Old Newgate Road

by Keith Scribner

  “Do you think you could get Ian running?” Cole urges him. “In a few years,” Andrew says, and instead takes the boys to watch track meets and hockey games, and one night to see Kenny Loggins at the Hartford Civic Center. Andrew talks through much of the concert, bragging that there are no obstructed views in the arena because the roof doesn’t require any posts to support it, as if he’d designed it himself. All the way home their car slips and slides in a blizzard, and a few hours after the concert, in the middle of the night when no one is present to witness it, the Civic Center roof collapses under the weight of snow.

  When he hears Ian crying in his room at night, Cole lets himself in and sits on the edge of the bed as his brother rolls away from him. “It’s all going to be okay,” he says, and hears the same voice he used to soothe him after their parents fought. Ian recognizes this voice, too—even the words are the same—and Cole can feel his brother’s bitter anger through the blankets. He’s desperate to help Ian, and asks Sandy if he shouldn’t start seeing a counselor again. She makes the arrangements, but Ian refuses, arms crossed, lips pursed, shaking his head.

  Since he’s taking extra courses, Cole studies long hours every night. There are a few kids at school who he sits with at lunch, but he knows they’re dying to talk about the one thing Cole avoids, so he always cuts it off. There are also kids who approach him with sympathy, even charity, and he recoils from them even more quickly. He assumes it’s much the same at school for Ian.

  That summer, he works tobacco for a different company in different fields. Nobody here knows anything about him. The easy-flowing Spanish and musical Jamaican French sound like escape, like he’s already far away. He tells everyone his name is Pedro.

  Ian is in bed every night by nine thirty. Half an hour later, Sandy goes out back to the hot tub, an evening ritual she and Andrew used to share. One time when they have friends over for dinner Sandy blurts, a little drunk, “But now the hot tub makes his knees swell, so I soak alone and he gets into bed and puts bags of frozen peas on his joints. Can’t have anything swelling up in bed, can we, Andrew?”

  She’s curvy. She looks sexy in her sweater-dresses. Her thighs are muscular from running and her hips are round. She hangs her robe on a peg and jiggles across the deck. From his darkened bedroom, his curtains barely parted, he watches her settle down into the tub. She soaks for a while, rises up to the edge with the steam pouring off her body, sinks back in the water, then out again into the open air. Turned straight toward his window, she’s slow and patient, and so is he, silently climaxing. His own nightly ritual.

  When Cole is in college, he’ll learn from Ian that Sandy’s pregnant. A baby boy. Ian doesn’t take the intrusion well, and in phone calls and letters he says she’s become distant. “Everything she’s got goes to the baby. We don’t talk like we used to. We don’t go to movies or out to eat. She barely cooks anymore. I eat cereal and Ragú and tuna fish. It’s like we’re all in our own little orbits now.”

  “What about Andrew?”

  “Since his surgery, he cycles. Everything’s all about cycling.”

  “Another surgery?”

  “Last spring. Jesus, Cole, you don’t know anything. He blew out his knee.”

  In one such call Cole makes a proposal: “How about this summer you come to Seattle? You’ve been talking about learning Japanese, and there’s a program here at UDub. One of my roommates is moving out for the summer. You’d have to get a job to pay expenses, but I’ll write Tilly to ask if she’ll cover the tuition.”

  “Yes. Holy shit, yes!” He feels his brother beaming through three thousand miles of copper wire.

  But before that, before Cole leaves his aunt and uncle’s house in Bloomfield, when he’s devoting all he’s got to finishing his spring courses in good standing so he can go off to the University of Washington a year early at seventeen and a half, he slips into his bedroom one night without flipping on the light and walks to the parted curtain at the window, but Sandy doesn’t come out to the tub. Although he’s often felt shame over his voyeurism, this time he feels stood up. He’d heard her go out the back door, the wind chimes on the steps, so he waits. But finally he goes downstairs, stopping and listening in the kitchen, tiptoeing into the mud room, then sees her out the back-door window, sitting on the steps leading down to the deck, face in her hands, back heaving. He yanks open the door and rushes to her side, and she turns to him, startled, as he grabs her arms and examines her in a panic: her face, her wrists, her throat. Until he’s sure she’s okay, he doesn’t even realize what he’s doing. And simultaneously, as she understands too, her face collapses. She starts crying again, her arms going limp, and now he’s holding her. “It’s going to be all right,” he murmurs. He rocks her, and after a time her jerky breathing settles down. They sit in silence, a warm breeze tinkling the chimes, and he thinks how much this feels like holding Liz.

  The next day, after acing an AP history exam, Cole slams his locker, springs down the school steps, and cuts along the soccer fields to go home. He waves to his uncle across the track, but Andrew doesn’t notice him because he’s stretching in the grass with Ruthie Jacks, a senior hurdler and sprinter. He slows his pace, watching his uncle jump up and then reach out a hand to pull Ruthie to her feet. They walk side by side toward the gym, their heads inclined toward each other. He bumps her with his hip and she slaps his shoulder, both of them laughing, and now Cole gets it.

  That night Andrew’s out at a runners club meeting in preparation for their trip to the Marine Corps marathon. Cole sits on the edge of Ian’s bed. “Last night was even worse,” his brother says. He’s been having nightmares. “I’m pounding lath in the backyard and when I lift off a piece I see Mom’s dead under the pile, but I can’t stop myself in time and I swing the hammer and hit her cheek…” He breaks off in tears. “I’m afraid to go to sleep.”

  “I miss her too,” Cole says, then squeezes his shoulder. “You know we’ll be in really close touch after I go to Seattle, right? You’ll come visit me. You’re always going to be my little brother.”

  After he’s spent another half an hour on math, Sandy slaps off the TV. She passes through the kitchen and he looks up from his graph paper and compass, and they share a glance, both of them thinking Andrew should be home by now. Then she changes into her robe and goes out the back door.

  After last night, and knowing what he knows, he doesn’t go upstairs to his window. He’s pissed off at his uncle, worried about Sandy, and scared by what this might mean for his brother.

  He stacks his books, and when he reaches past the fridge to turn off the light he can hear her whimpering on the steps again. He listens for a minute before opening the door. She stiffens, then turns, anger set hard in her face until she sees it’s him and not her husband. Eyes softening, she says, “I’m sorry. I didn’t think you’d hear me.”

  He sits beside her, taking her into his arms, and she seems to break into pieces, shaking in a fit of sobbing, and he remembers holding his mother that night before filling the ice bag, before the bruise blew up on her cheek. If he’d called the police then, or if he’d gone downstairs and dragged his father off the couch and beaten him half to death right then and there, she’d still be alive.

  A car comes down the road and she lifts away from him slowly, as if they’re fused with tears and phlegm and body heat. Andrew’s headlights swing into the driveway.

  In bed he’s slow to fall asleep, and soon after, awakened by a cry, he hurtles down the stairs. Andrew’s shadowed back looms over Sandy, huddled in her robe on the ottoman, her face in her hands. His arm is raised. Cole yanks his wrist—“Off of her!”—and twists him around, punching him right on the mouth—“I’ll fucking kill you!”—punching over and over as glass shatters and somebody shouts “Stop!” They’re pleading, piling on him, and pulling at his arms as he holds Andrew down by the collar, and then he realizes that it’s Sandy and Ian who are
trying to restrain him.

  In smoldering light, Andrew, on the ottoman, holds a bag of frozen peas to his face. Ian, in his pajamas, weeps silently into Sandy’s chest. She strokes his hair. She’s staring at Cole as if from miles away. “He would never,” she says, shaking her head, baffled. Not bruised, not whimpering. “Never.” Cole makes a fist and examines the blood on his knuckles, either Andrew’s or his own. A lamp has crashed over and paper-thin shards of broken bulb litter the floor.

  * * *

  —

  But that’s still two years away, and for now Sandy is his cool aunt sitting in the grass and leaning against the trunk of the pear tree, stirring Scotch and rocks with her finger. “Grandpapa,” she whispers to Cole. “More time under his tutelage.” She smirks. What Cole remembers of Grandpapa is his breakfast beer in a tall glass, the silver monogram flaking off, draped with a Kleenex to keep out the fruit flies and set on the counter overnight because his stomach couldn’t handle carbonation. Feeble from diseased intestines, no longer strong enough to beat his wife, and so effete he had to move to another town to escape that lavender house. He loved Moby- Dick, the Odyssey, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. He loved to smoke Chesterfields and watch Carol Burnett. Cole is unable to sculpt these aspects into a coherent vision of an actual man.

  The plates are piled with rabbit bones and chicken skin and gnawed corncobs. He drains his drink. He’ll head upstairs in a minute for another bong hit. His mother’s carrying a cake. There’ll be singing and flames.

  14

  The search for Osama bin Laden continues. as they wait at the bank, Cole’s reading an article in Time that quotes anonymous sources as saying they’re certain he’s in a particular cave among a vast complex of caves that have been inhabited and fortified for a thousand years, but when the Rangers swooped in, they found only small boys with goats. There’s an accompanying photograph of Saddam Hussein after he was pulled from his spider hole, disoriented and weary, his hand at his throat as if he knew what was coming next.

  Finally they’re invited to the desk. “This sounds like a big project,” says the young manager with gelled hair, whose tag reads simply “Levi.” “And just about all sweat equity.”

  “I’m a contractor,” Cole tells him. “And I’ve got a couple strong boys to help. I’ll bid out the roof and the furnace, but we can handle the rest.”

  “It’s still a sizable loan,” Levi says to Phil. It’s his house, so it’s his loan.

  “And an impressive property,” Cole says. “Money well spent.”

  “As for repayment, I don’t see any income other than—”

  “That’ll come out of the sale.”

  “But in this market—”

  “I can cover the payments till then. Do you need me to cosign? I’m more than happy to.” Even as he says this he knows the cash he laid out for the shed has left the business short, and that their personal finances are currently being examined by a divorce mediator.

  Levi flips the pages, staring at the figures.

  “It’s a beautiful old colonial,” Cole says. “When we’re done, someone’ll snatch it up in an instant. This is what I do for a living.”

  “Where’s your business located?”

  “Gotcha!” Phil has been silent, but now jumps forward in his chair and plants an elbow on the edge of Levi’s desk. “ ‘Business’ is right. What’s all this snatching and selling?” He reeks. Even with the long days of demolition he hasn’t been showering. Plaster dust is caked in the furrows at the back of his neck.

  “We talked it through, Dad. Once the house is in sellable condition we’ll get a good price.”

  “And where does your big-business scheming leave me? Have you thought about that?”

  “I told you, we’ll find a place for you that’s more manageable.”

  “What the hell kind of place?” As his voice sharpens, so does the sour smell in his clothes.

  “One that makes more sense for you.”

  “A facility!” He’s nearly shouting, and Levi looks over their shoulders, scanning the bank, uncomfortable. “An institution!”

  “No, Dad. Just a—”

  “I’ve done institutions and I ain’t going back. I’ll live in my car again before I do that. You can nag and push and taunt. Beg me to do it. Ganging up with her to humiliate me with that store in a shit location. Burger King grease wafting in. Doomed for failure—just what she intended.” He pounds the desk with his fist. “And now you and sonny boy here”—he stabs a finger at Levi—“think you can run me out of my own house and lock me up and steal everything I’ve ever worked for, the only thing I’ve got. There’s gallons of sweat equity in that house already. I was sweating over that house when you were still pissing in your bed, so don’t start in with ‘This is what I do for a living.’ She wanted this house. She and her mother. The queen of fucking England—”

  “Mr. Callahan,” Levi says, flustered. “Please.” He stands up and motions for them to shove off, his hands shaking. “Keep your voice down.”

  “Exactly,” Phil says. “She could never just shut the hell up.”

  Cole maneuvers him out of the bank and into the car. Hot air blows in the windows as he drives. Both sweating, they doubtless look crazed in the heat. “Everything was A-OK till you and your boy showed up. I was making progress on the house, working through the rooms. Didn’t you see I painted the two front bedrooms? I don’t know what the hell the renters were doing in there, and I don’t want to know. Mouse shit everywhere. Nests in a bureau and the kitchen cabinets. But I made the rooms look nice. Just in time for you to prance in and try to take over. Well, nobody’s stealing my house out from under me, you got that? I don’t see jackshit of you for ten years and suddenly you fly across the country to steal my house. And what about your own house? And your wife? Where the hell’s she in all of this? Huh? She’s eating her meals at another man’s table, isn’t she? Somebody else is ringing her register. I know what’s going on. I hear your whispering and phone calls. And the boy’s, too. You’re just standing by while some other guy punches his time card in your clock. Let me tell you, boy, among the men I spent some time with there’s only one way to deal with a snake in your grass, and running across the country to rob an old man ain’t it. Where I come from they got names for men like you, and these are not respectful names. You’re weak! An oversized weakling who whines just as bad as she did. ‘Wah, wah, wah. My momma’s an angel and my daddy’s a brute.’ What does your boy think of you? ‘My daddy’s a chump and momma’s a whore—’ ”

  Cole punches the steering wheel and pounds the brakes. The tires screech. “Shut your fucking mouth!” he screams, staring his father down.

  Phil’s sagging eyes startle wide, but as the smell of smoking rubber drifts into the car a smile creeps onto his lips. He squints at Cole’s tight fist, raised to strike. “You want to hit me, don’t you? One quick jab to the mouth.” He forces a laugh. “Ha! Anything to shut me up, right?”

  Having half-lunged toward him, Cole slowly uncoils and lets his fists go slack. He grips the wheel and drops his foot off the brake, but the car doesn’t move. He hits the gas and they lurch forward, then stop. He reaches down to the floor to pull up the brake pedal and jiggles the hand brake until they finally start rolling again.

  “What’s worse,” Phil says, “wanting to punch an old man or not having the balls to do it?”

  Cole thinks blind with rage as he tries to focus on the road ahead, sweat running in his eyes, his heart and breath in a lathering gallop, his false calm utterly unconvincing. He’s squeezing the wheel to keep his hands from shaking, and as they rise up and crest a hill he brakes and the car shudders all the way to the stop sign at the bottom. He’s broken something in the pedal or the lines—he has no idea what. His father gasps, and when Cole glances over he’s staring straight ahead down Old Newgate Road toward their house, where smoke
’s pouring into the sky. Phil must’ve left the stove on, messed with some wiring, tried to repair the furnace. Is Daniel at work?—he looks at his watch—yes, thank God, he’s definitely not home.

  He hits the gas and the tires spin out in gravel. Beyond the sheds and stand of willows there’s a wall of smoke. He speeds around the curve, an impossible gray expanse, from the road right back to the tree line. Flames shimmer as they get closer, the house completely obscured. But he does see a fire truck on the tractor road, and a tobacco bus and a Taybro pickup. He floors the last stretch but then hits the brakes, the car bucking and grinding as they pass through thick smoke drifting over the road. A police car looms in their driveway, and irrationally Cole’s seized by panic, his heart misfiring as he suddenly fears for Daniel’s safety—irrational because the house itself isn’t on fire and there’s a line of men spaced fifty feet apart edging the tobacco field at the back of their yard, where all twenty acres are burning.

  He pulls in behind the cruiser and the cop flips on his blue lights, spinning in their eyes and reflecting off the towering smoke, then he climbs out and waves them off. Cole sticks his head out the window: “We live here.” The cop gazes at the house for a moment—a poor appraisal, judging by the curl of his lip—and then walks over, eyeballing the car and ticking off offenses, legal and otherwise. The fire hums like a crowd mumbling and muttering, urgent with the occasional snap and crack. “Your name, sir?”

  “Cole Callahan.”

  He leans down to peer across to the passenger seat. “And you, sir?”

  Phil stares straight ahead. Silent.