Randall Metzger

You are standing in a wrestling room that smells like rubber mats and old sweat, in a body eighteen years old, wiry, quick, a body that could still surprise you with what it could do without asking permission first — and you are so tired of it. Twenty hours and change of Devin Marsh: the ache in shoulders that heal too easily, the phone buzzing with texts from wrestlers half in love with a coach who isn't really there, the small apartment with nothing in the fridge because Devin never had to think about money. It was fun for about six hours. Then it was a body with limits — too young for anyone to take seriously, too small to fill a room, a life with nothing in the bank and nowhere interesting to go tonight. You want weight. You want a house that doesn't creak with somebody else's rent. You open vessel.cards on Devin's cracked phone screen, thumb hovering, already gone before you spin.

The wheel turns and stops on somewhere you've never been.

You are heavier all at once — the specific gravity of it, a gut and shoulders that have carried decades of dinners you didn't order but somebody put in front of you. A phone drops out of a shoulder cradle into a waiting hand, warm from being pressed against a jaw for ten minutes of hold music. A pen is stalled on the second digit of a number written in blue ink on the back of an envelope. Outside a window you have not yet looked at, the sky has gone the color of a bruise, yellow light pooling under a black wall of cloud stacking up over stubble fields cut flat to the horizon. It is not evening where you left. It is not evening the same way here — the light says storm, says the day folding early under weather, and something in this man's body registers it low in the gut like a held breath, an old habit of watching the sky that isn't yours yet but is about to be.

The phone is warm. That's the first thing that comes through — heat holds memory better than most people think — and with it, a woman's voice from an insurance company, three minutes of automated apology, and underneath it, irritation so old and so specific it has its own groove: Randall Metzger has been on hold with this company eleven times this year over a hail claim on the pole barn roof, and every time the recorded voice tells him his call is important. His thumb finds the home button without thinking, muscle memory forty years deep, because before insurance claims there was cold-calling, there was a whole life of phones — a landline in a farmhouse kitchen, then a flip phone in a rental car parked outside a Holiday Inn Express in Salina, then this, a smartphone he still holds like it might bite him.

The flannel shirt gives you the morning. He remembers pulling it off a hook by the back door before six, the flannel gone soft at the elbows from ten years of wear, a shirt he keeps because it doesn't matter if feed dust gets on it and because his ex-wife — no, there is no ex-wife, there was never a wedding, only a long stretch with a woman named Carol who left for Wichita nine years ago and whom he does not miss so much as he misses being missed — bought him three just like it one Christmas and he wore them until they were rags and then bought his own. The sleeves go on heavy-armed, elbow first, the way he's dressed since his shoulder started catching — an old injury, a roof fall off a grain bin ladder in his thirties, never set right, and every morning there's a half-second where lifting the arm above shoulder height sends a hot wire down into the joint before it eases. He rolls the shoulder now, standing in the kitchen, and feels that same wire, dulled by decades into something almost like company.

The gum is already going in his cheek, has been going for the last ten minutes without him noticing, a habit that outlived the drinking he tells his pastor he's cut back on and has not; there's a fifth of Crown in the cabinet over the fridge, and there was another one last night, and there will likely be one tonight after this call, because a man alone in a house this size at the end of cut season has to fill the hours with something and Randall Metzger fills them the way he was raised not to but does anyway, quietly, and prays about it on Sundays, and means the prayer, and does it again. The mole on his cheek — his hand finds it without thinking, a tic thirty years old, checking it's still just a mole and not what the dermatologist in Dodge City warned him about twice now, though he hasn't gone back for the third look he was supposed to get.

He is worth more money than anyone in three counties would guess, looking at him in this kitchen with the linoleum peeling by the sink — commissions stacked up over thirty years selling irrigation systems and grain equipment across four states, a man who flies out of Wichita in a rumpled linen suit to trade-show hotel lobbies and closes deals over rental car coffee, badge on a lanyard, handshake first, mole high on his cheek the thing people remember about him in follow-up emails. He likes the road less than he used to. He likes coming home to this kitchen, this counter, this stack of mail he hasn't opened since Monday, less than he used to also, but there isn't another version of the life on offer, not at fifty-eight, not single, not with a hail claim to settle before the adjuster calls back.

The hold music loops. You feel it loop — the same eight bars starting over, a joke this whole system is playing on a man who is not laughing, and his shoulder, out of habit deeper than thought, drops the phone off its perch into the waiting hand exactly on the beat it always does. The pen is still on the envelope. Second digit of the reference number. It does not move again.

You look down at the hand holding the phone — thick fingers, a plain wedding band that isn't a wedding band, just a ring he wears because his father wore one, gum working slow in the jaw, weight settling into legs that have carried it a long time and know how — and you turn the hand over once like you're checking it's real, and out the window the thunderhead has gone the black of a slammed door, and you say, to no one, to the phone, to the storm coming over the wheat stubble:

"Well, hell. Here we go again."