Lyle Danforth

You are standing in a kitchen in Western Kansas, in the middle of the night, in a plumber's body that is twenty-one and heavy and warm, and you have been him for less than a minute. You are drinking water from the tap, cupped in his palm, and the house is asleep around you. His mother's radio-clock glows green down the hall. His goatee is wet. His knees don't hurt. He can lift a water heater without thinking about it.

It is not his fault. He works fine. But you stand at the sink and feel how small the kitchen is, how the whole county is a flat dark plate, and you think of the wheel the way you'd think of a cigarette you've quit. The page is open on the phone by the toaster. You have paid already. The spin turns while you are still swallowing.

The car drifts a foot toward the line and you are in it.

Ten and two. Dash glow on knuckles that are not the ones you had a second ago. The highway is black and the seat holds a long frame, 6'3", and your first move is a correction: one smooth pull, the car coming straight. Both hands come off the wheel and settle lower and wider, because these arms want it that way. Your thumb finds the signal stalk and the click begins for an exit that is not his.

Then the shirt. Flannel, soft at the cuffs, against your back and the crook of the elbows. He put it on this morning in a house on posts, the floor giving under his bare feet, a tin roof ticking as it warmed. A wife's voice from the other room asking if he had eaten. He buttoned the cuffs left to right, the ring catching on a thread, and he thought about nothing at all. The jeans come next, stiff with dirt, and the memory in them is a couch stood on end at the curb in white glare, red dust on his boots, a strap across his shoulder, the dull pleasure of a heavy thing balanced exactly right. Forty-four years of carrying other people's lives up other people's stairs. His lower back keeps a ledger of every one. His shoulders are strong anyway.

The steering wheel gives you more. The rubber is worn smooth where his palms go. Two children in the back seat once, years ago, one asleep with a mouth open, and a rush of tenderness so plain it is almost embarrassing to be handed. A woman before the wife, shouting in a driveway, and a smaller shame under it that he never told anyone. The keys swing against the column, and in them a pen-click habit: your right thumb is already working an invisible pen, click, click, while he worries about money he does not have. Under five thousand dollars to his name. A church pew, hard and varnished, his daughter's shoes swinging. The beard against your collar smells of smoke and vape sweetener. Some nights he drinks one beer too slow. The scar in his eyebrow itches where a pallet corner opened it when he was nineteen.

Three miles from home, and it is nothing to you, a road you never knew.

You lift your right hand off the wheel and turn it over under the dash light. Black tribal ink wraps the forearm. The band on the finger is thin and warm. You look up into the dark glass and the face there is a stranger's, bearded, kind around the eyes, tired.

"All right," you say, in his low voice. "Let's see how long you last."

Somewhere the wheel is already waiting, and you do not know whether this man is yours for years or for the length of this exit ramp.