Wendell Shrewsbury

You are standing on a tee box above the Han River with a driver across your shoulders, and the man you are wearing is twenty-nine and very good at this. The sun is warm on his forearms. A foursome waits behind you, and his body knows exactly how much to ask of the swing. It is the best body the wheel has ever given you. It also never wants anything. Every ball you hit lands where it was meant to land, and by the sixth hole you notice you've been waiting for a miss. You stand in his easy life with the club on your neck and you want something that costs more. You open the page.

The wheel turns. Seoul goes out like a hand over a lamp.

The rag is already moving. It goes around the belly of the brass twice more, and your arm, which is his arm, carries it a third time, slower. The chair is hard under you and the table edge presses your thigh. The air smells of brass polish, newsprint and cold coffee. A bare bulb hums overhead. Nothing pours out of the lamp and nothing answers. There is only the circle, and your hand keeps making it.

The flannel is soft with washing. Its cuffs are rolled twice, and the roll comes back to you as his. He rolled them in the dark of the hall this evening, thumbs working, after the long shift where he stood in the electronics aisle squaring boxes until the fronts lined up like teeth. He is proud of a straight shelf. Nobody has ever said so. You feel that pride, and it is small and clean and entirely his.

The rag is a piece of an old undershirt. A clip of memory comes loose: a girlfriend laughing in a kitchen, *Wendell, you can't keep every rag*, and his warmth at being known well enough to be teased. Under it is the plain gladness of a man who gets a second chance late. The lamp itself came out of a box at an estate sale, dented, green in the seams, and he bought it for two dollars because it looked like a thing somebody had once believed in. His thumb finds the dent. Behind it sits a bigger feeling, of a child on a porch holding a pull-string toy. Two children, grown now and far away. He sends money when he has it. He doesn't often have it.

His knees ache under the table, a dull fifty-eight-year-old ache. His back is tight from hours on concrete. The jeans are stiff at the thigh. In the pocket your fingers meet a bottle cap, and the heavy drinking comes back all at once, through the cap. Not a scene, just the weight of it: the careful walk past the mirror, the promise made on a Sunday in a pew, the hymn he still knows every verse of. He has not had one tonight. The quiet in him is the effort of not having one. He is polishing because his hands need a job.

The sleeve on the left rides up. Under the cloth there is a face on your upper arm, a black-and-gray portrait, and when your thumb passes over it something hurts, deep and old, a grief he never says aloud. The creek and the cable footbridge swing in his mind, green shade and brown water, a place he walks to be alone. You don't get the name. You get only how much he loved whoever it is.

Your palm is slick with polish. The brass has gone almost to mirror, and you can see a smear of bald head in it, a gray beard, a stranger's eyes. His eyes. Wendell was never patient enough for a shine like this, and it is finished now.

You lay the rag down. You turn the hand over under the bulb. It is wide and nicked, with a pale line of dried polish in the creases, and it is warm, and it is yours. Then you lift your eyes and say, in a voice gone low and Kentucky-rough, "Well. Look at that shine."

Somewhere behind the words the question is already there. How long will this one hold, and when will the wanting come back for you?