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

“My state bird,” Wintric says. “Little bastards are easy picking where I’m from, and good eats.”

“Jersey doesn’t have a state bird,” says Big Dax.

“I thought every state had one.”

“Isn’t Jersey’s the Shit Bird?” says Torres.

“We do have a horse and two ugly bitches on our flag,” Big Dax says. “That much I know.”

“We got a grizzly bear on ours, but no grizzlies,” says Wintric. “We got black bears. One ate the dog I grew up with.”

“Torres,” Big Dax says, “we found a true California hick.”

Wintric seizes the opportunity and talks about his rural hometown of Chester, about playing football on a losing team that carried fourteen guys total, about his respect for those who leave the logging town for other parts of the country.

Big Dax and Torres let him carry on. They don’t ask any questions about the girl in the alley, but later, after drinking enough smuggled booze to feel something, Wintric tells them that he began to undress her but stopped himself. He says she grabbed his hands and placed them on her bare shoulders, and he left his hands there for a moment before walking out. He says he wouldn’t be able to live with himself — a girl waits back home.

“No one’s ever waiting, my friend,” says Big Dax. “They’re living and moving on. And don’t get mad. It sucks, but it’s true.”

“That’s bullshit,” says Torres.

“You know it’s not,” says Big Dax, raising his voice. “You know about Billings and Winston and Henlish. What are their wives doing right now?”

“If you had someone at home, you’d know,” says Torres. “I feel sorry that this is all you have. It’s pathetic.”

Big Dax turns to Wintric. “Billings and Winston and Henlish are trying to stay alive over here and their wives are banging the shit out of dudes at home.”

“Okay,” Wintric says.

“Okay?”

“Okay. I don’t know them. That has nothing to do with me.”

“Fine,” says Big Dax.

“You have right now,” says Torres. “Then, when that’s gone, you have the next moment, then that’s it. What do you look forward to, man? If all it is is surviving, that’s shit.”

“I see,” says Big Dax. “I’m crazy for seeing things the way they actually are. Reality tells me it’s dangerous to believe that someone’s waiting for you back home. Their lives are shit. We stay busy, keep our minds working. They get to worry and pretend they’re fine with us dodging bombs over here. And you know they have to act as if they’re fine with it because if they don’t, if they actually speak their minds, they’re unpatriotic and bitches and everything else. You hate me for saying it. Fine.”

“Her name is Kristen,” says Wintric. “The girl at home. It’s my fault. I haven’t e-mailed. I told her not to. I don’t know why.”

“One day the people we’re trying to kill will be in charge again,” says Torres. “One day soon we’ll negotiate with these fucks, even though they’ve killed us and tortured us and today we’re trying to kill them. No one will remember 2004 or us breathing in the fucking burn-pit smoke or the bomb that almost took off my arm. None of this will have happened. So yes, I think about who’s waiting for me, because if I think about all this, I’m done. I got kids, man, so be careful.”

“I’m not commenting on Anna, your kids, or whatever,” says Big Dax, “just reality. Dude, you may be a lucky one. People change. That’s all I’m saying. They’re living every day that we live.”

“That’s enough,” says Torres. “Don’t say this shit again.”

“You guys believe what you want to.”

So Torres believes. He lives his return home in advance. He feels the departure out of Afghanistan, out of Kyrgyzstan, out of Germany, the packed jet, restless legs, nervous energy, the Atlantic, the boredom, the squiggly coastline of Maryland and Delaware, landing at Baltimore, buying a magnet of Colorado in a gift shop, flying across farmland, the Rockies bringing him to tears, into Colorado Springs. He sees his family running to him in the airport, his daughters jumping into his arms, them arguing about who gets to ride on his shoulders, walking into the home Anna bought while he was away, and after his girls are tucked in, Anna’s skin and weight pressed against him, her hands and mouth on him, on top of him, under him, the pressure build and release, home.

Wintric sees Kristen naked on the shore of Lake Almanor late at night, standing on a stump in the low beams of his Bronco, waving her arms, singing, urging him out of the water, to come to her and this place, his home, again.

THE TOP OF the World is a clearing cut into a hill outside Chester, California, and from that height Wintric watches a column of white smoke pushing out hard from the mill. Inside, men strip and cut trees into boards. Some of the workers tell their children they’re making clouds — Wintric’s father had told him this years ago — but from the Top of the World Wintric can see the plume dissolve into the air well below the slow-shifting cumulus.

The bet is up to thirty dollars, and the.38 special feels just right in Wintric’s callused hands as he squeezes the gun’s handle. He’s gathered his long brown hair behind him in a band, and his left big toe claws at a fresh hole in his shoe from a nail he caught working construction out by the sewers. He kicks some of the construction paycheck to his mom and dad to keep the electricity on, but the betting windfalls he keeps for himself.

Young men he passes every day in high school shout obscenities as Wintric takes aim at a target the instigators squint to see. Today there’s a run on motherfucker and bitch. The rules: they can shout and move about, anything except touch him. Tall trucks with gnarly tires line up at their backs. Ponderosa pines surround them, many with white chalk lines around their trunks where they’ll be cut.

Kristen sits in Wintric’s Bronco, swings her long legs out the side, and sings to Metallica. Her green eyes look out through mirrored sunglasses on a scene she’s witnessed plenty of times, and she wonders if this is one of those outings when he’ll purposely miss so the second round of bets nets over fifty bucks. She stays in the truck in case they have to leave in a hurry, but she feels relaxed as she hears her voice mesh with James Hetfield’s. She watches Wintric take the verbal abuse in his green Levi’s T-shirt, his young face, the squint he never seems to lose. To her, he seems most alive on these betting runs and other afternoons when he drives her deep into the woods on back roads and chances getting the Bronco stuck. She knows Wintric’s routine and senses that he’s about to perform the wipe-the-forehead move. It’s hotter than usual for late May, and she guesses that if everything goes well she may score an ice cream soda out of this if he leaves in a good mood.

A new smile rounds at the corners of Wintric’s mouth. He knows this game’s conclusion, but he lets the boys in their flannel shirts go at him a little longer. He has to play the whole thing up, even lose sometimes, or people will stop wagering. He drops the gun to his side and shakes his head. He wipes his sweatless brow. His toe digs at his shoe. After a theatrical exhalation he lifts the handgun and pictures the new boots he will buy: black steel-toe boots on sale down in Chico. The advertisement he saw on television says you can drop a thousand pounds on them without so much as a dent. He keeps both eyes open and visualizes the bullet’s trajectory all the way to the target, a skill he’s been able to conjure for as long as he can remember. One of the boys calls Wintric’s mother a cunt, which he would normally fight over, but the money’s too easy to take the insult as an insult. Just a game, he thinks. Still, the word hits Wintric enough for him to say, “Through the capital P. ”