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

“Army didn’t teach you ’bout snakes?”

“Just to stay away.”

Birds sound above them and something rustles in the branches.

“Sim, I don’t see it. Sim?”

“Splash a little.”

Dax tries to go onto his toes, but he sinks into the soft stream floor. An echo from his army training: Never get caught in the water. You’re helpless in the water. He examines the slowly moving water along an imaginary line between the snake’s entry point and his half-submerged stomach, then splashes the water in front of him.

“I was kidding about the splashing,” Sim says. “Jesus, stay still.”

“Shit. Shit.”

“If you see white in its mouth, that means it’s a moccasin. Everything else is okay. You’re a big guy. They don’t want to mess with you.”

Dax doesn’t hear the last sentence. He imagines the possible biting scenarios— a big guy, so much surface area to choose from: the moccasin attached to his face ( can it jump? ), the moccasin attached to his dick ( can it submerge? ), the moccasin still attached to his blackening arm at the ER ( do they let go? ), and he pleads with himself to stay calm, but the mash of all these possibilities overtakes him. Helpless in the water. He hurls himself toward the bank with lumbering steps, his thick legs sluggish through the stream. With yards to go to dry land he peeks back, and every ripple grows a tail and fangs. He hears a high-pitched whine coming from his mouth and, somewhere beyond, Sim’s laughter.

On the bank, Dax stands and surveys the ground around his feet. The birds have quieted and Sim floats on his back.

“I don’t see it,” Dax says.

“Well, damn,” says Sim. “It lives here. Where else you want it to go?”

On the drive back to Andalusia, Sim puts on some Jim Croce and sings along. His hair is cut at varying lengths, and a scar runs from his left ear across his cheek. Dax’s knees and shins are pressed against the Honda Civic’s dash; an empty Monster Energy can and a dog-track receipt are on the floorboard. Dax stares out the window at the greenery flying by. Lush and overgrown. Nowhere can he see bare earth. He recalls Alston’s fear of sharks, relayed during one of his high school root root diatribes—“I’ll fight a lion or a bear, man. Forget sharks. Fuck hippos. It isn’t fair. You’re drowning and bleeding and you can’t even move. At least I feel the dirt under me against a lion.” Dax replays the effortless motion of the snake entering the water, the silent shift from land to liquid. An unexpected gust of memory: high school English, My Ántonia, bored out of his mind, then the teacher reading out loud, a child hacking a huge rattler with a spade, the nerve to get close enough to kill with a spade; now his black snake, closing in somewhere in the water. He shakes his hands, and as he comes to, hearing Sim’s singing voice, an in-tune tenor, Dax transitions from daydream fear to real-time marvel. He listens as Sim matches Croce’s falsetto, even harmonizes on “I Got a Name.”

Sim stops midchorus and starts up about Andalusia even though Dax hasn’t asked.

“We got a porn star, a Miss Alabama, and Robert Horry. Hank Williams got married here. I’m eighteen and I know more about this area than most. Besides that, I don’t know what to tell you. Cole won’t move back here, but you know that. What hasn’t she told you? What you want to know?”

“Not sure,” Dax says, recognizing the slim chances of anything good coming from this conversation.

“Dad isn’t thrilled you all are living together.”

“Okay.”

“Cole is smarter than she lets on. She went to Vanderbilt, you know? No one goes there from here.”

“Yep.”

“She tell you she hates northerners? I’m just shitting. I’m surprised she picked up an army dude. She’s not exactly thrilled with guns.”

“I’m not in the army anymore.”

“No. Yeah, that’s what I meant. That you were. I mean, once you’ve been in. Whatever.”

Sim slows down for a tractor in the road, and the car shakes. “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” through the speakers and Sim hitting the chorus hard, then shaking his head.

“Croce was in the army. You know that, right?”

“Nope.”

“A pecan tree got him. You know that?”

“No.”

“Plane hit a tree and crashed. Louisiana.”

“Jesus.”

“Every time I have pie I think of ‘Time in a Bottle.’ It’s true, man. Everything about time.”

Dax spoons mashed potatoes onto his plate at the dinner table with Nicholle, Sim, and their parents, and he wonders if there is anything in his New Jersey upbringing that would scare Sim. Although he searches hard, all he recalls is a harmless bluegill attached to his pinkie when he was eight. He peeks across the table at Nicholle’s mother, a cheerful, plump lady who, if he unfocuses his eyes enough, could be Nicholle in thirty years. Nicholle’s father smiles approvingly.

After dinner Sim and Dax smoke on the front porch. Sim asks him if he was ever waterboarded. Dax tells him no.

“Me either,” Sim says, “but I beat up a homeless guy. Dumbass didn’t even fight back, just laid there.”

“Thanks for that, Sim.”

“You seen some shit, I know. What’s the worst thing? Kids hacked up? Damn Taliban.”

“Not my favorite thing.”

“I hear they like the little boys,” Sim says. “Will tie them up and hump ’em. Crazy shit like that, but chicks can’t show their faces. That’s dumb, covering up their bodies makes the dudes want to hump even more. Hell, even Jesus knew that. Taliban got it backwards. Show everything and the mystery is gone. No one cares. In Jesus’ time women were running around naked and there weren’t the issues we got now. Well, you should know, I’ve seen some shit around here. Cole don’t know this, but I can count cards. I act broke, but there’s ten thou in my room. Swear. I got a buddy working at the Venetian, man. Got one at Bally’s. Vegas.”

“Okay,” Dax says while fingering his chin. “Cool.”

Dax has no idea why he says cool, a word not normally in his go-to reaction vocabulary, and even Sim stares at him, curious.

“You count cards?” he asks.

Dax does, but he isn’t interested in where the conversation will go or what he’ll be invited to do.

“You mean, like gambling?” Dax says, and puts his cigarette out on his forearm.

“Damn,” Sim says, laughing. He shakes his head. “Gambling.”

What Sim doesn’t know, and what Dax plans on telling Nicholle later on, is that he does gamble. It’s not bad. Local games with friends. He brings what he can lose and that’s it. Even so, something warns him that Nicholle won’t approve, and it’s the one minor thrill he allows himself. If it came out now, there might be an argument, but nothing more than a night on the couch and an animated call from Nicholle to her sympathetic mother. On Dax’s scale of guarded secrets, the card games barely register. The one that still stalks him, the one he doesn’t know how to talk about, is his Afghanistan girl; how she walked toward him with a soccer ball, how the day ate her up; how for a few minutes he let the power overtake and fuel him, and later, how surprised he was that only one bullet was found, how intensely he argued with Wintric about who had actually shot her; how he had had to wait for EOD to arrive to detonate the vest she wore, still attached to her body; how the hour passed and the men saw her block the road, dying, then dead. And later, the doubts: Was she forced to wear the vest? Would she have stopped? The hope now that the bullet was Wintric’s after all.

Dax doesn’t know where his belief in a just universe comes from, but it exists, godless but real, and one day, be it snake or other ailment, he knows there will be retribution for the girl, no matter what she wore that day, no matter the situation. In the end he made a choice to shoot at a child. He can’t get it out of his head. Retribution. The worst part is the waiting game, and so he waits and senses the possibility of harm hovering over him, pausing until the time is right.