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

“Be fair. If it’s good enough for you…”

“Okay. Let’s not talk about it right now.”

“So you’re going to send me your hair?”

“If you want. I’m serious. I will.”

At the airport Wintric checks his bag, and they walk together through the central lounge. A band from the local middle school plays a poor version of the William Tell Overture in the lobby and they stop to listen near a hand-painted sign and a donation bucket. The clarinets are especially awful — a squeak emanates every third bar — and the trumpets fail to keep the momentum even at half tempo. Neither Wintric nor Kristen imagined a soundtrack to their goodbye, but they hear the music and stop. The aging carpet stretches another fifty feet to the metal detectors, but this is the spot. Behind them on the wall is an advertisement poster for Harrah’s Lake Tahoe. Wintric has asked Kristen not to write until he gets settled, and even then he isn’t sure how many reminders of home he wants right away. They hug, and as he pulls away he looks down her shirt.

“I have a window seat,” he says.

He walks away, the bottom of his ponytail bouncing in step. He doesn’t wave, and when he passes through the metal detector he lifts his hands up.

Marcus has twenty minutes before he enters, stage left. He realizes that everyone is worried about him, even though the cast is mostly people from the retirement home and other high school kids who don’t mind a horrible-paying summer gig. The director told Marcus that it would be okay to sit out until he is more comfortable. Julian, an ostentatious seventy-year-old with a bad hip, has memorized Marcus’s lines and could cover for him, but Marcus refuses. Marcus knows the words, but his demeanor in and out of character is the opposite of what the director needs: his character is supposed to be fiery and impassioned — a man fighting the railroad for his land — and Marcus is neither, though he may look the part with his impressive wrestler’s body. He has done poorly in rehearsals, but this is community theater in a small town, so they let him keep the part because he knows the lines and helped paint the backdrops.

His mother sits somewhere in the darkness of the half-filled elementary school auditorium. He wonders if she smells of Beam, her familiar breath-scent since his father lost a hand delimbing trees for the mill. The smell no longer bothers Marcus. His mother never drives drunk, and at least she’s there in the uncomfortable folding chair when other parents are not.

The actors sweat under the lights. Three pages before he goes on. Marcus wears thin overalls. His hat is too large for him, but he’s ready. He wonders if Kristen has come and decides that she has: he imagines she has sneaked in alone for his performance and she’s leaning forward, mouth slightly open, waiting for his entrance. She smiled when he told her about the play, and although there’s no reason to think that she’s there, Marcus doesn’t care. A hand pats him on the back and he steps out onto the stage.

The space is larger than he remembers, and as he takes the long walk to the aged railroad man, his mother shouts his name. The crowd laughs. Marcus is supposed to address the railroad man, but he stares out to the darkened back row as he speaks his lines. The conversation lasts six minutes, and Marcus maintains his focus. The railroad man ad-libs “Look at me” twice and then gives in and gazes at the back of the room as well. The other actors follow.

Marcus doesn’t realize that Kristen is actually sitting in the fourth row, where the cusp of stage light fades out. One of her girlfriends is playing a corn farmer, and Marcus had jokingly told Kristen that she should come and watch him forget his lines. Kristen hears Marcus speaking to the railroad man, a possible deal and a rejection, but they don’t look at each other, and quickly the play has changed in a way no one quite understands.

The audience listens closely, the awkwardness forcing them to shift in their seats. They want to know what they’re missing. They want to understand why no one looks at anyone else. Several glance over their shoulders to the back of the room to check if something is there. The railroad man angers, demands the five thousand acres: “Forty thousand dollars is more than fair!” But the farmer is trancelike, as if he can’t hear the offer or the threat that follows.

Marcus is in the middle of his monologue: “My land! My soul! Inseparable! The rebirth of our lives in the soil! This seasonal passion! Roots of my land! My Nebraska!”

He stands with his arms at his sides, slightly hunched over, gaze still locked onto the back row. He speaks to Kristen in the seat he can’t see. He’s placed her there and put her in a white cotton shirt. He enchants her, seduces her now. He hurls his lines forth, body slouched but his voice powerful and confident.

Kristen spots the farmer’s hat sliding down, his strong arms at his sides, everything odd but captivating. His voice has taken on a desperate but fierce rhythm, and his pleas fill the room like nothing else in Act I. She compares this actor onstage to the Marcus she’s known: playing in the back yard at family barbecues, looking at her longingly in ninth grade, exchanging daily pleasantries in the high school hallways, working at the soda fountain, wrestling, his singlet and triceps at the one match she attended. She’s heard he might get on with the mill.

The door opens at the back of the auditorium — a late arrival — and the hallway sheds enough light to illuminate the empty back rows. Marcus hesitates long enough for the director to whisper his next line. His hat has slouched down again, and he grabs the brim and flings it into the crowd. He glances around at the railroad man and the other actors as they all stare at the back of the room.

Kristen watches the farmer’s hat fly up and float down into the ambient light. The room is silent, and the entire cast focuses on a far-off point as the farmer takes in their faces for the first time. The farmer appears confused and stammers: vocal heartbreak. His hair is crazy.

“Her bosom! Her long reach around us! The spring like a… like a slow kiss!”

His pace is fast and his voice cracks. His eyes dart back and forth across the auditorium, and the audience squirms, some now staring at their feet, the awkwardness too much, but a few reach out to meet him, entranced. Kristen squeezes her knees. Her feet tingle. She sees his eyes pass over her. Is any of this for her? Is it all for her?

The farmer appears lost onstage, and he delivers his final words exiting, apparently too soon, because he’s still speaking even after he’s past the ruffled curtain: “And my heart in the wheat!” There is no scene break in the play, but the actors are speechless, the audience silent. Everyone hears Marcus, offstage, stamp his feet on the floor and call out, “Shit!”

He hits himself on the side of his head before leaving the building. He has more dialogue in Act III, but he doesn’t return. When someone has to deliver the farmer’s triumphant monologue about the unrailroaded land, a confident Julian limps out to center stage in the retrieved hat, but before he reaches his mark, the crowd buzzes and Marcus’s mother screams out “Bullshit!”

Above an old pair of Nike basketball shoes and Kristen’s prom dress, on the top shelf of her closet, sits a box containing two feet of Wintric’s hair. She hasn’t moved the box in four months. Wintric’s absence no longer occupies her daily thoughts, but when she does think of him — when she spies the box or when he sends a postcard of the Garden of the Gods, letting her know he’s been stationed at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs — his presence arrives, intense and warm. He has contacted her only twice, and each time he has written he has asked that she not contact him, said that he is still sorting out the military life and that her words would make him lose focus. When friends ask her if she and Wintric are still together, she pauses and answers “No,” but she despises the way that answer arrives more quickly to her lips with each passing day.