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

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 she 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 same 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.

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. Is 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.

Dax travels more now: outside the local rounds, he’s gone a week every month. When away, he calls home at 6:30 Knoxville time every night. Emma has normally finished her bath, and Nicholle puts the phone up to her ear so she hears her daddy’s voice. Emma is eight months old and already she plays with her first steps.

Whenever he’s in Memphis he plays cards a couple blocks off the strip in a brick basement where there’s a password. This is his trivial thrill. He recognizes most of the participants. They aren’t thugs, at least in his opinion — when they lose money, it hurts. They have polo shirts and middle-class mortgages.

One day after he negotiates the sale of ten new blood-sugar monitors at St. Jude Hospital, he showers and heads to the card game. The password is sycamore, but Dax says live oak, last week’s password. They let him in anyway.

Five hands in and Dax spies his flush and a story starts up around the table about a guy who had his dick put in a vise. The poor genital-squeezed guy owed money to the wrong people. There is laughter. Dax stares at his spades, organized and lethal. He reaches for chips.

“Named Sim,” says Brent, the organizer of the game.

“Sim?” someone says. “Deserved it.”

Jordan, a banker with nervous hands, asks if people can die from that — a dick in a vise.

A new guy, Ian, quiets everyone with his monotone.

“Yes,” he says. “If you leave ’em there, eventually they die of hunger.”

“You could rip your dick off,” Jordan says.

“I guess you always have a choice.”

Dax thinks of what he’ll say to Nicholle. How many Sims can there be? What do I ask? Water moccasin Sim, snapping turtle Sim. Torture. Dax remembers Sim laughing in the muddy water as Dax dried off on the bank, unable to get his knees to stop shaking. Where else do you want it to go? This is where it lives.

Dax waits until the next day, 7 P.M., to call home. He has spoken to Emma, and Nicholle explains how she is considering going back to work, just part-time, over the summer, then how she’s struggling to lose the last ten pounds of pregnancy weight.

“I need something to do,” she says, “outside the house.”

“When’s Sim going to come visit his niece?” Dax asks. It’s the easiest lead-in.

“I don’t know,” she says. “He’s not coming with money, if that’s what you’re asking. He called last night. Said he was in international waters. Probably the Mississippi.”

Sim rolls his truck four times outside Mobile on a Monday at 3 A.MHe’s drunk and his face and chest bruise up good. Nicholle’s parents call — her mother asks for their prayers. Nicholle prays and Sim stays in critical condition for eighteen hours, but he pulls through. Nicholle’s mother praises God and his mercy and his comfort. Glory and grace is all she talks about for a month. Sim drank a bottle of Jack and got behind the wheel; he forgot to put his seat belt on; he was ejected from his rolling vehicle and landed on his back in a patch of grass, looking up at the stars. Dax wants to ask Nicholle’s mother whether sobriety or buckling in is the devil’s work. Do we praise Jesus if Sim impales himself on a mile marker? He doesn’t say any of this. When he finally talks to Sim, he says, “I’m glad you’re with us.”

Two months later Sim shows up at the house twenty pounds lighter, hands shaking. He smells like cabbage and urine. He says he’s been in the same clothes for a week, sleeping during the day, driving at night. He’s out of money and in trouble. He says this is the kind of trouble you don’t wake up from.

“Got to stay out of ’bama,” he says.

Before Dax can wrap his head around the situation, Nicholle has invited Sim in and shown him to the guest room. He showers upstairs while Nicholle and Dax cuss and stomp. Before the shower water turns off they’ve reached a compromise. Sim has two weeks; he doesn’t leave the house, his truck stays in the garage, he gets no calls, and he’s gone, cops called with any weird stuff. After that he’s on his own. Dax knows Nicholle won’t kick her brother out at the deadline, but he’ll let himself be surprised.

For two weeks Dax finds himself in pleasant shock as Sim sleeps for two days, then cleans up and helps around the house. Gently enthusiastic and outwardly caring, he plays dolls with Emma, plays horse with Emma, helps feed her, bathe her. Just finding her walking legs, Emma trails Sim around the house, almost pronouncing his easy name, and he, nervous of possible falls, protects her from the brick fireplace, a backward tumble from the stairs, three inches of bathwater. His unexpected involvement frees Nicholle to extend her work hours, Dax to make a few more phone calls without a screaming child in the background. On the last night of Sim’s allotted live-in time, Dax and Nicholle crawl into bed with each other. No one has talked about Sim leaving the next day. They both know it’s his agreed-to time to depart, but he’s volunteered to wake up early with Emma, to take her to the park if they need some quiet time at the house. Dax leans over and kisses Nicholle, and for the first time in two months they make love.

A week later Dax makes the morning hospital rounds in Little Rock. He isn’t scheduled to leave until the following day, but he considers changing his flight to get back to the girls and Sim that night. He hustles back to the hotel and picks up the ringing hotel room phone just before he leaves for the airport. Nicholle’s nervous voice. She asks why Dax isn’t answering his cell phone, but before he can answer, she says that there are two men, a tall one at the front door, the other standing at the side of the house. She’s ignored them, but the man at the front door has stopped knocking and is peering into the long, narrow window to the left of the door. Emma sleeps.

“Am I crazy?” she asks.

“Wait a minute,” he says. “Are they in uniform?”

“No,” she says. “Why? Did you schedule something?” But she doesn’t let him answer. “Because it’s been far too long. They’ve been here five minutes.”

She tells him that she can see the one at the front door glancing around, not into the house, but around at the other houses in the neighborhood. He hears Sim in the background.

“Put Sim on.” Dax waits for Sim’s voice, and the pause stretches. Dax forces himself to breathe.

“Not lying. There’s some shit,” Sim says. “Damn. Damn. Nothing is gonna happen, man. Trust me.”

“You son of a bitch. Handle this, Sim.” No reply.

“Hello?” It’s Nicholle. “The one on the side moved into the back yard,” she says. Dax pictures the spacious yard and medium dogwoods. It’s 3:15 his time, 4:15 there. “Sim pulled the damn truck out into the driveway a few days ago. Listen to me. Something’s not right here.”

Dax stands in the hotel room, packed suitcase at his feet.

“Go get Emma,” he says.

Nicholle breathes heavily into the phone and says, “My God.”

Dax traces her path in his head, down the long second-floor hallway, through the white door into the baby’s yellow bedroom with block pink letters above the crib: EMMA.

“We’re back in our room. Emma’s — they’re in,” she says, interrupting herself. “The other one’s in the screened porch and the man at the front door, he’s knocking again.”

“Lock the bedroom door and call 911,” Dax says. “Do it now.”

“But Sim—” she says.

“Lock it now. Call 911.”

“Don’t hang up, damn you.”

“I don’t hear Emma.”

“She’s here.”

“Where’s Sim?”

“He’s down there. They’re screaming.”

It was twenty bucks a month for the alarm whose wires probably dangle unconnected. Dax pictures its white box under the stairs. Then the blue safe under their bed.

“Get the gun,” he says.

“I’m putting the phone on the bed.” Over the line Dax hears Emma’s labored breathing. It sounds like she’s trying to put the receiver in her mouth.

“I have it,” Nicholle says. “Okay.” A pause. “They’re fighting. God, they’re fighting.”

“Like we practiced. Put the magazine in. It should have rounds in it.”

“Crashing downstairs.”

“Pull the hammer back,” Dax says.

“What? What’s the hammer?”

“I mean the slide. Shit, the slide. We’ve practiced this. The top part, throw the slide back.”

“It’s sticking. On the stairs now.” She whispers. “Up. The. Stairs.”

“Yell out to them, ‘I have a gun.’” She does.

“And again,” he says.

She says it again, and “I will shoot you.” He hears her say the words, and she says “motherfuckers.” Emma cries.

“It’s sticking,” she says to Dax.

“Do you remember?”

“Yes,” she says. “I know what to do, but it’s sticking.” Her pitch rises. No one is on their way to them.

“Got it,” Nicholle says. “They’re talking on the stairs.” Her voice lowers even more. “They said Sim. My God, they know us.”

“Say it again.”

“What?”

“The gun,” he says.

“I’ve got a gun,” she yells.

“If they open the door, you shoot until the gun stops firing and then load the next magazine.”

She hears the finality in his voice, because she says, “No. No.” Dax hears her right before he hangs up and dials 911. He slings information as fast as he can to the operator and pictures the safety tab on the gun Nicholle holds, turned down, the red fire dot hidden. His sight goes wavy, the ceiling lowers on him, and he thinks of the locked trigger. He hangs up, calls his home phone, and the metallic tone pulses off and on until the answer machine engages. It’s her morning voice: “You’ve reached Nicholle and Dax Bailey,” and his voice in the background, “and Emma,” she squeaks. “We’re not in right now, but please leave a message and we’ll get back with you. Thank you.” He listens to the entire thing, thinks about leaving a message, his voice loud on the machine, but hangs up. She won’t be able to hear him, no matter what he says into the phone. He calls her cell phone, and when he gets her cell-phone message — just her voice — he hangs up immediately. He stares at a dark stain on the hotel carpet. Someone’s on the way. Someone’s on the way. He calls the home line again. This time he lets the whole message play and stands with the phone in his hand, a beam of light from the hotel window now shining through. Dax closes his eyes. The muffled near-silence records him listening, and he thinks there’s a chance, if he’s loud enough, Nicholle might be able to pick up one word, through the drywall and beams and carpet, past Sim’s body, past the men knocking on the locked bedroom door. He breathes in through his mouth and nose and screams “Safety,” over and over and over, until there are no more words, just his machine now recording his empty lungs.