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

Torres thinks of how he has taught his daughters to pray and what to pray for: safety, food, recovery. His younger daughter, Mia, is old enough now to speak a simple offering. Torres’s wife sent an e-mail with the words Mia recited every night, said she always finished with “Thank you.” Torres envisions his wife, Anna, and Mia at the side of her bed, kneeling, with their elbows on the Finding Nemo comforter. Anna said they were working on “Amen,” but she thought that “Thank you” was just as good. For the first time Torres considers the purpose of “Amen,” and after whispering the word three times realizes he has no idea what it means. He considers waking Wintric, but he won’t know, so he says the word one more time as the melody from the minarets filters through the window. In Afghanistan everything he knows about the world has a different name and, worse, he doesn’t know the meanings of the English words he uses for salvation.

Big Dax smokes outside, his dirty, dry skin irritating him. He takes a drag and thinks of his high school friend Alston, how surprised he would be by Dax’s cigarettes, even more so by the confident, uniformed man smoking them. He remembers when Alston left town in the middle of the night with his girlfriend, headed for Key West. Alston’s last postcard had a picture of a clear lake, a small boat, and a golf course putting green floating right in the middle of the water. On the bottom: “Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.”

Dax has heard that the army is building a new public pool nearby. What he would give for a few laps without his Kevlar vest and helmet and heavy boots — to purge the dust from his ears, mouth, and chest. Dax pictures all the pools he has swum in. Not that strong in the water, he still desires the chlorinated depths. To immerse himself in a swimming pool would be to return home. He misses the cool water and the chemicals, the tanned female lifeguards, community pools, post pools, a banana-shaped pool at a Vegas resort he once visited. His neighbor’s pool in Rutherford, New Jersey, where he grew up. That one had a four-foot-tall diving board, way too high for the six-foot-deep pool, but Dax and the neighbor kids would cannonball and jackknife off the board and float in the summer air and bet each other to belly-flop, although no one did. But while he starts to dwell in his comforting memory, he imagines a shadowed man there, in his neighbor’s back yard, strapped with explosives, in a slow-motion diving board jump. The board fully flexes before launching the man high into the air, and eleven-year-old Dax and a couple of local kids watch the terrorist click the handheld detonator again and again, but nothing happens, only a violent fall into a too-shallow pool.

Big Dax wasn’t in Rutherford the day the towers fell. Up visiting his grandparents in Watertown, New York, already signed up for the army but waiting for basic training, he watched the news for two days straight in disbelief. Dax pictured himself in camouflage, taking aim at people, missing, and he felt the nerves in his body ping. He would have to kill now, something he’d hoped to avoid when he signed up for the G.I. Bill and travel. In his transforming world, this is why he despised the terrorists: people dying, diving from the towers, it was dismal business to be sure, but now, after joining the army in a time of relative peace, he would be asked to shoot, and probably be shot at.

After returning home to three funerals in a week, Dax stayed up late replaying television clips of people jumping from the buildings. The news had stopped running them, and he couldn’t understand why. Without these clips the whole disaster was like any other demolition of steel and concrete, but these scenes showed living men and women falling through the air. This is where the pain lived, in impossible choices on a clear late-summer morning. Dax had never considered choosing between flame and gravity, but watching the people fall to their deaths, weighing which way to die, he guessed he would pick gravity.

One night his father spied him watching the clips.

“We think we’re more important than we are,” he said. “Each one of us. It’s our biggest mistake. Remember this — you can love God, but God doesn’t give a shit. You want to celebrate births and winning the lottery and graduations? You give credit to the heavens? Fine, but you better celebrate this shit as well.”

Dax hadn’t thought much about God, about intervention or justice, so he sat there in his living room and stared at his sober father pointing at the television.

“It’s okay to feel good when you make them pay.”

Tonight, in Afghanistan, Big Dax smokes his third cigarette down and snuffs the nub out on his forearm before flicking it away. Typically he performs this forearm trick in front of others, but lately he continues the move when alone, the singe becoming more and more bearable.

As he enters the room he sees Torres on his knees. Big Dax considers saying, “No one’s listening,” but he swallows it down easily and walks to his bunk, lies back, and lets the nicotine work.

One day while on patrol in a mud village in the midday heat, Big Dax, Torres, and Wintric drink tea with a man rather than detaining him because there’s no sign he’s killed four Americans and a Dane over the past five months. As they leave, the man smiles and waves at them.

Later in the afternoon, an elderly man offers what the men guess is his daughter to Wintric. It’s the opposite of what they’ve been briefed, that Afghan men would purposely disfigure — often with acid — the faces and bodies of adulterous women. Brown-eyed, short, and thin, the daughter smiles and widens her eyes when her father taps her leg with his cane. She offers her hand to Wintric in the narrow alley, and he steps close and takes back the girl’s hijab to reveal her dark hair. The men are hot in their gear, but the shade of the alley helps.

“Hey,” Big Dax says, “don’t do anything. There, I said it.”

“Second that,” says Torres, and strokes his rifle. “But seriously, don’t do anything. You have five minutes to check that house for weapons. She can help. Be careful. We’re not screwing around here.”

The father moves down the street, and Torres follows him for a few steps.

Big Dax leans on the thick mud wall of the building, waiting, thinking about the shade and the smell of roasting meat. He catches some kids staring him down from a house nearby, and he wonders if he had been born in that very alley what Afghan Dax would think of this man, with this rifle, leaning against this wall. He senses empathy there, but in scattered, fleeting fragments, not enough to care, not now, not with a few months to go.

After Wintric enters the shabby dwelling with the girl, he takes off his helmet and she turns to him and smiles. She motions him to a back room, but Wintric stays a couple steps inside the door. The girl walks back to him and touches his chest, but he can’t feel the pressure underneath his Kevlar vest. He hasn’t touched or been touched by a woman in months. She keeps her hand on his chest and raises her eyes to his. He watches the girl, not sure what’s expected of him or why he’s here, but he takes his time. On her right cheek, a tiny circular scar. Her lips are dry. She reminds him of no one and he feels a focused but nervous desire to touch her face.

Wintric reaches out and the girl’s arms fall to her sides and she closes her eyes. He stops his hand inches from her face. He lifts his left arm and senses a weight and remembers he’s holding his helmet. He sees it in his hand. He’s here, in this home. He’s in Afghanistan. When she opens her eyes, he turns and leaves.

The men walk in the dusty afternoon, and they soon pass a quail fight inside a tiny hall. Dozens of men circle a brown mat and cheer the frantic, bobbing birds.