And in the corner of his eye: a dark swoop. He twists his neck and jumps back as a second rafter barrels at him like a missile and strikes the ground so close he feels the thud in his spine. He spins around as the crane operator trots up. “What the fuck’s wrong with you!” Cole spits.
The bastard bends over the hook and releases the cable.
“You could’ve killed me!”
He yanks the cable free, then straightens up and twists his head toward Cole. “If I wanted to hit you, I would’ve.” He’s chewing on the cigar stub, stuck in the corner of his mouth, and through the horseshoe mustache, greasy cap, and thirty years of hard living, Cole identifies him instantly.
“You gonna use that knife or just dangle it?”
Cole looks down at the hand gripping the buck knife pointed for attack, and for a blurry moment it seems to belong to someone else. He slowly turns the blade until it glints.
“I wouldn’t hit you, Cole.” He laughs. “You’re practically blood. I can work this crane the way some people aim a gun.”
Cole takes his time folding up the knife. The cigar smoke, which he usually finds pleasing, turns his stomach. That face, lined and grizzled, stained by the years—if you could scrape away the gnarled outer layer, he’d look exactly as he did back then.
“You look like you seen a ghost, Cole.”
“Ready!” Antoine shouts from the rafters, but neither man looks up at him.
“Welcome home.” He smacks twice on the cigar and picks it from his mouth. Exhaling a big cloud of blue smoke, he jams the stub back beneath the heavy mustache. “Careful on the jobsite now.” He turns, and Cole watches him lumber back to the crane, a hitch in one knee, arms hanging long at his sides, leather gloves burnished at the palms from the crane’s knobs and levers.
Cole holds the slice of wood to his nose, watching Antoine hook the cables around the next rafter. As it sails skyward, the diesel roaring, he walks back to Alex at the car. “Do you know him?” he asks.
“Kirk?” She raises her eyes. “Oh, yeah.”
“He still trouble?”
She nods. “Our regular guy threw out his back.”
Sweat creeps down his skin beneath his shirt. The air is so dense with humidity it’s hard to get a breath. How did he ever live here?
“Are you okay?” Alex asks.
He feels a little dizzy, both hunger and the hot sun beating on him. “Yeah,” he says, his eyes on Kirk grinding gears, the burnt-clutch smell toxic. How easy it would have been to stick that knife between Kirk’s ribs. How easy to ignite the rage he thought he’d put forever to rest.
* * *
—
Driving over Hatchet Hill, the back route into town, they pass the trailhead where he and Liz planned to hike and camp that summer.
“The shed’s really a prize,” Alex says. “We considered keeping it ourselves, but we’re pretty overstocked, and I’m guessing things’ll be slow for quite a while. If not for the housing crash, I don’t think it would’ve been for sale.”
With the bust, she explains, the developer who sold him the shed is strapped for cash, and Cole’s ten K will float him for another month.
“And when do you and Antoine leave on your cruise?” he asks.
“Five days. As soon as your trailers are loaded. That’s why we had to use Kirk. Tight timeline.”
They drive by the house of a childhood friend whose family had snowmobiles; straddling the machines, he and Paul would choke down Yukon Jack and then blast up the ridge, smoke a bowl at the top of the quarry, and race along the edge. A miracle he wasn’t killed. “The Danube, right?”
“Steaming the river to the Old Country. Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest.”
He glances up the hill at the high school as they go by, then at the old pizza-and-grinder shop once they come into town. Two gas stations still face each other across the main intersection, one of them heavily shaded by an enormous elm in the cemetery. The Ulmus americana blight wasn’t as devastating as the one that wiped out the American chestnut, but it cheers him to see this majestic tree thriving. Old Newgate Tavern’s still here, and the Cumberland Farms.
“Antoine hopes that just being in those places where his ancestors lived—touching the stone walls in the churches, eating cabbage and lamb, lots of paprika and coriander…” She looks out her window at a little strip mall—just three shops—sitting where the skating pond used to be. “He hopes he’ll find a connection there.”
Liz’s old brick house hasn’t changed on the outside, but it’s no longer a home. A lawyer, therapist, and accountant have wooden signs on the lawn. Her father’s detached office belongs to a realtor. It’s still the stateliest property in town.
He sometimes can’t remember the order of things, but he believes his last time here—a year after his mother’s funeral, maybe two?—he’d taken the turn into their driveway too wide and he felt the ground go soft under the right front tire of his grandmother’s Coupe de Ville. The house would have looked as it does now except that the blinds would be drawn, and when Mrs. Schaler opened the front door, a cigarette in her hand, he would demand to see Liz. “You!” her mother says, eyes full of venom, so he pushes past her up the stairs, then searches room by room until he finds his girlfriend’s denim jacket hung over a bedpost, a Dark Side of the Moon prism on the wall, brown clogs under the desk. But no Liz. He knows she’s home from boarding school for spring break. She can’t be far.
He lies down on her bed to wait, his face buried in her pillow, and when they come for him—a cop’s tight grip around his upper arm—Cole pleads: “It’s not true what I said. None of it happened like that.” Harsh sunlight burns the edges of the shades like an atomic flash. Four of them squared off in the smoky living room on a Saturday afternoon—Cole, Liz’s parents, and the cop, who’s the only one of them who isn’t drunk. He rips free of the cop’s grip—“I just want to talk to her!”—and his arm gets wrenched up his back, his face pressed into the dining table.
* * *
—
Like an arc on a white sea he soon spots the roof of their old house above the tobacco nets on their way back to Alex’s shop. As they get closer, a shadow moves across a window—or is it a reflection on the glass, a trick of the sunlight flickering through the maples?
“Watch out!” Alex screams, and he slams on the brakes—a raccoon is lurching across the road. They rock to a halt and the animal stops too, on the yellow line, turning toward the car. “Why’s it out in the daytime?” she says. “Rabies?”
The raccoon rises up on its haunches and reaches its tiny hand toward the car—its markings and dark coat out of place in the bright sun—and just as it loses interest and turns away, a pickup comes barreling around the curve. It swerves but the rear tire strikes the animal with a quick and awful crunch. The truck slows as the raccoon drags itself with its forelegs to the edge of the road, but then speeds away.
“No,” Alex laments. “Oh, no.” Cole swings the car onto the shoulder and jumps out. The raccoon is clawing at the base of a maple tree on their old front yard, trying to pull itself up. It rolls onto its side, strains to right itself, and rolls back again, all the while scratching at the bark.
Alex has tears in her eyes. “Shit. What do we do?”
Cole searches the ditch for a rock, and the biggest he can find is no larger than a baseball. He approaches the animal tentatively. He can smell it now—wild and dirty, the smell of fear that predators detect or maybe of rabies ravaging its body under the thick pelt. “You might not want to watch this,” he calls.
Alex lowers her head, a hand hovering over her mouth, but keeps looking at him.
And when he raises the rock, the raccoon’s black eyes, squinting against the sun, grow wider in Cole’s shadow. It tumbles again onto its side, exposing a row of swollen nipples. She focuses on him, seeming to know what’s coming, and h
e smacks the top of her head with the rock. She falls back, the soft belly fur turned skyward. She’s only stunned—not dead—and after a moment her eyes flicker open. He gently presses her snout back with the sole of his shoe and slips the knife from his belt.
As the blood drains out, coloring the fur, the slight resistance he felt beneath his foot surrenders. He can see now that her belly was split open, and he smells the guts still warm with blood.
There’s no blood on his hands or his clothes. He wipes his knife blade in the grass but doesn’t fold it, just lets it hang to his side as Alex crosses the road toward him.
“Can you get rabies from blood?” she asks.
And strangely her question sparks a long-forgotten afternoon carefully drawing pictures, copied from the encyclopedia, with colored pencils. “No,” he says. “But I bet it’s not rabies. I gave an oral report once.”
“What?”
“In fourth grade. Rabies can bring raccoons out in the daytime, but usually it’s nursing mothers who need more food.”
Alex nods. She can’t take her eyes off the dead animal.
“Rabies and babies,” he says. “I hope her pack’s old enough to fend for themselves.” He remembers his mother helping him with the drawings on the floor in front of the keeping-room fireplace, how expertly she shaded the fur with the side of the pencil lead. “A gaze,” he corrects himself, “not a pack. A gaze of raccoons.”
He looks at the house, then down at the carcass. He’s gone from feeling like a mercy-killing Good Samaritan to a hit man with a body on his hands. He wishes he knew the renters, but hasn’t been in touch with any for eight or ten years. “I’ll have to bury it,” he tells her, looking out over the fields across the road; there’s plenty of loose soil back by the tree line, so digging would be easy. “I’m going to rinse my knife off, then I’ll knock on the door and see if I can borrow a shovel.”
“I’ll go ask about a shovel,” she says. “You go clean up.”
Cutting along the currant bushes and under the pear trees, he can see at the back of the yard the mossy concrete cistern that’s probably a hundred years old. When Cole was a kid, it’s where they got water for their rabbits and chickens.
He bends down and twists the spigot, which doesn’t budge, and he fears a frost has done it in, but then it snaps open and a rush of rusty water splashes onto the grass. Alex is at the back door, still thrown open as it was earlier, and he can hear her calling “Hello?” over the piano music, the same tumbling, off-balance piece they heard an hour or so ago. After a moment the water runs clear and he washes the knife and then his hands, one in the other. Alex calls again into the house. He closes the tap and wipes his hands and the knife on his pants, which makes him think of his son. Cole’s jeans from the knees down were Daniel’s towel, from the time he could stand until he was eight or nine—his hands sticky with ice cream, slimy with pumpkin guts, numb and gritty from saltwater and sand. As he straightens up and flips the knife closed, he looks back at the house, where Alex is gone from the door, but the piano’s still going. He passes by the grapevines and ducks beneath the branches of an apple tree, feeling apples squishing under his shoes through the thatch of grass and weeds.
At the back porch he’s about to knock on the open door, but the sight of their kitchen is so astonishing that he steps inside. Almost nothing’s different after all these years—the long heavy table where they ate, the straight line of Formica counter and pressboard cabinets, now painted a fiery yellow that someone hoped would brighten, the same brick-patterned linoleum rolled out over most of America in the seventies, scuffed through in spots to the asbestos backing.
Then he’s tracing his fingertips along the dent in the paneled wall, remembering how that particular fight began: she wanted him to go to a cocktail party at the Dovers’ and he refused. Simple as that. From there it built for days, the kids quiet and cooperative but glaring at each other as if to say, Stop it! Don’t! Don’t set them off! Then at dinner—they were going to Ian’s Little League trophy night and, as always, were running late—everybody was seated except for Kelly, who his mother had asked to get a serving spoon for the salmon wiggle. “It’s not here,” Kelly groaned, digging through the cluttered drawer. “Lord help us!” their mother responded. “Now we’ll really be late,” and she pushed back from the table declaring, “I could’ve found it ten times myself by now,” her heels pounding across the floor as his father’s whole body jerks, as if jolted by electricity, and he flings the stack of paper plates on top of the casserole, stands up, punches the plates down into the bowl, punches again, hot food spewing like lava, then lifts the big bowl and hurls it the length of the table at their mother. She jumps aside and it smashes against the wall. Ian is screaming now, holding up his bare arms helplessly, and before Cole understands what’s happening his father is wiping the scalding food from Ian’s skin with a potholder. When Cole begins cleaning up, he finds the deep curved dent that the bowl’s rim made in the paneling, realizing that Ian’s scalding skin is the only thing that prevented, on this particular evening, a beating.
The music picks up momentum, a violent pounding on the keys, and Cole looks into the keeping room—the big slab of a hearth and the huge fireplace now stripped of its iron. He steps through the doorway, the wide floorboards giving beneath his feet. Alex is turned away from him, standing beside the piano, right where his mother died. Her body blocks all but the curve of the pianist’s back. But by now, he knows.
Alex’s head sways gently. The room is mostly empty, with only a broken chair and some junk along one wall. The music picks up speed and charges to the end. “Wow,” she nearly shouts.
Cole stands motionless as the final chord settles like dust. “Hello, Dad.”
The two of them turn from the piano.
“This is your dad?” Alex says. “Did you know he was here?”
Cole shakes his head.
She’s looking back and forth between them, pure delight on her face. “How could I have missed it? Oh, my God. The resemblance is so obvious.”
With difficulty his father pushes to his feet and straightens up, like someone collapsing in reverse. Stiff hips, the forward pull of a low-slung paunch, shoulders pinched back to compensate for a stoop. When he shuffles clear of the bench, leaning on a palm on the edge of the piano, fingers curled into a loose fist, he says, “Son. What a surprise. Welcome home to you both.”
“What’re you doing here?” Cole’s sharp tone ruffles Alex, but his father is enlarged by it.
He takes a deep breath, seeming inexplicably serene, and says, “Renters moved out a while back, and after your uncle Raymond passed, there was nobody to find new tenants. My gig was up in Baltimore”—he glances at Alex—“and it’s no fun living in my car. Did you know Raymond passed?”
“But what are you going to do here?”
He gives the question more thought than it probably deserves. Cole doesn’t even know what he’s asking, his head swimming in confusion. What the hell? As dismissive as he is of his father’s conversion to the Bridgeport Correctional Center’s religion of positivity, he’s spent the last decades nurturing much the same thing in himself—a calm and centered peace that seeing his father here is instantly shattering.
“Live,” his father says. “I guess I plan to live here.”
The irony fucking kills Cole, and he’s about to say so, but Alex extends her hand over the piano bench. “I’m Alex Bearcroft. It’s a pleasure, Mr. Callahan. You play beautifully.”
His father takes her hand in both of his and holds it like a baby bird. “Tell me about you. How have you been?”
“I live just over on Suffield Road. Your son and I have known each other for years.”
“But you’ve never come to the house before?”
“I didn’t even know this was the house.”
He releases her hand, suddenly. “Yes,” he sa
ys, his eyes flashing on Cole. “This was the house.” He drops the cover on the piano keys, and then his spirits rebound. “Let me give you the grand tour.” It’s his mother’s phrase, one that his father never would’ve used back then.
Alex nods, smiles, and then glances at Cole, puzzled, as if her loyalties are shifting. “I’d like that, Mr. Callahan,” and she lets him take her elbow.
“But please call me Phil.”
“Certainly.”
“Good, then.” And he leads her into the parlor.
Despite his unrestrained laughter when creaming Cole at ping-pong, his father was usually reserved, even sullen. In the few times Cole has seen him since prison, he’s proselytized gratitude and looking toward the future. He’s spent these years working at halfway houses for parolees, and like the army culture that always seemed second-nature to him, he obviously felt comfortable inhabiting that world. Cole’s mother used to say that as a Catholic, no matter where you went around the globe, you could walk into a church for Sunday mass and be at home. For Phil, six months in DC and two years in St. Louis, with a constant stream of ex-cons to soak up his advice, then on to Little Rock and San Diego, sleeping in a bunk or his car, made him feel more at home, more settled and content, than he ever seemed when Cole was a boy. He’d hated running Marks & Tilly, a home store in Avon that his mother-in-law owned; he didn’t have the personality for it. He might even have hated restoring the house. As a kid Cole suspected that his father’s responsibilities provided nothing more than a reason for him to get out of bed in the morning, and that the life he perceived as oppressive helped explain—and Cole also believed this was normal for every husband, every man—his occasional brutality.
As in erupting on occasions: Mother’s Day one year. Easter. The day of her father’s funeral. Never every week or even every month. This was probably why his mother truly believed This will be the last time every time she said it. Nevertheless, in between, the sword was always dangling over their heads. Some years ago, when Nikki pointed out that Cole’s depression and impatience kicked in on weekends—as his father’s violence often had—he hated recognizing his father in himself.
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