Ruben Salazar Ortega

The garage is his gym, and the shelf above the bench holds toolboxes where a bar rack should be. Nobody has told me this yet. First I have to leave the other one.

Isaiah Whitfield has been mine for less than a minute, and his body is still a wonder to me. The black beard is thick against my collar. The shoulders are loose and young. A diesel mechanic's forearms carry a quarter-century of nothing yet. His kitchen in the Mission is dark and the fog is pressed against the window. The coffee I made him is still too hot to drink. He has everything a man should want.

I can't say why I'm going back. A minute ago I stood in his bathroom and looked at the freckles on his face, and I didn't know whose they were. Nothing was wrong. That was the trouble. I sat down at the laptop with his clean hands on the keys, and the wheel was already turning.

The garage comes up under me like a step that isn't there.

I am sitting. A board is hard under me, and the cold of a concrete floor comes up through the soles of my shoes. My forearms are on my knees and my belly rests against my thighs, heavy and warm. My breath is slow, and I understand that I stopped blowing it through my teeth a minute ago. There is a water bottle sweating by my left shoe.

The jacket is the first thing. I pinch the sleeve and a morning opens in me that isn't mine. It is a trailer's narrow hallway, and a woman's voice from the kitchen says *the gray one, it's cold*. His thumb finds the zipper pull and works it, up and down. He smiles at it. A girlfriend who still checks his collar, who has never once said she would stay. He zipped it halfway. I feel the care in that.

I press my palm to my knee and the khaki is soft, washed a hundred times. Then comes a porch, mid-morning, a mug going cold on the rail, and sagebrush with blue shadows crawling under it. He sits there most days. He has no money and doesn't mind saying so. *Under five thousand to my name,* he thinks, and it doesn't sting. It sounds almost like a prayer.

I turn my left arm and the sleeve rides up. A name is written there in script, with a date under it. The skin knows it before I do. His daughter, born in a hospital in Reno, and he held her with these exact hands. When the nurse spoke to him he stuttered, and he was ashamed, and the baby didn't care at all. The hands still go tight when someone is watching.

There is another name that isn't the one on his arm. A woman who got away. I touch my beard and it opens, a screen door in some other year, her back going down a driveway, and the word he couldn't get out in time. The word stuck on its first letter. He stood there with his mouth shaped around it until her car was gone. My throat closes on the same sound now.

The bench grain is rough under my palms. Church, a folding chair, his voice low in a hymn. He quit drinking in a parking lot with the keys in his fist. I feel the keys.

The body itself is a fact. My knees ache in a dull, patient way, and my lower back has a hinge in it. The belly is solid and the chest under it is strong, stronger than the rest admits. His hands are wide and spotted, and they already want the bar, two inches wider than he's gripped it all year.

I look at them. I turn them over. The palms are creased and the knuckles are thick.

I lift my eyes and say, slowly, so the words don't catch, "Well. Look at that."

Somewhere behind my ribs the wanting is quiet. I don't know how long it stays that way.