Peter Orner - Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

The man at the gas station told her that the big boats still call at Waukegan, but not as many as used to. Afternoons, after work, and before Damyan got home from school, she’d walk down to the beach by the harbor. She’d listen to the halyards clack against the masts of the sailboats not yet taken ashore for winter. But she didn’t come to look at the boats, small ones or big ones. She’d go down there to watch the waves, white as they crushed into shore, yellow as they withdrew. Plastic detergent bottles bobbed in with the current and bobbed out again.

Always, Maritsa would tell herself, the first betrayal, leaving, will always be the worst. She was confused by her own choices and her own desires, and she’d look out the windows of the houses she cleaned, at the enormous leafless trees, trees that took almost all the space of the sky, and curse herself for not knowing what to dream. Is this an answer? A husband panting into the phone? Days wandering rooms of other people’s piles of things?

Damyan looked so unlike his father that people in their building used to whisper that someone else must have been parking in her garage. She’d been called a whore behind her back so many times that for years she’d felt like one. Honorary whore of a building that apparently needed one. Damyan was a pale, oval-headed boy, with little hair and large, fearlessly unblinking eyes. He wasn’t afraid to look at anybody, and often adults were put in the uncomfortable position of having to turn away from a child’s stare. He had all his father’s curiosity and none of his mother’s restlessness. What’s the difference between snot and saliva? Why do people say you can drink one and not the other? They’re both only secretions. I’ve tried snot and it’s possible, you can drink as much as you want . His father’s boy, already exasperating teachers on a new continent. He was also a courageous kid and knew he had to buck up for his mother in a place that wasn’t so much unkind to her as ambivalent. His mother had always been a woman people talked about, and not only because she’d always been the prettiest. Now, here in Waukegan, no one much noticed her, and that shamed him. He tried not to let her know. He kept silent. And some nights she’d sit on the floor of his room and rest her head against his mattress and ask, Is it Daddy? No . Is it home? No . Why won’t you tell me? The boy would dig his face into his pillow and feign sleep.

The second betrayal was named Ted. He was from Pakistan. His name wasn’t Ted any more than Damyan’s was Danny. I’m Ted, he’d said, Ted tired of correcting people. She almost laughed. “That’s not funny,” she said. How long since she’d laughed? A ten-minute break during class, the two of them leaning against a set of little lockers. He’d looked at her then from an odd angle, his head too far to the left. He looked at her as if he already knew her weaknesses and was mocking her for bothering to try to hide them. He spoke English; he only pretended he didn’t. “It’s my second language,” he said, “but don’t tell anybody that we speak English in Pakistan, I’m here for dates. Night school ESL is the United Nations of Women. Filipinos, Mexicans, Koreans, Somalis, where did you say you were from again?” All this she laughed at, quietly, the way she remembered laughing as a child at things she knew she wasn’t supposed to, pressing her fingers into her lips. She thought it wouldn’t be right to ask his real name, that it would somehow break the grip he was already beginning to have on her. He would always be Ted, even after he was gone, and he had smooth lips that she knew would soon kiss her places Lyubomir couldn’t have imagined.

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.

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?