Aaron Whitecloud Redcorn

The first thing I notice about Sanjay Patel's body is that it will not stop hurting in the left knee. I have worn him for a few minutes. It is dark in the kitchen, and the coffee is going cold in a Kentucky mug, and I am standing in a man's life with my thumb on a phone.

I want to say it was the knee. It was not the knee. I came out of the bathroom and his daughter's voice was on the stairs, calling him Daddy like a question. Nothing in me answered. The word had nowhere to land. I don't want to say more about it than that. I paid, and the wheel turns.

It stops.

Cold air, early, the sky the color of dishwater. I am standing in a trench to my shins in clay, and the shovel is already moving. My arms are doing it, and the motion goes wrong. The blade bites crooked and the weight comes back up against my wrist. Then I do it again, slowly, and it is right. Ten more follow, each one checked, because I am checking. The body wants to go on without me.

I am heavy and strong. My belly sits against the belt, and my thighs are thick, and my back is warm and slick under a shirt that smells of sweat and dust. My breath is steady. My nose feels wrong, a little bent in the airway, and the right side whistles faintly. The air smells of cut earth and diesel and cold iron.

The shovel handle is smooth where thousands of palms have worn it. It opens something. A kitchen, a woman laughing at him because he has put the salt in the fridge, and the sweetness of being laughed at by her. A boy asleep on his chest. A girl with his nose, he thinks, though hers is straight. The feeling is large and plain, and it is not mine.

My fingers have been drumming on the wood, a quick roll. The rhythm comes up from somewhere older. A porch, a man's voice in the dark, a quieter name. Another man, once. The ache of that is his, not mine, and it is recent: a hand on a truck door, a decision, a drive home. His wife knows. I feel that he is not sure she should have had to.

The shirt shifts on my shoulders. Sleeve by sleeve I am in the morning: the yellow-green shirt pulled off the hook by the back door, the stiff reflective stripe, the dried mud at the hem, his wife's thumb pressing a crease flat on the shoulder without a word. Jeans stiff with old clay. Boots laced left, then right. Coffee standing up. The hard hat last, white and scuffed, taken from the passenger seat.

Under all of it, his savings: a number he turns over like a stone. Enough to be careful. Not enough to stop. He doesn't drink anymore. He prays, sort of, to no one he has named, mostly to the morning.

Down the street a stoplight turns red over an empty crossing. A diner stands dark with its sign still up, and no one is going to open it.

I lift my left hand off the handle. The ring is plain and worn thin. I turn the hand over. The palm is broad, with calluses, and the fingers keep drumming.

I look up and say, "Alright. Show me where you kept it all."

Nobody answers. I do not know how long this one lasts, or when the wanting comes back.