Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  There was yelling inside. A door slammed out front on the street. Jeb and I looked at each other, and then we were running down the back alley along the floodwall, over iced cobblestones past dumpsters and concrete loading docks and stacked oak pallets, then up under the railroad trestle past the traffic lights onto the sidewalk of Comeau Bridge. Jeb was ahead of me, his hair bouncing, his bare arms pumping. His other slipper was loose, the sole of his foot pale in the flickering fluorescent light of the streetlamps on the bridge. A car passed us, its tires humming on the iron grid, then another, and I was waiting for the screech of brakes, for a carload of men to come get us and throw us over.

  Soon we were in the bright light of the gas station on the other side, a stoner I knew from somewhere just hanging up the gas pump. His Camaro door was open, and the backseat was covered with eight-tracks and empty Marlboro cartons, Aerosmith blasting from his speakers as he drove me and my brother home.

  He offered us hits off a joint, but we said no thanks. He pulled up to our house on Columbia Park, his stereo too loud, and we thanked him and heard his tires squeal on the ice behind us. Jeb went ahead of me up the path in the snow to our steps, his foot probably half frozen now. Like always, nearly every light in our house seemed to be on, each window lit up and uncovered, and I walked into it behind my brother and shut the door. They’re coming for you. I believed that, and my first thought was to turn off the lights and darken the house. The living room was empty, Mom out maybe, or up in her room. Suzanne, too, up in hers, listening to music by herself. Nicole locked in hers, reading or doing homework on a Saturday night. There was the feeling I’d brought danger to them, but also, miraculously, that I would take care of it, that whatever was coming, I was going to take care of it.

  Jeb had found a jacket and wrapped it around his foot, and I was walking straight back to the bathroom, smiling, shaking my head, only now aware that the knuckles of my right hand were stinging and had been for a while, that first punch connecting, a right cross that came up from my back foot and into Steve Lynch’s sneering mouth. I ran warm water over my hands and soaped up and I looked in the mirror at the boy who hadn’t backed down or run away or pleaded. I was smiling at him, and he was smiling back at me.

  There were Bobby’s and Sam’s voices now, talking fast and excitedly. I turned off the water and rushed out to the living room where they stood telling Jeb their story, that after Lynch went down the bouncer started kicking everyone out, but Sam hadn’t done anything and held his ground and the bouncer wrestled with him and Sam got low and punched him in the groin and he went down and three or four others rushed in to help and Sam gripped the doorjambs and kept yelling, “You can’t push me out! You can’t push me!”

  But they finally did, right onto the sidewalk on Washington Street, the door slamming behind him. Sam walked around the corner and down the sloped alleyway into the parking lot. Bobby was there squaring off with two of Lynch’s boys. His eyes caught Sam coming across the lot. “Sam?”

  “Bobby?”

  And Bobby punched the biggest one in the face, then yanked his jacket over his head and went to work on his body, the other backing off.

  “And you.” Bobby turned to me. He was smiling wider and brighter than I’d ever seen him. Our living room looked small with him in it. “You fuckin’ nailed him.”

  I nodded and smiled, then I was laughing and I couldn’t remember feeling this good about anything in my life ever before.

  “Hey, Jeb,” Sam said, “we found your slipper. It’s in the car.”

  Jeb went outside for it. Bobby wanted to hear Sam’s story again about taking on the big bouncer, and Sam was telling it when Jeb’s voice came yelling from outside. “They’ve got sticks! You guys, they’ve got sticks!”

  The three of us were pushing through the foyer and out the front door. A sedan had pulled up ahead of Sam’s Duster, the back door of his car open, its interior light shining on ice patches on the asphalt and the four men closing in on Jeb in the street. Each of them carried what looked like wooden clubs or broken chair legs, the three of us already there, four against four, Dana Lynch swinging his stick and yelling, “You’re dead, motherfucker!”

  “I don’t think so.” The words came out of me, but my eyes were on the big one I’d already been in the snowbank with, the road slick under my feet, and Dana was slipping his way toward me. I could see his limp and remembered hearing months before about him getting his legs crushed between two cars at some party. Sam moved toward him, but the big one stepped in and pushed him back a step, and Bobby was calling to the others to make a move. Jeb stood in the middle holding his slipper, his foot still bare.

  Sam, so used to ice under his feet, stepped around the big one and put one hand on Dana’s chest and began talking him down.

  “Sam, I respect you, but my brother’s in the fuckin’ hospital, man! He swallowed his two front teeth.”

  Dana swung his club at his side, and now my mother was yelling from the porch that she’d called the cops and in seconds a cruiser’s spotlight was on us. The cop’s window rolled down. “Break it up or every single one of you are going to jail! You hear me? Now screw!”

  Then Lynch and his boys were gone and we were back in the house, laughing again, though not quite as hard, Jeb pulling that slipper onto his damp, pink foot.

  THAT NIGHT I lay in the dark a long time and couldn’t sleep. Steve Lynch would have false teeth for the rest of his life and never be quite as handsome again, and it was because of me. I knew I should probably feel bad about this, but I didn’t. Not even a little. I kept seeing the pride and respect in Bobby’s and Sam’s eyes in the living room, the way they looked at me not only like I was one of them, but maybe even a special one of them, a guy with a gift; I only hit him once, and he was in the hospital?

  I kept seeing his face as I punched it. I still couldn’t remember feeling the impact of the right cross, just the sight of him dropping like a switch had been turned off in his brain, the blood gushing from his mouth, the shock in his eyes and how white his cheeks and forehead looked, how I kept swinging and would have hit him every time if the bouncer hadn’t stopped me. How I wished he hadn’t. How I wished I’d hurt Lynch even more than I did.

  BECAUSE STEVE Lynch was seventeen, the town closed the Tap’s doors and they stayed closed the rest of the winter. Word was out, too, that I would soon be in the hospital myself. Not just from the Lynches and their friends but their cousins, the Murphy brothers. I didn’t know about this family connection till I saw them cruising by my gas station in a dented olive Chrysler, Dennis looking out the passenger window at me, his older brother Frank driving, two or three more in the backseat. My mouth dried up and I could feel my heart beating in my palms. I reached for the club and held it in my lap till the car disappeared under the railroad bridge for Lafayette Square. I stood and pulled open the slider to get some air.

  Twice a day, while doing errands for his father, Bobby would pull up to the pumps in his pickup truck to check on me. Sam, too. He was a student at Merrimack College down in North Andover and at least once a day between classes he’d swing by in his Duster. I’d tell them both I was fine, that they were wasting their time. This was partly true because Dunkin’ Donuts was right up the hill, and there always seemed to be at least one cruiser parked there most of the morning or afternoon. Also, I worked the day shift on a busy street, what were they going to do? But really, I was more angry than scared. I didn’t like how some were still saying I’d sucker-punched Steve. A sucker punch was walking up to someone with a smile, then surprising him. Or tapping someone on the shoulder only to pop him once he turns around. Lynch had pushed my brother down the stairs and was calling me on and I gave him what he’d never expected. And since that one punch, it was as if I’d knocked a sandbag loose inside me and now a torrent of bad feeling had pushed aside all the other sandbags and I needed another place for it all to go. Another face.

  SAM AND I were doing weighted dips in the basement when Suzann
e came downstairs crying. She wore a dark sweater and hip-hugger jeans and her eyeliner was smeared. After her rape, no one in the family talked about it much, and neither did she. She may have gone to a counselor once or twice, but I don’t think so, and now she knew for sure something she’d suspected for a long time: that Kench was cheating on her. He was living with a nurse named Denise over the state line in New Hampshire, and Suzanne wanted her things back, her record player, a turquoise ring of hers he’d liked and stuck on his finger. “Please, you guys, I don’t want them in her house.” She covered her face and Sam put his massive, sweating arm around her. In minutes we were driving north up the highway in our sweats, our muscles still pumped with blood.

  The nurse lived in a trailer park in the pines. It was after ten on a weeknight and we were driving down a dirt road over exposed tree roots, a bed of pine needles running down the center. Most of the trailers were set back into the trees, their window curtains drawn, many of them dim or dark. Some of the mobile homes had small porches or decks built onto them, and there were grills and lawn chairs and a few flower boxes nailed to the rails.

  “That’s it,” Suzanne said. “That’s his car.”

  Sam and I were walking in the dark across a strip of grass to a white trailer. I gripped the knob, turned it, then stepped into an unlighted living room, the thin carpet wall-to-wall. I could see my sister’s record player on the shelf across from a couch, the only light from a hallway to the left. I could hear Kench’s low stoned voice talking to someone, a woman’s voice, too, louder, clearer, then she was in the light of the hallway looking back at him, not seeing us at all. She was naked. I took in her breasts and hips and dark pubic hair and stepped back into the shadows beside Sam. “Kench! We’re here for my sister’s stuff. Get out here, you piece of shit!”

  There was the slamming of the bathroom door. “Who are you?! Get out of my house!” Then she was in the hallway, knotting the belt of a blue terrycloth robe, peering into the darkness where we stood.

  Sam yelled, “Be a man, Adam. Get out here!”

  The back room was silent. I pictured him lying naked under a sheet in his postcoital surprise, letting his girlfriend defend him the way he never defended my sister in Boston, and I wanted to walk back there and beat him where he lay. But the woman was yelling at us to get out, and now Suzanne was pushing past us, crying and calling Kench’s name, looking past her boyfriend’s girlfriend as she stood there suddenly still and quiet in her lighted hallway, everything clear to her now.

  Sam and I watched as Kench emerged from the bedroom. He was barefoot and his jeans were unbuttoned, his T-shirt on backwards, his long thin hair flat against his head. Suzanne was screaming now, swearing and calling him names, and she walked up to him and grabbed his wrist and jerked her ring off his finger, then was back outside, the door slamming behind her.

  I grabbed her record player off the shelf and yanked the cord from the wall. Kench and his new girlfriend stood in the lighted hallway together as if they were watching something terrible happen to somebody else. “I see you again, Kench, I’ll fucking kill you.”

  SAM DROVE over the dirt road while Suzanne cried softly in the passenger seat. I sat in the back next to her record player thinking about Kench, how he’d looked so sunken-chested and pathetic in that hallway, his nurse beside him in her robe. I meant what I said; if he came around again, I was going to pound him for doing what he did to my sister. Still, it felt wrong to have just walked into his girlfriend’s trailer like that, to have seen her naked. It also felt familiar, though I’d never done something like that before. Sam’s car rolled in and out of a rut, then he was on asphalt, accelerating, and I knew what it was. It was like punching Steve Lynch in the face, how you have to move through two barriers to do something like that, one inside you and one around him, as if everyone’s body is surrounded by an invisible membrane you have to puncture to get to them. This was different from sex, where if you both want it, the membranes fall away, but with violence you had to break that membrane yourself, and once you learned how to do that, it was easier to keep doing it.

  LATER, TWO or three in the morning on a Saturday night, a black SS Chevelle pulled up to our house, its eight-track blaring Blue Oyster Cult and waking up the neighborhood. Up on the third floor, I turned over in my bed, assumed they’d move on. But they didn’t. The driver revved the engine, and I thought, The Murphy brothers. The Lynches. The word now was that they were going to get me when I didn’t see it coming, maybe in days, maybe in months. My heart began to zip through my brain, and at the window I could see their interior light on, a woman in a leather jacket passing a joint to the driver I couldn’t see. I opened my window to yell at them to quiet down, to move on, but they’d never hear over their stereo and anyway this was a street full of homeowners who called the cops all the time, had called them on us: for the afternoon parties, for the motorcycles sometimes parked out front, and one afternoon Mom was home and she came out to greet the cop and the two or three housewives who’d gathered at his car to tell him all about us, this bad element on their street. My mother calmly talked to them, explained these were just teenagers listening to music too loud, that’s all, that she’d make them be more considerate about the volume in the future. After the cruiser was gone and the neighbors were walking away, one of the women—sharp-faced with the short, practical haircut of a woman who spent her days running a household—said to another, “She sounds educated. I’m really surprised. Aren’t you?”

  Now the neighbors would think these two in the Chevelle were with us, and I lay in bed waiting for the cops to pull up. But they never came, and the car got quieter anyway, the stereo off while the engine ran and ran, a sound I fell asleep to.

  The next morning it was still there, a black muscle car in front of our house like an indictment. It was empty, the driver’s door unlocked, and I opened it and peered inside for the keys. The interior smelled like dope. On the floor of the passenger side were three empty Haffenreffer bottles, and I slammed the door and called Sam and twenty minutes later I was behind the wheel of the Chevelle, Sam backing his Duster up to the rear bumper till the Chevelle nudged forward. I gave Sam the thumbs-up and he gave his Duster the gas. I had jerked the transmission stick down into neutral but the wheel was hard to steer and I could smell the rubber we were burning all the way up Columbia Park on a weekday morning, the sun shining bright on the trees in the median. The plan was just to get the car away from my house, but at the top of Columbia Park we waited for a van to pass by on Lawrence Street, and I could see past the chain-link fence around the reservoir, the sun flashing off Round Pond, and I eyed the rearview mirror and looked at Sam in his Duster, then raised my arm and pointed straight ahead, my neck pulling back as Sam accelerated, the tires of the Chevelle smoking, the air smelling like industry as we crossed Lawrence and headed up the lane beside the water. We passed one-story houses, their driveways vacant. In a hundred yards the road became dirt and the fence around the reservoir ended and there was an open space between its final post and where the woods began. I stepped on the brake and jerked the wheel to the left, the Chevelle pivoting around, the hood aimed at Round Pond.

  I climbed out and got into Sam’s car. He looked at me. I looked back at him. Then he stepped on the gas and it was only a few feet till the Chevelle dipped off the road and slipped down a short embankment into the water. It sank immediately, bubbles rising up out of the town’s drinking water, only the radio antennae visible as we drove away.

  Years later I would think about this, that this was the town’s drinking supply, but that morning as we sped away, my arms and legs felt light, my fingertips buzzing electric, and it was like sweeping out the corners and shaking out the rugs and mopping the floor till it shone.

  NOT LONG after, a warm day in late spring. Grass was poking up green in our small front yard and in all the other yards and the median of Columbia Park. The maple and oak trees were nearly leafed out and the air smelled like damp earth, the wooden plank
s of porch steps, budding flowers I couldn’t name, then the exhaust of Kench’s brother’s motorcycle as he pulled up onto our sidewalk and blocked anyone’s path to or from our porch and front door. He switched off the engine. He was smaller than Kench but had the same high forehead and long thinning hair. Sam and I were inside the house getting ready to go somewhere, and Kench’s brother was standing now, pulling off his bike helmet and smiling at me as I walked down the porch steps, smiling like he was a friend here to show us his new bike, and I was yelling, swearing at him, a jolt running up my right leg, his motorcycle falling over onto the grass. I began stomping it, felt small metal pieces break under my boot, I kicked in the headlight, boot-heeled the kickstand till it was bent, squatted and grabbed the chassis and heaved and rolled it onto the front sidewalk, then kicked it again, yelling at Kench’s little brother the entire time to get the fuck away from my house. You hear me?! Fuck off!

  I was sweating and breathing hard, the air quiet now. Sam stood beside me as we watched Kench’s brother struggle to lift his bike, his hair in his face as he fiddled with instruments I’d broken, as he bent back the kick-starter and got his motorcycle running and drove off slowly without even putting on his helmet.

  “Jesus,” Sam said, “you were pissed, huh?”

  “Fuck him, Sam. Fuck him.” I was looking out at the empty street. Bits of reflector glass shone on my sidewalk, and there was Kench’s brother’s face, the smile that had turned to surprise turned to hurt turned to fear. He’d never done anything to my sister, but that seemed to be beside the point; in the basement I was getting stronger and stronger. I could bench-press 100 pounds over my body weight. I could do ten wide-grip chin-ups with a 50-pound dumbbell hanging from my belt. I was throwing combinations at the heavy bag that rocked the joists of the house I began to feel I was defending for the first time.