Marcus Whitfield

The bus is parked at the turnaround and Luis Medeiros's knees ache. They have ached for fifty-seven years, and I have had them for less than a minute. I sit with his thick hands on the big flat wheel, the heater ticking, a gray Tuesday afternoon pressed against the windshield. A gull is working a french fry in the lot. He had a whole route in his body, forty-one stops, and I knew none of it. My thumb found a worn patch on the wheel anyway, and something in his chest went soft and sad for a dog I never met. That was the trouble. It was too much of someone else's grief, and none of it was mine. I wanted a body that arrived clean. I wanted to feel the first second of it again, so I open the site. A wheel, and my thumb on it.

It turns. The gull, the heater, the gray all go.

Heavy air. A dark road, and the dash glow lying on my knuckles. Both hands are at ten and two, and the car is drifting a foot toward the line. I pull it back in one smooth motion, and my body knows how. My shoulders are wide and my back is long against a seat that was never set for me. I let go of the wheel and take it again lower and wider, and I reach out and flick the signal. It ticks for an exit that isn't his. The highway hums up through the soles of his boots.

The shirt comes first. Green, soft, washed a hundred times, the cuffs rolled twice. Against my back it gives me this morning. His fingers on the buttons, bottom to top, because he always starts at the bottom. A woman's voice from the next room says he's going to be late, and he answers, "I'm always late and I'm always fine." Three kids are arguing over cereal somewhere beneath the voice. He is smiling as he rolls the sleeves, and the smile is a real one, so I feel it on his face now.

The wheel's leather is cracked under my right palm. Pressure, a bench, a machine half-built under hard white light. He loves the small click when a tolerance holds. He had a caliper in his hand all afternoon, and my fingers still curl around the shape of it.

On my forearm the eagle sits under the sleeve, and I feel it more than I see it. Nineteen, a shop with a buzzing needle, and a fear of getting it wrong that turned into pride. Under that sits another woman, an older story, the one who got away. He still drives past her street sometimes without meaning to. The ache of it sits low and quiet, like a stone he is used to.

Forty-four years show in his lower back and in the heat inside his jeans. The seatbelt crosses his chest and the cuff sits tight at his wrist. His jaw is smooth, freshly shaved, and the air from the vent cools it. My cheek tingles high up, where the mole is. Everything in him is steady, and I have never felt a body this calm.

The signal keeps ticking. I look down at my hands in the green dashboard light and turn them over. The ink on the forearm is faded and bold. Then I lift my eyes to the dark windshield, where a stranger is looking back.

"Well," I say, in a voice that is deeper than I expected. "Hello, Marcus."

I don't know how long I'll have him. The exit sign comes up pale in the headlights, and I take it.