Sons of Liberty (4 page)

“You. Up.” Lights. His brother’s face, white and tight, as if a sheet of exhaustion had been stretched around it.

“Cliff? What’s your problem?”

“I don’t have a problem, dumb butt. You do.” Cliff bent close, prodding Rock on the shoulder. Rock smelled toothpaste.

“You’re so lame. Get out of here, out-out-out. Outa my room. It’s after midnight. You can’t interrupt my sleep.” Rock kicked one leg out from under its trap of blankets and slammed his foot into Cliff’s thigh. But his brother was bigger, if not stronger, and in a minute Cliff had pounced on Rock, sitting upright on Rock’s heaving chest while his fingers trapped Rock’s wrists, then yanked and pinned his hands above his head.

“Listen up.” Cliff’s spitty whisper tickled Rock’s ear and he jerked his head away. “I know you think it’s okay that I had to sit in Mr. Faella’s office and listen to about ten minutes of garbage about honor codes because my freak brother thinks it’s cool to throw rocks at fat kids. But then to hear Dad compare you to Jesse James and the Sundance Kid or something? Meanwhile I had to take the second late bus to school—failed my Spanish quiz, not that you care, O great lord of D-minuses. But you’re not getting off that easy. ’Cause you can do me a favor tonight.”

“What’re you—” Rock squirmed and tried unsuccessfully for another kick.

“Since Dad thinks it’s so cool for you to beat up Briggsie, way cooler than me passing a Spanish quiz, I was thinking you could help me out with my homework.”

Rock sat up in bed as Cliff rolled off him.

“What are you talking about? You’ve been out of control ever since you barged in here.”

“Follow me. I mean it.”

Rock got up and mutely trailed Cliff into his room. It stunned him to see his brother so angry. It wasn’t something that happened very often.

Cliff pulled back his desk chair and pointed for Rock to sit; then he clicked on his Tensor lamp. “See this?” He waved a slice of ruled paper in the air. “I wrote down all the words I don’t know from this extra-credit essay we’re supposed to read. So what you’re gonna do is look up all the words in here.” He rapped his knuckles on a chunky Spanish—English dictionary that rested on the desk. “And then you’re gonna copy their meanings next to the words. Got it?”

“Cliff, no way I’m gonna do this.”

“If you don’t, then I call war. No joke. Starting with me pitching your bike in the pond, and second, I’ll tell Dad that you were the one who set off those firecrackers in the Superfresh last year. That’s just to start.”

“Why’re you being so, just, like my worst enemy?” Rock asked in a small voice, feeling like a baby even as he spoke.

“Look, Rock, we already have one bully in the family, if you haven’t noticed. And his name is George Kindle. And being a bully isn’t gonna be contagious in this house, not if I can help it. You start writing now, you’ll be done in under an hour. And try to make your penmanship so I can read it.” With these parting words, Cliff ducked and scrabbled like a cockroach under his bed. Soon all Rock heard was the whisper of Cliff’s pencil tracing out his latest house design.

El cielo,
Rock read.
Los abogados. Las películas.
There were about forty words. He picked up the dictionary. Rock would have considered it a favor if Cliff had made him miss a Spanish quiz, but Cliff took school pretty seriously. Rock decided that he owed it to his brother, though, since the Detonator had given Cliff more problems than it should have.

He wrote carefully, copied intently. He felt bad. Spanish seemed tricky; it must be pretty tough to pass a quiz, even with enough sleep the night before.

“I’m done,” he said finally, stifling a yawn. Cliff wriggled out from under his bed, flipping his notebook up on his nightstand.

“Great.”

“It wasn’t so bad,” Rock lied. Cliff looked over the paper, nodded, and then folded it into his Spanish workbook.

“Wonder how Liza’s doing.”

“Timmy’s gone until next Monday.”

“Oh yeah?” Cliff looked up. “I’ve been thinking about it all day. But, so Timmy’s gone, well good, that’s real good, then. ’Cause by after the weekend, it won’t be such a big deal. Remember how last time she got in all that trouble—and it wasn’t so long ago, right? Last time, when Liza wrapped papier-mâché all over that other girl, what was that girl’s name?”

“Ugh—Tanya Wallace. Snob. She deserved it.”

“You and Liza love that excuse, that the other kid deserved it.”

“ ’Cause it’s usually true. Anyhow, you’re right. Last time it wasn’t so bad for Liza, and the Wallaces even called over to the house. So.” They stood and stared at each other, remembering. “Not so bad,” Rock repeated. “Night, Cliff.”

“Night, sport. Thanks for the Spanish words.”

“Not like I really had a choice.” Rock yawned and rubbed his hands through his hair. He bet he looked especially hamsterish now.

“You’ve always got a choice,” Cliff said. “So happens you made a good one. Now scram.”

T
HE KINDLES MOVED FROM
San Diego, California, to Sheffield, Connecticut, at the end of the same March that Rock turned eight years old. Cliff was ten and Brontie was still a toddler just learning to walk. Touching down at the New Haven airport was the first time any of the three kids had seen real snow. Cliff and Rock had dashed out of the airport to the parking lot, to the brown hills of plowed slush and ice, excited to stomp and kick it. Even dirty and half melted, the giant snow piles were like a miracle.

“We need a new coastline,” their father had explained when the decision was made to move. “The only thing that’s constant in this world is change.” Connecticut wasn’t a true change for their father, though, since he’d spent all his growing-up years in Sheffield, in his aunt Cass’s house, which was gone now, “along with the inheritance money that the lawyers and tax people stole out from under us,” their father would recall with a hard little smile.

“All we Kindles got left in Sheffield is legacy,” he told his family. He spoke truth, though; Sheffield was rich with Kindle lore. Kindles had fought with the Blue Coats during the Revolution and with the Union during the Civil War. Cliff and Rock had discovered cemeteries filled with Kindle tombstones, some with etchings worn fingernail-shallow, the stone smudged green with lichens and mosses. Rock often repeated those dead Kindle names softly to himself, especially when he was mad at some kid and was chasing him down to pound him.

“Jeremiah Kindle. Robert Xavier Kindle. Christian Price Kindle.” Heroic colonist soldiers all of them, he bet. A legacy of bravery that Rock liked to think he personally kept alive, seeing as Cliff wasn’t much of a fighter.

“Kindles been living in Sheffield since before it was called Sheffield,” their father told them, pride lumped in his voice. “You might’ve been born on your mother’s side of the country, but you boys are Yankee blood through and through.”

One of Rock’s strongest memories of Sheffield was also one of his first. It was during move-in week, when brown cardboard packing boxes had created an obstacle course through their cottage, and the unpacking was like a celebration, their same old things transformed into treasures to reopen and appreciate all over again.

The day of Rock’s eighth birthday, his mother had baked a lemon cake from scratch, and his father barbecued shrimp and chicken. After lunch and cake the whole family had lolled in the living room, drinking icy Cokes from their father’s frosted German beer steins and sharing a family-sized bag of peanut M&M’s. Everyone had watched, even baby Brontie, as Rock, the star of the day, slowly opened his presents. Slot cars, he remembered. He’d seen the box in the car trunk the day before.

Then his father unexpectedly had told him to pick out a game to play.

“Anything.” He’d spread his arms expansively. “Something fun for the whole family.”

Rock had bristled with surprised joy and jumped up to locate the box where the games were packed. He’d picked Monopoly, a tedious game that no one really liked, but it took the longest time to play. Before anyone could protest, though, Rock had the board and cards neatly set up on a packing box. He’d even let Cliff be the race car, to pacify him. But soon the whole family was caught up in it—cheering and slapping their foreheads and clapping for each other, just the way the people did in commercials.

They’d played all the way up through hotels, and Brontie had fallen asleep on the couch, with little green houses stuck over the tips of her fingers. After they packed the game away and put Brontie to bed, their father built a fire in the fireplace, and they sang rounds of “This Land Is Your Land” and “Hotel California,” other songs too, and then they’d all eaten more cake, with herb tea that his mother served from her special-occasion tea set.

Rock had wanted to savor each minute of the afternoon the way he ate an M&M, holding it safe on his tongue, letting the candy shell and chocolate dissolve into a sweet, thick puddle, his teeth cleaving the softened peanut into two halves. He still carried the candy-bright images of that birthday tucked into a dark, safe place in his brain. He’d always thought of that day as a good-luck sign, like a bottle of champagne broken over the prow of a boat, launching the Kindles toward their new life in New England.

Cliff had confided to Rock that their old life in San Diego was full of problems, which was the real reason they’d all moved. First, their father’s car-servicing franchise had gone out of business. Then Mr. Sugar, the boss at their father’s next job, in the security department of the Jefferson Armory, fired him, “for mouthing off,” Cliff explained. And his job after that, working the graveyard shift at the gasworks plant, didn’t make enough money to support a family of four, soon to be five.

Cliff remembered the details of all the fights: how their mother cried a lot, and that when she was gigantically pregnant with Brontie, she’d left them for a month to visit Aunt Louisa in Arizona, where Brontie had been born. “Which I think half explains why Brontie’s so unconnected,” Cliff told Rock. “I thought Mom would never come back, though.”

Rock’s clearest memory of San Diego stood inside that same tiny and unsettled corner of time when their mother had left for Arizona, because he remembered how Cliff had taken over preparing Rock’s school lunches, using way too much jelly and forgetting the napkins.

“Yeah, it’s lucky she decided not to stay in Arizona,” Rock agreed. Aunt Louisa in Arizona. It sounded like a hillbilly song. Rock had met his mother’s sister only twice, but he knew she owned a small pottery store called Tucson Terra Flora that earned her enough money to visit Paris and Hawaii. Their mother would stick her postcards on the refrigerator, word side up. “And I’m glad we live in a place that doesn’t make Mom cry.”

Their Sheffield home stood inside a circle of cottages that ringed the edge of Moose Hill Pond and were within walking distance of the Sheffield Yacht Club, where they weren’t members, and Blackfoot Beach, which you didn’t need to belong to. The house itself was tiny and not meant to be lived in during the winter. The two upstairs bedrooms were unfinished, built with high rafters and uninsulated doors and windows. The miniature fireplace was mostly for show. There was only one bathroom, downstairs.

It would be just for a little while, their mother had explained when they first moved in. They’d find a better, permanent house before winter.

The cold weather had arrived early, a brutal September snap that had caught them off-guard. It whistled behind the walls and froze the floorboards and crept inside the tips of their fingers and noses. Their cottage was never warm, even when their father bought a cord of wood so they could feed the tiny fireplace with a platoon of sturdy logs. Their mother bought nylon blankets, six packs of heavy ragg socks, and warm bathrobes from Woolworth’s. But the windows rattled and the hot-water pipes froze. Rock kept his fingers warm at dinner by sitting first on one hand, then the other, trading off his fork from left hand to right.

“Aren’t we leaving?” Cliff had asked one night at dinner. “Aren’t we moving to a real house? A permanent one? Practically nobody lives on Linwood Drive as a year-rounder.”

Rock had nodded in silent agreement. The summer people had long since departed to New York or New Jersey or other parts of Connecticut, leaving their furniture shrouded in white sheets and mothballs until the next summer.

“If we can stick out our first New England winter in this cottage, then we’re prepared for anything,” their father explained. “Plus, the rent’s low, and even though I got steady work at the boat yard, it’s not the job security I’d need for a down payment on a bigger house.”

“Maybe we could borrow some money from Aunt Louisa in Arizona?” Cliff pressed on. “For the down payment?” Rock had known in a second that it was the wrong thing for his brother to say.

“I don’t remember asking for your worthless advice, Cliff.” His father had leaned back in his chair and begun folding his napkin, the white paper slowly disappearing into tinier and thicker squares in his fingers. His voice was heavy and quiet, the signal he was upset. “And I don’t remember raising my son to be a money-grubber. You want to make that phone call yourself, Cliff, since you feel so comfortable grubbing other people for money? Since you don’t seem to think that I’m providing for the family—”

“Sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean it.”

“I’m sure you didn’t. Because if you ever did call Aunt Louisa, you’d be betraying this family. Are you a betrayer of this family, Cliff?”

“No, I’m not. I’m not a betrayer.”

But Cliff’s words didn’t undo the damage. Rock stuck up his middle finger at Cliff as their father stood up from the table and stalked out of the house, slamming the door.

Later, there had been an Interrupted night, a wood-chopping one, just for Cliff.

Sometime soon after, Rock remembered it was inside that same first winter, Cliff became fascinated with the real-estate section of the
New York Times.
Sitting at the kitchen table, Cliff would shake out the paper with a flourish, then trace his finger lovingly down the shaded gray boxed photos of houses almost too fantastic to contemplate. Eventually, taking pencil to onionskin typing paper, he began to press out the elegant lines of his own house designs.