Dennis Alan Pennington

The deputy's knees ache on the stairs of the apartment I'm leaving, because I took him ten minutes ago and he has a Tuesday full of other men's trouble. His radio is on the kitchen counter, still talking. His badge sits beside it, and he left his coffee with the lid on, the way a man does who expects to come back to it. I looked at the badge for a long time. Then I opened the laptop and the wheel was there, patient as a dentist's chair.

He could not do what I needed. A woman in his city had stopped answering him, and I wanted to be a man with nothing to answer for. His lazy eye kept sliding off the screen. I paid and spun.

The wheel is a wheel. It stops.

The rhythm breaks first. My hand, his hand, slips on the ratchet and the bolt does not turn. I do it wrong, then again slowly, and it seats. I am standing at a rolling cart in a cold garage, a gearbox open in a pan in front of me, a car lifted over my head. The air smells of oil and cold concrete. Past the open door the palms are dark against a sky that has not yet decided to be morning.

I check the torque again. And again. Ten motions, each one checked, on a job this body has not needed to check in years.

Then the shirt gives me things. The cuff rolled twice, stiff with grease, and I know the hour he rolled it. He stood in a dark bedroom with the lamp off so as not to wake her, and a woman's voice said "Eat something," into a pillow. He had meant to. The patch over the heart says ARTIE'S AUTO, and there is a smaller one with his name. His thumb finds it, and I feel him pleased, at twenty-six, to be given a name sewn on.

The rag in the back pocket is soft as skin. I pull it and wipe my palm. Years come with it. A cigarette between these same fingers, in a lot behind a different shop, and the day he quit: no speech, just the pack in a bin and a bad month of picking at the skin around his nails until they bled. They are picked now. My thumbnail is already at the cuticle of my first finger, working, and I did not tell it to.

The ring is a plain band, thin from wear. I turn it and there is the courtyard at dusk, her key in the stucco door, the laugh she gives when he's late. I have not earned any of it. It comes anyway. There is a quieter thing under it, an old girlfriend and a letter he never sent, kept somewhere in him like a tool he never needs and never throws out.

Between my shoulder blades the shirt lies over something heavy. Ink, a name and a date, the script reaching up my neck. I do not need to see it. The skin remembers the needle and the long afternoon, and who it was for.

He is five-five and fifty. My back is tight, my knees are sound, and my forearms know the work better than I do. I am a long way from Boston.

I lift my hand into the light from the door. Grease in the creases, the ring, the bitten edges. I turn it over.

Then I look up, and I say, "Morning."

It is the first thing he has said today, and his voice is rough with it. I do not know if this one lasts until noon, or until the wanting comes back, which it always does. The bolt is still waiting under my hand.