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

3. Pollice Verso

THREE MONTHS AFTER his prison stint for starting a forest fire that killed a man, Armando’s father drives his family past the Supermax outside Florence, Colorado. He’s in good spirits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ask me anything about sports. Anything.”

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

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

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

“A thousand, worldwide. Still good odds.”

“What do you say?” his mother says.

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

“It is? Forget it, then,” she says.

“But you’d be okay with feet first?”

“Drop it,” she says.

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

“I could wear pink,” he says.

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

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

His mother moans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After a crest in the road his father turns south, guiding the van into a valley. A mile down the bumpier road he pulls the van off by a stream and parks.

They follow the stream for a while and piss at the base of a rusted-out sign before peeling off and hiking up a hill, then resting on a granite outcropping.

“Never eat an armadillo,” Armando’s father says. “Leprosy.”

“I’ll never eat an armadillo.”

“You never know when you’ll be tempted to try. Wyoming. New Mexico. Weird freaks out there.”

“What’s the weirdest thing you’ve eaten?”

His father smacks his lips. “Weird, of course, is relative. But to answer your question, human.”

“Human?”

“You believe me?”

“I guess.”

“Be careful.”

“Okay.”

“I ate a rabbit eyeball for twenty-five bucks.”

“Dad.”

“Hard Jell-O marble.”

Armando looks out on the modest vista — gray rock and trees scattered together. He picks up a flat rock and tosses it down the hill. Tiny dust eddies circle into the afternoon. He sees dirt on his jeans and swipes. He imagines Marie calling his house and leaving a message he’ll find later that night. He recalls the yellow shirt she wore at school, the freckles on her neck. Near the end of the day she mentioned to him that she wanted to see Se7en—he’s heard something about a severed head in a box.

“Your mom will wake up,” his father says.

“Yep.”

“I mean it, son. She’ll be back with us soon.”

“You gave her a blessing?”

“Doesn’t have to do with that.”

“Okay.”

“There’s free will, but there’s God’s plan. There’s volcanoes and shit too. God’s always watching, which is a pain in the ass. And, of course, Freud is always watching, which is less a pain in the ass, but still. So there you go.”

The wind blows through the trees and they hear the branches move.

On the way down they stay silent, but as they near the van, his father tells him to wait by the stream, ambles to the vehicle, and returns with a glass jug and matches.

“It’s getting darker,” his father says. “Okay.” He uncorks the jug and holds it out to his son. “Smell,” he says, smiling, but Armando can smell the gasoline from where he stands.

“Little smoke ’cause there’s no green on it,” his father says, stepping close. “Always pick dead ones.”

Only then does Armando notice the tree next to him. It’s largely limbless save a few dead branches near the top.

“I’ll do this one,” his father says. “Now listen. You just burn one. I got too cocky. Out of control.”

He steps to the snag and pours gasoline over the bottom two feet of the tree.

“Wow,” he says. “Yeah. That’s the smell.” He pinches a match and holds it in his left hand between his thumb and index finger.

Armando stares in wonderment. “They’ll see the smoke,” he says.

“Getting dark, son.” His father shakes his head. “And there’s no they.”

“Okay.”

“Most of the law is good, but some of it’s shit.” He shakes out his arms. “You already know that. You may think different, and I don’t care. Just never say I didn’t know what I was doing. You understand? Don’t ever say that.” He points the match at his son’s chest. “That’s the worst thing you can say about someone, that they don’t know what they’re doing. Doesn’t matter how old. We should hang kids that kill people. They know enough.” He pauses and examines the unlit match. “If you have a drink, that’s fine. Your mother will wake up and disagree.”

“I try things.”

“Good.”

“Some things.”

“Always believe in God. You’ll be tempted. People believe in gravity. No one knows what the hell it is. There’s no difference.”

“What?”

“Be suspicious of Jesus. No one understands what’s going on there.”

His father strikes the match on the side of the box and cups the miniflame. Armando’s head buzzes, and he steps forward.

“Can I?” he asks, but his father ignores him, and Armando sees his father’s mouth move, but no sound emerges. His father flicks the match at the base of the tree and the flame catches and climbs. The tree lights up quick — a twenty-foot torch.

Armando can’t find words to say, but in his mind many cartwheel by: beautiful, free, power, hot, trouble, crime, glorious, God, coma, dead, Marie, prison, run.

Then his father’s voice.

“She said I was a slob or something. Things go back and forth, then you dig up the good stuff, and I end up calling her an über-bitch. So she says she’s going to stay at her sister’s in Cortez. Fine. ‘Good,’ I say. And she gathers her stuff, her priceless diploma. Gets in the car. All ready to go. But she sits out there forever. She’s not crying. Not doing anything. Just sitting. Not even touching the wheel. Finally she comes in. ‘It’s Sunday,’ she says. ‘Can’t spend money on gas on Sunday.’ That’s it. She stays.”

“Mom?”

“Can’t spend money on Sunday? Can’t live like that, man. Don’t talk about it.” He takes a step toward the fire.

“And they say I killed a man. Bull. He killed himself. Intent matters. We pay people to kill. We give them awards. We call people heroes because they get shot down trying to bomb people. How does that make you a hero? You survive the Hanoi Hilton and you’re a hero? You firebomb Dresden or Tokyo and you’re a hero? Ask about LeMay.”

“What?”

“You need to know I’ve never killed anyone. Doesn’t make sense. Why would I do that?”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Go,” he says. “I want you to go.”

Armando doesn’t move, still mesmerized. His father walks over to him and gently squeezes his neck.

“Get in the car,” his father says. “I’ll see you at home. I mean it.” He turns his son to face him and smiles.

“Dad, I don’t have a license.”

“It’s okay. Drive slow.”

“Dad.”

“Now, son.”

Armando opens the driver’s door and gets in. He lowers himself onto the seat and takes in the burning tree, his father’s back to him, and he squeezes the wheel hard and he reaches his feet out to touch the brake and gas pedals. He has practiced driving twice in their old van, but this is a newer Aerostar, electric doors and windows and side mirrors, and already he has decided not to adjust anything, but the seat is too far away and it takes him several nervous seconds to find the button that brings him closer to everything. Armando turns the key in the ignition — keys left in the van — then lights on, dashboard to life, a little brake, and he grabs the shifter and slides it to reverse, off the brake, and movement. The lights of the van spotlight his father as he pulls back, and once Armando reaches the road leading out, he shifts to drive but keeps his foot on the brake. He wipes his hands on his pants and peers over. A thought comes to him, and he watches the lit tree, his father’s hands on the top of his head, a piercing certainty: his mother will never wake.

On the drive back Armando keeps it at thirty miles per hour. He focuses on the road, how close the van’s right-side tires parallel the shoulder, anticipating oncoming headlights, late-night loggers, but after thirty minutes of slow driving he enters a space of half awareness and replays the tree lighting, the glass jug, his father’s shiny face ranting, the invisible smoke flowing into the night. He considers his father, a man who seemingly knows everything but knows how to do little, who showcases benevolence and service, a diehard Broncos fan, a hugger, quick to smile and encourage. He’s also someone who attends every fire station open house to climb on the trucks, a man who lights a match and blows it out after every bathroom trip, a person who, no matter the intention, has burned someone to death.

While his father was in prison, his mother would tell him and his sister that the fault was the dead man’s for not heeding the warnings as the fire crept toward his log home. Never a passionate vocal defense, but it was practiced, and soon she stopped talking about blame altogether. Sometimes his mother wouldn’t come home at night, and he’d call the dentists’ office where she worked, and they’d inform him that she’d left hours before. Once she called him from Raton to tell him that there were extra frozen waffles in the freezer in the basement, that this would take care of him and his sister until she returned, but she was always home on Sundays, when she would dress up and haul them to church, a family procession he didn’t dread unless it was NFL season and the Broncos played the early game.

Driving down off the Front Range he passes a large truck heading in the opposite direction, and although he can’t make out the driver, Armando imagines a Forest Service uniform and a sidearm. He slows the van and pictures his father standing near the fire. When the truck pulls up to the still-burning tree, will his father run? Laugh? Align his wrists for cuffs? Then the startling thought that he might have to be the one to pull the plug on his mother if his father is in jail. He doesn’t know the rules, but as he speeds back up for home, he thinks of standing over the hospital bed when the doctor hands him the form to sign, points, says, “Sign here.” His messy signature materializes.

When Armando arrives home, his sister is watching Xena: Warrior Princess and eating a bowl of Corn Pops.

“You stink,” she says.

The next day there’s nothing in the Colorado Springs Gazette about a fire, no rumors at his school, and when his father shows up at their house two days later he wears new clothes.

“We’re going out to eat,” he says.

Armando’s mother wakes up twenty minutes after O. J. Simpson is acquitted. Thinned out and shaky, she carries some internal organ damage, but the doctors tell the Torres family that their mother will be relatively fine, save a limp and the need to regulate her insulin for the rest of her life.

The first thing his mother asks for is a chocolate pudding pie in a graham cracker crust.

“Just this once,” says the doctor. The dessert is Armando’s favorite, and after she tears into the pie and nears the last couple of bites she asks him if he wants some.

“No,” he says, amazed.

In the weeks after his mother’s return home she discovers that she no longer likes to read, she has perfect pitch, and the color yellow brings on headaches. Armando never hears her complain about the needles.

What he does hear is her singing voice. Never one to carry a tune outside of church — and even then quietly — his mother devours CD after CD and sings along at top volume. Her favorites are Chicago’s The Chicago Transit Authority and Tower of Power’s Tower of Power. One day Armando comes home from school and his mother hands him a trombone.

“Learn, for me,” she says, eyes wide and expectant. “You don’t have to play at school.”

Soon Armando finds himself with his trombone in hand, sitting down for private lessons in a padded room inside a rancher on the east side of town. The instructor is a blind man pushing seventy.

“‘Hot Cross Buns,’” the man says, face toward the ceiling, already nodding. “First, second, third position. Ready. Play.”

The first thing the Torreses buy with the $400,000 settlement from the car company is a two-story stucco home on a hillside near the Broadmoor.

This is the home where the family watches The Empire Strikes Back on an April Saturday night.

When the film ends, Armando’s mother says, “The Force is the gospel. That movie was inspired. I believe that.”

“Mark Hamill plus car crash equals ugly Skywalker,” his father says. “Kind of resembles Joseph Smith.”

“You’re not serious,” says his mother.

Later that night, while his family sleeps, Armando watches Risky Business in his bedroom. They have a free six-month HBO trial, so he’s been staying up late. As Tom Cruise starts fondling Rebecca De Mornay onscreen, he feels himself go hard. He doesn’t know if there’s actual no-masturbation doctrine anywhere in the Bible or the Book of Mormon, but there are enough context clues in Sunday school to guess that God would be pretty pissed at a young man jobbing himself hours before taking the sacrament. But still, he’s sixteen now and this feeling is back again. De Mornay is ungodly hot, and he thinks he might come even if he doesn’t touch himself. He begs for a concession between release and salvation somewhere in the night, and within ten seconds he thinks he’s found a compromise as he grabs his penis but doesn’t move his hand. If something happens, he thinks, then it happens.

Armando’s eyes and groin sync in heartbeat rhythm. He lets the pressure build as De Mornay straddles Cruise, and for a few seconds he thinks he may suffocate. He squeezes himself slightly and briefly considers dry-humping the new couch, and he hates himself and absolves himself: he didn’t seek out this I-want-to-do-this-beautiful-woman-for-days urge, but here it is, undeniable and strong, and yet this sensation collides with the vision of a white-robed, muscular, Caucasian God peering down, shaking his head, shaking a tiny bottle of Wite-Out, taking out the thin Wite-Out brush and painting over “Armando Torres” on the “Welcome to Heaven” list. Then, too quickly for Armando and his racing insides, the sex scene ends, and fully clothed actors talk onscreen in daylight, and his blood slowly settles. He feels a dull ache, and already he thinks about how he’ll be okay if he’s asked to say a prayer in front of people in ten hours. He is still clean.

On the eleventh hole of the Broadmoor’s West Course, Armando clips his tee shot off to the left and the white ball splashes into a pond. Early afternoon and the clouds have begun to gather over the peaks. He reaches into his bag for another ball, but he’s out. He’s a poor golfer, which he accepts, but he still waits a second before asking his mother for one of her balls. She used to be a scratch player but now carries a four handicap. “My car-crash four,” she calls it. She still maintains an effortless swing, but there’s a hitch now when the weight transfers to her damaged left leg, as if she tries to stop everything a split second before it happens.

Armando’s mother wears a blue visor and a form-fitting white polo. She is thirty-six years old and attractive, her slim waist and long hair often a target of silent male acknowledgment. Armando notices the minor nervousness of the two strangers who play with them. One wears a bright yellow shirt. The other, he overhears, is a retired Air Force Academy economics professor. Mr. Yellow Shirt shifts his gaze to the sky and smirks each time Armando’s mother flattens her back and sticks out her butt during her preshot routine.

Armando’s parents married when his father was twenty-two and his mother nineteen. He was a return missionary from England, smart enough to showcase a sliver of his bad-boy status by drinking Coke and growing long sideburns. His mother was a sophomore at Cornell. Within a year of their marriage she was pregnant with Armando. His father never finished his studies at Brigham Young, opting for a decent-paying job in the diamond business, but his mother keeps her framed diploma in their study on the wall above their new Apple computer.

While always weary of the attention his mother’s beauty receives, Armando is proud of her golf talent when they are alone on the course, but he’s not thrilled to be humbled in front of strangers — including a stranger who responds to “Colonel”—by asking his mother for a ball, which he knows will be a pink Slazenger.

“Need one, Mom,” he says.

His mother opens the side of her golf bag and reaches in, and he sees a gun among the golf balls — his father’s black 9-millimeter. The Colonel and Yellow Shirt don’t notice, and Armando’s body clenches.

“In the ancient days these used to be made by stuffing goose feathers in a leather pouch,” his mother says, impersonating her husband’s voice. She fingers the ball before tossing it over. “Swing hard.” She grins.

The rest of the round Armando catches himself staring at the Ping logo on his mother’s bag, thinking about the weapon behind the light-blue fabric. He loses two more of his mother’s golf balls and each time watches as she unzips the bag and chooses a replacement.

On the way home he works up the courage to ask about the handgun, but his mother strikes first. “Tell me about Marie. How much should I be worried?”

That night he and his mother sit at the kitchen counter eating chocolate pudding.

“You had a gun today,” he says. “In your bag.”

She swallows a bite, then takes her spoon and swirls the remaining pudding in her bowl. Her elbows rest on the polished granite slab.

“You never know,” she says. The tone in her voice signals the end, but Armando presses.

“For bear?”

“You never know.”

“Where else?”

“Let’s see,” she says. “I carry a smaller one pretty much everywhere. I don’t care if you know, but don’t tell your sister. Got it?”

“To Broncos games? Supermarket?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She spoons up some pudding and eats it.

“I grew up with guns, and you drive around long enough and you see bad situations. It always comes across as this random thing, but it’s not. Do you understand?”

“I guess,” he says, mouth full.

His mother stares above him. “I never want a fair fight. I don’t understand why anyone would.”

“Yeah. That makes sense.”

“Now eat your dessert or I will.”

Armando spoons the pudding to his mouth and peeks over at his now quiet mother. Her face has thinned, and Armando wonders what she’s thinking about: Guns? Fights? Pudding? Although his dad is the talker, almost all decisions for the family end with his mother’s approval: trips, major purchases, allowances, movies. This power enchants Armando and his sister — their father talks and talks and talks, then, in the end, waits for their mother’s nod, smile, or grimace. When she was in the coma the family would encounter unsettling swaths of silence after a debate, no matter how minor, before realizing that her approval was absent. As Armando thinks about it now, he wonders if he’ll always seek her consent, especially in challenging times, and it comforts him to think that he will. He doesn’t yet know what he’ll ask her, or what adult choices he’ll face, but he hears his mother’s confident voice in the space before future difficult decisions. Next to him, she stares beyond her bowl at the gray and white and black swirls of granite. Armando sits and listens to the sound inside his mouth as he swallows his pudding.

Under a cloudy and warm autumn afternoon, Armando and his father rest on the corner of South River Boulevard and West Walnut Street in Independence, Missouri. The manicured grass surrounding them is a gorgeous, shiny green. Armando’s mother and sister are in one of the Temple Lot’s visitor centers.

“We’ll never know if all this is true unless we find out it isn’t,” his father says. “But if we’re right, God is supposed to come down from the heavens and land right here. We’ll get the message, drop our stuff, and congregate at this exact spot. It’ll be busy.” He breathes in. “I tend to believe it. You’d think God would choose Tahiti or the Yucatán. But that’s too easy.” He scratches his forehead. “Missouri. Damn, it’ll take God coming down here to get me to relocate. Lots of fat people running around.”

“What about Jerusalem?”

“Jerusalem sounds more important, but it’s not. You know, someone in Jerusalem right now is high on dope or banging a prostitute or reading the Bible or sharpening a knife.”

Armando, confused, notices the perfect mower lines in the grass.

“Come on, Kansas City or Jerusalem or Berlin — it won’t matter. I wouldn’t mind touring Germany.”

A city bus stops near them, then drives away. A man walks by with an ice cream sandwich. The scent of fertilizer floats around them.

“Do we have to walk here?” Armando asks.

“That’s the rumor.”

“Is that written down?”

“Good point. I doubt you were trying to make a point, but still.”

“But we have to walk?”

“Walk to salvation with all our friends.”

“People in Europe are screwed.”

“Good point.”

“But what would happen if you didn’t? Say we drove here. Is God or Jesus going to tell us to go back home?”

“Put down your lendings. Put down your lendings.” He laughs. “‘The Fourth Alarm.’”

“What?”

“Cheever. You’ll get to him one day.”

“Who?”

“If the difference between driving and walking to Missouri is the litmus test for eternal life, then most are in trouble. Yes.”

“So the prophet will let us know when?” Armando says.

“I figure when we see the red chariot flying in the sky, we’ll start our trek.”

“With bolts of lightning.”

“No, you’re confusing mythology with Revelation.” His father balls his fists. “You’re too young sometimes. Soon you won’t be. It’s my fault. I’ve wished you older.”

“I know the difference.”

“Good.”

Armando watches his father pick at the grass between his legs, then toss it at his shoes. His father does this repeatedly, picking away a small circle of lawn.

“Let’s not talk,” his father says.

Armando leans back and stretches out on the ground. The day is too hot to get comfortable in his slacks, and he is starting to sweat through his gray shirt. He closes his eyes and listens to the traffic and his father picking blades of grass. He imagines walking here, to this place. His legs hurting, sleeping on the side of I-70 as cars and diesel trucks zoom by. How many will be with them? Then what? Do they live here forever? In Independence? What would they do? Look up at the sky and wait? Would they get bored? Is there a choice? He recalls a vampire book where the eternal bloodsuckers get bored out of their minds and need antidepressants to get through their days. Then a Sunday school talk comes to him. The well-dressed speaker had said that when contemplating the notion of “forever,” the kids should think of how long it would take a hummingbird to peck away at a piece of granite as big as the earth. “Well,” said the speaker, “eternity is a lot longer than that.”

Colorado driver’s license finally in hand, Armando chooses Gold Camp Road as his make-out parking location with Marie.

Marie is patient and understanding of his quirks: no gum, fascination with her birthmark, U2 and Bon Jovi ballads. And he of hers: breaks for air when she says so, and once in a while a lazy George Strait song.

After school one day, while he and Marie hang out in the living room watching reruns of The Wonder Years, Armando’s mother walks into the room holding a banana and an unopened condom. She’d watched a television special the night before in which Tom Brokaw lectured a town hall meeting on safe sex. She asks if Armando can put the condom on the fruit. Though unsure, he says he can.

“I’m not condoning premarital sex,” his mother says.

Marie buries her face in her hands.

“If you’re using this, you’re past the point of trouble. But if you’re past the point of trouble, use this.”

Armando’s mother puts the banana back in the fruit bowl and leaves the condom on the counter.

Armando’s father corners him one night after he breaks curfew getting back from Gold Camp Road. His father holds up the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and points at the cover, two beauties instead of the regular one, leopard-print bikinis, gleaming smiles, gleaming bodies.

“The lineaments of gratified desire. Say it with me. The lineaments of gratified desire.”

Armando squints and shakes his head.

“An orgasm is pretty awesome, son. You know this. But it’s not mystical. Semen shoots from your penis. It feels good. These pictures have nothing to do with that. People were having orgasms long before photography and papyrus. The women in these photos aren’t real. That isn’t their real skin. That isn’t the real sun, real light. They’re smiling, but they don’t know why.”

“Okay.”

Armando waits for more from his father, maybe something about masturbation, pregnancy, late-night HBO, Armando has no idea, but his father only nods, somehow satisfied, and tosses the magazine at him and walks away.

Part of Armando’s chores now involves stacking his mother’s dialysis fluid boxes every week after a large truck unloads them in the driveway. The machine in his parents’ bedroom stands on his mother’s side of the bed and makes puffing noises as her blood circulates through the contraption. Often this is where his mother will dispense her advice — hooked up, ready for bed — including her opinion that nothing good happens to teenagers after eleven at night. Sometimes she says after nine at night.

On weekend nights Armando and Marie drive out on Gold Camp Road and pull off in the trees, kill the lights, and try their best in the cramped back seat. He’s the novice, and while he’s unsure of the extent of her experience, he knows she has endured a couple boyfriends, good and bad. At sixteen, he doesn’t comprehend the vast possibilities that separate good from bad.

One night they drive out to the spot where his father torched the tree by the stream. They maneuver past their normal shirts-off, bra-off endpoint, and her hands start to show an interest in his jeans. In that moment he wouldn’t say “Stop” with a gun to his head. He feels Marie at the top of his jeans, running her fingers in the thin space between denim and skin, then fumbling with the button, then unzipping him. The roof closes in and spins. In this dark space in the Rockies he only wants to live forever, and for a moment he believes he will, weightless, on fire, and then he hears her, barely at first, crying.

“Marie?”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m okay. Lie back down. I’m fine.”

He lets her cry for a while with night all around before reaching out for her and holding her, feeling her breasts and warm skin on his skin.

“It’s not you,” she says.

“Okay,” he says.

There’s no talk about her crying that first night in the shadow of Pike’s Peak or any other night. Not even after several late-night parkings and other attempts at unzipping him and the tears that follow. He never asks her to try again, but she does. Even after he tells her “No, you don’t have to,” she ignores him and pushes him down and straddles him, her hands on his chest and stomach and hips, moving down.

Often, after their drive out into the Front Range and the mix of limbs and jaws, around midnight Armando lies staring up at branches and white stars through the rear window, listening in pleasure and fear for a sign, waiting for her mouth on him but always hearing her short breaths, then gradual sobs coming from the dark before he takes her in his arms, then dressing and driving home.

On the windy drive home there’s plenty of time to ask anything he wants, but they stay quiet, sometimes holding hands, having an occasional chat about Marie’s dream of living in Arizona, but normally they just listen to Jon Bon Jovi belting out “Bed of Roses” or “I’ll Be There for You” as they wait for the city lights to greet them below.

Pairs of men in tailored suits begin to show up in the Torres family kitchen. When Armando gets home from school they are crouching around the worn dining table, jabbing at papers while his parents nod along. They never glance in his direction, but their disinterest doesn’t bother him. Soon he finds out they are life insurance men.

One night after the latest set of buttoned-up men have fled, Armando hears his father say “Uninsurable” over and over before flinging a stack of papers and stomping off to the back yard. His mother sobs while warming water on the stove. Armando thinks about going to her but stays on the couch. She adds macaroni to the boiling water, then steadies herself on the kitchen counter, head down. His father reappears and takes her face in his hands and kisses her on her lips. Armando knows they love each other, but anything longer than a public peck is unusual. He glances over, then down at the carpet, then back. His father runs his fingers down his mother’s blue blouse and then pulls her close, keeping his right hip angled away from her injection site.

Armando isn’t interested enough to ask why his parents are in the market for life insurance — or what life insurance even is — and his parents don’t volunteer the information, but he is interested in this lengthy kiss, and he stares at the strangeness of his parents pressed together for so long. Not sure why he wants to cry or how he knows to stay silent, he watches as his mother tries to look away and his father pulls her back and kisses her again, but she’s crying too much now and the kiss has moved from pressed lips to pressed faces, chin to forehead. When his father says, “Go somewhere else, son,” Armando walks to his room, where, after thinking about his parents and his forays with Marie, he questions why no one has ever taught him the right way to touch someone you love.

Eventually one pair of insurance men circles back with frequency. The older one, with gray hair, always messes with his paisley tie, and his crumpled suit struggles to cover his bulging midsection. He and his younger partner come back time and again, and after one particular visit Armando guesses they will never return, because his mother hugs them and kisses them on their cheeks and his father shakes their hands and hugs them and calls them “my brothers.”

That night Armando’s parents take the family to the Cliff House in Manitou Springs, where the family drinks Martinelli’s sparkling cider from champagne glasses. His mother sings “Saturday in the Park” on the way home.

One January morning Armando’s mother undergoes a kidney-pancreas transplant in a Denver hospital. Two nights later — just he and Marie are home — Armando paws through his neighbor’s trash and swipes a five-foot-long, thick cardboard tube used to ship fly-fishing rods. He gathers up a few racquetballs and tennis balls, a screwdriver, and a red gasoline can from the garage. From his father’s gun safe he grabs a can of black powder, a fuse, and two M-80s. On their way to the snow-dusted back yard, he asks Marie to get a set of tongs and oven mitts from the kitchen.

He positions the tube at a 45-degree angle over the back fence, aiming toward the lights of downtown Colorado Springs. With the screwdriver he punctures the tube near the base and threads the fuse through. He places the M-80s in the can of black powder and the can of powder in the tube, insuring that one of the fuse’s tips rests deep in the small, dark kernels. The pungent smell surrounds him. Once the contraption is stable, oven-mitted Marie dips two racquetballs and four tennis balls into the gasoline with the tongs, then drops them down the tube.

Armando pulls a lighter from his pocket and walks over to Marie, still mitted, and she backs away.

“Holy shit,” she says. “This is a great idea.”

“God, forgive us,” he says. “Get the car ready. If it’s big, we’ll take off.” He smells his hands.

“I want to see it.”

“Okay.”

“Wash your hands first,” Marie says. “We should wash our hands.”

“Good.”

His still-damp hands hold the lighter and the fuse. A helicopter flies overhead, so he waits. Then another.

“Fort Carson,” he says. “Invasion.”

“Red Dawn?”

“Go, Army. Start up the tanks.”

Armando flicks the lighter and a miniature flame jumps to life. He lights the fuse and backs away.

“Cover your ears,” Marie says, hands on her ears.

“No.”

“Cover them.”

He can still hear the helicopters in the distance, the spinning rotor blades compressing the air tight. He watches his cardboard cannon, all potential, all rush, blood racing in his ears, floating, and a fire illuminates the tube from within, a split-second reverie of light and heat before the orange-tinged explosion rocks the night.

Armando’s mother returns home three weeks later with someone else’s organs tied inside her body. Her face bloats from anti-rejection drugs, and she sprouts light blond whiskers on her chin and a few strands hug her cheeks. If the new hair humiliates her, she never says so, and once in a while she still manages a toothy smile. Still, he wonders why she refuses to shave, but he lacks the nerve to ask.

His community service for the back-yard cannon explosion doesn’t start for another month. His father told him two things when the judgment was handed down: never confess and never do the same thing twice. They pay someone to fix the fence.

Armando doesn’t recognize the life draining from his mother until she grows scared of leaving the house, then of walking, then of standing. Her singing stops, and now, lying on their green living room couch, drinking 7Up and chewing saltine crackers, she will not speak unless spoken to, and even then she offers only one-word answers.

Armando, his father, and his sister try to play games with his mother or read to her every now and then, but mostly she lies there with a glassy stare. Still, at the end of the nightly story, or when he wins at Sorry or Uno, she says “Yes” or “Good” and strains a smile. But the Torres home grows sullen with the February snow, and he finds reasons not to return home until late at night. He kisses his mother on his way to bed and she stares up at him, still somehow knowing him, and although he hates himself for thinking it, he crawls under the sheets wondering if the person confined to the couch is still his mother or if she is something else now. On the worst days, when she barely moves or eats, he battles himself, wondering if he should pray for a swift, pain-free death, but then the anger overtakes him and he forces images of resurrection — his mother standing, walking, singing again.

One night his family plays the game Taboo. The score isn’t important to them. Armando’s mother mainly stays silent anyway. This time Armando draws the word tower. The taboo words eliminate most of the clues he would use, so he starts out with “It’s tall, straight, and long,” and before he says another word his mother shouts “Penis!” Armando, his father, and his sister freeze for an instant, dumbfounded, and then his mother laughs, and laughs again, and her giggles swell into full-throttle, full-belly roars. The implausible sound fills the room, and she sits up and doubles over, grabbing at her belly.

“Penis,” she says, and her eyes water and she laughs and hoots and snorts uncontrollably, and Armando’s sister and he laugh, and his father wipes at his eyes, and his mother keeps saying “Penis” and busting up and grabbing at her stomach, and she can’t stop herself and they don’t want her to stop, and she roars then says, “It hurts. It hurts,” and she grabs her body, and all of them know she’s in pain, but she keeps laughing.

“It hurts,” she says, and her cheeks are wet with tears, and she presses her hands to her midsection.

“Stop,” she says. “Stop it.” But she can’t stop, and she laugh-speaks “Help,” but it takes them a while to understand, so his mother says, “Help me,” and his father rises and goes to her. He places his hands on her stomach and asks, “Here?”

“Yes,” she says, her laughter swiftly shifting to groans. “Press.” Armando’s father presses his hands and they sink into her scarred belly. His mother brings her hands to her face and wipes at her cheeks.

“Harder,” she says, so his father presses further in, and she moans and clenches her hands. When his mother calms down, his father helps her recline on the couch, easing her head down onto her favorite red pillow. With their bedtime near, Armando and his sister pick up the word cards and put the game away. His mother’s laughter still wafts in the room. They kiss their mother’s forehead and say good night. They walk down the short hallway together.

“Mom’s okay,” his sister says. “She’s getting better.”

“Yes,” he says.

“What was the secret word?” she asks.

“Tower,” he says.

“Tower,” she repeats, then pauses. “But you said ‘long.’ That doesn’t make sense. A tower isn’t long. You should have said, ‘blank of power.’ She would’ve gotten it.” She shakes her head and turns and walks away.

One morning, after another week of his mother’s slow sink into the couch, soundless, his father comes into his room while Armando readies for school.

“She wants you to play,” he says. “It’s no big deal. Relax. But please. She’s asking for you.”

“Dad.”

“Just do it. It’s okay. I know what you’re going to say. Please.”

Armando brings his fingers to his lips and his insides evaporate. He visualizes his blind instructor, his words: “No. Again. No. Again. Are you trying? Have you practiced?” His trombone has been untouched for weeks, and he hasn’t progressed past basic scales and simple kids’ songs.

He grabs his trombone and walks downstairs to the couch with his head hanging. His father and sister have pulled up chairs. His mother is covered with blankets, and they’ve propped up her head. She stares off into the distance above, somewhere in the air below the vaulted ceiling.

“Mom,” he says.

“Chicago,” his mother whispers.

He shakes his head at his father.

“Play anything,” his father says. “It’s okay.”

“Anyone. Know. What. Time. It. Really,” she says.

“Mom, I can’t.”

His sister nods at him. His father holds his palms out.

“Play. Anything.”

He brings the instrument to his trembling lips, smells the slide oil, breathes in, and exhales hard into the mouthpiece. A metallic belch echoes in the room. He lowers the instrument.

“Dad,” he says.

“Chicago,” his mother whispers.

“Play. Just play, son.” His father walks over to him and lifts the trombone up. “You can do it.”

“Chicago.”

Armando feels the humiliation, the impossibility, and the mouthpiece on his lips. He doesn’t know the song. He inhales through his nose. His father mouths “Anything.” Armando closes his eyes and thinks he may be able to get out “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and he opens his eyes. His father mouths, “Anything, son, anything.” Armando closes his eyes and blows.

Two in the afternoon, and Armando and Marie leave school early, drive up to the Air Force Academy, and watch cadets fall from the sky. Adjacent to the overlook, a pedestaled T-38 jet points skyward. Facing east, traffic zips by on I-25, and high above is a slow-circling airplane. Wave after wave of tiny dots escape the plane in five-second increments before blooming blue parachutes. On the other side of the lookout, a group of tourists take photos, their bus hulking behind them.

Marie has her notebook out and is drawing landscapes, mainly high-desert-cacti scenes. She leaves a four-inch-by-four-inch square at the bottom right of each page for poetry. Armando has his hands in his pockets. He watches the level airfield and watches each cadet’s impact — a couple graceful, upright landings, but for most a weirdly managed feet-to-hip crash. Somehow they gather their chutes and walk away uninjured.

Although he lives just twenty minutes from this place, it’s only his third time on the base, the other two to watch the Thunderbirds perform at the academy graduation, but when Marie saw him with his head buried in the crook of his arm during fifth period, she tapped his back and said, “Let’s go.” She didn’t plan to bring him here, but driving north they noticed the parachute-spotted sky and pulled off the interstate.

Marie finishes a drawing and leans over to show it to Armando.

“What’s the first word that comes to your mind?” she asks.

“Water.”

“Too many cacti?”

“I like cactus.”

“Have you ever seen the big ones?”

“Sure.”

“The big ones are almost extinct. Phoenix and Tucson and places like that cut them down. There’s some at White Tanks by my grandma’s house.”

Armando stares at Marie and nods.

“You always stare at my birthmark,” she says.

“Not always.”

“Always.”

“I like it.”

“You don’t like it. You say that so I won’t feel bad.”

“Am I allowed to like it?”

“I don’t know. There’s no way to get rid of it. Anything I do will make it worse.”

Armando looks back at the crash-landing cadets. A pressure grows near the back of his head and he squeezes the base of his neck.

The plane has circled back high above. New dots fall and bloom.

“My mom’s growing a beard,” he says. “You don’t want to come over.”

“No.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“I’ll come over. I will.”

“Listen to me. You don’t have to.”

“If you want me to.”

“No. You shouldn’t.”

“I’ll come. Please. Just tell me.”

Armando kicks at the sidewalk and his shoe squeaks.

“She doesn’t care that she’s growing a beard.” He wipes at his cheek. “I want her to care about that. Shouldn’t that bother her?”

“I don’t know.”

“How is she supposed to get better? We have to feed her.”

“I’m sorry.”

“All we do is sit her up. She opens her mouth. That’s it. We don’t even move her to the bed.”

“Maybe she wants to be there. It’s comfortable for her. She can see you.”

“But she should stand up. How is she going to get better when she never stands? She has legs. We can help her get stronger.”

Marie clutches the notebook to her chest. Armando kicks the ground.

“You’re helping,” she says.

“All we do is feed her.”

“I don’t know.”

“No one knows. That’s the problem. Why can’t she stand with our help?”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think that?”

“Armando.”

“She wants to stand, Marie. We’ll help her. My dad on one side, me on the other. Lift up. It’s that easy.”

In the near distance a blue plane lands and idles on the runway while a new group of jumpers loads up. Through the air, the low hum of the plane’s propellers. Behind the airfield buildings, northbound interstate traffic has slowed to a crawl.

Marie strokes the cover of her notebook. She looks down at the ground, over to Armando’s shoes jabbing at the pavement. His black Nikes. The white swoosh a misshapen smile, a slanted J, an ice skate.

A week left of school, restlessness everywhere. Armando’s government class watches the television as a Colorado jury sentences Timothy McVeigh to death for the Oklahoma City bombing. McVeigh is largely emotionless, but many of the jurors appear tired and squeamish.

His teacher mutes the television. “The sad part is, they’ll make it as comfortable as possible.”

Marie’s voice brings him back. “Who’s that?” she asks.

On the television screen, two elderly people weep uncontrollably behind McVeigh’s lawyers.

“Everyone has parents,” says the teacher.

The class moves on to a halfhearted discussion of the judicial system. Armando daydreams about a clear Oklahoma morning on which he spots the moving truck, McVeigh at the helm, at a stoplight two blocks from the unbombed building. He imagines pulling a gun from a shoulder holster and putting a bullet in each McVeigh kneecap and one in each shoulder. When the cops show, he holds up a photo with the alternative, no Armando Torres intervention — a gutted building, 168 dead — and they proclaim him a hero and decide on the spot to keep the bullets in McVeigh, to take him to some dank garage and foster life and pain as long as possible.

That afternoon his father arrives at the school’s baseball field in the middle of PE. The sun shines and Armando stands in the dugout shade, joking with friends.

“Your dad,” someone says.

He watches his father slide through the gate in the outfield fence and step on the warning track. Armando stands and waves, but his father only nods, and Armando attempts to walk, but his legs lock up and he sits. His shoulders sag and he remembers to breathe as everything slows down. His father walks toward him, and it all seems to take too long, the length of the field, how many steps his father takes without getting any closer.

“Armando, your dad,” someone says.

As he hits second base, Armando’s father scratches his chest. The PE teacher meets him at the pitcher’s mound and the teacher nods his head and points at the dugout and stares.

Armando stands and hikes the dugout steps into the sunshine. The sky seems close.

His father crosses the base path and takes his son in his arms.

On the way home, Armando’s mind pounds out images of his mother on the couch—7Up sips, Uno indifference, trombone disappointment—and he can’t get his mind to work back far enough to when she was whole.

When his father misses the turn for home, Armando doesn’t ask where they’re headed. His father drives past the Broadmoor and its blooming flowers, past stucco mansions with rock walls, and turns right, heading up into the mountains. They gain altitude and Armando peers out over the valley, all the way across the city to the eastern plains curving toward Kansas and Missouri. Once the pavement turns to dirt his father says, “When Tesla was up here,” but he stops the sentence. His father rolls his window down, inhales, mumbles, “She wanted to see London and Naples, the Thames,” then flips a U-turn. On the way back down, the city rises up to them.

When they walk through the front door, his sister rests on the couch where their mother spent the last months of her life.

Armando retreats to his bedroom and sits on the edge of his bed and stares at a white wall holding up his room. His father comes in and sits down. Armando wants to tell his father that he thinks he’s okay, that he worries about his sister, that he wants Marie near, but he keeps quiet and sits next to his father, who begins to rub his son’s back, first slowly, then faster. Armando listens to his father breathe and feels his father’s hand circling fast, warming his back as they stare at the wall because neither of them knows what to say with the words they have left.