Rafael Montoya Quiñones

The farmhand's back is a long ache and I am sitting in it. I am Wade Thibodeaux for less than a minute and already I know what he is worth. Under the gold tooth his jaw is wired with the habit of clenching. The sun on the porch boards is the sun of a morning that has not yet decided to be hot. Nothing is wrong with him. His shoulders carry. His beard smells of coffee and diesel. I have no complaint I could say aloud, and that is what I do not like. I opened the page the way you reach for a pocket you have already emptied. Here is a body that works, and it was not enough. Some small thing was missing from the middle of me, and I could not have named it if the porch had asked.

The wheel turns. The gold tooth goes with the rest of him.

The probe is in my right hand and the board is under my left, clamped, and the rhythm breaks. My thumb lands a hair off the pad. I lift it and set it down slowly, correctly. Then ten more, each one checked, on a job that has not needed checking in years. The oscilloscope throws a green square wave across my face. A strap is cinched on my wrist. The window is full of white clapboard and overcast.

His shirt comes first, because it is against my back. Navy cotton, soft from washing. This morning: he stands in a bedroom with the blinds half down, doing the buttons from the bottom up, the way he always does, because his mother did it that way for a church photograph in some year of small shoes. His wife is asleep or pretending. He does the left cuff, then the right, and the tattoo shows below the sleeve, a small bad thing he got at nineteen. He feels the old embarrassment, the lightness of it, almost fondness. He pulls the sleeve down to cover it and it creeps back up. He lets it.

The trousers are green and heavy at the knee. He chose them over the gray pair without thinking, and a flash arrives with them: a kitchen, a woman's voice saying his name the Spanish way, and under it a second voice he has not heard in years, the ex-wife, laughing in a doorway. He does not miss her. He is glad she is somewhere. It is a warm, closed feeling, like a door left unlocked in a house nobody lives in.

The wedding band is cool on my finger. I turn it and a night opens: a parking lot, a folded paper cup, his hand shaking around a coffee and no drink in it, six weeks sober and proud of it in a way he told no one. His leg bounces. It has been bouncing the whole time, a pulse in the heel of the boot, and I let it, because stopping it would be stranger than not.

The bench edge presses my hip. The solder smell is sweet and burnt. His knees know the stool. His hands know the board before I do, and this is the part I will never get used to: the knowledge is not mine and it moves anyway, patient and exact.

I lift my left hand off the board and look at it. Brown, square, the ring, a pale nick across one knuckle I will never be told about. I turn it over. Then I look up, into the window and the gray light, and say it quietly, to nobody and to the glass:

"Okay, Rafael. Show me."

Somewhere behind my ribs the wanting is already a small sound, a page waiting. An hour from now, or four minutes. I don't know how long he is mine.