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

“Soon,” Nicholle says to the man, tilting her chin up. “Two months left.” It takes a second for him to realize that she spoke to him. The man breaks his stare. Nods. Grins. “Soon,” Nicholle repeats. She smirks. “Go, Vols,” she says.

The man taps his orange shirt above his heart, taps his forehead, and circles his hand toward them.

“I think girl or boy,” he says, and laughs. “One hundred percent correct.”

The magnolias Dax planted bloom large white blossoms. He stares at them with a cup of coffee one Saturday morning when the neighborhood man brings his retriever by. Nicholle’s parents are in town, and her father stands next to him, and the dog unloads one on their driveway. Dax is near his limit, with no plan. He tries to talk himself down, but it’s been too long now, and he is tired of being on the road, tired of coming home and running over shit on his driveway, stepping on shit when he mows, smelling shit even when he avoids direct contact. Nicholle’s father gives him enough time to say something, and when he doesn’t, he asks, “How often?”

“I only see them on the weekends,” Dax says.

“That’s not what I asked.”

Later in the week Nicholle’s dad informs Dax that the dog-walking jerk works the graveyard shift, that he must walk the dog after he gets home in the morning. Dax doesn’t ask how he’s come by this information. Nicholle’s father steps into the den and calls Sim on his cell phone. When he returns he says, “You’ll have to help.”

He asks Dax to wait in the parking lot of the local Walmart, and he comes out with a plastic bottle of antifreeze. Before he lowers himself into the car, Dax assigns the guilt to Nicholle’s father: his idea, his purchase. He has decided that he won’t say no as long as Nicholle’s father pours the concoction into the dog bowl himself. Nicholle’s father plops down with a heavy exhalation.

“Sim’s done this a couple times,” he says. “Says to mix in a cup of vinegar, a little honey, helps it go down.”

“Vinegar?”

“That’s what he says. Said he’d do it himself if he was here. Sends his love. Wanted me to tell you.”

Late that night Dax and Nicholle’s father walk down the street with a jug of antifreeze, honey, vinegar. Dax has downed five Heinekens in the past hour and a half, but they haven’t loosened him as he had hoped.

Before they arrive at the targeted street, Nicholle’s father slows.

“I need a smoke, and I think you do too,” he says.

“Yes.”

They veer over to a nearby pocket park and sit on a wide bench. Dax lights Nicholle’s father’s cigarette, then his own. He takes a drag.

“I’ve promised Nicholle I’ll try to stop once the kid is born,” Dax says. “They say heroin is easier to kick.”

“That’s probably not true.”

“Maybe. The president smokes. Good enough endorsement for me.”

“Obama can do what he wants. You see those before-and-after photos? Those guys age like twenty years in office, and that’s got nothing to do with cigarettes. Obama wants to snort coke, go ahead. Anyone who wants to be president deserves what he gets.”

Crickets everywhere and a diesel’s air brakes on Middlebrook Pike, the air humid, bats darting. Dax knows they won’t go through with their dog-killing plan; perhaps he knew it as they left, even before then. This pocket park, this new direction for the night, and the gathering nicotine soothe his body.

“Tell me what you thought when you first met me,” Nicholle’s father says. “I’ve never asked.”

“First time?”

“First time you came down to Alabama.”

“That you would kill me if I did anything to Nicholle,” Dax says. “I’m serious. I thought that you would do it.”

“More.”

“Then you have to answer.”

“Sure. Keep on.”

“Alabama hick, but nice as hell,” Dax says. “That you worried about me. Your girl was too good for an army vet. I think I heard Vanderbilt ten times in forty-eight hours. I wondered why anyone would choose to live where you live. You know, there are other options. But overall I thought, Don’t blow it. Everyone here seems sane, relatively. Maybe that’s pushing it with Sim, but really, that’s it. It’s been good. No BS.”

“Your arms,” Nicholle’s father says, and Dax realizes that he hasn’t listened to his minor confession, only that he wanted to get to this point, right now. “Your arms. I’ve always wanted to know about that. That’s the first thing. I’m no doctor. Disease? Your doing? Father? I’ve never had the courage to ask. War thing?”

Dax keeps his cigarette in his mouth and runs his right fingertips over his left forearm, the small bumps there. He looks down, but it’s dark, and he wonders if anyone could identify his own forearm if all he had to go on was touch. He remembers the first time he pushed the lit cigarette into his skin. Fort Benning, near the end of basic training: the searing but fleeting pain; the faint flesh-smoke smell; the silent admiration of a few nearby soldiers. He hasn’t put out a cigarette on his arms in some time— last time with Sim? — and he’s about to speak, although he doesn’t know what will arrive in the night, but he hears Nicholle’s father’s voice.

“You know I skipped Vietnam. Or didn’t volunteer. I didn’t go. I’m sure Cole has told you. I don’t regret it, but there’s something there. Not guilt. Just… I’m not sure. If there was a word that meant guilt but wasn’t guilt, that would be it. I pass by it easily, but it’s there.”

A car drives by and they watch it pull into a driveway.

“They had these draft lottery drawings, you know. On television. They’d reach down and pick a birthday on a slip of paper and post it to a big board, and damn, you didn’t want to hear your birthday being read. It’s the one time in my life that I feared my birthday. It’s a shit thing to do to someone. It’s then you realize that the day you were born has nothing to do with you. You’d give it up in a second.”

He takes a drag, and Dax, still feeling his forearm, stares at the orange glow of the cigarette draw.

“Anyway, here we are. Your arms.”

Dax has had enough time to think about his answer, but he was focused on the lottery, the exact opposite meaning of that word as he understands it — winning the big one — and still no answer about his arms.

“Is it too difficult?” Nicholle’s father asks. “I understand, son.”

“My arms,” Dax says, hearing himself. “I’ve done this.”

The doctor invites Dax to grab one of Nicholle’s legs before he instructs Nicholle to start pushing, and before he can say no, Dax finds himself holding Nicholle’s right leg, staring above her head, repeating Don’t look down, don’t look down, but he does. Emma arrives a little early; six pounds, three ounces.

Dax knows no man could endure Nicholle’s schedule of no sleep, all-go patience, and worry. Emma has Dax’s blue eyes, and even though many children are born with blue eyes, hers are his deep shade. He sees them under the oxygen mask she has to wear for several hours to keep her lungs full. A few days later he drives Nicholle and Emma home, his foot hovering over the brake, eyes scanning for sixteen- and ninety-year-olds.

Eight weeks later Emma has some neck control and Dax starts out on the road again. He returns from an Indianapolis-Louisville-Lexington trip exhausted. His back kills him, and he’s noticed a new red mole on the side of his rib cage. Emma rests on his chest and Nicholle sips half a glass of cheap Shiraz.

Dax had stopped by another VA hospital on this latest trip, and he tells Nicholle that if they play the percentages, he will probably die before her, most likely from some kind of cancer caused by the crap he breathed in while deployed — the jacked-up cells have probably already started multiplying somewhere far inside his slippery body.