Ruben Salazar

You are Walter Bellecourt for less than a minute, and already you hate the forklift. You hate the cold coming off the Boston floor of his kitchen, the way his knees complain at the sink, the sound of his breath. You came down for water and found nothing in the house that was yours. There is a phone in his big hand, and the page is still open. A wheel. You think of the wife upstairs, the one who said his name once in her sleep, and how she said it like someone who knew him. You did not know him. No one asks you to. You press the button before the water is finished running.

Then the dark, and a different dark.

You are on your side. A pillow is damp under your cheek. Blue light sits on one side of your face, and a phone hangs six inches from your eyes. The thumb is stopped on glass. The sheet is cool and the room smells of dust, detergent, and a glass of water gone flat on the nightstand. Beside the bed a charger cord lies in loose white loops. Somebody else's house is quiet around you.

You start the thumb again. It goes faster than his did. Past a truck for sale. Past a church friend's casserole. Past a woman's photograph, a recent one, and the thumb hesitates on its own before you push it on. Your thumb. His thumb. The ring on the left hand knocks softly against the phone's edge, a plain band worn thin, and the first memory comes through it.

A June afternoon, a courthouse hallway in a small town, shoes too tight. He is twenty-six and certain, and a woman in a yellow dress is laughing at how he cannot work the pen to sign. He clicks it, clicks it, clicks it. The feeling is simple: luck, and fear of losing it. Your hand is clicking something now, though there is nothing in it. His fingers know the motion without a pen.

The T-shirt on your back is soft with washing. It hands you the morning in pieces. He is at the gate in a corridor of painted cinderblock, pale green to shoulder height and cream above. The navy uniform shirt is on a hanger in the closet here, and the sleeves he fastened were the same ones he fastened every day for years, left cuff first, button, then right. Boots by the door. A ring of keys on a retractable reel, heavy as a small animal. He counts doors in his sleep. He wants, more than anything in the world, for nobody to need him to be brave.

The sheet under your leg is the sheet from the other bed, the one in a rented room after the quarrel. Another woman's name comes, softer, a fast heat behind his ribs. It is a thing he told no one, and not a sin exactly, but he prayed on it every Sunday in the same pew, hands pressed between his knees. Shame sits in the body like a swallowed stone. You feel it in his chest, and it is not yours, and it will not leave.

His back aches low on the left, fifty-two years of standing on concrete. His shoulders are strong, though, and his forearms. The skin of the chin has the odd deep cleft your tongue finds when you swallow, and the goatee scratches the pillow. His mouth tastes of the whiskey he poured himself before bed, one, then another. His children are down the hall. You can almost hear them breathing through the wall, and the knowledge of them arrives as pure weight, a debt he is glad of.

Then you lift the hand from the phone and the screen goes dark. In the black glass a face looks back at you, gray at the temples and thinning, and it does not blink when you want it to.

You turn the hand over. Palm, calluses, the pale band.

"Well," you say, in a voice a size too low, "hello, Ruben."

Down the hall a floorboard settles. You lie very still in him, listening for the next thing, the first small itch of wanting, wondering how long before it comes.