Old Newgate Road

by Keith Scribner

  “One more chance,” Nikki tells him. “If he misses another day, or even part of a day, he’s expelled.”

  “Christ.” He’s relieved, though at the same time knows that one last chance might not make much of an impression on Daniel. There are only two weeks of school left before summer break. But Cole will stand guard at the front door if that’s what it takes.

  “With the other thing, it looks like he’ll be paying a fine. The judge’ll let us know how much next week.”

  “So he’ll have to get a summer job.”

  “Which won’t be easy. There was an article in the paper. Even college kids can’t find jobs. Never mind a fifteen-year-old.”

  “I’ll hire him if there’s nothing else. I’ve got a big job going once I get this bid in. But I really think it’s better if he gets out of this mess on his own.”

  He hears Nikki exhale.

  “I know,” he says.

  “I just wish you weren’t away so you could help with this.”

  “I wish I were there too. But I’ll call him. And I’ll be back in five days.”

  “All of this is so you can watch some guys dismantle a barn?”

  “You know they’re called sheds.”

  “Oh, yes. The amazing Connecticut tobacco sheds where you had amazing sex when you were Daniel’s age.”

  He laughs. “Are you really still jealous of my girlfriend when I was fifteen?” He knows it’s more complicated than that, but Nikki lets it drop—kindly, he supposes. They’re silent long enough that he remembers the metal Sucrets box Liz always kept loaded with pot, cash, ChapStick, gum, as if she was ready to escape at a moment’s notice.

  Finally Nikki says, “Do you think he’s having sex?”

  He wishes Daniel was, since none of the activities he and Nikki propose distract him from committing juvenile misdemeanors that have twice landed him in court. He looks at his watch. “I’ll call him after chemistry.” God, they know his whole schedule by heart.

  “Okay, then,” she says.

  “Okay.”

  He starts toward the house. A bird shrieks. The three grand sugar maples still line the front yard. He used to climb these trees and can still identify the branches he scrambled up. He peers through the overgrown grapevines, but Alex is nowhere in sight. A battered Pontiac sits far up the driveway. The grass needs mowing. The place needs a coat of paint. Cole painted the entire house the summer he was thirteen, still too young to work tobacco. Is this the same paint he brushed on thirty-two years ago, blistering and peeling away from the clapboards in flaps the size of his hand?

  On the driveway, gravel crunches beneath his feet. Then, drifting out an open window: piano music. It sounds like a recording until he hears a wrong note, a pause, the music resuming. His sister Kelly took lessons on his father’s old upright. According to their mother he’d played brilliantly when they married and hoped to devote his life to it, but quit when he was in the army and never played again. His kids tried over and over to coax him back to the piano, and his refusal seemed to Cole, even when he was just a boy, like willful stinginess. His mother had also played when she was young, but a broken wrist that didn’t heal right finished that for good.

  The soulful, brooding piece comes to a final note, the resonance still hanging in the air until pounding chords begin a new movement, this one louder and more insistent. Farther up the driveway he glimpses around back and what he sees is impossible: his old bicycle, red and black frame, pitted chrome fenders. He’d built it from salvaged parts to ride the tobacco roads with his girlfriend. A plastic grocery bag hangs from the handlebar, bright and blazing in the hot afternoon sun, weighed down with what looks like a dozen eggs and a quart of milk.

  He’s baffled. He wants to show Alex the bike but can’t see her anywhere. He looks toward the house. Bricks have come loose in the bulkhead that his father once spent a weekend rebuilding. He’s watching himself like he’s in a flickering Super 8 film, soundless and luridly colored, wrestle a ping-pong table down those steps into the cellar with his father, then level it up on the dirt floor. With each serve and stroke and slam, their feet burrowed deeper and deeper into the dirt until the table rose so high they had to rake the mounds back into the troughs. When his father took the lead, he started laughing uncontrollably; with each point he won, he burst out cackling, raising his hand and calling for time to catch his breath before the next serve, his eyes brimming with tears.

  Cole continues toward the kitchen door, from the weedy patch where his mother tried to grow early-American herbs to the shaded spot where they’d planned to lay a flagstone patio for summer dinners but instead only ever heaped up lath ripped with the plaster from walls. He can see his sensitive, frightened little brother hunched over the wheelbarrow after school, even in the rain, hammering bent and broken eighteenth-century iron nails from the lath because they had to be saved, Ian pounding lath, as they called it, resigned to drudgery like one of Courbet’s stone breakers.

  Stepping up onto the back porch, he walks through an invisible spider’s web, sticky as a gypsy-moth cocoon across his face, and he wipes at his cheeks and chin. The back door’s wide open, and though the light inside is dim, he can make out their massive old kitchen table and somehow even the smells of their meals. And now he sees his mother standing at the stove in her beige skirt and white blouse and apron, her necklace of red beads the size of cherry tomatoes. When she cooked she used to speak to the food in French. Cole would slip into the kitchen unnoticed and listen to a pouty, round-lipped “un petit peu plus d’ail,” shaking garlic powder into hamburger; a sulky “tu sens si bon,” forming balls with the squishy meat; a playfully scolding “non, non, arrête ça,” slapping the balls into patties. Then she’d spot him—“Ah, salut, mon chéri”—and that would be the end of the French. “Set the table, please. Ketchup, pickles, ranch.”

  “Cole,” he hears, seemingly from inside, and he stands paralyzed at the threshold, his chest thudding. But then he turns his head, and beyond the driveway, through the curtain of the weeping willow, he spots Alex back on the road beside the rental car, waving her arms at him. “Cole!” He steps down off the porch and strides away from the door, but stops at his old bike again, mystified how it’s still here. And even more that someone’s using it. The milk carton pokes out of the plastic bag, and he runs his finger along the cool sweat condensed on its side. His eyes follow the tobacco road until it disappears between the nets, and in a flash he remembers that night: standing on the pedals, pumping his legs and gazing up at the golden sky rimming the Metacomet Ridge, then spreading purple as a bruise except for a single star, which wasn’t a star, but Venus.

  He swerved around a puddle in the tractor road, sweat worming down the insides of his thighs, and Liz’s thumbs tugged harder on the belt loops of his cutoffs. The bike wobbled—the front tire catching in a rut—and they nearly crashed, but she just laughed and kicked out her legs, which reminded him of the musical montage in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and with Liz’s hands on his hips he began singing that song—“ ‘Raindrops keep falling on my head—’ ”

  “Ha!” Liz said. “Do you remember when you didn’t get it?”

  “You’ve been reminding me for a year and a half.”

  “Such an innocent boy,” she teased, goosing him. “It’s so obvious Butch isn’t really riding Etta on the bike. He’s riding her.”

  “I know. I know. But they’re on the bike. I was still in eighth-grade English. Metaphors confused me. You were in ninth grade reading Hamlet.”

  “Etta scurries up to a hayloft,” Liz said, “bats her eyelashes, fixes her hair. They’re balling!”

  “I know, I know!” He laughed, steering around the back of the shed. “Now it’s my favorite metaphor ever.”

  After ditching his bike in tall weeds, he pried open the vent and they slipped inside, pinched off their sneakers, and walk
ed barefoot through the cool dirt, as fine and rich as cocoa powder. The narrow vents reached to the rafters, evening light casting long angled stripes across the ground. As they ambled the length of the shed, Liz’s joints loosened, her hips swayed; she swung the sneakers hooked in her fingertips, tossing her straight pale hair from side to side. His voice mellowed, dampened by the tobacco curing over their heads, as thick as a jungle. She leaned back against a wide chestnut post, pulled him to her, and kissed him deeply, then spread out their small blanket and lay back, a band of light crossing her bare thighs, and another her flushed face. She plucked a joint from her Sucrets box and struck a match. The light darkened, then slowly re-emerged bright yellow-blue with the rising moon. A gentle buzz rose through them. “The present is actually eight milliseconds in the past,” she said, “because that’s how long it takes your brain to deal with it all. You’re looking at my face like it’s right now, but you’re really seeing it in the past. Through time.” Her hand curled and twisted like the smoke in the heavy air.

  “Especially if you’re stoned,” he said.

  She formed pea-sized spit bubbles on the end of her tongue and flicked them out floating above them. School was beginning in a few weeks, he’d be a sophomore and she a junior, but next weekend they had a plan: she’d told her parents she was going with a friend to her family’s cabin on the reservoir; he told his he’d be camping with Paul. “If the sky’s clear,” he said, “let’s sleep under the stars.”

  “And pie for breakfast,” she said, her voice dreamy, unfocused. They were stoned and kissing and warm, the sweet sharp tobacco smell all around them. “Hostess cherry pie.”

  She’d brushed some hanging leaves as they walked through the shed, and her forehead and hair were sticky and fragrant with tobacco juice. He loved her with the reverence you’re supposed to feel for God. Their love was a release for them both, from the fighting in his home and, in hers, from her parents, big drinkers both, and her brother Kirk, who she shut up tight about when Cole touched the bruises on her arms and legs and begged her to confide. “I can handle it!” she’d snap. “He doesn’t fuck me if that’s what you’re worried about.” But he’d been watching Kirk, making a plan.

  Wriggling out of their cutoffs, staring into each other’s eyes, they escaped into ecstasy.

  * * *

  —

  They heard sirens when they got to the blacktop, Cole biking her home, and he thought, What if? He’d kept himself awake many nights imagining every detail, waiting for what hadn’t come. But what if it was happening now?

  Spinning down the hill past the cemetery and Old Newgate Tavern, they came to the center of town. Liz’s house was just beyond the town hall and elementary school. Her father had an insurance business and their place was a modest estate by local standards—brick and handsome with ivory trim, black shutters, and a circular drive, the detached garage converted to his office, perfect lawn and orderly flower beds, English ivy clinging to the chimney.

  He coasted around back, both of them relieved that her brother’s Chevelle wasn’t there. In the darkness they kissed goodnight, deep-throated and sloppy, and as she ran across the lawn to the kitchen door—passing through the dingy splotch of carriage light pulsing with mosquitoes and moths—he felt the familiar empty tug that he might never see her again.

  He rode past the Cumberland Farms—gearheads smoking cigarettes by the phone booth, a pregnant woman with a gallon of milk getting into her station wagon. He pedaled by Hair It Is! in an old house on the corner, looped behind the Congregational church, and then was back on a tractor road that took him through fields where he’d just done a fifth priming. This was his second summer working tobacco—he’d turned fifteen in April. Since Cole was big for his age, the straw bosses called on him for the heavy lifting and expected him to move faster down the rows than the other kids. It was the same with the restoration, his father having him rip out plaster and haul sheetrock. And in gym class, too, the teacher choosing him to demonstrate wrestling moves and recruiting him for the football team two years early. Even to himself he seemed to become a teenager overnight. In seventh grade he grew a foot, his arms and thighs and calves thickening. He’d been a child and then suddenly wasn’t. He’d felt powerful in the football gear, invincible, but he played on his heels, he was told, lacked the killer instinct he needed to learn how to hit. And at the moment of impact he always balked. By ninth grade the coach had lost interest—calling him a gun-shy bird dog—and no one cared when he quit the team.

  He biked the dirt road between two walls of nets, smelling leaves ready to be picked, thinking of Liz’s hair tonight, but then he caught a trace of smoke: above the treetops, the sky was glowing. He stood up on the pedals. The fire was behind the Viets farm, where two sheds sat close to the swamp, and he steered in that direction, pedaling faster, his heart picking up speed. Another fire. Insane! He got close enough to see sparks rising on the heat, then ditched his bike, ducked under the tobacco nets, and hurried between rows of plants to the far end, where he spread the net open to peek out. Beyond Viets’s fields of tomatoes and zucchini, the shed itself—loaded with leaves worth a hundred thousand dollars or more, partly cured, maybe already sold—was a dense inferno. Torched.

  Swirling red and blue lights reflected off the smoke. Radios squawked, water surged and splashed, the trucks rumbled and the fire roared. They had given up on the burning shed and were now dousing the one beside it—water pouring off its roof—to keep it from catching.

  It was late and he knew he should get home, but the fire captivated him. He and Liz had a nest in that shed last fall. He’d discovered a platform high up off the ground—no telling what it was built for—and Liz brought an old quilt from home, and they climbed up those massive chestnut timbers and made love and talked. Sometimes a bird got trapped inside or they watched a feral cat stalking invisible prey, and she played Pink Floyd on the portable cassette player, and as he watched the fire now he could hear, I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon…It was a great spot until Marianne Viets saw them going in one day after school, and she started spying, and then the place was no longer theirs.

  Cole wanted to get closer but knew he shouldn’t be seen. It was the fifth shed to burn since early spring. At the second fire, back in June, when Cole walked right up to watch, the police came at him, asking questions, writing down his name and address, itching with suspicion.

  They also questioned kids at school and pulled two kids right out of Liz’s algebra class. Because Boulger Tobacco was multinational, people said the FBI was involved. There were rumors of undercover agents posing as teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers. Rumors that the arson was related to the bomb scares that had already emptied out the high school twice that spring.

  With an explosive crack the roof finally caved in, the fire flared, and sparks plumed into the sky. Within the flames he could now see the dark skeleton of timbers. The police had his name and address but never contacted him, though since the third shed—out on Spoonville Road—he’d known who was setting the fires.

  * * *

  —

  Later that same night his mother screamed out his name and he sprinted from bed, and as he pivoted toward the door, the throw rug slipped and his feet skidded out from under him, and not until his cheek hit the corner of the dresser—pain expanding in his head like a whiff of ammonia—did he know he was really awake.

  He shot into the hall as a boom from their bedroom shook the house along with a startled cry. Even with the lights blazing and his covers kicked off, he’d fallen asleep. Damnit! For a week this fight had been building, starting with a highboy his father had bought that she said they couldn’t afford, then taking its usual course—the oil bill, the kids’ braces, marriage has to be a partnership! Her protests were met with gruff muteness. Last night at dinner she was crying while Cole and his brother and sister pushed mashed potato around their plates, so silent as
to become invisible until finally his father punched the table and their dishes jumped. Figuring this would be the night, Cole fought off sleep and kept alert as her grievances pierced the walls, never knowing what was happening during the silences. He’d never in his life heard his father raise his voice.

  Cole burst through their door as her bedside lamp hit the floor, light slashing sideways and too white across the room: his father’s arm cocked, his mother’s leg hanging off the bed. “Dad!” he shouted as Ian tore in behind him. “Stop!” And for a long moment they were all frozen. In the sudden quiet he heard her whimpers spill out, muffled through her hands, and Ian stifling the gasps that would explode into sobs, his own heart thumping in his ears as a horror-movie shadow of his father, fist still raised, blotted across the ceiling and down the far wall. When his arm dropped, he turned into the light glaring up from the floor, one side of his face twitching with anger, the other as black as a cave, and moved toward his sons, who stepped aside. Avoiding their eyes, he walked between them and out the door.

  Cole picked up the lamp and set it back on the nightstand, righting the shade and switching the bulb to low. He touched his mother’s shoulder, her skin bare and hot, the nightgown strap moist with sweat, and she sobbed violently into her palms. Rage rose up in his throat—an acid burn—and he swallowed hard against it while clutching his mother’s wrist and pulling it gently from her face. Her left eye and cheek were already swelling red, and when she turned into the light he saw a heavy drop of blood clinging to her nose. He lightly touched her forehead before leading Ian to his room and telling him, “Try to sleep.” Halfway down the stairs he heard the TV, so he went the long way around to the bathroom, shook two aspirin from a bottle, and filled a bag of ice in the kitchen.

  Upstairs, his mother hadn’t moved, still cradling her face in her hands, her back rising and falling as she wept. He passed her tissues and waited as she wiped away the blood, blew her nose, and gave them back in a wad. She accepted a cup of water, swallowed the aspirin, then pressed the ice bag to her cheek. Kissing the top of her head, Cole took in a low-tide smell of hairspray and snot and something from under her scalp, chemical and singed.