Hector Ybarra

Monday night, Honolulu, and the shop is closed around me. Pat Medeiros's hands are black to the second knuckle, and I am sitting on an upturned bucket with a carburetor in my lap I have no wish to fix. His knees complain when I shift. The unibrow itches. I have been him for less than a minute, and already I know the trouble: he is a man who is content. He hums over engines. He would be fine like this for thirty years. I am not built for fine. Somewhere in my pocket the phone has the page open, the wheel painted on it, and my thumb is already on it.

The wheel turns. I let it.

Dark. A mattress takes my whole weight, face-down, and my cheek is mashed into a pillow that smells of someone else's shampoo and my own sweat. My breath is ragged, then it is not. One arm hangs off the edge, and I feel the blood run down into the fingers. I draw it up. The body rolls onto its back by itself, and my hands fold on my chest, which is wrong. Somewhere inside this body knows that is wrong. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the blanket in a stripe.

Then the things come, because I am touching them.

The T-shirt, thin, washed soft, clings under my palms. A kitchen: a woman's laugh, and the shirt was a gift, two Christmases back, and he wore it to carry a crib up the stairs. The sheet under my shoulders. A wife, asleep, or not here; her side is cold, and he works the line at the plant, and she works days, and they pass each other in the hallway like shift change. The wedding band under my thumb is warm. A church parking lot, Sunday, his daughter's hand in his, a pastor gripping his shoulder, and a quiet pride, a little afraid of itself. Then the ex, an old girlfriend, a summer in a Chevy, and he keeps her the way you keep a stone in a pocket, never taking it out. The carpet under my heel when I swing a foot: it was new once, and he picked the color alone and was proud of it. Boots by the bed, laces still knotted, and my fingers twitch for a pen that is not there. They click it anyway, click, click, in the air. The ache in the lower back is twenty years of concrete. The lungs are tight with a pack a day, and I want a cigarette that is not mine. His forearms are strong, long arms, long legs hanging past the mattress's end. I am six-foot-four, and the room is small around me.

He put on a blue work shirt this morning, buttoned from the bottom up, the way he always does. He clipped the radio on last. He is a foreman. Men listen to him because he never raises his voice.

I lift my hand into the streetlight and turn it over. The ring catches the stripe.

I look up at the dark and say, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."