Raymond Dale Boudreaux

Somewhere in Seattle it is still dark enough that the kitchen light looks rude. You are standing in a janitor's body with a mop bucket's worth of sleep in it, and it is a good body, and that is the problem. Twenty-one. Knees that say nothing. Freckled forearms. A patchy beard you keep touching, because it is not yours and you cannot stop checking that it is there. He was yours for less than a minute and already you know everything he can do. You know all of it, and it is not enough. Mop, hallway, the slow hum of a building with nobody in it. Somebody ought to be able to do something with this much strength. You pay. You spin. The wheel clicks down like a tongue against teeth.

Heat. Wet heat, and the smell of steam off a street that has just been rained on. You are standing with one arm lifted, a club resting across your shoulder, and the other arm hanging heavy from a bucket of balls. The sun is on your face. Your weight is on one leg, wrongly, and your whole body corrects it before you do, a half-inch shift of the hips, a long habit.

Something in the motion has gone wrong, a half-beat out of time. You set it right slowly, on purpose. The ball is a small white thing on a rubber mat, and you place it. You check it. Then you do ten more, each one checked, which is nothing he would have done, because this is a thing he has done ten thousand times without ever looking.

The glove first. Tan leather, tacky with old sweat, shrunk to the shape of his left hand. Pulling at it, you get a flash, and it is not yours. A man of sixty, a green fairway at dawn, saying keep your head down, Raymond, and the shame of being fifteen and the pride on top of it. Then the bucket handle, plastic cutting a groove across the fingers, and he is counting balls for a lesson, a dentist from Metairie who will never break a hundred, and he likes him anyway.

The polo against your back is damp and light blue, and it gives you the morning in his hands. The closet door sticking. The wife, Annette, asleep with her arm over her eyes. Left sleeve, right sleeve, the buttons at the neck, the belt cinched one notch further than last year, his belly pushing over it, a fact he does not look at. He stands in the hall a second with the visor in his hand. Two kids' pictures on the wall. A girl at the bus stop, a boy who does not call enough. His jaw tightens, the way it does when he does not know he is thinking.

The ring. A plain band, warm, loose in the cold and tight in the heat. Touching it with your thumb brings another woman, years back, a porch in the Bywater, her laughing at him for being so careful with money, so careful with her. Old, mostly kind, not quite closed. Under that, the dip, a flat tin in the back pocket, the burn he promised to quit. And the money, which is a tight low hum under everything, rent and a roof and the shotgun house across the street, one room wide, every room opening into the next with nowhere to hide.

Your shoulder aches where the club sits. The lower back has an opinion. Fifty years of standing on concrete are in the arches of both feet, and the hands are broad, scarred in nothing, steady as a level.

You lower the club. You turn the right hand over. It is thick, freckled, gray hairs at the knuckle, the gold ring bright. You look up, past the net, at the street steaming in the sun.

"Well," you say, and the voice is gravel and slow, "look at that."

You wonder how long he lasts. Whether the wanting comes back by lunch, or tonight, or tomorrow, and whether you are still him then.