Gary Lee Dufrene

The cab of Curtis Haddix smells of cold coffee and the pine tree hanging off the mirror. It is dark in Eastern Kentucky, and I am sitting in a parked truck with a once-broken nose and a beard that itches. I have been him for less than a minute. The phone is lit in his big hand. Nothing is wrong with him. He is simply a man who is fine, and fine has turned out not to be enough. Under the heel of his boot the floor hums. In the mirror the black beard looks like a decision someone else made. I press the wheel.

Mid-stride, a stumble that never lands. The ground comes up and doesn't arrive, and the running goes on from the other foot.

Cold air, wet and green, and my breath showing white in front of a face that is not the face I just left. The weight is different. It sits lower, in the belly and the hips. There is a canal on my left, flat as tin, and gravel crunching under shoes that are worn soft. Something buzzes on my wrist: a split I never ran.

The jacket first. The zipper tab is cold against my chin, and the sleeve cuffs are damp at the wrist, and at once it is a morning in October. He is standing in a dark kitchen with one lamp on. Her robe is on the chair. He is zipping this jacket slowly so the teeth won't wake the child, and he is thinking, *just to the bridge and back, just so I can say I did.*

The wedding band is tight on a swollen knuckle. When I close my fist around it I get a church basement and folding chairs, and a woman laughing with her whole shoulders. He was twenty-six. He had prayed about her, actually prayed, on his knees by a bed in a rented room, and she said yes before he finished asking.

My left leg keeps trying to bounce even while I run, a tick in the knee, a hunger. It is the leg that jittered under every truck dashboard, every pew and every waiting room. Four years of pressing a pack against his hip, a pack a day, and the lungs know it. They burn and rattle at mile four and they complain, and they don't stop. His calves ache. His back is tight where the belly pulls. His thighs are strong from the van, from lifting boxes up and down all day.

The earbud hums. A sermon, low, a man's voice calling the flock home. He has been listening to it for weeks and not hearing it. I know that the way I know the gravel. I know the glass of bourbon in the evening, one, then two, and the lid he keeps closed on whatever comes after. I know the savings account, forty thousand and change, which he checks at red lights like a pulse. I know a girl with her mother's shoulders asleep with her mouth open.

None of it is mine. It is only borrowed through the cloth and the metal and the cold, and it goes out of me as the path unrolls.

I slow. I hold my hands out in front of me in the pale light, the left one with its plain ring, soft and hairy at the knuckle. I turn them over. They are shaking a little, and they are warm.

"Okay," I say, and the voice is thick and unfamiliar in my throat. "Okay. Hello, Gary."

The watch buzzes again. Somewhere behind me a kind of weather is moving, the wanting, small as a pulse, and I can't tell how long this one has.