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

What Dax can’t imagine as he drifts off to sleep is what will actually happen — that he’ll receive a postcard from Alston nine years from now, and on the front a photo of a mountain lake with an island golfing green right in the middle of the water. On the bottom: Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. And the handwritten words on the back: Yeah, Idaho. Shoot first. A. Closing his eyes on his dark room, Dax can’t fathom that he’ll receive the postcard in Afghanistan on his second tour there, or that later, on a dirt plain, he’ll peer through his rifle’s scope as a girl sprints toward him. So tonight he visualizes Alston in Florida; Janelle on a beach in a two-piece bathing suit; hurt Janelle in the night grass holding her stomach, her long naked legs, somehow inviting and cursed; Notorious B.I.G.; Janelle in a well-lit, cavernous store, an ELECTRONICS sign overhead.

She stands at the keyboards, alone. She’s picked a new model with a large CASIO on the side, and she turns the volume up and presses middle C over and over. Using just her right hand, she keeps to the white keys first, “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” then “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” easy and boring but still magic, the connected sounds from her fingers; then she moves to the black keys, the tone shifting, somehow ominous and tender at once. She doesn’t recall a song for the black keys, so she presses each one in order, working her way left to right, then back down again. She starts into the one Nutcracker song she knows, “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” playing slowly, biding her time. Every now and then she peeks over her shoulder for a ticked-off employee or a one-in-a-million keyboard seeker, but as always no one notices her, so she decides to stay and play until someone does.

TWO MONTHS AFTER the car bomb in Kabul, Big Dax sees nothing but dirt and a road extending from him bisecting more dirt. Two miles away, an Afghan town of a thousand he can’t make out through the windswept dust.

The checkpoint he mans is set up for car inspections, but there have been only six in the past two days. Two weeks on this duty and Big Dax, Torres, and Wintric are bored — they oversee this lightly traveled road, more donkeys than cars, and the loaded donkeys and their handlers often circumvent the checkpoint, far enough off the roadway to ease the nerves but close enough for the men to scope with their M4s.

Torres and Big Dax are a month away from heading home. The invisible clock ticks in their minds, but they refuse to talk about time. Torres has asked his family to stop sending care packages, since they won’t arrive until after his return, and something about that absence of the tangible — no cookies, no kids’ handwritten letters on the way to him — fills him with equal parts longing and dread. His wife, Anna, listening to the advice of the spouses back at Fort Carson, has been sending e-mails with reminders of their courtship and has attached photos of the Royal Gorge Bridge, Michelle’s ice cream shop downtown, Bishop’s Castle with its dragon head, Breckenridge, the master bedroom in the new house, a self-portrait in leopard-print lingerie.

Big Dax hasn’t told anyone, but he has submitted his separation paperwork. In moments of admitted weakness he already allows himself to daydream about leaving Afghanistan and Fort Carson behind and returning to Rutherford, getting his own place, the Meadowlands, the Jets, the Lincoln Tunnel, cargo shorts and T-shirts every day, how everything can once again become routine.

Big Dax spits and performs a short in-place jog to keep his legs alive. Behind a wall of sandbags Torres listens to early Pearl Jam and writes in his journal while Wintric spits tobacco into an empty Dr Pepper bottle and plays hearts with a lieutenant they all like. Wintric has won four games in a row since the lieutenant told him the 49ers suck.

“Call this payback for Montana and Young,” Wintric says as he shuffles the cards.

“Luck,” says the LT, wiping at his eyes. “And I mean they suck now. At least you have nice childhood memories.”

“They’ll be back.”

Torres uncovers an ear.

“Big Dax, what up?”

“Ass nothing,” he says.

“Beautiful,” says the LT.

“Not beautiful,” says Wintric, placing down a ten of spades. “Not beautiful. Need a little something every now and then. Nothing crazy, just something. I’m tired of beating you at this game. Need something to find. To do. We’re looking for nothing at all.”

“It’s true,” says the LT. “We’re looking for nothing. Absolutely nothing. That’s the game. And after a year of finding nothing, we leave. That’s the best way.”

“That nothing happens?” Wintric spits into the bottle.

“Yes.”

“That shit isn’t in the recruiting video.”

“You could be in Iraq.”

“Fuck Iraq.”

“How much you wanna bet that our boys are sitting there saying, ‘You could be in fucking Afghanistan where no one cares that a war is going on’?”

“No one is saying that,” says Torres.

“Sure, LT,” says Wintric. “But our job is to put holes in bad people. I’m realistic. I’d take an easy kill. Get one of these ragheads into the open. I don’t need no gray-area shit.”

“You’re wrong.” He pauses. “Our job has always been to unkill.” The LT inhales, feels the rattling phlegm, suctions it up to his throat, and spits.

“What? No word games, LT.”

“It’s easy. We unbomb and unshoot billions of people every day. There’s nothing we can’t destroy. Call up the bombers, the ICBMs. Punch in the code. What do you think the air force is for? We can end this world if we want, right now.”

“That’s fucked-up beautiful,” Big Dax says. “You’ve practiced.”

“That’s why we’re saviors. I’m not shitting you. This is serious. We save the entire world every single day. And we’re kind as hell, because a lot more people deserve to die than we kill. Remember that shit and you’ll sleep.”

“I’m sleeping fine,” says Wintric. “And if Bin Laden walked up right now, I’d happily blow his fucking head off. There’s no gray area there.”

“In a mountain somewhere, or Pakistan,” Torres says. “He deserves to die a hundred times over, but that’s one committed man. Whole world searching for you, millions on the table, and no word.”

“He’s dead,” Big Dax says. “Smartest thing they ever did was not to talk about his death. We’ll spend billions more searching for a dead man.”

“He’s not dead,” Torres says. “We’d know.”

“Torres, really, man. The smartest thing they could do is burn his body, spread the ashes, and walk away. It’s the story, the myth that has the power. They aren’t idiots. You expect a press release?”

“Everyone thinks they’re dumb shits,” says the LT. “Big part of our problem is that they’re as smart as us, but we can’t admit that.”

“They won’t burn him,” says Torres. “Muslims don’t cremate.”

“Only when we help them with a bomb from above,” says Wintric.

“Whatever,” says Big Dax. “They buried him, then. The point is, I doubt we’ll ever know. No Hussein hiding-in-a-hole shit.”

“We’ll know,” says Torres.

The LT coughs, spits. He draws more phlegm, spits again.

“Fuck me,” he says, and pinches his nose.

“Jesus, LT. Get some meds.”

“Burn pits, man. Call me in five, ten years. It won’t be good. The odds say we won’t be shot. You know that, right?”

“I know.”

“We breathe in the smoke instead,” the LT says. “No meds for this crap.”

“What we burning in those things beside our own shit?”