Leon Dupré Cardinal

You have been Jonathan Pruitt Keane for two minutes, and already the beard itches. Thirty-one years old, six feet of muscle, a store manager's keys on the dresser, and the house in Philadelphia so quiet you can hear the refrigerator thinking. You stand in his kitchen in the middle of the night with his big clean hands flat on the counter, and the thing that sent you back is simple. You tried to lift the gallon of milk the way a tired man does, one-handed, and it was nothing. It weighed nothing. He could do anything, and still you wanted the page with the wheel on it, because nothing in him was hard. You pay. You spin. You do not look at the nose that was once broken, the face you are leaving in the dark window.

Then the floor is carpet, and you are on your knees.

Your breath is in the middle of a laugh and stops there. The knees take it first, both of them, a dull hot ache as you come back down. Forehead to the bedspread, cotton rough against the skin. A lamp burns somewhere to your right. Digital red numbers sit on a nightstand beside a glass of water. The air is wet and warm, thick with river and old rain, and your own heartbeat is slow and heavy in a chest with more weight in it than the last one.

The t-shirt is the first thing that opens. Soft, washed gray, and as you pull it from your belly with a thumb, a morning comes up in his feeling: a hallway, a kitchen, a wife's voice calling that the coffee is gone. He pulled it over his head thinking about a compressor in the back room of a store, a walk-in cooler that fogs when the door swings. His arms went through the sleeves in the dark, left then right, the way they have for years.

The ring is next. Your thumb finds it, turns it, and a woman's laugh comes through, close, in a narrow house where the rooms follow one another like train cars. Two children, grown loud and gone quiet. A girl who once lived in another city and still sits somewhere in him like a stone in a shoe, never mentioned. He thinks of her when he drinks. The cigarette is for those nights, and for the bottle that stands in a cabinet and is lighter than it should be.

Your right leg is bouncing. You did not tell it to. It bounces against the carpet, restless, and a hundred waiting rooms and church pews come with it, a lifetime of a leg that cannot sit still before God or anyone.

The bedspread smells of detergent and faintly of smoke. Under it he prayed badly. Under it he laughed, because the prayer was a list and he was bored by his own list, and the amen came early. His face is wide in the cheeks, and when you let your mouth move the dimples cut in deep without being asked.

Your hands are on the bed. The knuckles are thick, scarred by cold metal and cold pipe, and they know the weight of a set of gauges and how to bleed a line. You lift your head. The room is yellow and brown and ordinary and smaller than the one you left.

You turn your right hand over. The wedding band catches the lamp. Palm, creases, the heel hard as leather. You look into the room with his brown eyes and say, low, "Well. Hello, Leon."

Somewhere under it the wheel is already turning, the question quiet as the clock: how long, and when will you want again.