I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them (6 page)

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 couple 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.

When he arrives, his apartment is cold, icicles hanging from the eves in front of the living room window. He turns the thermostat up to eighty, hoping it'll hit sixty-five. Uncooked pasta sits in a pot for the dinner he had planned to throw together after work. The living room recliner calls to him, and he lights another cigarette. Marcus stares out the window, over at the post office, an old building with two flights of stairs. They're finishing construction on a path for the handicapped. Marcus has never been in a wheelchair and wonders if anyone in the town will use the ramp. The route to the doors will be longer but easier on the legs.

At dinner Kristen gives him a plain red shirt before pouring herself a glass of cheap red wine.

“Something new,” she says.

He hates the shirt but promises her he'll think about wearing it.

After the pasta they relax on the couch and flip through the television channels. Channel six, eight, eleven, twelve, and Kristen tells him to stop.

“Keep it here,” she says. The evening news.

Marcus holds the remote, index finger on the black channel button, ready to press. Colin Powell inside the UN, photos of Iraqi buildings taken from space, arrows, ultimatums. Marcus stays silent and listens for Kristen's breathing, but all he hears is his apartment's undersized heater humming and Powell's voice: “We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction; he's determined to make more.” In his peripheral vision Marcus sees Kristen put the tip of her finger in her mouth. As the segment winds down, he prays for anything except a piece about car bombings or friendly fire or any mention of Afghanistan, and his fears soon dissipate when a mug shot of Phil Spector appears in a small box near the left side of the news anchor's head. “Producer of
Let It Be
arrested for murder.”

Marcus turns off the television and puts his arm around Kristen.

“We should get out of here. Go somewhere.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I'll go.”

“Mexico is warm.”

“Dreams. Only dreams.”

“We can drive.”

“You're not serious. We work, remember?”

“Closer?”

“Marcus.”

“I'm serious. Any place in the world you could go, where'd it be?”

She pictures the gaping hole in the gigantic redwood, envisions her car driving through, a thousand growth rings surrounding her, but she feels Wintric in the vision, feels him in the car with her.

“San Francisco,” she says. “Go see Bonds.”

“Doable. In a couple months, it'll be perfect.”

Eleven at night, and she asks Marcus if he wants her to do anything special, and he summons the courage to say yes. He's nervous, but after hundreds of classroom daydreams, he can give her detailed instructions. He undresses, positions himself in bed under all the blankets, closes his eyes, and waits. The streetlight shines in enough that when he opens his eyes, he sees her in the doorway and knows it's no longer a fantasy.

“Kristen,” he says.

She stands in the doorway. She hears her name and waits in the near darkness. She knows he'll call for her again.

3

T
HREE MONTHS AFTER
his prison stint for starting a forest fire that killed a man, Armando's father drives his family past the Supermax outside Florence, Colorado. He's in good spirits.

“You know the guy that invented the Richter scale? Dude was a nudist,” he says.

The Torres family laughs together inside their minivan as they head back to Colorado Springs after an overnight campout in the Wet Mountains. Fifteen-year-old Armando rests in the back seat with his younger sister. She holds her stomach and smiles. Armando half listens, half mentally undresses a girl in his grade named Marie who sports a pinkish birthmark on her cheek that resembles Wisconsin.

“I can't help but imagine a naked guy, poolside, when an eight-point-oh strikes a couple miles down the road. Bet he wishes he had pants on.”

Armando's mother smiles and play-punches his father in the shoulder.

“So you got gladiators,” he says. “And they battle it out and finally one stands over the other one, sword high, and he checks out the emperor to see if the near-vanquished will live or die, and the crowd gives the thumbs-up. You say, ‘Good news,' right? No, my dear family. Pollice verso. With a turned thumb. The movies have it wrong. Thumbs down, sword down. Thumbs up, dead.”

“So we should give a thumbs-down when someone does something right?” Armando's mother asks. “Weird.”

“There's a flower that opens up at night,” his father says. “Bats do the work, not bees. Your turn.”

Armando extends both thumbs up and smirks at his sister. His mind works, and a school bus passes the other way. “There's blind fish in caves.”

“One huge, linked cave. In Kentucky. What else you got? Give me something good.”

“My English teacher says Shakespeare ripped off his stories.”

“Shakespeare didn't rip off anything 'cause he didn't write the plays,” his father says. “Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. That's a fact. Listen up kids, read widely, but only pay attention to de Vere's stuff and three others—William Blake, Bill Watterson, Jane Austen. That's it.”

“You're full of it,” says Armando's mother, “but you're right about Austen.” Then, smiling back and winking at Armando: “Listen, a half, maybe a quarter of what he says is true.” She reaches and squeezes his shin.

“Ask me anything about sports. Anything.”

“We got the Olympics,” she says. By “we” she means Mormons. The Torres family has visited Salt Lake City twice: Temple Square, the tabernacle, two Jazz games. “We're going.”

“Luge and ice hockey,” says Armando's father.

“Maybe we can get him into luge,” his mother says, thumbing back at her son. Then, tone rising: “How many people can be into luge? A hundred?”

“A thousand, worldwide. Still good odds.”

“What do you say?” his mother says.

“That's headfirst, right?” Armando says.

“It is? Forget it, then,” she says.

“But you'd be okay with feet first?”

“Drop it,” she says.

“Figure skating,” says his sister. “I can see you in skates.”

“I could wear pink,” he says.

Armando's father whistles, sees the approaching dotted yellow center line, flicks the left turn signal on, and accelerates out into the left lane to pass a brown truck doing forty-five, but as their van draws even the truck speeds up, so he pushes the accelerator, but the truck matches him, and four seconds in he peers over and spots two shirtless boys, the young driver smirking, glancing at his speed, and nodding to his buddy, and Armando's father presses the brake, but the truck slows as well, and Armando's mother reaches up and touches her window and says, “Hey. Hey,” and the dotted line goes double yellow and Armando's father smashes the accelerator down and they fly along a bend, the van tilting hard, and a car coming for them in the far distance flashes its lights as the van's engine wails a high-pitched squeal, and Armando freezes in the back seat, and his father's head leans forward as the van gains a bumper ahead, then a full car length, and his father turns the wheel and cuts the truck off and the oncoming car whips past, horn ablaze.

“Shit!” his father says, lifting his right arm up with a fist.

His mother moans.

“My God,” she says. “Slow down. Slow down. Now. Please.”

Armando's father lifts his foot from the accelerator, but the pedal sticks. He presses the brake and the van shakes.

“Stuck. Pedal's stuck. Shit,” he says. “Help me.”

Armando glances outside and watches the red rock and pine trees flash by. Amid his still-forming fear he wonders if they're doing a hundred.

Later Armando will understand that his father's mistake was not shifting the car to neutral and not making any attempt to turn off the engine, but no one in the minivan knows that now, so while his father hammers down his left foot on the parking brake and his right on the main brake pedal, his mother unbuckles her seat belt and leans over the center console and yanks on the accelerator. The burning brake stench overpowers them. From the back seat Armando watches his mother's lower back jerk and jerk. He has never seen her body move so wildly, and the sight scares him more than anything that has happened up to this point, until his body launches sideways, then presses taut, and he hears his father yell out “Na!” as the van begins its roll.

His vision straightens and Armando makes out his sister's wet face and the ground at the window behind her. Something presses on his neck and he reaches there and grabs at flesh, bone underneath, and he moves it away from him. A dangling, shoeless foot on a leg—his mother's leg extending out at an impossible angle toward her body. He hears voices nearby and reaches out in the space in front of him, toward his sister, and sees his hands there before darkness overtakes him.

One afternoon, eight weeks into Armando's mother's coma, Armando's father picks him up from school in their loaner van and drives them past the luxurious Broadmoor resort and out on Gold Camp Road toward Pike's Peak. Aspens flank the packed dirt path. They talk about the Broncos beating the Redskins, about John Elway, how he may have a couple more seasons left in him.

His father says, “The guy once knelt on home plate at the Stanford baseball stadium and hurled a baseball over the center fence from his knees.”

Armando pictures young Elway kneeling on home plate before the throw. Elway's in uniform, warming up, windmilling his massive right arm loose as a crowd gathers near the backstop. A baseball appears in his hand, and in one superhuman motion he flings the ball high and deep. The ball still climbs into the sky as it passes dead center, headed for the clouds. Young Elway grins as Armando shakes the vision away.