Russell Kowalczyk

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Colton Marsh's hands are shaking, and they are not even his hands yet in any way that matters — an hour old, borrowed, twenty-one years of somebody else's calluses that never earned themselves. You stand in his kitchen in Denver with the laptop open on the counter, the blue glow of vessel.cards throwing light up onto a face you have worn for sixty-two minutes, and you already know you are going to spin again. It isn't boredom exactly. It's that an hour is not enough to find out anything about a person, and you have never once in two hundred and seventy-one spins let yourself sit still long enough to. The locksmith's apartment smells like somebody else's cheap coffee. His phone keeps buzzing with a name you don't know. You put your thumb — his thumb — on the wheel and you spin it before you can think better of it, because thinking better of it has never once stopped you.

There is no travel. There is no warning. There is a highway and a dark windshield and the dash lights coming up gold on a pair of thick, blunt knuckles, and then those knuckles are yours, and the wheel is drifting a foot toward the centerline before both hands come off it at once and resettle, lower, wider, more sure of themselves than the man they belong to has any memory of teaching them to be.

The turn signal clicks on. Left. For an exit that is not his.

You are sitting low in a seat built for a shorter man than you're used to being tall, and this body is not tall either, but it is wide — shoulders that fill the door frame of the car, a gut that presses soft and solid against the bottom of the wheel, forearms with real weight behind them. Fifty-six years fewer than you started this hour with. It should feel like a downgrade and it does not; it feels like ballast. The blood pressure in his ears is a faint high hum you will not understand for another few seconds, until the memory arrives with it — a doctor's office, a cuff tightening, a nurse saying *we should keep an eye on that* in a voice that meant nothing at the time and everything three years later.

The steering wheel under your palms brings it first. Fourteen years of this same drive, trailhead to home, home to trailhead, and under your hands the wheel remembers itself into a different one — county truck, gravel lot, a sign he built with his own two hands that says the name of a park he has loved past all reason since he was twenty-six years old and thought a ranger hat was the stupidest, best thing he'd ever agreed to wear. Pine smell that isn't in this car at all but arrives anyway, the way smell does, sideways, uninvited.

The shirt against your back is not the uniform — off duty, a plain navy tee, soft with washing — but the memory it gives you is of the other one, the green one, sleeve tight over the arm with the tribal ink he got at twenty-three in a shop in Columbus with a man named Duane who is dead now and who Russell still thinks about more than he'd say out loud. Buttoning that uniform shirt this morning, top button last, the way his wife taught him without ever meaning to teach him anything, just by doing it near him for twenty-two years until it became his own habit and he forgot whose it used to be. Boots on the floor mat under feet that know exactly how much throttle this pedal wants without being told, the specific give of it, worn-in like a joint.

The ring is on the hand you just put back on the wheel, low, and it is warm from his own skin already and it opens wide — not one memory but the whole shape of one: her name arriving not as a word but as a weight, a kitchen table, an argument about money eleven years back that ended with him crying in the truck outside cell service and driving anyway, and a woman before her whose name comes up too, uninvited, an old ache gone soft and mostly kind, the kind of ex you don't miss so much as visit once in a while in your own head, checking the door's still shut. Two kids. A girl's height chart penciled on a doorframe. A boy's first cast rod, and Russell teaching him to hold it the way his own father never once bothered to teach him, on purpose, because of that.

His hand finds his scalp without you asking it to — an old tic, the palm going up and over bare skin, smooth, familiar, soothing in a way that has nothing to do with vanity and everything to do with forty-nine years of just being a head that does that now. No drink in eleven years. No cigarette in fifteen, though the want for one still visits some nights, driving, alone, three miles out, like tonight, like this exact stretch of road he has driven four thousand times and will not finish tonight the way he started it.

You feel all of it land at once, the whole man, heavier than the locksmith by every measure that matters, and something in you that isn't cruelty exactly, isn't quite hunger either, settles into it like sitting down in a chair that fits.

You look at your hands on the wheel. Thick. A pale line through one eyebrow catching the dash glow when you check the mirror out of a habit that isn't yours yet but is already starting to feel like it could be. You ease off the gas, let the exit ramp take you nowhere, because you have three miles and no idea what waits at the end of them, no wife's face yet, no porch light.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to the empty car, in a voice pitched lower than you've used in months. "Okay. Let's see what you've got."

The signal keeps ticking, patient, for an exit nobody asked for.