Peter Orner - Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

And thus: Shy and gentle! Big and tall! Edward roams. Gone what? Two, three weeks? Rent need not be paid. Sounds like a good deal.

There was a blind guy who lived upstairs.

Now you’re just making shit up.

Not totally, mostly blind. His name was Mr. Ludner. He was easy to forget about. He was so quiet, but some nights Edward would go up there when I was working in the darkroom and sit with him. Mr. Ludner sold televisions at Sears for something like fifty years, and he’d lost his sight gradually, until one morning — this is what he told Edward — he woke up and he couldn’t shake out of the blur of his dream. Then he understood he wasn’t sleeping. Sometimes — this was the only time you ever heard a peep out of him — he played Mozart arias and tried to sing along in what he thought must have sounded like Italian. Mr. Ludner lived on a small pension and disability. Sears gave him a washer-drier when he retired, which he said was funny since he’d worked in home electronics. And those arias coming from upstairs. Mostly you just forgot about it and then there it was. The music, and him up there alone, singing alone.

Stace.

You know how I am.

The guy’s missing. You’re talking about pensions.

Right, because for you this would be easy, because for you saying anything is easy.

I’m listening.

Like I said, I was going out with friends more. Finding a life in the hills of Spokane. It’s not a bad city, really. You’re either from there or you’ve fled there, and the people who flee there are always somehow a little better off than they are in other places. Spokane takes all comers. People who’ve failed in Chicago, San Francisco, Denver, Seattle now grace the crumbling sidewalks of a city that’s always dying but never pronounced—

Stace—

He had such gentle fingers. He’d start at my head and run his hand down the length of my body and stop at the bottom of my feet and then just kneel on the floor and stare. And he’d talk to my feet. He’d draw little maps. The Coeur d’Alene River. The old Pacific and Northern Railroad line. The dirty bottoms of my feet, Barry. And I hardly knew him, but I let him look at me in that cold bedroom with one window that only shut on an angle. We plugged the gap with old towels, but it didn’t do much good. We slept under mountains of blankets, and I’d wake up in the morning and not want to get out of bed, so I’d walk around with those blankets on my back like I was one big turtle, because it was still so cold.

This isn’t right.

And he didn’t just talk to Mr. Ludner. Sometimes they played chess, too. And Edward put a bandanna over his eyes and played blindfolded to make the teams fair. They played chess in the dark in Mr. Ludner’s little kitchen. So three weeks after Edward left, I finally asked Mr. Ludner if he had any idea. I hadn’t wanted to bother him before, upset him. I was standing at the bottom landing and he was coming slowly down the stairs, his long thin cane in front of him, tapping the stairs. Mr. Ludner? I said. Edward’s gone. He’s been gone almost a month. The old man kept heading toward me down the stairs. When he reached the bottom, he looked at me. Normally he didn’t face you when he talked — he talked to you in profile — but that morning he faced me and he said, Yes, that must be true. Three weeks at least. Mr. Ludner straightened his tie. Even though he was retired, he always wore a tie when he left the house. I told him I don’t even know if Edward has any family. All I know is that he had a grandfather who died and I’m here in his apartment and I haven’t paid any rent. Mr. Ludner laughed when I said that about the rent. Why, my dear, I don’t pay any rent, either. Why not? I said, and he laughed again and said, You don’t know, do you? Interesting young man Edward. Modest to the teeth. He owns this building, my dear. Passed down to him from the very grandfather you mentioned. His parents are both gone. And he’s a good man to let me spend my retirement peanuts on things other than rent. Like fresh fruit, for example. I’m of the opinion that fresh fruit, far more than those vitamin pills they peddle to seniors — But I paid Edward rent, I said. I wrote him checks for my half. Well, he must have mailed the check to himself, Mr. Ludner said. I found out later he never deposited any of my checks. You know how I am about my checkbook. I wouldn’t have noticed in a thousand years the money wasn’t gone.

All right, now I just want to know.

So this shocked me a little, that he actually owned the house and never said anything, but then I figured he was probably embarrassed. I mean, who at twenty-four owns a house?

Just tell it.

Right, cutting to the chase now, Barry. One night toward the middle of January, Mr. Ludner was playing Mozart when the power went out. It was minus who knows what the fuck with the wind chill. Coldest night of the year and we’ve got no lights. I opened the inside door and called up to Mr. Ludner, who said the fuse box was in the basement. It was one of those old-fashioned basements with the double doors, you know, that open upward. I asked Edward about the basement once and he said there was nothing down there but mice and rusting bike parts. I crept around the apartment and found a flashlight in the utility drawer. Then I called up to Mr. Ludner and asked him if he had a key No key necessary, he says. The basement doors are always open.

Wait! Say no more! You went down there, and there was Old Edward, Mr. Bohemian Spokane, down in the cellar with his head blown off.

He used Hefty bags and rubber bands.

Come on.

Not come on.

Stace, I was kidding.

He took pills, but before that, he wrapped himself up in garbage bags because he didn’t want us to smell him. And we didn’t, because of the plastic and because of the cold. Mr. Ludner said it was probably because he wanted to die in his grandfather’s house, the house his grandfather left him, but that he also wanted us to go on living there because he was a good man. Mr. Ludner said Edward was a good man. When I found him, there were these black bugs that live straight through winter, the kind that sort of hop backward, crawling all over the plastic. He was still wearing shoes. But let me back it up, Barry. Let me take it step by step. I went around back to the basement doors and brushed away a crust of old snow, pulled them open, and went down the wooden stairs. I found the fuse box on the far right wall, where Mr. Ludner said it would be, and flicked the switch. I heard Mr. Ludner shout out the window, Hurrah! Mozart came back on. Then I found a string for the light and pulled. Not much there. Like Edward had said. Some cardboard boxes. A pair of old ski poles. A tire. A stack of waterlogged phone books. And then right beside the furnace, I saw a mattress with some books on it. A dirty yellow pillow. Some socks. And a bag of Cheetos. Edward thought it was funny that he still loved Cheetos. The crunchy ones, not the puffy. He said he hated the way the puffy ones melted in your mouth before you even had a chance to chew. And I thought, Holy shit, he lives down here. But for some reason, I wasn’t really freaked out. I just whispered, Edward? Edward? Jesus, Edward, why are you living down here when you’ve got a nice apartment upstairs? When it’s your house? I’ll move out and you can have your place back, but for godsakes, don’t live down here. And I’m talking to the walls of the basement as if he can hear me, as if he’s hiding in the dark corners and watching me. Isn’t that nuts?

I love you. You’ve got to know I love you, honey, I—

So I walk around whispering to him, thinking he’s either hiding or he’ll be back soon and I’ll wait for him and tell him, Look, I’ll leave. I’ll find a new place—