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

7. Touch

ARMANDO HAS BEEN back home from Afghanistan for two weeks, and as he peers out of the restaurant’s corner window he can’t get over how much the mountains west of Colorado Springs differ from the cracking peaks circling Kabul. Armando’s father adds sweetener to his iced tea, glances around the half-filled room, and taps the table.

“You’re right, no one really cares about you. No one is thinking about you. And thank God. It’d drive us all crazy. You want to come home to an America that realizes its sins? Screw that. We want to gloat, son, and you are the proof we don’t need. I don’t blame you and your dudes for pissing on dead Taliban. Go for it. Piss on the live ones. Screw the Geneva Convention. Rip dicks off, hack up kids, waterboard, light that Koran on fire, baby.”

“Easy. I was just saying—”

“Or treat for polio or pass out limbs like you all did. Do it. We’ll forget. Don’t do it. We’ll forget. So yes, I guess I thank you for raising your right hand. For walking into the recruiter, clueless. And don’t put this on your mother’s death.”

“What?”

“Seriously, who actually wants to go into the military? Enough, I guess. Everyone wants someone to tell them what to do. That’s what it was with you. Just needed someone to tell you what to do. Look, it worked. And you got it good. Someone will hire you here as soon after you sign your separation papers. They’ll be called patriotic for doing it. No one is calling you baby killers these days, that’s thanks enough.”

“You like hearing yourself talk. That’s okay.”

“You said no one cares about the wars. I’m agreeing with you. You say we’re at war? Where, son? Look around. Who’s talking about it? Chicago isn’t talking. San Fran? Memphis? We’re not a nation at war. We never were. Are you serious? No one cares unless it’s someone they know.”

“So no one knows anyone?”

“We don’t care because all of you have volunteered to die. If not in war, then when you get home all brain-fucked from an IED some illiterate planted for twenty bucks and his neck. And believe me, I think that’s shit. I’m not mad at you. The VA needs to get their shit together, sure. But there are choices. You chose to be a paid rifle. You are all-volunteer.”

“We volunteer to serve. We don’t choose our wars. Hell, I got in before 9/11. You know that. You act like that doesn’t matter. We’re allowed to be pissed about where we go.”

“You’re wrong. You volunteer to serve at the whim of presidents and senators with no skin in the game. Holy shit, we just reelected Bush. You volunteered to let human beings like him make the call on how you’ll die, so don’t pretend you’re a hero or something. Don’t go strutting around.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Don’t buy the commercials where people stand up and clap as soldiers walk through the airport. No one knows why they’re clapping. Forget the bullshit parades.”

“Parades? Dad.”

“You really think they’re for you? They’re for us, son. You kill people you don’t know, and they hate you the same way you hate them. That’s it. I know economics. It’s not just oil. I also know that no one is invading Florida.”

“Would that make it easier?”

“Defending actual land, actual Americans instead of algorithms that run the stock market? Yes. That would make me feel better. Would it make you feel better?”

“No. I don’t know. I used to.”

“Yes you do. You want to say yes. But if you say yes, your recent trip becomes hard to swallow. And you’ve been told isolationism is shit, although there’s no such thing as isolationism. Listen to me, there are things worth fighting for, we just can’t find them. Stare into your kids’ eyes and tell them about Karzai’s butchers. His druggie, raping buddies.”

“You know there’s no honest people in the world. It’s always the lesser of two evils. We’re corrupt, but not as corrupt. I know economics too. You fight for a way of life.”

“You’re wrong. We’re not as corrupt because our lie is better than their lie. And here, people know it’s a lie.”

“That’s not true.”

“Son, I like my Comcast, my fifty-five-inch plasma, and the Broncos. I want to get pissed when my cable goes out in the fourth quarter of the NBA Finals. I want it to ruin my day. I want to hate Ohio State, I want to eat blueberries year-round, pretend that Christ actually danced on water, and bang my new wife when I have a good day.”

“Don’t.”

“I want to go ape-shit at my grandkids’ soccer game when the ref makes a bad call. I tell this to your children when you’re away: ‘You get what you get and you don’t get upset.’ There you go. You want a thank-you?”

“No.”

“Okay. Thanks. I love you. You know that. But your uniform means nothing. No matter what you’ve been told, it’s only a job.”

“You’re wrong. Not about everything. But you’re wrong about that. And people know why they’re clapping as soldiers walk through the airport. They’re just glad it’s not them and they know that if things got bad enough it would be them. They’re clapping because they know sometimes it’s hopeless and we serve anyway.”

“But you’re getting out. Why?”

“It’s not because I don’t believe in what our military does.”

“So let’s say you were thinking of staying in. If they cut your pay and benefits in half, right now, what would you do?”

“That’s bullshit.”

“You don’t serve. You’re a paid rifle. Soon to be ex — paid rifle. I love you, son, but it’s true.”

“People are capable of appreciation.”

“It’s fear, and fear works.”

The carpeted chapel seats three hundred, and three quarters of the chairs are occupied this Sunday morning. Armando’s younger daughter, Mia, moans in frustration halfway through the hour-long service. Armando leans over Anna, squeezes Mia’s leg, and whispers, “Don’t make me.” She eyes him like a stranger. She shoulders into Anna’s red dress, his favorite, and quiets down.

A year away and his dark suit drapes loose on his dry, thin frame. Anna tries to calm both of their daughters as a woman with heavy eye shadow cries at the podium. She struggles through a story about how tithing has lifted her soul. She gathers herself: “It’s easy to die for the Lord, but hard to live for him.”

The statement settles nicely over the congregation and all the members contemplate their lives and the things they do or do not give to him. Armando glances at Anna, and he can tell that she contemplates it all, because she has her unfocused stare on the seat in front of her. She probably considers what service to this country means, with him being away so often, or maybe just the ways she lives for the Lord. Perhaps she relives Mia’s birth during his previous deployment: driving to the military hospital, only to be sent home because her body had not dilated enough; then, when it was time, waiting an hour for the anesthesiologist, giving birth, and, soon after, trying to get Armando on the phone half a world away, only to be told that he was unavailable; resting and worrying, imagining the worst, and finally writing an e-mail that she hoped he would be alive to read with nothing in the body, just the subject line: “Girl — Mia?”

Armando rubs her back and she leans into his touch, rewarding him. He’s unsure if God wanted him to join the military. Armando figures God is mostly hands-off, but even so, when he prays, he does so expectantly.

The speaker now rehashes the founding-of-the-church story, centering her comments on the resiliency of Joseph Smith and his early supporters, chronicling select hardships: Smith’s being tarred and feathered, the lynch mob killing him and his brother, church members dodging persecution in Illinois, Missouri, making their way to Utah in a great and difficult migration, and setting up shop near a lake of salt. Armando has heard these stories many times. There is pride there, and although the worst he has experienced is soldiers questioning his underwear, he appreciates the religious lineage of tough souls.

Mia moans again, and three people in the row in front of the Torres family turn and smirk-smile. Anna places her hand on Armando’s bouncing leg to soothe him, but his mind floats in a trance, now stuck on the particulars of tarring and feathering. Pine tar? Tar we use for the roads? Hot tar? Pour it on? Why the feathers? Mia fusses louder and Anna whispers, “I’m taking her out” to Armando, but his leg keeps bouncing, his eyes up—How do you get the tar off? Why tar and feather when someone can put a shirt on over it? Unless you do the face. Hot tar on the cheeks. A beard of feathers. Where do you get feathers? Chicken feathers? Who brings the feathers? Of all the choices for pain and humiliation, tar and feathers? His head clears and he peeks over at his family, but there is only Camila, sitting silently, stuffing the eraser end of a pencil up her nose.

On their way home from church Anna balls her fists and eyes the horizon. Armando focuses on the oncoming traffic, trying to push away the thought of one of the cars abruptly turning in to them head-on. He pictures the collision, beautiful and choreographed, all of them in the sluggish lean mid-contact, a crash-test-dummy commercial. He hears “Hello” and “Hey,” and Anna waves her hand at him and brushes her thighs.

Five blocks from home Anna apologizes, says, “I have to ask. Did you kill anyone this time?” She wants to understand what she is dealing with. The children wear headphones in the middle row, watching Shrek 2. Armando thinks of the checkpoint girl, his bucking gun, the bullet that missed everything and saved him. Then, reaching down after the Kabul bomb blast, touching the young girl’s arm, grabbing the limb, pulling, her arm sliding free from her body, him holding her dangling arm by the wrist.

“No,” he says.

She asks if the redeployment program on post helps at all. He opens his mouth but blanks on the answer. They have counselors, sure, but he’s been through the routine before. Everyone wants to get out of there, get home, and deal with it on their own. He has plans to leave the army anyway; no need to open up new files about stuff that they have no clue how to diagnose or treat, if there is even something to diagnose. He sleeps decently enough, and his dreams of a future without bomb-planted streets arrive in comforting color. The rumor is that the VA clinic lines and the wait time for benefits are insane, but he’s not worried about that yet. He still relishes his easy pleasures, how they are more than just pleasures, simple spaces where he can place hope and faith without any wounds: in his Denver Broncos, how they win more than they lose, how Jake Plummer will never get them to the Super Bowl; in Tiger Woods, how he will break out of his current slump any week now; in Green Day’s new American Idiot album, how it plays on repeat during his morning runs.

Armando is realistic. He doesn’t expect blanket immunity from his combat time. While he knows many soldiers who deal with combat seemingly well, who move on after their service to years of success and fulfillment, he’s also familiar with the stories of good men and women, many of them friends, who go sleepless for days, play metal music at 3 A.M., use drugs, experience perpetual sedation. Worse yet are the many others sticking guns in their mouths and pulling the trigger, wrapping belts around their necks and teetering off the chair, the unfathomable pain trapped in those that do, the unfathomable pain left in suicide’s wake.

In comparison he diagnoses himself fine, at least fine enough. He makes love to Anna. He takes the sacrament at church without anguish. He recognizes there are issues with being “fine.” What does it say that he’s not jacked up? Should he be different, jittery? Two deployments and he waits for the consequences of Afghanistan, confused. In an inexplicable way he wants the shakes for a day, an hour. When will he feel the pain of shooting at the checkpoint girl? When will he suffer the guilt of masturbating during the prayer calls? Will his minor yearnings for the amplified voices from the minarets stop? For the Afghan streets’ smell of crap, dust, and rot? Already tiny but manageable itches arise for the chaos that greeted him each morning and made him feel like he could die at any moment, and for other times, when the occasional blood moon out his window convinced him that he would live forever.

Anna’s voice lifts him out of the daydream. She reaches to hold his hand over the center console.

“I want to know how I’m supposed to talk to you.”

Armando hears Anna, but washed once over — a memory speaking to him — and he waits to hear how he’ll reply. He grips the leather-wrapped steering wheel and stares down the blue Toyota truck approaching fast, left tires hugging the double yellow. The truck’s chrome grille sparkles at him.

“I want to know how to talk to you,” Anna says again.

“Be thankful I’m not hurt. I’m not limping. I can play with our children.” He pauses and smiles as they turn onto their street. “And I’ve never been right up here.” He taps his head, already aware of and disappointed by the gesture. Anna goes silent, and he sees her hands squeeze her thighs. They pull into the garage, and Armando lets Anna lift the kids out of the car.

The Torres family settles into the early Sunday afternoon, and he unknots his red tie and unbuttons the top of his dress shirt. He helps feed the girls grilled cheese and remembers that Camila no longer requires a peanut butter dollop.

Anna bought their new house while he was overseas. The stucco rancher feels tight for their family — room walls crowd the beds on both sides. After lunch, the hallway floor creaks as his daughters skip to their rooms.

The girls nap, and Anna asks Armando what he’s thinking about while he relaxes on the couch watching golf (the Tour Championship, the fairy-tale green fairways, Retief Goosen going low). He really wonders how they grow and cut the grass in diamond patterns so perfectly for the golf tournament, recalls that when he used to play the Broadmoor course with his mother the grass was cut the same way, but he can see that Anna wants something more. He notices the hope in her elbowed lean across the laminate counter, in her slightly raised eyebrows, so he tells her that he often contemplates who’s going to win in the end, Allah or God. The sentence comes out a little sarcastic, but he sells the question with eye contact. He expects some ribbing or a frustrated shake of her head, but Anna glides from the kitchen to sit next to him. She turns off the television without asking.

She says that America is blowing it because there are not enough real Christians, that the Muslims have nothing against Christianity, that if Christians actually practiced their faith, were as devout as the Muslims were, most would get along fine.

“Some of the blame is ours,” she says. “America’s. We’re strong in all the wrong ways. We call ourselves Christians, but we’re something else.”

“Muslims can’t even get along with other Muslims. It’s not that easy.”

“I didn’t say it was easy. Anyway, you’re not going back. You’re here. That’s all that matters. And you weren’t thinking about Allah versus God. Talk to me like you care what I think, because I worry about you. I can’t help you if I don’t know anything. And if you want me to leave you alone, just tell me that. But it kills me when you don’t say anything or make stuff up.”

“I don’t want to invent things. If I need something, I’ll take care of it or tell you or both. Assume I’m fine unless I tell you. I’m tired. I feel like I’ve just got home.”

Armando takes in the living room, still new to him, the fifty-inch flat-screen too big for the room. He’s disappointed he opened his mouth about the Allah-God thing. This isn’t where he wanted this afternoon to go. He wants to see if Tiger can catch Goosen at the Tour Championship, wants to bask in a clear, unburdened mind, wants to consider telegenic lawn-mower patterns. He moves Anna’s voice to the background and notices the crown molding where the ceiling and walls meet and follows the line across the wall.

“You’ve been home two weeks. You’re getting out. I’m not trying to pile on here, but you’re somewhere else. I’ll give you space, but you have to talk to me. Your kids miss you. You’re not playing with them. Be their dad.”

Armando inspects a thin space between the molding and the ceiling. The work is shoddy, and the separation spells trouble elsewhere for a house this new.

“It’s a big deal. I’m speaking to you,” she says, and he hears her.

“Everything’s always a big deal. Relax.”

“Promise me that much. You’ll tell me.”

Armando nods along, the single physical movement he can muster, and when he doesn’t respond Anna reaches out and takes his hands in hers. He looks at his wife, her hair still pinned up nicely for church. He knows she wants to heal something in him, and as they sit there together he wonders if she is disappointed that he is whole.

An hour later Armando lounges on his front porch bench, reading old Calvin and Hobbes comics. An incredibly warm day for November. He watches the Front Range of the Rockies to the west, late-afternoon thunderheads instead of snow-filled clouds cresting the peaks. He considers waking the girls from their naps and heading up to Gold Camp Road, or for an ice cream at Michelle’s downtown, or maybe for a stroll around the Broadmoor’s pond, but he listens to the quiet peace in the air and closes his eyes and smells the almost-rain and stays put.

He’ll have to start applying for civilian jobs soon if he wants a smooth transition from military to civilian work, but he doesn’t yet know what jobs to apply for, where his skills align, what he would do if he had a choice. He has an army veteran friend making good money on the motivational speaker circuit. He’s told Armando there’s a place for him, that you keep the speeches to smaller venues, a twenty-five-minute routine — two war stories, wear your uniform, and include the words honor, courage, and sacrifice, and you’re set.

“There’s no scam here,” his friend tells him. “You tell the truth. The emotional truth. The World War Two, Korean, Vietnam, even Gulf War One folks want to know. They want to compare stories. People leave motivated. They appreciate service. They want to hear from someone that’s been there. The story is the hero. You’re just the teller. Up to a grand a speech for the truth. No one’s doing this. No one. If we don’t tell our stories, someone else will.”

Not shy in front of crowds, Armando has thought about the offer, but when he considers which stories to dress up, he invariably returns to the checkpoint girl. But instead of a girl — it can’t be a girl — it has morphed into a man, a bearded man, two bearded men in a tiny hatchback, two bearded men in a tiny hatchback yelling “Allahu akbar,” and in the story he doesn’t shoot, it is a story about witness, he was there but as witness to honor, courage, sacrifice. Even as he forms the new scenes, the new characters, he knows he’ll never tell either story. Even in debrief that day in Afghanistan, he, Big Dax, Wintric, and the LT had different answers to the same questions: “How many times did you yell to her to stop?” “Who shot first, second, third?” “How far was she?” “Why didn’t you aim for her legs?” “When did she drop the ball?” “Was it possible she was pleading for help?” “Is it true you argued among yourselves about who had hit her?”

The first droplets hit the front yard, and Armando wonders how long he’ll consider himself a soldier, how long he’ll want to. He’s told Anna that he won’t shave for a month after he gets out, but what that means he isn’t yet sure. The rain is pounding now, and a crack of thunder sounds a few miles south. He sees the familiar bevy of antennas on top of Cheyenne Mountain — the nuclear war — proof mountain. Thank you, Cheyenne Mountain. His father’s new wife used to work in the mountain, the stepmother he has come home to, unbearably kind and supportive. Disgustingly humble and already a confidant of Anna’s. This woman with years in the mountain, but she can’t talk about the mountain. Easy questions: “How many people do we have in there?” “Are we still tracking Russian nukes?” Armando has served at Fort Carson for years, not two miles from Cheyenne Mountain, and he knows nothing about it, save the nuclear war — proof claim, the antennas, the fact that he now knows someone who has worked there, and some unsubstantiated claims by his father. Years ago his father told him two things about the mountain: (1) that Russia’s nuclear aim was so poor that living next door to it was the perfect place to be, and God help anyone around the Durango area if things started rocking, and (2) that the microwave was invented inside the mountain. Whenever Armando’s father would heat up popcorn, he’d tap the microwave door and say, “Thank you, Cheyenne Mountain.” That’s what Armando hears now on his front porch, “Thank you, Cheyenne Mountain,” and the rain pounding, the antennas, the same antennas he watched blinking at night as a child, and he flashes back to when he was sixteen years old, popcorn popping on their Friday family movie night, each of them arguing for a different film and Armando’s mother finally deciding what to watch and all of them settling in. His mother on the couch, his mother on the couch post-transplant, saltines and 7Up, a trombone, the rain even harder now, punishing, his father on the baseball field taking him in his arms, the open-casket viewing the night before the burial, his fascination with his mother’s shaved face, her funeral, singing “Because I Have Been Given Much,” a three-mile-long car procession, the bishop’s promise that they would all be together again in heaven and his father laughing, months of his father’s madness, hiding the lighters in his sock drawer, his sister’s move to their aunt’s in Cortez, Marie to Arizona, a friend signing up for the army, Armando going along, the papers in front of him in the recruiting office, the path forward, out, his signature, signatures, his name, signing, black ink, his name.

Six minutes into the downpour Armando sees minirivers along the street’s gutters and pools forming in his uneven front yard. The Front Range is already clearing and he guesses the rain will stop soon, and it’s a good thing, because the yard can’t take much more water. Already he knows they’ll have to move from this place, maybe only from this poorly constructed house, maybe to a whole new city, but he’s certain this isn’t the place he wants to come home to, this isn’t the place he wants his kids to come home to, and although he has no way of knowing now, he’s right.

In a couple years he’ll move his family about forty miles north to Castle Rock, where they’ll enjoy a better view of the Rockies and a properly graded front yard, a home where his kids will grow and fight, where he’ll watch the Broncos lose a Super Bowl, where, decades from now and wheelchair-bound, Armando will turn to hiding bottles of whiskey in boxes of Christmas decorations, a home where he’ll write a letter inviting his estranged daughter Mia home and one July day, overcome with emotion, he’ll welcome Mia and her daughter back into his life. But right now Armando sits and watches the shallow front-yard pond creep outward, and although the sky has now cleared above him, the rain continues to fall.

That evening Camila and Mia play in the home’s fenced back yard. The moon already hugs the southeast sky, and things get heated between the girls after Camila trips Mia and tugs on her leg, pulling her around the still drying yard. Mia screams, but Camila keeps yanking.

“Easy,” Armando says. He stares at his kids. They ignore him. He realizes that they’re starting to look more and more like Anna.

“Do something,” Anna says.

Armando is about to ask her what she thinks about a third child when she leans over, grabs his arm, and whispers, “You have to touch your children, dammit. Do you hear me?”

The words hang on him, and the shock and anger brew inside his limbs.

“What the hell did you say to me?”

This fury arrives from someplace new, and he lines up obscenities on his tongue, but before launching them he shuffles through the past two weeks of memory and comes up with a stinging recap: the girls were too shy to hug him when he came off the plane with the cameras flashing and the news teams and the Bruce Springsteen music. He rushes past bedtime routines, feedings, a doctor’s visit, walks to the park, and he realizes that he has touched them, but only in passing; he hasn’t held them, not as he used to, not as he wanted to while he was away. His chest pounds and Anna’s hand clutches his biceps to lead him out to the yard.

Without a word he rises. His daughters now play with the water hose, Camila half plugging the stream into a spewing water fan, and for the first time their giggles terrify him. He walks onto the wet grass, but a few steps away he shakes his head, not sure what comes next. A crushing weight stops and holds him. Does he grasp them and throw them in the air? Grab their thin arms and pull them close? Take the hose and spray them? Does he ask for permission? He wants to live for them, but it all feels wrong, and before he knows it he sits, crushing the dusk grass, and everyone pauses, even young Mia, with a puddle covering her toes. He opens his arms, but his children stand motionless.

“Please,” he says.

“Girls,” Anna says.

“No! I’ll do it,” he says. “Camila, Mia. Come to your daddy. Now.”

They stand still.

“Why won’t you come? Please, girls.”

His arms are open. He could receive them so easily.

“Mommy,” Mia says.

“No! Here, Mia. Here. With me.”

“Mommy.”

“Goddammit! No! Here, Mia. Camila, here.”

“Armando.”

“No!”

Armando slams the ground, his palms on the ground, pressing, and he closes his eyes and steadies himself. He senses Anna moving in the background. He breathes and opens his eyes, but he’s still in his back yard.

“Girls,” he says, his voice cracking. “Girls.”

Camila takes a step forward and stops. Armando guesses that Anna is waving the girls forward, begging them with her arms to go to their father, but they stand locked in place, staring above him. He feels water on his legs, and Anna says, “Sing the ABCs.” He hears her and sees his arms and hands reach out to the great expanse in front of him. He thinks of the tune and just before he begins the melody, Camila starts with the A, and Mia joins in by the E. His daughters gaze at Anna, singing slowly and softly in the air, their faces solemn. The refrain should sound elementary, but the dual-voiced letters are veneration. Armando thinks back to when he sang this same song to his daughters at bedtime, and all at once he realizes that he has taught them a beautiful prayer, one they remember. He opens his mouth and hits the right pitch on Q. Together they sing the building blocks to everything they will ever say to each other.

When they finish he expects a surge of something, a new resolve, or an answer awaiting him after Z. He wants his body to come alive, but it’s near dark and the girls haven’t moved and he feels the cool water beginning to cover him, then Anna’s hands on his shoulders, squeezing him to life.