Old Newgate Road

by Keith Scribner

  “Everybody,” Kirk bellows over the ruckus, “this is Cole. Cole, this is everybody.”

  Liz sits, as she had before, on the very edge of a bench at the picnic table. She doesn’t look up at him as he takes a fresh beer from the cooler and slumps into a lawn chair.

  “Maxine,” one of the newcomers tells him. Her bracelets jangle as they shake hands, and she takes the chair next to him. “Jim tells me you have a teenager. How old is he?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “They grow up so fast,” she says, as if she’s known Daniel since he was a baby. “One day they’re burping up milk and the next they’re belching from beer. My boys are seventeen and twenty. Blink of an eye, I tell ya.”

  Liz takes a slow sip of her drink, adds more gin, then reaches into her purse for a long gold case, pops the clasp, and pulls out a cigar. She clips and trims it over the grass, flips open a fancy lighter, and patiently toasts the end.

  Maxine’s telling him about July Fourth on Cape Cod when she was a kid. “Fireworks over the sea,” she says. “Nothing compares.”

  Liz finally lights up and puffs, her cheeks drawn in, the cigar at the very center of her mouth. She looks straight at him and doesn’t appear angry, certainly not apologetic. And then her face is enshrouded in a dense cloud of smoke.

  * * *

  —

  From the foot of the stairs he futilely calls to Daniel over the music. He’s about to shout louder but stops himself; his heart still jolts when he hears anyone shouting, flinging him right back to his mother’s screams. When Daniel was three he’d wail out his complaints in a pitch identical to Cole’s mother’s. One time, after Daniel had been whining for an hour about watching another video, Cole left the house to go for a drive, just to distance himself from the sound. Not in a fury or frenzy, but calmly, therapeutically, he took a deep breath of cool air, put the car in reverse, and backed out of the driveway right into a UPS truck. The excitement of the crash brought an end to Daniel’s tantrum; he was instantly fascinated, intent on inspecting all the damage. “That’s an expensive way to quiet down a kid,” Nikki said. “Hey, whatever works.”

  When he pushes open the bedroom door, it’s so dark inside that it takes a moment for his eyes to adjust. Instead of the six or eight kids he expected, there’s only Daniel in a recliner working a Game Boy and Little Kirk on his bed playing Nintendo on the TV. Music’s blaring and the room reeks of hamburger and onion. The walls are mostly bare except for three centerfolds—a woman on her knees, another in nothing but cowboy boots propped up on a split-rail fence, a third splayed out on a Harley. Daniel swings to his feet and gives his father a quick Let’s go nod. Then the music cuts off and LK jumps up, too. “You’re not leaving already?”

  “Yeah,” Cole says. “You know, my father.”

  “Daniel could stay. My dad could drive him home later.”

  Cole is pleased that he can read the vibe from his son so clearly. “It really helps Phil to settle in if we’re both there in the house.”

  They say their goodbyes in the yard, where Jim calls Daniel a pussy for leaving so early. Cole wants to give Liz a hug, but she doesn’t get up from the bench so he bends down into her smoke and kisses her on the cheek. The cigar smells wonderful—pepper and eucalyptus—but up close her face is ashen. “Listen,” he whispers, “I’m sorry I upset you.”

  “Oh, little secrets,” Kirk blurts. “Some flames never burn out.”

  “Shut up, Kirk,” Cole says. “You sound like a ten-year-old.”

  Everybody goes silent. Jim puts down his drink and stands up.

  Holding the cigar to her lips, Liz says flatly, “He was just telling me what a fine nephew I have.”

  After a beat Jim picks up his cup. “Well, I can drink to that. Cheers!” And they all toast LK.

  Cole extends a hand to Kirk and they shake, then he and Daniel walk to the car.

  Driving back through town he asks, “Good time?”

  “Whatever,” Daniel says. “It is what it is.”

  “I thought he’d have more…you know, friends.” Cole stumbles on the last word because he’s not sure Daniel has many friends himself. He’s got dozens of people he’s close to, but they’re more like associates. They’re contacts, comrades.

  “He’s always talking about all his buddies,” Daniel says, “but his father said the Fourth is just the inner circle. I guess you made the cut.” They wait at the one red light in town, the blinker clicking.

  He turns left and Daniel gets a text. Accelerating, he can hear how smooth the car’s running since the mechanic put in a new fuel filter. The gas tank was corroding inside and out so he had that replaced, too. It feels good knowing there’s a spotless zinc-plated tank underneath them, sloshing with super-clean gasoline. The alignment will come next.

  Daniel replies to the text and then says, “LK’s all right. He knows how to work hard. Hard as anyone. But some of the shit he says, the music he likes, the pictures on his wall, his attitudes…I’m not like personally offended, but…he’s just sort of retrograde.”

  * * *

  —

  His body temperature rises in bed, which has been happening more and more in the last few years. He sometimes falls asleep and then wakes up in a sweat, his heart racing. The fan blowing on him isn’t nearly enough. He bought Daniel his own fan and hopes he’s not too hot to sleep. Working under the tobacco nets exhausted is hell.

  Daniel didn’t say anything else about the party before he went to bed. He’s never known much of Cole’s past—no family, no old friends, no childhood haunts—and this sudden immersion has to be strange for him. How can he reconcile all he’s known until now of his father with this house and Phil, with Liz and Little Kirk? “Retrograde”—ha! His son’s rock-solid, and the rush of respect Cole feels for him now makes him suddenly ache for his wife.

  He checks his phone for texts, then powers it off. It’s nine o’clock in Portland, and his mind keeps veering, as it does most nights when he gets into bed, back to Nikki. Tony fancies himself an aficionado of the latest restaurants, and he imagines they’re now finishing a meal and he’s bellowing to the owner about the dessert wine, the sort of bluster Cole especially abhors. And then they’ll go back to Tony’s house, which Cole essentially built, up the staircase made of chestnut that came from a shed in this very town, their hands on the newel post turned by Alex, to the bedroom and its wall of windows he installed with Ben in a soaking February rain.

  He cuts himself off. Fuck, he’d love to forget all that shit someday. To never think of it again. Is it possible Liz has truly forgotten so much of their time together? Reels of the summer his mother died play endlessly, unstoppably through his mind: the taste of weed on her fingers after Liz rolled a joint; the sense of escape with her, how together they were flung to another galaxy and when kissing goodbye were dropped with a smack back into their lives; the strange lengthening of time with her, how an afternoon could fill days. And out of nowhere he remembers the currants his father picked last week, gets out of bed and goes downstairs into the back room, flicks on the light and sees the blue-and-white-speckled turkey roaster sitting there on the old broken freezer. He tips back the lid and the sweet, sharp smell makes him shudder like a swig of Robitussin. The mold has grown up so fuzzy it looks like a dead rabbit face-down in the fermented berry slop. He covers it up and can only think, Nice day for a drive.

  * * *

  —

  A sudden pounding shakes the house to its bones, and Cole’s on his feet before he’s awake. It’s barely daylight and boom, boom, boom. He yanks on his shorts and rushes downstairs, where his father winds up and sinks a sledgehammer into the keeping-room wall.

  “Stop!” Cole shouts.

  Phil turns and stares into his face. “Progress,” he says. “No time like the present. If you’re not moving forward, you’re falling behind.” Then he slings
the sledgehammer to his shoulder to swing again.

  Cole raises his hands and rushes up. “No! We did this room already. It’s done.” His father’s still wound up, so Cole closes his fingers over the hammerhead until he drops it to his side. “This is drywall,” he explains, pulling away a broken piece to expose the insulation below. “We did this room years ago.”

  Phil steps back, scowling. “Not true.”

  “We did it together. We hung the sheetrock during an ice storm, and the power went out as we—”

  “Don’t lie to me! I told you not to lie to me.”

  “Look.” Cole tears away the loose chunks and holds them in a stack.

  “Tenants must’ve done this room,” Phil says. “And how the hell do we know they did it right? You’ll get a fire chute if you don’t staple the insulation to the face of the stud. The face of the stud. A lot of people have no idea.”

  “I’ll tell you what. I’ll cut a big hole back to the studs so we can check. But for now, let’s have some breakfast.”

  Phil goes off to the bathroom, and Cole hides the sledgehammer behind the pantry door.

  Daniel’s sitting there at the kitchen table eating a crepe with a tall glass of milk. “Dad,” he says, “your shorts are on backwards.”

  Cole looks down at himself and laughs.

  “I hope you’re not turning into Phil.” He takes a bite. “That’d be my cue to get on a plane.”

  He slaps drywall dust from his hands. “Pretty sure my noggin’s still screwed on right.”

  “This house does strange things to people,” Daniel says. “I haven’t drunk so much milk since I was a little kid. And people start saying things like ‘noggin.’ It’s the regression house.”

  * * *

  —

  A week later Cole’s out feeding the chicks at seven thirty on Saturday morning when LK comes shooting down the tractor road on his motorcycle with a milk crate of tools bungeed on back.

  Phil’s been good most mornings. He was eating an egg he’d boiled himself when Cole came down at seven, and then he went straight upstairs to get to work. Now, even out at the coop, Cole can hear him pounding away. “Is that our boy doing demo already?” Little Kirk asks.

  “No sign of him yet.”

  LK glances at his wrist even though he’s not wearing a watch. “Bullshit,” he says. “It’s time to get busy.” Then he marches to the house with the squared shoulders and purpose of an admiral.

  Cole fills the water founts and then takes a few minutes to look through a stack of invoices that came from Ben Salverson in yesterday’s mail. By the time he’s strapped on Phil’s old tool belt, the boys are in the little upstairs room with his father, plaster dust thick in the air, Daniel pulling the disposable mask away from his mouth to sip coffee, LK shoveling debris into a garbage can. Thirty years ago the room was plumbed for a bathroom, but never got beyond water supply and waste pipes. There’s still tearing out to do, so Cole makes long vertical cuts through the wall with a Skilsaw, Phil hands Daniel a crowbar and uses the claws of a hammer himself, and the two of them start popping lath away from the studs. What would Ian think to see these old lath nails going in the trash? Or does he think about any of this at all?

  When the can’s half full, LK tests the weight and after a couple more shovelfuls squats down to grab hold of it.

  “Let Daniel help you with that,” Cole tells him.

  “Now that’s just pussy shit,” he says, rising up to heft the barrel onto his back. “It’s a one-man carry.” He humps it to the door and turns downstairs.

  Phil yanks his mask away and spits out the window. “Your boy’s a good worker,” he tells Cole. “Focused and strong.”

  “That’s the Schaler boy.” He clasps his son’s shoulder. “Daniel’s right here.”

  Phil’s eyes dart around the room suspiciously, as if he’s searching for whoever might have left. “Back to it!” he barks. “We don’t have all day.”

  They work a solid morning. When they break for lunch, Cole straddles the windowsill, one leg in and one hanging out, and Phil plants himself on LK’s upturned milk crate, both eating sandwiches from paper towels. Cole believes his father needs to talk about what happened, that to allow him to slip into the fog that’s waiting for him and eventually die without ever confronting his deeds face-to-face with at least one of his children would condemn him to a Hieronymus Bosch triptych.

  The boys have finished their lunch outside in the shade. Little Kirk tosses a football from one hand to the other, grips the threads and cocks his arm as if to pass, then spins it to the other hand. Daniel twirls a Frisbee on the tip of his finger. Each has so little competence or interest in the other’s instrument, it’s as if they’ve come from different planets.

  Cole and his father are tired and dirty, looking at the morning’s progress and contemplating all that’s left to do. There’s satisfaction in demolition, but until construction begins you’re aware that the difficult labor has only taken you backwards, that everything’s less livable than when you started.

  “So what’s it like being back in the house?” Cole asks.

  “I just want to get ’er done. Get this place right. You know, for…I suppose for posterity.”

  He lets his father believe in this pipe dream, though they don’t have a prayer of ever finishing the house. His hope is to get the upstairs bathroom in, insulate and sheetrock the rooms with bare walls, and swap out a few light fixtures. He can cover that on his credit card along with the tools he bought last week. He’ll get a short-term loan against the sale of the house and hire roofers; he fears the old oil burner might not pass inspection, so he’ll have that replaced, too. He plans to contact realtors toward the end of the summer, hoping the house sells in the fall.

  Though he’s been in touch with the VA, he’s frustrated as hell not to have gotten any real answers yet. The appointment with the neurologist is still a month out. He’s been to the town hall and paid the real-estate taxes. More on the credit card. Incredibly, his father owns the house outright; Raymond paid it off years ago and kept up on the taxes until he died.

  Meanwhile, he’s been reading about competency paperwork and he spoke to a lawyer last week. Everything will be easier if he can move ahead on Phil’s behalf.

  And that’s been the shape of his days. He makes Daniel breakfast and drops him at Boulger, then comes back and works with his father on the house. He makes dinner and Daniel devours enormous amounts of food, dusty from the fields, his hands black from tobacco resin. The smell of him—tobacco and dirt and sweat—in this kitchen, with Phil at the head of the table, can make Cole forget he has any life beyond this house. He can almost imagine that Kelly might walk in the door at any moment, that if he looks back over his shoulder he’ll see his mother at the stove.

  13

  “I could’ve done it ten times myself by now!” She’s still in church clothes, covered by her apron, pointing a mixing spoon at Cole, who hasn’t started vacuuming yet. Kelly’s cleaning the bathroom, Ian helping their father pick up tools in the keeping room. It’s Tilly’s sixtieth birthday party, July 19th, and nothing is ready, nothing is right.

  “How could we have come to this? Is it so much to ask for? First I can’t have raised paneling, then you can’t even get it done by Mother’s birthday. What did I say in June? In March, for God’s sake? I remember exactly when it was, because the kids were on spring break and we were making the big push to finish the insulation upstairs and Tom Mace came over on the Sunday before the kids went back to school and we were all insulating and I told him raised paneling, installed, sanded, and painted—all finished—by July nineteenth. We agreed. We were in agreement. I had your word. And the raised paneling goes out the window because Tom Mace wants to try something different. Does Tom Mace even know how to make raised panels, I’d like to know. I can’t help noticing he’s got raised paneling
in his house. And now for Mother’s birthday party, for which I’ve been promising the room would be done, a little chance to show off all we’ve accomplished, we’ve got a construction zone. Might as well hold the party in a shed. Mother’s sixtieth birthday. In a half-built warehouse. Good Lord, Phil. The day that I have as much say around here as Tom Mace will be a glorious day indeed. I mean, a year or two living in chaos is one thing, but when it becomes an eternity, when it’s all we know as a family, when it takes over our marriage…”

  Cole pulls the Electrolux through the keeping room, past his father on his knees, rolling up insulation. Ian sweeps sawdust, bent nails, and puffs of pink fiberglass into a dustpan, then sprinkles it on top of the already heaping garbage can.

  “Done by Mother’s birthday. You and Tom Mace looked me in the eye and promised.”

  Through the parlor he drags the vacuum behind him, and hears one last word before switching the machine on again: “Ludicrous!” He climbs the stairs and works down from the top, the suction hushing, grit ringing through the metal wand, and is it the clack of the door latch at the bottom of the stairs that makes him turn, or a glimpse of her shadow, or the smell of her blood? One foot on the bottom step, hands cupped at her chin, she bursts out sobbing and blood leaks down her wrist and onto her blouse. He sets the vac on the landing and, still gripping the wand, opens his arms as she staggers up into them, her back heaving and hot. They sit down on a step and she leans into his chest, his bare arms sticky on her bare shoulders, and when his father comes through the doorway at the bottom of the stairs, Cole’s arms flinch, tightening his hold on his mother. His father looks very small down there, reaching up toward them with a sandwich baggie of ice, three cubes. He doesn’t even know where she keeps the fucking ice bag. His mother lifts her head and sees him, then buries her face back in her hands, wailing over the howl of the vacuum, and his father hasn’t taken another step toward them, still just reaching, both of his parents waiting for him to call the next shot. And Cole stretches his arm down while his father climbs two steps up, then two more, and gives him the plastic bag of ice, their hands brushing. His father’s eyes are downcast, or not even. Looking neither at Cole nor at anything else, his eyes blinking, his face twitching. His emotions are firing but he has no idea what they are, cannot discern between rage and remorse, sympathy or contempt, a short circuit visible in his nonexpression. Years later, it will be this face he sees when Phil—a decade after killing her—tells him, “She’d nag and nag until I finally hit her, so at the end I was always the bad guy.” He’ll remember his father at the bottom of the stairs appearing tiny, foreshortened, and there will come the nights when he can’t stop seeing that image, sleepless in bed, his arms wrapped around Nikki’s back, his leg against her thigh as she breathes heavily in deep sleep. And then he’ll realize that this was his role in the family, to comfort his mother afterward, not to protect her before. To harmonize through jokes and upbeat filibuster and misdirection, to tamp down escalation: Don’t set them off! He’ll use these same techniques when Daniel is a toddler—“Guess what kind of bird I saw?” “Look at that school bus!”—and like Daniel they are children. Children with children. Cole’s role is to keep the peace, but when he fails he doesn’t protect her, merely waits to comfort her in the aftermath.