Gilberto Camacho

You leave Clarence Whitaker standing in a dark kitchen in Queens with a cold cup of coffee and his own good hands. He was sixty and easy to live in. His knees never complained and his shop was paid off in his head. You wore him for less than a minute. Something still sent you back to the page, and the reason is the sentence you wouldn't say out loud, so you don't. You pay and spin.

The wheel clicks. The kitchen goes out.

You are on your side in the dark, and a small blue light is six inches from your face. Your thumb has stopped on something. A mattress sags under a heavy hip. Your socks are damp at the heel. The room is still, a house asleep around you, and your thumb starts again, faster and steadier than it was, flicking past whatever he had stopped on.

Your free hand rises and touches your cheek. It goes by itself, to the mole high up under the eye, and the habit is his. The pad of your thumb finds the chinstrap, then the shaved skin above it.

Then the shirt gives you something. The cotton is worn thin and smells of smoke, and against your ribs it opens a morning. He is sitting on the edge of this bed in the gray before work. The yellow shirt is in his fists, stiff with dried clay, and he pulls it over his head and feels it settle on his shoulders. His wife's feet are warm under the blanket behind him. He is thinking about nothing but the cigarette. He ties the boots. He is tired in a way sleep does not reach, and it is not unhappy. It is only forty-three years of it.

The ring is on your left hand, thin and warm, and when you turn it with your thumb a kitchen comes up. A woman laughs with her back to him at a stove. Under it, older, there is another woman, one who got away. She is a bus window and a name he stopped saying, and the ache of her is worn smooth, like a stone he keeps in his pocket. He has never told his wife about her. The ring knows.

The tattoo itches. You press your thumb along the old faded lines and get the needle, a boy's nerve, a summer he wanted to be hard. Under that is the craving. Your lungs are heavy and your mouth wants a cigarette, a pack a day, yet no bottle at all. A bottle was a door he shut and bolted years ago, and your hands feel the strength it took.

The back of your neck is tugged by the bun, the hair pulled tight and dyed flat brown over the gray. Your knees ache from the trench. Your shoulders carry the shovel. This weight is solid and slow, and it has done honest work.

You lift your hand into the blue light and look at it. It is broad, and the knuckles are scarred by clay and cold. The ring sits on it. You turn it over, palm up, and close the fingers on nothing.

You raise your eyes and say, quietly, in a voice with gravel in it, "Okay, Gilberto. Show me."

Your thumb is still warm from the glass. You wonder how long you get this time.