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

Marcus’s coworkers wait for the day when he’ll blow something up. Several of them have known him since grade school, and as long as they can remember he has worn black. This, they say, is a sign; of what, no one is certain, but they figure it can’t be healthy, and he rides his bright yellow motorcycle around town, most of the time helmetless. Kristen was the one thing he had going for him, and that ended a year ago, but they can tell he still holds out hope. They know where he goes after work most nights, and they debate when to have him yanked from the heavy machinery. He’s become clumsy around the saw, and it’s only a matter of time before the DAYS WITHOUT AN ACCIDENT sign resets to zero, but today people up and down the line notice his newfound eagerness. He works fast, and he has all his safety gear on, a first in weeks.

Marcus lets the day’s excitement brew in him. During their breakup Kristen told him that it had nothing to do with Wintric, but Marcus knows different. He’s followed the two of them to the Top of the World, observed the parked car. He’s watched her take Wintric into her place night after night, and watched the lights go out, but some nights they leave the lights on, and he watches their shadows move on the thin blinds. Last night he sneaked up to the bedroom window. They were arguing again, and while he hoped the fight was about him, he didn’t hear his name. After Wintric left, Marcus sat underneath a tree in the dark, smoking for two hours, replaying Wintric’s exit, convincing himself that the departure was final. Marcus has heard the rumors about Wintric — that there is more than the foot wrong with him — but there is little evidence now that he has lost the boot, save for Wintric putting on some weight and the fights with Kristen, which could be about anything. Marcus decides that in the end, cause doesn’t matter. Already he feels more powerful and capable than Wintric, and it’s this that strengthens his hopes.

After work Marcus stops by his apartment and changes into the red shirt Kristen gave him. He checks for Wintric’s Bronco before approaching Kristen’s door. She answers in a torn shirt, her eyes glossy.

“Where is he?” Marcus asks, already shaking.

She shoulders the door frame.

“Jesus, Marcus. What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be hiding under a tree?”

“Tell me where he is and I’ll take care of it.”

Kristen feels a pain inside her and senses Marcus awaiting her command. She pinches the bridge of her nose. It’s already dark, and she considers for a moment whether Wintric would be jealous if she invited Marcus in, if the simple action of Marcus crossing her home’s threshold would shake Wintric back into reality, or at least shake him enough for him to be willing to talk to her. She wants to hurt Wintric for last night, for months’ worth of nights that have left her worn — for leaving for the army and sending only his hair — and she sizes up Marcus, desperate and lost in his red shirt. His mouth is open and he smells like cigarettes and sawdust.

“Go away.”

“He did that to you?” Marcus says, reaching out to touch the torn fabric of Kristen’s shirt. She lets him caress the material and brush her skin.

“Does it matter who did it?” she asks.

But Marcus has stopped listening. He focuses on his index finger, how his finger reaches between the ripped fabric of her shirt, the way his skin feels on the smooth skin above her collarbone. He takes a step closer, resting his foot on the threshold.

“I bet he’s at the Top of the World,” she says. She doesn’t know what will happen, but as the words leave her mouth she’s as excited and fearful as she’s ever been. The past two months have racked her — Wintric’s insomnia and apathy mixed with moments of energy and resolve. Yesterday she arrived home from work to find Wintric in an overflowing bath, fully clothed, a blue Sierra Nevada Brewery hoodie pulled over his head, submerged jeans and Nike basketball shoes.

She lifts Marcus’s hand off her, and his face whitens as he steps backward.

“Is he alone?” he says.

Kristen turns and slams the door behind her. She’s unsure whether Marcus can figure out all the roads to get there, but that’s not her problem. She stands in her living room, just inside the door, on a welcome mat still damp from Wintric’s dripping clothes, where he stood and yelled before leaving last night. Her hand on the arm of her couch, where Wintric plays Halo 2 and pops OxyContin while she works, where he tells her he loves her, begs her to stay with him, tells her that he is her folded American flag, only alive. She walks to the kitchen, to the stove, and turns on a burner without any intention of cooking. She watches the burner brighten orange, feels the subtle heat in the air. Next to the stove, on the side of the refrigerator, hangs a calendar, stuck in June even though a mid-October day is ending. Tired, confused, and guilty, she finds her phone and calls Wintric. She tells him that Marcus is angry, unreasonable. She hears his drunken voice.

“Thank you,” he says. “I’m here. Still here.”

She hangs up, turns off the burner, and calls the cops.

The lit plume of smoke pours upward from the mill, dissipating into the stars. Wintric has been coming to the Top of the World for years, but lately he’s come alone. It’s where he goes to return Torres’s phone calls and avoids answering his questions. Wintric prefers to listen while Torres practices his speeches on him, but they never include the checkpoint girl, a fact not lost on Wintric. For him, the girl has submerged just below the pain of his rape and his injured foot, but she’s there, potent each time she surfaces.

Tonight Wintric forgoes a fire, slumps in a cheap nylon folding chair, and steadies his bad foot on a block of wood.

The night is cool, and he sips at a fifteen-year Scotch his neighbor gave him when he came home in the boot. The streetlights on Main Street spread out in front of him like a runway. Eight minutes since Kristen’s call, and a lone motorcycle speeds across the dark expanse well below him. Although he knows there’s a causeway underneath the tires, it seems as though the bike zips along the top of the water. The velocity is amazing, the oval headlight beaming the black away at full throttle. The bugs are thick, and Wintric guesses that Marcus’s helmet is covered with flattened bug bodies.

Marcus can’t hear the tiny pings that come fast and fill up his visor. This is the first time he has pushed the bike past sixty, and he can barely see. He dreads removing one of his hands, because the bike shakes. Marcus knows that if Wintric is at the Top of the World, Wintric could spot him, but is he watching? Does Wintric have his pistol with him? Marcus has heard the betting stories, and he’s scared but wired. His vision slowly disappears behind the crushed flies and gnats and mosquitoes.

The bow his mother gave him for his eighteenth birthday wraps around his chest and squeezes him. He has put an arrow down the back of his shirt, tip up, rubbing against his helmet. He has no plan, and he struggles to organize his thoughts, but somewhere among the whirling emotions and projections he feels Kristen’s hands on him once again. He knows he’s being used in a way he doesn’t fully understand, but she almost invited him in. The road is empty and black, and Marcus wrenches the accelerator and squints.

Wintric hears the bike. The throttle sound varies depending on the ridge, the turn, and the grade. Even though he sips at the Scotch slowly, he has refilled his glass twice before the bike’s gravely throat is on him, the bike’s light swinging around the final turn.

Wintric was shocked when Kristen told him about the relationship with Marcus — the shy soda fountain kid in all black, a half-capable wrestler. He didn’t believe her at first, could not understand how she could go for Marcus, even if their families were close. As time went on Wintric came to believe that her choice was more a comment on him, that he and Marcus were somehow equals, he and the kid who dished out ice cream and dreamed of the mill. This thought has cornered Wintric, and since his return he’s watched Marcus around town; watched as he rides his rundown motorcycle back and forth to work, as he shops at the market where Kristen works. Wintric has spied him jogging in the street and wondered if Marcus purposely runs by the Ellises’ place. Wintric’s parents’ house is out of the way, but once or twice a week Marcus jogs by with his jerking, elongated steps, his elbows pinned. The stride is outrageous and pitiful, and Wintric envies every whole-body step. He realizes they might not even be equals.