It was then that Cole saw what she saw: he had a two-fisted grip on the steering wheel, but in his right hand, sticking straight up, was the eight-inch chef’s knife, suds dripping down the blade onto his wrist and his forearm.
“What did you plan to do if you found him?” Nikki asked when he got home, and without a word he rinsed off the knife and set it in the drainer.
And it was the same question twenty-five years earlier: winter in Connecticut and they’re coming back from Tilly’s after dark, the three kids in back, his parents up front, when—boom, boom, boom—the car swerves and they all gasp. It’s a barrage of snowballs. His father cranes back and muscles a U-turn, spinning out in the snow. There’s an apartment complex on the hill above the road, with Christmas lights around the front doors, reindeer and Santas on the stoops, most of the windows glowing with warm light. His father finds a spot close to the top of the hill, puts the car in park, and turns off the headlights, and they sit there: the engine idling, the blower throwing off heat, Christmas lights blinking red and green, and Cole would swear to this day that he could hear the fury surging through his father, the blood roaring in his ears, his gnashing teeth.
Ten minutes later, back out on the main road, snow flurries in the headlights, his mother said, “What did you plan to do if you found them?”
* * *
—
Liz clutches his hips as they ride through the rain, slaloming around puddles in the tractor road, half a mile of nets on both sides, until they coast down to three sheds sitting on low land. They bump across the weeds and into the woods nearly to the creek and Liz hops off and lights a joint, the canopy of leaves protecting them from the soft summer rain. It’s early evening, but the sky is gray and the mercury lights on the tool-and-die factory have come on, close enough to hit with a BB gun; it’s an eerie light, watery and shifting. The cinder-block building is new. Just a year ago you could jump the creek and get lost in those deep woods until finally you’d come up to the chain-link fence topped with barbed wire at the airport’s perimeter.
He passes the joint back to Liz and she raises it to her lips. She looks cute as hell in her blue rain slicker, stringy locks of hair wisping out from under the hood. Holding a hit in her lungs she says, “I hate that building.”
“I do too.”
“I mean, who works there? How do you just plop a factory down in the woods and start making tools and dies? And like, I know what tools are, but what are dies?”
Cole always pictured enormous high-speed lathes cutting foil-thin shavings off of bright flawless cylinders of steel, but he doesn’t really know. He takes a hit and shakes his head.
“So they make hammers and crowbars and saws?” she says.
“I don’t think it’s that kind of tool.”
“My brother’s a tool. All his friends are tools.”
“It’s creepy what goes on in that factory.” As the weed hits him, the mercury lights get even more wavery, more silvery. “Like Soylent Green in reverse. They suck up a lot of shit from the bottom of the ocean and like every hour they plop out another set of Kirks and his posse.”
“And what about the die part?” Her voice flattens, loses its light bantering trill. “I wish he’d die.” She’s staring across at the building, the big lights dappling patterns on her face like rainwater running down glass. Her lips form the shape of a duck’s bill, then the tip of her tongue appears and she launches a little bubble of spit. They watch it float off, dodging raindrops, and then she says, as if in a trance, “Let’s torch it.” A single fat raindrop sparks her cheek, and she comes back to herself. She kisses him and squeezes him between his legs. “Allons-y.” This kills him. French is the best class she’s ever taken. She feels how turned on he is and rubs him roughly through his jeans—“Ooh la la”—and pushes her tongue into his mouth.
They turn. Beside a shed on the hill there’s a white car with a light on top, the man behind the wheel watching them. Cole’s legs go a little wobbly, but Liz marches ahead. “Grab the bike,” she tells him, and as they start walking up the cop gets out of his car and waves them over.
“What’s going on?” he says.
Cole answers: “Not much.”
“What are you doing here?”
Cole examines the patches on his uniform—not a cop, just a security guard.
“We’re exploring nature,” Liz says.
The guy smirks. He’s young, maybe twenty. “What sort of nature is that?”
“Trees,” Liz says. “A babbling brook.”
“What are you hiding under your coat?” he says to her.
“Nothing.”
“That’s not what it looks like to me.” In fact, it doesn’t look like she’s hiding anything at all. The coat’s kind of small, tight-fitting.
“Unzip it,” he says.
She tugs Cole’s arm. “Let’s go,” she says.
The guard grips the top of his nightstick and moves closer to them, his black belt with a flashlight and cuffs squeaking. “You stop right there, little lady. You two are trespassing on private property. I could take you both in to answer some questions about arson. Not to mention smoking grass.”
Grass. Pathetic. “I’ve been coming here since I was born,” Cole says.
“Now you let me see inside that coat.”
Liz’s face is twisted up. She draws down the zipper to the bottom.
“Open it up. Let’s see in there.”
She’s wearing a gray ribbed tank top, a dark spot over her stomach where she’s sweated a little.
“All right,” he says. “I’m going to have to take you one at a time into the car to write up a report.”
She zips her coat. “Fuck you! You can have our pot, but if you hassle us any more, I’ll tell the real cops that I saw you toking up on duty. We both saw you.” She takes her Sucrets box out of her pocket and tosses it to him. “C’mon, man,” she says to Cole, and they start walking away.
But the asshole lurches toward them. “You first, little missy.” He grabs her arm.
“Hey!” Cole shouts.
The guard yanks her toward the car.
“Look,” Cole pleads, “we weren’t doing anything.”
Liz struggles against him. She catches Cole’s eye, but he doesn’t know what to do. You can’t attack a cop, for fuck’s sake. Not even a rental cop! He pulls her closer to the car, but then she stomps his foot and knees him in the balls, rips her arm free, and doesn’t even glance at Cole as she sprints away.
Cole feels paralyzed, his feet stuck to the ground. He looks at the cop, then at Liz racing into the distance, then at his bike down by the creek. The cop’s bent over with his hands on his groin—she really nailed him—but then he straightens up, raises his fist, and feints a charge at him. “Get the fuck out of here,” he spits, and Cole backs away warily and grabs his bike.
He rides three tobacco roads before he spots Liz up ahead, walking fast and close to the nets. He stops and she gets on, and he rides them to his house, and for a little while they sit on the back porch steps watching the rain tink on a copper weathervane he’s never seen before sitting on the lawn. She’s silent, distant. Rattled.
“He’s not going to file any reports or anything,” Cole says. “What can he do?” He pats her knee. “Zilch.”
She nods, looking ahead, biting her lip.
“If there’s more fires, there’ll be more cops.”
“He wasn’t a cop,” she snaps.
“I know that.”
She pulls at the frayed ends of her cutoffs. Her legs are wet and shiny, her sneakers muddy.
“How’d you know he’d want the pot?”
“Didn’t you see his bloodshot eyes?”
“I was too busy watching his hand on the grip of that billy club. And wondering if he had a gun in the car.”
“He didn’t want to shoot us.”
“If they accuse me of burning down the sheds, I’ll have something to tell them about.”
“Jesus, Cole!” she shouts so suddenly that it startles him. “He didn’t want to fill out any stupid reports.” She reaches toward him like she intends to shake some sense into him—“Don’t you know anything? Don’t you know what the fuck he wanted?”—but instead she grabs both sides of her own head, and the cuffs of her raincoat slide up her arms, where he sees fresh bruises circling her wrists. He pushes the sleeves up farther: purple and brown splotches all the way to her elbows.
“What the hell? Oh my God, Liz.” And he wraps his arms around her as if she’s been cleaved in two. “Kirk?”
“Forget it!” she says, and pushes him off.
“There you kids are,” his mother calls from the kitchen door, and Cole jumps, startled again. Liz tugs down her raincoat sleeves.
“Hey, Mom,” he says.
Liz clears her throat.
“Who wants some bread pudding?” she asks, stepping by them with the camera. She snaps a picture of the weathervane, then turns back and says “Cheese!” and takes one of him and Liz.
“That’d be good,” he says, blasé, though he loves her bread pudding. But what he’s imagining is beating Kirk just short of death—so visceral he can’t stop his hands from shaking.
“You two look like what the cat dragged in.”
They wander into the kitchen, spaced out, no longer stoned.
“Bread pudding!” his mother shouts through the house. Ian’s the only one who appears.
“How’s it going?” Liz asks him.
“You guys want to watch Adam-12?”
“Sure,” she says.
His mother passes around spoons and dishes of warm pudding. “Now, Liz, this is a very typical Early American dessert. The particular recipe comes from The Williamsburg Cookbook, but it was common in New England, too. At Christmas of course I make it in the bake oven, but I’m not about to light a fire in this heat.”
The pudding is sweet and warm. As good as ever.
His father, still in the pressed shirt and tie he wore to the store today, says, “Smells good,” and she hands him a dish. He savors a spoonful, moving it around on his tongue before pronouncing it “authentic.”
“Adam-12’s about to start,” Ian says.
“This,” his father says, pointing his spoon at Liz, “is a very typical Early American dessert.”
Kelly never comes down from her room, but the rest of them watch TV, his mother ironing, his father in his chair with a catalogue, Liz sitting between Ian and Cole on the couch, still wearing her blue raincoat, looking like a kid on the school bus. The highboy’s standing just inside the funeral door, where it was abandoned upon delivery.
“He’s lost weight,” their mother says about Officer Pete Malloy on Adam-12. She hangs another of his father’s pressed shirts on the candelabra.
At a commercial Ian turns to Cole. “Do you know when you’re going camping yet?”
Cole glares at him. “Paul’s not sure if he’s free.”
Ian nods. Gets it.
When the show comes back on, the cops are called to a domestic disturbance. A swarthy, big-gutted man comes to the screen door of a run-down house.
“A goat,” their father says, dog-earing a page of the catalogue. “We need a Toggenburg goat.”
They watch the beginning of Hollywood Squares and then Liz, who’s said almost nothing since they came inside—almost nothing since the guard at the shed—says, “I gotta go.”
They put their dishes in the sink and he follows her out onto the porch, and she keeps walking, across the backyard toward the fields.
“I’ll give you a ride home,” he says.
“I’d rather walk.” She takes another long stride, then turns back: “When are you going to get it through your fucking head that you could pound the shit out of your father?”
16
“You are banished!” Uncle Andrew will bellow a day after Cole hits him. The draping arm of his brown velour robe will sway as he points at the front door, his bushy hair backlit by the sun behind him, his face darkened by shadow, all of which will provide a biblical image to match this biblical decree, which is perhaps what Cole wanted all along. To escape and become someone new.
He’ll get his own place in the apartments beside the town hall, or call his Puerto Rican friend, who lives with a dozen other tobacco workers in Hartford, or move to Seattle and finish high school there. He will become whoever he chooses to be.
But landlords in Bloomfield won’t rent to a seventeen-year-old with a cast on his fist, whose own family just kicked him out; and someone at the apartment in Hartford tells him over the phone they’re all in upstate New York picking the last of the apple harvest; and going to Seattle on a thousand bucks and the hope of continuing with his heavy course load and graduating this year seems a recipe for disaster. So he tells Tilly he needs a loan. She orders a sit-down with Andrew, all three of them, business-style, at the Four Chimneys, but Andrew’s unwavering: “I won’t have him living under my roof. He’s my sister’s son, but he’s his son too. We know what he’s capable of.” There’s less slurring already from Andrew’s swollen lips. His eye has opened, though the bruise is still pretty bad. He’s using the arm in the sling to spread butter on a crescent roll.
Cole reaches for his water, forgetting the cast, and knocks over his glass. He turns to Tilly. “The only option is I go to Seattle immediate—”
“You’ll live with me,” she pronounces, and a bloody steak sizzling with onions on a hot iron platter is placed on the wet tablecloth in front of him. There’s no escape. He is who he’s become, simmering, splattering, smoldering. He fists the oversized steak knife—the blade as long and curved as the one they used to slaughter the rabbits. He digs in.
Ian takes it hard. He’s slowly prepared himself for Cole’s leaving a year early for college, and now it’s another six months before that. In the few days it takes him to pack up, Ian barely emerges from his room.
Cole moves into his mother’s childhood bedroom. Since the stroke, Tilly doesn’t go upstairs. Andrew has put a bed in the room they called the library, and brought down her bureau and her clothes, so he has the second-floor bathroom to himself, a luxury he appreciates. The first night, with Tilly sitting at the head of the kitchen table, he pours her Scotch and she tells him he can use her car until he saves enough money to buy one of his own. He develops an elaborate ritual of making himself a mug of tea, then dumping it out and sipping Scotch from the mug. He still goes to Bloomfield High, driving the ten miles in Tilly’s yellow Coupe de Ville. He gets a job making grinders, two nights a week and on weekends. He calculates that it will take over a year to make enough to buy a decent used Toyota. By the third week he’s quit faking it with the tea. Each night, when he’s done with his homework, he and Tilly sit at the kitchen table and pound Scotch; he tops off her crystal glass and then his Bennington Potters mug, as if they’re two old men playing cards into the night to forget their dark troubles.
The home health aide comes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. She changes Tilly’s sheets, cleans up around her bed, refills her pill dispensers, tells her to cut back on the Winston Kings and stop drinking. “Terrible interactions with your medications,” she cautions her, holding out the pill bottle so Tilly can see the warning sticker.
“What wonderful eyes you must have to read something so minuscule,” Tilly tells her. If it’s a Friday, she and Cole are usually drinking before the aide even leaves.
And she does have wonderful eyes. Green and bright, despite being perpetually exhausted. Linda has soft features, a small round nose, pale lips, an oval face so puffy that it’s almost as if she lives on pastry, though Cole never sees her eat anything. Tilly doesn’t eat either, so he tries to load up on capicola
grinders and school lunch. He eats pasta. He eats scrambled eggs, watery and metallic-tasting after the fresh eggs he’d taken for granted.
Linda is divorced with two little children and lives with her own mother, who tends to the kids in the evenings while she works. She wears a silver ankh on a chain around her neck. “Is that a lesbian symbol?” Tilly asks him.
It’s late and they’ve been drinking for a couple hours. Cole eyes her, shakes his head.
“What, then? A hippie thing? Some kind of cult?” Since the stroke her eyes point in different directions and she talks out of the corner of her mouth. Booze exaggerates the effect, like a g-force pulling her face toward her left shoulder.
Cole takes a big swallow. “I believe it’s an ancient blood-sucking cult. They slurp down a little each night from an old lady until she dries up into dust.”
“Well, then.” She pushes her glass toward him for a pour. “At least she’s in the right line of work.”
He still hasn’t made any friends at school, a newbie whose tragedy is known to all, and in a sad realization one night, lying in bed with the spins, too drunk to fall asleep, he realizes that his entire social life is asking people if they want hot peppers on their grinder. Cheese? In the oven? And sometimes bullshitting with regulars; the owner and his son argue in Greek and have no interest in talking with Cole or the customers. And his nights drinking with Tilly. He resolves to drink less, night after night with bed spins or worse, mornings of dragging downstairs and steadying a mug of instant coffee in his hand out to the Cadillac, painful just keeping his eyes open against the headache, driving to school with Paul Harvey’s tales of redemption on the radio, resolving over and over to set himself straight.
Old Newgate Road Page 24