Wendell Ratliff

You are four minutes into being Marcos Ibarra when you decide four minutes was enough.

You're standing in his booth at the Alhambra, the projector ticking warm behind you, the reel light throwing that dusty cone through the little window into an empty theater, and you keep looking down at his forearm, at the patched pale blotches climbing the brown skin, thinking about how he's stood in this exact booth for nineteen years running the same six title cards through the same tired machine, and there is nothing wrong with him — nothing wrong with any of this, that's the trouble. He is fine. He is settled. He has a wife who texted him something with a heart on it twenty minutes ago and he answered it without even looking up, the way you answer something that isn't a question anymore. Four minutes in him and you already know the whole shape of the rest of it, and the wheel is sitting right there on the little shelf phone, vessel.cards, cheap and patient, and boredom is not a strong enough word for what moves your thumb, his thumb, across the screen. You pay. You spin. Somewhere a card is already being cut for a man named Marcos Ibarra who will never know he was almost somebody's whole four-minute life.

It lands you standing.

Not sitting — that's the first wrongness, a held breath of a wrongness, your knees locked and your arms straight down at your sides gripping a bar that is going up, and the bar is heavier than anything Marcos's arms ever knew, and your grip is wide, hands two inches out from where muscle-memory says they should be, and there is chalk-dust smell and gym rubber and somebody's music thumping through a wall speaker, and you are sixty-two, no — fifty-six, the read comes a half-second later, gray hair cut close, a body that is working hard and working well, not laboring, and you finish the rep because the rep is already most of the way finished and stopping isn't a thing this body knows how to do mid-motion. The bar racks. Your arms drop. You are breathing through your nose in slow controlled pulls that this body chose for itself before you arrived, on a bench, under a rack, and there is a water bottle sweating against the rubber mat by your foot.

The bottle is what does it. Your hand goes down without you deciding to send it, wraps the cold plastic, and Wendell Ratliff comes up through your palm like heat off asphalt.

The label sticker, half peeled, his thumbnail work from some other week, some other rack of weights — and then you're not on the bench anymore, you're twenty-six years back and younger, dealing your first table at the boat casino two counties over before it moved onshore, before it got a real name, green felt under fingers that already knew how to shuffle before he ever got paid for it, his father having taught him poker at a kitchen table with a bad hip and a good laugh. You feel the cards without seeing them — the exact give of a deck riffled ten thousand times, the way his right hand knows the pitch of a card sliding off the top without his eyes tracking it, a small mindless competence sunk so deep it isn't a skill anymore, it's just how his hand is shaped.

The shirt against your back — his gym shirt, damp, cotton gone soft from a hundred washes — gives you the vest instead, black, the bow tie he ties without a mirror now, twenty-some years of muscle in his fingers finding the loop and the fold. You feel the pit boss's radio crackle memory, the fluorescent hum of a shift that runs till 4 a.m., the particular ache behind the eyes that comes from reading forty faces a night for the tell that means trouble. He works nights. This is why the gym at this hour, why the rest of the county is easing into a Friday morning and he is here mid-morning with his day only half spent, his night's shift eight, nine hours behind him and another one waiting after he's slept through the daylight like always.

The wedding band is warm from his skin and it opens wide — a whole marriage, not one memory but a weather system of them: Carol laughing at something dumb he said the first night they met at a wedding neither of them was invited to, technically; the three kids loud around a table that got smaller as they left one by one; the debt that sits under the house like a foundation crack nobody talks about anymore, the number so far underwater it stopped being a number and became just a low hum behind everything, a thing that made him take a second job dealing corporate poker nights and still didn't move the needle. He doesn't drink much. Never smoked, watched his own father cough himself down to nothing and swore off it before he ever started. The diabetes sits quiet in him too, a discipline of small daily corrections, a meter in a gym bag, a reason he's out here between sets instead of home asleep — his doctor's voice, his own stubbornness pushing back against age with iron and time under a bar.

You feel his hands wanting a pen that isn't there, that habit of clicking one when his mind wanders, and under all of it, steady as a second pulse, the creek out behind his house, the cable footbridge he crosses most evenings just to hear the water, green shade, brown current, nothing dramatic about it, just his.

Your — his — chest rises once, full, controlled, the last of that held breath from the rep finally let go.

You look down at his hands on your knees. The wedding band. The calluses shaped by a thousand nights of cards that are not in them now. You turn the right one over slowly, like you're checking it belongs to you, and lift your eyes to the mirror across the gym floor, to nothing, to no one, and say, low, almost amused at yourself:

"Whose deal is it."