Wyatt Kerrigan

You are standing in Frank Dellacroce's kitchen in Queens with his coffee going cold, and the thing that sent you back is the stairs. Sixty years old, and the knee says no to them. It said so this morning, a bright wet crack, and you stood at the bottom with the rail in your fist and thought: this is the body I paid for? Fourteen hundred and ninety-nine men, and you got a manager with a cleft chin and a gut that hangs over his belt like a coat on a hook. He had been you for less than a minute when you decided. You open the page. The wheel is already turning, and you let it.

Then the chain.

It is heavy and cold in your fingers, and it slips. One link drops wrong. You catch it, do it again slowly, correctly, and the hook goes home. Your breath is a young man's breath, deep and unbothered, and the air is thin and gray before sunrise. Dust hangs behind you, and cattle are shifting in it, low and warm.

Your hands know the gate. They do not know you.

The chain is rust-rough, and something opens. It is his father's voice, saying wrap it twice, you never trust the latch alone. Then a whole afternoon at fourteen, the same chain slick with rain and the same fear of being wrong in front of him. You feel it in your chest as a tight, proud ache that is not yours.

The shirt is soft denim, washed nearly to nothing, and the sleeves are rolled twice. You feel the morning he put it on: the dark kitchen, one lamp, buttoning from the bottom because the top button sticks. He thought about Jolene, the ex, her hair tie still on the dash of his truck, and he did not move it. He pulled the cuffs down against the cold and snapped them one at a time, left, then right. He ate nothing and drank black coffee standing up.

The chaps hang heavy on your thighs, the leather stiff and slick with years. He buckled them in the dark by feel, and the fringe tapped his leg. The hat brim shades your eyes. The beard is itchy at the jaw and warm against your neck. The boots grip the gravel, and a spur ticks when you shift. Your shoulders are strong, your back is sore in a clean way, and nothing in the knees complains. Twenty-three. It is almost rude.

Your thumb finds the edge of the nail on your other hand and picks. You did not tell it to. A small raw habit comes with a flash of him at a funeral, at a bar, in a truck, always picking, always worrying something he could not say. Under that, quietly, is the money, more than anyone here would guess, and the land, and a loneliness he never named.

You look at your hands. They are broad and freckled, with calluses like coins. You turn them over. Then you lift your eyes to the pale road and the water tower, the day not started yet.

"Huh," you say, in a voice rougher than you expected. "So this is you."

The cattle shift. Your thumb goes back to the cuticle. You wonder how long this lasts, whether the wanting comes back by noon, or tonight, or in four minutes.