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

He grabs his trombone and walks downstairs to the couch with his head hanging. His father and sister have pulled up chairs. His mother is covered with blankets, and they’ve propped up her head. She stares off into the distance above, somewhere in the air below the vaulted ceiling.

“Mom,” he says.

“Chicago,” his mother whispers.

He shakes his head at his father.

“Play anything,” his father says. “It’s okay.”

“Anyone. Know. What. Time. It. Really,” she says.

“Mom, I can’t.”

His sister nods at him. His father holds his palms out.

“Play. Anything.”

He brings the instrument to his trembling lips, smells the slide oil, breathes in, and exhales hard into the mouthpiece. A metallic belch echoes in the room. He lowers the instrument.

“Dad,” he says.

“Chicago,” his mother whispers.

“Play. Just play, son.” His father walks over to him and lifts the trombone up. “You can do it.”

“Chicago.”

Armando feels the humiliation, the impossibility, and the mouthpiece on his lips. He doesn’t know the song. He inhales through his nose. His father mouths “Anything.” Armando closes his eyes and thinks he may be able to get out “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and he opens his eyes. His father mouths, “Anything, son, anything.” Armando closes his eyes and blows.

Two in the afternoon, and Armando and Marie leave school early, drive up to the Air Force Academy, and watch cadets fall from the sky. Adjacent to the overlook, a pedestaled T-38 jet points skyward. Facing east, traffic zips by on I-25, and high above is a slow-circling airplane. Wave after wave of tiny dots escape the plane in five-second increments before blooming blue parachutes. On the other side of the lookout, a group of tourists take photos, their bus hulking behind them.

Marie has her notebook out and is drawing landscapes, mainly high-desert-cacti scenes. She leaves a four-inch-by-four-inch square at the bottom right of each page for poetry. Armando has his hands in his pockets. He watches the level airfield and watches each cadet’s impact — a couple graceful, upright landings, but for most a weirdly managed feet-to-hip crash. Somehow they gather their chutes and walk away uninjured.

Although he lives just twenty minutes from this place, it’s only his third time on the base, the other two to watch the Thunderbirds perform at the academy graduation, but when Marie saw him with his head buried in the crook of his arm during fifth period, she tapped his back and said, “Let’s go.” She didn’t plan to bring him here, but driving north they noticed the parachute-spotted sky and pulled off the interstate.

Marie finishes a drawing and leans over to show it to Armando.

“What’s the first word that comes to your mind?” she asks.

“Water.”

“Too many cacti?”

“I like cactus.”

“Have you ever seen the big ones?”

“Sure.”

“The big ones are almost extinct. Phoenix and Tucson and places like that cut them down. There’s some at White Tanks by my grandma’s house.”

Armando stares at Marie and nods.

“You always stare at my birthmark,” she says.

“Not always.”

“Always.”

“I like it.”

“You don’t like it. You say that so I won’t feel bad.”

“Am I allowed to like it?”

“I don’t know. There’s no way to get rid of it. Anything I do will make it worse.”

Armando looks back at the crash-landing cadets. A pressure grows near the back of his head and he squeezes the base of his neck.

The plane has circled back high above. New dots fall and bloom.

“My mom’s growing a beard,” he says. “You don’t want to come over.”

“No.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“I’ll come over. I will.”

“Listen to me. You don’t have to.”

“If you want me to.”

“No. You shouldn’t.”

“I’ll come. Please. Just tell me.”

Armando kicks at the sidewalk and his shoe squeaks.

“She doesn’t care that she’s growing a beard.” He wipes at his cheek. “I want her to care about that. Shouldn’t that bother her?”

“I don’t know.”

“How is she supposed to get better? We have to feed her.”

“I’m sorry.”

“All we do is sit her up. She opens her mouth. That’s it. We don’t even move her to the bed.”

“Maybe she wants to be there. It’s comfortable for her. She can see you.”

“But she should stand up. How is she going to get better when she never stands? She has legs. We can help her get stronger.”

Marie clutches the notebook to her chest. Armando kicks the ground.

“You’re helping,” she says.

“All we do is feed her.”

“I don’t know.”

“No one knows. That’s the problem. Why can’t she stand with our help?”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think that?”

“Armando.”

“She wants to stand, Marie. We’ll help her. My dad on one side, me on the other. Lift up. It’s that easy.”

In the near distance a blue plane lands and idles on the runway while a new group of jumpers loads up. Through the air, the low hum of the plane’s propellers. Behind the airfield buildings, northbound interstate traffic has slowed to a crawl.

Marie strokes the cover of her notebook. She looks down at the ground, over to Armando’s shoes jabbing at the pavement. His black Nikes. The white swoosh a misshapen smile, a slanted J, an ice skate.

A week left of school, restlessness everywhere. Armando’s government class watches the television as a Colorado jury sentences Timothy McVeigh to death for the Oklahoma City bombing. McVeigh is largely emotionless, but many of the jurors appear tired and squeamish.

His teacher mutes the television. “The sad part is, they’ll make it as comfortable as possible.”

Marie’s voice brings him back. “Who’s that?” she asks.

On the television screen, two elderly people weep uncontrollably behind McVeigh’s lawyers.

“Everyone has parents,” says the teacher.

The class moves on to a halfhearted discussion of the judicial system. Armando daydreams about a clear Oklahoma morning on which he spots the moving truck, McVeigh at the helm, at a stoplight two blocks from the unbombed building. He imagines pulling a gun from a shoulder holster and putting a bullet in each McVeigh kneecap and one in each shoulder. When the cops show, he holds up a photo with the alternative, no Armando Torres intervention — a gutted building, 168 dead — and they proclaim him a hero and decide on the spot to keep the bullets in McVeigh, to take him to some dank garage and foster life and pain as long as possible.

That afternoon his father arrives at the school’s baseball field in the middle of PE. The sun shines and Armando stands in the dugout shade, joking with friends.

“Your dad,” someone says.

He watches his father slide through the gate in the outfield fence and step on the warning track. Armando stands and waves, but his father only nods, and Armando attempts to walk, but his legs lock up and he sits. His shoulders sag and he remembers to breathe as everything slows down. His father walks toward him, and it all seems to take too long, the length of the field, how many steps his father takes without getting any closer.

“Armando, your dad,” someone says.

As he hits second base, Armando’s father scratches his chest. The PE teacher meets him at the pitcher’s mound and the teacher nods his head and points at the dugout and stares.

Armando stands and hikes the dugout steps into the sunshine. The sky seems close.

His father crosses the base path and takes his son in his arms.