Russell Tennant

You are standing at a loading dock in Houston with a wrench in a hand that is twenty-eight years old, and you are already tired of the hand.

It is not that Mario Salcedo does anything wrong. He is tall, and the ceilings are low, and every doorway has been an apology. The freckles on his forearms bother you in the bathroom light. All morning a compressor has been failing on the third floor, and you have fixed it with his competent fingers while a thing in you stood to one side and said: this is it, this is what a whole life is, a compressor. You have been him for less than a minute of your own counting, and you have already gone back to the page. The wheel is on the phone in your pocket. You do not say why. You press it.

Then there is a bridge deck, and the sun is on your head.

The rhythm breaks. Your right hand has gone down to the tablet in the wrong order, the pen driving where the stylus should be. You stop, then do it again slowly and correctly. You tap the next field. You check it. You tap the next. Ten times you check what has not needed checking in years, and the checking is yours, because you are a stranger standing in a man's habit.

The weight comes first. It sits low and wide, a heavy, muscular belly over a belt, and the whole frame leans a little forward from the hips. Your knees ache in a way Mario's never did, a dull, old, reliable ache. Your breath is shallow and tastes of smoke. The air smells of hot concrete and cut steel.

The hard hat sits tight on your skull. Your left hand drifts up on its own and pushes it back, and your palm runs over the bare scalp, warm and stubbled, and with that touch you get a bathroom mirror and a razor, a morning years ago when the hair finally went and he decided to take all of it, quickly, and was relieved.

The vest is mesh and stiff with dust. It brings a hook by a door, and a Tuesday-morning thought, not yours: *Don't forget the vest, you forgot it in March.* The blue checked shirt is cotton, soft at the cuffs, and your fingers find the button he left open. This morning he did the buttons from the bottom up, because the top one had always fought him. He stood in a bedroom with nobody else in it, and the quiet was ordinary to him and even good. The black jeans have a worn patch at the thigh where the tablet rides. He pulled them on sitting down, because standing took a small negotiation with the knee.

The tablet's rubber case is gritty under your thumb, and the memory behind it is a long one. Sixty-hour weeks and a pour that had to be perfect. A foreman named Ortiz who once threw a clipboard and later brought him coffee. A bridge he loved more than he would say in a church basement, where he sat in the third pew every Sunday and sang the old hymns flat and happy. Then the cigarettes, the first one at seventeen behind a gym, and the thousandth-thousandth one this morning at the truck, a pack a day for thirty years. He knows exactly what it is costing him. He lights the next one anyway.

Below your boots lie the rebar mats in their grid, tied by other hands. The soles of his boots are cracked and shaped to his feet. Under them comes a feeling he has never put into words: that if the steel is right, nothing falls, and that this is the closest he gets to love.

You lift both hands. They are thick, ruddy, scarred only by work and weather, and they are not yours. You turn them over. The pen is still between two fingers.

You look up into the light and say, rough and quiet, "All right. Let's see how long you last."