Old Newgate Road

by Keith Scribner

  “Sir?”

  “He’s Philip Callahan,” Cole tells him. “The homeowner.”

  The cop is nodding, first just his head but then somehow with his full torso. “Callahan,” he says. “I see.”

  The wind shifts and they’re all breathing smoke from wet tobacco, like burning soggy compost. “Is it wire worm?” Cole asks.

  The cop puts a handkerchief to his mouth. “Blue mold,” he says. “You can back onto the shoulder and let me out.” He leans down once more and looks at Phil. “You have a good day, Mr. Callahan,” but Phil keeps staring out the windshield.

  “Asshole,” he says when the cop’s taken only a few steps away.

  “Quiet,” Cole hisses.

  When they get out of the car, they stand at the head of the driveway surrounded on two sides by flames. From this spot in Cole’s boyhood backyard, it looks like the whole earth is on fire, quickly closing in.

  * * *

  —

  The second priming is done in most of the fields, and their shed—the one they’ve been coming to for much of the summer—is half loaded. The leaves hanging high above them, picked today or yesterday, release a clove-and-maple-syrup scent that drifts down onto them in the darkness. Liz is deeply asleep, drooling on his bare chest. And soon he falls asleep too, and he dreams what becomes his recurring dream: with Liz in a shed, flames blaze up the walls all around them, and he pulls her to her feet, grabbing up their clothes in his arms; at full sprint he drives his shoulder into a vent and they squeeze out between the boards into fiercely bright sunlight, naked and clutching at each other, cringing in the face of the flames, and though they’re now safe on the tobacco road, barefoot in the soft dirt, Cole somehow knows this is the end.

  Years later, when he’s studying art history in college, images from Renaissance paintings of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden—cringing, naked, culpable, and no longer innocent—will follow him into sleep, so the dream, like memories, will develop over time.

  Drool trickles down his ribs, waking him from his nightmare, and soon they’re on his bike in the moonlight, Liz’s thumbs hooked in the belt loops of his cutoffs, passing the cemetery and the bank. On the short road to Liz’s house they hear the first siren. He rides across the side yard and they jump off behind the lilac bush in the dark, crouching down on the ground as Kirk’s Chevelle barrels into the driveway. He’s killed the headlights before the car even stops. A fire truck rumbles by, then another, followed by a police car speeding around the corner. In the sky now, over the trees, firelight begins to glow.

  They back deeper into the bushes. Kirk shuts off the engine but doesn’t get out of the car, just sits there behind the wheel. He lights a cigarette and takes a few long drags, then turns the radio on. Through his open windows they hear a commercial for McDonald’s and a request for “Free Ride” going out to Gina from East Hartford. Kirk smokes the cigarette down to the filter and lights another off the ember.

  “What the fuck’s he doing?” Cole whispers. Liz doesn’t respond, but he takes her sticky hand in his. In the dim light, the blood dripping from her fingertips is black.

  “I’m gonna sneak in the back door,” she says, biting and tearing at her cuticles, and before he can kiss her goodnight she’s crawling under the bushes toward the back of the house. He doesn’t hear the latch, but he waits a minute and sees her bedroom light come on.

  He sucks her blood off his skin, and watches Kirk smoke through three songs, and when the commercials start up again he clicks off the radio, gets out of the car, and walks back to the trunk. He looks over his shoulders, scans the house windows, and seems to gaze directly at Cole in the darkness. Then he opens the trunk, grabs two gas cans in one hand—empty, Cole can tell from how he swings them—and closes the trunk with a gentle click before hustling to the gardening shed behind the house.

  * * *

  —

  On the bus, the Puerto Ricans are furiously discussing “el fuego” and “el incendio provocado.” From the local kids, more talk of conspiracy: it’s a rival tobacco company, likely Diamond & Wentworth; it’s cigarette companies trying to beat back cigars; or it’s pot growers who want to knock out Connecticut Shade so when pot is legalized—any day now, they all insist—the land will be available. Cole spends his day under the nets out on Kennedy Road doing a third priming, carefully cradling each leaf like a baby under one arm, snapping it from the stalk with his thumb and index finger, and laying it gently in the plastic bin. Every six leaves he whistles to a kid on a bicycle pulley, who pedals the rope around a wheel, drags the bin down the long row, and loads it onto the bus. Like this, he and fifteen others work the bents through the long, hot afternoon.

  At dinner he eats with his blackened hands, still sticky and sweet-smelling, picking up fish sticks less tenderly than he picked tobacco leaves and dabbing them in tartar sauce. The phone rings and Kelly jumps up to answer, stretching the cord into the keeping room and talking fast and muted to one of her friends. “Not during dinner!” their mother shouts.

  “Just a sec.”

  “Another couple weeks,” their father says, “those rabbits will be ready to butcher.” Ian freezes, a fish stick in front of his open mouth. He sets it down on his plate.

  Cole nods, nothing more.

  “Airfare goes down in the fall,” their mother says. “People say fall’s as lovely as spring. The parks. The evening strolls.”

  Kelly giggles from the keeping room.

  “I don’t think I want to butcher them,” Ian says.

  “Nonsense,” their father says. “Life is for new experiences.”

  “Like Paris,” their mother says.

  “In colonial times,” their father explains, “everybody knew how to butcher.”

  “The museums aren’t so crowded off-season. Can you imagine a private audience with the Mona Lisa? An intimate mass at Notre-Dame?”

  “Back then you’d know how to stuff your own mattress.”

  “Kelly!” their mother shouts. “I said now!”

  “Okay!” she snaps, and talks lower and faster.

  “Kelly!” their father barks, and she comes.

  “Jeez,” she says, “it was important,” and sits back down at the table.

  “Hotel prices drop, of course, and even restaurants have special—”

  “I told you it’s too expensive!” He speaks sharply, glaring at his plate. “Enough!”

  “We can afford chicken coops and tea caddies and bed warmers and ladder-back chairs. We can afford what you want but not what I want. Who’d ever believe that with five fireplaces we could have too many andirons? But somehow you’ve bought enough to supply Sturbridge—”

  There’s a knock at the front door, the one they never use. It doesn’t even open, so their father goes out the kitchen and around the side of the house. Cole stands up to follow him.

  “Sit,” their mother says. “It’s probably Jehovah’s Witnesses. Who bothers people during dinner? Can’t we even once have an uninterrupted family meal?” Her lips are trembling, her face showing the heat. “Can’t we live like normal people?”

  “Looks like the sheds are definitely arson,” Cole says. “That’s what the straw boss said this afternoon. Piles of old clothes soaked with gas.”

  “Asinine,” she says, staring at lettuce leaves on her fork before pushing them into her mouth and chewing hard.

  “I’ll bet it’s some burnout potheads,” Kelly says, glancing at Cole like maybe she thinks it’s him.

  Their father’s voice and another man’s rumble from the front room. Kelly stays at the table—“Suddenly interruptions are okay?”—and the rest of them go see the two men carrying a piece of furniture wrapped in a pad through the funeral door.

  “Driving out,” the man’s saying, “I thought to myself, How could anyone live way out here? What if you needed a hospi
tal? Who picks up your garbage?” Cole recognizes him as the owner of an antique shop in Hartford, a stout Italian with slicked-back hair and an Old World accent. He’s stopped there with his father: “Lots of junk, but occasionally a find,” he’d remark, turning over a flip glass and checking the bottom for wear.

  “But now I see—” the man begins as they set the piece down, but then their mother tears off the furniture pad to reveal a highboy, exclaiming, “What in the name of Jesus!” and the antique dealer looks around the half-sheetrocked room, at severed wires and open radiator pipes, a missing closet door, rolls of insulation, piles of tools, furniture pushed away from one wall. “Now I realize that you don’t actually live here.”

  * * *

  —

  That night, he lies in bed with the ice bag on his chest, his fan off. His sweat soaks into the sheets. His mother’s voice pierces the walls and rushes through cracks beneath the doors: “I’m taking charge of the money.” And after a pause: “It’s going back. You call him tomorrow and tell him to pick it up. I’ll pay him the delivery charge myself.” When she stops, they all pray in the silence that it’s over, so they can breathe and rest their jittering hearts and sleep. But then, like thunder rolling in the distance, not really heard but felt, a vibration in a low register, he’s saying something, and they brace for more.

  Cole jumps at a boom. He has one foot on the floor when their parents’ bedroom door latch clacks, and his father goes downstairs. After a minute he hears an exasperated, furious “Criminy!” and she follows him, and now her shouting is muffled, coming up from the kitchen through the floorboards. Then his own latch lifts and Ian steps through.

  “What’s up?” Cole says. It’s nearly midnight.

  “Nothing.”

  “Can’t sleep?”

  He’s looking at the stuff on Cole’s bureau—a cigar box holding photos and letters from Liz, a ring made from a penny that she brought him from Mystic, a leather peace sign, an incense burner, Speed Stick. He touches each item like checking peaches for ripeness.

  “I can never sleep in this heat,” Cole says, and Ian’s fingertips hover over a tiny White House encased in Lucite the size of an ice cube, also from Liz; she stole it for him, and the next day was sent home early from the school trip to Washington DC, when she was caught shoplifting in the Supreme Court gift shop.

  “Is that why you can’t sleep?” Ian says, his voice unusually deep and flat. “Because it’s too hot?” Caustic, even. “That’s what’s keeping you up?”

  Ian has always been vulnerable and quiet and hyper-observant. A frightened child, someone might say. This past Christmas, Tilly, Uncle Andrew, and Sandy were over for dinner, and their father was carving and Cole was drinking Scotch in his ginger ale and everyone was in a cheery mood—their mother had just told a story about the year an ice storm knocked out the power on Christmas Eve—when Ian reached for the stuffing and knocked over a candlestick that in turn tipped an empty wineglass onto the table. Nothing was broken. No one much reacted—except for Ian, who burst into tears and raced up the stairs. Their mother went after him, but he didn’t come out of his room until the pie was served.

  “I’m running away from home,” Ian says. He sits on the foot of Cole’s bed, holding the miniature White House between his thumb and forefinger, staring into it as if Amy Carter might open the front door and invite him inside. “Not permanently,” he says. “Just a couple months.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “South.”

  “You’re gonna hitchhike?”

  “Some. But mostly walk. You can take the Metacomet Trail a long way and get food in towns, and it’s easy to—” He stops when their mother’s shouting cranks up a level; they’ve both been monitoring it as they talk, waiting for the cry for help. Ian holds the Lucite cube up to the lamp like he’s looking at a Kodak slide, and when silence resumes he says, “It’s easy to camp anywhere.”

  “You’ll need money.”

  “I’ve got money,” he snaps.

  “Are you going to tell Mom and Dad?”

  Ian shoots him a look. “Jesus, Cole, you don’t tell your parents when you’re running away from home.” He’s got long, little-boy eyelashes and soft cheeks, but also the sunken eyes and slanted mouth of a bitter, world-weary man. He shrugs. “I need to borrow your camping stuff. I’ll be back by winter.”

  “When are you leaving?”

  “Soon. But my hiking boots are too small. Kelly’s gonna drive me to Hartford for new ones.”

  “She knows, huh?”

  “She thinks it’s a great idea. She’d do it herself but doesn’t want to screw up her chances at the Air Force Academy.”

  “When’s she taking you for boots?”

  “I don’t know, maybe tomorrow. Anyway, can I borrow your camping gear or not?”

  “I need it, actually.”

  Ian’s face turns angry in a flash. “Fuck you!”

  “I’ve got a camping trip planned. But after that—”

  “When?”

  “Not long, but we haven’t picked a weekend yet.”

  Ian squeezes the cube in his fist much as—years from now—he’ll squeeze a tiny toy backhoe, screwing up his face, and then throw it against the wall, hopping on one foot and shouting, “Damnit! I told you to pick this crap up!” And Cole will notice again how the walls feel so flimsy in their cramped Toyohashi house. When Ian’s wife appears in the doorway, Ian barks, “Get those kids in here!” and Michiko hurries into the next room and returns with the two boys.

  “Look,” Cole says, going down on a knee. “Let me—”

  “Leave them,” Ian commands.

  The boys back up against their mother.

  “What did I tell you two about picking up these trucks? Do you know what it feels like to step on a sharp hunk of metal? Now get over here.”

  They remain bolted to Michiko, but she gently pushes them toward their father, who’s sitting on the edge of the couch, and when they’re standing before him, Ian grabs the younger one by the arm and spanks him twice.

  “Hey,” Cole says, jumping to his feet. The boy bursts into tears and runs to his mother.

  “Get back here this minute,” Ian tells him through clenched teeth, and the sobbing boy returns to the spot his father is pointing to right at his feet.

  “Maybe we could all just pitch in,” Cole offers.

  “You have a lot to learn about this culture,” Ian tells him. “And parenting. Talk to me when you have a couple hellions.” He grabs the older boy’s arm and swats him four times.

  “Jesus.” Cole feels nausea rising. He looks at Michiko, who’s staring at him pleadingly, clutching at herself, and cowering in the doorway. The older boy’s fighting back tears and the younger one’s bawling, both standing at attention before their father.

  “Now pick everything up and put it in the oshiire.” They scramble around gathering up the few toys in view, even sweeping their hands under the furniture, then press them to their bellies and run out past their mother.

  She’s still searching Cole’s face for understanding. A few days later, he’ll ask if she needs anything, if they’re okay or there’s a problem, if there’s anything he can do, and she’ll evade each of his questions. “Nothing…Fine…Not at all…No, no, no.”

  But now, hearing the boys whimpering in their room, watching Michiko silently place a tray of bean cakes and tea on the table between him and his brother, he says “Excuse me” and steps into his shoes, then walks down the street gasping for air, trying to get a breath. He’s been in Japan for two days and the jet lag has really whacked him. He never sleeps well anyway; but here he feels more awake than ever throughout the night, while during the day it’s like he has a low-grade flu. And the strain of contending with Ian certainly doesn’t relieve any of these symptoms.

  He passes a liquor st
ore with a vending machine out front that sells gallon-sized cans of beer with plastic spouts in the shape of the Kirin dragon. He passes a house getting re-sided—the carpenters three stories up, in black-canvas toe socks instead of boots, shuffle back and forth on bamboo poles lashed together for scaffolding. His stomach is settling down, though his heart’s fluttering and he’s still gulping down breaths when he cuts through an alley that he thinks will come out at Ian’s house. In back gardens, futons are flung over railings in the sunlight. And in Ian’s garden he spots a tiny pear tree, its branches weighted down with fruit, and reaches over the wall to wrap his hand around a plump, impossibly beautiful pear. But when he tugs, the stem snaps and his thumb breaks through the skin, the whole pear—completely rotten on the inside—smushing into a soupy, dark-brown goop. He flicks his fingers, but the sickly sweet smell still covers his hand, and he suddenly lurches over and pukes.

  Back in the house, one boy’s practicing the piano and the other’s doing homework in the kitchen while his mother chops vegetables. Ian’s in the living room, watching TV and having a whiskey. By the time Michiko calls everyone to the table, Cole is feeling better. Hungry, even. She points to each dish and names it for him and is up and down throughout the meal, running to the stove and back with hot seared vegetables, another piece of fish. She’s on the edge of her chair having a few mouthfuls herself when Cole stands up with his rice bowl.

  “No, no,” Michiko says, lunging between him and the rice cooker.

  “That’s okay. I got it.”

  “No, please.” She’s in front of him, her hands on his bowl, but he doesn’t let go.

  “Really,” Cole says. “It’s no problem.”

  “Please, sit!” she barks, snatching the bowl from his grasp and bumping him toward the table.

  He spreads the napkin on his lap as she serves him a fresh bowl of steaming rice, the boys now giggling.

  A broad satisfied grin spreads over Ian’s face. “You can’t try to pull that stuff,” he says, nearly laughing. “You’ll start a fucking revolution.”