Old Newgate Road

by Keith Scribner

  He looks at another picture: Phil holding a rooster in front of the henhouse. They’d just built it from rough-cut Southern pine and it looks new, surprisingly, as Oregon homesteads out on the high desert are surprisingly new in old photos. His father has long, thick sideburns, and his black plastic glasses are held together across the bridge with tape. The Band-Aid runs along his nose. Although he isn’t smiling, he looks as proud as he would in a 4-H portrait, presenting the rooster he fattened up and will butcher in a few weeks.

  And then he sees a flash of Daniel in the face of his father as a younger man—a skeletal resemblance, the curve of the cheekbones, the insistent jaw—and he’s suddenly afraid for his son. Christ, he was arrested, he went to jail! How can Cole protect him if he continues to seek out trouble? The most basic and essential duty of a father is to keep his children safe; that’s what you sign on for. They had to get him away from his crowd of freegans—ha!—away from his strident, if honorable, principles. Getting him out of Portland for a while might be the only solution.

  Until he’s slipping the photos back in the envelope he doesn’t realize his hands are shaking. He’s looking forward to driving back to the hotel and having a stiff drink at the bar off the lobby. He’ll check on his father and go.

  Upstairs, he pushes open his parents’ bedroom door. The bed’s empty, and he jerks his head around like he’s being stalked: in the dark room his father’s standing in the moonlight at the window.

  “One of the females was pregnant when we got them,” he says.

  “You just need to sleep now. Why don’t you get back in bed.”

  “We thought she might be sick, but it was babies. Seven of them. Minus the one that died.”

  “The rabbits,” Cole says, “the New Zealand Whites,” squeezing his father’s elbow and nudging him toward the bed.

  But Phil cups his hands around the sides of his eyes and presses his face to the glass. “Did you bring the garbage cans in?”

  “They’re not out, Dad.”

  “On Tuesdays.” His father turns from the glass, his face so vacant it could belong to anyone. It could be Cole himself.

  When he’s finally got Phil in bed, he closes the door and leans on the railing in the hallway, the mullions in the Palladian window etching moon shadows over his body. He texts Nikki—she’s not going to like it—and then Daniel.

  Then he shuts off his phone but doesn’t go downstairs. He doesn’t drive through the night with the windows open wide to the airport hotel. He steps quietly down the hall to his room.

  7

  It’s a Friday and school will be over in a week, but it feels like summer already after a spring so long and warm, and this morning, eleven a.m., they’re all outside in T-shirts and shorts because of another bomb scare.

  Cole’s friend Roxanne says, “The Red Army, the SLA, the Communists. It could be anybody.”

  “It could also be a senior,” Cole says. “Any kid in school.”

  “Don’t be so naive,” she tells him. “Our little town in the New England countryside isn’t immune from the threats of the world. In fact we’re the target. This enemy strikes at the heart.”

  Cole thinks her politics are shaped by some combination of English class, where she’s reading Beowulf, and gym, where they’re on week three of dodge ball. Behind her he sees seven or eight boys have lifted up Miss Huebler’s Datsun and are carrying it over the flowers ringing the circle and will set the car down on the grass beneath the flagpole, which was exactly what they did at the bomb scare last week. “I think,” he says, “the enemy is within.”

  “What about the tobacco sheds?” she says. “You think that’s just a kid from school too?” Two have burnt down in the last two months. “It’s ugly corporate tactics. Tobacco’s on the way out in Connecticut and these guys are desperate. Torch the competition. No different from Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Trust.” He happens to know she wrote a paper on that subject for American history. “When corporations aren’t busting up unions, they’re busting up each other.”

  Kids are spilling out of the smoking pavilion, lounging with cigarettes in the grass while a senior girl sits on a picnic table playing a guitar. Another two strum and sing “Southern Man” in the shade up on Bonfire Hill. Others play catch or tennis or, on the far side of the baseball field, chuck clumps of dirt attached to long weeds over the barbed-wire fence at the bull who’s grazing just beyond their range. They all call him Buford, though nobody knows his real name or whether he even has one; in the school’s mythology he’s a menace and a constant threat but also an ever-watchful protector.

  At the center of the soccer field, Liz catches a Frisbee on the run. She flings it back where it came from—two masses of kids, three Frisbees slicing the air—and then ambles toward Cole and Roxanne. “Too hot,” she says, plopping down between them. She kisses Cole and he tastes her sweat mixed with peppermint Lip Smacker; he smells green grass and body heat. She gazes back at the Frisbee players, or beyond, to Buford; the bullet scars on her neck have reddened, as they always do when she’s hot.

  “Roxanne thinks our town’s the front line of a ruthless corporate war,” Cole says.

  Liz’s shoulders stiffen and the damp spot on the back of her T-shirt sticks to her skin.

  “What do you think about it?” Roxanne asks. “You know, the bombs, the arson.”

  “Oh,” she says as the first of the police cars pulls away from the school. “I don’t really think about it at all.”

  And then the fire alarm blares two short bursts. School’s back open, in time for fifth period. French I.

  * * *

  —

  Ian needs help designing an ecological city for civics class, so that afternoon Cole cuts Palmolive and Herbal Essence bottles into tiny solar panels and Kelly glues cotton balls on the tops of factories, Ian’s answer to noise pollution. Smoke and factory waste travel in bendy straws to treatment plants that transform it into fuel for the monorail. “Fresh drinking water from the mountains,” Ian tells them. “Laid-off people pick up litter. The recycling plant’s attached to the school, so kids collect newspaper and bottles and bring them in on the bus.”

  Cole straightens a wall on the monorail station.

  “How about a slingshot at the airport,” Kelly suggests, “so jets don’t burn so much fuel taking off?”

  Ian’s eyes widen. “Or a catapult.”

  And then they hear the Impala in the driveway. It’s their father, but at the wrong time for him to be coming home. They rise from the floor and move toward the window cautiously. Cole pushes a curtain aside, kitchen shears in his hand.

  Pressure-treated lumber is roped to the roof, and the trunk’s half open, tied down against a heavy load, sinking the back of the car like a boat taking on water. When Cole steps outside, his father calls, “Come look!”

  Three liquor boxes sit across the backseat. Cole opens the door, bends down inside, and pulls up the flaps on the closest one. Two pink eyes swimming in a puff of white fur peer up at him anxiously.

  His father’s in high spirits. “Get over here!” he shouts toward the house, flipping open the tops of the other boxes. Ian and Kelly crawl into the car, kneeling backwards on the front seat—their four heads now in a tight huddle. “New Zealand Whites,” their father says. “Two females. One male.” He reaches into a box and scratches the scruff of a neck. “Sweet little things.”

  “Time crunch,” he announces, looking at his watch, and they start unloading. “But as a reward”—from under a bag of rabbit pellets in the trunk he fishes out a skillet and waves it like a flag—“we’re making crepes for dinner!” And when they don’t react, “It’s a crepe pan!”

  Ian grins. “A real one?”

  “Made in France.”

  “Whip cream?” Ian asks. “Chocolate chips?”

  “I got it all. But first, work clothe
s. Everybody.”

  Cole changes quickly and comes down to the kitchen to call Liz and tell her he can’t meet her at the shed before the dance.

  “Bogus,” she says.

  “Sorry. But after, for sure.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I’ve been thinking,” he says. “We should go camping, just us.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Later this summer. We’ll plan it.”

  “We could hitchhike to Maine,” she says, “and live in your pup tent next to a lake. There’s land up there that people have never even been on. In the winter you break into a summer house and live beside the fire and drink their booze and ball in every room.”

  It’s still afternoon, but he can hear the raspiness that’s come and gone since the bullet grazed her voice box, the raspiness that means her parents are sloshed.

  “Let’s just leave tonight after the dance,” she says.

  For the next two hours the four of them work together. His father paces out the size of the hutch, and Cole slams down eighteen inches with the posthole digger. Falsetto harmonies of Earth, Wind & Fire glide from Kelly’s window, where she’s propped her speakers on the sill. Together, she and Ian heft a bag of cement mix and dump it into the wheelbarrow, then she trickles water on the dusty mound while he mixes it with a hoe. Their father cuts 4x4s to height and chooses long pieces of lath from the pile and sets them to the side. When the holes are ready, Cole drops in a post and holds it plumb with the level, Ian shovels in cement, and their father nails on lath for stays. Kelly assembles the cages using hog-ring pliers to crimp the galvanized wire together. And they all keep stopping to pet the rabbits, huddled in the liquor boxes a few feet away on the grass.

  Their father holds one in his arms, scratching it under the chin. “What do you want to name them?”

  “Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner,” Ian quips.

  They’re all a little stunned, silenced, looking at him cautiously as he hoses out the wheelbarrow tipped on its side, the hard spray of water ringing on the steel. Then Ian looks up with a grin.

  “Exactly,” their father says, tucking the rabbit under one arm and slapping Ian on the shoulder. “And I think…I don’t know much about these animals”—he kneads the rabbit’s belly with his fingers—“but we might have hors d’oeuvres too. This one could be pregnant.”

  In the kitchen, Kelly cracks eggs in a mixing bowl, the bass from her stereo thumping through the ceiling. “Two cups of milk,” she tells Ian, bending to the counter to read the recipe that came with the pan. Cole melts half a stick of butter over a low flame. Their father squirts dish soap on a sponge.

  “This is the only time we’ll ever wash it,” he’s saying. “You just wipe it out with a paper towel. It has to season. If you wash it, you ruin it.”

  Kelly sets Ian to mixing the eggs with a fork, then empties the rest of the carton into the egg holders in the door of the fridge. She rests her chin on Cole’s shoulder. “Don’t let it boil,” she says, as he stirs the butter with a spoon, then she bonks him on the head with the empty egg carton, singing along with the song playing from her room.

  The batter now ready, their dad drops a hunk of butter into the hot pan, and once it’s sizzling he pours in a ladle’s worth, and Cole wishes his mother were here, speaking French to the crepe as the edges, swimming in butter, begin to brown. In fact, where is she? She should be home by now. His father bangs the pan on the burner, jiggles it until the crepe slips loose, lifts it off the flame with a two-handed grip, flicks his wrists, and launches the crepe into lazy flight above their heads—a slow-motion flip—then catches it, cooked side up, as they all four cheer.

  * * *

  —

  After the dance the heat in the shed presses close, dense with humidity and dust. “We’ll go for the summer,” she murmurs, her breath heavy on his face. “We can decide in September if we ever want to come home.”

  “But I’m working tobacco as soon as school’s out. I can’t just leave like that.” He kisses the hard ridge of her collarbone. “Let’s go camping for a weekend. It’ll be amazing.”

  A spit bubble floats from the tip of her tongue, then another, hovering in front of their faces.

  Decades later, early on a Saturday morning in their kitchen in Portland, Nikki will touch his shoulder and suggest they take their coffee back to bed, but he’ll say, “I’m already into this coat,” wearing nitrile gloves and holding up the rag and the cup of tung oil. She’ll cinch her robe tighter, clutch her mug to her chest, and say, as she turns from the room, “I’m going dancing with my book group tonight,” and Cole will know he’s hurt her again, but he’ll keep rubbing oil into the chestnut trim he’s just installed around the big bay window, and he’ll get the idea to go to the club later and surprise her, imagining he’d dance into her circle of friends where she’d open her arms to him. Peeling off the tight blue gloves to refill his coffee, he’ll remember that night with Liz in the shed, their legs still entangled, her voice distant: “Maybe I’ll just hitchhike to Maine by myself.”

  * * *

  —

  When Kirk’s car isn’t parked in the driveway, relief lights Liz’s face, and she kisses Cole quick and runs for the house.

  He pedals through the center of town, past the old cemetery and the library, headlights coming at him in the distance. The car slows and stops a hundred yards down the road, sitting there for a minute as Cole gets closer, but then it jumps left, accelerating onto a tractor road, and from the silhouette and parking lights and the throaty rumble of the 350, Cole recognizes it as Kirk’s Chevelle.

  By the time he gets there, he can see only two faint red lights through the turned-up dust. He stops and leans on his handlebars, watching, and then steers his bike onto the dirt road.

  He stays near the edge, the tree line shading him from the bright moon. The road bends to the right, drops into a mud puddle, and then cuts like a long corridor between the tobacco nets on either side. He’s never worked these fields—they’re Boulger—but he’s been back in here snowmobiling, exploring, smoking cigarettes or weed. Straight ahead, he sees Kirk’s car lights go out.

  He stashes his bike in the woods and slips through the nets. The plants are six inches or better, ready to string up any day. It’s ten bents or more to the far end and he walks between rows, Kirk’s voice becoming distinct as he gets closer. It occurs to him that he might find Kirk having sex with somebody, though he’s never heard of any girlfriend. But he could be pressuring some girl, forcing himself on her, and Cole’s heart races: he’d bust out from the nets and fling open the car door and pull Kirk off, throw him to the ground and stomp his balls, saving the girl, then spin the Chevelle’s tires and throw mud on his body lying there in the dirt.

  Squatting down, he parts the net. Kirk’s leaning against the car and passing a joint to Matt Gosling. He watches for a few minutes, hoping one of them will drop his pants and bend over the hood. But when they finish the joint, Kirk opens the trunk and the two of them stand there staring into it.

  Just as Kirk reaches in, a police siren pierces the quiet. Kirk slams the trunk shut and jumps behind the wheel, and without flipping on the headlights they shoot down the tractor road. Another siren starts blaring and Cole feels guilty and suspicious hiding inside the nets at the scene of…Was it a crime? What were they doing? Their car long gone, he decides the only thing to do is sprint back down the ten bents, get his bike, and stay hidden in the woods. But by the time he gets there—dusty and out of breath with dirt in his sneakers—the sirens are fading north of town. And riding back toward the street, the dust from the Chevelle still hanging in the air, he wonders if he actually saw what he thought he did back there: Kirk lifting a gas can halfway out of his trunk before dropping it back in and speeding away.

  * * *

  —

  He wakes up, sunlight suffusing his eyelids—or
he’s almost awake, because he doesn’t know where he is. Or when. Dust tickles his nose. He sneezes and sits up, looking around his boyhood room.

  At the kitchen table his father’s eating a piece of bread heaped with currant jelly, leaning on his elbows over a newspaper. “The Patriots won,” he says.

  Cole glances down at the table. It’s a November paper, three years old. “Good season?” he asks.

  His father snaps the page over. “I wouldn’t know.” He suddenly seems miffed. “It’s a violent game.”

  Cole turns on his phone: voice mails, texts, and missed calls from Nikki and Daniel that all came in last night. It’s now only four a.m. in Portland, so he’s got time.

  “Hey, listen,” he says. “I’m thinking I’ll hang around a little longer. No rush getting back home.”

  His father is silent, staring at his half-eaten slice of bread and jelly, then finally scrapes back his chair and rises, spreading his arms wide, and reaches around Cole, hugs him hard, and slaps him twice between the shoulder blades. “That would be fine, son,” his father’s breath on his ear. “Superlative.”

  * * *

  —

  By eight o’clock he’s watching Kirk hoist a massive chestnut beam and swing it onto Cole’s stack. One of the flatbeds is already half-loaded. Christ, it’s a lot of wood. He grins. Double what he imagined. Over the crane’s diesel he hears the blat-blat of a two-stroke engine: Little Kirk’s darting toward him on a dirt bike. When Cole waves him over, he skids to a stop in the gravel and kills the engine. His helmet looks too small, capping him like an old leather football helmet, but it’s silver and scratched up with a gold star on the side like maybe he swiped it from a pinheaded human cannonball in the circus.