Colby Draper

The first thing I do, standing in the kitchen in El Paso, is rub my scalp. Calvin Rodgers has shaved it every morning for twenty years, and the stubble is already coming back under my palm like sandpaper. Two minutes I have been him. Two minutes, and I have already found the thing he cannot do: the loan screen on his phone, the number that will not move, the lot of a dealership where he sells other people's futures and cannot afford one. The coffee is bad. His knees ache when he leans on the counter. The phone is warm in my hand, and the page is open, and the wheel is already waiting on it.

I press. It does not feel like falling.

I am mid-stride. Cold air goes into my chest and comes out white. There is gravel under my shoes, a canal on my left giving off the smell of wet concrete, and a watch buzzing against a wrist that is mine now. My pace breaks for two steps, a stumble that never lands, and then I am running on the other foot, arms lower, head still.

The jacket zipper is cold against my chin, and the cold opens something. A morning, not this one: a man in a firehouse bay laughing so hard he has to bend over, and I feel the laugh in his ribs, borrowed and warm. He is Colby. The name comes with the feeling of being called it across an engine bay.

The watch buzzes again, a split for a mile I have no record of running. Under it the memory comes: the girlfriend asleep, one arm flung over his side of the bed. He stood in the dark and put on these clothes, the black pants first, one leg and then the other, the drawstring pulled twice and knotted. The jacket came last, his sleeve catching on the tattoo, a name and a date he does not need to read. Whose name, I cannot say. The grief around it has no edges, only weight, and I let it go by.

My jaw pulls on the right side where the skin is tight and shiny. A flash of heat comes with it, a hallway of orange, a ceiling coming down, and the sound of his own breath inside a mask. He was twenty-two. Every winter morning the scar aches like this, and he runs anyway.

My thumb finds my mouth. The nails are bitten to nothing, and my teeth already know how. Behind the lip sits a nicotine pouch, a small sting against the gum. His body wants it. His legs are good, long and loose, lungs deep at mile four, and nothing in them hurts the way Calvin's knees did.

There is no money in him either. A tin of folded bills in a drawer, a truck payment, a number he does not look at. Scraping by. We are the same in that, almost.

I slow, and the gravel goes quiet. I look at my hands and turn them over, palms up, ragged at the nails, a stranger's, steaming slightly in the cold.

Then I lift my eyes to the water and say aloud, in a voice that is lower than I expected, "Okay. Okay, Colby."

The watch buzzes, wanting the next mile. I do not know how long I will want this one.