope or banging a prostitute or reading the Bible or sharpening a knife.”

Armando, confused, notices the perfect mower lines in the grass.

“Come on, Kansas City or Jerusalem or Berlin — it won’t matter. I wouldn’t mind touring Germany.”

A city bus stops near them, then drives away. A man walks by with an ice cream sandwich. The scent of fertilizer floats around them.

“Do we have to walk here?” Armando asks.

“That’s the rumor.”

“Is that written down?”

“Good point. I doubt you were trying to make a point, but still.”

“But we have to walk?”

“Walk to salvation with all our friends.”

“People in Europe are screwed.”

“Good point.”

“But what would happen if you didn’t? Say we drove here. Is God or Jesus going to tell us to go back home?”

“Put down your lendings. Put down your lendings.” He laughs. “‘The Fourth Alarm.’”

“What?”

“Cheever. You’ll get to him one day.”

“Who?”

“If the difference between driving and walking to Missouri is the litmus test for eternal life, then most are in trouble. Yes.”

“So the prophet will let us know when?” Armando says.

“I figure when we see the red chariot flying in the sky, we’ll start our trek.”

“With bolts of lightning.”

“No, you’re confusing mythology with Revelation.” His father balls his fists. “You’re too young sometimes. Soon you won’t be. It’s my fault. I’ve wished you older.”

“I know the difference.”

“Good.”

Armando watches his father pick at the grass between his legs, then toss it at his shoes. His father does this repeatedly, picking away a small circle of lawn.