Curtis Overton

Here is the Travis problem. His body is good, and it is wrong. It's twenty-six and it hums. It wakes before I do. I've stood in his kitchen in Small-town Ohio with a mug going cold, watching a stranger's blue eyes in the dark window, and nothing in the whole house needs me. The white streak in his hair catches the light when I turn my head, and I keep turning my head to see it. Ten spins, and the tenth is the first one I've been bored inside. His scrubs hang on a hook by the door. A clock ticks over the stove. Mid-morning on a Tuesday, and I have nothing to do with a body that could do anything. So I put his thumb on the screen and let the wheel run, and I don't say why, not even to the window.

The wheel stops. The kitchen goes.

I'm sitting. The seat is hard plastic, third from the door, and a strip light buzzes over me and puts a hot line across my scalp. My knee is bouncing. It was bouncing before I came, and on the click of a board across the room it stops. Forty-eight. I have a paper cup in my right hand, the water gone warm and flat. I set it on my knee, then think better of it and lower it to the floor between my boots, square, the way you'd set down something you mean to come back for. I fold my hands. A name gets called and I don't look up. Something in the body decides that, not me.

The weight is the first thing. It's low and wide and settled, a belly under a black tee, a chest that has hauled things. The hoodie is stiff at the cuffs with old dirt. When I press my forearm against my side, the zipper teeth leave their line in me, and the sleeve gives me a morning.

Cold, before light. His hands pull this hoodie off a hook because the truck heater is dead. A woman's voice from a room he isn't in says take the thermos, and he doesn't, and he feels bad about it all the way down the block. The marble step outside the rowhouse is worn into a bowl, and he steps in the same hollow everyone has, and the first sun is only a stripe at the end of the street. He is tired in a way sleep doesn't touch. He is tired of being asked for things.

My thumb finds the left ring finger. A band of skin there is paler than the rest, smooth, a little tender-looking. The body knows it without me. A kitchen. A fight that went quiet instead of loud. He set the ring on the counter, and it made a small sound, and he has been listening for that sound for years. Two kids at the top of the stairs, one of them pretending to be asleep.

The knee wants to bounce again. I let it. The jeans are not jeans, they're work pants, and the thigh under them is thick and sore, a hard ache at the hip like a bruise inside a bruise. Forty-eight years of lifting. The lower back speaks when I lean forward. The hands, though, the hands are strong, thick-fingered, patient. My right thumb rubs the ridge of my left palm and remembers the handle of a shovel, the grain worn smooth, the spoil heap steaming beside the little excavator on a cold morning. He likes that sound. The bucket biting. The ground giving up what's in it.

On the back of my hand, a cross and two praying hands, inked dark and blurring at the edges. I turn the wrist and feel nothing in me answer. He doesn't believe in them. He got them for his mother, at nineteen, drunk and tender, and kept them because taking them off would have been a kind of lie too. More of it rises, a cigarette-smelling porch, a woman he was with before the marriage, someone who still knows how he sounds when he's scared. He called her last week and didn't say anything and she said his name anyway.

Money: the number is small and he knows it to the dollar. A truck payment. A child's shoes.

The strip light buzzes. The cup sits between my boots.

I lift my hand and look at it. Thick, scarred at the knuckle, the pale mark on the finger. I turn it over. Palm up, it's empty. I raise my eyes and say, low, to nobody, "All right, Curtis. Let's see what you were waiting for."

And under it, the wheel, patient, wanting nothing yet. How long, I wonder. Until when. Whether I'll still be here tomorrow, in this chair, with this knee.