Sam Gruber

You are standing in a kitchen in El Paso with a coffee going cold, and the body you're wearing is tired in a way you didn't ask for. Eduardo Cisneros: forty-two, five-seven, skinny, a back that has learned the shape of every pallet at the freight dock. Less than a minute of him so far. You've been rubbing the beauty mark by his mouth with your thumb the whole time, a thing he must do, a thing you've inherited without a single memory attached. Nothing is wrong with him. That's the trouble. The stubble is fine, the brown eyes are fine, the knees complain on schedule. But the morning is mid-bright through the window, a Tuesday, and you can feel how little there is in this man you haven't already tasted. So you open the page. The wheel is already turning under your thumb.

Then the floor goes out from under the kitchen.

You are standing, arms raised, and your shoulders burn with it. Concrete under both boots, cold coming up through the soles. Something black and heavy hangs overhead, close enough to touch, and your fingers are already on it, already turning something small and exact. The motion is wrong. Your hand slips half a beat, and you do it again slowly, and it seats. The air smells of oil, rubber, wet cement, and the open bay door lets in a street with one green light and a diner with a CLOSED sign in the window.

You check the next one. And the next. Ten of them, each one looked at, because you don't know this job the way your hands do.

The rag in the back pocket tugs when you shift, and you touch it. Cotton gone soft as skin. A kitchen, a small boy on a counter, laughing as you wipe jam off his chin. Your chest goes tight with a fatherly tenderness that isn't yours. Then the belt buckle against your belly: this morning, the buckle clicked, a woman's voice from the bed said *you'll be late*, and the warmth of it sat in you like bread.

The shirt sticks to your shoulder blades. His hands did the buttons from the bottom up, always, and rolled the sleeves twice. The patch over the pocket says SAM. A flash of his mother calling it across a yard. Under the right sleeve, ink on the skin: a heart, a swallow, a wrench. You feel their heat without knowing their stories, and one of them aches, a name you can't reach, an ex-wife's, and with it a sorrow that is polite and permanent and has learned to be quiet.

The piercing in the upper ear catches on your shoulder when you tilt your head. Eighteen, a bathroom, a friend with a needle, his own stupid grin. The goatee under your jaw is rough. Your lungs are clean; a memory of cigarettes surfaces and stays down, a quitting that cost him a year of bad tempers. No beer in this man's blood, no wanting it. A prayer mat rolled in a closet, the quiet of the forehead against the floor at dawn before the girlfriend woke. A little money in an account, a number he checks the way other men touch a pocket.

He is strong. Twenty-six. The arms hold the weight above you as if it were nothing.

You lower your hands. You turn them over in the lamp light, ink and grease in the creases, and lift your eyes to the street, the green light holding.

"Okay," you say, in a voice that isn't the one you came with. "Okay, Sam."

Somewhere a wheel is already waiting. How long does this one last? You flex the fingers and don't know.