Rigoberto Almanza

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You knew his mole before you knew his name.

That's the truth of it. Garden City, the county EMS hall, orientation day nine years ago, and the instructor was going down the roster and you weren't listening because there was a man across the folding table with a dark spot high on his left cheek and a way of sitting that made the whole table shake. Leg going. Heel drumming the linoleum like he had somewhere better. You wanted to put a hand on his knee and hold it still. You didn't. You never did, in nine years, though God knows you thought about it every shift you drew with him.

Rigoberto Almanza. Rigo to everybody, Almanza on the board, and on the board is where it mattered, because you were Almanza's other. That's what dispatch called it. Not by name — by *the other one.* Two medics in a county with four, and you split the same two hundred square miles of wheat and dryland corn and county roads that go dead straight to the horizon and then go straight some more.

He was better than you. Say it. He got faster IVs on farm hands who'd been in the sun eleven hours and had veins like thread. He talked grandmothers down out of hysterics in Spanish and then talked their sons down in the kind of flat Kansas English that never sounded like it was trying. His numbers were better. His run reports were better. He got the letter from the hospital board and you got a copy in your inbox for morale.

And he never once rubbed it in, which was the worst of it. He'd sit on the bumper at the open back of the rig on a quiet street on the north side, boots in the gravel, radio mic clipped at his collar, and offer you half a cigar he'd been saving since Christmas — he only ever smoked cigars, never cigarettes, said cigarettes were for people who didn't want to enjoy anything — and he'd say *you did fine out there, man,* and mean it, and that leg would be going the whole time, drumming the diamond plate, and you'd want to hit him.

You knew everything about him because in a county that size you can't help it. Four years in before EMS, the unit insignia inked over his heart, the top of it showing at his collar whenever he leaned forward. Church twice a month and a big night once or twice a month too, and he never seemed to think those two things were in a fight. Twenty-some thousand in a credit union account he mentioned exactly once, at a bar, embarrassed, like having savings was a thing to apologize for. No kids. No wife.

And Marisol.

You met her at his cousin's wedding in Dodge, and you watched him watch her leave, three years later, from the parking lot of the Pizza Hut where she told him she'd taken the nursing job in Wichita and he wasn't going to come. He didn't cry. He said *okay* about nine times. Then he got in the rig with you and ran a Code 3 to a grain elevator and was flawless.

That's the woman who got away, and here's the part you never told a soul: you envied him *her,* and you envied him the losing of her, because at least he'd had something big enough to lose. You had a duplex, a dog, a shift bid, and nine years of measuring yourself against a man who never noticed he was being measured.

Then July.

You were both on the same call. Center-pivot irrigation, a shorted pump, standing water. He went in first because he always went in first. You went in after him because you always did. What the report will eventually say is *simultaneous electrical injury, two patients, both providers.* What it means is that a current went through the two of you at the same instant and stopped two hearts on the same beat, and the county's third and fourth medics loaded you both and ran you both into the little hospital on the west edge of town where they put you in the same room because there wasn't another room.

Three feet apart. Two gurneys. Two monitors, both singing that one flat note.

You were nowhere. There's nothing to tell about nowhere. But at some point in the nowhere you understood, with a clarity you've never had about anything, that there was only going to be one of you, and that you had spent nine years learning every inch of him and he had never once bothered to learn you. That's not a plan. It's an appetite. It's the thing you were, underneath the polo and the numbers and the *you did fine out there, man.*

They shocked him.

You felt it as a shove — an enormous flat hand across the chest, and light, and then floor tile and a hanging fluorescent panel and a window with the blind half-drawn and the light outside gone yellow the way it goes before a thunderhead stacks up black over cut stubble. Voices. Somebody's palm on his sternum. Somebody saying *he's back, he's back, sinus rhythm.*

His eyes opened on that ceiling. Yours behind them.

You lay there and did an inventory the way he'd have run a primary survey. Chest hot and stinging under two pads. Shirt rucked up over the belly. His belly — heavier than yours, softer, warm, rising and falling, and you could feel the pull of it in the low back. The insignia on his chest, right there under your chin, ink you'd only ever seen the top edge of. Hair shaved tight at the sides, full on top, itching with sweat against the pillow. Somebody had cut his boots off.

And the leg. The right one, jumping. You hadn't told it to. It was going all on its own, heel tapping the frame of the gurney, and you understood that it was his still, that some part of him was in the wiring and would be forever, and you would spend the rest of your life sitting in his body being unable to sit still.

Three feet to the left, a monitor stopped singing at all, and a nurse said *time of death* and a name.

Your name.

You didn't turn your head. You couldn't have. But you heard the whole room hold its breath and then get busy, the way rooms do, and you lay in the borrowed weight of him and thought: *nobody is going to come looking for me. There is no me to look for. There is only Almanza's other, and now there isn't even that.*

Nine years, and it took nine seconds.

They'll ask him questions for the next month. Neuro checks. Cardiology in Wichita — and Marisol works in Wichita, and he never stopped keeping her number, you know exactly which pocket of which jacket, and that's a thing you could do now, with his mouth and his voice and his shoulders and everything of him except the part of him she actually wanted.

His mother will come from Liberal and hold this face in both hands and cry into it and say *mijo* and you will have to answer.

His pastor will pray over this body and say *God brought you back for a reason, Rigo,* and this mouth is going to have to say *amen.*

And Thursday, when they clear him for light duty, you'll sit on the bumper at the open back of the rig on a quiet street, and put a cigar in this mouth, and look down the road at the stubble and the black stacking sky, and the leg will be going, going, going, and there will be nobody left in the county to say *you did fine out there.*

You wanted his life. Understand that you have it. All of it. Including the part that has to live in it.