Bryce Tolliver

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You have watched him for eleven days and you still don't know his middle name.

That is the shape of it. You are nobody to him. You have never spoken to him, never brushed past him in a doorway, never been a voice on his radio. He has no idea a thing like you exists, and you don't much know either — you don't know how you get in, only that you can, the way water knows a crack without knowing masonry. There was no bargain. Nobody sold him. Nobody knows.

You picked him because he yawns.

That's the truth of it, small and stupid. You'd been drifting the strip along Bellfort past the tire shops and the taquerías, sitting in the humidity like a smell, and there he was at 6:40 in the morning outside a Shurton Drugs & Foods, leaning his hip on the fender of a black-and-white, ginger hair falling in a heavy fringe to his eyebrows, layers past his ears, damp at the temples already because it's Houston and the air is a wet towel by seven. And he opened his mouth to yawn and covered it with his hand — a whole hand, palm flat, the way a kid does — and you thought: *there. That's a man who is still being polite to nobody at all.*

Eleven days after that you know things a stranger shouldn't.

He is twenty-one. Five foot seven and built like a fire hydrant, the muscle earned in a cinderblock gym off Airline with a punch card taped inside the door of his locker. Brown eyes, which surprises you every time; you keep expecting green, the way people do with redheads, and the brown makes his face plainer and better. Freckles all across the nose and the tops of the cheeks, a dense scatter of them, dark against skin that will not tan and only ever goes pink. That's the thing about him. That's the first thing and the last thing. In the low sun they come up like something written.

He smokes a pack a day and hides it from nobody, because there's nobody to hide it from. He drinks maybe four times a year, and badly, and doesn't like it. He has no god and doesn't feel the absence — you have listened to him not think about it, which is a specific silence. He is single and there is no ex who matters; there's a girl from two years ago whose name he can recall but not her laugh, and that's the whole file. No kids. No church. No one waiting up.

He owes twenty-four thousand dollars he cannot see the bottom of. A truck he shouldn't have financed, a semester and a half of community college that didn't take, the academy, a molar. He does the math on the drive in and gets a different answer every time, which is how you know he isn't really doing the math. Money for him is a weather system, not an arithmetic.

And when he isn't thinking about his hands, they click a pen. That's the tell. Report in his lap, radio squawking somebody else's disturbance three miles off, and the pen goes *tk tk tk tk* against his thumb, thirty, forty times, an idling engine of a man. It's in the shirt pocket in the picture, that pen, clipped in with the cap up. You have come to think of the sound as his real voice.

He carries other things he wouldn't bring up and you won't either.

You want to say you deserve him. You don't. You want to say you needed a body and his was the one that opened; that's closer. But the honest version is meaner and simpler: you wanted to be looked at with those eyes from the inside. You wanted to know what it is to be twenty-one and heavy in the shoulders and fair-skinned and owed money by nobody and owing it to everyone, standing in a parking lot at dusk with the sunset going peach and dirty over the Houston Suspension Repair sign across the road, the cooler cases humming through the glass behind you, the whole day still ahead like a hallway. You wanted the *ordinary*. You have never had one hour of it.

He has no idea. That's not cruelty on your part, it's just the arrangement. There is no wheel he knows he's standing on. There's a shift ending or beginning — he isn't sure himself which, the schedule has been chewing him for a month — and there's a yawn coming up out of his chest, and he lifts the flat of his hand to his mouth for the sake of manners he learned from a woman in Baytown who is not thinking about him right now either.

The yawn takes him with his eyes shut. His head tips forward. The fringe swings. Beneath the hand his jaw goes wide and his breath goes out of him long and cracked, and the sound is the sound of a screen door.

You are already inside.

Not through the mouth. Not like that. There is no seam and no doorway and nobody will ever be able to say. He simply finishes the yawn and it is not entirely his mouth that closes.

The hand comes off. He rubs one eye — knuckle into the socket, the way he does, hard enough that he'll see a smear of light for a second — and that is the last thing Bryce Tolliver does.

Then the hand stops.

It stays up. Fingers half-curled, still an inch from the cheekbone, and the arm holds there like a man who has forgotten the second half of a gesture. The face under it is doing nothing. Not slack, not pained. *Uninhabited*, for the length of a breath, the way a room is when somebody's stepped out.

And then it lowers.

The eyes that come open behind that hand are the same brown. Same lashes, pale at the roots. But the way they land on the world is not the way his landed on it. There is a *count* in them now. They go over the sunset like it's evidence. They go over the pumps of light coming out of the drugstore, and the wet asphalt shine, and the black-and-white pressed cool against the hip, and the word HOUSTON in block letters right there by the knee, and none of it is familiar and all of it is *his*.

Then they find the window.

The patrol car's glass is tinted and low-sunned and it holds a face. Ginger, wet-templed, fringe in the eyes. Freckles across the nose. Twenty-one years old and mortgaged and unbelieved-in and *five foot seven*, God, the ground is closer than you thought, the world sits differently on a short strong man.

You lift the hand — his hand, thick-fingered, the palm dry and callused across the base where he grips the bar at the gym — and you turn it over and look at the back of it, at the fine red-gold hair on it, at the freckling that goes up the forearm and thins out. You do it slowly, because there is no reason to hurry. There is no term on this. There's no way back and you weren't looking for one.

Somewhere down at the bottom of him the pen is in the shirt pocket with the cap up, and you can feel already, in the tendons of the second and third fingers, the little worn groove of a habit waiting for you to be unconscious enough to use it.

Then you say the only sentence you have.

*"Twenty-four."*

Because that's what he owes, and it's yours now, and it's the first debt you have ever been able to carry. You've wanted one for a very long time. You'd have paid more.