Dwayne Combs

You are Cody Brandvold for less than a minute more, and he is already tired of himself. It is early. The yard outside the trailer is gray and the first truck hasn't started anywhere. His body is a good one: six feet, wide through the shoulders, a full beard you keep rubbing as if it were a habit. You stand at the sink with a glass of water and notice what you can't do. Yesterday a woman at the lumber yard said his name, and you answered like a man answering to someone else's. You don't know how to be bored by this. So you do the thing you don't say aloud, and you tilt the phone toward the wheel.

The wheel stops. The beard goes. Something in your chest drops into a different place.

Your cheek is in a pillow that smells of old sweat and laundry soap. Your knees are drawn up. A bar of light has found your face through a gap in the foil, hot and white. You turn from it, and the turning is wrong, so you turn back into it and open his eyes and keep them open. It hurts, and you let it.

The first thing you touch is the blanket, rough under your fingers, and the memory comes up warm. It is his daughter, small, asleep on this same blanket on a couch, and the weight of her is the whole of his chest. It isn't your feeling. You only hold it.

The work trousers are stiff at the knee with dried grit. They hand you the morning: sitting on the bed edge at dawn, the belt through the loops by feel, a thumb finding the button. Then the long gray sleeve of the henley, its small frayed hole at the elbow, which his thumb goes to without asking. You were never told that he is tired the way a house is tired. His lower back is a hot rope. His calves are tight. A pouch of nicotine sits tucked in the pocket against his hip, and the wanting for it arrives before the thought.

The mattress dips under your hip. You get the foil: his own hand pressing it up against the glass last night, tape in his teeth, because the day doesn't care that he works down there in the dark. You get the hall, the quiet of it, and a woman's voice saying his name in a way that isn't kind anymore. It is the ex. You don't know what she said. You only know how it landed.

Socks. Floor. The boots stand by the bed with their tongues out, and the smell of them is wet stone and coal dust. Your feet remember the cage dropping before you've even moved them.

You lift your hand into the bar of light. The knuckles are thick, the skin cracked at the creases, the nails ridged. You turn it over once. It is yours until it isn't.

You look up, and you say, quietly, "Alright. Let's see how long you last."