Free I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them by Jesse Goolsby Page B

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.”
    â€œI know the difference.”
    â€œGood.”
    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.
    â€œLet’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.”
    Â 
    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.
    â€œI’m not condoning premarital sex,” his mother says.
    Marie buries her face in her hands.
    â€œIf 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.
    â€œThe lineaments of gratified desire. Say it with me. The lineaments of gratified desire.”
    Armando squints and shakes his head.
    â€œAn 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.”
    â€œOkay.”
    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.
    Â 
    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