Wendell Mackovic

You are sitting in Bryan Hutsell's apartment, in Bryan Hutsell's body, on Bryan Hutsell's mattress on the floor, and you have been him for three minutes and that is already too long. The skinny-fat gut, the cleft chin you keep catching in the microwave door's reflection, the smell of a man who has been between jobs long enough that between has become the job. You spun to get out of the last one and you landed in worse. Phoenix light through a blind with two slats broken. A beer can on its side, empty, that isn't even yours in any sense that matters, since none of this was ever going to be yours for long. You didn't unpack Bryan. You didn't want to. Thirty-seven men behind you and this is the first body you have hated inside of thirty seconds of arriving, and there is a phone with a cracked screen already open to vessel.cards, wheel spun up bright and waiting, because you never closed the tab, because some part of you already knew three minutes was the ceiling. You put the thumb down. It isn't even a decision. It's just the next thing your hand does.

The wheel spins somewhere you can't feel and then you are standing on asphalt with your knees locked slightly and a chain in each hand, cold through work gloves, and the weight is wrong in the good way — wiry, light, a body that knows exactly how much of itself to spend on a task and no more. Sodium light overhead, orange and heavy, and a strip mall glowing behind you with a sign that says HOUSTON on an awning you can't place yet. Halfway through wrapping a hook around an axle. Your hands — his hands — go still. Then they redo the wrap, slow, checking the seat of the hook against the frame like it's the first tow of the week and not the ten-thousandth.

The chain is what gives you the first of it. Cold, oiled, familiar in a way your arm knows before your mind does — a flash of a Ford up on the hook last winter during the one week Houston got ice, a Corolla with a quinceañera dress still on a hanger in the back seat, the owner crying more about the dress than the car. Then it opens wider, the way they do, unbidden: this is Wendell, and Wendell has done this so many nights that the nights have worn a groove and he rides it without thinking, which is why the tremor when your hand did it wrong for half a second felt, to him, like nothing at all — a hiccup, gone.

The jacket against your back gives you more. Navy canvas, stiff with old grease at the cuffs, and it's the coat he's had since before Carol got sick, and touching the collar of it brings back her hands turning it up against a February that doesn't really happen in Houston but happened anyway that one year. Carol at the kitchen table teaching their daughter to do her own eyeliner while their son sat under the table making truck noises with a real chain link he wasn't supposed to have. Carol's laugh, which you don't get to hear, only get told about, secondhand, the way all of this comes secondhand — through cloth, through the ring on the fourth finger of the hand not holding a hook.

The ring gives you the most and the worst. Cheap gold, thin now from twenty-six years of a body wearing it down. Her in the hospital bed asking him, not for reassurance, but for the actual math — what the funeral would cost, whether the truck could go one more year without a transmission job, because that was Carol, practical to the very door of it. Him saying he'd figure it out. Him figuring it out. Him still wearing the band four years later on a hand that ties hooks to strangers' cars at whatever hour the shift demands, because somebody has to and the kids are grown and gone to Austin and Tulsa and call on Sundays, and an empty house doesn't need a man home early.

The shirt, buttoned wrong by one hole this morning — no, not this morning, some morning, they blur, but this one comes clear: him standing in front of a mirror that used to be Carol's mirror, threading his arms through gray twill, checking the phone clipped to the collar out of habit though the light on it hasn't worked right in a year, lacing boots that know the shape of his feet better than any doctor does. Sixty-one and skinny as a rail and none of it easy anymore — the knees complain on the crawl under a bumper, the shoulder complains reaching for a high hook, and none of it stops him, because stopping was never on the table, not with a mortgage still breathing and two kids he will not call broke. A drink when he gets home, one, maybe a second if the shift ran ugly. No church on Sunday, hasn't been since Carol's funeral, when the words didn't do what they were supposed to and he noticed and never went back.

You feel the freckles under your own fingers when you touch your face without meaning to — sun damage from decades of Texas, permanent, a map of a life spent outdoors doing work nobody thanks him for by name.

You look down. The hook is in your hand, swinging slightly, and the fingers around it are thin and sun-spotted and not yours, were never yours, are the only ones you have now. You turn the hand over once, watching the ring catch the orange light.

"Alright," you say, out loud, to the empty lot and the strip mall glow, in a voice that still has Houston in the vowels though it isn't yours yet either. "Let's get this one hooked up."