Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  WHEN THEY were done with her, when they were done taking turns with her one at a time in the backseat while the other drove slowly past the steel-shuttered windows of shops, under overpasses, past the locked doors of apartment buildings—when they were done, they stopped at a corner and pushed her out. She wore only her shirt, nothing else, and as they drove off she stood there with her feet together, her arms crossed tightly. It was after three in the morning in February in Boston, ice on the sidewalk, the snowbanks along the curb dirty and frozen, her feet bare, her legs. Both of the men had held the same knife to her the whole time, and that was how she was going to die, wasn’t it? But no, the cold will do it now. Maybe she was thinking that when she saw the headlights coming and she waved the car down, a taxicab, the driver older and black, looking her over, letting her climb into the back of his heated cab. She told him what had just happened to her, and he shook his head, “All that free shit thrown at them and they gotta do that.”

  He used his radio to call the police. She described to him the dead-end alley she’d been taken from, the streets and buildings around it. The driver took her right to it. In the glare of his headlights, Mom’s red Toyota was still there, and Kench lay on his back in the low snowbank where he’d fallen. Over the rooftops, the sky wasn’t quite as black, dawn not far off, a Monday in February, Valentine’s Day.

  NOW IT was just after seven, Mom and Bruce were in his car speeding down the highway for Boston, and I was picking up the phone to call my father.

  At first, because I never called it, I couldn’t remember his number. Then it came to me and I dialed, my fingers hot in the rotary holes, my body light, my tongue thick. His phone began to ring. I stood in the hallway near the back door, the one Suzanne had used the night before to leave. I heard again their voices, heard the car start up, and why didn’t I get up and run down there and stop them? I knew then, wherever they were going, she was doing it for him. I should’ve done something. Again, why didn’t I?

  Outside the sky was gray. Patches of snow lay in our neighbor’s side yard. Somewhere in our house Jeb and Nicole were awake, home because of what had happened, though I did not know where they were or what they were doing.

  “Hello?” He sounded as if he’d been up for a long while.

  “Pop?”

  “Andre?”

  “Yeah. I have bad news.” It felt as if I were telling him to lift his chin and hold still so I could plant my feet and raise my fists.

  “What? What is it?”

  And throw this right cross into his nose and mouth and trimmed beard. “Suzanne got raped last night.”

  “What?”

  “In Boston. Mom and Bruce are going to get her right now.”

  My father said more things, his voice shot through with shock and pain. He said he’d be right over, and as I hung up, my face began to feel on fire for what I felt right then, shame that I had not protected his daughter, my sister, but there was something else too, something I needed to deny but could not, this dark joy spreading through my chest at having just done that to him, the one who should’ve been here all along, the one who should never have left us in the first place.

  ON THE heavy bag now, I punched it so hard my knuckles stung and my shoulders ached. I kept seeing the men who’d done that to Suzanne; I kept seeing them as they were doing it. Then I’d change what happened. I’d stand in the middle of the street till the cruising sedan had to stop and I’d walk around to the driver’s side and set my feet and punch him in the temple, ripping a light through his brain that would forever stop his heart. I’d jerk open the back door and pry the knife from the one on my sister, then hook my forearm around his forehead and pull the blade into his throat and draw it from ear to ear, and I’d punch the bag and punch it and punch it till I couldn’t breathe anymore and my heart was charging faster than the sedan of the two men who got away and were never found, not then, not now, gone for good.

  WASHINGTON STREET lay behind concrete floodwalls and ran parallel to the Merrimack River from Railroad Square all the way to the Basilere Bridge. In the winter of 1977, it was a street of closed shops, some of their display windows covered with brown paper, squares of masking tape sticking to the glass. Other businesses had nothing covering their front windows, and beyond them lay one big dusty room. Against the wall would be shelves and a bare countertop holding a brass cash register, its drawer open and empty. The old Woolworth’s building was closed up and locked, but farther down the street was Mitchell’s which was still operating and where, when she could, Mom would put clothes on layaway for us. Farther west was Barrett’s. Through the windows I’d see men in shirts and ties selling clothes to men who wore ties, too. I rarely saw men like that and assumed they must live across the river in Bradford.

  And Washington Street was where the bars were: the Lido, the Tap, the Chit Chat Lounge. They were on the street level of the mill buildings, darkened, nearly windowless caves filled with men and women drinking and smoking, their cigarette smoke swirling through the dim lights behind the bar. There’d be music playing on the jukebox: Frank Sinatra and Sonny and Cher, Elton John, Tom Jones, and Johnny Paycheck. Near the register were jars of pickled eggs, a rack of potato chips and Slim Jims, wooden booths built into the walls, a few scattered cocktail tables, most of their bubbled Formica tops spotted with cigarette burns. Throughout downtown, along the narrow streets and alleys between the mills, there were many other bars like this: Ray and Arlene’s, Smitty’s, the 104 Club. There were stories of knifings or shootings in these places, of brawls with guys getting their teeth knocked out, their noses broken, their jaws splintered and having to be wired shut. The same names kept coming up, too—the Murphy boys, the Finns, the Duffys, Jon and Jake Cadell, the Wallaces, gangs of brothers who drank together down on Washington Street, then got into fights, sometimes with each other. And there were men known for just that one thing—brawling and almost always coming out on top: Jackie Wright, Paul Brooks, Ray Duffy, Bobby Twist, and Daryl Woods. Others, too. They’d work all week for the city repairing roads, or over at Western Electric in Andover assembling circuit boards, or on a construction crew, or in one of the quarter-running mills downtown stamping shoe soles. Then on Friday and Saturday nights they’d fold their drinking money into the front pocket of their jeans, pull on their leather jacket, and hit Washington Street.

  IT WAS a Saturday night in winter, and we were heading downtown in Sam’s black Duster, me and Sam and my brother Jeb. For the past three years, he’d barely left his room. He was tall and lean, and his hair was so wild he had to stick strands of it behind his ears so he could see. He’d go five or six days without shaving, his cheeks and chin covered with soft brown whiskers.

  He was seventeen now and a junior at the high school. When he actually went there, he wore a denim vest and spent most of the day in the art department, drawing and painting and sculpting. One afternoon he found a dead cat in the snow off Columbia Park, and he carried it into the house and cut off its tail with a kitchen knife. The next day he wore the cat tail as a tie, the bottom half of it tucked neatly into his vest.

  He practiced classical guitar hours and hours every day up in his closed bedroom. His former teacher from the middle school would be in there with him, and soon my brother’s guitar would go silent and she’d start moaning. After a while, Jeb’s guitar would start up again. I would hear this sometimes and think only good things, that my brother was getting regularly what most boys could only dream of, that she was keeping him so busy with sex and art that he couldn’t possibly want to die anymore. She still bought him guitar strings, music books, paints, canvases, but he never went out with me on the weekends, never roamed the streets anymore like we used to. On Saturday nights, she’d come for him in her Z-28, and he’d walk out of the house for trips to restaurants down in Cambridge and Boston.

  It was a cold night in February, two feet of snow on the ground, a thin layer of cracked ice on the sidewalks. Somehow I’d talked Jeb into going out with us,
and it was strange having him in the backseat behind me, but it felt good. Like it used to. Just the two of us, before there were any friends like Cleary who was at the trade school now and had stopped coming around. We didn’t see much of him at all, though we started to hear about his little brother Mike, who was making a name for himself as a martial artist, a polite and gentlemanly killer.

  That night Sam and I were wearing sweaters and leather jackets, jeans and boots, but Jeb never seemed to get cold. He wore a T-shirt and loose corduroys. On his feet weren’t shoes but wool slippers his teacher had knitted for him. He needed a shave.

  Sam had the radio on, Rod Stewart singing about Maggie kicking him in the head. We were heading down to the Tap on Washington Street. On Saturday nights they had live music, and the place would be full of men and women, some of them from Bradford College across the river. Sam drove under the railroad bridge into Lafayette Square. We passed the bright lighted windows of Store 24 and cut around the rotary into the dark streets of downtown, tall abandoned mill buildings on both sides of us as present yet gone as dead ancestors. Every block and a half there’d be a blue or red neon glow coming from the first-floor window, another bar this town was full of, and I was looking forward to the Tap, but not to drink. Sam and I were eighteen now and legally old enough to be in these barrooms, but for months now he and I hadn’t had even one sip of beer, and we weren’t eating anything with sugar in it either. We were trying to get as defined as possible, to get cut.

  Sam drove the Duster down the alleyway and into the asphalt lot below. It was crowded with cars and pickups. There were streetlamps along the floodwall shining down on the plowed banks, the lot salted and sanded, and out on the river was the slow dim movement of white floes on black water. Even before I stepped out of Sam’s car I could hear the thumping bass of the band up in the Tap, could hear all the bar voices talking over it.

  Jeb climbed out of the back. His hair was in his face. There were brown whiskers across his cheeks and chin and throat, and as we crossed the lot for the rear door of the bar, Jeb just a few steps behind us in his T-shirt and hand-knit woolen slippers, I felt I’d done him some kind of wrong by bringing him, that I was using him somehow, my little brother who’d become a kept boy, a musical recluse.

  The stairwell up to the street level was dimly lit, the wooden treads wet and gritty. The music was louder here, and I heard a woman laugh over the noise. At the landing, Sam pushed open the door, the long oak bar two and three people deep, the bartenders working fast and never stopping, the band too loud, the air stuffy and smelling like damp wool and cigarette smoke, perfume and spilled beer and sweat. The bouncer sat on a stool collecting a two-dollar cover charge. Even on the stool he was taller than we were. He had curly black hair and a wool sweater and looked thirty years old.

  We paid our money and made our way through the crowd. The floor was wide hardwood planks worn smooth, and the band was in the next room where the lights were dimmed and men and women sat at cocktail tables drinking and talking and laughing. A lot of them looked older than we were, married couples out for their Saturday night. The band was on a small stage, a cigarette smoke haze under the lights where the lead guitarist was singing about Amy and how he’d like to spend the night with her.

  Usually Sam and I would head to the bar and order a milk, wait for the bartender to say something before he poured us the watered-down liquid they used for White Russians, but the bar was just too hard to get to, and as we stood there in the squeeze of bodies I began to recognize a face here and there, some of them girls from the high school, young women now. A lot of them worked shifts at Western Electric or in one of the mills or restaurants downtown, or maybe they were training as a nurse’s aide in an old folks’ home or had tried a little college like me before dropping out.

  I could see a few of them drinking at the bar, talking to each other over the music. They took deep drags off their cigarettes and turned their heads to exhale, their made-up eyes glittering darkly.

  Everybody was talking and nobody was even pretending to listen to the band. I was already tired of standing in the middle of it all and hoped Sam felt the same way and would want to leave soon. But he was talking to Bobby Schwartz, who I hadn’t seen come in. Bobby looked big and handsome in his dress leather jacket and somehow he’d made it to the bar and had a drink in his hand. He was smiling at Sam, nodding at whatever he was saying, and something was happening up against the brick wall, Jeb slapping away the hand of Steve Lynch.

  Lynch was over six feet and had curly blond hair and a deep voice and the girls liked him though he was known for being a badass, for walking the halls like some charismatic king, always three or four others trailing behind him. More than once I’d seen him push a smaller kid out of the way, or knock another’s books out of his hands as he passed, and he’d laugh and call them faggots. I’d been in the same class with his older brother Dana, who wasn’t much different, just a little bigger and not quite as handsome.

  Lynch was here with three or four of his buddies. Now they were standing there waiting for him to do something to this little shit with the untamed hair and slippers on his feet who’d just slapped Lynch’s hand aside after Steve’d scratched Jeb’s chin and said, “You need a fuckin’ shave.”

  Bobby and Sam saw what was happening, too; the three of us stepped closer as if we’d been pulled there, the four with Lynch looking us over, us doing the same to them. I was vaguely aware of a steady electric current rising up my legs and into my chest, and I wasn’t afraid, just so aware, Lynch’s voice somehow the only one I heard above the dozens of others, nobody looking over at us, the crowd still drinking and talking and laughing, Steve’s voice, Let’s take it outside then.

  You first.

  No, you.

  And Jeb stepped sideways through the crowd, Lynch following him past the bouncer through the door for the long stairwell down to the parking lot where my brother would have to fight in his slippers and T-shirt, his hair swinging in front of his face, and I wanted to follow, but Bobby was holding his hand up to Lynch’s boys, smiling that same smile he used to have in Connolly’s ring, both gloves at his side, daring you to swing, “You stay, we stay, right, boys?”

  The tallest and biggest nodded, and the seven of us stood there in the smoke haze and the noise of the crowd that didn’t know we were waiting to see who’d come back in that door.

  It was Lynch and it was way too soon. Less than a minute. He was smiling, looking down at me as he rejoined his friends. Sam said something, or Bobby, but I was moving through the crowd past the bouncer, then down the long stairwell, thinking knife. He stabbed him.

  The steps were pockets of air under my feet. Then I was out in the cold, the grit of salt and sand on ice under my boots, Jeb standing there looking at me.

  “You all right?”

  “I had my back to him, he kicked me down the stairs, I can’t find my other slipper.”

  Jeb’s left foot was bare, his toes naked on the iced-over asphalt.

  “Where is it?”

  “Up there somewhere.”

  I was back inside, the stairs under me like an afterthought. And I was scanning them for my brother’s wool slipper, but I wasn’t looking for it. Then I was on the landing and past the bouncer inside the noise and heat and smoke, walking past Lynch and his boys to Sam and Bobby. He kicked him down the stairs. Help me find his slipper.

  Sam went first and then I did too, but there was the feeling I was done with this, done with looking, done with everything, and I ran back up, stepped inside the bar, turned, and there he was, Steve Lynch on the landing, grinning down at me. My back was to the open door of the bar, and as the words came out of my mouth I could feel my weight sink back on my right foot, my arms go loose at my sides, and it was as if I were in a warm bath under a blue sky, my words coming together in a question that could only get the answer I was waiting for. “Have you seen my brother’s slipper, Steve?”

  “Slipper? Your brother’s a fuckin�
� faggot and so are—”

  He was falling, not backwards, but straight down, as if a blade had taken off his legs at the knees, and I was swinging and swinging but the bouncer’s arm was in the air between us and I was trying to punch over it, my fist just missing Lynch’s face which was bone-white, his lower face wet and red, his mouth a dark hole though my fist felt nothing, and the bouncer pushed and I was half falling, half running down the stairs and out into the cold air where my brother waited.

  “You find it?”

  I was breathing hard. I shook my head. “No, but I clocked him.”

  “Good.”

  “Yeah.” And we began walking through the dim parking lot for Sam’s Duster, the air strangely still and calm, the streetlamps shining down in the parked cars, the ice floes in the river beyond barely moving. I felt light and pure and free of something. Sam’s car was locked.

  “Your foot cold?”

  “A little.”

  Something was different. Everything was different. There was more quiet in the air and more noise, too. The band had stopped playing upstairs and all the voices seemed to come louder through the brick walls. The back door pushed open from the stairwell and three of Lynch’s boys came walking toward us. The bigger one, the tallest one, said, “You sucker-punched my friend,” and he tackled me into a snowbank, then was sitting on my chest punching me in the side of the head, in the ears, in the neck and shoulder. Then it was over. He’d done his duty, and he was walking back to his buddies, the three of them standing next to Jeb like they were in front of a fire watching it burn. The big one and his buddies walked back inside, and I was standing, dusting the snow off. That was it? My entire boyhood I’d been unable to talk or move or resist out of fear of that? My head and ears were sore, so what.

  I wanted to run back up there and try again. I wanted to set my feet and throw one into the big one’s face, but now couples were leaving, a few of the women lighting up, their pocketbooks swinging. Engines started to turn over and Leslie, a woman I knew from the college, another townie, was walking fast to her car. I could see her breath. “Andre, they’re coming for you. Like fifteen of them. I like your face just the way it is, honey. Please, you gotta get outta here.”