Old Newgate Road

by Keith Scribner

  * * *

  —

  Ian opens his hand and raps the White House on Cole’s bedside table as their father comes up the stairs. “Will it be less than a couple weeks? I really want to get going.”

  “I’ll talk to Liz.” They’re both waiting for their mother to follow him, but she doesn’t, which can only mean she’s down in the kitchen crying. She might charge up in a few minutes, or maybe she’s too exhausted; this might be the end of it for tonight. “Why are you running away?”

  Ian shoots him the bewildered look again.

  “I mean, what do you hope to get out of it?”

  “I just want them to stop. If I run away, maybe it’ll distract them for a while, and when I come back they’ll be so relieved that they’ll quit it for good.”

  “Or they’ll fight about whose fault it is that you left in the first place.”

  “They’d also have more money if they didn’t have to spend any on me, so they wouldn’t have that to fight about, either.”

  “You really think it would make a difference?”

  “I thought about killing myself—”

  “No, Ian. Don’t say that.”

  “I don’t really want to—”

  “Good.”

  “Then I thought about burning our house down.”

  “That would be a distraction,” Cole says.

  “But I don’t want to lose my stuff, and if I stashed it all outside somewhere before I did it, they’d all know it was me.”

  * * *

  —

  In the bar at the airport Sheraton Cole opens his laptop on a table by the window and connects to wi-fi. The waiter lays down a cocktail napkin and a gimlet, and he takes a long sip. He’s come here to finally finish that email to his sister and brother, but when he opens his inbox there’s a message from Alex right on top. She’s in Budapest. “You’d love it,” she says, and she tells him about intricately carved woodwork in the opera house, massive wood columns and doors. “And as Antoine had hoped, the smell of thick stews, the faces of grandmothers in the market, the night sky over the Danube, the pull of its current—it’s all strangely familiar to him.” She writes about their river cruise and the days since spent wandering around and eating pastry and napping before dinner. “What’s wonderful about traveling is that we can completely let go of control and never have to meet anyone’s schedule or expectations—responsible only to ourselves.”

  Out the window a jet takes off, and Cole thinks how easy it would be to grab Daniel and get on the next plane home. To leave his father and the mess of this house behind. He spins the chestnut ring around his finger, imagining what all that wood must look like stacked in the Greenworks shop and imagining the finished timbers in the family room, wondering if he could get it closed up by winter.

  He has no idea what to tell Ian and Kelly about their father. He can only think of Alex and Antoine on their three-month sabbatical. He admires their marriage. If he could just figure out exactly why, then maybe with Nikki…maybe there’d be a chance.

  He drains the last drops of gin and lime, then slips his computer in the bag and pays the bill.

  * * *

  —

  The competency paperwork is so involved that he suspects completing the forms is itself a competency exam. Since nobody will give his father a loan, Cole has to submit the paperwork to a judge so he can apply for one himself and also make other financial decisions on his father’s behalf. Phil doesn’t know about any of this, so through a day of working on the bathroom he sneaks in questions that need to be answered.

  Setting the toilet—Cole shimming the base while his father tightens the nuts—he says, “So when was your last physical?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I know you are, but everybody gets them. I go every few years.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Do you have a regular doctor?”

  “Between the army sawbones and prison hacks who’ve poked and clawed at me, it’s a miracle I’m still alive.”

  This might be the first time this summer he’s heard his father say “prison,” which makes him hopeful that he’s broken through the armor of denial and convenient forgetting. “Well, who’s the last doctor you saw?”

  Phil eyes the level stretched across the toilet rim, tightens down the last nut, and slowly stands up, wincing, his hands on his lower back. “He’d press the stick on my tongue with his big rough fingers that stunk real bad of cigars. That scorched smell of smoking them down too far.”

  “Who was that?”

  “I’d look up his nostrils in absolute amazement. Stuffed with steel wool. How could he even breathe? But sure enough, when that cold stethoscope moved around all over my back, huge powerful blasts of air rushed out of his nose like a dragon.” He rips open the toilet-seat box. “Dr. Engstrom.”

  Cole takes the seat from him and fits it onto the rim. “Where’s his office?”

  “At his house, right here in town. Where the Cumberland Farms is now.”

  He finally catches on. “So this was a while ago?”

  “He’d clamp those polio braces too tight on my knees.”

  They unpack the cabinets. It’s been years since Cole bought any—he has a cabinet shop at Greenworks—but he’s got to admit these look pretty good: maple raised-panel doors, quality hinges, laminate shelves, all finished and delivered—too damn easy. “What else do you remember?” he says.

  “What a stupid question. I remember everything.”

  “Like what?”

  “Okay,” Phil says. “In the summers my father made ice cream with fresh strawberries and peaches?”

  “Nice.”

  “For Christ’s sake. Not really. I’m just yanking your chain.”

  “You don’t remember much, do you?”

  “Don’t start with that crap again.”

  “Look, if we can transfer authority to me, I can take out a loan and we can finish the house. They’re not going to give you one. They don’t think you’re a reliable risk, and since the crash everything’s gotten so tough.”

  “Let me talk to that little prick again. I’ll set him straight.”

  “What did you have for breakfast?”

  He stammers and his face goes red. “Who cares? The reason they ask that is nobody cares. It’s unimportant.”

  “Do you remember Mom?”

  “She was an elegant lady. Soft-spoken and very proper, yet she went to work at Ensign-Bickford during the war making munitions. She was there on the day of the famous explosion. Didn’t even mention it at supper. She always smelled of gunpowder.”

  “I’m talking about my mother. Your wife.”

  He grins, still yanking his chain, and hefts a cabinet into place.

  “Do you remember her?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a saint. A gift to mankind. A winged goddess.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Don’t ask stupid questions if you—” He stumbles, steadies himself on the cabinet, then his head rolls and Cole grabs hold of him as he’s about to keel over. They’re both slick with sweat.

  “I’ll get us some water,” Cole says, and goes down to the kitchen. When he comes back with two big cups his father sinks a hammer into the sheetrock and tears out a hunk with the claw. “Stop!”

  He cocks the hammer for another blow.

  “No, Dad. Stop!”

  “We’ll never finish this if we don’t get moving.” He turns and points at Cole with the hammer. “I want you to have this whole room ripped out by suppertime.”

  “Dad”—he grips the hammerhead and gently pulls it away—“this room is done. We drywalled last week. It’s taped and primed. Look at it.” He puts a cup of water in his father’s hand. “Have a drink. We’re both so
overheated it’s hard to think straight.” He sits him down on a bucket of mud. “I fell off a roof once from the heat,” Cole says. “Reached for a bundle of shingles and the colors started swirling and the last thing I remember was rolling off the edge.”

  “You fainted?”

  “Ninety-five degrees on black shingles in the sun. I make my guys keep an Igloo of Gatorade up on a roof.”

  “So you hit the ground?”

  “The painters had spread a drop cloth over the hedges. I fell into it like a hammock.”

  “Lucky day.”

  “You can say that again.”

  They each take a long drink. Cole’s wearing nothing but shorts and boots, but still can’t cool off. Phil’s clothes are dripping with sweat.

  “I knew a guy who took a bad fall,” his father says. “It killed him.”

  “What happened?”

  “They call that type of thing an accident.”

  Cole’s heart speeds up a notch. “I’ve heard you pull that line.”

  His father sucks at the corner of his mouth, as if he’s got a cigar stuck in there. “I can’t recall the exact circumstances, but it was a few stories onto a concrete floor. They say he landed smack on his head.”

  “And how about your accident.”

  “I didn’t see it. I was in the exercise yard at the time. The kitchen vents blew down on the shady end. Liver and onions. That was Tuesdays.”

  “I’m talking about Mom.”

  “Beef was expensive during the war, but she’d bring home rabbit meat from a butcher shop right outside the gates of Ensign-Bickford. We ate rabbit all the time.”

  “Do you still claim it was an accident?”

  “You probably didn’t know she also worked at Colt for a time during the war. It takes nimble fingers to insert the firing pins. And she worked tobacco as a girl.”

  “One day you’re going to die,” Cole says. “Do you really want to go to your grave in denial?”

  “I’d catch her sometimes taking a puff on my father’s cigar. It was our little secret. Hers and mine.”

  “Damnit!” Cole shouts. “Have you thought about the lives you ruined? Not just hers, but the rest of us, too.”

  Phil reaches for his water and knocks the cup over, then watches it spread across the floor. “Why are you yelling?”

  “She worked, she came home, her keys and purse barely hit the kitchen table before she turned on the stove and started cooking dinner. She took care of all of us. She was the reason we were as much of a family as we managed to be. And you can’t even admit to my face what you did.”

  “What did I do?”

  “Fuck! I’m talking about Mom!”

  “Then ask her.”

  * * *

  —

  The sun’s going down but it doesn’t feel any cooler. He made dinner for the three of them, and Daniel’s gone to a party with LK. They’ve both promised to help with the bathroom this weekend. Cole plans to hold off on the back bedrooms until he finds out if he can finagle the loan.

  He looks out the kitchen window at the fields of charred tobacco plants. A million-dollar loss, the newspaper said. He loves the look of forests out west after fire, especially in the winter—the straight black trunks slashing the white mountainsides with the spare, delicate beauty of Japanese ink drawings; but there’s no beauty here, it’s more like cabbage left to rot in the fields. And then he sees someone—oh, no, his goddamn father—stomping through the swath of knee-high burnt vegetation. Cole jogs as far as the chicken coop, then turns back, hops in the car and guns it, cutting across the yard to the tractor road. Phil’s charging due west toward the orange sun flattening out on the Metacomet ridgeline. Cole comes up fast, dust rising behind him.

  “Dad!” he shouts through the open window.

  Phil glances over but keeps moving.

  “Dad! Come get in the car.”

  He veers away with his face turned straight ahead, like a misbehaving dog pretending he can’t hear he’s being called, so Cole follows the road around the back end of the field and parks where he can intercept him. Beyond this point, the field falls away into swamp, shaded by willows and cottonwoods, where he and Ian used to jump from one solid grassy hump to the next until one of them inevitably fell in. As his father approaches, his pace slows; he’s apparently resigned to capture. A mosquito buzzes at Cole’s ear, and he slaps his neck.

  Phil’s heading straight for the car, and Cole gets out to corral him, but it’s not necessary; he pulls open the passenger door and gets in. Cole throws it in reverse and backs up slowly over the rutted road with one eye on his father, who’s still looking straight ahead.

  “Where are you taking me?” he says.

  “To the house. We’ve got to get cleaned up for bed.” The scorched and rotting smell, as bad as it is, still doesn’t mask the reek of his body. He’s sweat so much there are patches of dried salt on his clothes, and his hair’s matted with oil and construction dust. If Family Services conducted a surprise visit, they’d probably remove his father from his own home. Ha! No such luck.

  Cole’s still in reverse, craning to peer over his shoulder, when Phil grabs onto the dash. “It’s like everything’s going backwards.”

  “We’ll get stuck if I try to turn around here.”

  Phil stares out the windshield and says, “Nice day for a drive.”

  At the main tractor road, Cole backs around and they roll slowly forward toward the house, and now it’s his father looking over his shoulder at where they just came from, then ahead at the house, then behind them again.

  When they pull up, Phil says, “It’s fine. I just had a shower.”

  “When?”

  Suddenly he’s stricken with confusion and fright, like it’s a trick question. “It’s fine!” But he doesn’t fight as fiercely as usual—for whatever reason—and Cole manages to get him in the bathroom. The stink is truly suffocating. Four or five ninety-degree days of hard labor since he’s bothered to wash himself at all as far as Cole can tell.

  He maneuvers him to the toilet lid. “Okay, first your shirt.” But he just sits there, arms hanging at his sides until Cole unbuttons it and peels it off of him. “Pants now,” he says, and turns the shower on, but he still doesn’t make a move. “Come on, Dad. Work with me.”

  Finally he comes out of the trance. “Why the hell do you keep calling me that?” Then he stands up and heads toward the door.

  Not a chance Cole’s giving up now, so he grabs his shoulders and turns him around. “Won’t it feel good to get clean?” He unbuckles the belt, releases the button and fly, and yanks the pants down his legs, but now his father tries to escape and trips up and Cole catches him, smearing himself with the slick filth. Before he can run, Cole gets his underwear down to his ankles and holds him steady while he pulls out one foot and then the other. He rips off the socks and shoves him under the water, but as soon as he steps away his father follows him onto the floor.

  “Back in.”

  “I’m clean.”

  “You need to wash.” With a hand flat to his chest he pushes him under the stream. He’s not fighting, but not washing either—just standing under the warm water as if it’s ice cold.

  “Why are you trying to kill me?”

  “Dad, I’m—”

  “You can’t trick me, you know.”

  And for almost a minute they’re in a standoff—Cole holding him under the stream while Phil makes half-hearted dodges to get around him. Finally Cole grabs the soap and scrubs his father’s back. There’s not a washcloth in the house so he washes with his hands, lathering his shoulders and the ropey curving scar, as big as a banana, along his shoulder blade, pausing there before lifting his elbows to scrub his armpits, then down his thighs and calves—“Steady yourself,” he says—lifting one foot at a time. With lots of suds on hi
s hands he washes between his father’s legs—first the back, then he turns him around and lathers up the front. He scrubs his chest—thinking, oddly, of Daniel finger painting in his highchair—then his neck and ears, reaching his thumbs deep into the swirls. “Close your eyes,” he says, guiding his head under the spray, then lathers up his hair. And then he rinses him off, top to bottom, his hands reaching again into every crevice and cranny, sending the suds and grime down the drain.

  After toweling both of them off—his clothes are completely soaked, right through to his underwear—he stands him at the sink with his razor and shaving cream. Phil picks up the Barbasol and rubs the can over his whiskers, knowing that’s the general idea but also that it’s not exactly right. Cole’s never given anybody a shave before but tells him to hold still and slowly, carefully gets the job done; a few missed spots, maybe, but no nicks or cuts.

  He’s just done a load of laundry and runs to the dryer to get clean pajamas, then helps his father into them. It’s still early, but he seizes the opportunity to get him to bed. The sheets smell sour; he can wash them tomorrow. He fiddles with the rabbit ears on the bedside TV until the picture clears up on a cop show. “Good to be clean?” he asks.

  “I feel like celery.”

  “We don’t have any celery,” Cole says. “How about a peach?”

  “Don’t try to confuse me. I’m saying I feel like a stalk of celery.”

  * * *

  —

  “I scrubbed him clean as celery,” Cole says.

  “That’s extremely clean.”

  “Cleaner than iceberg lettuce.”

  “Way cleaner,” Nikki says.

  In a stretched-out silence, the energy that was building between them wanes.

  “I texted Daniel,” she says, “but he didn’t respond.”

  “He’s at a party.”

  “Like a normal party with kids making out and sneaking sips of beer?”

  “Something like that, I guess.”

  “What else do they do?”

  “I’m not sure. Video games, maybe. But mostly they work. If not in the fields, then on the house. They’re both pretty motivated.”