Old Newgate Road

by Keith Scribner

  “No worries. I gotta get back. Tell Daniel goodnight, and we can talk more tomorrow.”

  And then she’s gone. In the dark window he stares at a reflection of himself in the wing chair, holding the phone until the beeping stops. Get back where? he thinks. What’s Nikki getting back to?

  A minute later, Liz calls again. “Liz, hi,” he says. He hears music throbbing in the background.

  “C’mon over to Kirk’s,” she shouts. And when he doesn’t reply, “Cole, are you there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “We’re having a party,” she says, her voice loose and loud.

  “I thought it was a kids’ party.”

  “They’re in the basement, but Kirk and I are upstairs and it’s sort of boring since he doesn’t drink.”

  “Bite me!” he hears Kirk shout in the background.

  “And he’s being sort of inappropriate.” She laughs.

  “I really need to keep an eye on my father,” he says.

  “You said he has no sense of time. Just tell him you’re coming to pick up Daniel. So you’re gone for an hour instead of fifteen minutes. It’s all the same to him, right?”

  He’s grateful for the lightheartedness and says he’ll come over, but when he finds his father in the kitchen, all the burners are flaming and he’s pulling everything out of the fridge and heaping it on the floor. “If we don’t get going on those currants, there won’t be any jelly. I can’t find the…” He scrunches up his face, confused but not angry. “The sweet salt.”

  Cole turns off the stove, but doesn’t dare tell him that he dumped the currants in the trash long ago. After scooping out the mold, it would’ve made an excellent batch of prison wine.

  “I need to go get Daniel. Maybe you should come with me.” Cole covers his father’s hand with his own—he’s holding a jar of relish—and guides it back into the fridge. “Let’s put this stuff away and we’ll take a drive.”

  Recognition sparks his face. Maybe he wants to say Nice day for a drive, but he can’t find the phrase. “We need to make hay while the day, ah…while the day’s not old.”

  “It’s already old. Look out the window. It’s dark.”

  He doesn’t look, suspecting a trick. “I want to get the countertop in today and tile the backsplash and wire in the exhaust fan.”

  These are the tasks they finished this morning before Cole went to the cemetery. “Why don’t you just come along, Dad?”

  “It’s fine,” he says, and sits down in his chair at the head of the table. Once there, he looks at the salt and pepper shakers, the stack of paper napkins, and says, “What are we having?”

  “How about if you play piano while I pick up Daniel?” Cole rubs his shoulders for a minute, then lifts him gently by the arm—he doesn’t resist—and leads him to the piano. As soon as he sees the keys, he gets his bearings and launches in from the top.

  “I won’t be long,” Cole says. He tiptoes out and quietly closes the door, praying his father doesn’t burn down the house.

  * * *

  —

  At the screen door Liz plants a wet kiss and the taste of a Manhattan on his lips. “Thanks for coming,” she whispers, and in the bright kitchen Kirk shakes his hand heartily. He’s shaved and trimmed his mustache and is wearing a Hawaiian shirt, so when his teeth aren’t showing he looks almost decent. Liz looks good too—all in white except for a violet scarf, gauzy as tobacco netting, that’s draped over her shoulders, her hair pulled back, her face flushed. Music thumps up through the floor.

  “How’s it going down there?” Cole asks.

  “Haven’t checked it out.” Kirk puts a Manhattan in Cole’s hand. “What happens in the basement stays in the basement.”

  “We were just remembering,” Liz says, “when kids used to skate on the pond.”

  “Yeah, I noticed there’s a strip mall there now.”

  “That’s new,” Kirk says, then sucks air through his teeth. “But years ago, long before that strip got built, a kid fell through the ice and his parents sued the town. The board of selectmen, in their infinite wisdom, closed it off to skating.”

  “And years later they filled it in,” Liz adds, “on the absurd notion that it would cut down on mosquitoes.”

  “Idiots,” Kirk says, shaking his head in disgust, and then muttering, “Total fucking idiots.”

  “We sort of met at the skating pond,” Cole says, smirking at Liz, but her eyes are on Kirk and the agitation that’s suddenly got his face twitching.

  Drunken screeches and hollers boom through the floor with the pulse of the music. He hopes Daniel isn’t drinking too much.

  Kirk cracks open another can of Dr Pepper. “Speaking of the old days,” he says, “I never thanked you for narking on me. Reform school really turned my life around.”

  Liz stiffens. She puts her glass to her lips.

  Cole sits forward in his chair. Cautiously, he says, “Really?”

  “Fuck no!” he shouts. “I was gonna be a cop, our own town cop, and that was the end of that. But hell…” He smiles. “A lifetime ago, right? Water under the bridge.”

  Liz is staring into her drink. She crosses her legs.

  “What I figure,” Kirk says, “is look at your life. Would you want it to be different? Because if you like yourself, if you think everything turned out okay, you can’t wish something in the past was different. I’m not talking time-machine bullshit. I’m talking about being good with what you got and knowing that everything that came before brought you right up to it.”

  Though the sentiments are simpleminded, Cole’s pretty impressed that Kirk could’ve even come up with them. He doesn’t seem like the bitter person who torpedoed a chestnut timber at him on his first day back in town. “Lots of people need a decade of therapy to reach that understanding,” he says.

  “Why would I do that? I got my health, a nice home, a sister I recently reunited with, and the greatest young man in the world as a son.”

  “He really is remarkable,” Cole says. “You can’t believe all the help he’s given me on the house. He’s so solid, shows up ten minutes early, ready to work. I’ve never heard one complaint out of him. I got pretty good guys on my crew in Portland, but the truth is most of them aren’t as solid as LK. It’s been good for Daniel too, to have that friendship.”

  “He learned that from me. Loyalty. The value of your word, of hard work, of doing your best. As I said, all the life experiences—good and bad—bring you to who you are. There’s been some rough patches, but we come out stronger. No harm, no foul. When something’s not right, then make it right. I can’t stand people whining about all the injustices done to them. Everybody survived, right? Nobody died.”

  Cole sits back in his chair, silent. He hadn’t realized the dishwasher was running, but it comes to the end of a cycle and the motor’s quiet for a moment before the pump kicks on, blasting dirty water into the drain.

  “So sometimes people do die,” Kirk says. “But you’re not dragging around feeling sorry for yourself, right? You understand that shit happens and it’s made you stronger and you wouldn’t be who you are today if she hadn’t died. I mean, obviously that’s how you feel. A big architect—all the way out in who the hell knows where, but never mind that—so successful you can blow into town after all these years and buy up thirty thousand board feet of our heritage and for old times’ sake fuck my sister.”

  “Shut up,” she says. “Jesus.”

  “More power to you. I mean it. You’re a real hotshot.” He raises his can of Dr Pepper. “Cheers.”

  Cole stares dead at him.

  “Look, you gotta feel that even the bad shit makes people stronger to sit here in my house drinking my liquor knowing that because you’re a narc I spent four years in juvie.”

  “Enough, Kirk,” Liz says.

 
“My whole point’s no hard feelings. Getting arrested and doing time made me who I am, and being the narc who put me there made him who he is.” He opens his hands. “We’re a greatest hits of everything we’ve ever been. And we’re good with that.”

  Cole’s phone chimes and he pulls it out of his pocket, keeping one eye on Kirk. It’s a text from Daniel: “Come get me now!” “I guess my boy’s ready to head out,” he says, and takes the last swallow of his drink.

  “Let him party awhile,” Kirk says. “It’s barely ten, and summer’ll be over in no time.”

  A house-rattling boom and a shout through the floor speeds up Cole’s heart. It doesn’t sound like rowdy fun, but confrontation.

  “I’m leaving too,” Liz says, glaring at her brother.

  After another more muffled shout that might be Daniel, Cole rushes across the kitchen, yanks open the door, and pounds down the stairs into dim light and smoky air, the stereo speakers buzzing with bass. A couple’s slouching on stools at the bar over shot glasses and bottles, kids are splayed out on the couches, and beyond them—when he turns the corner—his son’s getting flung backward.

  Cole jolts toward him, tripping over a kid on the floor and stumbling as he sees Daniel cock his fist and punch Little Kirk on the side of his head. “Hey! Both of you!” he shouts. “Stop that!”

  But LK swings and catches Daniel right in the mouth. Cole shoves by one kid but a second jumps in front of him, grabs his shirt, and throws him aside. “Mind your own business!” Not a kid at all—bigger than he is, with a blond mustache and hands the size of mitts.

  “Out of my way!” Cole shouts, ramming with his shoulder and knocking him down. By now Little Kirk’s got Daniel’s shirt in one fist and he’s pummeling his stomach with the other. “Stop it!” he yells, just as Daniel head-butts LK on the bridge of his nose and he falls back, blood spurting across his face. Cole stands between them, pushing his son away. “Enough, for fuck’s sake!” But LK licks at the blood on his lips and charges them, so he grabs him by the shoulders. “Cut this shit out!”

  Just then he’s blindsided, his whole head on fire, his ear stinging. It’s Kirk, standing between him and his own son with his fist raised for another shot. “What the fuck?” He points at Cole, as if to tell him to stay put, and roughly grabs LK’s chin to examine his bloody face. “Did that asshole do this to you?”

  “I did it,” Daniel says.

  “Is that true?” Kirk says, and his boy nods. “You let that skinny faggot do this?”

  “What the hell’s going on here?” Liz plants herself between the four of them, but they’re all growling and grunting like dogs until Daniel says “Look” and nods at the corner behind the couch. Though Cole’s vision is swirling, he sees a girl lying on the floor. Unconscious, naked from the waist down. And LK cinching up his belt.

  “He was raping her,” Daniel says.

  “She wanted it, you fucking dumb-ass.” LK wipes at the blood running from his nose.

  “She’s passed out! She’s been passed out for an hour.”

  “She doesn’t care.”

  “Oh, my God,” Cole says.

  “Who is that?” Kirk asks his son. “Rita Gruber?”

  He nods.

  Kirk smiles, shakes his head. “Gimme a goddamn break. That tiny skirt she strutted in here with? We all know why she came over and drank herself unconscious. Everybody knows about Rita Gruber.”

  Quick as a gunshot, Liz smacks Kirk’s face so hard he shouts out, then she rushes to the girl’s side. “Get me something to cover her up with!” She touches the girl’s forehead, feels the pulse at her neck. Cole tosses her a sweatshirt flung on the back of a recliner, and Liz gently slaps her cheeks. “Rita. Wake up, Rita.”

  Retching comes from the far end of the room, where the girl slouched on the stool is puking on the bar as her boyfriend jumps aside. Kids are scurrying out from dark corners and bounding up the stairs. Then there’s a police siren in the distance.

  “I called the cops,” Daniel says.

  LK lunges at him, but Cole stops him with a stiff arm, then Kirk grabs his son by the collar and throws him to the floor. “Find her clothes,” Kirk tells him.

  “You said you were my friend!” LK screams at Daniel, then bursts into tears, blood still running from his nose and into his mouth. “How could you do this to a friend?” He slaps his hands around his own face, sobbing on the floor.

  Kirk kicks him. “Find that little whore’s skirt and clean yourself up. Now!” The siren’s getting closer, and he turns to Cole. “You two next. Get the fuck out of my house.”

  Cole takes Daniel by the elbow, but he doesn’t budge. “I’m the one who called them,” he says. “I shouldn’t leave.”

  Cole eyes Kirk, his hands, gauging the level of his violence. The big blond guy he knocked over has taken off. Liz has rested Rita’s head on a throw pillow, her blouse straightened, buttoned, the sweatshirt covering her from knees to waist. She hasn’t come to. The sirens are now out front, and Cole’s aware that he should be having flashbacks, reliving trauma. Expecting this, he’s already reminding himself that now is not then, though he’s still pulsing with heat and sorrow and grief. He wants to help the girl, to protect her, but she’s safe in Liz’s care, and he also feels that as a man he should keep some distance from her trauma. He used to believe that all boys grew into men who beat their wives, and tonight he can’t help feeling that all males, even witnesses after the fact, are implicated. Except—he looks at his son—for Daniel, so his protective impulse shifts to him. Again he’s the reasonable, sane one, who understands fairness, right and wrong. Of course they can’t run.

  “You’d better go let them in,” he tells Kirk.

  “Get her out of here,” Kirk tells Liz. “Drag her into the laundry.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Cole says. “The best thing you can do right now is meet the cops at the front door.” His calm is all thanks to Daniel, as if his son’s speaking through him.

  A few minutes later Kirk leads a cop down the stairs. “Some of the older kids might’ve snuck in some booze. Careful there.” They step around a puddle of vomit by the bar.

  The cop is young, not far from Daniel’s age. He kneels beside the girl, feels her pulse, opens an eyelid with his thumb and shines a small flashlight on her eyeball. “How long has she been out?” he asks Liz.

  “She was like this when I came down, maybe ten minutes ago.”

  “Over an hour,” Daniel says.

  The cop looks up at him and then he radios for EMTs. “Drugs?” he asks Liz.

  “I don’t know.”

  He stands and steps toward Daniel. “Do you know if she’s taken any drugs?”

  “I just saw a few shots of tequila,” he says.

  “Are you”—he looks at his notepad—“Daniel Callahan?”

  He nods.

  “I’m Cole Callahan. I’m his—”

  “I’ll get to you. What happened here, Daniel?”

  “She was passed out in this recliner when I went in that other room over there”—he nods at it—“to watch a movie, and when I came out Little Kirk had her in the corner and he was raping—”

  “Raping her,” Kirk mocks. “Did you see her resist? Hear her say no?”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Liz says, still kneeling beside Rita, and drops her head.

  “He wasn’t even in the room,” Kirk says. “It’s a he-said-she-said.”

  “If you don’t stop interrupting, I’ll have you wait in the back of the cruiser.”

  “When I realized what was going on I tried to pull LK off of her, but this blond guy and another one held me back.”

  “This is bullshit!” Kirk says.

  “Last chance to shut up,” the cop tells him.

  “You don’t have to believe me,” Daniel says. “Just look at their phones. They were t
aking pictures.”

  “So where are they all?” the cop says.

  Daniel looks around. “Gone.”

  “Where’s your son?” he asks Kirk.

  From the foot of the stairs he shouts, “Get your ass down here!” But for as long as the cop takes statements and photos, finally ordering Kirk out of the basement, Rita still unconscious, Little Kirk doesn’t show.

  * * *

  —

  Together, Cole and Daniel coax and trick Phil up the stairs and into pajamas. “You smell like bourbon,” he says to his son, “and you both look shell-shocked.”

  “Yeah, well,” Cole says. “Long night.”

  “What time is it?”

  “After midnight.”

  “You used to stay up past midnight doing pull-ups and…” He mimes it.

  “Isometrics.” That was Kelly.

  “In prison, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d remember my own kid having the gumption to keep his body fit, and I’d roll off my bunk and do push-ups on the cold floor.”

  Cole settles him into bed and pulls the white sheet up to his chest. “Do you want to watch TV before you go to sleep?”

  “What I’m saying is that my kids inspired me long after I went away. I’d punch up my pillow, my muscles warm, half awake, half dreaming that I’m in the keeping room and the house has been finished for years, not snaking wires or sweating pipes but just reading by a fire, and thinking how relieved I am that I’m sitting here looking at bed warmers hanging next to the fireplace, brass candlesticks on the mantel, instead of lying on a bunk in prison.” He smooths the sheet over his bony legs and bloated stomach, looking like a corpse that’s woken up in the morgue. “I’m saying I appreciate you two and the Schaler boy for pretending we’re ever going to finish the house.”

  “We’ll get it just where we want it.” Cole squeezes his leg through the sheet.

  “Not a chance,” Daniel says. “Only us working? Now you’re dreaming. That would take years. We have to get back to our lives.”

  Cole gives him a pleading stare.

  “Just tell the truth,” Daniel says. “Give it a shot. He’s already paranoid and now you’re telling him something he knows is a lie. That confuses him more. No wonder you and Mom can’t communicate well enough to keep from torturing each other. You’re both so pissed off and defensive and proud you don’t even know what you’re saying. I’ve heard you on the phone and you’re all like ‘Everything’s great here…Daniel has a friend his own age…Working my father toward a retirement home.’ Truly batshit, Dad.”