Sons of Liberty (5 page)

PARIS IN CONN. LVLY FRNCH CNTRY HOME ON ¾ ACRE WDLOT. 3500 SQ. FT. 5 CAR GAR./FULL BSMNT. MSTR. BRM w/JAC. Cliff would write in the corners, in neat block letters, abbreviated descriptions of homes more luxurious than Rock had ever seen in real life. Rock watched, filled with suspicious awe that Cliff could mastermind buildings that looked way too sterile and luxurious to allow a Kindle to move in.

They’d all survived that first winter, of course, and by next spring the neighborhood was transformed from its boarded-up, going-out-of-business landscape. The pale grasses that pushed up through the new earth eventually had to be mowed, and soon Rock’s Saturdays were filled with lawn-mowing duties, the outdoor scents of lilacs and freshly poured tar making him forget the numbing cold of only a few weeks past.

It was that same spring that Timmy and Arlene and Liza and Trev arrived, moving down to the red cottage at the end of Linwood Drive.

The way Rock remembered it, Liza just appeared one day on the Kindles’ front stoop, holding a plate full of peanut butter no-bake cookies, explaining that they were leftovers from her stepfather’s birthday party.

“And it wasn’t his birthday till July,” she’d quacked the truth happily some weeks later. “I’d just watched you guys riding past on your blamed bikes all week, and I wanted to ride with you. I was fixing to bust a gut, wishing you guys’d come over and introduce.”

Rock remembered seeing the scrawny dark-haired girl standing on the edge of her porch the day he and Cliff had biked to Sheffield Sporting Goods, but who’d go out of his way to hang out with some girl? Liza’s cookie plan worked, though, and it didn’t hurt that she could ride no-handed and do bike-stands, even on a chintzy girl bike with a plastic basket in the front and unicorn decals plastered to the purple frame.

“Weren’t my bike original, it was my cousin Diane’s,” she’d declared hotly when they’d teased her. “And whoever says not’ll have to wrestle me for no-take-backs.” It took a while for Rock and Cliff to get an ear for Liza’s way of talking. Trash talk, their dad called it. Lazy white trash from East Hick, Maine, he said about all the Mobleys. Not to their faces, of course. To their faces he was just terse, silent in his disapproval.

The Mobleys were actually from Skowhegan, on the northernmost tip of the Maine coastline. They were a young family, rough and blunt with their language, lots of times spicing it up with curse words.

One of the first times Rock and Cliff went over to Liza’s house, they saw Arlene nursing Trev on the porch. Her turtleneck was bunched up under her neck and the baby’s mouth was stuck to her like a plunger. Rock and Cliff held a secret meeting later, under Cliff’s bed, because it had been so jolting, seeing all that secret pink skin exposed, right in the middle of the day.

“Trev’s only my half brother,” Liza was quick to tell them. “Timmy’s not my real dad neither, no suh. That’s why my last name ain’t Mobley, it’s Vincent. See, Timmy’s just a step; only twelve years older ’n me, anyways, so he couldn’t be a real dad of mine even if he’d’ve wanted. But my real daddy, Crow Vincent, he’s living up in Maine. He’s in a singing band. When I get older, I might sing backup for him, you just watch.”

“Timmy catch you fibbing like that, he’ll wash your mouth out with soap,” Arlene had remarked. She was a solid woman, with square shoulders and square fingers and a thick headful of curls like cedar shavings.

“Crow is so in a band! On the weekends! He is so!”

“I’m not sayin’ it’s all of it a fib, but where do you come off, girl, saying you’re gonna be singing backup, with your voice like a cat scritch and too short to reach a microphone?” Arlene sniffed over her dishwashing. “Crow, he ain’t in the kinda band needs backup girl singers, anyhow.”

It was one of the few conversations Rock remembered about Liza’s dad. No one seemed to know too much—or was willing to give away too much—about him. The best way to speculate on Crow Vincent, Rock always thought, was to look at Liza, since she sure didn’t seem like kin to Arlene.

The Mobleys were blond and sturdy, as if they’d been carved from the same heavy cut of butcher-block wood. Liza, in contrast, was pole skinny, with fingers and toes like hooks that could catch hold of anything: a tree, a roof siding, the school-yard wall. Rock’s class one year had studied animal bones in science, and Rock always imagined Liza’s insides being shaped from whalebone, bouncy and strong, bending any direction.

“I’m double-jointed,” she’d brag. “Everywhere.” And then she’d do a backflip or a headstand to prove it. “When I get older,” she told them, “I’m fixing to join the Cirque du Soleil. I think that’s what the French version is for Circus of the Stars. You watch. I’ll getcha free tickets. When I’m older.”

That was how Liza always talked. You watch, you just wait, you better believe. Like the whole reason for getting older was to make good on all the bets that no one had wagered against her to begin with.

Liza regularly shocked Sheffield with her brave acts. She could do anything: front and back wheely-pop her bike over the deepest pothole on Linwood Drive, dive from the roof of her house straight into the quivering upper branches of the maple tree that grew alongside it, chase down a bee and squish it to death in her bare hands to pay it back for a sting.

“They die anyway, you know. After they sting you,” Cliff said once as he and Rock watched her rub her hands on the grass, cleaning off the bee guts.

“Yeah, but not with the same amount of pain,” she’d answered.

Liza once had borrowed Timmy’s kayak and taken it into the ocean at high tide. Using a paddle she’d made from a broken broomstick and two scuba flippers, she plunged out to the point in the water where the waves had just played with her, rolling her over and over in the surf. Her legs had swollen up with pale jellyfish bites and her teeth had practically chattered off, but she’d dragged the kayak back on the sand of Blackfoot Beach and regarded the boys with a giant grin.

“Fun!” she’d chattered. “That was real fun.” It seemed as if she’d slowly sneaked up on becoming Cliff and Rock’s best friend, although it was hard for Rock to acknowledge being friends with a girl. While girls always thought Cliff’s elf nose and crooked smile were cute, and he’d been going to girl-hosted parties since fourth grade, the girls generally left Rock alone, which was fine by him, since they always acted too giggly and secretive for his taste. Liza was more like a boy, anyway, Rock always consoled himself. Even if she did prefer colors like pink and purple, and had all those Hollywood posters hanging in her room. Liza was tough.

“She just doesn’t care,” Cliff remarked once. “She doesn’t care about her own
life.
The stuff she does.” But Cliff was wrong, Rock thought. Liza had a giant appetite for her life, eating up everything in her path, like in that old video game Pac Man. If a tree or a pothole or a kayak was in front her, then
gulp!
Liza just swallowed it right up into a dare or a stunt. Rock didn’t think he knew anybody else who needed to jump so high, or swim so far, or make her heart beat so fast as Liza. On occasion, her appetite seemed show-offish, like a big burp in his face.

“Hey-a, Rock,” she’d taunted him just the other week. Rock had been walking down the road, uselessly searching for a half-used hot-lunch ticket pack he thought he might have dropped there some weeks ago. Liza’s voice had pitched out at him like a ghost from nowhere. “Hey-a, wimpus maximus. Can you do this?”

And then she’d appeared, bouncing down a scrubby little birch tree, mountain-rappeler style. She had made the harness using Arlene’s clothesline; one end was roped to a pillow she used as a seat, the other end was fastened to an uppermost tree branch. Rock watched, fascinated, as she’d bumped clumsily, her sneakers kicking off from the trunk to speed her progress. Midway down, the clothesline broke and she fell with a thunk to the dirt.

“Put it in one of them sailor knots of yours, and I’ll let you go next,” she’d wheezed, still sprawled on the ground on her stomach.

“You okay?” Rock stepped forward, but she had bounced to her feet and ignored his question.

“You fixing to do this or no?”

“Doesn’t look that great,” Rock said honestly.

“Chester,” she said, squinting up at the tree branches. She always used that version of Rock’s name when she thought he was being a chicken.

“You’re such a show-off.”

“And you’re such a phony. Boy, sure ain’t it funny how kids think you’re just so ba-ad, Chester, when you can’t even do this little baby ride.”

That got him, of course. Rock had climbed the stupid tree and tied the cord with a sailor knot, and then taken a dizzying spin down on Liza’s homemade rappel, feeling queasy at every bump. The scare outweighed the fun about two to one, he decided. When he got to the bottom, he’d had to put his head between his knees for a second to clear the buzz in his ears, and his stomach felt like someone had flipped it upside down.

“Fun, huh?” she’d asked him.

“Sure,” he coughed, swallowing hard.

Classic Eliza Beth Vincent, never knowing when a good time turned into a stomachache.

T
HE MORNING AFTER THE
Detonator incident, Liza didn’t show up at the Kindle cottage.

“It’s almost 7:42,” Rock mentioned reluctantly, once again checking the oven clock.

“Call her.” Cliff glanced up from his second helping of scrambled eggs. He pointed a squiggle of bacon at Rock.

“Isn’t it too early?” Panicked, their mother looked up from her cookbook. “No one will be awake. Oh, no, what am I saying? Silly me, of course they’re all awake by now …” She sighed, her eyes drifting back to her recipes.

Rock studied his mother carefully. Lately she seemed even more scattered than usual, always twittering a million goofy questions and never quite listening to the answers. Tucked inside her soft flannel robe and slippers, she looked frumpy and floppy, like a once-cherished stuffed animal that’s both a comfort and shame to rediscover. It had been weeks since Rock had seen his mother in regular clothes. She’d given them up, he guessed, when she gave up going outside.

“Ma, what are you doing today?” he asked abruptly.

“Would you please just give Liza a call and stop worrying about what Mom’s doing today?” Cliff pitched the bacon at him. It clung to Rock’s sweater a moment before it slid a bumpy trail to the floor. Rock scooped it up and stuffed it into his mouth.

“No throwing food,” their mother implored. “Please, kids. Cliffy, come on. Please.” Rock turned away from her and picked up the phone, yawning. Two nights in a row without a good sleep was becoming a drain. He punched in the number. When he heard Timmy’s “Hello,” his breath choked into a coughing fit.

“Who’s this? This some kinda prank?” Timmy’s voice was so loud that Brontie, hearing it, started to whimper.

“There’s a scary man in the phone!” she said, looking at Cliff, who put his finger to his lips. Rock turned and felt his brother’s stare intent on the back of his neck.

“No, it’s me, it’s Rock Kindle.” He coughed into the phone and bacon bits spewed everywhere. “Sorry about that. It’s just I thought you were away until next week.”

“No suh, no suh. Turned out they didn’t need me so long.”

“Oh. Uh, so, has Liza left to come over here yet?”

“Liza? Naw, Liza’s not feeling so good today,” Timmy answered. “She got a sore head. She’s not up to school today.”

“Okay, thanks.”

But the click had already sounded in Rock’s ear.

Rock replaced the receiver. “Timmy’s home and Liza’s got a headache,” he said. Suddenly the smell and taste of food made him sick, and he spit the rest of his bacon into the trash.

“What’s he doing home? You told me last night he was away.” Cliff’s voice was blaming.

“Don’t talk like it’s my fault that he’s there. Liza told me he was gone till Monday. So, anyhow, she’s not coming and we better push off.”

“You sure she’s not going to school?” Cliff looked at the phone as if it had more answers for him. “What did Timmy say?”

“You heard what—look, you wanna call yourself?”

“Let’s go.” Cliff was not smiling, even when Brontie reached her arms toward him for her customary good-bye kiss.

They sat together on the bus that morning, which they almost never did anymore, since Cliff liked Natalie Abersese. But now they sat together and Cliff doodled a new house on his brown-paper book cover and Rock finished up his history ditto. They didn’t talk about Liza. They talked about other stuff: who was going to win the NCAAs this year, which kids they could get to play on a weekend Rollerblade hockey team, how they could raise enough money to buy themselves some used Rollerblades. It was as if they both decided that the sound of their own voices could pinch out the shivery thoughts that slid underneath the aimless chatter.

“It’s weird how you always get top grades in history when you rot at everything else,” Cliff commented brightly, glancing over at Rock’s ditto.

“Comes natural to me.” Rock shrugged. “Photogenic mind, like Dad.”

“Photo-
graphic
. And you do not, either. You both just wish you did. Anyway, I know you study. You have about fifty index cards stacked up on your bookshelf about the frigging Revolutionary War. I remember having to do that paper. Mrs. Lewin. She was Miss Duncan when I had her. What a hottie.”

“I’m getting an A in gym, too.”

“A in history, A in gym, D-pluses in everything else.” Cliff laughed.

“Dad’s teaching helps more ’n what most bird-brain teachers at Sheffield could tell me.”

“Dad’s teaching,” Cliff scoffed. He eased himself low in his seat and traced his pencil over the outline of a sketch he’d made—a church, it looked like to Rock, with a domed roof and stairs leading up to two arched doors. “Sometimes I don’t think I’m up for taking any more from him, Rock.” Cliff spoke through his teeth as he shaded in one of the columns. “There’s times I don’t know what’s stopping me from jumping on my bike and taking off to anywhere, to get away from all that … ruling over us, you know what I mean? All that bossing us around. And even when he leaves, when he gets fed up with us and goes to Maguire’s, even then it’s like he’s still in the house, pushing us around with his nasty mood, ’cause all the rest of us are left feeling so bad.”