Gary Pruitt

The dock is dead quiet for eleven a.m., because the graveyard shift is the one nobody wants and you took it in a body that isn't yours, six minutes old, still learning its own knees. Colton Braswell is small and quick and twenty-eight and none of it fits right yet — the shoulders too narrow for the weight you're used to throwing, the black hair falling different into his eyes. You stood in his life for six minutes and already the boredom of him is a physical thing, a low hum under the ribs, because there is nothing here. A pallet jack. A loading light. A body that does what it's told and asks nothing back. You didn't spin again for a reason you'd say out loud to anyone. You spun again because six minutes was enough to know this one had no weather in it at all, and somewhere behind your sternum, even wearing his youth, even wearing his strength, you were already gone, already thumbing the site open on a phone that isn't yours either, already watching the wheel spin down through names.

It stops. There is no drumroll for you, no drop, no travel — one instant you are Colton's hands letting go of the jack handle, and the next you are these hands, mid-turn, wrist deep under a car with a socket wrench biting into a bolt that has been half-loosened maybe ten thousand times by this same motion. The wrench slips a quarter-inch wrong. You correct it, slow, deliberate, the way a man checks a step he's walked blind for years. Light through the open bay door lies flat and wet-looking on the street outside, steam coming up off asphalt that got rained on an hour before dawn — dawn that happened here while you were still in Texas eating a Tuesday's breakfast. Somewhere in this city it is the middle of the morning, the same middle of the morning, and this man has been under this car since two, because the owner needs it back before the lunch rush at the restaurant on the corner, and none of that is a fact yet — it is the smell of the shop, motor oil and wet concrete and the particular mustiness of the rag hanging out of the back pocket, and each smell is a hand reaching into you.

The rag first. It gives you a hundred wipe-downs, a thousand, his father's shop in Chalmette before the water took it, a boy of nine handed his first crescent wrench like a sacrament. Then the wrench itself, and it gives you the trade whole: the particular give of an old bolt right before it turns, the difference between a knock that means a bearing and a knock that means nothing, the pride of a man who is good with his hands and never needed to be more than that. The tattoo on your forearm burns up out of the ink itself when your sleeve brushes it — twenty-two years old, a shop in the Quarter, a girl he was trying to impress who is not the girl he married, and under that memory another: the wedding, an outdoor thing near the lake, a band on a finger that isn't there anymore, and the pale stripe of skin where it used to sit gives you the whole marriage in one cold flash — good years, then years that weren't, then a kitchen table and papers and her face doing the thing it did when she'd already decided. Three kids come with her, all at once, ages tangled — a girl's recital, a boy's first truck, somebody's graduation he sat through alone in the fourth row because that was the arrangement they'd worked out and he kept to it, because whatever else went wrong he never once made them choose.

The shirt against your back finishes it, sleeve by sleeve, the way he pulled it on this morning in the dark of the shotgun house, one room after another after another, his own footsteps the only sound, coffee already cooling because he drinks it fast and forgets it. Fifty-four years old and the body under the shirt tells you plainly what that costs and what it doesn't: a low ache low in the back that's been there a decade, shoulders still strong, forearms still strong, the leg you're standing on already wanting to bounce though there's nothing nervous in the day, just a motor that runs whether he's thinking about it or not. He dips a pinch before opening and doesn't much drink, goes to a church that doesn't ask him to believe anything he can't. None of that is a hardship carried around — it's just the shape of a life assembled quietly, alone, paid off, worth more than anyone looking at these boots would ever guess, and not lonely so much as used to it.

You bring your right hand up out from under the car, still holding the wrench, and turn it over in the flat wet light like you've never seen a hand hold a tool before.

"Well," you say, out loud, to the empty bay, "guess I know what I'm doing today."

And somewhere behind that — not a plan, not a date, just a shape waiting at the edge of things — is the wheel, still spinning if you let it, and no way yet to know if this one lasts the afternoon or the rest of your life.