Page 31
He says it the way a man says a thing he has never examined, which is to say easily, and then it sits in the room long enough that he hears it himself.
“That came out worse than I meant it.”
“It came out accurately.”
He looks at me.
“Yeah.” He rubs his thumb along the edge of the table. “Carry my own bag. Mack gets it before I can tell him not to.”
There it is. Somebody else reaching first.
I know a great deal more about that answer than I intend to tell him.
“Take your shirt off.”
His eyebrows lift.
“For the assessment.”
“I was going to behave.”
“I had no such expectation.”
That gets the laugh he has been angling for since he walked in. I do not give him mine.
He takes the shirt off the way men with bad shoulders do. Left arm first. Head second. Right arm last and slowly.
Most of them make an audition out of it. They have spent a considerable amount of money on that torso and they would like it noticed, and so they wait, and I write.
He does it like a chore he has performed ten thousand times and has never enjoyed.
His left arm is sleeved to the shoulder, old and dark and well done, the kind of work a man adds to across years rather than buys in an afternoon. I have an opinion about that and I decline to have it in this room.
“Reach overhead.”
He does.
The arm rises higher than the numbers in his chart suggest it should, and his ribs go with it, and there is a flat white line of old scar above one hip where somebody closed him in a hurry.
“Again. This time keep your trunk still.”
“My trunk?”
“Your ribs. Your belt buckle should stay facing forward.”
He looks down. “You been watching my belt buckle, Doc?”
“No.”
“Fast answer.”
“Accurate answer. Again.”
The smile stays while he resets.
The corrected reach stops lower.
Much lower.
