Odell Raymond Tubbs

You are standing in Dean Ostrander's kitchen in El Paso, and the coffee has gone cold in his big square hand. He is thirty-six and built like a door. One minute old, and already you know what's wrong with him. Everything in him is easy. The shoulders ask for nothing. You are bored by a body that never argues, and under the boredom is the other thing, the one you won't say: sixteen days ago you stood in a freckled man's house in New York and left it, and you have not stopped hearing the screen door. Doug Fennimore's hands were small and precise. You wanted to know what it would be to be the one who was wanted by him, not the one who left. Wanting something is not a reason. You put the cup down. You spin.

Heat, all at once, and white sky. Gravel under your shoes. A box is in your hands, corner against your palm, and your arms are mid-lift, loading, the body already halfway through a motion you did not start. Your hand misses the shelf by an inch. The box tips. You catch it, and put it right, slowly, the way a man does who has never once had to think about it.

The shirt is first. Brown cotton stuck to the small of your back, and it hands you the morning: a thumb pushing each button through, bottom to top, because the top one sticks. A woman's voice from the other room asking if he ate. He says yes and means no. Then the belt, the scanner clipped to it, heavy as a pistol, and under your thumb the worn edge of its case brings a night in a truck cab with a lit cigarette he has not touched in eleven years, and the clean shame of throwing the pack in a ditch off this same road.

Gravel shifts under the soles. Your knees speak, left worse than right, a dull hinge of sixty-three years. The belly rides over the belt, warm, solid, a thing he stopped apologizing for. The ink on the forearms pulls when you grip the box: an anchor gone soft blue, a swallow, a name too faded to read. The swallow was Navy-town bad judgment at nineteen. The anchor was for his father.

The cardboard is rough. Three children. A boy's graduation, a girl on the phone crying from Houston, the youngest asleep in the truck bed once, years ago, on a run. The ex-wife's laugh, kind now, tired. The woman at home who leaves his plate covered. He does not drink. He remembers why, and it is not a story he tells.

You check the next box. And the next. Ten of them, each turned over, each label read. Out past the barbed wire the water tower stands in the haze and you feel him, faintly, everywhere, like a coat you cannot take off.

You lift your hand and turn it over. The palm is wide and creased, the knuckles thick. It is not yours. You look up.

"Well," you say, low, "hello, Odell."

The wind moves the dry grass. You wonder how long this one holds, and whether you will be him when the sun goes down.