Peter Orner: Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

Henry’s enemy lived in the room next door. Sometimes I saw him in the hall carrying his portable television. That TV was cradled in his arm the day I shouted, I need help, Henry’s fallen down. The man walked calmly into Henry’s room and set the TV down on the floor. Then he knelt and checked Henry’s pulse at the neck, professionally, using two fingers.

“Poor sap,” he said. “He thought I’d go before him.”

“There’s no hope?”

“Someone should alert Sister Harris. She’ll want to get the room ready for the next contestant. This is prime real estate. Two windows. Most of us only have one. Can you imagine? One window?”

“Would it be all right if I had a little time?” I said.

“Of course, they’ll want to fumigate it first.”

“A few minutes, only to—”

“Who are you, anyway? A grandson? Nephew hoping for an inheritance? Pennies under the mattress? Don’t kid yourself.”

“I’m one of the listeners.”

“Listeners are supposed to spread the visits around.”

“I know.”

“You don’t think the rest of us aren’t about ready to croak? He had you convinced he was the only one?”

Together, we lifted Henry off the floor. It was surprising how light he was. We hoisted too quickly. Like when you brace yourself to raise a log that turns out to be hollow. We set Henry gently on the bed. His enemy wrenched off his tennis shoes without untying the laces. He studied Henry in his clean white tube socks. Henry was fastidious. He shaved twice a day, once in the morning and once, he said, at teatime. His enemy was on the fat side and had small, sharp teeth like a ferret’s.

“You hated him back?” I said.

The man snorted and sat down on the one chair in the room. “No. My enemy is Vern in East Wing.” He spoke to the corpse. “How about a truce, Henry? Okay? Bygones be all gones?”

I laughed.

“I’m meaning this sincerely.”

“You tortured him with the TV.”

“Look, I’m hard of hearing. For years I invited him over for Johnny Carson. And Tom Snyder’s show. He would have liked Tom Snyder. Snyder’s an intellectual, just like—”

“He said you could hear your TV in Milwaukee. He said you took a shower with it.”

“Now these are exaggerations.”

Henry’s last words to me, only a few minutes before all this, were “I tire of you.” It wasn’t the first time he put it that way. I’d always worried that my too-open eyes and never knowing what to say were literally boring him to death. Now I’d done it, I’d murdered him. Henry’s enemy looked like he was about to doze off, the TV cuddled against his chest like a baby. I walked over to the bulletin board and looked at the new Goya picture. I would check out art books for Henry from the library. He’d rip out the color plates and tack them up. Goya was his favorite. Henry claimed Goya was one of the few artists who truly understood the nature of everyday degradation. Cervantes, too. Look to the Spanish. They’ve been shat on enough to understand. This latest Goya was a drawing of a man hanging by the neck from a branch. A woman standing on the ground below him was reaching up into the man’s mouth.

“His teeth,” Henry had said. “See how it goes? Napoleon’s dragoons rape and pillage. You get strung up. All is quiet. After that, some crone sneaks up and rips off your dentures.”

I looked at the dangling man, his baggy pants, his sad feet. What good were his teeth to him now?

My job was to listen, to be a kind ear was how it was put to me, but often Henry would demand that I talk. About what? Anything, he’d say. Just talk. I told him the truth about anything I could think of. About not being sorry my dog ran away, about my lack of friends. About my parents and what strangers they were to each other. I told him the last thing I wanted to do after school was go home. He took no pity on me, which is probably why I kept showing up. Sometimes he’d hold up his hand and in this way demand silence. It was in those moments we might have known each other best, and even appreciated each other’s company.

Once, Henry said, “You know what?”

“What?”

“You end up living someone else’s life.”

“Really?”

“One day you won’t recognize yourself in the mirror. I guarantee it. One day you’ll wake up and your face — alien territory.”

“Whose did you want to live?”

“Mine!”

“So wait, I’m still confused, whose did you live?”

“Don’t you listen?”

I opened one of Henry’s windows. Rain was falling now in invisible streaks. You had to squint to see it. It’s strange to look at a street you know so well from a different angle. Here was a street I’d grown up on, walked up and down my whole life. I could never get used to the view from up there. It wasn’t the place I knew. The wet September street, the empty sidewalk, the few cars passing, and the sounds they made, rain quishing beneath tires. It’s so simple, I thought, even I could figure it out. St. Johns Avenue goes on without you.

Henry lying on his bed. His enemy tsking, gloating. I asked him again, would he mind giving me a little more time? Alone?

He stood. “You have nine hours until rigor mortis.”

“He was an intellectual,” I said.

The man nodded and, with his TV, did a little shuffle of a dance out of the room.

Not a shred of the old building remains. Where it once stood, there are three new houses, basketball hoops in the empty driveways. It was an old-age home for retired employees of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad. Such places used to exist around Chicago. The home looked like a kind of Greek temple, with a set of huge pillars in front. To walk those steps was like arriving somewhere. But at the same time vines crawled all over the front, as if even then the building knew it didn’t belong in the neighborhood and was trying to camouflage itself. People seemed to notice it only after they started to tear it down. Before the railroad bought the place, sometime in the twenties, it had been a convent. When it changed over, some of the old nuns stayed on to care for the railroad men. Henry used to wonder out loud where all the young nuns went, if there were ever any young nuns. He said he sometimes roamed the halls looking for virgin ghosts to violate. He never once mentioned trains. He’d been a conductor on the Chicago/Kenosha line for fifty-odd years. I visited him on Tuesdays, sometimes Thursdays. I sat on the edge of the bed. Henry’s wet eyes were still open. His enemy poked his head back in.

“A cavalry of habits is on the way. Someone else must have heard you yelling and pressed a button. God forbid anybody gets out of bed around here.”

“All right,” I said.

“What’d you do? Drugs?”

“Stole.”

“How many hours?”

“Hundred.”

“What are you up to?”

“Passed it. Court signed off.”

“Ah, a saint.”

He stepped toward the bed and grabbed hold of one of Henry’s big toes. I made a move to stop him, but seeing it was done out of some kind of affection, I let it go.

Awoman who sells television antennas in the Zócalo walks slowly through a mostly empty plaza as the sun begins to rise and thinks of her sister who lives in Ohio now. Her sister who was beautiful before she had children. Teresa never had children herself. She and Reuben tried for years. But nobody called her beautiful to begin with. Why all this again now? The light, something about the changing light. As if a sheet were slowly being lifted off the crust of the earth. She crosses the plaza and thinks of a sleeping face, some lost morning. Her sister’s name is Rosella, a name Rosella always said she hated though it went so well with her beauty. She’s not lost, she’s in a place called Dayton.