Peter Orner - Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

“I’m from Massachusetts,” she finally says. “Fall River. BMC Durfee High. National Honor Society and head cheerleader.”

“I never had any doubts,” Kennedy says. And he stands there for another long half minute, his wide face sweating, mesmerized. He already knows he doesn’t stand much chance of the nomination, but what’s a primary fight against a sitting President of his own party compared to this woman, my mother, whose name he will never know?

For hours we listened to it on the radio, and not once did Larry Phoebus say a word. A woman walked into a classroom of a school a couple of towns over and began shooting. She killed an eight-year-old boy and wounded three other kids. She’d also, the radio said, left homemade bombs at other schools, including a school just a few blocks from where Larry Phoebus and I were parked. I could hear the frantic sirens, like crazed, amplified mosquitoes. Now the radio said that the police confirmed that the woman had fled across the street from the school where she shot the kids and was holed up in a house with a hostage. I was sitting there with Larry Phoebus, looking out the windshield of the truck, staring at the Chicago and Northwestern tracks, at the tall weeds that grew up between the ties, listening to all this on WBBM Newsradio 780.

I was home from my first year at college. It was July. I’d wandered across that year, as I’d wandered across much else, incurious, biding my time. Waiting for what, I couldn’t say. My stepfather, who was mayor of our town, found me a job in the Streets and Sanitation Department. For a few weeks, I was proudly blue-collar. Work — who would have thought I would take to it? I worked for Streets as a jackhammerer. I destroyed curbs with erotic abandon. I will make this corner handicapped-accessible if it’s my last act on earth. I wore a sweaty red bandanna. Rudimentary biceps were beginning to rise between my shoulders and elbows like small loaves. I’d be uptown, standing on the street, encircled by a little ring of pylons, smoking, and I would tell the imaginary pom-pom girls who thronged around me, I can’t talk right now. Look, can’t you ladies see I’m a workingman?

Then I was late three mornings in a row and the crew boss, Miguel, said, I’m taking you off Streets. You’re with Larry Phoebus now.

No, Miguel, no — please—

And don’t run to your dad. He knows all about it. He said to go ahead and fire you, but I figure, why not let you quit on your own?

He’s not my dad.

Turn in your gloves, Hirsch. You won’t need them again. Ever.

Larry Phoebus worked on the Sanitation side. He drove an enormous white truck with an enormous, bulbous hose attached to the end of it. It was called the Vac-Haul. It was rumored to have cost the taxpayers of our town two million dollars. My stepfather was very proud of it. The Vac-Haul was designed to suck up major sewage backups without the need to send “manpower down the manhole,” as my former Streets partner, Steve Boland, explained it. The truck was Larry Phoebus’s baby. He was long past retirement age. He’d worked for Sanitation for something like fifty years and was now refusing to leave. It was said that he didn’t trust another living soul with the Vac-Haul, and when it was time for him to die, he was going to drive that two million dollars straight into Lake Michigan.

Also, Larry never spoke. It was said around the lunch table that Larry Phoebus had pretty much given up communing with the rest of the human race in the 1960s when the world, his world, everybody’s world, went so haywire. Yet the precise reason for his total silence was a mystery nobody was especially interested in solving. Only Steve Boland speculated at all. He liked to hold forth in the lunchroom. Love, Boland said, what else is new under the sun? Only a woman could numb a guy like that. I hit the mute button myself for a couple of years after my first divorce. She took all my money, the house. All our friends. So I mean, answer me this, you’re living by yourself in some dump-ass rented apartment in Highwood and you think you’re going to want to chitchat?

“What the hell are you yattering about?” Miguel said.

“I’m talking about alone,” Boland said. “Do any of you even know what it means?”

Larry Phoebus himself never appeared in the lunchroom. He ate in the Vac-Haul. At lunch, he’d glide the magisterial truck into its special parking place in the garage and pull out a sandwich from his jacket pocket. We’d watch him up there in his cab, slowly chewing, looking down at us but not seeming to see very much.

Being Larry Phoebus’s assistant was the worst job in either division, and they usually gave it to one of the illegal Mexicans who’d come in looking for a day’s work, but that day, the day I was late a third day in a row, none of those guys were around, and so I became Larry’s new boy.

The Vac-Haul needed two people to operate it. One to guide the hose into the hole, the other to flick the switch in the cab.

The worst part of the worst job was that the Vac-Haul was rarely put to use. No question that it was a great monument to the progress of modern sewage engineering, but the town’s system apparently functioned just fine. Yet, in order for Larry Phoebus to be paid (and for the department and the town to justify the expense), the Vac-Haul had to leave the garage. And so every morning and every afternoon, Larry Phoebus would parade the truck around town for a while and then park behind the White Hen Pantry to wait out the hours listening to the news on the radio. And so maybe to Larry Phoebus that day was no different from any other day. Maybe the voices on the radio were a little more hysterical than usual, but it all amounted to the same never-ending drone that was life outside the cab.

WBBM News time: 3:26. In Winnetka this hour, SWAT teams and hostage negotiators have descended upon the 300 block of…

Sweltering hot in the cab. Larry Phoebus never rolled the windows down and he didn’t run the air conditioner, either. I listened to the old man’s wheezy breathing in the stagnant air. I watched the side of his gaunt face and tried to think of something to say. Things must have been so different when you were a young kid, huh, Larry? How were things when you were young, Larry? Let’s turn off the radio and talk, Larry. You and me. Tell me your life, Larry. I’ll listen. Who’d you love, Larry? You must have loved somebody. Steve Boland says there’s no other explanation.

Larry Phoebus watched the railroad tracks, the weeds. Finally, I got down out of the cab and went in the White Hen and bought some doughnuts, a box, an assortment. Back in the truck, I held the box out to Larry Phoebus, and in my memory, my ceaselessly lying memory, Larry Phoebus turns to me, and though he doesn’t exactly speak, his eyes look at me and say, No, but thank you.

Maybe I thought the doughnuts would provide a little fellowship, break some bread, at a time like this. A time like what? What was that time like? I sat there with my doughnuts. Every once in a while I took a bite out of one and put it back in the box. I figured I’d sample the whole assortment. I seem to remember maple frosting was a new, radical flavor then. You’re dead, Larry. You would have to be long dead by now. The Vac-Haul is probably not such a marvel anymore, either. You were a man I sat next to, a man who for hours and hours I sat next to.

When I think of that time, I think of the tenacity of that man’s breathing. I think of her also. For weeks, her name was everywhere. She grew up not far from where I did. Like me, she was a suburban Jewish kid from just outside Chicago. We are legion; we hail from a place called the North Shore, a graceful place on the bluffs of Lake Michigan. I never knew her, she was about eight or nine years older, but I did go to high school with her cousin. She — we don’t say her name out loud — went to college in Madison, like my brother, like my father. She was a member of the same sorority that my grandmother was a founding member of in 1926.