Dale Hargis

You are Rafael Almanza, and you have been him for less than a minute.

The cab of the truck is dark, the engine ticking as it cools. His thumbs are still on the wheel at ten and two. The hazel eyes in the mirror don't look back at you the way you thought they would. Five foot five, and the seat is set for it, so everything is close. You pay for the wheel with a card that is his, and the page is open on the phone propped against the dash, the wheel painted and waiting. Beard rough under your knuckles, freckles you can't feel. The thing is that he could not back the trailer. You tried, twice, in the yard in the dark, and the hands knew the wheel but not the angle, and you sat there humiliated by a stranger's missing skill. A body that works is not enough if it won't do the one thing you wanted today. You press the button anyway.

Then there is a mattress under your whole front, and the air is thick and warm and smells of old laundry and sawdust. Your cheek is in a pillow. One arm hangs off the bed, the blood gone to pins in the fingers. The breathing in your chest is ragged and you smooth it into one even breath. A streetlight lays a stripe through a gap in the curtains. You roll onto your back and the arm climbs up on its own, and your hands fold on your chest like something laid out. He never slept like this. You feel that, even this early, as a small wrongness in the muscle.

You are in a work shirt, still dressed, still in his jeans. The cotton against your ribs is stiff with dust. You press your palm flat to it and the morning comes up through it: his thumb working the zipper of the vest, the tiredness of a man who has done this nine thousand times, the tape measure clipped on by feel. He swears softly at a bootlace. Somewhere a kid's drawing is stuck to a refrigerator, and you feel what he feels about it, a fierce, scared tenderness. Two of them. The shirt gives you that and no names.

You turn your wrist and the sleeve rides up. Under the cuff, half hidden, is the script of a tattoo, a name and a date. You don't read it. You touch it, and the memory is a hospital corridor, bright and cold, his own breath loud in his ears, and a grief so square and heavy you almost let go of the arm. You take your fingers away. It isn't yours to carry.

The jeans are rigid at the knee where he kneels on subfloor. His calves ache from stairs. A thumbnail is split and sore. Under the quilt his palm finds a seam, and that gives you a girlfriend laughing at him in a kitchen, flour on her wrist, his whole chest unclenching. Your fingers go to the eyebrow, to the pale ridge cutting through it, and what comes is a board kicking back, white light, a coworker's shout, and then pride that he finished the cut anyway.

He is thirty-two. His lower back hurts in an honest way. His hands are broad and scarred and trained, and they want to be holding something.

You lift them into the streetlight and look at them. Turn them over. Palms, knuckles, the split nail. They are warm and they are yours for now.

You look up, toward nothing, toward whoever is watching, and say, quiet, "Okay, Dale." Then, because the wheel is already there behind your eyes, patient, painted: how long does this one last?