4

When Miguel walks through the door into the kitchen it is late.  His jacket comes off and he stands for a moment in the dim light.  He leans heavily on the back of the chair, pushing down on it and then sliding it quietly out from the table, he sits.  

In the bedroom, Inez sleeps and their baby, wrapped in a blanket and cozy at the bottom of the crib's protective cage, dreams of faces and sounds.  Miguel's hand rests on kitchen table and his face is weary and his eyes cast upon the black plastic of the pepper shaker and the white plastic of it's neighbor.  His gaze lingers for a few minutes and then he breathes in with purpose and exhales with languor.  

In the bedroom, Miguel looks first at the soft, buried mound of Inez and then touches the soft blanket covering the baby.  Undressing and laying down next to Inez, a strong tide of sleep covers him and he is lost under the washing flow.  He dreams that long night of fire, of the junkyard and of its piles--patchwork colors of rusted metal, blue and orange, rusted and heaping--and at the center a flashing strobe of memory, of something in the past lurching forward, the black heat of burning tires.  Miguel notices the man standing near the fire.  They separated by a few yards and then are standing side by side, in the sudden manner that dreams may shift.  The man lists sided to side, unsteady.  He reeks of liquor, his heavy eyelids closed and his mouth slightly agape--a sleepwalker wandered into another man's dream.  Miguel can see his hands, crusted and dark the deep redblack of old blood.  The clothes workworn and stained, the gray hair shapeless and the fire's light playing against the scrap metal bent and twisted.