Peter Orner - Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

Pampkin’s hand crept across the table toward my father’s. Gently he clutched my father’s wrist.

“Do you know what she said? She said, ‘You have no idea how this feels.’ I said, ‘Maureen, I thought I did.’ ”

“More coffee, Mike?”

“Please.”

But he didn’t let go of my father’s wrist, and my father didn’t try to pull it away. Pampkin kept talking.

“You get to a point you think you can’t be surprised. I knew a lady once, a blind lady. Lived on Archer. Every day she went to the same store up the block. Every day for thirty-five years. She knows this stretch of block as if she laid the cement for the sidewalk herself. It’s her universe. One day they’re doing some sewage work and some nudnik forgets to replace the manhole cover and vamoose. She drops. Crazy that she lived. Broke both legs. It cost the city four hundred thousand on the tort claim to settle it. I’m talking about this kind of out-of-nowhere.”

My father sat there and watched him.

“Or let’s say you’re on Delta. Sipping a Bloody Mary. Seat-belt sign’s off. There’s a jolt. Unanticipated turbulence, they call it. It happened to a cousin of Vito Marzullo. All he was trying to do was go to Philadelphia. Broke his neck on the overhead bin.”

When I woke up on the kitchen floor, the room looked different, darker, smaller in the feeble light of the sun just peeping over the bottom edge of the kitchen window. Pampkin was still sitting there, gripping his mug of cold coffee and talking across the table to my father’s shaggy head, which was facedown and drooling on the bumper stickers. My father was young then. He’s always looked young; even to this day, his gray sideburns seem more like an affectation than a sign of age. But early that morning he really was young, and Pampkin was still telling my father’s head what it was like to be surprised. And he didn’t look any more rumpled than usual. Now, when I remember all this, I think of Fidel Castro giving those eighteen-hour speeches to the party faithful. There on the table, my father’s loyal head.

I was fourteen and I woke up on the floor with a hard-on over Mrs. Pampkin. One long night on the linoleum had proved that lust, if not love, had a smell, and that smell was of bland soap. I thought of ditching school and following her to some apartment or a Red Roof Inn. I wanted to watch them. I wanted to see something that wasn’t lonely. Tossed-around sheets, a belt lying on the floor. I wanted to know what they said, how they left each other, who watched the retreating back of the other. How do you part? Why would you ever? Even for an hour? Even when you know that the next day, at some appointed hour, you will have it again?

Got to go. My husband’s running for governor .

Pampkin droned on. He had his shoes off and was sitting there in his unmatched socks, his toes quietly wrestling each other.

“Or put it this way. An old tree. Its roots are dried up. But you can’t know this. You’re not a botanist, a tree surgeon, or Smokey the Bear. One day, a whiff of breeze comes and topples it. Why that whiff?”

I couldn’t hold back a loud yawn, and Pampkin looked down at me on the floor. He wasn’t startled by the rise in my shorts. He wasn’t startled by anything anymore.

He asked me directly, “You. Little fella. You’re as old as Methuselah and still you don’t know squat about squat?”

I shrugged.

Pampkin took a gulp of old coffee. “Exactly,” he said. “Exactly.”

And either I stopped listening or he stopped talking, because after a while his voice got faint and the morning rose for good.

Pampkin died twelve years later, in the winter of ’92. (The obituary headline in the Chicago Sun-Times ran: AMIABLE POLITICIAN LOST GOVERNOR’S RACE BY RECORD MARGIN.) I went with my father to the funeral. The Pampkins had never divorced. We met Mrs. Pampkin on the steps of the funeral home in Skokie. All it took was the way they looked at each other. I won’t try to describe it, except to say that it lasted too long and had nothing to do with anybody dead. They didn’t touch. They didn’t need to. They watched each other’s smoky breath in the chill air. Facing her in her grief and her wide-brimmed black hat, my father looked haggard and puny. He turned away only after more people came up to her to offer condolences. I don’t know how long it went on between them. I’m not even sure it matters. Does it? I now know it’s easier to walk away from what you thought you couldn’t live without than I had once imagined. She was taller than I remembered, and her face was red with sadness and January.

“Don’t look so pale, Ray,” she whispered to my father before moving on to the other mourners, her hand hovering for a moment near his left ear. “Mike always thought you were a good egg.”

That year we lived on W Street in a small one-story house with a concrete slab in the backyard. Everybody else on our block lived in similar houses, and during the long summer we spent afternoons sitting in chairs on our respective slabs. In the Midwest, we don’t appreciate fences. Yards should blend into yards. I don’t remember any of our neighbors’ names, only that we sometimes drank a few beers together and talked about the heat. There are so many ways to talk about heat. I was an adjunct in the English Department. Sam was a poet who didn’t believe universities and poetry had anything to do with each other. She got a job at the Golden Wok, waiting tables. The Golden Wok was cheap and open late, a big sprawling place that had a way of looking empty even when it was filled with people. It was there she met someone, whether a fellow waiter or a patron, I never asked. Lincoln used to be a beautiful city. This was before it got ruined, locals said, by too many expressways. Nebraska, apparently, can never have enough roads through it. Still, there were the sunken gardens with all the flowers in a bowl and the mansions up on Sheridan Boulevard. Sam and I would drive up there and look at the houses. Once, she pointed to one of the houses and said, in all seriousness, Who would we be if we lived there?

“Coupla of rich-ass Cornhuskers,” I said.

“That’s all?”

Sometimes I think of that house. It had what Sam called a porte cochere over the driveway. Sam was from the South and said such dumb open garages were common in South Carolina.

“They’re for hairdos, you know, to protect the ladies when it’s raining.”

Near our house on W Street there was a park with a couple of netless tennis courts, and I used to sit at a picnic table under the tall trees and read for class. I remember sitting there and reading the Time Passes sections of To the Lighthouse and coming, again, to that moment when Mr. Ramsey reaches out for Mrs. Ramsey in the dark of the morning corridor, not knowing that she’s already gone. How could it still jolt when I knew it was coming, when from the first page I knew it was coming? Lincoln, Nebraska, 1999, the tall trees, nobody playing tennis.

In the unquiet of his shoe-box study, amid the noises of his house, Walt tries to read. Walt Kaplan. Furniture salesman, daydreamer, reader. It’s 1947, a year no one will much remember. After the war, but before anybody really got used to the war being over. He gives up. How could anybody read in this asylum? The peck of the clock nicks away his flesh. No matter how much I eat, he thinks, it makes no difference. I’m a fat husk. A funny thing. Sarah’s downstairs on the phone: the phone. Such fathomless yappery. Why, why must she shout? Is everyone who rings this house in need of orders? And there is the thump of Miriam’s battering up and down the stairs. Eleven years old and the kid sounds like a platoon. And he aches for her. He always has. So that somehow hearing her is the same as not hearing her is the same as her gone. What? Kid this loud? Possible? Gone? Such cacophony. I am a morbid man, a morbid, lazy sloucher. He shouts, “Knock it off, Orangutan! You got a father in here thinking.” The kid doesn’t answer. So he talks to Sarah without talking to Sarah, which is one of the great advantages of being married so long. Cuts down on the need for superfluous conversation. He talks to the idea of her. She talks on the phone.