Travis Whitcomb

You are leaving the man in Chicago because of his knees. That is what you would say if anyone were awake to ask. Sixty-four, and the stairs to the bathroom have become a negotiation, and tonight you stood at the top of them with a hand on the rail, in a house that is not yours, and the whole body said no, quietly, the way a tired animal says it. His beard is itchy. His belly sits on his belt like a sleeping dog. He has been yours for less than a minute and already you know the arithmetic of him. The other thing, the thing you would not say, is that the last man was fifty-five and skinny and had a son. You were him for under a minute. You saw the phone on his counter with the name on it, Travis, and the photograph beside it, and you did not touch it. You are already spinning.

Then the wheel stops, and you are lying on your face.

The pillow is flat and damp against your mouth. Your breath was ragged a moment ago, someone else's, and then it is even, and it is yours. One arm hangs off the mattress, the knuckles almost brushing carpet. Light from a streetlamp lies through a gap in the curtains in a hard orange stripe. Your body is young. It is the first thing you notice and the loudest: nothing hurts. Your knees are simply knees.

You roll. The hanging arm draws itself up, and you are on your back, and your hands fold on your chest like a man laid out. He never slept this way, you somehow know, and it does not matter. Your heart is slow and enormous.

The sheets come first. Cotton gone thin, washed too many times in a laundromat with a broken dryer, and the feeling arrives without asking: a Sunday, the smell of cut grass in the fabric, his own fatigue, sweet and total. He had mowed the outfield in diagonals and the stripes came up pale and dark, and he stood at the fence and looked at them for a full minute before going home. Nobody else saw. That was the whole of the joy.

The T-shirt on your ribs is soft and sour from a day of work. You pull the collar and a memory comes with it, the morning he put it on: left arm first, always, the sleeve catching on the wrist's callus. Under your palm his chest rises. You press the pad of your thumb against the other palm and find the hard ridge there, the shape of a handle, a rake, a mower bar, ten thousand pushes.

The waistband of the sweatpants. A flash: the trailer step, sagebrush scratching at the aluminum, the blue shadows at noon so sharp they looked cut. A phone call he let ring out. A man's voice on the machine, older, stiff, saying his name carefully, Travis, as though it might break. His father. A line cook in Ohio who does not know how to say what he wants to say. You know that voice. You were inside the throat that made it. You know what the man was trying to say and could not, and the son knew too and let it ring, and the feeling that arrives with it is not anger. It is a bruise he presses on purpose, to check that it is there.

Under the heel of your foot, the carpet, gritty with desert. A beer in a can on the nightstand, warm, the one big night a month, the others quiet. Nothing in the bank. Nothing owed. A man who owns a mower's worth of skill and a bed and the whole silent sky, and has never once felt poor in it.

You lift your hands into the orange light. Strong, square, scarred by nothing, rough where the work has been. You turn them over. Then you look up, past them, to where the ceiling holds the stripe of lamplight, and you say aloud, in a voice that is lower than you expected and not yours yet:

"Hello, Travis."

The room does not answer. Somewhere a truck downshifts on the highway. You wonder how long the knees will stay young, how long before the wanting stirs again, whether you will wake tomorrow in this cotton and this light, or in some other man's dark.