Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

by Peter Orner

  PART IV

  Country of Us

  Hush, Luster said. Looking for them aint going to do no good, they’re gone.

  —WILLIAM FAULKNER, THE SOUND AND THE FURY

  WALDHEIM

  Sam Koplovitz was a bookbinder and died poor, and so a burial society called the Sons of Maccabee dug him a grave at Waldheim, a fallow field west of Chicago on the banks of the Des Plaines River. For years he’d been paying that outfit seven dollars annually for a two-plot. As long as he paid up, he figured, he wouldn’t croak. This wishful thinking was effective until March 1941. But here’s the thing: when the time came near for his wife, Rose, thirty-plus years later, she flat out refused to go to Waldheim. It wasn’t that she hadn’t loved him. She had. His dumbo ears, his monologues from the toilet. The way he never sat in a chair without taking his belt off first. But she said now that her daughter’s husband had money, they’d have to kill her first before she stuck one dead toenail way the hell out there at Waldheim. They buried her in Skokie near the new mall in the early seventies. Of course, Sam doesn’t know this, and by his calculations Rose must be getting on near a hundred and thirty, and he continues to marvel at the strength of her constitution and the progress of modern medicine while at the same time chastising himself for being lonely and wishing that it would end so she would come to him.

  RENTERS

  Frank had never been one to fight back in the heat of any moment. He would usually wait a few days and then state his opposition to some plan or another of hers without warning. As a strategy for getting his way this usually failed miserably. Marie had just stepped out of the tub when he announced: “Since when have you needed my permission for anything, ever?”

  “Is this an ambush?”

  He tried to hand her a towel, but she wouldn’t take it.

  “You’re wet.”

  “Am I?” Marie said. “Really?”

  “I’ve been giving it thought.”

  “It?”

  “The firearm we discussed.”

  “Oh, that. I’m not asking. I want it. They’re two entirely different things.”

  “We’re going to keep up with the treatments. Another six months and we’ll know—”

  “Bad enough every doctor lies to me, but to have you, too. I know it, I feel it. Frankly, Frank—”

  “Please, no frankly Franks—”

  “Don’t make me laugh. Hurts.”

  “—and if we want a second opinion before then, we can always go to Sioux Falls—”

  “Whether I’d ever have the guts is another story. I want the comfort. That’s all. Look at me.”

  “I’m looking.”

  “Fuck Sioux Falls.”

  He tried giving her the towel again. She wouldn’t take it and stood there, water on her bony shoulders.

  “Now you’re looking.”

  “Not very comfortable for me.”

  “You? We’re talking about you?”

  A half hour later, he went down into the basement and rummaged around. Most of their stuff was still unpacked from the move. He found his 20-gauge in a narrow cardboard box that also held the vacuum cleaner and a barbell. A few times a year he went pheasant hunting with colleagues from his department. He walked slowly up the stairs. She was standing at the kitchen sink with a mug of coffee. He put the shotgun on the table.

  “That?”

  “I’ll have to buy some shells.”

  “Something for under my pillow, Frank. You know I’m talking about something for under my pillow.”

  A few weeks later, Frank drove by the old house. Was it a few weeks? Lack of sleep warped time. It was six thirty in the evening in mid-September and the glass in the big front window was burning in the slowly dissipating light. Frank slowed down, considered stopping, but didn’t. It felt disloyal to even look at the place. Still, the farther away from the house he drove, the more he saw the blur of those flames in the window.

  Cleaned out, not much of a trace of the years they spent there except possibly the remains of Marie’s garden. Years ago, Frank had built a snow fence to protect the garden from the wind and the deer. Marie would spend Sunday hours out there, squatting and puttering, talking to her plants, coaxing the soil. He thinks of a few stubborn tomatoes, withered lettuce, some hearty beets. Between the two tall maples in the side yard, there might still be a few broken plastic clothespins in the dirt. Moving your stuff out of a place is like unloading a ship, except an empty house doesn’t sail away beyond the horizon. It sits there and waits for you to return. All you have to do one day is head west, on Route 14, because you don’t want to go home right away, and there it is, halfway to Volga, the house, their house. It was never theirs, legally, anyway. Though they didn’t have to be, Marie and Frank were renters, they’d always be renters. They’d never wanted to be beholden. Renting had always felt more free. They could always pick up and move somewhere else, which must be why they never did. If you execute the choice, you lose the choice. When they finally did move back to Brookings to be closer to the clinic, they thought about buying a place, but they were in their mid-fifties now. What would be the point? Especially now. All things being equal, which they weren’t, wouldn’t rent and a mortgage amount to pretty much the same thing for a couple without kids? In their mid-forties, they’d said the same thing. How did they think they’d avoid becoming beholden? Frank spun the car around. As he drove back east, he passed the house once again and thought of them at the windows. How many times had the two of them stood at those windows?

  Neither Marie nor Frank was a native. In 1975, they’d moved here from Chicago to teach at South Dakota State. Marie was a nineteenth-century Americanist; Frank taught classics. While the favorite pastime of many of their colleagues was to try and conjure up what heinous crime they must have committed in some other life to deserve exile in this moonscape among the earnest corn-fed, Marie and Frank had come, over the years, to consider eastern South Dakota the only place that would ever be home. Surrounded on all sides by the gentle undulations out near the edge of the horizon. To call this flat isn’t really to look at it. The land rolls, as if it’s always in motion. The switch grass leaning away from the wind. Here and there a clump of trees, and a little over a mile from home, or what used to be home, but still on the property, a hidden arroyo, a private wound in the earth. Only Marie and Frank knew where it was.

  But for those front windows, the house itself had been nothing special. The bedrooms were tiny squares, though there were more of them than they needed. They each had one of their own for an office, and one together, which made them feel a little ludicrous and also rich. Sometimes they’d invite each other to their office. Even as recently as a couple of years ago, they still did things like that, slide messages under the doors of their own house. Hey. You busy? Once or twice a summer, they chained Rudy up (they hated to do it, Rudy liked nothing more than roaming when they took walks, this was the single exception), walked to the arroyo, climbed down into that grove of soft sand, and put down a blanket. Nobody knew it. It wasn’t like they showed off to their friends. Look at us, after all these years. Marie’s long red hair spread across the sand. Rudy howling—

  She’d stopped appearing in his dreams. Now he’s afraid to fall asleep. Lying there beside her, awake, hours, awake—most disloyal of all, he’s begun to remember her as if she’s already gone.

  It was Marie who had found the house. It was Marie who had insisted, so many years ago now, that they move outside of Brookings. Frank had protested, asked what would be the point, it’s not like we’re tenant farmers. But Marie said, If we’re going to live here, let’s at least endure the landscape.

  “You mean experience?”

  “That, too.”

  It had been a long time since anybody farmed the land that went with the house. Schactler, their old landlord, had two other farms in Beadle County but always meant to restart operations on theirs. Every time he came by to collect the rent, he said, “Won’t be long now before you hear th
e sound of the tractor out here, you two won’t mind a little noise?” But neither of his sons came home from college in the East as they’d promised. Nothing made Schactler prouder than that his sons were too good to come home to South Dakota and work the land with their father. Even so, he slaved away, keeping the other farms going, and so was content to get a little house rent off the third place. Schactler once said renting a house was one thing, to rent out land another. He couldn’t stomach what another man might do with it. Like your woman, he said, winking at Frank. Marie said Schactler might be an unreconstructed Neanderthal, but what he said about land made sense. There’s a way to call something sacred without getting high and mighty about it. After his wife died, Schactler slowly began to slow down. He stopped talking farming the third farm, stopped talking about his boys coming home. Mrs. Schactler had been a kind, shrewd woman who always complimented Frank on Marie. What’s a homely-looking character doing with a fiery sass like that? And she never got on them, even with her eyes, as God knows so many other people did for years, about: where were the children.

  For years, in early May, Schactler used to light a controlled burn to prepare the fields around the house for the planting he never got around to doing. The glow of those fires. How they’d turn off all the lamps and stand at the window and watch the flames poke up into the night. Last he heard, Schactler was in a nursing home in Aberdeen. Soon his boys would come home to sell all three farms.

  He thought of the way the night wind would press against the big window, as if someone were out in the dark pushing against it with both hands.

  In the old kitchen, her head lying on a stack of student papers, her eyes wide open, the sun a rising layer of pink on the outer fields.

  “Come to bed.”

  “Tomorrow’s tiring.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Even the plants exhaust me, the toaster—”

  Raising her head in the blue dawn, eyes blazing, not tired at all.

  “Stop being terrified, Frank. We can’t both be. Who’ll remember to feed the dog?”

  “Isn’t arroyo a gorgeous word?” Marie said.

  “It is.”

  “Origin?”

  “Everyone else around here says creek, it’s only us—”

  “Origin?”

  “Spanish. Pre-Roman.”

  “It’s like a nook, a cranny. All my life I’ve been looking for a good cranny. Bury me here.”

  “Stop.”

  “It’s just biology. It’s all just biology.”

  “Marie.”

  “You won’t?”

  “Furthermore,” Frank said, “it’s a zoning issue. You can’t just bury people—”

  That night, after driving by the old house, he did find Rudy barking along the fence line of the new house when he pulled up. He leaped out of the car and flung open the front door and found Marie lying on the couch, her head thrown back against the armrest, a book on the floor. He ran across the carpet, knelt, and gripped her knees. He looked up at the bare walls. Their paintings and posters and framed photographs were still in boxes from the move, though they had already lived eight months in this new place. Couldn’t he at least have unpacked a few and nailed up some pictures? Why had he waited so long? He gripped her knees. The leash of the oxygen tank gently resting on her bare clavicle. After a moment, under his own heavy breathing, hers, shallow, nearly silent. He lifted his head and watched her sleep and waited for the relief that was sure to wash over him. He waited, and still it didn’t come. The fires, M., do you remember Schactler’s fires?

  Don’t forgive me—

  ON THE 14

  On the Mission bus today I sat across from Uncle Horace who has been dead for twenty-odd years. The last time I saw him was at Aunt Molly’s in Fall River. On the bus, he looked tired. He was barefoot. He looked like he didn’t want to talk. When I knew him, Uncle Horace always wanted to talk. He always wanted to tell you who he knew. Horace was a man who made great claims of knowing people. Chiang Kai-shek, Julius Rosenwald, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Shake the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand of John L. Sullivan! On the bus, he was bedraggled, as if God had left him out in the rain for decades. The bus was hot and crowded, our breath was clouding the windows. There was no room to take off our coats. At Fourteenth and Mission, an enormous teetering woman with uncountable numbers of Safeway bags got on and my uncle shot up from his seat, swooped his arm, and announced, Madam, to your rest!

  Standing on the bus now, my uncle was hunchbacked. He’d always had great posture. (“At Eton,” he used to say, “we always ate sitting to the trot.”) On the bus he was so stooped over I could have set a table on him, and would have, too, if I’d had some dishes. We could have had tea and crumpets like old times. Bent, drenched, broke, pilloried, my dead uncle. He slipped the woman with the bags of groceries his card and told her to come by his office Tuesday after lunch.

  “I’m back from the club by 2:30 at the latest. Bring your checkbook, My Lady. Or cash.”

  He began moving through the crowd, handing out his card. “Wise up, people. Money begets money. You want to ride the Fourteen for the rest of your lives?”

  When my stop was next, I yanked the cord and got up, stood by the middle door. A moment later, a moist, oddly soft hand enwrapped my neck. I turned to him, and he spoke as if I was me but also as if this didn’t matter, as if my being myself, whoever this was, couldn’t have less to do with anything.

  “Nobody can take them away from you,” he said, his little face bunched, his shoulders rising past his ears.

  “What?”

  Those fingers on my neck, not holding exactly, only resting, almost as though he were gently feeling my pulse, as if I was the one—

  “The lies you tell are the only things that stay,” Horace said. “Truth won’t get you a cup of coffee in hell. Forget about the Ritz, honey.”

  “But,” I said, “because of your lies, they all died broke. Haddy, Charlie, Pauline, Nelson, Dotty, Stanley, Ida, Molly—Grandma Sarah used to say that you went for everybody in town’s quarters, but when it came to relations, you went for their nickels, too.”

  “A tony relative in every family. You play your part, you do your share.”

  “And everyone ponied up—except Irv Pincus, who could always smell a rat when a rat—”

  “Still, not a bad record.”

  “Yes, and it was you—”

  “It was I!”

  “Proud?”

  “I was loaded. They all wanted what I had. I’m blame? I’m criminal?”

  “But the only reason you had what you had was because they gave you all their money.”

  “A technicality!”

  “Grandpa Walt dropped dead after reading his bank statement.”

  “Your grandfather had a weak heart. Not to mention no stomach for business.”

  “Your own son—Monroe—finally went bonkers. They had to lock him up at Taunton State five years ago.”

  “The Ginsburgs have no lunacy.”

  “He literally tore his hair out of his head with his hands—”

  “Must have been on his mother’s side.”

  “Remorse?”

  Uncle Horace stood up a little straighter. “A legacy, boy, a legacy. May you leave one yourself. That way you wouldn’t have to steal mine. Then again, how much do you think it’s worth? How about we go seventy/thirty? Go ahead sell it, sell it all!”

  “And Josephine?”

  “Leave her out of this happy reunion.”

  “I mean the humiliation—”

  “I said leave her out—”

  “—to beg for handouts from her own flesh and blood, the very people you plundered—”

  “Not once did she beg. Listen: Nobody didn’t love Josephine. If I’d been the Boston Strangler, they’d have emptied their pockets—”

  “And they did! They did!”

  “And may you for a single day of your life, for one hour, know the kind of love that I—”


  “Wait, what are you doing in California?”

  “Everybody ends up in California.”

  The doors flapped open: Twentieth Street. Before he stepped down, Uncle Horace leaned to me. That old smell again, of Aunt Molly’s. A reek of bleach and onions. He smooched one ear, then the other.

  “Sayonara, turkeyboy.”

  LONGFELLOW

  My brother used to terrorize me with a small rubber hippopotamus named Longfellow. He was about the size of a tooth, and he spoke in an extremely high, piercing voice. Longfellow said it wasn’t my fault I was so limited intellectually, that it was simply the luck of the draw and with hard work, and perhaps some family connections, one day I might be able to eke out a living. Now, Big Bill Thompson-Fox was the mayor of the town where Longfellow lived. Unlike Longfellow, the mayor was kind to me. The town was called Pubic, Illinois. Big Bill Thompson-Fox was a finger puppet of a fox in a policeman’s uniform and my brother endowed him with the gentle, patient drawl of Sheriff Andy Taylor. A child psychologist might say that Longfellow and Big Bill Thompson-Fox represented the two sides of my brother’s nature. On the one hand, I was his brother and he hated me, and on the other hand, I was his brother and he loved me. I don’t know. All I know is that Big Bill’s kindness barely made a dent, because even though he had a relatively important job (part-time mayor of a town of about 550 Pubians) and Longfellow didn’t seem to have a job at all, the mayor was no match for the hippo.

  I also lived in Pubic, or my voice did. I was the voice of the Matchbox Chevrolet Caprice that served as Big Bill Thompson-Fox’s limousine. I wasn’t supposed to say any words. The car didn’t know any. My role was to make automotive noises at appropriate moments. As I say, Longfellow’s chief preoccupation was making me cry, but he also spent much of his time and energy disrupting city council meetings and haranguing Big Bill Thompson-Fox for things like misappropriation of public funds, giving out no-bid contracts to shadowy underworld cronies, and in general fostering a culture of corruption that pervaded Pubic from the lowliest branch post office to the fifth floor of City Hall. One day Longfellow advocated impeachment of Big Bill after he allowed me (i.e., his car) to vote on an important resolution that would have limited fluorocarbon emissions. Longfellow claimed that it was a blatant conflict of interest. For the record, I voted against the resolution, because I felt that any restrictions on the auto industry would have resulted in the loss of American jobs. After Longfellow raised his loud objections (Kickbacks! Backroom cigars! Sweetheart deals!), Big Bill Thompson-Fox, in what I thought was a pretty brilliant switcheroo, claimed that my vote actually hadn’t counted, that it was nonbinding. “In certain circumstances,” Mayor Thompson-Fox said, “interested members of the public may, according to our charter, weigh in, in a purely advisory capacity, on matters of particular interest, in order to give them more of a voice in government. It’s a unique and quite participatory feature of our democracy here in Pubic. It’s actually based on a pre-Napoleonic French model.”