Thomas Ryan Doherty

The janitor's body is a good one. That is the trouble with it. Colton Pruitt's back has been aching since six, and the mop bucket is still halfway down the hall, and I am standing in the supply closet of a school in Nashville with a rag in his fist, thinking about the wheel.

He is not bad, Colton. His knees go on stairs. His beard itches in the heat. A boy in the east hall called him sir this morning and meant it, and I did not feel it. I stood there holding what he had been handed, and it was all furniture. Everything in him is somebody else's furniture. I wanted a room I had not walked through yet. That is all. I would not say it aloud to the boy.

I put the rag on the shelf. Eighty-nine. I pay, and the wheel turns, and there is no between.

Warm cotton in my right hand, and a hum above me like a held note.

I am crouched. My thighs know it, and so do my heels, and the concrete is cold through the soles of shoes that are worn flat. The dryer's mouth is open in front of me and the air coming out of it smells of lint and hot dust. One sock, white, still holding the heat of the drum. Then I pull the rest out in one armful and drop it into the basket, and my hands are already moving.

They will not stay still. The fingers tap the plastic rim, then my thigh, then the rim again. The body wants a cigarette the way it wants water, a pack a day pulling at the chest. My lungs have a shallow place in them, a rasp when I breathe in.

The sock first. Heat in the weave, and then a morning comes up through it, not mine. A drawer upstairs, eight shirts crumpled in it like something given up on. His shame about the drawer is light and ordinary. Then the hoodie at my back, the cuffs shoved to the elbow, and he is pulling it over his head in a cold room. UNIVERSITY across the chest has cracked and gone soft. It was a gift, or it was left behind. The sleeve is the sleeve of a boy named Eli, and the feeling that follows it is a bruise pressed on purpose. Recent. Still sore. He wore it today because it smelled faintly of someone, and he has washed it twice and it does not anymore.

The tattoo is under the pushed-up sleeve, and I feel it without looking: the insignia, the needle, a year when he was nineteen and sure. Something about a unit, and men who counted on him. The folding comes with it. Corners squared, a bunk, a sergeant's voice. His hands fold the towels before I ask them to, three fast motions each, edges meeting. They are better at this than the shirts upstairs deserve.

Then the jeans, stiff at the knee. A church basement, folding chairs, a hymn with the verses he still knows. His mother's pew. The wrong word he never said in it. Money like a hand on his neck, the number twenty-some thousand, always under him, always rising to the lip.

I look at my hands. They are his. They are mine. They will not stop moving.

I stand, and the knees crack. I look up into the tube light and say, to nobody, "Well. Hello, Boston."

Tomorrow I may still have this beard. Or the wanting comes back by supper, and he is only warm laundry.