Dale Herriman

Emiliano's shop smells like cut keys and machine oil, and none of it is yours to keep. You have had this body three minutes — you have not even learned what his coffee tastes like, and already you are bored inside him, the itch starting up under his sternum, that specific hunger the wheel teaches you before anything else it teaches you. The bench in front of you has a lockbox half-picked, and you look at Emiliano's own hands doing careful, competent work and think: not this. Not thirty-four and quick and poor and small. You want weight. You want a life with more years pressed into it. Locking the shop's back door out of habit that isn't yours, you go to the little terminal in the office, pull up the page with the wheel on it, and spin — not for a reason you would say to anyone, only that having been ten men already, the eleventh feels owed to you, the way a second drink feels owed after the first one goes down easy.

The road exists before you do. Then it is around you — dark two-lane, a windshield with a bug-spatter constellation on it, the orange dash-glow lying across knuckles that are not the hands you left behind. They are wider, older, a plain gold band biting a little at the base of one finger. Your foot is already on a pedal you did not choose. The wheel is warm from another man's grip a half-second before it was yours. Both hands come off it, drop, resettle lower, wider apart — an old habit filling in under you before you know it is a habit — and somewhere in the same motion a turn signal clicks on, blinking for an exit that means nothing to you yet, ticking green light onto the dashboard, onto your new forearm, onto the mole riding high on this stranger's cheek that you can feel like a pinprick of shadow even though you cannot see it.

The shirt is what opens him first — worn thin over the shoulders, a soft cotton gone the color of dusk from a hundred washes, and it gives you a whole morning before you've finished noticing the smell of fabric softener in it. Dale, pulling it over his head in a bedroom with the shades still down, his wife's breathing slow and even behind him, the leg already bouncing while he sits on the edge of the bed lacing his boots one-handed, patient with laces gone stiff with old mud. He does this every morning. He does not think about doing it. His hands know the double-knot before his mind has clocked in.

The wheel under your palms brings the rest crashing in, faster than the road can hold it. Thirty-one years of this exact truck's ancestors — a string of them, each one a little newer, all the same green dash-light, all the same three-mile stretch of nothing between the ballfield and the house. The field itself rises up in you: mower engine roaring low, fresh-cut stripes laid dark and light across outfield grass like a flag nobody salutes, the particular satisfaction of a chalk line drawn dead straight down the third base side, sweat cooling on the back of his neck under a Kansas sun that never once, in thirty years, felt like enough of an audience. Him alone out there most days. Him fine with that.

The apnea machine's hiss ghosts up out of nowhere — off, at night, waiting for him — and behind it, quieter, a hospital room decades back, a nurse putting his first daughter into arms that shook, and then years compressed into a blink: his son's glove popping against a chest protector, his wife laughing once at something he doesn't remember saying, her hand flat on his sternum on a night neither of them talks about now, this same wedding band pressing cold against her spine. He does not drink, has not smoked since the year his daughter was born, goes to no particular church but stands sometimes out past the pitcher's mound at dusk with the thunderheads stacking up black and gold over the wheat and feels something he'd call God if anyone asked, which nobody does.

Then it is only the seat, the wheel, the low hum of tires. Your hands — his hands — lift off the wheel entirely for one bad second, held up in the dash light, turned palm to palm to palm like foreign objects. Thick fingers. A callus map you didn't earn. The ring catching the glow.

"There you are," you say, to no one in the cab, in a voice pitched lower and older than any you've worn, and you don't know yet if you mean him or yourself.