Tanner Olszewski

You are standing in Efraín Maldonado's kitchen in Queens with his coffee going cold, and the thing that sent you back is the sound of his knees. Fifty-nine years of them. Every stair is a negotiation. The goatee itches. The nose that was once broken whistles on the in-breath, and all morning you have stood at his window watching men half his age carry things up the street without thinking about it. That is all. You wanted to carry something. You open the page with his thumb, which is thick and slow, and the wheel turns, and you do not feel yourself leave.

The cold comes first, then the weight. A torque wrench in the right hand, the left braced on a radiator, and your arm is already moving, the click about to come. It comes wrong, a half-beat early. You stop. You do it again slowly, and it clicks true.

Steel under your palm, wet and cold. Diesel and brick dust and the sweet rot of old coolant. Through the open bay, the L tracks run pale against a white winter sky, and a train goes over like something being dragged.

You check the next bolt. Then the next. Ten of them, each one tried with a thumb, though your body says they never needed trying.

The coverall is stiff at the elbows. The cloth in the hip pocket, a red rag gone dark, comes under your fingers, and a morning arrives that is his: a radiator knocking in a room with one window, a hand finding the zipper in the dark, the leg going in, then the other, the boots by the door still damp from yesterday's slush. He laces them standing, one foot on a chair, because his back likes it that way. He eats nothing. He thinks of a number, the rent, and the number is not large and not small. It sits in his chest like a swallowed stone. No one waits for him. The quiet in that room is not sad to him, only his.

The wrench handle is knurled, worn smooth in the places his hand has lived. Through it comes a night with the older mechanic, Walt, teaching him to feel a bolt stretch before it fails, two fingers on the wrench's neck, saying listen, don't look. He was seventeen. He was so proud he could not say so. You feel the pride now, a warm small coal.

The body is a good one. Your shoulders are loose and long, your thighs hum from hours of crouching, your forearms are tight with a day's work. The jaw is smooth and cold from the morning's razor. Hair slicked back stiff with water, the wind on the shaved sides of your head. The knees do not speak at all. You nearly laugh.

You lift your right hand off the wrench and turn it over. Black in the creases, calluses like pressed coins. A stranger's, and yours.

You look up, past the truck, into the white street.

"Okay," you say, in a voice too young for what you mean. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

The bay door rattles in the wind. Somewhere under the thought is the old itch, already, faint as a train a long way off.