Harlan Wade Prewitt

You are standing in a feed store's back lot with Raymond Dale Kimbrough's broken nose in the middle of your face, and the dishwasher's hands are pink and wrinkled from two minutes of nothing, and already you are bored of him. That is not the reason. The reason is smaller. Two minutes ago you reached for a coffee cup on a high shelf and the shoulder said no, a hot wire down to the elbow, and you stood there holding your own wrist and understood that skinny-fat at fifty-five is a promise of this every day. Also his moustache itches. Also the light, that long orange Monday light over the Texas flatland, makes you think of a beekeeper in Chicago whose hands you wore for five minutes, and what you did with them, and a man in Dallas you have wanted to stand inside ever since. You do not say that part to yourself. You open the page. The wheel turns. Raymond goes out like a pilot light.

Concrete under you, rising. One foot on a step, the other behind, the weight of you leaning forward into a climb. Paper in your left hand, a leather handle in your right, the handle warm and cracked. Your breath comes short and a little wet. You are low to the ground, you notice, the whole world pitched at a different angle, and heavy through the middle in a way that feels like ballast.

The paper first. Your thumb is pinching its edge and the edge says: a motion to continue, a client named in the first line, forty-one minutes of a morning spent on a paragraph. Harlan, it says, in a voice you did not hear but feel, Harlan, you always read walking, you will fall one day. You have not fallen in twenty-six years.

The briefcase handle. It is brown, split at the stitching, and under your fingers it gives you his father's, no, not his father's, a pawnshop in Garland, a Saturday, a hundred and ten dollars, the first thing he bought after he passed the bar at twenty-five. He has carried it up these steps so many times the leather has taken the shape of his fist.

Your cheek, your jaw: the short beard, and under your lip a packed warmth, a pinch of dip you did not put there, mint and tobacco, a flat sting. Memory slides in on it: a pickup cab, a spit cup, his dad's way of doing it, a lake, a Fourth of July, a burn of cheap whiskey, one of the big nights, the twice-a-month ones, when he sings badly in a driveway and the neighbors forgive him.

The shirt against your back, the white undershirt, then the vest. Now the morning arrives sleeve by sleeve. He stands at the bed in the gray before the light. Undershirt over his head, snagging on the beard, tugged down over the belly he has stopped being angry at. Trousers, the left leg first, always. The shirt's absent, he likes the vest close, so the vest goes on, and he does the buttons from the bottom, five of them, fingers knowing the holes without his eyes. The jacket, shrugged up over the shoulders, the sleeves a hair long at 5'4", and he has never fixed it, it is the one vanity he lets go. The watch last, steel, cool on the wrist bone. He looks at his dyed hair in the mirror, flat dark brown, gray rising at the temples like water in a footprint. He sighs at it. He leaves it.

Your knee reports. The right one, the climbing one, a dull grind each step. Your lungs are working. Your arches ache. Strong, though: the thighs lift you without being asked, the grip on the case does not let go, and the left hand turns a page by itself, flicking it flat with one finger, ten thousand times practiced.

The truck behind you in the drive, in the memory not the street: the Ford, paid off in March. The house with no one in it. The kitchen light he leaves on so it will not look empty. Nobody to call. He has fifty thousand or so saved and nothing in particular to spend it on, and some nights he stands on the back patio and feels, vaguely, that something larger is paying attention, and does not call it God. And Marcus Adebayo, a name that comes up out of the courthouse stone: a rival, a man across a table, a hive of a man, careful, stubborn. You know the hands that man has. You have had both of them.

You stop on the step. You look down.

Your hand, freckled over the knuckles, the paper trembling a little in it. You turn it over. Palm, the creased heavy pad of it, a pen callus on the middle finger. Yours. For now.

You lift your eyes and say, quietly, "Let's see how long you last."

The sun is in your face, and somewhere in you the wanting is only asleep.