Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

by Peter Orner

  Which is what happened, for three months, but mostly they watched television and ate bag after bag of sour-cream-and-onion Doritos. They’d talk about how fat real Americans were compared to TV Americans, except for Roseanne and her husband. (Why aren’t their kids fat, though?) They’d sit and wonder whether they’d bloom out like sandbags after they got their citizenship. Ted was a small man, half the size of Lyubomir. She could have picked him up and tossed him. They’d talk about how stupid the shows were, and how this stupidity, which was genuine stupidity, was something to laugh at, but also to be wary of. All the dollars in the universe, Ted would murmur, and this is what they do with it.

  One night, after two in the morning, the two of them on the living-room floor, naked beneath a thin blanket, the TV light casting a gray pallor over the furniture, the volume down so low all they could hear was faint laughter, and suddenly the child in the bedroom begins to shout. Amid all the unrecognizable words, it was possible to make out: Dyado! Dyado! Ted’s first thought was that it meant father, that the crafty boy knew the only way to rid his mother’s house of this interloper was to cry out at the worst possible moment. After she’d buttoned her shirt and gone to the boy’s room, he’d remained on the floor, motionless, a couch cushion beneath his head. Maritsa. She told him she’d been named after a river. He tries to picture a river quietly gurgling through a snow-hushed forest in a country that he will never see. Yet he’s never had any talent for conjuring trees or woods or rivers, and the image gives way to her face.

  Now she is back from the boy’s room, settled under the throw, her head next to his on the cushion. She rubs his wrist.

  “Hey.”

  “What was that about?”

  “It’s all right.”

  “His father?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Only a nightmare.”

  Maritsa told him a strange thing then. She spoke in his ear. In the dream, Damyan had been shouting, not for Lyubomir, but for his grandfather, her father, a man who died before Damyan was even born. He was warning him about a truck. A famous family story. The kid must have heard it a thousand times.

  “My father was hit by a truck, but he lived. The story is always told this way. After the war, Dyado got hit by a truck on Ravoski Street. He was flattened—he never walked again—but he didn’t die. The Slavs couldn’t kill him, the Germans couldn’t kill him, the Russians couldn’t kill him. Not even a truck.”

  They lay in the silence, the TV light crawling, then retreating, across the walls.

  Later, years later, Ted will think of that night. A woman named Maritsa. The two of them on the floor. Her boy shouting in the night, warning a man already long dead. Dyado, the truck! Are warnings ever timely?

  Damyan stares at his mother. They’re at the post office mailing letters. Her mascara makes her eyes look too wide open.

  “What is it?”

  “Ted doesn’t come anymore.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She looks past the top of her son’s head, through the slits in the blinds, at the pieces of cars flinging by. You chased him away. Anyway, it wasn’t love. I’ve ruined your father. She says nothing.

  The boy waits, looks at his mother, and knows she will keep taking walks, alone, even after his father comes, if his father comes, and that the walks will have nothing to do with her friend from English class, or any other man, including his father. Still, he tries to be kind.

  “Maybe he’ll come back,” he says.

  LUBYANKA PRISON, MOSCOW, 1940

  A tired man, when he laughed, he seemed absolutely alone on earth.

  —ILYA KAMINSKY, “TRAVELING MUSICIANS”

  They beat him with the sawed-off legs of a chair until he admitted to being an agent of the French intelligence services. To his interrogators, Babel wrote, “If you are fundamentally flawed, then perfect this flaw in yourself and raise it to the level of art.” Did they have any idea what he was trying to say? What was he trying to say? His trial lasted twenty minutes. Nothing was especially comic about any of it, but he of all people thought he should be able to find something. Will this be my last failure? Tragedy is underdeveloped comedy. An Irishman said that. Of the two guards escorting him to the place against a shiny white wall—it must be someone’s job to clean it—he noticed the smaller one to his right, his immaculately groomed beard and his breath like sweetly rotting pears. Of the guard on his left, he noted only that he was more ape than man, which struck him as an uninspiring observation. His own feet, he noticed them also. One was very cold and one seemed to be on fire. The guard on his left, the big one—Babel imagines his wife’s small, chapped hands. The guard on the left will rub them tonight, the sad nooks between his wife’s dry fingers. This ape. She’ll ask: And today? And he’ll say, Nothing much. A little Jew in glasses, twelve or so others. Come closer, won’t you ever come closer?

  FEBRUARY 26, 1995

  A Chinese restaurant in a strip mall off I-495 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, just across the road from the huge, white, boxlike Showcase Cinemas. Seitz looked out the window and watched the cars leaving the parking lot. The restaurant was dark. Each table had its own light, a small round bulb behind a red shade. Seitz thought: Our own sad moon. He listened to two ladies chat in the next booth.

  “No kidding. Every day she goes home to make dinner for a man who’s been dead seventeen years.”

  “Like my cousin Aurelia, long conversations with her cat. She talks and talks and then pauses while she listens to the cat.”

  His food arrived. Seitz ate slowly, as was his habit. He always looked closely at each bite of food before he put it in his mouth. There was a commotion. The waiter and the manager ran back and forth between the kitchen and the men’s room, both of which were in the back of the restaurant. They tried not to shout. A hushed panicked way of whispering. Ten or so minutes later, the police arrived, followed immediately by the paramedics. The cops asked everybody, seven people in total, a family of four, the two ladies, himself, if they would please step outside and wait to be questioned. Bring your coats, please. There was one table with a plate of half-eaten food and a full beer but no diner.

  Out on the sidewalk one of the ladies said, “See, Marion, something’s always happening. Last week, the flat tire and running into Cindy Donatello after how many eons? Not that she’s still not haughty.”

  Seitz and the waiter leaned against a parked car and watched more cops arrive. These upper-level cops, or so Seitz imagined that’s what they were, moved languidly, confidently, like they did on television. He wondered if they sat around all day waiting for things like this, like actors in their dressing rooms.

  “Not that cold,” the waiter said.

  “Actually not,” Seitz said. “Unseasonable.”

  The waiter assured him that what had happened had nothing to do with the food. “I’m not saying it’s especially great,” the waiter said.

  “What happened?”

  “Guy got whacked in the men’s room.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Only once or twice in the head,” the waiter said. “But enough.”

  “Dead?”

  “Totally.”

  “And nobody heard?”

  “Hand drier was on. The thing sounds like a plane landing.”

  A cop came up to Seitz. “You a patron?”

  “Patron?”

  “Could I ask you a few questions?”

  The cop led him to one of the squad cars. They stood by the hood. The sun was down, but the parking lot lights remained bright. The squad car was still running, which added to the sense of excitement. Seitz explained that he’d been on his way home from a sales call in Kittery, Maine, when he’d gotten hungry. He’d never been to the place before, just passing by. Hadn’t heard a thing.

  “What do you sell?”

  “Hardware.”

  “Wrenches, hammers?”

  “Computer hardware.”

  “Oh, rig
ht, right. What’s your name?”

  “Donald Seitz.”

  “And your address, Mr. Seitz?”

  “One twenty-nine Florence Street. Malden, Mass. 02148.”

  All Seitz knew about Lawrence was what he read in the papers, that it was a city on fire. This was in 1995, and Lawrence was the arson capital of the country. Building by building, block by block, they were burning the old mill town down. Seitz thought of waking up in the night and seeing the sunrise glow at the wrong time of day. He could see the attraction, almost the love you had to have of old buildings, these red-brick New England monstrosities, to want to see them turned to ash. Think of the heat you need to burn brick. Of course, out here by the highway, you couldn’t see the city at all. Out here wasn’t Lawrence or anywhere really. He thought of the dead man. He thought of his unfinished plate of food.

  The manager apologized to everyone personally and handed out coupons. The family and the two ladies walked to their cars. Then Seitz, too, left for home.

  Murders weren’t uncommon in Lawrence, but they weren’t an epidemic, either. This one wouldn’t have made the Boston press had it not been for the novel way the man had been killed. Slaughtered like a veal calf in a bathroom stall during business hours. The metro section of the Boston Herald ran the story for a couple of days. After that there wasn’t anything more to say. The bathroom window was found open. Police concluded that the killer must have come in and out the window. The murdered man was named Patrick Laplante. Unemployed, the Herald said, long history of drug-related arrests.

  Seitz drove the forty miles back to the restaurant a week later. He was a man who redeemed coupons. Why not? It’s like money in your pocket. A few days later, he drove up again, though he had no business in Kittery or anywhere else north of Boston. At first the waiter and the manager, Mr. Lee (who turned out to be the owner), said they knew nothing more about the Laplante murder than he did. But after a while they started telling him things. The waiter said there was no lack of suspects.

  “One detective told me that he was thinking of putting up a wanted poster offering a reward for anybody who didn’t have a reason to off Patrick Laplante. He was a runner, a little old for it. He never advanced beyond street level distribution. The word is he was skimming more than an acceptable amount off the top. Both the other runners and the chiefs wanted him over with.”

  Mr. Lee told him about the new policy. The door to the men’s room was to remain open at all times. No exceptions. It made things awkward, but what choice did he have? He also had the hand drier dismantled and brought back paper towels. “Supposed to save me money,” Mr. Lee said. “Damn thing ruins me.”

  Seitz became a regular customer. He’d never been a regular before. With it came a kind of belonging he’d never craved, yet he found it wasn’t unpleasant. The waiter brought him a Sprite and a lemon without his asking. They must have thought he was an investigative reporter or a private investigator of some sort, a fiction he didn’t discourage by taking notes on cocktail napkins. Seitz never ventured into Lawrence itself. The restaurant and the land around it were enough. Enough for what? He wasn’t entirely sure. Looking out the window, Seitz thought about what used to be here. Woods? After that, farmland? That’s the way he always understood it, but how could anybody tell? The grass along the interstate was well watered, but whoever walked on it? Still, you couldn’t act like this place didn’t exist. Hadn’t something happened here, too, the ultimate thing?

  Donald Seitz was a bachelor who in ten years had been with three different women, one of whom he loved. She was married when they met. She left her husband for him. Seeing how easy that was, she left Seitz a few months later. He’d always had a talent for not being lonely. He thought vaguely of his childhood, how his desire to be alone unnerved people. His mother once took him to a doctor about it. In particular, Seitz had always preferred to eat alone, at home. The Laplante murder changed this in a way that, again, he couldn’t quite explain. He found himself more and more intrigued by eating alone in public. He marveled at all the things he’d been missing. Think of all that can be snuffed out, irrevocably, while you fumble through your mu shu pork with plastic chopsticks.

  Four months later Seitz was sitting in what had become his booth. A Tuesday night, around 8:30. In his reflection in the window he watched how the soft skin beneath his jaw tightened as he chewed, transforming his face into someone he’d never seen before. The waiter approached. Seitz smiled.

  “Mind if I sit?”

  “Of course not.” Seitz shoved his plate away.

  “No, keep eating.”

  The waiter wasn’t Chinese. He liked to show off the few words in Cantonese that Mrs. Lee, the cook, had taught him. The waiter’s eyes were droopy and his skin was pale in spots, red with pimples in others. Seitz took a pen out of his jacket pocket and uncapped it.

  “I’d rather you not write this.”

  “Not a problem.”

  Seitz glanced up at Mr. Lee, who was watching them from his post behind the bar, a towel over his shoulder. He and Mrs. Lee often argued. They always tried to keep their voices down, but eventually their voices would reach such high notes their fights became operatic. Something told Seitz that whatever made them so excited never had anything to do with the restaurant. Possibility here as well, in the arguments other people have that we’ll never know the origins of or even understand. How much drama lost?

  He smiled again at the waiter. “Call me all-ears,” Seitz said.

  The waiter leaned forward. “It’s about that night—Laplante.”

  “Yes.”

  “I compromised the scene.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The waiter put both hands on the table and edged even closer. In the red moonish light, his face didn’t look as young as it did from farther away. He always looked twenty, twenty-five, but right now he could have been ten years older.

  “I moved the body—just a little—but who knows? Maybe I wrecked the whole investigation. All I did was tug his foot and pull him off the seat. Any idiot could see he was dead. He hardly had a mouth or nose left to breathe out of. The guy really got clocked. I just wanted to give him some dignity.”

  “Sounds like you did him a good turn, a human thing.”

  “But with all this O.J. stuff, L.A.P.D. and contamination and all that, I just worry—”

  “From what I understand,” Seitz said, “these cops couldn’t have found the killer if he left a trail of egg rolls to his house,” Seitz said. “What would a few inches matter in an investigation like this?”

  The waiter laughed, but his eyes moistened. Tears?

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “Why wouldn’t I believe you?”

  The large, pimpled face stared. Mr. Lee coughed. A couple were waiting to place their order. The waiter slid out of the booth. Seitz went to the men’s room and poked around, tried to feel something. What? An absence? The place was nothing but clean.

  That night he went to a late movie at the Showcase. A comedy, a love story. Seitz was one of the few people in the audience. He watched the silhouettes of solitary heads in the darkness. He’d never been much of a moviegoer, too much noise and commotion. And they’d always taken him too far away. It would take hours to adjust sometimes, to return to being Don Seitz. After, he walked to his car and turned the key, but rather than unlocking the door, he locked it. I forgot to lock it? Maybe it was the movie, the surging out the exit door into the night, even a movie like this, a movie already half forgotten. He felt almost giddy. There was a tingling in his feet, his toes. He turned the key the other way and got in the car. After a few minutes of stillness, he adjusted the rearview and, in the great brightness of the overhead lights, met another pair of eyes.

  “I’m not a reporter,” Seitz said.

  “I know,” the waiter said.

  “I’m not anybody.”

  “I know.”

  “Only curious.”

  “Yes.”

  Seitz
looked out at the few scattered cars remaining in the vast parking lot. It looked like an emptied harbor. Tomorrow all the cars would be back. He wondered if he’d be burned or simply left cold.

  LATE DUSK, JOSLIN, ILLINOIS

  Even the shadows are green tonight. Deb watches the moon. It’s out early. Also, it is too hot for October and the crickets are confused. By October they are supposed to shriek less loudly. By October their hysteria is supposed to dissipate. By October there is supposed to be calm. By October—not this October, another one—she promised herself she’d be gone. She once said to Carl, If you were a real man, you’d get me the hell out of here. He just looked at her and scratched his cheek. He wasn’t a man to answer when spoken to like that. Not taking the bait was his specialty. If Carl were a fish, he’d live forever. Either that or he’d starve. But even she has to admit there’s beauty in this green, practically breathable light. The land stretching away into it. The power line towers also. Even the driveway. Even the shed. All coated. All still. Carl says the land is here for us to build on. Here for us to expand on. That’s what it’s here for. As soon as the fiscal year is through, he’s going to make an appointment to talk to the architect. The initial permits will have been approved by then and so—

  Weather said a storm this afternoon but it never came. She likes to watch the storms meander this way from out beyond Dixon. The lightning like a jabbing finger choosing, choosing. Now the light itself is enough. Carl’s on his way home, singing along to the radio unless there’s a commercial. Sometimes he even sings to those. Carl, you stupid fuck. The land will bury you. This land, any land. Least any sane person would do is leave. How many times do I have to say it? Deb gulps the light, wishing she hated it, wishing she didn’t only want to stand here and watch it tonight, wishing for courage, stupidity, anything other than reverence. This strange, breathable light, this lifeblood light.