I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them

by Jesse Goolsby

  The bell rings, and she leans in with bad coffee breath. “Not everyone has to go to the mill.” Then, with a smirk: “I wouldn’t assume they’ll be hiring.”

  Marcus stays put, waiting, and Kristen walks up his row, books at her chest. He flexes his right arm, leans in enough to get a whiff of her vanilla perfume.

  Wintric and Kristen eat lunch in Reno before his flight to basic training. The slot machines near the casino buffet bang out their solicitations. The carpet underneath them is a dated turquoise-pink-and-black stew. He wears a gray shirt with Army across the front, and his hair reaches the middle of his back. He has put away four platefuls of shrimp.

  Wintric has never been on a plane before, and his buddy told him to watch for the turbulence, but he isn’t afraid. When he imagines the inside of the plane, the images are from the movies and the seats are large and flight attendants in tight uniforms carry trays of drinks.

  “Are you going back for more?” Kristen asks.

  “No, I’m good.”

  “Is it time?”

  “You want me out of here?” Wintric says, and stares at her to make sure she feels the joke, but he knows she’s his equal.

  “As soon as possible,” she says. “Don’t worry, you won’t miss anything. Afghanistan has world-class shrimp.”

  “Got to get through Fort Benning first.”

  Kristen wears his favorite outfit, but she hasn’t caught him glancing at the plunging neckline.

  From the casino floor, Wheeeel ooooff Fortune!

  “Will you send me your hair?”

  “What?”

  “Your hair. It’s something. Stick it in the mail.”

  “You want me to overnight it?”

  “Stick it in the mail.”

  “Fine.”

  “They’re gonna wonder where the heck you came from with your hair.”

  “The army has to have people like me. That’s the point. Rich big-city people don’t enlist. Why would they?”

  “It saves the kids of our town.”

  “What does?”

  “The army saves. That’s what my dad says.”

  “We’ll see. Not sure what I need to be saved from.”

  “No. I didn’t mean . . .”

  “It’s okay.”

  She spoons soft-serve vanilla ice cream into her mouth.

  “They take girls, K. I’m only half joking.”

  “Yeah. Well. I haven’t thought about it.”

  “I don’t know if I want you to think about it.”

  “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 actor
s 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.

  On the far right of the closet hang four white shirts and three pairs of brown pants, her work clothes. The supermarket—the only one in town—loans the employees a logoed apron for each shift. The block lettering reads, Holiday.

  An athlete in high school, Kristen was all-district in basketball and volleyball, and she’s considered asking her old basketball coach if she might serve as an assistant, maybe one day take over the volunteer job. She thought about college until the nerves and lack of money became real, so she took the checkout job after graduation and promised herself that she’d earn an associate’s degree from Lassen College over in Susanville, but already she can’t imagine a future in which she’ll start classes. She doesn’t love or hate her job; it’s just her life now, and most days she doesn’t allow herself to dream up alternatives, save maybe the coaching gig in a couple years. If she keeps out of trouble, she can get a fifty-cent raise every six months.

  After work one evening Kristen grabs her sleeping bag and drives out to a campsite at Domingo Springs. When she pulls up, her two girlfriends are setting up a tent near a stand of dead trees, and one of them holds up and shakes a bottle of rum. Experienced outdoors, Kristen knows her friends have picked the worst possible October location. There’s not much protection from the breeze, the bathrooms are upwind, and the comforting springs are a good fifty yards away, but Kristen cares little—this is how she relaxes. Local places like Domingo Springs, Willow Lake, Drakesbad—the trees, clean water, Mount Lassen nearby—form the limits of the world she knows and support her personal edict: Why go somewhere else when you’re happy where you are? The campsite is only twenty minutes from town, but far enough. She drops her sleeping bag and backpack by the nearly assembled tent and heads off to find dry wood for the fire.

  Newly hired, Marcus drives his Forest Service truck up to the payment box at the campground. He opens each numbered slot and marks his camp sheet. His uniform almost matches the light green truck. He drives ten miles an hour through the one-way maze of campsites, each with a crusty barbecue grill and picnic table. Some of the campers haven’t paid, but it’s mainly locals this time of year, and he ignores their five-dollar sins and motors along with the window open, returning waves and stares. He enjoys it out here—he recognizes a few of the people, and they treat him with respect.

  As he rounds a curve he sees Kristen’s car and the three girls huddled around a fire too large for the pit. The truck stops, and before he can convince himself otherwise he is halfway to them, kicking at pine needles along the way. One of the girls tosses the bottle at the tent, only to have it slide down the zipped-up screen entrance. He attended school with all of them and expects them to call his name in relief, but it’s too dark and all they make out is his uniform. One of Kristen’s friends has hit on Marcus a couple times, and he’s disappointed she’s among the group.

  Kristen, not quite drunk, stands. She has to focus hard to recognize Marcus, but when she does she says his name, and his shoulders relax. The girls invite him to join them and Kristen fetches the bottle, which Marcus accepts.

  He says nothing about their payment, nothing about the tall fire so close to the dry trees, but he does talk, sparingly at first. Yes, he works for the Forest Service now. He patrols campgrounds throughout the area. He’s self-deprecating and fit, and soon chugging the bottle. One of the girls stares at him and smiles.

  Marcus avoids Kristen’s eyes, and for the first time she wants him to look at her. They all laugh and talk about high school, and Kristen tells a story about a girl fight she thinks is new to him, but halfway through she remembers that Marcus was there. She asks him why he didn’t interrupt her, why he’s so quiet, but he just nods and stares at the fire. She talks to the other two girls now, recalling the summer play, breathless and stunned, this Marcus a genius. “The fucking wheat!” she says. She describes the farmer, the silence, the frantic tension, the craziness in Act III.

  Marcus glances over. He can’t feel his hands.

  It’s eleven-thirty when one of the drunk girls asks Marcus if he has to report back. He’s an hour late, and they’ll think he fell asleep, or worse. Marcus tries to stand up straight, and his legs take a moment to support his weight. When he starts the truck, the fuel gauge shows empty and the orange light is illuminated. He’s excited and overwhelmed, but he keeps the truck on the road while scanning for deer. After he coasts into the Forest Service station lot on fumes, he picks up his phone. No missed calls.

  Late morning in early February, and the Forest Service supervisor tells Marcus they’re letting him go. He doesn’t argue, but the supervisor lists the reasons besides overmanning: sleeping on the job, failing to prevent the tree fire last fall at Domingo Springs, having an ambivalent attitude. She tells him that she thinks the mill has started hiring again.

  Marcus senses his own smile. It’s been two months since he started seeing Kristen, and although there have been no promises, they meet up regularly and have agreed to get together later that night.

  The station is a mile out of town, two to his apartment, and Marcus walks back in the dirty snow. He has yet to save up for a car, but an old yellow motorcycle stands for sale in his neighbor’s yard for a hundred and fifty bucks. He stays off the shoulder of the road—the last level inches before the mounded snow berm—and passes the airport. To his right are a couple single-prop jobs tied to the tarmac and a refurbished WWII fire bomber that’s about to take off to hit an incredibly early blaze far south in the canyons. Marcus has heard about the winter fire, but there’s no smoke to prove it’s real.

  He passes a worn-down storage shed and a decent Mexican restaurant—the sixth restaurant in the doomed location—and he raises his arm to slap the green city-limits sign and reads the familiar POP 2200 and ELEV 4525. A coup
le years ago rumors floated that they were taking a new census, but no one ever came to his family’s door. Then, without notice, the sign changed: the town lost twenty-four people. No one knew who the departed were. The county didn’t repaint the elevation, and the last 5 has almost faded away completely.

  Marcus strolls past the entrance to the mill, by the red barber shop/laundromat combo, by the Pine Shack Frosty, and he smokes a cigarette as he gets to the Beacon gas station. The smoking is a recent habit. He can’t get enough of the smell on his clothes and in his apartment. He doesn’t cough at all, and he jogs to equal everything out. Kristen won’t touch cigarettes, but she keeps quiet about the smell when she heads over to his place.

  Marcus takes a drag, and from the gas station door someone appears dressed in camouflage, and for a moment Marcus’s world explodes and he projects in flashes—Wintric, home, hero, breakup, Kristen, empty, a gun—but the man turns and he sees that he’s not Wintric, just a no-name hunter returning from a morning out. Marcus’s blood runs back to his legs and his heart settles. It’s at this moment that he imagines, then wishes for, an accident wherever Wintric is—Afghanistan? Fort Carson? At first thought it’s not Wintric’s death, just disfigurement, a lost hand, leg. But no, he thinks, it has to be his face, turned unrecognizable. He pictures a mash of swirled flesh, but he wonders if there’s too much sympathy and attention in that, no matter how repulsive. Having heard about ill-equipped Humvees from his uncle, Marcus considers an IED ripping Wintric in half from the bottom up—an instantaneous death. There’s sympathy there, he thinks, but it won’t last.

  Marcus walks past the Holiday supermarket and a silent surge hits him from being this close to Kristen, only a parking lot, a brick wall, four small eat-in tables, a rack of magazines, and two cash registers away. He could go in and surprise her—she might like that—but he talks himself out of it.

  He walks by the Kopper Kettle and the U.S. Bank and pauses in front of the ice cream shop where he used to work. A woman dusts the empty barstools. He passes the old theater converted into a church and the park with bent basketball rims and stops on a bridge over the North Fork of the Feather River. He works his mind toward hopeful images of the evening: Kristen sliding her pants off, her bra, standing in his doorway. He pauses to survey the cold water of the river, and he wonders how the lake can sit low in the summer with all the water running underneath him.