Walter Emerson Coombs

You have been Gerald Pruitt for less than a minute, and already you know what is wrong with him. He is sixty-five and soft, and his chair is leather and expensive. The glass wall shows you a Tuesday morning with the whole city lit up below it. Nothing is missing. That is the trouble. You stood at the window with his coffee going cold and found you wanted nothing in the room, not the view, not the name on the door, not the phone buzzing with people who would have given him anything. He had never wanted anything either. You can feel it in his chest, a flat place where wanting should sit. So you open the page with the wheel on it, and you pay, and you spin. You watch the colors blur and think, not him, not him, somebody who has somewhere to be.

Then you are standing with your arm over your head.

Your left hand is up and closed around a metal bar in the ceiling. The right hangs at your side. The air is warm and smells of diesel, vinyl and salt. White light comes through a wide window. Your weight sits on one leg, the knee bent, and your back is turned half to a doorway. You were reaching for the vent control and you have done it wrong. Your fingers closed on the wrong edge. So you do it again, slowly, and get it right.

Then you check the mirror. You check the door lever and the brake. You check the fare box, which is empty, and the mirror again. Each check is a small tight motion, and every one comes out exactly right on a job that has not needed checking in years.

The shirt comes first. The cotton is stiff on your shoulders, and the pocket holds a pen against your chest. You touch the badge and feel a morning in a kitchen. His fingers do up the buttons from the bottom, and the radio mumbles tide times. The coffee is burnt, and he does not mind. He tucks the shirt in with a thumb along the belt line, and the leather is cracked soft where the same hole has been used for years.

The bar in your palm is cool and slightly tacky. Under your hand something comes up whole. It is a winter, a long run in the dark, the heater failing, and a woman with a stroller who thanked him as though he had done something. He had only opened a door. He keeps the thanks somewhere he does not look at.

Your right thumb has found the edge of your index nail and is worrying the cuticle. It is raw there. He does it when he is thinking about nothing, and it comes with a feeling of being waited for and not found. A man laughs in a truck cab, young and loud, with a boat behind him and a grin. He drove away. The man got away, and Walter let him. It was not hunger, he never had that kind, only a long ease between two people that nobody had a name for. Something in his chest still turns toward the water, toward that grin.

The knees ache a little. The back is strong and the shoulders are old and good. The beard is coarse under your fingers when you touch your jaw, and the eyebrow is one heavy line you can feel move when you frown.

You look at your hands. Calluses, weather, knuckles thick as walnuts. You turn the right one over and the palm is lined deep. Gerald's hands had never held anything.

You look up, out through the windshield. The shingled house is silver, the traps are stacked, and the light is cold and clean.

"Well," you say, in a voice that is gravel and kindness. "Hello."

You do not know how long you get to keep this. The wanting is quiet now, but it is only quiet.