Peter Orner - Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

In the old kitchen, her head lying on a stack of student papers, her eyes wide open, the sun a rising layer of pink on the outer fields.

“Come to bed.”

“Tomorrow’s tiring.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Even the plants exhaust me, the toaster—”

Raising her head in the blue dawn, eyes blazing, not tired at all.

“Stop being terrified, Frank. We can’t both be. Who’ll remember to feed the dog?”

“Isn’t arroyo a gorgeous word?” Marie said.

“It is.”

“Origin?”

“Everyone else around here says creek, it’s only us—”

“Origin?”

“Spanish. Pre-Roman.”

“It’s like a nook, a cranny. All my life I’ve been looking for a good cranny. Bury me here.”

“Stop.”

“It’s just biology. It’s all just biology.”

“Marie.”

“You won’t?”

“Furthermore,” Frank said, “it’s a zoning issue. You can’t just bury people—”

That night, after driving by the old house, he did find Rudy barking along the fence line of the new house when he pulled up. He leaped out of the car and flung open the front door and found Marie lying on the couch, her head thrown back against the armrest, a book on the floor. He ran across the carpet, knelt, and gripped her knees. He looked up at the bare walls. Their paintings and posters and framed photographs were still in boxes from the move, though they had already lived eight months in this new place. Couldn’t he at least have unpacked a few and nailed up some pictures? Why had he waited so long? He gripped her knees. The leash of the oxygen tank gently resting on her bare clavicle. After a moment, under his own heavy breathing, hers, shallow, nearly silent. He lifted his head and watched her sleep and waited for the relief that was sure to wash over him. He waited, and still it didn’t come. The fires, M., do you remember Schactler’s fires?

Don’t forgive me—

On the Mission bus today I sat across from Uncle Horace who has been dead for twenty-odd years. The last time I saw him was at Aunt Molly’s in Fall River. On the bus, he looked tired. He was barefoot. He looked like he didn’t want to talk. When I knew him, Uncle Horace always wanted to talk. He always wanted to tell you who he knew. Horace was a man who made great claims of knowing people. Chiang Kai-shek, Julius Rosenwald, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Shake the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand of John L. Sullivan! On the bus, he was bedraggled, as if God had left him out in the rain for decades. The bus was hot and crowded, our breath was clouding the windows. There was no room to take off our coats. At Fourteenth and Mission, an enormous teetering woman with uncountable numbers of Safeway bags got on and my uncle shot up from his seat, swooped his arm, and announced, Madam, to your rest!

Standing on the bus now, my uncle was hunchbacked. He’d always had great posture. (“At Eton,” he used to say, “we always ate sitting to the trot.”) On the bus he was so stooped over I could have set a table on him, and would have, too, if I’d had some dishes. We could have had tea and crumpets like old times. Bent, drenched, broke, pilloried, my dead uncle. He slipped the woman with the bags of groceries his card and told her to come by his office Tuesday after lunch.

“I’m back from the club by 2:30 at the latest. Bring your checkbook, My Lady. Or cash.”

He began moving through the crowd, handing out his card. “Wise up, people. Money begets money. You want to ride the Fourteen for the rest of your lives?”

When my stop was next, I yanked the cord and got up, stood by the middle door. A moment later, a moist, oddly soft hand enwrapped my neck. I turned to him, and he spoke as if I was me but also as if this didn’t matter, as if my being myself, whoever this was, couldn’t have less to do with anything.

“Nobody can take them away from you,” he said, his little face bunched, his shoulders rising past his ears.

“What?”

Those fingers on my neck, not holding exactly, only resting, almost as though he were gently feeling my pulse, as if I was the one—

“The lies you tell are the only things that stay,” Horace said. “Truth won’t get you a cup of coffee in hell. Forget about the Ritz, honey.”

“But,” I said, “because of your lies, they all died broke. Haddy, Charlie, Pauline, Nelson, Dotty, Stanley, Ida, Molly — Grandma Sarah used to say that you went for everybody in town’s quarters, but when it came to relations, you went for their nickels, too.”

“A tony relative in every family. You play your part, you do your share.”

“And everyone ponied up — except Irv Pincus, who could always smell a rat when a rat—”

“Still, not a bad record.”

“Yes, and it was you—”

“It was I!”

“Proud?”

“I was loaded. They all wanted what I had. I’m blame? I’m criminal?”

“But the only reason you had what you had was because they gave you all their money.”

“A technicality!”

“Grandpa Walt dropped dead after reading his bank statement.”

“Your grandfather had a weak heart. Not to mention no stomach for business.”

“Your own son — Monroe — finally went bonkers. They had to lock him up at Taunton State five years ago.”

“The Ginsburgs have no lunacy.”

“He literally tore his hair out of his head with his hands—”

“Must have been on his mother’s side.”

“Remorse?”

Uncle Horace stood up a little straighter. “A legacy, boy, a legacy. May you leave one yourself. That way you wouldn’t have to steal mine. Then again, how much do you think it’s worth? How about we go seventy/thirty? Go ahead sell it, sell it all!”

“And Josephine?”

“Leave her out of this happy reunion.”

“I mean the humiliation—”

“I said leave her out—”

“—to beg for handouts from her own flesh and blood, the very people you plundered—”

“Not once did she beg. Listen: Nobody didn’t love Josephine. If I’d been the Boston Strangler, they’d have emptied their pockets—”

“And they did! They did!”

“And may you for a single day of your life, for one hour, know the kind of love that I—”

“Wait, what are you doing in California?”

“Everybody ends up in California.”

The doors flapped open: Twentieth Street. Before he stepped down, Uncle Horace leaned to me. That old smell again, of Aunt Molly’s. A reek of bleach and onions. He smooched one ear, then the other.

“Sayonara, turkeyboy.”

My brother used to terrorize me with a small rubber hippopotamus named Longfellow. He was about the size of a tooth, and he spoke in an extremely high, piercing voice. Longfellow said it wasn’t my fault I was so limited intellectually, that it was simply the luck of the draw and with hard work, and perhaps some family connections, one day I might be able to eke out a living. Now, Big Bill Thompson-Fox was the mayor of the town where Longfellow lived. Unlike Longfellow, the mayor was kind to me. The town was called Pubic, Illinois. Big Bill Thompson-Fox was a finger puppet of a fox in a policeman’s uniform and my brother endowed him with the gentle, patient drawl of Sheriff Andy Taylor. A child psychologist might say that Longfellow and Big Bill Thompson-Fox represented the two sides of my brother’s nature. On the one hand, I was his brother and he hated me, and on the other hand, I was his brother and he loved me. I don’t know. All I know is that Big Bill’s kindness barely made a dent, because even though he had a relatively important job (part-time mayor of a town of about 550 Pubians) and Longfellow didn’t seem to have a job at all, the mayor was no match for the hippo.