Peter Orner - Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

“We’re going to keep up with the treatments. Another six months and we’ll know—”

“Bad enough every doctor lies to me, but to have you, too. I know it, I feel it. Frankly, Frank—”

“Please, no frankly Franks—”

“Don’t make me laugh. Hurts.”

“—and if we want a second opinion before then, we can always go to Sioux Falls—”

“Whether I’d ever have the guts is another story. I want the comfort. That’s all. Look at me.”

“I’m looking.”

“Fuck Sioux Falls.”

He tried giving her the towel again. She wouldn’t take it and stood there, water on her bony shoulders.

“Now you’re looking.”

“Not very comfortable for me.”

“You? We’re talking about you?”

A half hour later, he went down into the basement and rummaged around. Most of their stuff was still unpacked from the move. He found his 20-gauge in a narrow cardboard box that also held the vacuum cleaner and a barbell. A few times a year he went pheasant hunting with colleagues from his department. He walked slowly up the stairs. She was standing at the kitchen sink with a mug of coffee. He put the shotgun on the table.

“That?”

“I’ll have to buy some shells.”

“Something for under my pillow, Frank. You know I’m talking about something for under my pillow.”

A few weeks later, Frank drove by the old house. Was it a few weeks? Lack of sleep warped time. It was six thirty in the evening in mid-September and the glass in the big front window was burning in the slowly dissipating light. Frank slowed down, considered stopping, but didn’t. It felt disloyal to even look at the place. Still, the farther away from the house he drove, the more he saw the blur of those flames in the window.

Cleaned out, not much of a trace of the years they spent there except possibly the remains of Marie’s garden. Years ago, Frank had built a snow fence to protect the garden from the wind and the deer. Marie would spend Sunday hours out there, squatting and puttering, talking to her plants, coaxing the soil. He thinks of a few stubborn tomatoes, withered lettuce, some hearty beets. Between the two tall maples in the side yard, there might still be a few broken plastic clothespins in the dirt. Moving your stuff out of a place is like unloading a ship, except an empty house doesn’t sail away beyond the horizon. It sits there and waits for you to return. All you have to do one day is head west, on Route 14, because you don’t want to go home right away, and there it is, halfway to Volga, the house, their house. It was never theirs, legally, anyway. Though they didn’t have to be, Marie and Frank were renters, they’d always be renters. They’d never wanted to be beholden. Renting had always felt more free. They could always pick up and move somewhere else, which must be why they never did. If you execute the choice, you lose the choice. When they finally did move back to Brookings to be closer to the clinic, they thought about buying a place, but they were in their mid-fifties now. What would be the point? Especially now. All things being equal, which they weren’t, wouldn’t rent and a mortgage amount to pretty much the same thing for a couple without kids? In their mid-forties, they’d said the same thing. How did they think they’d avoid becoming beholden? Frank spun the car around. As he drove back east, he passed the house once again and thought of them at the windows. How many times had the two of them stood at those windows?

Neither Marie nor Frank was a native. In 1975, they’d moved here from Chicago to teach at South Dakota State. Marie was a nineteenth-century Americanist; Frank taught classics. While the favorite pastime of many of their colleagues was to try and conjure up what heinous crime they must have committed in some other life to deserve exile in this moonscape among the earnest corn-fed, Marie and Frank had come, over the years, to consider eastern South Dakota the only place that would ever be home. Surrounded on all sides by the gentle undulations out near the edge of the horizon. To call this flat isn’t really to look at it. The land rolls, as if it’s always in motion. The switch grass leaning away from the wind. Here and there a clump of trees, and a little over a mile from home, or what used to be home, but still on the property, a hidden arroyo, a private wound in the earth. Only Marie and Frank knew where it was.

But for those front windows, the house itself had been nothing special. The bedrooms were tiny squares, though there were more of them than they needed. They each had one of their own for an office, and one together, which made them feel a little ludicrous and also rich. Sometimes they’d invite each other to their office. Even as recently as a couple of years ago, they still did things like that, slide messages under the doors of their own house. Hey. You busy? Once or twice a summer, they chained Rudy up (they hated to do it, Rudy liked nothing more than roaming when they took walks, this was the single exception), walked to the arroyo, climbed down into that grove of soft sand, and put down a blanket. Nobody knew it. It wasn’t like they showed off to their friends. Look at us, after all these years. Marie’s long red hair spread across the sand. Rudy howling—

She’d stopped appearing in his dreams. Now he’s afraid to fall asleep. Lying there beside her, awake, hours, awake — most disloyal of all, he’s begun to remember her as if she’s already gone.

It was Marie who had found the house. It was Marie who had insisted, so many years ago now, that they move outside of Brookings. Frank had protested, asked what would be the point, it’s not like we’re tenant farmers. But Marie said, If we’re going to live here, let’s at least endure the landscape.

“You mean experience?”

“That, too.”

It had been a long time since anybody farmed the land that went with the house. Schactler, their old landlord, had two other farms in Beadle County but always meant to restart operations on theirs. Every time he came by to collect the rent, he said, “Won’t be long now before you hear the sound of the tractor out here, you two won’t mind a little noise?” But neither of his sons came home from college in the East as they’d promised. Nothing made Schactler prouder than that his sons were too good to come home to South Dakota and work the land with their father. Even so, he slaved away, keeping the other farms going, and so was content to get a little house rent off the third place. Schactler once said renting a house was one thing, to rent out land another. He couldn’t stomach what another man might do with it. Like your woman, he said, winking at Frank. Marie said Schactler might be an unreconstructed Neanderthal, but what he said about land made sense. There’s a way to call something sacred without getting high and mighty about it. After his wife died, Schactler slowly began to slow down. He stopped talking farming the third farm, stopped talking about his boys coming home. Mrs. Schactler had been a kind, shrewd woman who always complimented Frank on Marie. What’s a homely-looking character doing with a fiery sass like that? And she never got on them, even with her eyes, as God knows so many other people did for years, about: where were the children.

For years, in early May, Schactler used to light a controlled burn to prepare the fields around the house for the planting he never got around to doing. The glow of those fires. How they’d turn off all the lamps and stand at the window and watch the flames poke up into the night. Last he heard, Schactler was in a nursing home in Aberdeen. Soon his boys would come home to sell all three farms.

He thought of the way the night wind would press against the big window, as if someone were out in the dark pushing against it with both hands.