Raymond Villarreal

You are leaving Darnell Okafor-Reed, and the leaving is easy because he never fit. The steering wheel of the van is still warm in your memory, though you are standing at a loading dock with a clipboard in your hand. Boston is bright and cold. A man has just asked you to sign for forty boxes, and your hand is not good at his signature. It has been less than a minute, and already you hate the beard. You hate how the beauty mark sits under your eye like a thing someone will remember. He was a good body that did what it was told. But a man at a dock tells you what he is by how he stands, and you were bored standing. You set the clipboard on a pallet and let the page open behind your eyes.

The wheel turns. You pay, you spin, and the dock goes out like a light.

Plastic under you. A strip light hums over your head. The board above the door clicks, 48, and the knee you didn't know was bouncing stops with it. Your hand puts a paper cup of water down square on the seat beside you. The water has gone warm. Your hands fold themselves, and they are already shaking, a fine steady tremor you did not order. Someone says a name across the room. You do not look up. It is not yet your name.

Then the denim under your palms. It is stiff at the thigh, worn soft at the knee, and the knee remembers things. A kitchen. A woman's voice says, "Ray, the other shirt," and he holds the flannel up against the window and chooses it anyway, because it is the one that doesn't need a belt. He puts the left arm in first, the way he always does, and the cuff catches on the ring. The ring is a plain band, and his thumb turns it without being asked. Twenty-eight years of turning it. Under it is a feeling like a held breath: he is afraid of whatever is behind that door.

The flannel is heavy on the shoulders, and the shirt beneath it is damp at the small of the back. The chair pushes up into a spine that has stood at a gate for thirty years. A corridor of cinderblock painted the color of weak tea. The weight of the keys. The clang of a gate he has closed ten thousand times, and the hum he hears in his sleep. He loves none of it and is loyal to all of it. You feel the belly, solid and warm, resting on his thighs. The shoulders are still strong, and the lower back aches in a way he has stopped reporting. His breath is slow, careful, a man counting.

Then a church basement, folding chairs, and a hymn he knows only the bottom half of. Two children in the back seat of a Buick, one of them asleep with her mouth open. Rain on a brick porch. A cigarette in the cold with a beer, the one vice, which he confesses and repeats. The tremor is the thing he has told no one. He hides his hands in his pockets on the line. He has learned to hold a cup square so it will not rattle. Today someone will read a number off a page and tell him what it means.

You look at the hands. They are broad, brown and ringed, and they shake only a little, like a pulse that wants out. You turn them over. They are not yours, and they are yours.

You lift your eyes. "Forty-eight," you say, quietly, to nobody, and the name is called again, and you do not yet know whether you will answer to it tomorrow, or in an hour, or whether the wanting has already begun.