Raymond Tso Yazzie

You are standing in a barn in the dark, in Daniel Park's body, and you have been standing there for some time. Four minutes, by the clock on the phone. Four minutes in him and already you know the trouble. His shoulders are good. His back is good. The house is asleep around you, and the only thing in the place that wants anything is you. You put your palm flat against a saw bench and wait for his carpenter's knowledge to tell you something, and it gives you the grain of the wood and nothing else. It is not enough. You want a stranger's weight to be heavy in a way you haven't felt yet. You open the page. The wheel is already turning under your thumb.

Then the hedge. Damp air, thick as a hand over your mouth. Sprinklers somewhere, and a streetlight buzzing orange at the end of the block. Your arm is bent at the elbow, holding a plastic grip, and a thin line runs from it down to a dog with its face buried in leaves. You stopped walking before you got here. Your knees are stiff. Your belly sits over your belt, soft in front and narrow everywhere else. The dog lifts its head and looks at you, ears flat.

The fleece first. You close your hand on the zipper pull, and the cold metal gives you him: a closet, a girlfriend's voice from the bed saying *take the blue one, it's chilly*, and the sleeves going on one arm at a time because his left shoulder catches when he reaches back. The gray shirt under it was his daughter's idea, a birthday gift, too soft for work, so he wears it for sleeping and for this. The pants are sweatpants gone shiny at the knee. He pulled them on in the dark so as not to wake anyone, standing on one foot, and the bed creaked, and he froze, the way a man does who has spent a lifetime being quiet at the start of someone else's day.

The grip is warm plastic, a worn thumb groove, the lock button clicking under your thumb. A field comes up through it: the mower stripes laid out pale and dark, the stands empty, the smell of cut grass at five in the morning, and a pride in the lines that he has never said aloud to anyone. Thirty years of it. The infield dragged smooth. A foreman who calls him *chief* as a joke. He lets it pass.

Your fingers are curled around the grip, and without being asked the knuckles want to crack. You let them. The pop runs up into the wrist and he lets go of something, a small private comfort, his mother's habit, which she scolded him for in a kitchen with the radio on.

Under the collar the skin of his neck is tight, and when you touch it a face rises behind your eyes. It is a portrait in black and gray, and it is his father, who is dead. He sat in a chair for six hours for it, and a church deacon later told him it was vanity, and he thought *no, it's a door*. He goes to the evangelical church anyway, in the back row, and sings the second verse low. The dog's leash hums against your palm. Two children, grown past needing to be walked anywhere. Beer on Fridays and never more than two. He has eleven thousand dollars to his name and he counts it sometimes, lying awake.

The dog is still looking at you. You wind the cord twice around your fist and it snaps taut. You take a step, and your body knows this stride and then does not, because you are in it.

You turn your free hand over under the streetlight. The ink on the back of it is a face, gray eyes under a hat brim, and it looks up at you from his skin. The knuckles ache. You are lighter than you were. You say, quietly, to nobody, "Okay, Ray. Come on," and the dog comes.

You don't know how long you get to keep him.