Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

NATHAN LEOPOLD WRITES TO MR. FELIX KLECZKA OF 5383 S. BLACKSTONE

Castaner, Puerto Rico (Associated Press, April 7, 1958)

Nathan Leopold is learning the technique of his 10 dollar a month laboratory job in the hospital here and using most of his spare time to answer his voluminous mail. One hospital official said the paroled Chicago slayer has received 2,800 letters in the three weeks he has been here, from all parts of the United States. He has expressed his intentions to answer every letter.

The room is not as bare as you might imagine. In fact, it’s crowded. A distant relative in the furniture business shipped a load of overstock from the Merchandise Mart. Sofas, love seats, end tables, floor lamps, a pool table. It took three trucks to deliver it all from San Juan.

Nathan, home from work, sits at a large oak desk, big as a banker’s. He takes off his shoes. He rubs his feet awhile. He watches his canaries. The birds are, for a change, silent. He leaves their cage door open. He likes to watch them sleep, their heads up, their eyes vaguely open, as if on a whim they could fly in their dreams.

He takes another letter from the pile and sets it in front of him. He puts on his glasses. He reads.

When he’s finished, he brings his hand to his face and gently rests his index finger on the tip of his nose. The room has a single window that looks out upon the village and, beyond it, a small mountain. When he first arrived here, it was heaven. The spell was short-lived. He no longer feels the urge to walk across the village to the mountain and climb it.

Dear Mr. Kleczka,

I received your correspondence two weeks ago. Please accept my most sincere apologies. I receive a great many letters and am doing my best to reply with a reasonable degree of promptness. Also, note that the mail delivery services here in the hills outside San Juan leave a bit to be desired. Among other things, you call me God’s revulsion and express the wish that I choke on my poisonous froth. You write that my employment in a hospital is the ghastliest joke Satan ever played and, as a veteran of Hitler’s war, you know from whence you speak. I do not doubt you, Mr. Felix Kleczka. You write from what you describe as the old neighborhood. Let’s not indulge ourselves. I am not going to tell you about the last thirty-three years. I want you to know that I believe — I am sure this is something even we can agree on — I am the luckiest man in the world. I am free and nothing you could imagine is more delirious. Yet, delirium, I might add, always gives way to a fog that never lifts. This said, allow me to describe a bit of my work at the hospital. I met a woman today. She is dying of a rare disease. It is not pancreatic cancer, the doctor assured me, but something far more uncommon. The disease is untreatable, and the most that can be done for this woman is to prescribe painkillers and ensure a constant supply of nutrients to the bloodstream, because, apparently — this is the way I understand it — her body rejects those fluids necessary for the survival of her vital organs. In other words the patient is leaking away. Her name is Maya de Hostas and she has two children, Javier and Theresa. There is no husband to speak of. Maya de Hostas is dying, Mr. Kleczka, but it is a slow process. The doctor says it could take more than six months, perhaps a year. Do you scoff? Do you tear at this paper? Do your hands flutter with rage? Nathan Leopold is telling a story. Nathan Leopold is telling a story of other people suffering. You remember my youthful arrogance like it was yesterday. All the brains they said I had. All the books I’d read, all the languages they said I spoke. Russian, Greek, Arabic. They say I even knew Sanskrit! My famous attorney glibly talking away the rope. I still repeat his speech like a prayer. The easy and the popular thing to do is to hang my clients. It is men like you, men with long memories, that make our — your — city great. You sweep the streets of scum like me. This is no defense, Mr. Kleczka of 5383 S. Blackstone, but allow me to tell you I love you. I love you for keeping the torch lit, for taking the time to write to me. I am deadly serious, oh deadly serious, and as I sit here — the waning moments of light purpling the mountains — I imagine you. I imagine you reading of my parole with such beautiful fury. You want to come here yourself and mete out justice. Don’t you want to get on a plane and come and murder me with your own bare hands? No gloves for such a fiend. And then take a vacation. Why not? Bring the wife and kids. It’s Puerto Rico. But your wife says an eye for an eye wouldn’t help anybody and certainly wouldn’t make any difference to Bobby Franks. It wouldn’t bring that angel back, and they’d only throw the key away on you. (Though, of course, your defense would have much to say by way of mitigation.) But the fiend, you cried. Animal! Your wife is a wise woman but you, Sir, are wiser. There are times, of course, when only blood will suffice. Should you make the trip, know that my door is always open. I live in a two-room flat. If I’m absent at my employment, please wait for me. Make yourself at home. Don’t mind the chatter of the canaries. I feed them in the morning. I keep whiskey, though the conditions of my parole forbid spirits, in my third desk drawer. Why not pour yourself a glass? And know that as you strangle me or slash my throat or simply blow my head off, I’ll love you. As I bleed onto this unswept floor (the maid comes only on Tuesdays), I’ll love you. Mr. Felix Kleczka of the old neighborhood. What else can I say to you? Do not for a moment think I say any of this slyly. I have been waiting with open eyes and open arms for the last thirty-three years, prepared to die the same death as Dickie Loeb, whose rank flesh is only less tainted than mine for being done away with sooner. Only maggots know the truth. Well, I am here. I will never hide from you. I get a great deal of mail, as I said. Much of it is supportive of my new life. This week alone I received three marriage proposals. Your letter reminded me very starkly of who and what I am. Even so, I must ask you: Are there still old neighborhoods? Are there still people who knew us when? And should you decide not to come and take up the knife against me, know that I think no less of you. Your cowardice, more than anything, this I understand. Once, a young man bludgeoned a child with a chisel. To make certain, I stuffed my fist in his mouth. My hands are rather plump now. Still, I recognize them for what they are, some days.

Sincerely,

N. Leopold

Dark outside the window now. Night heartens. He’d lived so long craving light. Those first few weeks, it was the light, all that immortal light.

Now he’s satisfied with a lamp. He flicks it on for comfort. He watches his face in the window. His laugh begins softly, like a murmur. Eventually it will be loud enough to wake the birds.

At the end of our street was a commune in a log mansion — Jed Holson’s house — and girls in frayed orange cable-knit sweaters and no pants would chase each other across its enormous furnitureless rooms. It was the suburbs, it was the seventies, life was bizarre and glorious, and we didn’t even know it. Jed’s father, Elijah Holson, had been a founding director of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. In 1918, he built himself an eighteen-room house of locally hand-hewn oak on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. He dug a moat around the house and put down a drawbridge. A grand house, a famous house, a house for the ages. The son was even more eccentric. In the spirit of his own time, past seventy himself, Jed Holson went hippie. His wife fled to California, and Jed opened his father’s mythical log palace to all female comers. Long-haired men were welcome, too. The lawn was crowded with VW buses and tents. People did their laundry in the moat. Jed’s doctor lawyer banker neighbors didn’t know what to make of all the parties. It didn’t matter. They weren’t invited. By the time I was old enough to enjoy the show, Jed — his crazy beard, his experiment in alternative living, his passel of nymphs — was forgotten. The log house went dark. Free love, old hat. As a kid, I used to climb up and pace the front porch, ghosting back and forth in front of the big windows, waiting for the flesh and the laughter. Jed must have been asleep somewhere in the gloom, his chin sunk in a tangle of yellow beard.

HIGHLAND PARK, ILLINOIS, 1981

DETAMBLE

They tore down the house on Detamble, but this has never mattered. We see that house every time we drive by. It happened more than thirty years ago. A childless couple. A childless couple who had always, the Sun-Times quoted a neighbor as saying, kept to themselves. Did they truly keep to themselves? Or is it only with hindsight that we see such people in their isolation? The husband was a retired ear, nose, and throat specialist; the wife was a horticulturist at the Chicago Botanic Gardens on Lake Cook Road. It might have taken them longer to find them if not for the dog. On the night of the third day, the hunger got to be too much, and her howling finally alarmed the neighbors. They went over and rang the bell. When they got no answer, they called the police, who used an ax to break in a side door. The husband and wife were found in the garage. (The dog, an Afghan hound, was found locked in the basement.) The only signs of struggle were bloody scratches on the wife’s arms and cheeks. The husband had no defensive wounds. This led investigators to conjecture that he had been taken by surprise, while she had seen it all coming. The other clues were that both of them had their heads stove in by some type of batlike object. It may have been the fireplace poker, the only material thing, as far as anybody could tell, missing from the house. The only other compelling piece of evidence: the wife, the horticulturist, was found wearing a money belt that still contained $20,000 cash.

“Bookies,” our neighbor to the east and town opinionator Penny Buckholtz surmised. “Everybody knows, after a certain point, it’s too late to pay them back with money. And I, for one, always knew something wasn’t right about those two. Why no kids? People who live in the suburbs without kids to raise are always hiding something. Why else would they live here?”

Penny Buckholtz may have had something there, and this is pretty much how we all took it. Must have been some kind of gambling debt. Don’t mess with the mob. You think they respect a suburban border? You think they care this is Lake County? No matter how mild-mannered you seem, they’ll take care of business the only way they know how.

There are no more memorable details and no other reasons to remember this couple aside from the way they died. We hadn’t known them. We hadn’t even known them well enough to make up stories about them, except of course Penny Buckholtz, who never had any compunction about making up stories about anybody, murdered or unmurdered.

It is tempting, after so long, the file long since closed, to zero in on the dog. Dogs are sympathetic. In a lot of stories dogs are even more sympathetic than people. For hours and hours, there’s that confused, whimpering, sleeping, pacing, foraging, and finally hopelessly yowling dog. Maybe the story is the dog and how alone she was, and how silent the house seemed. Those two had always been quiet, but no voices at all is different from silence. The silence worried the dog more than hunger. The woman had a small sad way of laughing that the dog could always hear wherever she happened to be in the house. The dog would always run toward that laugh.

It should be said that the murders, in spite of their brutality, didn’t terrorize us. We didn’t lock our doors any more than we had before. Everybody knew this wasn’t the beginning of a crime wave. No omen. It was simply an aberration. Our town has always been a safe place to raise your kids. Detamble, like so many of our leafy streets, is peaceful. Nothing ever happens on Detamble. It’s mathematical. But don’t you need some sort of break in the normal for there to be normal in the first place? The normal, the leafy, the peaceful, reaches out and bludgeons. A kind of sacrifice so the rest of us can slumber on amid the trees, on the bluffs, by the lake.

DYKE BRIDGE Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts, 1976

My brother and I in the knee-deep water, standing in the tidal current, under Dyke Bridge. We are hunting whelks. Yes, it is the water Mary Jo Kopechne drowned in. I know all about it. About Teddy drunk and how the story of what happened was less covered up than simply muddled. What was there to cover up? Her body was found in his car. My brother told me. How Teddy was still mourning his brothers, both his brothers, and that he drank too much. Not that this excuses what happened, my brother says. But wouldn’t you drink if somebody shot me in the head? And then your other brother? If you had another brother? Wouldn’t you drink a whole hell of a lot and probably crash a car?

We are on vacation with our parents on Martha’s Vineyard. We are from Illinois. It is classy, according to my parents, if you are from Illinois to take a vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. It’s also Kennedyesque. My parents are still married (to each other), though my brother and I would prefer this not to be the case. We have ridden our bikes out to this bridge to see this very spot, to muck around in this famous water. My brother is wearing a T-shirt with the face of Senator Sam Ervin, the hero of Watergate, on it.

I want to remember that we were alone, that it was only the two of us, but somewhere, in some stack of pictures, in some cabinet in my father’s house, there are pictures of my brother and me standing under Dyke Bridge, so it must be that at least one of our parents was with us and recorded it, and since my mother rarely took pictures, it had to have been my father; but let’s leave him out of this. Just my brother and me in the knee-deep water and my brother telling me that Teddy was heading back to the island that night, back from the even smaller island where they’d been at a party. That he was driving a black Chevrolet, because the Kennedys may be richer than God but they aren’t ostentatious. And that Mary Jo Kopechne wasn’t even very beautiful. She wasn’t Teddy Kennedy’s wife, either, he says, but that goes with this territory.

What territory?

The territory of being richer than God, my brother says. The landscape of sex and whisperings and innuendo.

I would rather fish up a whelk than listen to this, a live whelk with a black body inside, a Jell-O-ish squirmy thing that we will take back to our rented house and boil alive on the stove.

Even so, I ask, how much not very beautiful was she?

And my brother says, Not particularly unbeautiful. Just not that beautiful for a Kennedy. She wasn’t Jackie, is what I’m trying to say. But anyway, nobody was Jackie. Even Jackie wasn’t Jackie. Anyway, Teddy may have even loved her though he hardly knew her. Especially after she asphyxiated.

What do you mean?

My brother stares at me for a while. He and I have the same eyes, which is sometimes creepy. You don’t know yourself coming and going, as my grandmother used to say. Then he squats in the water and takes up a couple of handfuls of ocean water and raises his hands as it flows through his fingers. Don’t we sort of love what we kill? my brother says. What about the whelks?

Our bikes are on the bridge, leaning against a broken piling. Dyke Bridge is tiny, a miniature bridge. It is not much bigger than the width of a Chevy and nearly the same length. Driving off it is the bathroom equivalent of falling out of the bathtub.

I e-mail my brother and ask him if he remembers all this. He is still very sensitive when it comes to the Kennedys. Like my mother, he remains a staunch believer in the notion that the New England wisdom embodied by the Kennedys and their aristocracy of sorrow will save this doomed country yet. My brother works in Washington.

Why exaggerate? Why tell it worse? What happened isn’t enough? Yes, it’s a dinky bridge, but it’s bigger than a bathtub. I remember. We were out there with Dad. He took pictures. He thought the whole thing was hilarious. He kept saying, Be careful not to step on Mary Jo’s face.

And furthermore, my brother says, I should not, even over private electronic communication (remember: don’t use my.gov address for things like this) provide aid and succor to the haters who still love to dredge this story up out of the muck. Remember Chappaquiddick! Let the man rest in peace. And anyway, he says, why don’t you just pick up the phone and call me? Why do you e-mail your brother?

I write: E-mail gives the illusion of dramatic distance. Pretend I’m in Shanghai or somewhere.

He replies: Anyway, isn’t anything drive-offable if you put your mind to it? Or even when you don’t, especially when you don’t? He was tanked, what’s the story? You’re going to pass judgment? Look at your own life.

My brother is right. He is right. Even when he is not right, he is right. Look at my own life. And nothing he has ever told me have I forgotten.

It is only that something happened there, under that bridge, where my brother and I once swam. As things do, as they always have, so many more things (strange things, impossible things) than we can even begin to imagine. Dream it up. It already happened. One minute you’re drunk and laughing and your hand is on her bare summer thigh and there’s nothing but tonight ahead, and the next, the car is upside down and water’s flowing in through the cracks in the windows and the car’s like a big fat grounded fish and there’s this woman — what’s her name? — flailing her arms in the darkness and trying to shout but no sound is coming out of her mouth, and you wonder for a moment if you love her. Wait, what’s your name again? I’m confused. This is all so much black confusion. Shouldn’t I be swimmingly noble? Don’t I know the cross-chest carry? Aren’t I a Kennedy? Aren’t I the brother of the hero of PT-109? Isn’t now the time? No. Now is not the time. Now is the time to save yourself. Doesn’t matter who you are, Senator, save yourself — and run. My brother once said (though he doesn’t remember): Don’t we sort of love what we kill? This I’ve learned on my own. Sometimes you just have to save yourself and then run like hell. There’ll always be time for nobility, honor, sorrow, remorse, yes, maybe even love — in the morning.

The shadow of that little bridge over our heads. Us in the dark water, my brother and me, the gummy sand, July 1976.

THE MAYOR’S DREAM

No man is an Ireland.

— RICHARD J. DALEY,

48TH MAYOR OF CHICAGO

His Honor’s dreams tended to be practical and concerned matters such as tax policy or the loosening of onerous zoning restrictions or who to slate for state’s attorney. This was different. He found himself pounding on the door of a house, an ordinary bungalow. For some reason, he wasn’t able to use his fists. He’d lost the ability to close his hands. And so with open palms he pounded. Of course, it was his own house at Thirty-sixth and Lowe. Except at first he didn’t seem to know this. He tried to pound harder, his hands hopelessly platting against the door. Sis isn’t home, nor are any of the the children. He has no keys, apparently no pockets, either, though he’s wearing a suit. He goes around the house. Same thing. Back door’s locked. He’s starting to worry that the neighbors will think he is a prowler. He has influence? He knows President Johnson? He knows the Queen of England? Bring the kids next time, Lizzie. Right now he is only a man, Dick Daley, and he’s locked out of his house. Try throwing your weight around in a dream and see where it gets you. He goes around to the front again and sits on the stoop. Night comes without any slowness. It’s day. It’s dark. He sits on the stoop. The lights pop on in the house across the street, and he watches the shadows beyond the curtains. He watches those shadows — the Cowleys’ shadows — for what feels like hours. Now he wants to know something. Why do shadows dance when if you look directly at the people themselves — not their shadows — they aren’t dancing?

FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLDS, INDIANA DUNES, LATE AFTERNOON

Her name is Allie and she sits outside a ring of boys at the bottom of this hill of sand, along the southern edge of Lake Michigan. Chicago rises like a kingdom in the distance. Closer, maybe a quarter of a mile away, lurk the boxy towers of a defunct steel mill. Out in the water is a platform with a rusty crane, floating with no apparent purpose. She wonders how long it has been since the crane has been useful and whether it will ever be useful again. Allie hugs her shoulders and inhales the clean, mineral waft. The lake, for some reason, has always smelled like rice to her.

She used to love one of the boys — Marcus — but it’s become clear to her that it isn’t Marcus but all the boys together that she loves, wants. Their motley collection of skinny bodies. Alone, she could take or leave any one of them, but together there is something so skittery about them. They all want her, too, or at least they claim to, with their sagging mouths. But would they even know what to do with her body if she tried to give it to them? She’s long known what to do with theirs, and she lets them know, and this makes them nervous and need to grip each other harder. It is each other they need. Later, maybe, her. Later one or the other of them will fumble for her in the dark. Now it is only this unfinished day, the sun like a fiery headlight through the trees on the top of the bluff, and the sand, the waves riding slowly up the beach. Wave after wave breaks and flattens, but the noise of them never pauses for even a single breath. That low, constant roar that she will hear long after they all leave this beach. It is each other they need, and it is their needing each other that she wants. She sits on the sand and watches. They wrestle and chase; they smash their bodies into each other. She cups some sand and drains it on her feet. She scratches her long legs. She digs a groove in the sand with her heel and waits to be noticed. Marcus locks arms with Anthony, lifts him up, Anthony’s big feet waving. It will go away, this time. Just like the nicknames her father used to call her. Now that she has breasts, he calls her Allison. She stands up and runs down to the edge of the water. She dives, leaving her eyes open. The cold stings. She swims through the blur. The boys have a new thing they say: Butter my bread. Butter it, butter it. She’d do it, faster than they could even imagine. They’d run up the dunes screaming for their mothers. Butter nothing, wimps. For now, let them lie about it. For now, let them stay skinny cowards flinging into each other. She rises and stands in the shallow water and faces the beach as the waves break upon the shore, only to fall back toward her.

DENNY COUGHLIN: IN MEMORY

Things were good for a while. A team made up of guys from Southie would play a team made up of guys from Charlestown — with a couple first-degree lifers from Chelsea or Malden thrown in to make things even. Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. Can’t you see Pinkhands Salerno? Nursing his eye with a frozen sausage and shouting from the sidelines, “Fuckers, this show’s gotta go on!” Like we were putting on Guys and Dolls, opening night, on Broadway.

This place used to be called just Walpole, but the people of Walpole got tired of being known only as the town with the prison, so the state of Massachusetts changed the gulag’s name to Cedar Junction, a mythical place, an intersection of horrors just off Route 47 North. Turn right at the Dairy Delight and keep going a mile and a half. Paint scabbed, looks like an abandoned factory but for the layers of razor wire loop-dilooped, glistening silver in the sun, and the warning signs and the guard towers and the machine gunners.

Denny Coughlin made the rules, and Salerno, his most faithful lieutenant, carried them out with the zeal of a convert. Denny Coughlin. Good old Boston Irish from an old Southie family. Some of the sons went into the racket, others into politics. When his brother Len got hitched, Mike Dukakis gave the bride away. Denny, though, was in the crime branch, and back then — he’d be the first to admit it — he was a few clowns short of a circus. He got lugged on a murder two for busting a former associate in the head with a tire iron behind the Shell station on Columbus Boulevard. Denny pled to manslaughter and landed twelve to fourteen at Walpole, where he rose to his true calling, undisputed king of prison floor hockey.

Time. We don’t measure it in years. We measure it in lunch, in soup, in the ache for those we’ll never touch again, but out there on the gym floor, twenty-eight minutes, three times a week, it did, it did move faster.

The game had two basic rules:

Rule 1: No injuries. If you got hurt enough so that you couldn’t play, you dragged yourself off to the sidelines, stuffed your elbow back in the socket or got a towel to stanch whatever was bleeding. But you were forbidden to go to the choke. The rule came about because Sergeant Whosafuck said the game was getting too expensive after Rent Meelhan got blunked by Fabain and Joey Norris and had to be carried off, blood gushing from his eyeballs, on a stretcher. Spent a week in the choke with five broken ribs and a knob on his head big as Uranus. Finally they had to send him to a real hospital. So Whosafuck said, “Next time somebody goes down like that, that’ll be it, and you useless hogs will suck each other’s dicks while the blacks get double gym time for basketball.”

“Sergeant Whosafuck, must you be so vulgar?” Salerno asked. “Think of the tender ears. We’ve got juveniles here tried as adults.”

“Hustoff, Salerno. Hustoff. It’s Slovenian.”

And so Coughlin decreed it: “The days of wine and pain are over.” Nobody would get hurt again — ever. Salerno was a trustee. He’d steal the frozen meat from the kitchen that we’d use for icepacks.

Rule 2, which was around before we needed Rule 1, was straightforward also: The puck is always live. No time-outs. Constant action. The game never stopped unless the puck went under the equipment cage on the far side of the gym. When this happened, one of the screws would have to get up off his lolling ass and open the metal gate to retrieve the puck. Now, the important thing to understand here was that the puck remained live even when it went under the wooden bench the officers sat on during games. The drill was that the screws covering the gym — usually Morton and Salazar — would leap up whenever the puck went under the bench so that the guys could fight over the puck until somebody dug it out. The screws — at least Morton and Salazar — knew the deal. They got a kick out of seeing us beat the living crap out of each other up close. But when the puck went under the bench (about three times a game), they ran for the hills.

(The only other rule, so minor it didn’t need a number, was that blacks didn’t play floor hockey. But this was less a rule than the simple fact that the blacks, according to Coughlin, were scared pissless to play us barbarians. Same reason they don’t come to Southie. We’re big and white and hairy, baby!)

Nobody ever got hurt, nobody went to the choke. So maybe it was surprising that it was Rule 2 that caused Whosafuck to finally ban hockey, after all the trouble we went through to enforce Rule 1.

It was a tight game, only four minutes left before count call. Charlestown up by one. Coughlin was having an off day; he hadn’t scored. For a big man he had a strange grace as he went after the puck. He moved with this real fluid motion, as if he really was on ice skates. I played for Southie, defense. I’m not that aggressive a guy. I’m in here on a murder one, crime of passion, my lawyer called it. And it was love, that much is true, but I’m not making excuses — anyway, too long a story. In the gym, I rarely moved much. I’m decently sized myself, and mostly I just stood there in front of our goal like those cement pots they use to block off a street. Sometimes my head wouldn’t even be that much in the game because I’d be too busy watching Coughlin. There isn’t any other way to say it. Out there on the floor he wasn’t inside, he was somewhere else. And he’d thread through a bunch of guys, twirl like a ballerina, and come out with the puck like it was glued to his stick. It was a beautiful thing to watch. Losing brought out the artist in him. He never wanted to crush Charlestown; he always wanted them to believe they could beat us. Coughlin always said you had to give Charlestown some reason to believe. Otherwise, why would they ever play?

That day I think Coughlin may have pulled something, because he was favoring his left side a bit, but as soon as he heard the first warning bell, five minutes to count, his body seemed to forget about it and he got the old hunger back. But Charlestown had some strong players and they were hanging in there; most of them dropped back to defend. They kept deflecting Coughlin’s shots — with not only their sticks but their shoes, their elbows, their necks, their teeth. It was getting bloody down there on their side of the gym. Charlestown was smelling it. And Coughlin, with only about two minutes to go, had decided enough was enough—

Another shot ricocheted off the goal, and this time the puck went under the officers’ bench. And, see, that day a brand-new screw was down in the gym and he didn’t know the rules. Morton, the lazy fuck, didn’t bother to tell him. Salazar would have told him. Salazar would have showed him the ropes. But Morton, never. It would have taken too much energy to open his mouth and say, Hey, listen, rook, when the puck goes under the bench, they’ll kill you if you don’t get out of the way, okay? What would it have taken? And so of course, when it happened, the twenty-year-old puny rookie screw didn’t have any sense. Even though Morton was practically in New Hampshire when that puck slid under the bench that day. But the kid didn’t move. I’m a guard, the kid thinking, I’m wearing a uniform. I have to move for these Neanderthals? Two hundred fifty-five pounds of Denny Coughlin barreling his way, and the kid sits there on a picnic. Coughlin couldn’t stop, and he popped the kid so hard his head mulched against the concrete wall like a kicked-in pumpkin. It was bad. Morton, who knew damn well Coughlin was only going for the puck, fucked him anyway. That’s your Rule 3: They will always fuck us anyway. He got on his radio and called in an emergency B single assault on an officer. It didn’t take more than ninety seconds for Whosafuck to burst in with six helmeted Nazi lunatics from the Special Operations Response Team, plastic shields in one hand, wombats in the other. And the SORTs went right for Coughlin. But hear this, Coughlin, even on the floor, even getting his teeth kicked in by the toes of the SORT screws’ boots — the man still spoke up for the game, for us:

“Puck’s always live. Puck’s only dead when it goes in the cage!”

And when they dragged him away by his pits and he was nearly unconscious, his blood across the gym floor, he kept sputtering that he didn’t need to go to the choke, that he was fine, absolutely fucking fine.

Salerno told us what happened after. He had contacts in the choke. They couldn’t save him, so they had him medivaced to Mass General. But that was only covering their asses. Denny Coughlin was brain dead before he rose up from Cedar Junction.

THE DIVORCE

Gary died before the divorce was finalized, before he’d even moved out. Francine tried to be philosophical about it. Gary, had he been here to laugh, would have laughed. To him matters of life and death were laughable. He’d only fall apart when he couldn’t find his keys. And she did try to be — what? — light about the whole thing. An odd word, light, especially as it applied to her. Francine wasn’t light; she had no lightness about her. If you asked people, they might have said, Oh, no, not light, whatever you mean by this. Franny’s, you know, serious, lovely but serious. And yet today she feels oddly buoyant. Even the casket itself seems as if it’s bobbing in water. She loved him. Some people you come across in this world you end up loving. So many we don’t. So many we don’t even give a second thought. Why Gary? Nothing in particular doomed their marriage, and maybe this is why they decided to end it formally in the eyes of the State of Michigan before they had a true reason they could quantify in their heart of hearts. Heart of hearts. Her mother used to say that. What did it mean, the heart of a heart? What about the heart of a heart of a heart? Where does it stop? She stands before the casket and tries to weep. She’s finding it hard to stay focused. Affairs on both sides, but these were years ago, and, if anything, they’d strengthened their bond. For a while they were more interesting to each other. Once she’d run into him on the street downtown and he wasn’t wearing his wedding ring and she’d punched him in the face. Gary laughed, she laughed. To the end, he’d made her laugh. Francine wasn’t light, but Gary could make her laugh. This is more baffling than sad. I said I wanted to be alone, not alone alone. Gary? Just this past weekend he was packing boxes and asking politely if he should take or leave the ashtray they’d stolen from the hotel in Florence. Neither smoked anymore. What happened to smoking? She keeps trying to weep. She’s in the seat of honor, the seat closest to the body of the deceased. Deceased? What kind of word? Isn’t it redundant? Why not simply ceased? The casket is just far enough away so that she can’t reach out and touch it. She wishes she came from the sort of people who fling themselves on caskets. She saw that once, at the funeral of a Filipino coworker. Relatives clinging all over the casket like people on a raft. The lack of restraint was inspiring. But her own position now is somewhat awkward. Most of their friends know what’s been going on. Their kids too, of course. They’d taken it in stride. All in their twenties and thirties now, they’d been trained well by their parents never to pass judgment. Mom, Dad, do what you have to do. We totally get it. Anyway, who’s not divorced? People were groping for her now, tugging at her clothes, as if she were a talisman. “Oh, Franny, I’m so, so, so—” “Gary and I were supposed to play golf on Tuesday, a thing like this you can’t—” “The soul of kindness, you remember when he came over in his pajamas and talked Arthur off the roof?” “Anything at all, Fran, day or night, call me, will you? You won’t. Will you?”

And when it’s over she goes home, takes off her dress, and stands before the mirror. He’d been sleeping in one of the kid’s old rooms while he apartment hunted, a phrase he took literally. Gary was hunting down a house, a place to land. He said it was actually interesting, hilarious almost, how even familiar rooms, even architecture you know in the bones of your fingers, can one day simply deny you. Now I’m a guest, now I take up space. Oh, Gary, I just want to be alone, a little alone. Is this such a crime? I’m not blaming you, I’m merely remarking on the situation as a general matter, Fran. It’s not about you and me even, it’s simply bizarre to be looking for an apartment in a city I thought I knew but don’t really. I mean, going inside these buildings, walking up stairs, going through strange doors into rooms where other people I will never meet no longer live… She will have to get dressed again to go to his sister’s. Judy had been generous to host the after-funeral, given that it might be uncomfortable for the mourners to see his stuff already packed up like this. She puts on a dress. Hates it, tears it off. She remains in front of the mirror. Now she weeps, out-loud sobs that embarrass her even though it’s only her and the cat. Baldo. Baldo purring on the bed like nothing’s different. And Gary the only one who truly loves — loved — you. He was trying to find an apartment that accepted pets, which he said wasn’t so easy. When did everybody turn on pets? Renters don’t get companions? Only owners? How much damage can one old cat possibly do? A lot, she’d said. Don’t you remember what Baldo did to the suede couch? It was like Charles Manson came over. She looks at herself in the mirror. Not so terrible. Her arms need work, but not so bad. She will be wanted again. She begins to quake before the mirror. Will be wanted. Naked, Gary was always nervous. He’d always been self-conscious of what he considered his small penis. How did he know it was small? Did he go around comparing at the gym? He never went to the gym. She has to remember to cancel his membership. Charlene Gooch moved to New Hampshire to be closer to her grandkids, and they charged her credit card for three years before she noticed. Sex? Not unloving, hasty, and they liked it that way. They’d turn on the light again, begin reading where they’d left off, their bare arms touching. Okay for you? Mmmmmm. You? Mmmmm. My god, she thinks, horny? Now? This is ridiculous. All you were doing was moving out of the house.

He’d loaded his boxes, not in anger, in bemusement, holding items up, asking, Do you mind? This pillow with the elephant on it is definitely yours. And the furry slippers. The furry slippers are yours, Gary. He was magnanimous about the wedding gift crockery. He left her all the good saucepans. He packed only what he was going to need for a small one-bedroom. Still, she could sneak a few things back now, she supposed; by law it was all hers, again. The painting, for instance. He’d packed it with styrofoam peanuts. They’d had a friend once, an angry aspiring painter. The friend had painted what he called an abstract portrait of the two of them. To Fran and Gary it looked a mound, a blue mound. Still, they’d held on to it, hung it in a corner of the bedroom in case their friend became famous. He was certainly angry enough to be famous. What happened to Yari? People, they evaporate. She stands before the mirror. But somebody who was just here? How do you remember someone who was here a minute ago? Gary used to sit at the kitchen table and read her things out of the paper. The other day he said something about Egypt. Something about the Suez. How it all started with the Suez Canal. Canals, he said, usually cause more problems than they solve. Why do you think that is? She hadn’t answered, only took another sip of coffee and went out to the garage.

1979

Jimmy Carter dead in the water, and the Democrats either can wait to be kicked like a sleeping dog or at least try to bite back. It’s 1979 and certain pipe dreams are still smoked. And Ted Kennedy shouts — call it the last gasp of the sixties—Mutiny! And Chicago mayor Jane Byrne, Mayor Bossy, Fighting Jane, backs him to the hilt. Byrne relishes any fight. She says she wants Carter’s sanctimonious presidential head on a platter for the good of Chicago, and as Chicago goes, so goes the country. Byrne hosts a whopping fundraiser for Kennedy in the ballroom at the Hyatt Regency. Giddy, rebellious Chicagoans gather to meet the Last Brother. Some people attend because they actually support him; other people want to see who is supporting him in order to decide if they support him. Since nobody can quite figure out who is who, it’s a confusing evening. Kennedy himself is present, and despite the fact that in an interview on CBS, he couldn’t for the life of him explain why he was running, Senator, could you tell the American people why you want to be President? Uh, uh, uh, uh, you see… the man is still a Kennedy. Ladies swoon as he works the room. When he reaches my mother, though, it’s the other way around. Like Roger Mudd on CBS News, she leaves Teddy Kennedy speechless.

“I’m from Massachusetts,” she finally says. “Fall River. BMC Durfee High. National Honor Society and head cheerleader.”

“I never had any doubts,” Kennedy says. And he stands there for another long half minute, his wide face sweating, mesmerized. He already knows he doesn’t stand much chance of the nomination, but what’s a primary fight against a sitting President of his own party compared to this woman, my mother, whose name he will never know?

THE VAC-HAUL

For hours we listened to it on the radio, and not once did Larry Phoebus say a word. A woman walked into a classroom of a school a couple of towns over and began shooting. She killed an eight-year-old boy and wounded three other kids. She’d also, the radio said, left homemade bombs at other schools, including a school just a few blocks from where Larry Phoebus and I were parked. I could hear the frantic sirens, like crazed, amplified mosquitoes. Now the radio said that the police confirmed that the woman had fled across the street from the school where she shot the kids and was holed up in a house with a hostage. I was sitting there with Larry Phoebus, looking out the windshield of the truck, staring at the Chicago and Northwestern tracks, at the tall weeds that grew up between the ties, listening to all this on WBBM Newsradio 780.

I was home from my first year at college. It was July. I’d wandered across that year, as I’d wandered across much else, incurious, biding my time. Waiting for what, I couldn’t say. My stepfather, who was mayor of our town, found me a job in the Streets and Sanitation Department. For a few weeks, I was proudly blue-collar. Work — who would have thought I would take to it? I worked for Streets as a jackhammerer. I destroyed curbs with erotic abandon. I will make this corner handicapped-accessible if it’s my last act on earth. I wore a sweaty red bandanna. Rudimentary biceps were beginning to rise between my shoulders and elbows like small loaves. I’d be uptown, standing on the street, encircled by a little ring of pylons, smoking, and I would tell the imaginary pom-pom girls who thronged around me, I can’t talk right now. Look, can’t you ladies see I’m a workingman?

Then I was late three mornings in a row and the crew boss, Miguel, said, I’m taking you off Streets. You’re with Larry Phoebus now.

No, Miguel, no — please—

And don’t run to your dad. He knows all about it. He said to go ahead and fire you, but I figure, why not let you quit on your own?

He’s not my dad.

Turn in your gloves, Hirsch. You won’t need them again. Ever.

Larry Phoebus worked on the Sanitation side. He drove an enormous white truck with an enormous, bulbous hose attached to the end of it. It was called the Vac-Haul. It was rumored to have cost the taxpayers of our town two million dollars. My stepfather was very proud of it. The Vac-Haul was designed to suck up major sewage backups without the need to send “manpower down the manhole,” as my former Streets partner, Steve Boland, explained it. The truck was Larry Phoebus’s baby. He was long past retirement age. He’d worked for Sanitation for something like fifty years and was now refusing to leave. It was said that he didn’t trust another living soul with the Vac-Haul, and when it was time for him to die, he was going to drive that two million dollars straight into Lake Michigan.

Also, Larry never spoke. It was said around the lunch table that Larry Phoebus had pretty much given up communing with the rest of the human race in the 1960s when the world, his world, everybody’s world, went so haywire. Yet the precise reason for his total silence was a mystery nobody was especially interested in solving. Only Steve Boland speculated at all. He liked to hold forth in the lunchroom. Love, Boland said, what else is new under the sun? Only a woman could numb a guy like that. I hit the mute button myself for a couple of years after my first divorce. She took all my money, the house. All our friends. So I mean, answer me this, you’re living by yourself in some dump-ass rented apartment in Highwood and you think you’re going to want to chitchat?

“What the hell are you yattering about?” Miguel said.

“I’m talking about alone,” Boland said. “Do any of you even know what it means?”

Larry Phoebus himself never appeared in the lunchroom. He ate in the Vac-Haul. At lunch, he’d glide the magisterial truck into its special parking place in the garage and pull out a sandwich from his jacket pocket. We’d watch him up there in his cab, slowly chewing, looking down at us but not seeming to see very much.

Being Larry Phoebus’s assistant was the worst job in either division, and they usually gave it to one of the illegal Mexicans who’d come in looking for a day’s work, but that day, the day I was late a third day in a row, none of those guys were around, and so I became Larry’s new boy.

The Vac-Haul needed two people to operate it. One to guide the hose into the hole, the other to flick the switch in the cab.

The worst part of the worst job was that the Vac-Haul was rarely put to use. No question that it was a great monument to the progress of modern sewage engineering, but the town’s system apparently functioned just fine. Yet, in order for Larry Phoebus to be paid (and for the department and the town to justify the expense), the Vac-Haul had to leave the garage. And so every morning and every afternoon, Larry Phoebus would parade the truck around town for a while and then park behind the White Hen Pantry to wait out the hours listening to the news on the radio. And so maybe to Larry Phoebus that day was no different from any other day. Maybe the voices on the radio were a little more hysterical than usual, but it all amounted to the same never-ending drone that was life outside the cab.

WBBM News time: 3:26. In Winnetka this hour, SWAT teams and hostage negotiators have descended upon the 300 block of…

Sweltering hot in the cab. Larry Phoebus never rolled the windows down and he didn’t run the air conditioner, either. I listened to the old man’s wheezy breathing in the stagnant air. I watched the side of his gaunt face and tried to think of something to say. Things must have been so different when you were a young kid, huh, Larry? How were things when you were young, Larry? Let’s turn off the radio and talk, Larry. You and me. Tell me your life, Larry. I’ll listen. Who’d you love, Larry? You must have loved somebody. Steve Boland says there’s no other explanation.

Larry Phoebus watched the railroad tracks, the weeds. Finally, I got down out of the cab and went in the White Hen and bought some doughnuts, a box, an assortment. Back in the truck, I held the box out to Larry Phoebus, and in my memory, my ceaselessly lying memory, Larry Phoebus turns to me, and though he doesn’t exactly speak, his eyes look at me and say, No, but thank you.

Maybe I thought the doughnuts would provide a little fellowship, break some bread, at a time like this. A time like what? What was that time like? I sat there with my doughnuts. Every once in a while I took a bite out of one and put it back in the box. I figured I’d sample the whole assortment. I seem to remember maple frosting was a new, radical flavor then. You’re dead, Larry. You would have to be long dead by now. The Vac-Haul is probably not such a marvel anymore, either. You were a man I sat next to, a man who for hours and hours I sat next to.

When I think of that time, I think of the tenacity of that man’s breathing. I think of her also. For weeks, her name was everywhere. She grew up not far from where I did. Like me, she was a suburban Jewish kid from just outside Chicago. We are legion; we hail from a place called the North Shore, a graceful place on the bluffs of Lake Michigan. I never knew her, she was about eight or nine years older, but I did go to high school with her cousin. She — we don’t say her name out loud — went to college in Madison, like my brother, like my father. She was a member of the same sorority that my grandmother was a founding member of in 1926.

Valerie Bertinelli played her in the TV movie.

We listened to it on the radio, Larry Phoebus and me. The radio said another shot fired. The radio said SWAT teams. The radio said house surrounded.

We were still in the truck, in the parking lot, waiting out the hours before the Vac-Haul could go home to the garage, when the radio announced another shot, a lone one. The empty parking lot, the train tracks, the tall weeds growing up through the ties. I thought something should change, that at least the light should change. But it was July in Illinois and the sun refused to sink. Only the radio voices were moving. I gripped my doughnuts. The heat in the cab rose with every breath Larry Phoebus took. The side of his motionless face. The radio said stormed the house. Was he hearing any of this? His sharp jutting chin pebbled with gray hair. A strong, ready chin. Even hiding in the parking lot, Larry Phoebus never slouched. In the event of a catastrophic sewage emergency, Larry Phoebus would be there, on the scene. Flash-flood warnings called to him in dreams. The radio said hostage in critical condition. The radio said suspect shot herself in the mouth. The guy from the White Hen came out with a huge bag of garbage and launched it, shot put — style, to the top of the already heaping dumpster like another body.