I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them Page 17

  The place is spacious and they have privacy on almost an acre—dogwoods, a pear tree, a tall row of hedges running the property lines. The neighbors are fine, but a guy who lives around the corner lets his retriever shit in their yard. One Sunday morning, Dax trims the flowering bushes in the front yard, and the neighbor comes around with the dog and waves friendly to Dax before the dog scampers ten feet onto Dax’s front yard and poops. Dax lacks the courage to say anything. He’s out-of-shape heavy and he has come to believe a fistfight hovers in every confrontation, no matter how minor. This neighbor is a large guy, like Dax, but it seems like he wouldn’t mind a fight, win or lose. Sometimes Dax sees both the neighbor and his dog rolling around on the guy’s front yard when Dax comes home from work.

  Other than the shitting dog, life is good: Dax works for a local collection agency and lies to his Nashville boss most days about where he is, the hours he puts in, but he works hard enough that his boss never questions him, so he gets in a round of golf at the local course on Thursday mornings. The money is okay, and Nicholle does well at a local consulting firm, well enough for them to come out ahead a little each month. Dax is a converted Tennessee fan, but Nicholle is Alabama all the way, so they sport “house divided” license plates, half orange, half crimson. They join a coed softball league, help clean up the local park, and make the HOA meetings about a third of the time. He enjoys the routine, and for the first time he assesses himself an adult, living a regular life. Even so, they break up their regular life enough to keep everything interesting. Nicholle begins highlighting her blond hair with bright colors—she switches from pink to orange every couple of months—“Because I can,” she tells Dax. One day, after the linoleum warps in their master bathroom, Nicholle suffers the long lines at a local hardware store before deciding to bypass the registers altogether, and she walks out with four hundred dollars’ worth of beige tile on a large cart and loads the lot into their truck and drives home.

  Sim phones one night and talks to Nicholle for an hour. When Dax pokes his head into the room, Nicholle waves him away.

  She descends the stairs and Dax turns off the Tennessee game, expectant.

  “He needs money,” Nicholle says. Dax’s head is already in his hands. “Five thousand.” They don’t have an extra $5,000 anywhere. “Let’s give him what we have. It’s serious and he’ll pay us back. He says he’ll pay us back. I know what you’re going to say. It’s not Vegas. Please. He wouldn’t ask unless he needed it. I know. He can’t go to Dad. I know.”

  Dax has prepared—the phone call had to be about money, and he has decided not to say a thing.

  “He’s desperate, and we can cash bonds if we have to. Say something. We need to be together on this.”

  Dax knows she’s near tears. The pleading hurts her, but Dax remains parked on the couch. He leans back into the cushion. He wants this to sting a bit, and his reclining works. He guesses what is going through her mind—we’ll never see a penny back, we can’t afford it, you despise me for asking—and yet here she is. Sim, her brother. Dax tells her he wants Sim to drive up so Dax can see him face-to-face when he hands him the check. Everyone agrees, but two weeks later Nicholle puts the money in the mail and talks to Dax about the price of gasoline.

  Although they understand that there’s never a perfect time to start a family, Nicholle and Dax have thought about it for some time, and agree on a Tuesday night in April to make love without protection for the first time. After he comes she raises her legs, grabs the backs of her knees, and pulls them to her chest. “Gravity,” she says.

  Years of teenage warnings and general fear of accidental pregnancy trump the stats that tell them it will take time to get pregnant, and for the first three months they approach the pregnancy test with expectant glee. They’re both healthy, but after six months Nicholle is not pregnant. Their conversations about sex lead to arguments, so they decide to lie to the doctors, tell them they’ve been trying for a year so they can get an appointment to figure out the issue. One of the first things the doctor has Dax do is provide a semen sample. He complies with the request in a specially furnished hospital room with clear plastic on the couch and recliner and drawers full of oddly titled pornography (Brick, Lemon People).

  Soon they learn that his sperm have “square heads,” that this could be an issue going forward. When they get the news, he pictures mini hammerhead sharks swimming around in his testicles. He says, “Like mini hammerhead sharks?” but the doc shakes his head and Nicholle cries into her palms so he shuts up. It’s in this moment that he realizes Nicholle wants this more than he does, or at least is more serious about everything. He wants to be a dad, but he isn’t sure why, outside of the fact that he thinks he would be a good father. He visualizes Little League games and bike rides, skinned knees and good-night stories, but this optimistic collage is all he has, and he worries that it may not be good enough.

  Dax reaches over and rubs Nicholle’s back underneath a painting of cherry trees in bloom. The doctor lets her cry for a while before telling Dax to avoid saunas and hot tubs and to eat more fruit and test again in six months.

  Nicholle and Dax fight and stress, and making love morphs into an exercise of forced monthly routine over the next year. In that time he takes a job as a rep in a pharmaceutical company—a favor called in by Nicholle’s dad—selling various pieces of medical equipment. The company wanted veterans and the money is better than at the collection agency, but he travels frequently.

  Dax is sitting down to eat inside a Taco Bell in Jacksonville when Nicholle calls. He shifts the greasy bag to his right hand and answers the phone.

  “You’re going to be a father,” she says.

  “Okay,” he manages. “What the hell? My God, Nicholle. I wish I was there. I’m coming home.”

  She cries over the line and he wants to, but contrary to all things he thought he might feel when they eventually received the news, he imagines the future drive home from the hospital with their newborn child in the back seat. He thinks of all the new drivers, the drunk drivers, the red-light racers. He relives the painful surprise of talking to Torres after his accident, hearing his words, “I never saw the car.”

  “We need a car seat,” he says.

  “I love you,” Nicholle says.

  He loves her too, but he says, “Does this mean we don’t have to steal a baby?”

  Five weeks later he’s standing on the sidewalk outside the VA hospital in Charlotte when Nicholle phones and lets him know there’s trouble. He hears the words ectopic pregnancy, not sure what that means. Mid-July and dust swirls in the sky, and as she explains, he thinks of their growing child in her right fallopian tube, budding bigger and bigger, slowly killing his wife. She says the doctors are going to take care of everything the next day, and they do. He flies home and he and Nicholle rest in their living room, Nicholle’s head in his lap, and he rubs her back, then reaches down and strokes her legs. She hasn’t shaved them in eight days and he feels the bristles on his fingertips. He can think of nothing to say.

  “We have to wait three months,” she says. “We’ll try three months from now.”

  The ceiling fan spins above them, but the rushing air does little to help the thick humidity. He studies her body from her head down to her hips and bent knees and tucked feet. Slowly she uncoils. She has yet to tell her parents—which surprised Dax—but as she heads upstairs and closes their bedroom door, he knows she’ll reach for the phone. He hears Nicholle’s muffled voice through the ceiling. There’s nothing her mother can do from that distance, but he knows there’s a safety in that bond that he’ll never be able to join.

  Downstairs and alone, he turns on the television, then turns the set off. He sees his reflection in the blank screen. He waves at himself and stares at the reflection of his living room furniture. Nicholle’s building cries travel through the ceiling and he considers the disproportionate pain of their situation, how he does hurt but mainly by proxy, how Nicholle bears the brunt of everything. I
s all this part of my penance? I don’t have to bear the pain full on. A life for a life? Am I even with the universe? The pain of losing something sight unseen seems a reduced sentence somehow, losing something not even named. Is this just the beginning? The ceiling fan turns overhead and Dax stands. The room has an eight-foot ceiling, and the fan’s blades whip inches above the top of his head, the cool air on his shoulders. A person in a fallopian tube. Replaying the Afghanistan checkpoint, he sees the shawled girl curled up, an embryo. His girl. Her bare heels digging into the dirt. He named her long ago, and tonight he hears it in his ears: Courtney. It’s a lie, an impossibility, an American name, but he doesn’t care. He hasn’t met a Courtney since. She’s the only one.

  After a second miscarriage, Nicholle becomes pregnant again. Seven months along, with a big, beautiful belly and a dark line bisecting her bulge, she and Dax ride in a city bus on the way to a Tennessee Volunteers’ game in Neyland Stadium. Dax can’t stop touching her, his fingers on her thigh, his palm on her belly.

  Across from them sit four men in turbans and orange shirts with capital T’s on them. Logically Dax knows that these men aren’t terrorists, they’re probably not even Muslim, but he’s nervous. The men speak a mix of English and a language Dax can’t decipher and appear to be joking with one another, but one of them gazes over at Nicholle, at her belly, and stares. His brown face goes slack, trancelike. Dax wonders if this is the moment: This man will make a move toward them. The friends will hold him down while the man struggles with Nicholle. Dax may survive the attack, alone. When that flurry of images passes, he imagines the man flying a plane, a single-prop Cessna, over their neighborhood. The front-yard hawks are up and circling high in the sky. The man brings the plane into a dive, tears up the birds, heads straight for their shingled roof, but before Dax can complete the daydream, Nicholle reaches for his clenched hand, unfolds it, and intertwines hers. The man stares unflinchingly.

  “Soon,” Nicholle says to the man, tilting her chin up. “Two months left.” It takes a second for him to realize that she spoke to him. The man breaks his stare. Nods. Grins. “Soon,” Nicholle repeats. She smirks. “Go, Vols,” she says.

  The man taps his orange shirt above his heart, taps his forehead, and circles his hand toward them.

  “I think girl or boy,” he says, and laughs. “One hundred percent correct.”

  The magnolias Dax planted bloom large white blossoms. He stares at them with a cup of coffee one Saturday morning when the neighborhood man brings his retriever by. Nicholle’s parents are in town, and her father stands next to him, and the dog unloads one on their driveway. Dax is near his limit, with no plan. He tries to talk himself down, but it’s been too long now, and he is tired of being on the road, tired of coming home and running over shit on his driveway, stepping on shit when he mows, smelling shit even when he avoids direct contact. Nicholle’s father gives him enough time to say something, and when he doesn’t, he asks, “How often?”

  “I only see them on the weekends,” Dax says.

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  Later in the week Nicholle’s dad informs Dax that the dog-walking jerk works the graveyard shift, that he must walk the dog after he gets home in the morning. Dax doesn’t ask how he’s come by this information. Nicholle’s father steps into the den and calls Sim on his cell phone. When he returns he says, “You’ll have to help.”

  He asks Dax to wait in the parking lot of the local Walmart, and he comes out with a plastic bottle of antifreeze. Before he lowers himself into the car, Dax assigns the guilt to Nicholle’s father: his idea, his purchase. He has decided that he won’t say no as long as Nicholle’s father pours the concoction into the dog bowl himself. Nicholle’s father plops down with a heavy exhalation.

  “Sim’s done this a couple times,” he says. “Says to mix in a cup of vinegar, a little honey, helps it go down.”

  “Vinegar?”

  “That’s what he says. Said he’d do it himself if he was here. Sends his love. Wanted me to tell you.”

  Late that night Dax and Nicholle’s father walk down the street with a jug of antifreeze, honey, vinegar. Dax has downed five Heinekens in the past hour and a half, but they haven’t loosened him as he had hoped.

  Before they arrive at the targeted street, Nicholle’s father slows.

  “I need a smoke, and I think you do too,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  They veer over to a nearby pocket park and sit on a wide bench. Dax lights Nicholle’s father’s cigarette, then his own. He takes a drag.

  “I’ve promised Nicholle I’ll try to stop once the kid is born,” Dax says. “They say heroin is easier to kick.”

  “That’s probably not true.”

  “Maybe. The president smokes. Good enough endorsement for me.”

  “Obama can do what he wants. You see those before-and-after photos? Those guys age like twenty years in office, and that’s got nothing to do with cigarettes. Obama wants to snort coke, go ahead. Anyone who wants to be president deserves what he gets.”

  Crickets everywhere and a diesel’s air brakes on Middlebrook Pike, the air humid, bats darting. Dax knows they won’t go through with their dog-killing plan; perhaps he knew it as they left, even before then. This pocket park, this new direction for the night, and the gathering nicotine soothe his body.

  “Tell me what you thought when you first met me,” Nicholle’s father says. “I’ve never asked.”

  “First time?”

  “First time you came down to Alabama.”

  “That you would kill me if I did anything to Nicholle,” Dax says. “I’m serious. I thought that you would do it.”

  “More.”

  “Then you have to answer.”

  “Sure. Keep on.”

  “Alabama hick, but nice as hell,” Dax says. “That you worried about me. Your girl was too good for an army vet. I think I heard Vanderbilt ten times in forty-eight hours. I wondered why anyone would choose to live where you live. You know, there are other options. But overall I thought, Don’t blow it. Everyone here seems sane, relatively. Maybe that’s pushing it with Sim, but really, that’s it. It’s been good. No BS.”

  “Your arms,” Nicholle’s father says, and Dax realizes that he hasn’t listened to his minor confession, only that he wanted to get to this point, right now. “Your arms. I’ve always wanted to know about that. That’s the first thing. I’m no doctor. Disease? Your doing? Father? I’ve never had the courage to ask. War thing?”

  Dax keeps his cigarette in his mouth and runs his right fingertips over his left forearm, the small bumps there. He looks down, but it’s dark, and he wonders if anyone could identify his own forearm if all he had to go on was touch. He remembers the first time he pushed the lit cigarette into his skin. Fort Benning, near the end of basic training: the searing but fleeting pain; the faint flesh-smoke smell; the silent admiration of a few nearby soldiers. He hasn’t put out a cigarette on his arms in some time—last time with Sim?—and he’s about to speak, although he doesn’t know what will arrive in the night, but he hears Nicholle’s father’s voice.

  “You know I skipped Vietnam. Or didn’t volunteer. I didn’t go. I’m sure Cole has told you. I don’t regret it, but there’s something there. Not guilt. Just . . . I’m not sure. If there was a word that meant guilt but wasn’t guilt, that would be it. I pass by it easily, but it’s there.”

  A car drives by and they watch it pull into a driveway.

  “They had these draft lottery drawings, you know. On television. They’d reach down and pick a birthday on a slip of paper and post it to a big board, and damn, you didn’t want to hear your birthday being read. It’s the one time in my life that I feared my birthday. It’s a shit thing to do to someone. It’s then you realize that the day you were born has nothing to do with you. You’d give it up in a second.”

  He takes a drag, and Dax, still feeling his forearm, stares at the orange glow of the cigarette draw.

  “Anyway,
here we are. Your arms.”

  Dax has had enough time to think about his answer, but he was focused on the lottery, the exact opposite meaning of that word as he understands it—winning the big one—and still no answer about his arms.

  “Is it too difficult?” Nicholle’s father asks. “I understand, son.”

  “My arms,” Dax says, hearing himself. “I’ve done this.”

  The doctor invites Dax to grab one of Nicholle’s legs before he instructs Nicholle to start pushing, and before he can say no, Dax finds himself holding Nicholle’s right leg, staring above her head, repeating Don’t look down, don’t look down, but he does. Emma arrives a little early; six pounds, three ounces.

  Dax knows no man could endure Nicholle’s schedule of no sleep, all-go patience, and worry. Emma has Dax’s blue eyes, and even though many children are born with blue eyes, hers are his deep shade. He sees them under the oxygen mask she has to wear for several hours to keep her lungs full. A few days later he drives Nicholle and Emma home, his foot hovering over the brake, eyes scanning for sixteen- and ninety-year-olds.

  Eight weeks later Emma has some neck control and Dax starts out on the road again. He returns from an Indianapolis-Louisville-Lexington trip exhausted. His back kills him, and he’s noticed a new red mole on the side of his rib cage. Emma rests on his chest and Nicholle sips half a glass of cheap Shiraz.

  Dax had stopped by another VA hospital on this latest trip, and he tells Nicholle that if they play the percentages, he will probably die before her, most likely from some kind of cancer caused by the crap he breathed in while deployed—the jacked-up cells have probably already started multiplying somewhere far inside his slippery body.

  “Great, Dax,” she says. “Welcome home. Shut up and hold your girl. She missed you.”

  Sometimes he worries that Nicholle might die first. When she’s late getting home from a mom’s night out and he gets her voicemail—her gentle voice, as if everything is okay—his mind allows about a thirty-minute cushion and then begins the murmurs of what-ifs. The whole scene flashes by: the dreaded call—auto accident, funeral, insurance money, his baby girl growing, him dating or not, the guilt of either, moving, different career, Emma’s wedding—but then, as always, the garage door rumbles open and Nicholle saunters in, because in the end, nothing is wrong.