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

The motorcycle pulls in twenty yards from Wintric’s chair, and the bike’s headlight shines at his feet. Marcus removes his helmet and unfurls the weapon over his head. Wintric remains seated, bypasses his glass, and lifts the bottle to his lips. Marcus fumbles badly in his attempt to place an arrow on the string, and Wintric knows that he has never used the bow before.

“Hey, can you take the other half of this foot off for me?”

Marcus draws the bow.

“You’re drunk.”

“You’re not?”

“I’ll kill you here.”

“Lower. There, I know it’s dark. I don’t know you.”

“Don’t believe me, you son of a bitch?”

“I believe you, Marcus. But right now, tonight, it doesn’t matter. Go, buddy. Take the town. I’m leaving here.”

“You’re not leaving.”

“I don’t even know you, Marcus.”

“You know me. Stop saying that.”

“Seriously, pull up a seat. Tell me.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“I don’t know you.”

“Shut up.”

“Have her, man. She won’t help. She’s nice, though, right? Goddamn. If she was from somewhere else, she’d be a catch.”

“You know me.”

“I see you running your marathon, stud. What you training for? You training for the mill? You running the Fourth of July Fun Run? Marcus, you badass. You should join the army, man. They’ll love you. You can serve ice cream all day long.”

“I’ll shoot you. You hit her, I hit you.”

Wintric squints. “Hey, you wearing red instead of black? Mixing it up, hero?”

The sharp whipping sound of the arrow cuts the air above Wintric’s head.

“There you go! Come on, Marcus.” Wintric drops his leg off the log, yells out in pain, and tumbles off his chair to the ground. He rolls, clutching his foot, stops on his back, and pulls his left knee to his chest.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Marcus has frozen in place, holding the bow away from his body. Wintric braces himself on his elbows, breathing hard, the pain mixing fast with the Scotch.

“You brought one arrow?” Wintric says. He waits, and when Marcus says nothing, Wintric laughs. “Fucking Robin Hood.”

Marcus lowers himself to the ground.

“Her shirt is torn,” he says.

On the causeway below, two patrol cars scream out. The red and blue lights play in the dim landscape.

“We’ve got five minutes,” Wintric says. “What you want to do?”

“Kristen called the cops,” Marcus says. The words arrive as a question and a statement and he tries to paste them together. He feels himself fingering the tear in her shirt.

“She called me,” Wintric says.

Marcus pauses for a few seconds, jumps to his feet, and rushes to the bike, but before he gets there he stops and lifts his bow. In one fluid motion he spins and hurls it toward town, launching it high in the air with a grunt.

The cops disappear, negotiating the twenty-three switchbacks, two road changes, and a navigable stream. Wintric pulls himself back into his seat. The town lights flicker.

“I’m pressing charges, asshole,” Wintric says. “You better run, boy. Run. I know you, Marcus. I know you, man. County jail, bitch.”

Marcus jumps on his bike, starts it up, and speeds off.

Wintric listens to the sound of the departing motorcycle and the incoming sirens as they mesh together for a while before the rising sirens take over. He will recognize the cops who arrive. Everyone in town knows all the cops — there are only eight — and these guys will be pissed that they had to come out to the Top of the World, but everything should be fine as long as he doesn’t give them any hell. Wintric brushes at his arms, knocking off pine needles he picked up from the fall. He reaches for his glass but finds the bottle first and uncorks, then drinks. The cops are close and he anticipates a spotlight in his eyes, but he has a few seconds, and he looks out over the town’s lights below, a pocket of amber glow in the California blackness.

Kristen has her brown pants on and reaches for her white work shirt in her closet. Last night Wintric called her after the cops pulled up to the Top of the World. She forgets much of what he said, but in the end the cops said they would talk to her later and Wintric said he would stop by sometime. Apparently the warning call was enough for him, but he was drunk, and she’s unsure if he’ll remember or if anything will change. She’ll answer a couple more questions after work, but she guesses everything will blow over in a week and find a comfortable place in the local gossip. No one has heard from Marcus, but Kristen expects to see him in the store.

She buttons up her shirt and eyes the box at the top of her closet, the one with Wintric’s hair. She’s running late, but she grabs her footstool and brings the box down. Narrow and long, like a box for a sword. It has a layer of gray dust over its white cover. Kristen sits on the side of her bed with the box in her lap. She thinks about blowing the dust off the top. She thinks about writing a word with her finger, but no words come to her.

SEVEN WEEKS PREGNANT and nauseated enough to search for the women’s bathroom, Kristen sweats in the “Express — twenty items or less” line at the Susanville Walmart and tries to calm her stomach and mind; she regrets the Jack in the Box tacos she had for lunch, and her mind replays her answer to Wintric’s question about an abortion: “I don’t know.”

Married for two weeks, she wears a solitaire diamond ring and a silver wedding band, and while she hasn’t asked him, she guesses Wintric purchased the set from the same store where she now stands and vises down on the shopping cart’s handle. She’s still acclimating to the minor weight of the set and the protruding diamond, and the inside of her left-hand middle and pinkie fingers are sore from the new rub.

She swallows and fingers the sweat away from her face. She reaches into her purse and grabs the small plastic baggie of saltines she totes around, selects a cracker, and places it on her tongue.

Unloading her cart onto the conveyer belt, she surveys her soon-to-be purchases: a whistle, a gray T-shirt, a new sports bra, dry-erase markers, a dry-erase board with basketball court markings, an iron-on Coach logo, the Dead Rising video game, the latest People magazine, three gallons of milk, tortillas, instant coffee, deodorant, toothpaste, and athletic socks.

She guesses the Walmart checkout man is new, exhausted, or stupid, because he struggles to locate the barcode on everything he attempts to scan, and while she counts out her sixteen items before the plastic bar that separates her things from the cowboy-hatted man’s stuff in front of her, she realizes that the conveyer belt isn’t moving, that everything is taking too long for her trembling stomach and esophagus. After another cracker and two more minutes of nervous gulping, the cowboy has his total, and he reaches into his front jeans pocket and brandishes a leather-bound checkbook, then asks for a pen. These acts will delay her bathroom entrance by a minute, probably more.

Miraculously, the second saltine has helped, offering a sliver of reprieve — enough, she thinks, to get her through the check writing. She glances left, to the inviting stand of magazines and candy, and catches a photo of a sultry-grinned Fergie, light blue Cosmopolitan at the top, deep red “THE SEX HE WANTS” below. Next to Cosmopolitan, Time magazine, “LIFE IN HELL: A BAGHDAD DIARY.” Next to Time, GQ and a flirty-grinned Justin Timberlake, “THE PRIVATE LIFE OF JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE.”

Kristen pops another cracker. Her esophagus and stomach downshift from tremble to sway.