Dennis Yamashiro

Aaron Littlebird's hands are so small. That's the thing you can't get past, sitting in his narrow chair in his narrow apartment above the museum's loading dock, the storage room smelling like acid-free tissue and old varnish. Sixty seconds ago these fingers didn't exist for you. Now they're tapping a cotton glove against the desk, and you hate them a little — the boy's build, the wrist you could circle with two fingers, twenty-eight years old and skinny as a fence post. You spun for a museum conservator and got a man who catalogues arrowheads that used to belong to people like him. There's a irony in there you don't have the patience to unpack. It's the middle of the day here, light coming flat and white through a basement window, and somewhere a supervisor is expecting him back from lunch in four minutes, and none of that is your problem, because your thumb is already on the site, already on the wheel, because a minute in a body this slight feels like wearing a coat that doesn't close. You want weight back. You want a man who takes up his doorway.

The wheel spins where you can't see it spin. It never has a between.

You are mid-motion, hand closing around a laminated brochure at a trailhead sign, and the motion is wrong — thumb catching the corner crooked, brochure sliding, and you correct it, slow, deliberate, like a man relearning where his own fingers end. The one after that you do right. And the one after that. Ten small corrections in a row, each one checked, on a job that hasn't asked to be checked in years. Pines behind you, standing close and dark. Down the slope, one stoplight holding red over an empty road, and past it a diner with its awning rolled and the window dark. Evening light, going copper at the edges. The hat brim throws a line of shadow across your — his — nose, which you can feel now is not straight, a old break healed on a slant, and it aches faintly the way a knee aches before rain.

The brochure paper is what opens him first. Cheap stock, curling at the corners from humidity — a hundred afternoons of handing these to families with strollers, to retirees with binoculars around their necks, saying the loop trail's a mile eight and the creek crossing floods after rain, don't let the kids past the second marker. Dennis Yamashiro has said those words so many times they've worn a groove. Thirty years in this county, minus the four he spent at Kent State not finishing a geology degree, minus a bad two years married to a hygienist named Carol who wanted Columbus and got Ohio Pines instead — that marriage ends on a porch in October, both of you polite about it, so polite it curdled worse than shouting would have. He carries the radio's braided cord next, the weight of it against his sternum familiar as breathing, and it gives him the sign-off he uses walking to his truck at the end of every shift, static then his own voice, ranger seven clear.

The shirt is the deep one. This morning — his morning, hours ago now by his clock, years ago by nothing at all — he stood in front of the dresser mirror buttoning it from the bottom because his father taught him that, some superstition about starting where you can see your hands, and the shirt still had the crease from the hanger in the shoulder. His gut pushed at the second button the way it has for a decade, and he didn't fight it, just tucked in what tucked and let the rest be. He'd patted the pouch of nicotine in his breast pocket, one under his lip before he even had coffee, the little cool burn he doesn't examine too closely — he quit drinking two years back without much ceremony, just stopped wanting it one gray February, and this is what filled the hole, this and the pen he clicks without noticing, click click click, an old court reporter's habit he picked up from nobody in particular. Belt buckle. Boots, already broken to the shape of his feet, laces double-knotted because he's tripped on the trail exactly once, badly, twenty years ago, and it made an impression the way falling does.

He thought, this morning, of Priya — girlfriend, eight months now, a physical therapist two towns over who thinks his crooked nose is the whole reason she noticed him at the county fair — and of texting her about dinner, and did, thumb clumsy on the screen the way it's clumsy on anything smaller than a trail marker. He thought, for one unbidden second while knotting his boots, of Renee, the ex from before Carol even, the one who still calls sometimes on his birthday and once told him he'd make somebody a good father, which landed strange since he never has been one and doesn't expect to be. His blood pressure medication sat by the sink; he took it without water, grimacing, an old man's habit at forty-three that he resents and does anyway. His body under the uniform is soft in the middle, strong in the forearms from ten thousand gates lifted and fence posts driven, a low ache behind the right knee that flares on the downhill stretch of the loop trail, present now, dull, honest.

You look down. The hand holding the brochure is broad, brown-knuckled, a stranger's hand doing a stranger's small competent job, and you turn it over slow, watching the calluses catch the copper light.

"Little late for a walk," you say, to no one, testing his voice in your mouth — low, a little rough at the edges, Ohio flat under it — and behind you the stoplight clicks from red to green over a road with nobody on it to obey.