Old Newgate Road

by Keith Scribner

  Cole opens the chicken wire. “You okay?”

  “These runts need looking after.” In one hand he’s got a chick tucked against his chest and in the other he’s cupping a handful of grain. He nods toward the corner of the pen. “Scoop up that one over there.”

  Cole sneaks behind the bird and snatches it—smaller than the others, with scraggly feathers and a scabbed-over bald spot on its head that he strokes with his finger.

  “That’s where the rest of them are pecking her,” Phil says, without taking his eyes off the bird cradled to his chest—a tenderness Cole doesn’t recall ever seeing in him before. Either he developed this gentle and nurturing impulse in the years since they were a family or Cole has forgotten—the moments all chewed up and spit out by memories of violence.

  Violence is always annihilating, not only when it’s inflicted with malice. When Nikki went into labor, neither of them expected soft music and pastels and a bundle of joy magically appearing in their arms, but they also didn’t imagine that childbirth would nearly kill her. She had a dreamy pregnancy at the start. No morning sickness, lots of energy. She loved her lush body. Their pleasure was intensified in everything they shared—from chocolate to pesto to the long massages he gave her at night. Her hair smelled like she’d been baking ginger-molasses cookies.

  Then, in month seven, her blood pressure shot up—preeclampsia—and she had to go on drugs and take to bed. Except for doctor visits she almost never left the house, but somehow she still came down with the flu. By the time her water broke she was completely sapped. She labored for eighteen hours, her blood pressure off the chart. She was in agony. Beside her, squeezing her hand, he’d never felt more helpless. And then as Daniel started descending, a wave of relief. But the delivery stalled out and Nikki was screaming for help, screaming as the doctor calmly worked scissors along Daniel’s crowning skull and cut her open. But Daniel stayed put, his mother now screaming even harder, and they were trapped in this state—Nikki in excruciating pain, their baby half born, masked and unalarmed strangers draped in blue paper gowns surrounding them—until Daniel shot out like a rocket.

  Nurses took their baby away for a time, and Cole pressed his cheek to Nikki’s and her breathing quieted. Although he was relieved it was over, his gut clenched with his failure to protect her from this suffering. Soon Daniel was laid on her chest, amazingly in tiptop shape. Cole was crying, a gushing release, and then, without warning, a nurse snatched their baby back: Nikki was hemorrhaging. They tried to pull Cole away from her, but he refused. When an aide, his arms like a bouncer’s, grabbed his shoulders, Cole threw an elbow. Blood poured from her, glugged as if from an upturned jug. They stuck an oxygen mask over her face. Needles, IVs. Monitors wheeled to her bedside, more people draped in blue. With metal trays of clanking tools they worked like butchers, maddeningly calm, to stop the bleeding. Heaps of gauze, pillows of it soaked with her blood, piling up on the floor. He had no way of knowing if they’d stopped the bleeding, except that eventually the doctors and nurses in their bloody gowns took a step back from Nikki and her eyes were still open and her chest rose and fell. Or mostly stopped it. She bled for three more days, but she was stabilized. She wasn’t going to die.

  In a couple weeks she was up and around. In a couple months her doctor told her she had the strength of any woman two months postpartum. They’d saved her uterus, which was good news, because she and Cole had planned to have two children or even three.

  His father finds another runt cowering in the henhouse and carries it against his chest to the watering fount. He scatters the other birds and holds this one to the trough while it drinks, then reaches into his pocket and comes out with a handful of grain spilling between his fingers.

  The violence that Nikki suffered annihilated everything except his desire to save her, and that was how he lost her.

  12

  The sign for Holcomb Estates no longer stands at the entrance on Route 20, and so many trees have matured since this cow pasture sprouted thirty or forty houses that he drives right past and has to turn around at the high school and come back. “Unbelievable,” he says to Daniel. “This was the new fancy neighborhood when I was a kid.” Scraggly lawns, torn screens, peeling paint, and on one house a window shutter dangling from a single screw. Denise Cowl and C. J. Gibson lived here, brand-new Pontiacs in the two-car garages, Winnebagos in the driveway. Split-levels and colonials, finished basements with wet bars. Some had above-ground pools, and Denise’s parents had a Jacuzzi on the patio. Between the huge leafed-out trees and the overall shabbiness, the neighborhood he envied no longer exists.

  He turns in and pulls up behind a few cars parked in the cul-de-sac, and with a six-pack under his arm he and his son walk up the driveway. Kirk’s at the grill wearing a yellow polo shirt and an American-flag apron. “Happy Fourth!” he calls as they come across the yard. He’s got a cigar stub stuck in the corner of his mouth.

  “Danny boy!” comes from the circle of lawn chairs.

  “Hey, Jim,” Daniel says to his boss at Boulger.

  Kirk rings his spatula on the grill. “What are we drinking?”

  Cole pulls a beer from the six and sets the rest on the picnic table.

  “I’ll have water,” Daniel says.

  “The water boy,” Jim Stanton says, mocking and endearing at once. “From the tap, am I right? Don’t offer this kid a bottle of water unless you want a lecture about who the hell knows.”

  Kirk grabs a bottle by the neck. “Water’s for fish. But tequila!” He splashes some into the plastic cups everybody’s holding out and pours new ones for Cole and Daniel.

  “He’s fifteen, Kirk.”

  “When I was fifteen me and Jim put down a pint of Yukon Jack before the party even started. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes sir,” Jim says, raising his cup.

  Daniel’s hands remain in his pockets. “Is LK inside?”

  “Follow the music,” Kirk says, emptying Daniel’s red plastic cup into Cole’s. “You’ll find him.”

  As Cole watches his son go into the house, Liz comes out carrying a tray of guacamole and blue chips. It hadn’t occurred to him that she’d be here. She moves the tray to her hip, kisses his cheeks, and dips a chip in the guacamole; he thinks she’s going to feed it to him, but she pops it in her own mouth.

  Cole introduces himself around and sits down in a lawn chair with a beer. Before long they’re all very loose. Though Kirk’s sipping Dr Pepper from a can, he’s the sort of reformed drinker who enjoys getting everyone else drunk. Cole’s faking it with Jim’s wife, who says she remembers him from middle school and goes on and on about some birthday party at the shore; he has no memory of the day, or of her at all. But then she says, “We climbed on top of the picnic-table pavilion and jumped off into mounds of sand,” and now he recalls the asphalt shingles scorching his feet, and instantly the whole afternoon, her included, comes back to him.

  “That huge lifeguard,” Cole says, “he came after us when we wouldn’t get down off the roof.”

  “Yes! We ran into the bathrooms to hide.”

  He can almost smell the damp concrete, the Coppertone and piss. “Kerry Jacobson’s birthday,” he says. A name, a girl, totally vanished from his mind until this moment. “She loved Juicy Fruit gum.”

  She nods. “Kerry could be a real bitch about the Juicy Fruit.”

  “She was a brand loyalist,” he says. “In high school didn’t she always wear a T-shirt with ‘Marlboro’ across her chest?”

  “She was so proud of that shirt, she wore it constantly. And her left boob was bigger than her right, so we called her Marl-burro.”

  Cole laughs. “I wonder where she is now,” he says, not really wondering. What he’s thinking is how astounding it is that a chance meeting and random conversation can resurrect someone after such a long time.

  “She lives in Enfield,” Jim’
s wife says. “She’s a CPA. It’s sort of sad, actually. Her husband died of a heart attack, and a year later she got diagnosed with breast cancer.”

  “That’s awful. How is she?”

  “She’s great. She had some work done after the mastectomy. Way beyond fixing the off-kilter thing. Her boobs look amazing.”

  “Whose boobs?” Jim shouts from behind the barbecue.

  “Kerry Jacobson.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he says and kisses his fingertips Italian-style. “Grade-A choice.”

  “You’re single, aren’t you, Cole?” Jim’s wife asks.

  “Separated.”

  She winks at him, sisterly. “You should call her up.”

  Daniel always accuses his parents of living in a bubble, a liberal Portland exclusion zone where they pretend the forces of racism, sexism, and economic injustice barely exist anymore, not since the bad old days. Cole’s not sure how his son would react to this conversation, but he’d at least accuse him of failing to speak up because he fears conflict. Which he does. He’s been sneaking glances at Liz, who’s listening to every word but revealing nothing. He’s about to change the subject when Kirk does it for him.

  “I heard your dad ordered up some day-olds,” he says.

  Cole smiles and nods, indicating his dismay.

  “What’s he gonna do when you fly the coop? That’s a lot of work, all those chicks.”

  “Good question. Maybe I’ll come back to help him butcher the roosters, but I’m not even sure he can remember to feed them, so I may have to…” He sips his beer. “I really don’t know,” he says, and he doesn’t.

  “LK and I could help butcher.”

  “Thanks, man. That’s a nice offer.”

  “He can pay us in fryers.”

  “Sure,” Cole says.

  “Has the old man ever butchered on that scale?”

  “When I was a kid we got fifty white rocks. In no time the roosters were waking us all up before dawn, and eventually the whole family was so damn sleep-deprived I think we would’ve machine-gunned them all if we had the hardware. So we start in on a Saturday morning, and of course Ian and I want to see a chicken running around with its head cut off, so my father agrees to give us a chance. He’s got a plan—probably he read it somewhere—and he makes a little noose out of string and holds up the first rooster so Ian can slip the noose over its neck. Then my father pins the chicken down on a tree stump and Ian starts pulling on the string to stretch out its neck. ‘Okay, go!’ my father says, the chicken fighting to get loose, and I swing the ax. But it’s so dull it barely crimps the feathers, and this chicken who’s getting bludgeoned in the general vicinity of his throat looks up at me with one eye like ‘You gotta be fucking kidding me.’ And my father shouts, ‘Again! Swing harder!’ and I do, but the ax just crushes the neck, doesn’t chop, and the poor thing’s making these terrible squawks and moans. By this time Ian’s crying, so he lets go of the string and my father grabs it so now he’s got one hand holding the bird down and the other yanking on the neck—” and suddenly Cole realizes how uncomfortable everyone is: Jim Stanton’s looking at his hands, his wife has shrunk back into her lawn chair, Kirk’s swishing Dr Pepper around his mouth and eyeing Liz, who has one hand at her throat. He’s told this story before but never to an audience familiar with his family saga, and looking at their faces he knows what every one of them is thinking, and he makes them even more uneasy by stopping so abruptly, then saying flatly, “I chopped once more and the head popped off and my father let it go, but it didn’t run around like in the cartoons, just clawed and flapped furiously, spinning in circles in the dirt until it died.” Finally he stands up. “I’ll go see if Daniel and LK want some food.”

  Liz walks with him to the house, pulling open the screen door with one hand, a plate of pie in the other. He follows her through the kitchen—surely an early-seventies original, with almond-colored cabinets and gold-speckled Formica. He can hear the music pounding from upstairs, LK’s laugh, “Bite me, bitch!”

  “I want to show you something,” she says through a mouthful of pie, and leads him down the steep basement stairs, the temperature dropping with each step.

  “God, why don’t they have the party down here?” he says. The basement’s paneled in knotty pine, the bar built from packing crates with “This Side Up” stamped in red, upside-down. The clock behind the bar has crooked arms and numbers running counterclockwise. There are tiny statues of drunks in top hats leaning on light posts and St. Bernards with casks strapped to their chests.

  Liz reaches around behind the bar, clinks some bottles, and all she comes up with is crème de menthe. “Kirk was a lot more fun before he quit drinking.” She leaves the bottle and takes him around the pool table, pointing at the far wall, which is covered with old framed photographs. “Here’s what I want to show you.”

  The first he notices is Liz’s freshman-year school picture, and he recognizes the calico shirt, the leather choker with the wooden bead. And the smile, wide and aggressive, her eyeteeth prominent. Most of the photos are of Kirk—toddler, Little League, altar boy, honeymooner—but there are others of Liz, too: school pictures from earlier grades, on a cruise ship, standing at a table where someone’s carving a ham. He’s scanning for one of himself but instead sees her wearing a bikini next to Kirk, in cutoffs, bare-chested, his arm draped over her shoulders, and Cole’s face twists up with revulsion. “How can you even look at that?”

  “Cole! Settle down.”

  “I just…I wish I’d punched his face in thirty years ago.”

  She sets her paper plate on a cider barrel and clutches his hands to her chest.

  “Same goes for my father. But he’s an old man who’s losing his marbles. Too late now to pop his jaw.”

  “I heard you popped him pretty hard.”

  “That was only reactive, spur-of-the-moment. What I wish is that I’d looked him in the face, thought about it for a second, and then watched my fist hit him over and over.”

  “And you’d feel better now if you’d done that?” She squeezes his hands tighter.

  “I’d feel I’d done something. I should’ve protected you.”

  “So now we’re talking about Kirk again. You seem to mix them up. FYI, Kirk didn’t murder your mother.”

  “It’s not a joke, Liz. For Christ’s sake, he stole your childhood.”

  “Ha!” She laughs. “A little dramatic, isn’t it? I told you the other night I barely remember what he did. The truth is, I barely remember my childhood at all.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Who the fuck are you to tell me what I remember?”

  “You don’t want to remember, because your parents were drunks and your brother was an abusive asshole and it’s easier to block it all out.”

  “Those are your memories of my childhood. I remember Easters with my cousins in Middletown. A cruise in the Caribbean. I remember being in love with a boy named Cole.” She snorts. “And how my parents hated him after he turned my brother in. And truly, not a whole lot more.”

  “How about the spit bubbles?”

  “The what?”

  “You launched them from the tip of your tongue.”

  She shakes her head with exaggerated patience. “Doesn’t sound like my style.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, Cole. I don’t remember spitting.”

  “What about our plan to go camping?”

  “I’ve never camped. I like room service and hotel robes—the plusher, the better.”

  “How about the creepy security guard who caught us smoking pot, and I was totally clueless to what was really going on?”

  She smiles, shaking her head slow and wide.

  “Look, I didn’t get it about that guard until much later—I don’t know, years—and I still feel terrible about being so blind. It alwa
ys seemed you held it against me and that’s why you stayed in Florida that summer.”

  “Cole, you gotta stop! This is intense. You’re lugging around shit so old it’s petrified. Big heavy sacks of shit stones. Protection, retribution…they’re the big deals in your life. You can’t unload them into mine.” She kisses the back of his hand. “I stayed in Florida that summer because I met a guy, a college guy with an apartment, so I got a job waitressing at a country club. My parents were relieved not to…well, parent me. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have done what you did, but they spiraled down after Kirk was arrested. Now they’re gone, I have a wonderful marriage to a man I love, a fulfilling career, a good-enough relationship with my brother, and a decent kid who calls me Aunt Liz.” She gives his hands a final squeeze, then lets go to signal the end of the conversation.

  “But you must remember hiding with me at night under the bushes outside your house, too scared to go inside. You were so afraid of Kirk you’d bite your cuticles until they were bleeding, and you—”

  “Yes!” she shouts, then slaps him hard across the face. “So what? So I fucking remember! Does that make you feel better? What good does that do me? I’m not naive about what he did. I’m just sick of hating him.” She raises her arm for another slap and he flinches, then she turns away and pounds up the basement stairs.

  Shit! He didn’t mean to upset her, he just wanted…what, exactly? He wanted to know that trudging through this muck he wasn’t alone.

  He rubs his stinging cheek. When was the last time someone slapped him? He considers this while his eyes drift over the photographed moments Kirk is using to create a life that could belong to any other boy—a skinny kid holding up a fish, or getting his first communion, his first car. He struggles to think of somebody else, but then decides the only other person to ever slap his face was his mother.

  Outside the day has faded to a soft twilight. A few stars are out. Liz is coming out the kitchen door, and they keep their distance while walking back to the others. Two more couples have arrived, hefty and loud in pressed linen shirts and bright plaids, gold necklaces and watches and perfumes he can smell over the burgers getting cold beside the grill.