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

“Sure, all of them are kaput,” he says, but his voice sounds tired and dismissive.

“You don’t believe me. Fine. Not important to you.”

“Yep,” he says, and she leans back.

“You, at the fancy hotel. You, searching for someone your type. You, a damn believer.”

The shift to awkward accusation surprises Armando, and before he realizes that he won’t understand any answer, he asks the question.

“You’re not staying here?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“What?”

“I know a broken vet when I see one.”

“What?”

“You’re a war man. You care about nothing because you think you’ve been through everything. I got a cousin like you.”

“You don’t know me.”

“I’m good at guessing. Let’s see, a war hero, back to a country that doesn’t take care of you. VA sucking the life out of you with long lines and doctors that, let me guess, just don’t care. Married, broken dick, so kids are out of the question, war hero wears off, and you cry when you drive by fucking pick-up basketball games.”

“I have kids,” he says faintly, before the adrenaline hits and pours out over everything. “Okay,” he says, then takes a drag, holds the smoke in his mouth, and thinks. The chemicals burn his tongue and cheeks.

“Since you’re a bitch that can fit into a dress, I figure a dud in high school, but an athlete, cheerleader maybe, doing the big boys, flunking science. Had the looks before you were T-boned. Couldn’t have been your fault. New nose, but Johnny Ballplayer walks away after four weeks, and thank God he never used the ring sitting in his drawer. Nice settlement, but it doesn’t help the old back, and you’d climb on anyone if they’d only offer you a compliment. Let’s see here. You’re not so bad in the shadows.”

He knows he has her, because she swivels the chair to face him and reaches up to touch her ear, making sure it’s still there. She grins with a hint of defeat, and he figures he’ll forgive her in the coming minutes. The pause stretches, and he questions whether he got all of it right.

“You think I can’t walk, don’t you? You think this isn’t a choice?”

Armando goes mute. He’s at the end of a tunnel. No matter what has happened, this is a line, one he would fight over— faking it? — but this insane question scampers away and he can’t bring himself to answer. His mind spins and the muscles in his back tighten; he’s tired now and conscious of the last seventeen waking hours. His cigarillo is a nub.

He’s about to give up and respond, flick his smoke away, and head up to his room. He’s decided on “I’m tired,” but before he gets the two words out, Ms. Starlight stretches both legs outward, holding them parallel to the ground.

Armando’s vision flexes and blurs. His anger forms from somewhere deep. The doorman nods off, and the pounding bass from the club has disappeared. Legs still extended, she scowls at him and laughs.

“All of this,” she says, “just a temporary thing. Nothing but a fall and three weeks while the bruise heals. You, on the other hand—” She stops midsentence. Her forehead crinkles in frustration. After a few seconds he’s convinced she’s said everything, so he turns back to the doors, but before he gets to the entrance she clears her throat.

“You sorry fuck,” she says.

Alone in the elevator. The screen displays the police sketch again, a full-body sketch, and Armando realizes that the accused always stand in the police lineups. His head aches while he replays his lobby story to Courtney, Ms. Starlight’s parting words, and now, unsolicited, a dark and shifting memory materializes — this time the M4 bucks on his shoulder and the Afghan girl runs at him barefoot before exploding from the chest out, and when he reaches her she is somehow whole again, but dead, and Armando raises her shawl, but there is no vest, no bomb, nothing but her shirt and ribs and chest.

The elevator screen shows forty degrees and foggy at the airport, which is never good. His 7 A.M. flight will be delayed. He tries to think of the plane, tries to hold the image, envision its angle upward into the early morning, but the late night engulfs him and he thinks of Anna at home and he wonders if she’s ever had another man over while he is away. What kills and saves him is that the answer is very likely no. More likely Anna wallows nightly in the crushing guilt of the “for better or for worse.” He imagines her greeting him tomorrow in the driveway, taking his suitcase from his lap. He hears her yelling to the kids that Daddy’s home, and the girls rushing out, arguing about who gets to push him up the ramp. He can taste his wife’s kiss the first time they tried to make love after the accident.

They had waited months, her floating over him.

“Do you want me to try? Do you want me to touch you?”

“Yes,” he said, and being so scared of the silence that followed, scared to look down, scared to count the seconds pass as he sank into himself, feeling Anna’s hand on his chest, stomach, then nothing, only empty, numb, nothing below, and later, with shaking hands and an upper body on fire with anger, wheeling to the kitchen and pulling out a bread knife. The serrated edges of the knife pulling against the sharpener, taking his boxers down and gripping his genitals in his left hand. He felt the knife’s weight in his right hand but nothing when he pressed the sharp edge to the base of his penis. He saw the skin open slightly and blood began to run down the blade and onto the floor. He heard one of his daughters rise and use the restroom down the hall, heard the toilet flush, the tap run and stop, soft footsteps, and the closing bedroom door. The house quieted and he heard night insects outside and he stopped the bleeding with paper towels and cleaned the floor and cleaned the knife and put it back in the drawer he could reach. He turned off the lights and sat alone in the dark room.

The elevator doors open to his floor and he starts out, but something in his arms fails him and he pauses in between the closing doors. They close and open, close and open around him — chewing. He ponders the worst thing that could happen if he gets back in the elevator, but before the doors close for the third time he’s back in, pressing the 23 button. Something in his working bones tells him that Courtney’s room is on the twenty-third floor.

He rolls off the elevator and takes his place beside two fake leather chairs and a granite console table with a gold-faced lamp. He stares at the two elevator displays, digital red numbers stuck on L. One of them moves to 4 and down again. Another begins its ascent, and he’s stuck in this miracle lottery. The number climbs above 17, stops, and starts up again. His seat creaks as he adjusts. He isn’t sure how long he can last, if he has enough resolve to stick this out, but as he looks down at his bent legs in his wrinkle-free slacks, he feels a warming in his gut and begs it to lower. He understands the astronomical odds, but he has faith that the elevator doors will open to him and for the first time in years he’ll feel his pants slide down over his knees before they fall to the floor. Ms. Starlight was right, he’s a believer, he has to be, and tonight there will be a reckoning, a savagery, enough passion and blood and faith to resurrect the universe at one in the morning, but as the elevator doors open and he sees Courtney’s smeared makeup, he wonders if he has enough of anything.

TWO HOURS BEFORE showtime in his army dress uniform at the Fourth of July parade, Wintric lounges on his living room couch, fingering a recently purchased pocketknife as his three-year-old son, Daniel, tries to balance on one leg. Daniel teeters on his right foot for three seconds before losing his balance.