Rafael Gutierrez

The lawyer's body is in a kitchen in Los Angeles, before the light, holding a glass of water it hasn't drunk. Twenty-five and freckled, with an athlete's easy knees. For four minutes I have been him. The water tastes of nothing. The phone on the counter shows a docket for nine o'clock, and a man I have never met owes me nothing and everything. I do not feel the want come. I feel the glass go down on the granite, and my thumb is already on the page with the wheel.

Then rain.

It is on my face before I know I have a face. Steady, cold, straight down, and my hood is off my head and the water runs over the bare scalp, into the beard, under the collar. The bus shelter is behind me. I have stepped one pace out into the runoff and my sandals are under an inch of moving water. Above the shelter's edge a sign glows 3 MIN. My chin is lifted. My mouth is a little open and the rain is in it.

The wool starts first. A heavy black habit, soaked at the shoulders and heavier every second, clinging at the chest. Under my right fingers, the belt: stiff old leather, the buckle worn smooth where a thumb has worried it. And his thumb is on it now.

*Dawn, a cold room, the belt cinched one hole tighter than last year. The habit came over his head first, rough linen, smelling of the line behind the kitchen, the left sleeve still damp at the seam. He had slept badly. His knee told him so on the stairs. He tied the cord, pulled the hood straight, and said the first Hail Mary before his sandals were buckled, because if he waited he would not.*

The rosary hangs at my hip, and the beads knock against my leg when I breathe. I close my hand on them. Wood, smooth as river stones. The crucifix is cold.

*The garden. Late afternoon, August, the stone wall giving back the day's heat. His knees in the dirt between the tomato rows, the hoe handle gone silky from thirty years of palms. Brother Anselm was laughing at the squash. Nobody had ever called him anything but Rafa there. He had not been cold in years, he thinks, and not warm either. Just a long middle.*

My feet, in the water. The straps cut a little across the instep, and the pavement's grit rolls under the arch. Bad left knee, bad lower back, forty years of bending. And strength all through the shoulders and forearms, a man who lifts sacks of compost without thinking. I breathe, and the chest is broad and slow, and my heartbeat is as steady as a hand on a door.

*Dallas, a long time ago. A woman named Marisol on a porch, laughing, a screen door slapping. He had loved her for six years and let her go because he thought God was asking, and he has never been sure. He still sees the porch light when he closes his eyes. Nobody at the monastery knows her name.*

That one hurts, and it is his, not mine. I let it go through me.

The bus is coming. I hear it before I see it, tires hissing, a low gray shape at the end of the street. I don't move. The rain keeps coming down, and I stand in it like a man who has not been cold in a long time.

I lift my hands out in front of me. Brown, square, scarred by work and weather, the knuckles thick, the calluses at the base of the fingers. I turn them over. The palms fill with rain.

I look up, and I say, quietly, "So this is the weight of one."

The headlights swing across the wet street. I don't know how long he lasts. I don't know if I am still him by the time the doors open.