Osvaldo Reyes

Dallin Redcloud's hands smell like alfalfa and diesel and it has been less than a minute since they became yours, and already you hate them a little — the gap in his front teeth catching his tongue, the ache low in a twenty-four-year-old back that should not ache yet but does, because whoever had him before you ran him hard and never once stretched him out. You stood in the equipment shed holding a bent fence tool you don't remember picking up, and the wanting came on you the way it always does now, not boredom exactly, more like an itch under skin that isn't skin — you have been him for less than a minute and you can already feel the whole rest of his life laid out flat and small: hay, fences, a bunkhouse, three more decades of Nevada wind. Six hundred and eleven men ago you might have stayed and found out what farmhand feels like all the way through. Not today. You set the tool down on the bench, careful, the way you are careful with things that were never yours, and you go back to the page with the wheel on it, the one that is always open somewhere behind your eyes now, and you spin.

The kneeling goes first — the knees hit the mattress edge from underneath before you understand they are knees, heavy ones, and the amen is already half out of a mouth that is not shaped like any mouth you've wanted before, thick through the jaw, freckled you'll learn in a second when you can see it, and the man's whole body is rising, was rising, is caught rising — weight coming up off bent knees and then simply refusing, folding back down onto the bedspread like a building deciding against being finished. Forehead meets the quilt. Somewhere under you a clock reads a time that does not belong to the light coming through the window, and the light is all wrong for eleven in the morning until you remember it isn't wrong at all, it is exactly what eleven in the morning looks like here, hard and white and coming off water somewhere close.

The t-shirt is the first thing that talks to you. Cotton, soft from washing, and it gives you a Tuesday — him pulling it over his head in a laundry room smelling of fabric softener, Marisol's voice from the kitchen asking has he seen her reading glasses, and the shirt remembers being folded by her hands before it remembers being worn by his. Then the bedspread under your — his — forehead gives you more: forty years of Sundays, a church with a bell that sticks on the upswing, his mother's rosary looping through fingers thicker than these ones are now, a boy in Rockdale with freckles the other kids made fun of until he grew big enough that nobody did anymore. The wedding band on the left hand is warm from his own skin and it opens wide — a beach at Manly the year he turned thirty, Marisol laughing with her shoes in her hand, and then, folded right alongside it the way these things always come folded together, another woman entirely: Teresa, years earlier, a name he has not let himself think in daylight in a long while, the one who got on a plane to Auckland and did not come back and who he still, God forgive him, sometimes finds behind his eyes when the coffee's too quiet on the porch. Three children arrive in flashes too fast to hold — a christening gown, a graduation gown, a phone call from Perth that made him cry in the garage where nobody could see.

His body under you is heavy in a way that isn't unhealthy so much as settled, sixty-two years of good meals and no cigarettes and a knee that clicks when the weather turns; the smooth jaw tells you he shaved not an hour ago, unhurried, humming something without knowing he was humming it. The undershirt against your back gives you the whole routine of getting dressed this very morning — sitting on this bed's edge, sock by sock, the good knee first, a habit thirty years old — though you are still in the t-shirt and the sweatpants, still on the near side of dressing, and somewhere in him is mild surprise that he never made it past the amen today, that his prayers, which are never very serious, which are more like checking in with someone he assumes is patient with him, got interrupted by nothing he can name. He does not know it was interrupted by you. He will never know that.

His hands are open in your lap where they fell, and you turn them over — thick fingers, a plain gold band catching the window light, a groove worn into the right one where a pen sits when he isn't thinking about it, decades of clicking it open and shut in meetings he can't fully remember and doesn't need to anymore. You lift them, look at the freckles scattered across skin that has weathered a whole life you did not live, and you say, to the empty room, to the clock, to nobody: "Amen." And you almost laugh, because it comes out sounding like you mean it.