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

Nearby an old man unfurls a red-and-brown rug as the children gather around and join the limbless adults in prayer, their voices echoing off the valley walls.

“They know not what they say,” Torres says. Wintric guesses he means the children, repeating the chant they’ve heard since birth, but maybe he directs the jab at the entire group, kneeling and bowing and rising in unison.

“And they’ll kill that one before too long,” Big Dax says, nodding at a young man, maybe sixteen, standing and running his fingers through his dark hair as the others pray. “‘Motherfucking infidel’ is what the rest are thinking. They seem like they’re praying, but they’re begging for that dude to be hit by lightning.”

“He’s not praying,” Wintric says.

“Holy shit, Ellis,” Big Dax says. “You’re a genius.”

“But.”

“Think about it, brother,” says Torres.

“But the dude is… local.”

“Do you know there’s someone, right now, playing the trombone in Afghanistan?” says Torres.

“What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“There’s an Afghan right now, in this country, looking at porn,” says Torres. “Someone planting a bomb, reading Hemingway. Someone building a bridge, listening to Celine Dion, getting off, not praying.”

“Yep.”

“Don’t let it surprise you,” Torres says.

“Fine,” Wintric says.

“Not everyone wants to kill us,” Torres says.

“Seems like they do.”

“You haven’t been here long enough to say that. You haven’t done shit. You’re a baby.”

“I’m in this valley,” Wintric says.

“You’re a kid.”

“I’m here like you are.”

“You heard of the saying ‘Be polite, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet’?”

“No.”

“Too bad,” Torres says. “It’s some Marine shit, but it’s perfect.”

“Yep.”

“There are a ton of people praying that we all die,” Torres says. “Enough to keep us sharp.”

But Wintric has stopped listening. He eyes the young man combing his hair with his fingers as the others rise and bow, rise and bow, not twenty feet from him. The move is something Wintric performed a thousand times before his enlistment, and he raises his right hand and rubs the stubble on his shaved head, still sensing the phantom weight of his once-long hair. Wintric wants to know what the young man is thinking, wants to ask him how he can just stand there, doing nothing. Is he afraid? Bored? Something else? The young man scratches his crotch and the atmosphere of wonder lessens. Still, Wintric wants to rise and walk over to him, but he fights the impulse and stares at the grass between his knees. He digs a clump up and inspects the individual blades.

Wintric isn’t yet aware that Torres’s comment will stay with him: occasionally, in the future, when he witnesses something out of the ordinary — in this country or his own — he will think, Someone’s playing a trombone.

At last a C-130 lumbers overhead, drops a flagged transmitter, then circles back. High above, a parachute opens. Two crates full of prosthetic arms and legs float down to them. Torres recalls watching Air Force Academy cadets drift under blue parachutes, then he wonders out loud if the Afghans think Allah is a C-130 pilot, or the plane itself.

“Rain down the healing,” Torres says.

Big Dax says it’s all about personal will and raises his thick arms to the sky.

“Do they thank Allah for our bombs?” he asks.

Wintric stays quiet. He stares at the crease between his forearm and biceps, then fingers the skin there. At Fort Carson he saw soldiers with new carbon legs and arms, men and women, usually silent and alone, rubbing on their bodies, their stumps. He peers over and studies the armorless Humvee they will ride back to base. The hulking vehicle seems invincible, but he’s seen videos of convoy ambushes: the dark cloud, pressure shock, and heavy Humvees slamming back to earth as mangled coffins.

Wintric already longs for his 1985 Ford Bronco. He installed a six-inch lift, a tow kit, and oversized, gnarly mud tires. The tire-tread hum on the highway drove Kristen mad, but he would take her mudding, or farther still into the forest to fool around. Sometimes he’d take his revolver and throw lead at squirrels, paper plates, or posters of basketball players he used to hang in his room.

But here, deployed half a world away, his back-slung rifle has the safety on, and he doesn’t know when he’ll need to summon his shooting skill. He considers the menacing but helpless Humvee and hopes that when they’re done today, the dirt road will just be a dirt road.

Once the replacement body parts are sorted by limb, the three men help fit everyone. Most of the arms are too long or the wrong shade of skin, but the limbless smile, cry, hug the soldiers. After everyone has been fitted, a few artificial legs are left over, so the Americans send the confused villagers home with extras.

Before dark the soldiers climb into the Humvees, confirm emergency plans, coordinate with the other vehicles in their convoy, and start the engines. As they drive away, Big Dax rolls his window down and gives a thumbs-up to the newly limbed as they limp away, grappling with plastic legs piled high.

“Vote for us,” he yells.

A month and a half later, late on a hot July morning, red and yellow kites fly above Kabul. They veer and shake. One darts off, away, descending toward the roofs.

On a street corner, Big Dax, Torres, and Wintric scan the foot and auto traffic and swap stories. Smells of chai and lamb mix with exhaust from gridlocked vehicles. Wiping the sweat from his face an hour into their four-hour patrol, Torres oversells a harrowing skiing experience at Breckenridge. Someone whistles to their right before a car bomb explodes, the pressure fire blowing the men back.

Torres vomits on his boots and Wintric is knocked unconscious, then comes to with Big Dax cursing and dumping water onto his face before running off.

Bodies and flames, shit and screams litter the street. Dazed people run and stumble away.

Torres picks a scrap of metal out of his biceps, then reaches down to drag a silent girl away, and with his rescue yank the girl’s shoulder detaches, the surrounding skin separates, and her thin arm slides from her body.

A man runs in to help and Big Dax almost shoots. A bearded man in white linen snaps photos, steps over slithering bodies. He covers a charred corpse’s genitals with a blue cloth before clicking away at the carcass. He kicks the corpse before hurrying away.

Wintric tries to yell to him, but nothing comes out, and Wintric goes to walk, but nothing happens, and he feels wet inside and sees in waves. He screams but hears nothing, now aware that he is somehow trapped within his body.

Smoke and sky, someone firing a rifle into the air, then Big Dax, running nearby, waving at Wintric, saying something, nodding, thumbs up, then reaching far down, lifting him up.

Ambulances arrive in the dissipating smoke, then leave. People with various flags on their uniforms fill out paperwork, take photos, then depart. Afghan men and women shriek in the streets, then go, and workers tend to the debris that covers a once-busy intersection.

That evening, as Wintric dozes off in the corner, cleaned up save a smattering of dried blood spotting his throat, Torres listens to the calls to prayer. Torres’s limbs and mind ache, and he sifts through the day’s events. He touches the bandage on his arm and ponders the size and shape of the future scar. He monitors his fingers and wills them to stop trembling, but they refuse. Emotion pools within him and he finds himself on his knees, hoping to tap into some communal source of faith and belief. He tries to focus, but soon his mind drifts to the millions of people praying against him and his country. He pictures a vast field, an enormous crowd of white-robed men and women bowing in unison, the haunting force and beauty of mass synchronization.