Peter Orner - Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

“Mind if I sit?”

“Of course not.” Seitz shoved his plate away.

“No, keep eating.”

The waiter wasn’t Chinese. He liked to show off the few words in Cantonese that Mrs. Lee, the cook, had taught him. The waiter’s eyes were droopy and his skin was pale in spots, red with pimples in others. Seitz took a pen out of his jacket pocket and uncapped it.

“I’d rather you not write this.”

“Not a problem.”

Seitz glanced up at Mr. Lee, who was watching them from his post behind the bar, a towel over his shoulder. He and Mrs. Lee often argued. They always tried to keep their voices down, but eventually their voices would reach such high notes their fights became operatic. Something told Seitz that whatever made them so excited never had anything to do with the restaurant. Possibility here as well, in the arguments other people have that we’ll never know the origins of or even understand. How much drama lost?

He smiled again at the waiter. “Call me all-ears,” Seitz said.

The waiter leaned forward. “It’s about that night — Laplante.”

“Yes.”

“I compromised the scene.”

“What do you mean?”

The waiter put both hands on the table and edged even closer. In the red moonish light, his face didn’t look as young as it did from farther away. He always looked twenty, twenty-five, but right now he could have been ten years older.

“I moved the body — just a little — but who knows? Maybe I wrecked the whole investigation. All I did was tug his foot and pull him off the seat. Any idiot could see he was dead. He hardly had a mouth or nose left to breathe out of. The guy really got clocked. I just wanted to give him some dignity.”

“Sounds like you did him a good turn, a human thing.”

“But with all this O.J. stuff, L.A.P.D. and contamination and all that, I just worry—”

“From what I understand,” Seitz said, “these cops couldn’t have found the killer if he left a trail of egg rolls to his house,” Seitz said. “What would a few inches matter in an investigation like this?”

The waiter laughed, but his eyes moistened. Tears?

“You don’t believe me.”

“Why wouldn’t I believe you?”

The large, pimpled face stared. Mr. Lee coughed. A couple were waiting to place their order. The waiter slid out of the booth. Seitz went to the men’s room and poked around, tried to feel something. What? An absence? The place was nothing but clean.

That night he went to a late movie at the Showcase. A comedy, a love story. Seitz was one of the few people in the audience. He watched the silhouettes of solitary heads in the darkness. He’d never been much of a moviegoer, too much noise and commotion. And they’d always taken him too far away. It would take hours to adjust sometimes, to return to being Don Seitz. After, he walked to his car and turned the key, but rather than unlocking the door, he locked it. I forgot to lock it? Maybe it was the movie, the surging out the exit door into the night, even a movie like this, a movie already half forgotten. He felt almost giddy. There was a tingling in his feet, his toes. He turned the key the other way and got in the car. After a few minutes of stillness, he adjusted the rearview and, in the great brightness of the overhead lights, met another pair of eyes.

“I’m not a reporter,” Seitz said.

“I know,” the waiter said.

“I’m not anybody.”

“I know.”

“Only curious.”

“Yes.”

Seitz looked out at the few scattered cars remaining in the vast parking lot. It looked like an emptied harbor. Tomorrow all the cars would be back. He wondered if he’d be burned or simply left cold.

Even the shadows are green tonight. Deb watches the moon. It’s out early. Also, it is too hot for October and the crickets are confused. By October they are supposed to shriek less loudly. By October their hysteria is supposed to dissipate. By October there is supposed to be calm. By October — not this October, another one — she promised herself she’d be gone. She once said to Carl, If you were a real man, you’d get me the hell out of here. He just looked at her and scratched his cheek. He wasn’t a man to answer when spoken to like that. Not taking the bait was his specialty. If Carl were a fish, he’d live forever. Either that or he’d starve. But even she has to admit there’s beauty in this green, practically breathable light. The land stretching away into it. The power line towers also. Even the driveway. Even the shed. All coated. All still. Carl says the land is here for us to build on. Here for us to expand on. That’s what it’s here for. As soon as the fiscal year is through, he’s going to make an appointment to talk to the architect. The initial permits will have been approved by then and so—

Weather said a storm this afternoon but it never came. She likes to watch the storms meander this way from out beyond Dixon. The lightning like a jabbing finger choosing, choosing. Now the light itself is enough. Carl’s on his way home, singing along to the radio unless there’s a commercial. Sometimes he even sings to those. Carl, you stupid fuck. The land will bury you. This land, any land. Least any sane person would do is leave. How many times do I have to say it? Deb gulps the light, wishing she hated it, wishing she didn’t only want to stand here and watch it tonight, wishing for courage, stupidity, anything other than reverence. This strange, breathable light, this lifeblood light.

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.

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.”