Gordon Haskell

Maurice Whitlock's body is sitting in a kitchen chair in Denver, and I am leaving it with the coffee still warm. Nothing is wrong with him. He has a good chair, a good job, a laptop with forty tabs of other people's bugs. That is the trouble. Fifty-four years of him fit like a coat bought for someone with a plan. This morning I sat there with his thumb on the trackpad, and the whole day was already written in him. I could feel the next thirty years, flat and fed. So I paid, and the wheel turned its bright colors, and I did not say goodbye to him, because he is mine and I am not sorry.

Now there is a window full of mountains, and a handle in my right hand.

My weight is wrong. It is lighter, all in the long bones, and I stand on the balls of my feet. A lathe ticks as it idles beside me. Cold light comes through glass. Steel chips lie curled around my boots like shed springs. My hand has already done something wrong with the tool, a half-turn too far, and then does it again slowly and right, as though it were embarrassed. The air smells of cutting oil, hot metal and old coffee.

The coat touches me first, and the coat remembers. Cotton gone soft as skin, heavy in the pockets. This morning he stood in a bungalow bedroom in the dark before the sun, and a woman's arm lay over the blanket, and he did not wake her. He took the coat off a nail by the door. Left sleeve, then right. He shrugged the collar up against his neck, against the burn there, which pulls when he turns his head. That scar is old. He was twenty-six and a coolant line let go. He remembers the sound before he remembers the heat. Every working day since, his hand goes to his collar before it goes to a tool.

I flex the fingers. Calluses ridge the pads like fine files. The knuckles ache, the dull weather ache of fifty-seven years, and behind it is strength, a pinch that could hold a thousandth of an inch. In the pocket my fingers find a steel rule. It gives me his daughter at nine, standing on a stool in a different shop, reading the marks aloud. "That's sixty-fourths," she said, proud, and he loved her so hard it almost embarrassed him.

Under my boots the concrete is cold through the soles, and it gives me the long Tuesday of the divorce. He sat in the truck outside the house he still paid for, and the engine ran, and he did not go in. The first son is grown now. The second one still calls. His girlfriend leaves coffee in a thermos by the door, and he drinks one whiskey at night on the porch, then sometimes a second, watching the light go off the peaks. He sits there as a Buddhist, badly and faithfully. He breathes in, breathes out, and counts to ten before he lets any anger have a word.

Why did he check each motion just now? I find the answer in his chest, a small cold stone. Last month a part went out wrong. Nobody was hurt, but he saw how easily it could have been otherwise. Today he has been checking everything, ten times over, and I have stepped into the middle of his fear.

I lift the handle. It is warm from his palm. I turn my hand over in the window light, thin and veined and scarred only by work, and look up at the mountains.

"Well," I say, in a voice rough as gravel. "Hello, Gordon."

It's so quiet that I can hear the chips settle. How long will he last? Until I want again. I can feel that want already, a small bright thing asleep under his ribs, and I do not know how long it will stay asleep.