Apology

her knees. She wanted to take him and hide him inside her. Her mouth was a lovely prison, he felt. He could spend his life there.
Her memory neared him, the smooth edges falling away. He could not get inside her fast enough. Before he could settle on the image, before he could see her entirely again, he immediately felt ashamed and crouched, rubbing his palm over the streaked wall and then to the grass and dirt.
All of it was cold already, its dampness. He imagined Mary coming now with a basket of warm clothes; her folding, and then handing him one of his own clean T-shirts to use.
Shoe, in his stooped way, walked around to the other side of the urinal. He dragged his right foot behind him. The boot made walking more difficult. Shoe put his lunchbox on top of a sawhorse and leaned against the equipment, waiting for anyone to appear at that point.
Where were they? Where were those who had ridiculed him for trying to pull himself out of the mess of the pit? They were probably at home still, rummaging in the darkness of their rooms while their wives slept off sickly sweet hangovers, or the crackling emptiness of meth.
Or there were no wives and never had been. He knew this situation best.
And what hadn’t he tried in the years it had taken him to arrive at this one moment? There were nights fused with white light burning, weeks lost entirely to his compulsions. Each time, it was mostly the same. Everything, in one form or another, left him hollowed out and waiting, or searching, for something to inhabit that space.
Once, when he had finished up a job in North Carolina, he left the empty motel where he was staying and walked across a nearby field. It was dusk, and he had come upon a design of poles that resembled a ship’s masts, the hull of that ship run aground in the surrounding farmland.
Hanging from the horizontal tiers were gourds painted white. Wide symmetrical holes had been bored into the bulbous ends. Martins were falling out of the sky, darting into the numerous shells of homes someone had taken the time to make for these birds. The gourds swung like pendulums, though at stranger intervals. Shoe had given up on chemicals by then. This image had come too late to warn him away from the life he had already led.
As for women, those he had loved were faceless, despite his attempts at summoning their images. Or they had merged into the same woman. He couldn’t remember which. Sometimes the culmination of memories made her hideous. Or if a passing thought came into sharp enough focus for him to give it his attention, she was always almost pretty. He could make out the outline of her eyes, or just fragments of the collective eyes that stared back at him from his past. Sometimes he laughed at his egalitarian lust. The shapes their eyes became, the different colors that made shadows, or the thick, salty scent of their skin, waves of hair that crashed endlessly within his mouth.
There had been one woman actually.
He had met her in a bar in Taos. He had taught the woman’s son to play chess, and sometimes, if it was still light when he came home from work, he and the boy would go out in the yard and kick a ball around.
He felt terrible when the boy, after some months, called him Dad. The mother had encouraged it. He could think of sadder things, yes, and it felt good to be someone’s father. Even if he knew he could never be the kind of man who would welcome the responsibility for the remainder of his life.
This mother and her son didn’t think it would be temporary.
It was this thought that haunted him some mornings when he woke, reaching absentmindedly for the emptiness beside him, or cocking his ear toward the ghost room that held the memory of the child, that same child waking in the dark and crying for him—Dad! Dad!—and him waking, hearing the call, and dragging his body into the darkness to disappear.
Shoe ran a hand along the nicked wood of the sawhorse; a determined hit to the largest cut could snap the sawhorse in half. He laughed at the thought. He knew he was no Bruce Lee.
If he owned a watch, he would have checked his wrist. He started to wonder if he had made a mistake. Had he missed the foreman telling the rest of the crew that they would have the day off? This seemed an impossibility. It wasn’t the weekend. But still, Shoe thought.
He struggled to climb on top of the bulldozer. Once there, he looked beyond the nearest street and out to the main road that fed into the neighborhood. There were headlights coming this way now, and he was glad for it. He decided it would probably be a good idea to have his shovel by his side once the foreman pulled up.
Still hunched over, with his right shoulder weighing him down as usual, he walked as best he could to the pit and turned around, easing his way into it. Like he was guiding himself down a ladder, rung by rung. His boots slid into the moist clay. Nothing seemed to have dried since he was last in this space.
When he reached the bottom, he stumbled. Something was on the ground. It made him fall against the far wall. When he looked down by his boots, there was just enough light to see the girl slumped on the floor, her head next to the shovel. Everything was still.
Shoe yelled, but his voice didn’t reach above him. He panicked. He tried to climb out with one huge jump, gripping near the opening, but he slid back down as if in slow motion. He tried again. Still, he fell back.
He thought she