Levi Hartsock

You are standing in a kitchen in Detroit, in the dark before the day, and your thumb is on the crooked tooth of Owen Kratzer's front lip. Two minutes in him. The stove is cold. The lazy eye drifts toward the window and you let it. Nothing is wrong with him. He's fine, narrow, quick-handed, and there is a burn along his forearm he must have earned at some grill you will never stand at. That's the trouble. He works. You paid, you got him, and by the second minute you knew you would have done this with anyone: the wanting came back as if it had never left. You press the screen. The wheel goes.

Then: weight. A crate on your forearms, split-pine edge biting through a sleeve, cold air hard in the nose, the smell of beet greens and turned dirt. Your leg is bouncing, the left, and you did not tell it to. The ground is uneven under both boots. Somewhere behind you a single yellow bulb burns by a trailer, and the rest of the world is black and asleep.

The hat first. Straw, frayed at the brim, and when your chin dips it scrapes his forehead, and with it comes a flash that is his, not yours: a feed store counter, the hat bought because the old one blew into a ditch, and the pride of paying cash. Nineteen. Seven dollars, folded small.

The shirt rubs your shoulders as you shift the crate. Gray cotton gone soft. His hands remember the morning he put it on, which was this afternoon, in the trailer, before sleep failed him: left cuff, button, right cuff, button, the third button always catching on the thread, the bandana knotted last because his grandmother's icon on the shelf made him feel watched if he went out sloppy. He crossed himself first. Quick, right to left. You feel the habit move in your fingers and almost do it.

The pants are stiff at the knee with dried mud. The crate bites. Your back is long and young and doesn't complain, a six-foot frame tuned to bending, only the hamstrings tight, only the wrists a little hot. Under your beard, a grin you didn't make: he sang to himself in this row an hour ago, a hymn in a language he barely has. Slavonic, learned by rote at his grandmother's church. His mother's mother. Memory comes through the crate handle, a smell of incense, candle wax, her hand pressing his head down.

A silver hoop pulls cold in your left ear. Flash: a boy at a mall kiosk, sixteen, his cousin holding his shoulders, the needle, the laugh, the hoop he never took out. No ex, no one waiting. Only the trailer, the rent, the foreman who pays in cash, the fear in his stomach about the winter. Money counted in a coffee can. Never a drink; he watched a man go down that road, and the memory comes with a sour smell and a closed door.

Every motion in your arms is ten thousand repetitions deep. You set the crate down on the stack and the motion is almost right, then wrong, and you do it again slowly, carefully, and it comes out right.

You look at your hands. Wide palms, split calluses, soil in the creases, dirt under nails he scrubbed at this afternoon and lost. They shake once, then stop. You turn them over in the weak light. Yours.

You lift your eyes to the dark, the sagebrush, the little lit window of the trailer.

"Well," you say, and his voice is lower than you expected, "hello, Levi."

The leg is still bouncing. Somewhere past the hunger you already feel it, faint as a hand on a doorknob: how long, this time, before you want to go.