I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them (11 page)

“A falling refrigerator,” Dax says.

Alston runs his fingers through his hair and looks at Janelle.

“Fuck Saddam.”

Drew Barrymore sits behind Dax, Alston, and Janelle in a New York City theater just before
Die Hard: With a Vengeance
starts. Early summer and hot, and Dax and Alston have traveled the short distance to the city from Rutherford for basketball camp and sneaked out on the third night to the show. Dax didn't anticipate that Janelle would show up, but nothing surprises him about Alston and Janelle, now that she's a permanent fixture.

Dax is too nervous to talk to Drew, but Alston turns around and says, “
Poison Ivy
was your best work,” and for those words he receives a condescending pat on the head before the lights dim and they all watch and cheer Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson as they kill, maim, and solve logic puzzles to save New York City from pissed-off foreigners.

On the sidewalk after the show a disheveled and serious old woman begs Dax never to cut his hair because she's certain the Japanese will soon invade the country searching for American locks. Dax takes a step back and the woman holds up a paintbrush as evidence.

“Promise me,” she says.

“Yes,” Dax says.

“They have unfinished business here.”

“Okay,” Dax says.

“Oklahoma City was two months ago. It was just the start.”

“Yep.”

“I was alive for Pearl Harbor.”

“Okay.”

“Promise me.”

“Fine.”

“Your hair.”

“Yes.”

A block later, Dax, Alston, and Janelle stroll along the night boulevard, and a boy around twelve years old walking in the other direction pulls up his shirt to reveal a white-handled revolver stashed in his pants. He contorts his fingers into a practiced gang sign. Once Dax notices his weapon, he allows his shirt to fall back down, nods his head, and continues down the street. Dax's body shakes and Alston says, “Calm down. It wasn't loaded.”

“You can't tell that shit from the handle,” Dax says, trying to settle himself.

“I can tell.”

Dax is in awe of Alston because of his ignorant surety—an unabashed confidence that Dax desires for himself—and because Alston teaches Dax things he's not supposed to realize until much later in life, stuff like honesty is rarely the best policy, a car runs even if you don't have a driver's license, and people do whatever you want them to do if they're scared enough.

Alston's father left when he was eight, and his undisciplined mother saw Alston as a miniature version of his wayward father—same verbal energy, blue eyes, and attraction to alcohol—so Alston largely takes care of himself. Most nights dinner is frozen chicken nuggets and a Coke from the corner store. His father still shows up once a year and takes Alston up to Bear Creek Camp near Wilkes Barre to shoot a .357, camp out, and sip a mix of whiskey, vodka, and root beer, a drink Alston's father calls root root.

Dax's father, a tired, below-average dentist, gave fatherhood a shot when Dax had to make a decision during the divorce but has since focused on golf, his new girlfriend, and his timeshare in Hilton Head. If he had to do it all over again, Dax wouldn't pick differently—he has all he needs, and his father kicks him extra money whenever he asks. Plus the freedom gives him more time with Alston, the one person he considers a close friend.

One of the things Alston teaches Dax is neutral drops, the art of shifting an automatic vehicle into neutral, revving the engine, and simultaneously “dropping” the shifter to drive. One Friday night Dax and Alston neutral-drop Dax's 1984 Toyota Camry in the Lincoln Elementary School parking lot, listening to the front-wheel-drive vehicle skid on the old pavement. Alston nurses a fifth of Black Velvet, and even though he has never had a driver's license, he demonstrates particular talent at the neutral-drop maneuver, seemingly oblivious to the grinding sound the shift produces after each drop.

“You need a six-cylinder,” Alston says. “But hell, you have a car.” He pauses and takes a sip. “Drink this,” he says, offering the bottle. “I know you won't. And that's okay. If you did it, I'd hate you. You've fucked yourself into expectations, my friend. Always the good guy, huh?”

“Never,” Dax says.

“Guy with your size should be fucking shit up. You know that?”

“I am.”

“No. You're not. Listen, it's easy. You need to be louder. Even when you're wrong, be loud. It works.”

“Where do you get this stuff?”

“I have eyes and ears.”

“Fine.”

“I mean it. A guy your size, they'll tuck their dicks and run. Girls coming out of their minds.”

“You should teach, A.”

“Volume up. Free lesson, my friend. And you should play football. Everyone likes football. You watch it enough.”

Dax loves college football and follows the games closely, especially the New Mexico Lobos, from where his father went to school, but actually playing football would mean violent contact, speed, and inevitable pain.

Alston revs the engine and drops the shifter and the tires squeal.

“Not bad,” he says. “Hey, what about Janelle?”

“What about?”

“You know she's messed up, right? That family she lives with—they got all those dumb-shit foster kids.”

“Okay.”

“Weird shit. Foster dad jacked up.”

“The dad messes with them? Did she say that? I don't want to know.”

“We're going to take off. This is the last time you're going to see me.”

“Don't tell me.”

“Why not?”

“I don't want to know. You tell me too much.”

“'Cause you don't know anything.”

“Where you gonna go?”

“She wants Key West. Figures rich people need help around their mansions. Plus if we got to live, why not live there?” He takes a swig of the Velvet.

“I don't think Key West is real. But even if it is, it can't be all that great or everyone would live there,” Dax says.

“I always wondered why people don't move to the vacation spots. If you have so much fun there, just move, get a job, boom, done.”

“Sounds too simple. Like when you're ten and say you're going to run away when your parents piss you off and you don't make it out of the driveway.”

“I'm not ten, and besides, how hard is it? Get on the bus, get off at Key West.”

“You think Greyhound goes to Key West?”

“Close enough.”

Weeks pass and Alston and Janelle haven't gone anywhere. Autumn sweeps in and basketball season arrives. Dax finds himself starting at power forward. He's big but not very strong, and outside of the summer camp with Alston he has largely ignored the sport, but the team needs height, so Dax clogs the lane and keeps his arms up.

Alston comes to the home games with Janelle and sits in the front row trying to pick fights with opposing players, which, while funny, still surprises Dax. He has seen Alston in three fights, all of which he lost badly.

After one home game—a rough night when Dax's best efforts and Alston's “weak dick” chants fail to keep Dax's man from pouring in thirty-three points in a blowout win—Dax, Alston, and Janelle neutral-drop in the post office parking lot. Alston drives first, drinking root root from a Natural Springs water bottle he then passes to Janelle. Dax lounges in the back seat, feeling the jerk and lurch of the car from neutral to drive, neutral to drive, and the dirty smell of brakes and tires. Tired, he thinks of the player that lit him up in his home gymnasium, how the guy was smaller than him, not that much faster, but had seemed so much better at everything. He wonders why it's so damn hard to get his body to do exactly what he wants, as fast as he wants it.

When it's Dax's turn to drive, Janelle and Alston climb into the back seat and disappear into the darkness.

“Put on some Biggie and drive around,” Alston says, so Dax does. He drives down Montross to Pierrepont to Riverside with the music loud. A cop car appears up ahead and Dax rolls his window up. He turns on Passaic and something pushes at the back of his seat. Alston told Dax that the first time he and Janelle screwed he used Saran Wrap and a rubber band, so this is what Dax can't shake out of his infected mind: Alston, back at home, unfurling a rectangle of clear plastic and snapping it off with the carton's sharp teeth.

After a song titled “Who Shot Ya?” beats out of the factory speakers, Alston hops into the front seat. For a while no one says anything, and for the first time Dax notices that he has to hold the steering wheel an inch to the right to keep the Camry straight, but he's unsure what this means.

“I fucking hate people that play instruments,” Alston says. “Seriously, who has time to learn to play an instrument? There's nothing better to do? Let's learn notes over and over. Dumbasses.”

From the back-seat darkness, Janelle says, “I played the piano for a little bit.”

“You're a foster kid,” Alston says.

“So? You're a shit. I can play a Beethoven song, a song from
The Nutcracker,
and an overture.”

“What's an overture?” Dax says.

“Did I say I was a fucking music teacher?” Janelle says.

A right turn.

“Where did you get a piano?”

“Electronic keyboards at Walmart. They got them set out and plugged in and no one's ever there, so you go in and practice and keep the volume low. Sometimes I went to Target, but mostly Walmart.”

“Radio Shack?” Dax says.

“Did I say Radio Shack?”

“Foster-kid trick,” Alston says.

“When we're married we're having ten foster kids,” Janelle says.

“You're too tall for me,” Alston says.

“You're too small for me. And by that I mean your cock.”

With that, Alston jumps into the back seat.

Dax slides a Boyz II Men CD in and thumbs the track to “I'll Make Love to You,” knowing it'll piss off Alston, but there's no reaction. After the first chorus Dax only wants to escape from his car, so he drives to his high school, parks the car facing the grass field, leaves the stereo on, and gets out.

The grass is still wet from the previous night's rain, so Dax walks the length of the field and leans on a damp picnic table. He looks up at the city lights' dirty hue, then over at his Camry, a tiny light from the stock stereo illuminating the interior.

Dax smells the night grass, considers how there's a good chance that no one, anywhere, is thinking of him. He thinks of his mother, her hands on his face the day she left, her eyes on his eyes, her voice whispering. “I love you, but you chose
him.
” Dax imagines his mother in Dallas, where she now lives, strolling down the street in an oversized cowboy hat with her Texas husband. They hold hands and laugh and push their set of twin girls in a wide stroller. The last he heard from her was three years ago, when she sent him a Troy Aikman jersey for his birthday. A New York Jets fan, he burned it in his back yard with Alston.

Dax fights the tension in his chest and glances over to his car—still the stereo's glow, but he's not sure how long the battery will last. His dad has shown him how to jump the car, but he's not sure he remembers, something about grounding. Janelle will probably know.

A helicopter overhead, with a searchlight scanning. A pain in Dax's back right molar, then gone. Dax thinks about his dad, the new girlfriend who resembles his aunt Karen, how his dad has been harping on Dax to consider the army, how it'll pay for school, how he'll have no one to fight, just train and train, maybe stub a toe or two, then go to college. Even Alston thinks it's a good idea: “Sweet outfits? Rugged, hot army bitches? Bazookas? Fuck, yeah. Do it.” Dax pictures himself in camouflage, running in formation, hiding in the woods, and wonders what kind of disadvantage he may be at in blending in with the surroundings. He's a big man, easier to see. That can't be good. But who's shooting?

He hasn't been swayed toward this army idea, but when he imagines college or a job, nothing comes to him and he hears his father's low voice in his head: “A paycheck, free post living, free food, free school.” Dax thinks,
How can everything in the military be free? When was the last time we really got into a fight? Vietnam? Iraq? Does Iraq count? A few days of bombs. Night-vision tracers on CNN. A falling refrigerator.

Dax has fired a gun once outside Watertown with his WWII army vet grandpa, who has also been pushing the military route. Empty beer bottles near a creek in autumn. He remembers the silver revolver, the bunny-eared rear sights, the fierce percussion, and the still-standing bottles. His grandpa's voice—“Fun, isn't it?”—and Dax thinking it was something, but fun?

Dax snaps out of his dream when a lifted truck pulls into the spot next to his car and someone jumps out. The person races in front of the truck's headlights, then jerks the Camry's back door open and reaches inside. Dax stands and starts walking back, and by the time he's close enough to see clearly, a man towers over Alston, punching and punching, and Janelle, pantless, is at the man's back, tearing at his neck and face. Dax's body comes alive, and he races across the field and lunges at the man, but Dax is thrown off and he feels a punishing pounding on his face and chest. He tries to rise but can't. The man lifts a grunting Alston from the pavement and rams Alston's head into the Camry's door. Janelle lies in the first cut of grass holding her stomach, her naked lower half kicking at the sky. The man walks over to Janelle, pulls her up by her hair, walks her to the truck, throws her in, and leaves.

Dax's chest burns; rocks dig at his back. Alston moans.

“Al-ston,” Dax says, trying to find his lungs. “Alston.”

“Shut the motherfuck up.”

Dax touches his body, but everything is too new to know anything. He goes to his knees, then stands and staggers over to Alston, who drags himself up into the passenger seat.