Old Newgate Road

by Keith Scribner

  * * *

  —

  When Cole’s getting into bed, there’s a beating on the door so violent that his first reaction is to grab the gun from the nightstand. But there is no gun, so all he can do is slip into his clothes, sneak stealthily downstairs, and peer out a window at Kirk’s truck in the driveway, engine rumbling, high beams glaring. He kicks the door and shouts, “Open up, Callahan!”

  The dome light in the pickup comes on. “Stop that, Kirk! Stop that right now!” It’s Liz and she’s hurrying up the driveway.

  Cole goes to the door and listens to them on the other side. “If you can’t calm down, we’re leaving,” Liz says. “I swear to God, Kirk, I’ll call the police if you don’t control yourself.” He doesn’t respond, but Cole’s so close—just the thickness of the door away—he can hear his heavy labored breaths.

  Liz softly raps her knuckles and says, “Can you open up, Cole? We’re just trying to find LK.”

  Wishing he’d taken the time to put his shoes on, he slides the deadbolt and pulls the door back toward him a crack, and with the moist night air comes the feverish smell of trouble. Kirk pushes inside, and when Cole gives him a hard shove, his head snaps back against the wall. Before he can recoil, Liz jumps between them. “Stop it, for fuck’s sake!” she shouts. “Both of you. You’re middle-aged men. You look ridiculous.”

  Kirk’s arms slowly drop to his sides, and then Cole realizes his own fist is raised, so he lets it fall.

  “Nobody can find him,” Liz says. “He texted Kirk and said he was coming over here to set things straight with Daniel.”

  Daniel! He’s got to make sure he’s safe. He spins around—and there he is, standing on the keeping-room hearth.

  Cole says, “I haven’t seen him,” then notices his father sitting on the piano bench, watching.

  “He didn’t text you?” Liz asks. They all scrape into the keeping room, everyone still tense. Phil switches on the small lamp on the piano. Cole keeps an eye on Kirk.

  Daniel looks at his phone. “Nothing.”

  “He took off on his motorbike,” Liz says. “The police want to talk to him.” She shakes her head. “He needs to turn himself in.”

  Kirk stares angrily at Daniel. “He didn’t come here?”

  “If he did,” Daniel says, “I’d call the police.”

  “Listen, you little fuck!” Kirk snaps, pushing past Liz, knocking her to the floor, and charging across the room.

  From her knees she pleads, “Stop it, Kirk!”

  Cole blocks his path, the two of them chest to chest grabbing fistfuls of each other’s shirts. “Get out,” he shouts, “or I’ll—” and he cuts himself off, but the truth is that seeing Kirk go after Daniel makes him want to unleash on him, to pummel him until his own fists are bloody and broken. Old fantasies of beating the hell out of his father and all the men who’ve stood in for him and his long-buried desire to do the same to Kirk merge in a vicious, immediate urge.

  Liz seizes her brother’s shoulders from behind and he swipes her hands off and she’s on the floor again. “This is my son!” he says, nose to nose with Cole, his face oily with sweat and smelling of scorched cigars. “One little mistake that we don’t even know if he made—all on the word of this little shit. You said yourself what a good kid my boy is. You don’t destroy his life over something so measly.”

  “Out, right now!” Cole growls. They’re pushing at each other so hard that his bare feet start to slip.

  “Not till I find my son.”

  “He’s not here. So go look somewhere else.”

  Liz is pulling Kirk off again and he’s relenting, still clutching Cole’s shirt, but his body going limp, his arms flaccid. They both take a step back, and Liz guides her brother toward the door.

  “But why won’t he answer his goddamn phone when he knows it’s me?” His eyes are red, a tear runs down his cheek. He wipes it away, as surprised as everyone else. And embarrassed, so he snarls again. “I can’t believe I thought you might be good for him,” he says to Daniel, bitterly. “That’s not friendship, what you did. I draw the line at calling the cops.”

  Daniel puts his hands in his pockets, looks down at his feet, then back at Kirk. “I draw the line at rape.”

  Kirk lunges so fast that he knocks Cole over and grabs at Daniel, who slips away sideways, but then Kirk catches hold of his T-shirt and cocks his fist, and as Cole’s still scrambling to his knees, a hammer suddenly pounds into Kirk’s shoulder blade. Screaming, he crumples to the floor, writhing, then gasping when Phil steps on his neck, waving the hammer over him.

  “You’re a delinquent,” Phil says calmly. “The whole town knows about you.”

  Cole gets to his feet, rubbing the back of his head where it hit the fireplace brick, and covers the hammerhead with his hand. “It’s all right now, Dad,” he says, and just like that he steps off of Kirk’s throat and the hammer disappears behind his back where he’d been hiding it all this time.

  Kirk gets awkwardly to his feet, moaning and holding his right arm tight to his side. Phil sits back down on the piano bench. Daniel stands by the bathroom door. He seems unhurt. Strangely, in fact, unrattled.

  “Get him out of here,” Cole tells Liz.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says, taking Kirk by his good arm and leading him out. On the steps she turns. “I just thought I could keep him from going ballistic. I thought I could handle it. But it had already gone too far.”

  Kirk’s tires spin out on the driveway and screech when they hit the road, the pickup bucking, his greasy tools crashing into the tailgate, the hose on his fuel tank popping loose and flinging out over the side of the truck. He speeds down Old Newgate Road, the nozzle dragging on the pavement and shooting off a trail of sparks.

  “Did he hurt you?” he asks Daniel, moving his hands over his son’s shoulders and arms, touching his face.

  “I’m fine. Good move there, Kung Fu Grandpa.”

  “How hard did you hit him?” Cole asks his father.

  “Oh, he’ll be fine in a day or so. I got hit there myself once or twice. Clumsy as hell eating soup left-handed.”

  “I’m sorry about this,” Cole says to Daniel.

  “I’m thinking it’s about time for me to be getting home. This has been cool and all, but if you really think it’s better than the occasional can of spray paint in the name of social justice, then we have some serious talking to do.”

  * * *

  —

  Yet again, Cole gets into bed. His phone is turned on next to him, and he told Daniel to do the same. The fan’s blowing. He lies with the sheet pulled up to his waist, his chest bare. Just one cool night would be—as Nikki loves to say ironically—“a blessing.” It’s only ten o’clock in Portland and he considers giving her a call, but he really doesn’t want to explain how he’s taking care of their son. Getting to know his family history has really been a blessing. He imagines her smiling at that. He longs for the time he could make her smile. And he feels himself relaxing, relieved that for now the hell of this night is over. But only for now. Daniel will have to give a deposition. He might have to be a witness at a trial. He’s tangled his son up in his own past. Brought him across the country to save him from trouble and instead plunged him headlong into something much worse. And the girl. Rita. Tonight will follow her through the rest of her life.

  He gives up on sleep. In the kitchen he runs water into a glass and takes it into the keeping room, where he stands beside the piano gazing out at the stars. Phil will put up a fight, but Cole will get him living in a facility where he’s cared for. The house can sell as is. In the moonlight he looks at the sizable dump pile they’ve amassed from the summer’s work, on the same spot as when he was a kid. Daniel’s right: it’s time for them to go home.

  This decision is a relief. He sets the glass in the sink, and coming back through the keeping
room stops at the fireplace, stripped of its iron crane and hanging pots and brass-knobbed andirons. They’d had a reflector oven on the hearth that his mother cooked the Christmas turkey in before a roaring fire. There’d been trivets and the brass bedwarmer. All that remains is an oversized iron nail in the paneling that the poker used to hang from. It was a hearth as impressive as any in Sturbridge Village.

  Back in bed he remembers the day his mother spoke French with the Quebecois on the stagecoach at Sturbridge, the day his parents held hands for those few steps across the common. The evening was beginning to cool when they got in the car with a paper bag of saltwater taffy. As his father drove, they passed the taffy around, all five of them chewing and sucking on the colorful sweets. The sun went down not long after they were on the highway, and in the darkening car he and Kelly and Ian stayed silent: they were listening to their parents have an easy, intimate conversation in the front seat about pewter salt cellars. For a minute neither of them spoke, then his father remembered a cellar they’d bid on at an auction in Deerfield, which reminded his mother of a hutch table from a house there that she’d seen in a Skinner auction catalogue, and how it looked very similar to their own. Nightfall and the soothing hum of the road cast a spell over the car. Ian rested his head on Kelly’s shoulder, but his eyes remained open. They let the candy slowly melt in their mouths so they wouldn’t make a sound chewing, sprawled together across the backseat witnessing the effortless drift of amiable conversation between their parents.

  * * *

  —

  His dream is the old one of making love to Liz high up on a platform in the burning shed, then grabbing their clothes and scrambling to escape, but this time it’s all twisted up with those soothing, seductive early years in the Hawthorne apartment with Nikki—until it’s interrupted like a needle dragged across a record and, as if he was never asleep, he’s racing from his bed, racing toward his son, who’s calling “Dad!” over and over. Smelling the smoke, he yanks open Phil’s door and sees Daniel ransacking the bedding. “He’s not here!” he shouts, and Cole checks quickly under the bed and inside the closet. “Let’s go!” he says, and pushes Daniel ahead of him as they thunder down the stairs, hotter as they drop, and now he smells gasoline. There are pockets of fire in every room.

  “Dad!” Cole shouts when they find him sitting at his place at the kitchen table. “C’mon, let’s move!” He and Daniel grab him and they stumble out the door into the yard, turning back to see the house ringed in low-burning flames. “Did you call 911?” he asks. Daniel shakes his head and Phil just stares at the house. Senselessly Cole pats his hips for his phone—he’s wearing nothing but underwear. “Phone?” he asks Daniel, who shakes his head again and, already lurching forward, says, “I’ll run up for mine.”

  “No, stay here with Phil,” Cole orders him, then runs inside and up to his room, grabs some clothes and the phone, and bounds back down.

  Daniel and his father have backed away from the house, and Cole’s dialing as he joins them. In a minute they hear the long wail of the firehouse siren, but since it’s a volunteer department it’ll take some time. Phones are ringing automatically all over town, summoning them to the station to suit up and roll out.

  “Is there a hose, Dad?” Cole says, but his father has slipped away and is peering into the chicken coop. “Shit!” He turns to Daniel. “See if you can find a hose out back.”

  Then he dashes to a hose bibb and forces the rusty handle, but when it breaks free, nothing happens. Around the front of the house he tries another with the same result. If they could just find a hose he could tape it to the kitchen faucet, and when he gets around back Daniel’s hauling junk off a pile—old lumber and corrugated fiberglass, an ancient lawnmower and a shattered TV—but looks up and shakes his head.

  Fuck! Curtains flame through the windows and Cole sprints into the kitchen and runs water into a pan, and while a second fills he splashes the keeping-room curtains; one spot snuffs out and smokes briefly before the flames spring back. With the empty pan he runs into the kitchen. Standing there in the smoke is Daniel, who reaches for him saying, “Forget it!”

  “I want you out of here!” he shouts, pushing his son toward the door.

  Daniel takes him by the arm. “We can’t do anything, Dad. It’s too late.” He coughs, and Cole does too. “Too late,” he repeats.

  The rush of resignation is so physical that Cole lets the pan drop to the floor. It’s calming, almost a relief. He gently closes the tap, and they abandon the house to the fire.

  The siren from town is still sounding—a low moan slowly rising to a fevered wail, then dropping silent until the moan builds again. No sign of the firefighters yet. His father, watering the chickens from the cistern, might think it’s morning. In fact, the keeping-room windows are so lurid with flames that Cole can see the mantel and the tin wall sconce holding a candle stub. And now blue lights come flashing down Old Newgate Road and a speeding cruiser stops just short of the house but then guns it up the driveway and onto the grass, and the same cop he met a few hours ago at Kirk’s jumps from the car and calls, “Is everybody out of the house?”

  “Yes,” Cole shouts.

  “How many?”

  “Three.” He points. “My father and son.”

  The cop turns toward the fire, flames curling out an open window, and shakes his head. “That motherfucker,” he says, mostly to himself.

  “I smelled gasoline,” Cole tells him, then hears a siren drawing close.

  “Do you have keys to this car?” the cop asks, waving at Phil’s old wreck.

  Cole touches his pocket and nods.

  “Then pull it forward. Clear this area.”

  As he’s starting it up, red lights streak over his windshield—fire trucks now turning up the road off School Street. He rolls the car straight ahead, past the pear trees and where the rabbit hutches once stood, past the cistern and the butchering post, and stops where the grass ends.

  He gets out of the car, and Daniel comes across the yard to join him as a fire engine and tanker rumble into the driveway and the volunteers get to work with astounding efficiency, dragging out hoses across the yard, pulling open valves, smashing a window with a long pole. Very quickly water is surging into the house. He feels a breeze, and a minute later a stronger gust, which despite all the water stokes the fire.

  All summer he’s been hearing the melody, either from the piano or inside his own head, and now he thinks nothing of the occasional note that emerges over the gushing water, rumbling trucks, and crackling fire—a phantom playing from the flames.

  But Daniel’s face is contorted by panic. “He’s in there!”

  Cole bolts for the back porch and bursts into the kitchen, squinting against the thick smoke and lifting his shirt up over his nose. Flames lap up the walls. Water cascades from the ceiling light and splashes onto the table, and he sloshes through the flood into the keeping room. In the glow of red and blue and white lights flickering in the windows he sees his father, faint and gray through the smoke, playing the piece as routinely as ever.

  He coughs and squeezes his eyes closed, then calls “Dad!” over the racket of shattering glass and the mean snap and roar of the fire that’s combusting everything. He horse-collars him, but Phil spins and pushes him away. He gasps and coughs while his father, coughing too, turns back to the keyboard. Cole reaches both arms around his chest and lifts him off the bench, but then he squirms and elbows Cole in the ribs and, when his hold loosens, pops him under his chin. “God damn you!” Cole shouts, blood and thick saliva seeping over his tongue.

  “Get away from me!” His father’s face is paranoid and afraid.

  Once Cole locks his arms around his torso again, the bench tips over and they both hit the floor hard. On his knees he tries to drag him out, but he’s clutching the piano leg and the whole thing rolls when Cole jerks. He kicks the bench aside and tries
to peel back his father’s death grip. “Let it fucking go!” The piano skids another few inches across the floor, and looking over his shoulder Cole sees that Daniel’s got hold of Phil’s ankles and is yanking on him. “Get out!” he shouts at his son.

  “Pull!” Daniel shouts back. Even through the smoke Cole can see how red his son’s eyes are, that he’s pressed his shoulder to his nose, doubled over coughing as tears stream down his cheeks.

  “Okay,” Cole shouts. “Pull!” They tug together and the piano doesn’t budge, the wheels caught between floorboards. How the hell can his father’s grip be so powerful? Next there’s the crash of a wall collapsing in the bathroom. They’ve got to get the hell out of here. “Dad,” Cole says, and when his father turns toward him he punches him square in the face. He goes limp long enough that Cole can pry his hands free and Daniel can drag him away, until Phil grabs the other piano leg.

  “Jesus Christ, you’re gonna kill us all!” Cole cocks his fist to hit him again.

  “That’s the Cole I remember!” he shouts.

  And Cole holds back. This is the first time all summer his father has spoken his name.

  “Put another beating on the old man. Do it! I know you want to, but don’t stop short this time. Take it all the way.”

  Daniel releases his ankles and looks at Cole as if he’s suddenly weighing all the different versions of the story he’s heard. And even through the smoke Cole can tell his son understands that Phil’s telling the truth.

  Cole lowers his fist, then stands up and steps on Phil’s wrist with more and more weight until he finally lets go. Daniel drags him away from the piano, and they carry him out.