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

12. No Doorbell

TWO HOURS BEFORE showtime in his army dress uniform at the Fourth of July parade, Wintric lounges on his living room couch, fingering a recently purchased pocketknife as his three-year-old son, Daniel, tries to balance on one leg. Daniel teeters on his right foot for three seconds before losing his balance.

“Put your arms out,” says Wintric, miming the arm movement from the couch.

Daniel glances at his father and raises his arms out to his sides. He lifts his left foot a couple inches off the living room floor and wobbles, then stomps the foot down. He tries again.

Wintric’s left foot rests on the carpet. His only remaining toe on the foot — his big one — brushes at the light-pink remnants of an old cranberry juice stain he recently gave up on. His big toe has done this minor back-and-forth dance as long as he can recall, but the involuntary movement has become even more noticeable since the other digits disappeared.

Five years since he last wore his uniform. Wintric steals a mental picture of the green army getup in his closet, sucks in his belly, and wonders if the few extra pounds he carries will be problematic come zipper and button time. The parade organizers have asked him to walk in the patriot group each year since his return to Chester, but this is the first year he has agreed, largely to appease Kristen’s pleading, her insistence that their son would be proud to see his father walk down Main Street with the other veterans who have returned to their California mountain town.

Wintric ignored her requests for years, claiming that he was no longer a soldier, that he had despised his time in the army, that the single reason he kept his uniform was to remind himself of what he so gladly gave up, but the truth is harder for him to reconcile — the rage at his uniform, at hearing the words army, sacrifice, honor, the anger and pride he feels when someone thanks him for his past service or when he sees a map of Afghanistan or photos of flag-draped caskets or White House Medal of Honor receptions on the Internet. He can’t list all the reasons that he said he would wear the uniform this year, and his son may be one of those reasons, but he knows that if he can get it on and walk through the fury and the Main Street chaos, he may just snuff out some of his attacking memories.

The living room smells like bacon from their earlier breakfast, and Wintric hears Kristen’s shower singing from the back bathroom of their two-bedroom home.

On television Rafael Nadal is in the athletic throes of destroying Tomáš Berdych in the 2010 Wimbledon men’s final. NBC’s sports announcers talk over the action, belaboring the fact that England’s queen personally graced the tennis event earlier in the week for the first time in thirty-three years, but what gains Wintric’s full attention — as a man who has never watched or even considered watching tennis — is a point-winning roar from the muscled, animalistic Nadal.

Wintric focuses now on the Spaniard as he moves angrily across the court, stomping, hurling his sculpted body at every shot. There is little grace, but Nadal’s ferocity has Wintric entranced. The ball shoots off Nadal’s racket as if stunned into velocity, into impossible angles that ride the white out-of-bounds lines. After each winner Nadal flexes his bricklike biceps and stares into the stands. During volleys Berdych can only guess where to move next, and when he guesses correctly, his luck prolongs the point a mere few more seconds. Even when he wins a game, only minor fanfare arrives. The battle seems more like boxing than tennis, and although the match just started, Wintric knows it’s over, and he can tell Berdych knows it’s over. Wintric understands that one of the most difficult things is to finish the fights you’re supposed to win, and this is ultimately why he falls for Nadal. Because although the Spaniard is heavily favored, he appears not to realize just how good his odds are, so all of this will end quickly.

After one of the commercial breaks, the commentators interview Monica Seles, a player Wintric has never heard of, and a moment before he changes the channel the television screen cuts to a video: 1993 in the lower left-hand corner, a young Seles, an orange clay court, and a man walks onto the court, then chaos as security grabs the man, and Seles, now curled on the clay, reaches to her back, wincing in pain. Wintric turns the volume up and the words jumble: stabbing, nine-inch boning knife, two years before she came back, never the same player. Wintric thinks of how easy it is to hurt — just walk out of the stands with a knife, simply veer your car a couple feet to either side; he exhales and a memory arrives, his childhood bedroom.

Wintric was twelve, asleep in the room he had wallpapered with posters of NBA basketball players, when his father shook him awake, handed him a revolver, and snap-whispered, “If something happens, shoot for the body.” He was all nerves in their narrow, predawn hallway and scooted forward, left hand on his father’s back, right hand gripping a heavy gun — a loaded gun — and as they glided past his infant sister’s bedroom, Wintric heard knocking. The whole scene cluttered within him: shoot for the body, murderer, knocking, Are we shooting through the door? What criminal knocks? I don’t have shoes on, How big is a bullet? His father disappeared, so he crouched down on the floor in a flood of fear and closed his eyes, then opened them, but there was no difference in the darkness, and still that feverish knocking. He waited for the shot, for his name in the night, and the carpet was cool on his feet. The standoff was taking too long, and then a slurring voice filtered through the door; the voice hurled his father’s name — John — and then lights on, door open, and their drunk neighbor spit out, “Your back yard’s on fire.”

Then dawn, and Wintric watched his father direct the water stream from their garden hose onto a smoking pile of leaves they had left for Glad bags later that day. They would never discover what lit them, and he didn’t know why, but his father still gripped his gun, and so did Wintric. He inspected the silver gun, the bullets’ brass backings. He was unsure whether the revolver’s safety was on, and that was something he should’ve known. It was the kind of thing his father expected him to know when he gave him the combination to the safe in the bedroom. Wintric performed a slight tug on the trigger and watched the revolver’s hammer start its backward ride, but he stopped early and everything slid back into potential. Another tiny tug, and the minuscule movement of the hammer shocked him. His father shook the morning cold out in his shorts, nightshirt, and old slippers and stared mesmerized at the water flow, and Wintric realized then that he could shoot him. Not that he wanted to, only that he could, with minimal effort. He could kill him if he aimed straight enough. Without prompt he stroked this strange charge of power and alarm that people must feel when they realize they can do absolutely anything they want if they have the nerve.

Wintric turns the tennis match off, runs his fingers through his shoulder-length hair, and watches Daniel — the one-legged balancing act now over — bang his fist on the wooden coffee table.

Daniel, short for three, wears a 49ers shirt and Lightning McQueen underwear. His son smiles at him, and the genuine expression wrenches Wintric and the familiar pit inside him opens, the competing hate and desperation and care for this child, an accident, an “orgasm gone wrong” he told Kristen upon hearing the news of her pregnancy. On the days he feels something for the boy it angers him that his son resembles Kristen more than him. Especially lately, Daniel’s large nose and brown eyes feel like a cruel betrayal. Wintric has had a harder time lately fighting off the days that circle in upon him, the logging town he swore he would escape, the girl he thought he was leaving forever as he headed off to basic training, the half a foot that slices him with shame.

Wintric stares at his left foot, and even after all these years, it seems more a sad prop than part of his body. He taps into the hate, how in his entire life he has really wanted to kill only one person — even counting the war, just one — how he has failed to act on that constant desire, how each day he continues to fail, how the girl he did kill has nothing to do with this focused resentment.

The man Wintric wishes dead is Derek Nelson, once Sergeant Derek Nelson, one of the men Wintric believes assaulted him. There was another person, perhaps two, but Nelson is the one name that pierces and haunts him. Wintric has no proof, save for an incredible moment before being airlifted out of Bagram Airfield. He sat off in a corner of the rudimentary passenger terminal with his carved foot elevated when a solider he’d never met approached him and said, “It was Nelson,” nodded, and walked away.

Wintric knows that Nelson lives in Green River, Wyoming, in a yellow mobile home on Davy Crockett Drive. He has a black Lab and a beat-down Tacoma missing a tailgate. He leaves for work with the gas company around 7:30 A.M. and gets home around 5 P.M.Wintric knows this because he has sat in his car on Davy Crockett Drive with a loaded.44 and watched Nelson leave and arrive at his home multiple times. The closest he ever came to fulfilling his revenge wish was in the middle of June two years ago, his second trip to Green River. Deftones blasted from the speakers, and Wintric opened the car’s door and walked halfway across the street before turning back, closing the driver’s door, sobbing, then pointing the car back west, all the way home to California.

“I’ll get it,” Daniel says, and leaves the room. He returns gripping a Nerf dart gun that Wintric bought him for his birthday. Daniel has recently got the hang of the play weapon: pushing one of the thin suction-cupped darts down the muzzle, pulling hard on the rear plastic tether until it locks back in place, now ready with enough pressure-build to launch the dart on a line across the room. Daniel has been taught not to aim at people, but Wintric has told him that he can shoot his daddy every now and then for practice, an act that draws Kristen’s complaints and an encouraging “Nice shot” from Wintric.

Wintric thumbs the pocketknife in his hand. He opens up the three-inch blade, locks it into place, places the knife on the coffee table, and leans back. His big toe digs into the carpet, and he thinks about the upcoming parade, meeting up with other vets, the hot day, thousands lining the street, gawking. His neck tightens. Daniel stops pounding the table and points the gun at the blank television and shoots a dart at the screen.

“Nice,” Wintric says.

“I shoot it,” Daniel says.

Wintric glances at the ceiling — an intricate corner cobweb — and back down to the coffee table.

Through three walls, Kristen sings a Whitney Houston ballad in the shower.

“Knife,” Daniel says, pointing.

Wintric watches Daniel’s hands. One stays at his side with the toy, the other points at the knife.

“Knife,” Daniel says, staring at Wintric. Daniel lowers his hand to the table a few inches away from the knife. Wintric’s body warms, and he sees his son’s eyes widen and his back straighten, and Wintric gives his son a nod and watches Daniel’s hand slide the last three inches to the black handle and grip down.

“Know what you have there?” Wintric asks.

“Knife,” Daniel says, eyes down.

“Whose knife?”

“Daddy’s.”

“That’s right.”

Daniel releases his grip on the knife and stands quietly. He searches for another dart, but none are nearby.

“You can play with it,” Wintric says, then nods. “Play with it.”

Daniel considers the knife, then Wintric, and pauses. He steps toward the coffee table, places his hand on the knife’s handle, and glances back up at Wintric.

Wintric sees his son’s small fingers on the black handle. He inhales and holds the air in. The room comes alive, brighter, the same peripheral illumination Wintric encountered once while bathing Daniel as a newborn. He let Daniel slip under the water, and for a few seconds he left his helpless son there, submerged and floundering, while the air lit up around him. He struggled to name the rush he felt that day in the moments before he saw his hands reach down into the sink and lift his son upright. Now, with Daniel’s grip on the knife, no words arrive, only this tragic high.

Wintric’s temples pound and his eyes lose focus. He envisions his son picking up the knife and digging the blade into his own hand, the blood there, holes in hands, crucifixion, nails, roofing, falling from the McIntires’ roof last fall, how he had time to think before crashing down onto the cinderblock fence, how the back brace pressed him tight. He had to explain to people that the brace wasn’t from his time overseas but his foot was.

Daniel holds the knife straight out now, a miniature sword. He stabs a half foot of air and looks at Wintric.

“Walk around,” Wintric says.

Daniel strides to the window and surveys the street, then turns and points the sharp blade at the television, then the rocking chair — he grins — then at a honeymoon photo of Wintric and Kristen at Lake Tahoe, then back at the wooden coffee table. Daniel sticks the knife’s point into the wood, enough to catch, then pushes down, leaning with his small shoulder, and abruptly loses balance; his hand slips forward, running down the knife’s handle and the blade’s safe backside.

“You slipped there, son. Watch. You’re learning the wrong thing.”

Wintric picks up the knife and holds the blade toward his son.

“This is sharp. Sharp means hurt.”

Daniel turns away.

“You don’t care.”

Daniel turns back, blinks, and Wintric grabs his son by the back of the neck, yanks him forward, lifts his chin up, and forces the blade to the front of his son’s neck.

“Daa,” Daniel moans, stiffening.

Wintric moves the blade over to the flesh above his son’s collarbone and places the tip’s razorlike half inch over his son’s carotid. He closes his eyes and tries to ignore the white light filling in around him, attempts to feel his son’s pulse through the blade and handle. Nothing. Daniel gasps, and the slight jerk of his body wakes Wintric, now opening his eyes and repositioning the knife where Daniel’s Adam’s apple will grow in, now guiding the blade up and down, shaving at the thin skin there.

“Sharp,” Wintric says, then nabs his son’s left wrist and flips his hand over. “Sharp,” he says, and he pushes the tip of the blade into his son’s palm. Daniel falls to the floor, crying.

“Calm down,” Wintric says, and he rises, strides to the kitchen, and returns with a Band-Aid. The rush of guilt assails him, then backs off, and his hands shake. “Daddy loves you,” he says to his son, and he licks the small drop of blood away and attaches the Band-Aid. “Play with knives, but be careful. Understand?”

Daniel looks away.

“Say yes,” Wintric says, tightening his grip. He grabs his son’s ears and squeezes.

“Daa.”

“Say yes,” Wintric says, nodding up and down. “Yes?”

Daniel nods.

“Good.”

The seven veterans stand and spit and scratch in their military uniforms at the Collins Pine lumberyard parking lot, waiting for the Fourth of July parade to begin. They touch and straighten their pressed uniforms, and after a truck backfires one veteran successfully fights off a flashback to the past by imagining a nude Angelina Jolie. Here in this northern California small-town haven, there are no mortars, no IEDs, no bullshit commander, no Arabic. Those days are long gone for them, passed to others crouched on the other side of the world, waiting for someone to say stop, to come home, and to walk in their own parades.

One young soldier is missing both arms, her sleeves hanging flat and pinned to her sides. She nods at her new boyfriend and he swigs a Coors Light and tosses the silver can to the ground. Wintric and an airman in the group will soon showcase their limps as they stroll along the straight avenue.

Each of the seven is a recent veteran, not long back from Afghanistan or Iraq, save one Vietnam-era graybeard who hasn’t missed a Chester independence parade in twenty years. Their group is sandwiched in front by a flatbed truck carrying the high school’s small jazz band and behind by a dozen 4-H kids holding photos of fattened-up cows, goats, pigs. The sky is clear, except for a single line of clouds that could pass for a contrail. Douglas firs and cedars surround the paved lot, and a paramedic kneels off to the side in the summer grass. He rubs his face, then squints.

A pair of old, smiling women wearing T-shirts with a cursive Lake Almanor on the front walk up to the group and pause.

“When do you go back?”

“We’re all veterans.”

“So you have to go back?”

“No. We’re not in the military anymore.”

“Oh.”

“We used to be.”

“You get to wear uniforms?”

“Sometimes.”

“Okay. Thank you, all of you,” one of them says, then points at the armless solider. “Especially you.” The soldier nods, glances down at the parking lot asphalt, and shakes her head.

The women start to walk away and she cough-speaks: “Bitches.” It gets a laugh. “Esssspecially you,” she mocks.

The parade is starting late owing to several locals finishing up the nearby 5K Fun Run at a breathless walk. Fire trucks, clowns, Shriners’ hats, classic cars, and decent floats for Boy Scouts, the Elks Club, the Plumas County beauty queen, the county commissioner, the community chorus, and the Little League All-Stars mix together and form a bunched half-mile line leading from the parking lot. Wintric guesses that all the floats will get applause but that the crowds lining the street will rise from their cheap foldout chairs for his group and the American flag that accompanies them. Some will put their hands on their hearts, some will chant “USA,” and more than a couple will point at them, directing their children’s attention to the uniformed few and whisper well-meaning half-truths into their kids’ ears.

In the parking lot, the high school jazz band in front of the seven starts to warm up, then launches into a bare-bones version of Glen Miller’s “A String of Pearls.” One of the soldiers shakes her head at the out-of-tune mash coming from the trumpet-trombone-tuba-saxophone-clarinet combo.

“Shit,” she says.

“Convoy or parade,” says one. “Not an easy choice.”

“Screw you.”

“Chester, baby.”

“This is a movie. A wonderful movie,” the graybeard says. “And this is our anthem.”

“Play Metallica, damn!”

Then some movement. The seven straighten up and six instinctively run their hands down their chests and stomachs, smoothing their uniforms and feeling themselves underneath, but it proves a false alarm and everyone stops and exhales.

“Hurry up and wait.”

“It’s okay to be happy, everyone,” the graybeard says. “You’ll get that after a few years.”

“That’s some Yoda shit,” Wintric says.

“It’s a choice, my young friends. It’s not an easy choice, but it’s a choice.”

Soon, after another false start, it’s go time, and they walk the double yellow lines on the street and wave and soak in the day like their uniformed siblings across the country, past the salutes, the swelling communal pride, the repeating three jazz songs that get worse, then somehow better, as they all stop and go, stop and go.

The sweat begins in earnest when the seven hit the parade’s half-mile point. There has not been a lot of chatting between them since the parade started. It’s hot out, and most of them prefer not to rehash what they have in common. They learned long ago that you never want to appear as if you’re having a good time in uniform. It sends the wrong message.

The Chester High School band in front of them has moved from a too-slow “String of Pearls” to a squeaky “Take Five,” and already Wintric is near his breaking point.

The crowd, three to five deep on each side of the road, points, whispers — most smiling. Happy, sunburning fat people are everywhere, locals mixing with the tourists. The parade’s pace picks up, and Wintric’s good foot begins to cramp. He glances over at the armless soldier walking next to him and wonders why she didn’t wear prosthetics for the parade.

A sweat stream flows down Wintric’s leg and runs into the holster strapped to his shin. Something about the.380 hugging his right leg comforts him, even though it’s the one of his eight guns he hasn’t fired in the last six months.

The crowds have grown considerably since he was a kid watching a similar procession, and he uses the thick multitude as an excuse to give up searching for Kristen and Daniel. He wonders if they’re packing up their things at that very moment. He imagines Daniel tattling—“Daddy stuck me with his knife”—and Kristen leaving for Chico or her parents’ place or heading off to get the sheriff, who would be hard to find on account of the parade. Maybe Daniel won’t say anything; maybe it was just an accident with a kid playing with his dad’s knife.

Up ahead a fire truck blasts its horn for the twenty-second time. Wintric wipes his brow and concentrates on his protective boot and minimizing his limp as much as possible as he walks his town: past the Beacon gas station, past the road leading to the elementary school, past the dirty tire shop, past the dentist’s office, past a shallow stream where he used to catch crawdads with his friends, past the Holiday supermarket. He searches for a cloud, but they’ve disappeared, and his good foot revs up the ache again.

The heat and the collective stares close in, and for the first time he notices how tightly his uniform hugs him. It’s all too much to bear, and he decides to ditch this whole thing midwalk and flee through the supermarket’s parking lot back home, but the band conductor says “Star-Spangled Banner” and the parade slows to a halt.

“Here we go. For God and country,” the graybeard says.

“Hope they do the Hendrix version,” someone whispers.

The seven come to attention and the crowd rises and quiets.

“One. Two. Three,” says the conductor, counting the band in, and the players all take a breath together, ready to exhale into their instruments, and in that moment before sound someone shouts “Peace!”

The first few bars of the song roll over Wintric and he closes his eyes. He avoids the things that normally come to his mind during the anthem: army events, the flag, Washington, D.C., the Olympics, San Francisco Giants games. He feels the gun on his leg, thinks about its shape, how his hand fits around it just right, the clean silver finish, the gorgeous oily smell when he holds it close to his nose.

The crowd starts singing with a purpose when they hit “rockets’ red glare,” but Wintric is still lost in contemplation when his left foot zips him with pain. He shuts his eyes tighter and his insides turn. He wishes he had popped four pain pills instead of two and hears “flag was still there,” but it’s distant background noise now as he focuses on the pain, how his bright nerves throb with his pulse, how the electric pinging travels from his foot all the way up to his scalp—this cut foot, this big toe digging, the living room cranberry stain, falling from McIntire’s roof, the cramped plane ride to Reno, my discharge, Afghanistan, the knife lodged in my foot after the first strike, shitting blood, face-down in the dirt, the first push to my back, the smell of burning trash, a moment alone.

Wintric sits in his car on a Saturday morning across Davy Crockett Drive from Nelson’s yellow house with a.357 revolver in his lap. It’s his third trip to Wyoming, and the light fog is beginning to burn away under the rising sun. Nelson’s black Lab yaps at a crow that has perched on a new doghouse. His Tacoma has been replaced by a new Jeep Wrangler with AFG and Wyoming Cowboys window stickers. The squat homes on the street are lined up close, and Wintric searches the road to see if the dog’s barking has anyone’s attention, but there’s nothing.

Wintric sips at his coffee and considers the fifth of whiskey in his glove box, but decides against a pour. His roofing kneepads rest on the passenger-side floor by Audioslave, the Tragically Hip, and Deftones CDs and a Burger King bag. The dog has exhausted herself, and the only noise is the idling car’s engine and the AC on low. Wintric reaches down on his right side where his ass and hip meet and pushes and rubs at the soreness. In his head he repeats the slogan he’s been repeating across the Great Basin—It’s easy if you want it.

This time he thought he’d drive to the house and walk up to the door without hesitation, but he’s been stuck in the car for fifteen minutes. A garbage truck drives by with no one on the back, and Wintric sips at his coffee and spills a couple drops on his Sacramento Kings T-shirt.

Nelson’s front door appears freshly painted and clean against the fading yellow siding. For a moment Wintric thinks he sees the door move, but nothing happens. Easy if you want it.

Wintric’s phone vibrates and he peeks at the number — Kristen.

Two years ago Kristen placed her People magazine down on her bedroom nightstand and asked him if he was having an affair. Does he love her? Does he like anything in his life? Is he going to leave her? Her hair was down, and he saw the despair in her face. Her yearning broke him, and he described the assault out loud for the first time. He expected tears, but the story arrived emotionless, straight: the dark night, the helplessness, not knowing who it was, the whispered “Nelson,” the silence out of fear and pride, living with it all. At the end he heard himself repeating the lie he keeps safe: “And then I step on the fucking knife.” It’s her face that he sees now: mouth slightly open, eyes narrowed, one large crease that he had never seen before stretching across her forehead. It’s her words that he hears: “Just tell me what you want. What do you want to happen?”

Wintric answers the phone.

“Baby? Where you at?” Kristen asks.

“Here,” he says.

“I’ll go.”

“No. Talk to me. Just for a second.”

“Dammit, Wintric. Get out of the car and do it. Right now. Keep me on. Walk up to the front door. If you wait, it’s over.”

“Yes.”

“Do something. Please.”

“Yes.”

“Got your gun?”

“No.”

“Good. Get out right now. Open the door. I love you.”

“Okay.”

“Go now.”

“Talk later.”

Wintric glances in the rearview mirror, runs his hands down his cheeks, exhales three times, slips the gun into his waistband, opens the driver’s door, stands up, and closes the door. A motorcycle rounds the corner, and he lets it pass. He leads with his bad foot and crosses the road. When he hits the first step of the home he pauses, and the dog trots over to him. No bark. Four more stairs and Wintric stands in front of the door, and through the chaos he notices that the door isn’t freshly painted; it’s unlike any door he’s seen, plasticky and shiny. He searches for a doorbell, but there isn’t one. He cocks his arm back to knock but pauses for a few seconds, waiting, listening. The smell of dog shit wafts over him. He moves his body and his knuckles strike the soft surface and he hears the weak sound of his fist knocking on the flimsy door. Wintric steps back from the door and moves his hands behind his back and sticks his chest out. The dog yaps, but Wintric refuses to turn. Ten seconds. Twenty. He steps forward and accidentally kicks the threshold with his right foot before knocking again. He steps back, and the dog is at his side. He swats at the Lab, but the dog jumps back, then forward again. Ten seconds. Twenty. No answer. Nelson’s absence isn’t something he had considered, and he stands there on the landing in momentary paralysis.

Wintric turns around and surveys the neighbors’ homes, but nothing moves. He runs his fingers through his hair. A Harley rumbles in the distance and the black Lab walks to his side, nuzzles.

“Get,” he says, his voice cracking. “Get, fucker.”

Wintric places his open hand on the door. He pushes and the door flexes. A whimper from the dog, and he feels the gun in his waistband.

“Get.”

The sound of his voice turns something in him, and he rolls his hands over and sees the sweat. He steps forward once more and knocks on the door, the sound this time three strong strikes, the noise coming to him as rapture. From somewhere behind his jaw Wintric finds emotion near, and he tries to calm by breathing through his nose, but his chin begins to move from side to side, and he realizes he has seconds. He pushes the dog aside, walks to his car, and gets in. He starts the car and punches it down the street, through another neighborhood, past two churches, out to the highway, where he rides the bumper of a gray Buick. His sobs come with guttural moans, and he uses his forearm to wipe at his face. He drives over the Green River and pulls into the back of a McDonald’s parking lot and turns off the car. He lifts his shirt over his head, bunches it up, and presses it hard to his face, over his nose and mouth. He screams into the cotton and lowers the shirt and sees his eyes in the rearview mirror and it’s him, alive, in Green River, Wyoming. Behind him the drive-through line in the mirror inches forward. He watches the vehicles stop and go, stop and go. Wintric grabs the gun from his pants, empties the bullets, and slides the gun into the center console, bullets into the glove box. He looks at his gas gauge, although he knows the tank is nearly full. He rolls down the driver’s-side window and listens to the people ordering and the metallic voice reading their orders back.

Although he’s attempted the emotional exorcism before, Wintric tries again; he decides he isn’t looking for Derek Nelson. He reinvents the past twenty minutes. He closes his eyes, calls up the vision, comfort, the story he’ll tell Kristen. I met Nelson. He was there at the door. I saw him and I asked him and he looked at me like I was crazy and he invited me in, but no, just passing through, Go Army, Go Army, best of luck, brother. It’s not sticking. Go Army. Brother. The vision isn’t sticking. Nelson at the door. He’s not there. Wintric can’t see it. He sees the door, only the door. The white door. Fist knocking. The door. No doorbell.

“Come home,” Kristen says. “We’re here.”

“Don’t put him on. I can’t handle it right now,” Wintric says.

“Come home.” Aside, in a whisper, “To Daddy, honey.”

“Don’t put him on.”

“Where are you?”

“Through Elko.”

“We miss you. Things are going to be better now. You know that. You faced him.”

“Yeah.”

“You never have to tell me what he said. It’s for you.”

Midday and fighting sleep thirty miles outside of Winnemucca, Wintric single-lane drives behind a diesel doing forty-five on an eight-mile stretch of construction in the middle of nowhere I-80. The diesel has a pair of old mud flaps with a busty, long-haired, reclining woman relaxing in chrome. Every now and then the sun strikes it right and she throws a bright flash. Desert hot, and the AC pushes out cool air and the car’s temperature gauge flirts with the yellow zone. A Circus Circus Casino billboard arrives and races by to his right, followed by a billboard for reverse vasectomies. Wintric takes in the miles and miles of beige rock intersected by a slit of blacktop.

Already halfway through Nevada, he fights himself about his decision to leave Green River, not to wait it out. This mental manipulation along this same strip of land is nothing new. He’s called Torres on the way home after each of his failed attempts and lied about where he was and his reason for phoning, and each time Torres has listened to the made-up stories and offered advice that Wintric can’t use. Even so, Torres’s soothing voice has helped get him home. Wintric looks at his cell phone, at the default blue background, but there’s no service.

Coming into Imlay he spots a bizarre, bony structure south of the interstate that he’s never noticed. He pulls off into the almost ghost town to stretch in the post office parking lot. He’s never stopped here; normally he presses on to Fernley or Reno. A new American flag flies over the double-wide tan building. His sweaty shirt smells like his chicken sandwich lunch, and the early afternoon sun hits hard. He wipes at his eyes, then pops four pills and gulps a swig of warm water. A woman and her daughter exit the post office and squint. Wintric walks over to the building, to a map of the local area. He runs his finger to the X that marks the spot where he stands. Surprised, he studies what appears to be a large lake nearby. Rye Patch Reservoir. He scans the distance, but all he sees is desert scrub, fences, and the hazy outline of cracking mountains. He thinks, Water somewhere.

Later, he stands on a rocky peninsula and the blue water appears to be a misplaced fantasy, a geological mistake. No trees with all this water. Far west, two small boats. Overhead, blue sky and crisscrossing contrails. A darting white bird descends to the water and lands near him. A subtle crosswind blows across the great, shallow bowl of land.

The cool water offers some reprieve from the hot day and Wintric lowers himself to the shore. He presses his middle fingers to his temples, then inhales and holds the air until his body forces him to take another breath. He inhales and holds the air again, feeling his neck and eyes pressurize before his forced exhalation.

A gust of wind races across Wintric’s face, and he digs up a white rock that catches his eye and tosses it out near the bird. He yawns and follows the bird’s ascent into the air and his eyes stop on an unusual gray balloon in the far distance. The scene takes him a minute to process. Deep in the landscape, the large, slender balloon floats high in the air. He guesses that the ruler-shaped object is three or four stories tall, but gaining any perspective is impossible. Wintric watches it for a minute, peering for a tether or movement, but the balloon appears to float, motionless.

He reclines on a smooth spot of shore and brings his hands to his face. An orangey light filters through his joined fingers. Fanning his fingers open, he sees the balloon through the gap between his left hand pinkie and ring finger. Closed, orangey light. Open, balloon. Closed. Open. Closed.

Wintric wakes, dreamless. The wind brushes his face and something crawls across his hand. Above him a large black bird circles in the heat. He peers west, but the boats are gone. In the distance the gray balloon hovers. He stands and brushes himself off. He finds and crushes two ants crawling up his forearm.

In the car, he turns the key in the ignition and the engine turns over. His foot on the brake, he shifts the car into drive, feels the slight lurch, and glances at the horizon, the balloon. Three miles away? Ten? He shifts the car back to park and reaches for his gun, grabs it and some ammunition, and gets out.

Back at the shoreline, Wintric digs his big toe inside his boot and he thumbs the hammer back, then raises the revolver. Hundred to one? A thousand? He keeps both eyes open and places the balloon in the sights, then raises the gun higher and aims there. Blue sky in the sights, and he visualizes the bullet’s trajectory all the way to the balloon, the gigantic drop of the bullet over the miles. A gentle exhalation and trigger pull. The blast sound echoes out and he lowers the revolver. He studies the remaining bullets’ brass backings. He raises the revolver and smells the gunpowder in the air. A trigger-pull blast sound. Another. Then quiet, except for the ringing in his ears, sirens circling his head. He stands listening to the sirens circle and circle and circle before slowly leaving him. He stands staring at the balloon, stands for minutes, searching for movement, but the balloon floats in the air, miles away.

In Lovelock, Wintric stops at a convenience store and buys a Coke, a bag of jerky, a package of Lightning McQueen stickers, a postcard with a picture of the Pershing County Courthouse, and a stamp. In the parking lot he finds a pen in his glove box among the unused bullets and owner’s manual. He addresses the card to Nelson without a return address. He writes, “I was there,” then scribbles over it. He thinks for a minute, then writes “AFG” and “my revenge.” Below that, “your house” and “no doorbell.” He stops and looks up and wonders if that’s enough. If it’s him, will he know? If it’s not, does it matter? He places the card on his lap and picks up his phone. He wonders if he and Torres are in the same time zone. His phone has service, but he puts it back down in the cup holder.

Wintric looks at his postcard. He places the tip of the pen on the card to write his full name, but in the time that it takes him to begin the first letter he decides to write just “Wintric.” He sees the pen’s tip on the white surface. He starts the W, but stops at a V. He lifts the pen and holds it in the air.