Peter Orner - Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

AChinese 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, right, 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.