Mateo Garza Whitlow

I leave Daniel Okamura standing in his kitchen in Ohio with the dark house ticking around him. He has been mine for five minutes. His dimples are still tight in my cheeks from a smile I made at the window over the sink. The counter is cold under his big carpenter's palms. His knees ache from a fifty-hour week, and nobody here is awake to see me not wanting any of it.

He can't do what I need. The wheel gave me a man who builds things, and tonight I want someone who owes. I want a person in the hole with no way out, a kid who has already begun to lose. Wade Lundgren was my best friend for three minutes, on a night I spent sitting in his truck cab looking at his wife's name on his phone. I know Wade's hands. I know the Texas highway hum he keeps in his chest. Twenty-one minutes ago I left him, and I have not stopped hearing the one name he kept saying to himself in the dark. Mateo. His oldest friend, eighteen years old. Wade is thirty-eight, and still a boy to him. Wade prays for that boy. So I pay, I spin, and Daniel's kitchen is gone.

Dark. A mattress under my ribs, face-down. One arm hangs off the edge and the fingers brush floorboards. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the sheet like a blade. My breath is ragged, and then in one pull it goes even. The arm draws itself up. The body rolls onto its back, and the hands fold at the chest like a man laid out. He has never slept like this once in his life. I don't know it yet, but the body is telling me.

Then the room starts coming through what I touch.

The T-shirt, soft and gray and thin at the collar. Under my fingers it gives me a morning: he pulled it from the floor pile, sniffed it, and decided it would do. Left arm through first, because he is lazy and it was nearest. The cotton has gone thin at the hem from his thumb worrying it. He does that when he is anxious about money. Two children, the shirt says, suddenly, without warning. Two. At eighteen. Their small weight on this chest, a hot head under his chin, the smell of their hair. He does not live with them. A recent ex-girlfriend's name sits behind it, a door he keeps pushing shut and it keeps swinging open. I feel it in my sternum. I did not ask for this one.

The sweatpants, loose at the knee. The sheet under my palms, cheap and pilled. Debt comes up through the mattress like cold from a floor: tuition, a loan he signed with his father's name beside his, the number he recites before sleep like a rosary. He is skinny and soft in the belly, a body that has not been looked after. The belly rises under my folded hands. His jaw is smooth. He shaved tonight, for no one, because shaving is a thing he can still finish. I lift a hand to touch my own face, and that is his habit, not mine. Even the hand knows where it wants to go.

A Bible, I realize. Somewhere on that crate by the bed. His faith is evangelical, a plain stubborn thing. He prayed on his knees before sleep, and the floor remembers it in my kneecaps. He never drank. He asked God for a way to pay.

I open my eyes. Streetlight, jacaranda smell drifting in, the city humming low. I lift my hands and look at them. Slender, unmarked, long in the finger, a stranger's. I turn them over. They are shaking a little, or I am.

I look up.

"Okay," I say, in his voice, quietly. "Okay, Mateo."

How long does a boy like this last? Until the wanting comes back, and it always does. I wonder if I am still him by morning.