By seven in the morning they reached the French town of New Rochelle, and her previous experience of Frenchmen notwithstanding, had an excellent breakfast at an ordinary there. She was so frozen she could scarcely lift the fork to her mouth and found she had no desire to leave the fireside ever again, no matter that her family would never more lay eyes on her and the widowed Mrs. Trowbridge would die in penury and the life of Boston—and its gossip—would go on without Sarah Kemble Knight ever seeing or knowing of it. But within an hour of their alighting, they were back on the road even as she cursed Thomas Trowbridge under her breath and her horse stumbled and slid and made risk of her life and limb with every clumsy faltering step.
They rode all day, through an increasingly civilized country, from time to time meeting other people on the road, people on foot, on horseback, in wagons. Cold, sore and miserable as she was, she nonetheless couldn’t help feeling her spirits lighten as they came closer to their destination—here was real progress, in a peopled country, the wilderness falling away to the axe on both sides of the road. She took it all in and thought to memorialize it in her journal when they were arrived at New York late that night. All well and good. But then came the final crisis, the one that nearly prevented her from laying eyes on that so nearly foreign city with its Dutchmen pulling at their clay pipes and playing at draughts in stifling taverns, the women in their peculiar dress and jeweled earrings—even the dogs that looked to be from another world—and the amenable society of the Governor Lord Cornbury from the Jerseys and the solid brick buildings built cheek to jowl all through the lower town and a hundred other things. The sleighing parties. The shops. The houses of entertainment in a place called the Bowery and the good drink—choice beer, metheglin and cider—and a standard board that consisted of five and six dishes served hot and steaming from the fire. All this. All this and more.
But when they came to Spuyten Duyvil, the Spitting Devil, at the crossing to the north end of Manhattoes Island, with the night coming down and the wind blowing a gale and the waters surging as if it were the Great Flood all over again, she couldn’t go on. There was a bridge here, narrow and unreliable, perched high up out over the waters, and it was slick with a coating of ice that lay black and glistening in the fading light. She got down to lead her horse, because if she led him she’d be lower to the ground—or the planking—and wouldn’t be at the mercy of his uncertain footing. Thomas Trowbridge, hulking in his coats, paid the gatekeeper the sixpence for the two of them, and started across, mounted and oblivious; Sarah held back.
He was halfway across to the far shore, nearly invisible to her in the accumulating dark and the hard white pellets of ice that seemed to have come up with the wind, and the gatekeeper was huddled back in his hut giving her an odd look. All she could hear was the thunder of the roiling water where the river hit the surge of the tide even as the skin of it, black and unforgiving, stretched taut beneath her and exploded again. She was going to die. She was certain of it. She’d come all this way only to have the horse panic and trample her or bump her over the rail and into the spume or the bridge collapse beneath her. Thomas Trowbridge was gone now, enfolded in the mist, and he hadn’t even so much as glanced back. The city was on the far shore, somewhere to the south of the island, and it was what she’d come for. There was lodging there. Fire. Food. Die or not, she stepped out onto the bridge.
It quaked and quailed. The wind thrashed. The horse jerked at her arm like a dead weight come to life. But she steeled herself and put one foot in front of the other and never looked down, a whole eternity passing till she was halfway across and then another eternity till she made the far side in a hard pale swirl of spray thrown up off the rocks and frozen in mid-air. For a long while she just stood there looking back the way she’d come, the bridge fading away into the blow till it might not have been there at all. But it was there, because this was no child’s tale struck with magic, and she knew, even as she turned her mount and swung out onto the road, that she would have to cross it again.
Up Against the Wall
MY CHILDHOOD wasn’t exactly ideal, and I mention it here not as an excuse, but a point of reference. For the record, both my parents drank heavily, and in the early days, before my father gave up and withered away somewhere deep in the upright shell of himself, there was shouting, there were accusations, tears, violence. And smoke. The house was a factory of smoke, his two packs of Camels a day challenging the output of her two packs of Marlboros. I spent a lot of time outside. I ran with the kids in the neighborhood, the athletic ones when I was younger, the sly and disaffected as I came into my teens, and after an indifferent career at an indifferent college, I came back home to live rent-free in my childhood room in the attic as the rancor simmered below me and the smoke rose up through the floorboards and seeped in around the doorframe.
After a fierce and protracted struggle, I landed a job teaching eighth-grade English in a ghetto school, though I hadn’t taken any of the required courses and had no intention of doing so. That job saved my life. Literally. Teaching, especially in a school as desperate as this, was considered vital to the national security and it got me a deferment two weeks short of the date I was to report for induction into the U.S. Army, with Vietnam vivid on the horizon. All well and fine. I had a job. And a routine. I got up early each morning, though it was a strain, showered, put on a tie and introspectively chewed Sugar Pops in the car on the way to work. I ate lunch out of a brown paper bag. Nights, I went straight to my room to play records and hammer away at my saxophone and vocals.
Then a day came—drizzling, cold, the wet skin of dead leaves on the pavement and nothing happening anywhere in the world, absolutely nothing—when I was in the local record store turning over albums to study the bright glare of the product and skim the liner notes, killing time till the movie started in the mall. Something with a monumental bass line was playing over the speakers, something slow, delicious, full of hooks and grooves and that steamroller bass, and when I looked up vacantly to appreciate it, I found I was looking into the face of a guy I recalled vaguely from high school.
I saw in a glance he’d adopted the same look I had—the greasy suede jacket, bell-bottoms and Dingo boots, his hair gone long over the collar in back, the shadowy beginnings of a mustache—and that was all it took. “Aren’t you—Cole?” I said. “Cole, right?” And there he was, wrapping my hand in a cryptic soul shake, pronouncing my name without hesitation. We stood there catching up while people drifted by us and the bass pounded through the speakers. Where had he been? Korea, in the Army. Living with his own little mama-san, smoking opium every night till he couldn’t feel the floor under his futon. And I was a teacher now, huh? What a gas. And should he start calling me professor or what?
We must have talked for half an hour or so, the conversation ranging from people we knew in common to bands, drugs and girls we’d hungered for in school, until he said, “So what you doing tonight? Later, I mean?”
I was ashamed to tell him I was planning on taking in a movie alone, so I just shrugged. “I don’t know. Go home, I guess, and listen to records.”
“Where you living?”
Another shrug, as if to show it was nothing, a temporary arrangement till I could get on my feet, find my own place and begin my real life, the one I’d been apprenticing for all these years: “My parents’.”
Cole said nothing. Just gave me a numb look. “Yeah,” he said, after a moment, “I hear you. But listen, you want to go out, drive around, smoke a number? You smoke, right?”
I did. Or I had. But I had no connection, no stash of my own, no privacy. “Yeah,” I said. “Sounds good.”
“I might know where there’s a party,” he said, letting his cold blue eyes sweep the store as if the party might materialize in the far corner. “Or a bar,” he said, coming back to me, “I know this bar—”
I WAS LATE for homeroom in the morning. It mattered in some obscure way, in the long run, that is, because funding was linked to atten
dance and there had to be somebody there to check off the names each morning, but the school was in such an advanced state of chaos I don’t know if anyone even noticed. Not the first time, anyway. But homeroom was the least of my worries—it was mercifully brief and no one was expected to do anything other than merely exist for the space of ten minutes. It was the rest of the slate that was the trial, one swollen class after another shuffling into the room, hating school, hating culture, hating me, and I hated them in turn because they were brainless and uniform and they didn’t understand me at all. I was just like them, couldn’t they see that? I was no oppressor, no tool of the ruling class, but an authentic rebel, twenty-one years old and struggling mightily to grow a mustache because Ringo Starr had one and George Harrison and Eric Clapton and just about anybody else staring out at you from the front cover of a record album. But none of that mattered. I was the teacher, they were the students. Those were our roles, and they were as fixed and mutually exclusive as they’d been in my day, in my parents’ day, in George Washington’s day for all I knew.
From the minute the bell rang the rebellion began to simmer. Two or three times a period it would break out in riot and I would find myself confronting some wired rangy semi-lunatic who’d been left back twice and at sixteen already had his own mustache grown in as thick as fur, and there went the boundaries in a hard wash of threat and violence. Usually I’d manage to get the offender out in the hall, away from the eyes of the mob, and if the occasion called for it I would throw him against the wall, tear his shirt and use the precise language of the streets to let him know in excruciating detail just who was the one with the most at stake here. A minute later we’d return to the room, the victor and the vanquished, and the rest of them would feel something akin to awe for about ten minutes, and then it would all unwind again.
Stress. That’s what I’m talking about. One of the other new teachers—he looked to be thirty or so, without taste or style, a drudge who’d been through half a dozen schools already—used to get so worked up he’d have to dash into the lavatory and vomit between classes, and there was no conquering that smell, not even with a fistful of breath mints. The students knew it, and they came at him like hyenas piling on a corpse. He lasted a month, maybe less. This wasn’t pedagogy—it was survival. Still, everybody got paid and they were free to go home when the bell rang at the end of the day, and some of them—some of us—even got to avoid the real combat zone, the one they showed in living color each night on the evening news.
WHEN I GOT HOME that afternoon, Cole was waiting for me. He was parked out front of my house in his mother’s VW Bug, a cigarette clamped between his teeth as he beat at the dashboard with a pair of drumsticks, the radio cranked up high. I could make out the seething churn of his shoulders and the rhythmic bob of his head through the oval window set in the back of the Bug, the sticks flashing white, the car rocking on its springs, and when I killed the engine of my own car—a 1955 Pontiac that had once been blue, but was piebald now with whitish patches of blistered paint—I could hear the music even through the safety glass of the rolled-up window. “Magic Carpet Ride,” that was the song, with its insistent bass and nagging vocal, a tune you couldn’t escape on AM radio, and there were worse, plenty worse.
My first impulse was to get out of the car and slide in beside him—here was adventure, liberation, a second consecutive night on the town—but then I thought better of it. I was dressed in my school clothes—dress pants I wouldn’t wish on a corpse, button-down shirt and tie, a brown corduroy sport coat—and my hair was slicked down so tightly to my scalp it looked as if it had been painted on, a style I’d adopted to disguise the length and shagginess of it toward the end of appeasing the purse-mouthed principal and preserving my job. And life. But I couldn’t let Cole see me like this—what would he think? I studied the back of the Bug a moment, waiting for his eyes to leap to the rearview mirror, but he was absorbed, oblivious, stoned no doubt—and I wanted to be stoned too, share the sacrament, shake it out—but not like this, not in these clothes. What I finally did was ease out of the car, slip down the block and cut through the neighbors’ to our backyard, where the bulk of the house screened me from view.
I came up the cellar stairs from the garage, my father sunk into the recliner in the living room with the TV going—the news grim and grimmer—and my mother rattling things around in the kitchen. “You going to eat tonight?” she asked, just to say something. I ate every night—I couldn’t afford not to. She had a cigarette at her lips, a drink in her hand—scotch and water. There were dishes set out on the table, a pot of something going on the stove. “I’m making chili con carne.”
I had a minute, just a minute, no more, because I was afraid Cole would wake up to the fact that he was waiting for nothing and then it would be the room upstairs, the hypnosis of the records, the four walls and the sloping ceiling and a gulf of boredom so deep you could have sailed a fleet into it. “No,” I said, “I think I might go out.”
She stirred the pot, went to set the cigarette in the ashtray on the stove and saw that there was another there, already burning and rimmed red with lipstick. “Without dinner?” (I have to give her her due here—she loved me, her only son, and my father must have loved me too, in his own way, but I didn’t know that then, or didn’t care, and it’s too late now to do anything about it.)
“Yeah, I might eat out, I guess. With Cole.”
“Who?”
“Cole Harman. He was in high school with me?”
She just shrugged. My father said nothing, not hello or goodbye or you look half-starved already and you tell me you’re going to miss dinner? The TV emitted the steady whipcrack of small-arms fire, and then the correspondent came on with the day’s body count. Four minutes later—the bells, the boots, a wide-collared shirt imprinted with two flaming outsized eyeballs under the greasy jacket and my hair kinked up like Hendrix’s—and I was out the door.
“HEY,” I SAID, rapping at the window of the Bug. “Hey, it’s me.”
Cole looked up as if he’d been asleep, as if he’d been absorbed in some other reality altogether, one that didn’t seem to admit or even recognize me. It took him a moment, and then he leaned across the passenger’s seat and flipped the lock, and I went round the car and slid in beside him. I said something like, “Good to see you, man,” and reached out for the soul shake, which he returned, and then I said, “So, what’s up? You want to go to Chase’s, or what?”
He didn’t reply. Just handed me the tight white tube of a joint, put the car in gear and hit the accelerator with the sound of a hundred eggbeaters all rattling at once. I looked back to see my house receding at the end of the block and felt as if I’d been rescued. I put the lighter to the joint.
The night before we’d gone to Chase’s, a bar in town I’d never been to before, an ancient place with a pressed-tin ceiling and paneled booths gone the color of beef jerky with the smoke of a hundred thousand cigarettes. The music was of the moment, though, and the clientele mostly young—women were there, in their low-slung jeans and gauzy tops, and it was good to see them, exciting in the way of an afterthought that suddenly blooms into prominence (I’d left a girlfriend behind at college, promising to call, visit, write, but long distance was expensive, she was five hundred miles away and I wasn’t much of a writer). My assumption—my hope—was that we’d go back there tonight.
But we didn’t. Cole just drove aimlessly past bleached-out lawns and squat houses, down the naked tunnels of trees and into the country, where the odd field—crippled cornstalks, rotting pumpkins—was squeezed in among the housing developments and the creep of shopping malls. We smoked the joint down to the nub, employed a roach clip and alternated hits till it was nothing but air. An hour stole by. The same hits thumped through the radio, the same commercials. It was getting dark.
After a while we pulled up at a deserted spot along a blacktop road not two miles from my house. I knew the place from when I was a kid, riding my bike out to the reser
voir to fish and throw rocks and fool around. There was a waist-high wall of blackened stone running the length of a long two blocks, and behind that a glimpse of a cluster of stone cottages through the dark veins of the trees. We’d been talking about something comforting—a band or a guitar player—and I’d been drifting, wheeling round and round the moment, secure, calm, and now suddenly we were stopped out on the road in the middle of nowhere. “So, what’s the deal?” I said.
A car came up the street in the opposite direction and the lights caught Cole’s face. He squinted, put a hand up to shield his eyes till the car had passed, and he craned his neck to make sure it was still moving, watching for the flash of brake lights as it rounded the curve at the corner behind us and vanished into the night. “Nothing,” he said, a spark of animation igniting his voice as if it were a joke—the car, the night, the joint—“I just wanted you to meet some people, that’s all.”
“What people? Out here?” I gave it a beat. “You don’t mean the little people, do you? The elves? Where are they—crouching behind the wall there? Or in their burrows, is that where they are—asleep in their burrows?”