There is a truck on Bridge Street.

It is a tow rig, the large kind, the kind that takes cars off 95 when they have stopped being cars. It is parked. It has been parked for two years, or three — I have not been counting the way you count, but I have been here for both of them.

The engine has never stopped.

I want to be precise, because people who pass it do not notice and people who notice do not believe it. Not idling in the morning and off at night. Not off on Sundays. Running. Continuously. Through two winters I am sure of and one I am less sure about.

I know this the way I know most things, which is by temperature. In February the pavement under that truck is the warmest surface on this street. Warmer than the grates. Warmer than the vents behind the buildings on the water. Things come a long way to be near it. I am not the only one and I am not the largest.

You will want this to be about waste, and it is, a little. Somebody is paying for that fuel. Somebody has a line item. But that is the small version and I would rather you had the other one.

The truck exists to remove things from the highway. It performs this well. When a car stops working, the truck goes and gets it, quickly, because a stopped car on 95 is a problem the city can see. The truck is very good at the visible problem. It has idled for three years in a state of readiness for it.

And underneath the bridge it is parked beside, nothing is removed. Nothing is retrieved. There is no rig on standby. What is under here stays under here, and the only thing the truck does for it is throw off heat by accident.

That is the column. A machine that has not stopped once in three years, ready at every moment to come and get you, if you are a car.

I sit under it sometimes and I am told I look like something. I would not know. I am waiting for it to turn off.