Cole Williams

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You spin Gerald Boudreaux's knuckles against Gerald Boudreaux's thumb, standing in Gerald Boudreaux's kitchen, and they don't crack. Fifty-four years old and soft in a way that has nothing to do with weight, this body, a short beard going gray at the chin-point, brown eyes that need the little folding glasses left by the laptop. You have been him less than a minute and already you know the whole shape of tonight without wanting to: grading left undone, a glass of wine already poured and going warm on the counter, a framed photo of a wife who isn't around anymore in any way you've bothered to ask about. There is nothing wrong with him. That is, itself, the problem. A body that fits like a rented coat, competent, tenured, unhungry. You did not sit down in this chair to grade freshman papers at midnight forever. The laptop is still open to the wheel's page, gray steel background, one bright wheel on it like a coin dropped in still water, because some old animal part of you never actually closed the tab. You didn't come back for a reason you could say out loud. You came back because the wine is warm and the house is quiet and there are still, by your own count, ninety-two names in the folder you don't open anymore, and a nine-hundred-and-eighth doesn't feel like too many to want. You put two soft fingers on the trackpad. You spin.

The rhythm breaks first — a chain going through your hands wrong, the tension caught crossed instead of true — and you correct it, slow, deliberate, the way a man checks a knot he has tied ten thousand times and has never once needed to check. You are standing bent at the waist, both hands full of aircraft tie-down chain, sun coming in low and gold through the open hangar door behind you, salt and jet fuel and hot metal in your nose. Your back is a stranger's back, wide through the shoulders, twenty-three years old and not sore anywhere yet. You run the next link through checked, and the one after, and you don't know why you're checking, only that something in the doing of it feels like it just remembered how to be done.

The coveralls have a name over the pocket — WILLIAMS — and touching your own chest through the fabric gives you a flash of a mirror, fluorescent barracks light, a hand smoothing the collar flat two hours ago, an unconscious small tug at the hem the way you'd square a uniform your whole life without being told to anymore. Cole Williams. The name arrives with the touch of his own stitched letters like a introduction nobody asked for. The boots are the next thing — steel-toe, broken in exactly to the shape of these feet, and standing in them gives you a whole year: nonrate, seasick the first six weeks out of San Diego, learning the deck the hard way, a chief who worked him like a mule and made a sailor out of him anyway. There's gratitude in that memory that isn't yours and won't leave.

The chain in your palms is warm from sitting in sun, rough-galvanized, and holding it gives you this morning — no, this moment, still becoming this morning — the smell of the hangar bay at shift start, coffee from a thermos with a dent in the side, the particular ache low in his lower back from bending all day that a twenty-three-year-old body simply absorbs instead of complaining about. You get flashes of the shift itself running backward: the same chain, an hour ago, a joke thrown across the deck at a guy named Delgado, laughing with his head back. Further back: red dirt yard, the house on posts, his mother's tin roof ringing under rain like something being played. A woman's name sitting behind his molars he doesn't say out loud anymore — an ex, gone two years, and still there's a want in his chest shaped exactly like her that comes up unbidden when the light does this particular gold thing at the end of a particular kind of day, the way it's doing now.

You feel, distantly and completely, how this body carries itself without asking: shoulders that know how to plant against weight, the tobacco pouch worn soft in a back pocket from being carried and not always used, big-night memory of a Friday two weekends back, laughing too loud at Kailua with people who are, in the ordinary sense of the word, his. Freckles under your eyes when you glance down at your own forearm — sun-earned, permanent, the one plain fact of this face that any stranger would name first if asked. Calluses on your palm where the chain sits. A body that has never once needed to check its own hands doing this job, until half a second ago, when you arrived inside it and made it stop trusting itself for exactly ten links.

You straighten up. The chain goes taut, correct, the aircraft secure, the job finished the way it always finishes, except that you did it once wrong and once slow and eight times deliberate, and nobody on this hangar deck noticed a thing.

You look at your hands — his hands, tan to a line at the wrist, a scrape healing on one knuckle you don't have the memory for yet, freckles scattered clear to the first knuckle of each finger. You turn them over once, like you're checking they're real, then look up through the open hangar door at the water going copper under the last of the light, and you say, quiet, mostly to yourself, in a voice that isn't the one you had forty seconds and one continent ago:

"There you are."