Mateo Alvarado

You are still Elias Tsosie for a few more seconds, and he is tired in a way you did not expect. The route runs at dawn, and the truck's hydraulic arm has a shudder in it that you feel in the big forearm and the heavy shoulder. His knees are bad. You found that out on the first stair. Today a woman on Yucca Street waved from her porch as the truck passed, a woman he must have waved to for years, and you did not know her name or what he called her. You stood in his life like a man in a coat that doesn't fit. He is dark and slow and decent, and he is not wrong in any way. He is just finished. You wanted something quick, with young hands that know a trade, and you did not want to spend a whole day learning the shape of one more grief.

The page is open. The wheel turns. You press.

Then the cold is in your wrists, the kind a bay door lets in off a wet street. Your arms are over your head, and a torque wrench is in your right hand, ratchet already seated on a bolt. The cab is tilted above you, white and enormous. The motion is half done, and it goes wrong. Your wrist turns a hair early and the click comes in the wrong place. You stop. Slowly, correctly, you do it again. The wrench answers, and your jaw is clenched so hard your back teeth ache.

You check the next bolt. It is fine. You check the one after that, and it is fine too. Ten of them, and every one is right. Some part of you, or of him, does not believe it.

The red rag hangs from your hip pocket, and when it brushes your knuckles you get a flash. A dim kitchen, a woman's laugh, and her tossing him that rag from the sink, soft with a hundred washings. He felt warmth, and a small lazy pride at being someone's man. You don't know her name yet. The feeling comes anyway, and it is his.

The coverall is stiff at the collar and soft at the elbows. The zipper pull is cold against your throat, and it gives you the morning. He stood in the hallway, one arm in, then the other, while the radiator knocked. He thought about the rent. The sums come to you in his voice, small and stubborn and a little ashamed, and under them there is his private quiet: a stoop in the rain, sodium light turning the puddles orange, a hookah smoked twice a year with his cousins, laughing until his gap-toothed grin ached. He believes in something he never says out loud. When he is alone he feels watched by something kind.

The bay floor is wet under your boots. The leather has been cracked and re-greased until it knows his feet. You are five-five, light, and quick. After Elias, the body feels like a held breath, all spring and no weight. Your fringe is blunt against your forehead. Your tongue finds the gap in your teeth, and you recognise a habit in it that is not yours.

You lower the wrench and turn your right hand over. The calluses are hard ridges across the palm, black in every crease. They have done this ten thousand times without him. You look up, past the cab and the open door, to the gray street.

"Okay," you say, in a voice that is higher than the last one. "Let's see how long you last."