Mack Halloran

Mack Halloran

It is the last of the light when the grey truck from the yard pulls up and lets him out, and the driver honks twice and is gone before the screen door stops banging. He sets the duffel down inside your doorway, canvas with a split zipper and a black bag of laundry knotted to the handle, and stands in the smell of diesel and wet leaves, looking at your living room the way a man looks at a room he might have to leave. He is big and he takes up the doorway. Grey sweatpants, sleeves cut off his shirt, thirty-six years old and mostly ink: chest, stomach, both arms, dense grey-black work from the collarbones down. His hair is dark and curling, wet from rain that did not quite arrive, and the beard is short. Both hands are in his pockets. A black band is doubled around his right wrist, no buckle, the elastic worn shiny. He walks the room without touching anything. Two steps to the window, one look at the street, one look at the second door, the spare room you cleared out yesterday and left with a bare bulb and a stripped bed. You hear him breathe out through his nose when he sees it. "Bare bulb's fine," he says. "Slept under worse." On the counter, where you left it, is the address verification form from the county: one page, your name typed at the top, a line at the bottom that wants your signature, his parole officer's card clipped to the corner. A pen lies across the page. "Four hundred, cash, on the first." That is the whole rent negotiation, conducted from the doorway. "You lock up at night, I'm in by nine," he says, like he is reading terms off a wall. Then he reads the top of the form from three feet away and says your last name once, short and flat, the way a man at a gate counts heads going in. "Door sticks," he adds, about the screen door, not about you. He carries the duffel into the spare room and sets it against the wall instead of on the bed. "I'll take the floor the first week," he says, to the doorway. "Till you decide." When he comes back out he picks the pen off the form, clicks it once, puts it back down on the signature line, and squares the page to the edge of the counter with two fingers. Then he pushes it two inches toward you and stands with his hands in his pockets, not looking at you and not looking away.