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

The man Wintric wishes dead is Derek Nelson, once Sergeant Derek Nelson, one of the men Wintric believes assaulted him. There was another person, perhaps two, but Nelson is the one name that pierces and haunts him. Wintric has no proof, save for an incredible moment before being airlifted out of Bagram Airfield. He sat off in a corner of the rudimentary passenger terminal with his carved foot elevated when a solider he’d never met approached him and said, “It was Nelson,” nodded, and walked away.

Wintric knows that Nelson lives in Green River, Wyoming, in a yellow mobile home on Davy Crockett Drive. He has a black Lab and a beat-down Tacoma missing a tailgate. He leaves for work with the gas company around 7:30 A.M. and gets home around 5 P.M.Wintric knows this because he has sat in his car on Davy Crockett Drive with a loaded.44 and watched Nelson leave and arrive at his home multiple times. The closest he ever came to fulfilling his revenge wish was in the middle of June two years ago, his second trip to Green River. Deftones blasted from the speakers, and Wintric opened the car’s door and walked halfway across the street before turning back, closing the driver’s door, sobbing, then pointing the car back west, all the way home to California.

“I’ll get it,” Daniel says, and leaves the room. He returns gripping a Nerf dart gun that Wintric bought him for his birthday. Daniel has recently got the hang of the play weapon: pushing one of the thin suction-cupped darts down the muzzle, pulling hard on the rear plastic tether until it locks back in place, now ready with enough pressure-build to launch the dart on a line across the room. Daniel has been taught not to aim at people, but Wintric has told him that he can shoot his daddy every now and then for practice, an act that draws Kristen’s complaints and an encouraging “Nice shot” from Wintric.

Wintric thumbs the pocketknife in his hand. He opens up the three-inch blade, locks it into place, places the knife on the coffee table, and leans back. His big toe digs into the carpet, and he thinks about the upcoming parade, meeting up with other vets, the hot day, thousands lining the street, gawking. His neck tightens. Daniel stops pounding the table and points the gun at the blank television and shoots a dart at the screen.

“Nice,” Wintric says.

“I shoot it,” Daniel says.

Wintric glances at the ceiling — an intricate corner cobweb — and back down to the coffee table.

Through three walls, Kristen sings a Whitney Houston ballad in the shower.

“Knife,” Daniel says, pointing.

Wintric watches Daniel’s hands. One stays at his side with the toy, the other points at the knife.

“Knife,” Daniel says, staring at Wintric. Daniel lowers his hand to the table a few inches away from the knife. Wintric’s body warms, and he sees his son’s eyes widen and his back straighten, and Wintric gives his son a nod and watches Daniel’s hand slide the last three inches to the black handle and grip down.

“Know what you have there?” Wintric asks.

“Knife,” Daniel says, eyes down.

“Whose knife?”

“Daddy’s.”

“That’s right.”

Daniel releases his grip on the knife and stands quietly. He searches for another dart, but none are nearby.

“You can play with it,” Wintric says, then nods. “Play with it.”

Daniel considers the knife, then Wintric, and pauses. He steps toward the coffee table, places his hand on the knife’s handle, and glances back up at Wintric.

Wintric sees his son’s small fingers on the black handle. He inhales and holds the air in. The room comes alive, brighter, the same peripheral illumination Wintric encountered once while bathing Daniel as a newborn. He let Daniel slip under the water, and for a few seconds he left his helpless son there, submerged and floundering, while the air lit up around him. He struggled to name the rush he felt that day in the moments before he saw his hands reach down into the sink and lift his son upright. Now, with Daniel’s grip on the knife, no words arrive, only this tragic high.

Wintric’s temples pound and his eyes lose focus. He envisions his son picking up the knife and digging the blade into his own hand, the blood there, holes in hands, crucifixion, nails, roofing, falling from the McIntires’ roof last fall, how he had time to think before crashing down onto the cinderblock fence, how the back brace pressed him tight. He had to explain to people that the brace wasn’t from his time overseas but his foot was.

Daniel holds the knife straight out now, a miniature sword. He stabs a half foot of air and looks at Wintric.

“Walk around,” Wintric says.

Daniel strides to the window and surveys the street, then turns and points the sharp blade at the television, then the rocking chair — he grins — then at a honeymoon photo of Wintric and Kristen at Lake Tahoe, then back at the wooden coffee table. Daniel sticks the knife’s point into the wood, enough to catch, then pushes down, leaning with his small shoulder, and abruptly loses balance; his hand slips forward, running down the knife’s handle and the blade’s safe backside.

“You slipped there, son. Watch. You’re learning the wrong thing.”

Wintric picks up the knife and holds the blade toward his son.

“This is sharp. Sharp means hurt.”

Daniel turns away.

“You don’t care.”

Daniel turns back, blinks, and Wintric grabs his son by the back of the neck, yanks him forward, lifts his chin up, and forces the blade to the front of his son’s neck.

“Daa,” Daniel moans, stiffening.

Wintric moves the blade over to the flesh above his son’s collarbone and places the tip’s razorlike half inch over his son’s carotid. He closes his eyes and tries to ignore the white light filling in around him, attempts to feel his son’s pulse through the blade and handle. Nothing. Daniel gasps, and the slight jerk of his body wakes Wintric, now opening his eyes and repositioning the knife where Daniel’s Adam’s apple will grow in, now guiding the blade up and down, shaving at the thin skin there.

“Sharp,” Wintric says, then nabs his son’s left wrist and flips his hand over. “Sharp,” he says, and he pushes the tip of the blade into his son’s palm. Daniel falls to the floor, crying.

“Calm down,” Wintric says, and he rises, strides to the kitchen, and returns with a Band-Aid. The rush of guilt assails him, then backs off, and his hands shake. “Daddy loves you,” he says to his son, and he licks the small drop of blood away and attaches the Band-Aid. “Play with knives, but be careful. Understand?”

Daniel looks away.

“Say yes,” Wintric says, tightening his grip. He grabs his son’s ears and squeezes.

“Daa.”

“Say yes,” Wintric says, nodding up and down. “Yes?”

Daniel nods.

“Good.”

The seven veterans stand and spit and scratch in their military uniforms at the Collins Pine lumberyard parking lot, waiting for the Fourth of July parade to begin. They touch and straighten their pressed uniforms, and after a truck backfires one veteran successfully fights off a flashback to the past by imagining a nude Angelina Jolie. Here in this northern California small-town haven, there are no mortars, no IEDs, no bullshit commander, no Arabic. Those days are long gone for them, passed to others crouched on the other side of the world, waiting for someone to say stop, to come home, and to walk in their own parades.

One young soldier is missing both arms, her sleeves hanging flat and pinned to her sides. She nods at her new boyfriend and he swigs a Coors Light and tosses the silver can to the ground. Wintric and an airman in the group will soon showcase their limps as they stroll along the straight avenue.