I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them Page 16

  Her shirt is soaked through along her shoulder line, and she closes her eyes and inhales the thick air. All around her the light impact of things falling—water, leaves, feathers. She opens her eyes and the immensity of the woods rushes at her, but there’s no fear, only a sense that she’s finally discovered a place worth finding.

  Kristen walks the trail, and the spreading wetness trickles down her shoulders to her arms. She considers what she’ll tell Wintric when she gets home. The lines she rehearses all have redwoods and I needed in them, and these words, so absurd and amazing, repeat in her mind. She moves down this trail, and then, without warning, off to her right she spots an enormous mound, a circular darkness just past the first line of forest. Surprised, she stops and raises her hands and focuses on this mass. She takes a couple more steps and studies it, this felled redwood. The tree exposes its huge base, a twenty-foot tentacled wall of roots and dark earth. The stunning displacement has cratered the ground.

  Moving off the trail and ducking under a few damp branches, she stands on the edge of the bowled-out earth. She checks the area, but there’s no sign of violence: no other felled trees, no signs of wind or fire. And before her, on this tree, no lightning or chainsaw marks. Up the trunk green needles flare from the branches and she knows this is recent, that this tree is not dead but dying.

  Kristen looks up to the circle of sky that was once blotted out by this tree, then reaches out and touches one of the gnarly roots. She closes her eyes and smells the damp soil. This place is real. She is here. Everything seems so slow around her, the scattered and patient dripping, the turning earth.

  When she opens her eyes, she’s leaning on the tree, unaware how long she’s been gone. Above her the gray sky, and somewhere down the trail voices calling out and, closer, the low bark of a dog. Kristen hurries back to the trail and glances around her. In the next moment she finds herself running, striding out long and fast, unable to recognize the force that propels her forward. Her heart pounds in her ears and her arms swing wildly; she runs and leans into turns, now outside herself, beside herself; the forest speeds by, the straining legs and heartbeat someone else’s.

  She arrives back at her car and the deserted parking lot faster than she guessed she would, and she bends over, hands on her knees, gasping. She waits for her mind to return to this body.

  Inside the car she removes her sandals and leans back and feels her drenched shirt on her skin. She takes it off, drapes it over the passenger seat, and starts the car. Her right quad starts to twist and she rubs at the pain. The insteps of her right and left feet are rubbed raw, and she knows that she’ll suffer blisters. Breathing through her nose and out of her mouth, she waits until she can no longer hear her heartbeat.

  She turns on the stereo, puts on Modest Mouse, softly at first, then cranks the volume and sings. It’s then, among the thrashing thoughts of driving home, of this mad dash, of her wet and blistering body, as she breathes in to attack the chorus of track two, that she realizes she’s not nauseated.

  Inside the idling car Kristen turns off the stereo, reclines her seat, and slides her drying hands inside her shorts and over her lower belly. She pushes her belly out and feels the pressure against her hands. She wishes now that she hadn’t told her parents so soon, at least not until she figures out what she wants. If she has the child, it’ll have a March birthday. It seems so far away: 2007. Spring. There’s still snow in March.

  Kristen sits up and levers the seat upright. She punches the stereo button and track two comes alive. She runs her fingers through her hair and looks up past the nick in the windshield and sees the way home.

  10

  Safety

  NICHOLLE, DAX’S NEWLY MINTED serious girlfriend, hails from southern Alabama. The first time he meets her family, her brother, Sim, chauffeurs him to his swimming hole. They hike on a narrow path from the car through a blanket of kudzu and pockets of honeysuckle, dodging large bees. Moments before they splash in the muddy stream, Sim slaps Dax’s back and says, “Watch for moccasins and snappers.” Soon they’re neck-deep under the hazy summer sky, and just as Dax’s body relaxes he spots a black snake slithering down the bank and entering the water. Dax isn’t sure what a moccasin looks like, and he throws up his arms and calls to Sim, who appears unfazed.

  “Army didn’t teach you ’bout snakes?”

  “Just to stay away.”

  Birds sound above them and something rustles in the branches.

  “Sim, I don’t see it. Sim?”

  “Splash a little.”

  Dax tries to go onto his toes, but he sinks into the soft stream floor. An echo from his army training: Never get caught in the water. You’re helpless in the water. He examines the slowly moving water along an imaginary line between the snake’s entry point and his half-submerged stomach, then splashes the water in front of him.

  “I was kidding about the splashing,” Sim says. “Jesus, stay still.”

  “Shit. Shit.”

  “If you see white in its mouth, that means it’s a moccasin. Everything else is okay. You’re a big guy. They don’t want to mess with you.”

  Dax doesn’t hear the last sentence. He imagines the possible biting scenarios—a big guy, so much surface area to choose from: the moccasin attached to his face (can it jump?), the moccasin attached to his dick (can it submerge?), the moccasin still attached to his blackening arm at the ER (do they let go?), and he pleads with himself to stay calm, but the mash of all these possibilities overtakes him. Helpless in the water. He hurls himself toward the bank with lumbering steps, his thick legs sluggish through the stream. With yards to go to dry land he peeks back, and every ripple grows a tail and fangs. He hears a high-pitched whine coming from his mouth and, somewhere beyond, Sim’s laughter.

  On the bank, Dax stands and surveys the ground around his feet. The birds have quieted and Sim floats on his back.

  “I don’t see it,” Dax says.

  “Well, damn,” says Sim. “It lives here. Where else you want it to go?”

  On the drive back to Andalusia, Sim puts on some Jim Croce and sings along. His hair is cut at varying lengths, and a scar runs from his left ear across his cheek. Dax’s knees and shins are pressed against the Honda Civic’s dash; an empty Monster Energy can and a dog-track receipt are on the floorboard. Dax stares out the window at the greenery flying by. Lush and overgrown. Nowhere can he see bare earth. He recalls Alston’s fear of sharks, relayed during one of his high school root root diatribes—“I’ll fight a lion or a bear, man. Forget sharks. Fuck hippos. It isn’t fair. You’re drowning and bleeding and you can’t even move. At least I feel the dirt under me against a lion.” Dax replays the effortless motion of the snake entering the water, the silent shift from land to liquid. An unexpected gust of memory: high school English, My Ántonia, bored out of his mind, then the teacher reading out loud, a child hacking a huge rattler with a spade, the nerve to get close enough to kill with a spade; now his black snake, closing in somewhere in the water. He shakes his hands, and as he comes to, hearing Sim’s singing voice, an in-tune tenor, Dax transitions from daydream fear to real-time marvel. He listens as Sim matches Croce’s falsetto, even harmonizes on “I Got a Name.”

  Sim stops midchorus and starts up about Andalusia even though Dax hasn’t asked.

  “We got a porn star, a Miss Alabama, and Robert Horry. Hank Williams got married here. I’m eighteen and I know more about this area than most. Besides that, I don’t know what to tell you. Cole won’t move back here, but you know that. What hasn’t she told you? What you want to know?”

  “Not sure,” Dax says, recognizing the slim chances of anything good coming from this conversation.

  “Dad isn’t thrilled you all are living together.”

  “Okay.”

  “Cole is smarter than she lets on. She went to Vanderbilt, you know? No one goes there from here.”

  “Yep.”

  “She tell you she hates northerners? I’m just shitting. I’m surprised sh
e picked up an army dude. She’s not exactly thrilled with guns.”

  “I’m not in the army anymore.”

  “No. Yeah, that’s what I meant. That you were. I mean, once you’ve been in. Whatever.”

  Sim slows down for a tractor in the road, and the car shakes. “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” through the speakers and Sim hitting the chorus hard, then shaking his head.

  “Croce was in the army. You know that, right?”

  “Nope.”

  “A pecan tree got him. You know that?”

  “No.”

  “Plane hit a tree and crashed. Louisiana.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Every time I have pie I think of ‘Time in a Bottle.’ It’s true, man. Everything about time.”

  Dax spoons mashed potatoes onto his plate at the dinner table with Nicholle, Sim, and their parents, and he wonders if there is anything in his New Jersey upbringing that would scare Sim. Although he searches hard, all he recalls is a harmless bluegill attached to his pinkie when he was eight. He peeks across the table at Nicholle’s mother, a cheerful, plump lady who, if he unfocuses his eyes enough, could be Nicholle in thirty years. Nicholle’s father smiles approvingly.

  After dinner Sim and Dax smoke on the front porch. Sim asks him if he was ever waterboarded. Dax tells him no.

  “Me either,” Sim says, “but I beat up a homeless guy. Dumbass didn’t even fight back, just laid there.”

  “Thanks for that, Sim.”

  “You seen some shit, I know. What’s the worst thing? Kids hacked up? Damn Taliban.”

  “Not my favorite thing.”

  “I hear they like the little boys,” Sim says. “Will tie them up and hump ’em. Crazy shit like that, but chicks can’t show their faces. That’s dumb, covering up their bodies makes the dudes want to hump even more. Hell, even Jesus knew that. Taliban got it backwards. Show everything and the mystery is gone. No one cares. In Jesus’ time women were running around naked and there weren’t the issues we got now. Well, you should know, I’ve seen some shit around here. Cole don’t know this, but I can count cards. I act broke, but there’s ten thou in my room. Swear. I got a buddy working at the Venetian, man. Got one at Bally’s. Vegas.”

  “Okay,” Dax says while fingering his chin. “Cool.”

  Dax has no idea why he says cool, a word not normally in his go-to reaction vocabulary, and even Sim stares at him, curious.

  “You count cards?” he asks.

  Dax does, but he isn’t interested in where the conversation will go or what he’ll be invited to do.

  “You mean, like gambling?” Dax says, and puts his cigarette out on his forearm.

  “Damn,” Sim says, laughing. He shakes his head. “Gambling.”

  What Sim doesn’t know, and what Dax plans on telling Nicholle later on, is that he does gamble. It’s not bad. Local games with friends. He brings what he can lose and that’s it. Even so, something warns him that Nicholle won’t approve, and it’s the one minor thrill he allows himself. If it came out now, there might be an argument, but nothing more than a night on the couch and an animated call from Nicholle to her sympathetic mother. On Dax’s scale of guarded secrets, the card games barely register. The one that still stalks him, the one he doesn’t know how to talk about, is his Afghanistan girl; how she walked toward him with a soccer ball, how the day ate her up; how for a few minutes he let the power overtake and fuel him, and later, how surprised he was that only one bullet was found, how intensely he argued with Wintric about who had actually shot her; how he had had to wait for EOD to arrive to detonate the vest she wore, still attached to her body; how the hour passed and the men saw her block the road, dying, then dead. And later, the doubts: Was she forced to wear the vest? Would she have stopped? The hope now that the bullet was Wintric’s after all.

  Dax doesn’t know where his belief in a just universe comes from, but it exists, godless but real, and one day, be it snake or other ailment, he knows there will be retribution for the girl, no matter what she wore that day, no matter the situation. In the end he made a choice to shoot at a child. He can’t get it out of his head. Retribution. The worst part is the waiting game, and so he waits and senses the possibility of harm hovering over him, pausing until the time is right.

  Two weeks before the Obama-McCain presidential election, Dax calls Nicholle’s father to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Her father cries. “I couldn’t be happier,” he says. “I’ll let you talk to Karen.” Silence over the line while he passes the phone, but his voice comes through again. “Two things, son.” It’s the first time he has called Dax son. “One. I’ll only loan you money if Nicholle asks. Two. All I care about is her happiness.” Silence over the line again. “Two and a half. You’re a Tide fan when you visit. Good luck.”

  A week later, after Dax asks Nicholle to marry him under a flowering dogwood, she makes him call Sim.

  “Know where I been?” Sim says, after telling Dax good job on the proposal. Dax says no. “Riverboats, man. Rivers are international waters. No rules, buddy. State, government can’t touch ’em.”

  “Okay,” Dax says.

  “Should get married on a riverboat. There’s one called the Gypsy. I can sing.”

  “We’ll consider it, Sim.”

  “Love you, Dax,” he says.

  Dax passes the phone to Nicholle, who’s all smiles. “The Gypsy?” she says. Dax stares at the floor. “You want to sing at the wedding?” She gives Dax a look—Sim is off-limits.

  During their engagement Nicholle and Dax pick up books about successful marriages. They open their favorite one, The Questions You Should Ask Before “I Do,” whenever they Sunday-drive around Knoxville, where they live. Dax learns that Nicholle would never adopt, is pro-choice, thinks sex twice a week is enough, hates cats, wants three kids, doesn’t mind if he has to travel for work, doesn’t want Dax’s childhood friend Alston at the wedding, is scared of getting her mother’s cheeks, thinks Dax should remove the eel tattoo on his back, and doesn’t like it when Dax says “You know what I’m saying?” when trying to prove a point.

  She learns a lot about Dax as well, at least the stuff he wants her to know—sex three times a week is about right, every person should know how to shoot a gun, kids should never have to answer the “Which parent?” question during a divorce, he hates snakes, he hasn’t determined his dream job, Rutherford and New Mexico are his dream retirement spots—but her face goes to stone when he tells her that his number-one pet peeve is when people praise God only for the good things in life.

  “What the hell is up with cancer and dropped touchdown passes?” he says. “No one points to the sky and pounds their chest during chemo or when a pass slips through their fingers.”

  They go at it pretty good on this topic—she invokes C. S. Lewis—and near the end he warns himself, If you’re smart, you’ll never say these things again.

  All this learning about each other is fine, but the intense material comes out as they pull in their chairs at a restaurant in a white, stuccoed courtyard on their honeymoon in Savannah. They wait for their food, sipping on red wine, when Nicholle asks Dax the worst thing he has considered doing to someone else, even if just for a split second. He wonders if she’s fishing for something from his deployments and he considers the checkpoint, but all that comes to him is a mongoose darting across the road, then the girl, far away, waving. He pushes the image away. He searches his mental catalogue for relief, and it doesn’t take him long to sift through the many momentary revenge wishes to a wooded lot outside Rutherford.

  Dax starts talking and the memory materializes—he was twelve, cutting down a dead pine with his father. He had taken a break and rested against the old red Dodge truck, and in a bizarre mental pulse he thought of taking the chainsaw and hacking his father. He imagined the roaring saw, the blood and limbs mixing with the sawdust, the dumbfounded look in his father’s eyes before the spinning hot teeth bit. He remembers even in that moment being ashamed and thrilled at the sam
e time.

  Now, in the Italian restaurant courtyard, he holds the saltshaker in his hand and avoids Nicholle’s brown eyes. Dax is unsure if the words have come out right.

  “It’s crazy,” he says. He places his hands in his lap. “I don’t know what I’m saying. You know what I’m saying?”

  She wears his favorite sundress, a white number with red and yellow flowers. She’s tanned and has her hair pulled back, her arms toned from years of swimming laps. A large party two tables over clink wineglasses. They’re all visitors.

  “Stealing a baby,” Nicholle says. “I don’t know where it comes from, but there it is. I’d planned names, escape routes from the local hospital, everything. I didn’t care if it looked like me. I even thought it might be easier to take a one-year-old, not a newborn. She’d be eating solids. And it’s always a girl. I remember very clearly thinking that I could pull it off. I was fifteen, maybe. I’d keep her in my room, not eat all my food and sneak the rest to her. Her name was Jodi. I’ve always loved that name. Jodi.”

  “Almost like Jedi.”

  “That’s not why.”

  “Yeah.”

  The food arrives. Dax cuts the veal with his knife. He takes a bite and watches Nicholle move her bare arms as she negotiates her utensils into her pasta, then grabs her wineglass and gulps. They should laugh. He considers laughing.

  “So,” he says. “I’m glad we’re the normal ones.”

  After their honeymoon, Dax and Nicholle move into a rolling subdivision in Knoxville called Hawks Nest. About a month into their stay, the two hawks they were told about as they debated buying the home make their nest in a giant pine in their front yard.