Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  It lay on top of the books she’d stacked on his weight bench, its leather holster unsnapped, the .38 halfway out of it. I picked it up. The holster fell away, the snub nose cool and heavy in my hand. I flipped open the chamber, and there were the brass firing pins of six .38 shells.

  Had she loaded this? Would she know how? I looked but didn’t see a bullet box anywhere, and I could hear her in the other room talking to somebody from the college, some dean whose first name I recognized as she told him how my father had left her for a child, that he had spent the night with her in Boston and Little Andre was here to help her with his things.

  I upended the .38 and tapped the handle against my hand. Six rounds fell into my palm. They were hollow-points, bullets designed to fragment once they hit their target, to do the maximum damage. I knew Pop had bought these, that he imagined having to stop some rapist with them, and maybe he was keeping his gun loaded these days, though I couldn’t see why. I stuffed the bullets into the front pocket of my jeans. I shoved the .38 back into its holster and snapped the strap around the hammer, and I opened the drawers of his desk, but she’d already packed them and I saw no boxes of ammunition.

  Lorraine had walked down one level to the kitchen. She stood there staring out the window as she smoked and talked on the phone to one of Pop’s friends about what he was doing to her. I felt sorry for her, and I didn’t feel sorry for her.

  She turned and saw me heading for the stairs and the front door. She held up her hand, a More between two fingers, its smoke curling above her head. I waited as she said goodbye to the dean. She hung up the phone and stubbed out her cigarette and walked up to me.

  “You can’t stay, can you?”

  I shook my head. “It’s really none of my business. Sorry.”

  “No.” She put her hands on my shoulders, looked into my eyes. “I shouldn’t have called you.” She hugged me to her and I hugged her back. Her body felt so small and I could feel her breasts against me and I began to get hard and pulled away. She kept her hands on my shoulders, looked into my eyes, hers brown and edged with pain and something I couldn’t name. We stood there quite a while, it seemed. Then she thanked me again for coming, and I turned and left my father’s house, six hollow-point shells, heavy as a promise, in the front pocket of my jeans.

  ALL DAY long, I went to classes and carried them with me, didn’t know where to put them. It didn’t feel right to throw bullets in the trash. What if some kid found them and was the kind of kid I’d been? I pictured some ten-year-old squeezing the rounds in a vise and taking a hammer to the firing ends.

  Later, walking across the Basilere Bridge, I checked the traffic for a cruiser, then stopped and pulled the hollow-points from my pocket and threw them out over the railing, watched them briefly catch the sunlight as they fell into the dirty, swirling water.

  It was early evening when I got to the bottom of Columbia Park. Across Main, two girls from Seventh Ave sat on the steps beside Pleasant Spa drinking Cokes and smoking. I was thirsty and told myself to drink some water before I changed and went down to the basement to work out. And maybe that’s what I was thinking of as I walked up my street and saw stacked on our front lawn everything Pop owned. There was his weight bench and barbell and iron plates; there were cardboard boxes that held his books and albums, his Akubra hats and pipes and clothes and running shoes. There were two or three full garbage bags there too.

  HE LIVED with us for two weeks. We didn’t have a spare bedroom, and our only couch was a wicker sofa too small to sleep on, so he slept up in my room. I gave him the bed and slept on the floor, which I found I liked anyway, that cool hard surface under my back. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw Pop so happy. Maybe when we were small and lived in Iowa City, when he was finally out of the Marines and going to graduate school full-time, when he was writing and taking classes and making love with his beautiful young wife, our mother, when he’d sit down on the couch with us four kids and tell us stories of Running Blue Ice Water.

  Now he was forty and free again, Lorraine and her two quiet kids and her nine thousand pounds of furniture heading back South. He laughed a lot, sometimes a little too hard and a little too long, and he was in a constant mood to celebrate. Nearly every night he and I would drive down to the bars on Washington Street. It was strange going out with him this often, like having a new buddy, one I’d always known but never really knew.

  I’d try to guide us to a corner table so my back would be to a wall or window and I could see who was coming in and who was leaving. I seemed to always be looking for trouble, for a husband to slap his wife, for a boyfriend to call his girlfriend a cunt or a whore, for a bigger one to lord over one smaller.

  Since fracturing that bully’s forehead, there’d been more fights: once, when Marjan had been in the wedding party of a friend, the reception later at an Am Vets down in East Boston. Two men in a Chrysler kept tapping the rear bumper of the limousine that held Marjan and the other bridesmaids. I was driving my mother’s Toyota not far behind, and the driver of the sedan was unshaven and had dark curly hair and he leaned on the horn again and again, tapping the bumper with his. “It’s party time, bitches! Come out and fuckin’ play!” The limo driver was old and small. He was parked at the entrance to the hall where he was supposed to open the back door for the girls, but he kept glancing into his side view mirror and he wasn’t getting out from behind the wheel. Now the driver of the sedan was yelling more shit out his open window and he bumped the limo again, and I pulled my mother’s Toyota into an empty space and was running between parked cars, the sedan driver looking over at me just as I threw one into his face, then another and another. A small voice inside me said, This is wrong, he can’t fight you behind the wheel like that, you have to step away, but I kept swinging at him inside his window and only stepped back when he jerked open his door and stood, staggering a second, this very big man, at least a foot taller than I was, seventy, eighty pounds heavier, and now his friend was hurrying around the trunk behind him and I couldn’t let my adrenaline back up on me and turn my legs to water because once you started you couldn’t stop or they’d get you so I reached up and grabbed the tall driver’s ears and yanked his face down onto my knee, then hit him with rights again and again till somebody pulled me off, a crowd around us now, men from inside the bar.

  It was cold, but a lot of them wore T-shirts. One of them had a smoking cigarette between his lips, and he told me cool your fuckin’ jets. The big one was bleeding from his nose and mouth. He was telling two men how I jumped him for no reason, that I was crazy. And now his friend, short and thick-looking, close to thirty and wearing an Irish scully cap, was pacing back and forth behind him, breathing hard, his fists clenched, and I knew what he was doing. He was getting himself to where he had to be. Because now he had a good look at me, this nineteen-year-old in a borrowed suit jacket and old corduroys, who was so much smaller than his big friend and probably not as strong as he was either, and you couldn’t let the rush fade or there’d be nothing to fight with, and I yelled, “C’mon! You want to go at it? You want to fuckin’ go at it?!”

  He rushed at me but two or three regulars held him back, the big one surrounded by four more. The one smoking the cigarette pulled at my arm. “I said cool it.”

  The bridesmaids were going inside now. A few gripped small shiny night bags, a few others bouquets of flowers, and Marjan looked over her shoulder at me as if she’d never seen me before, did not even know my name.

  The function hall was smoky and dimly lit, the DJ playing loud disco. Marjan was at the head table with the bride and groom, and I sat in a chair where I could see the door. The term sucker punch was in my head, my face heating up with the knowledge that that’s what I’d done, surprised a sitting man with a fist to the face. I kept hearing his voice out there in the parking lot calling me fucking crazy, and now my arms and legs felt spent and heavy and it would be bad if the two of them came in now.

  “Why the fighting?”

&nbs
p; A man sat beside me. He was five or ten years older than I was. He had long black hair tied in a ponytail. He wore a string tie with a turquoise and silver clasp at his throat, and he had narrow shoulders and dark eyes and high cheekbones.

  I shook my head. I shrugged.

  “Violence only leads to more violence, man.”

  “Yeah? What about the girls? The driver wasn’t doing anything about it.”

  “Were they really in danger?”

  “Yep.” I stood and made my way through the tables for the bar and a beer. Men and women were talking and smiling at one another, laughing and drinking, and I felt like some kind of dimwitted brute.

  Weeks later, drunk at Ronnie D’s with Suzanne and her new boyfriend, Fred, a gentle mechanic with a bushy beard, I’d look up every time the door opened or closed; I was still expecting to see the Lynches or the Murphys coming for me, and I was tired of this, tired of the flare of adrenaline every time air from the street drifted in, and I turned to Fred and asked him if he’d give me a lift down to Riverside. It’s where the Lynches and some of their cousins drank, at a bar in a Chinese restaurant in the shopping plaza next to the stadium. Fred said he would but first I needed the bathroom, and I made my way through the crowd and an opening in a partition wall and there was Pop, sitting at a table with three Bradford girls. The bar was loud with talk and laughter and you couldn’t even hear the jukebox, just the dull thumping of a bass guitar, a black man singing somewhere beneath it. Pop wore one of his Akubra hats tilted back on his head, a drink in front of him, a smoking cigarette between two fingers on the table. The girls across from him were laughing hard about something, the one beside Pop laughing too, and I knew who they were but didn’t know them. He saw me and waved me over.

  “Want a drink?”

  “I can’t.”

  “What?” He cupped his hand to his ear. I walked around and leaned in close, could smell the Marlboro smoke in his hair. “I can’t. I’ve gotta go fight somebody.” It’s the most I’d told him about anything, and he looked up at me, his face somber, and I squeezed his shoulder and left him for the bathroom.

  In the blue light of the Chinese restaurant’s bar, Dana Lynch stood there with four or five others. He was wearing a pullover sweater and I was drunker than I’d thought and walked between two men I didn’t glance at. I looked up into Dana’s face, saw some of Steve in it, saw the surprise. I patted his stomach, “You’re getting soft, Dana.” I stepped past him and walked to the men’s room by a tank of goldfish treading water. I had to piss again, but I ignored the urinals, stood by the door and waited. Maybe they’d all come in, maybe just him.

  I waited till I couldn’t any longer and I used one of the urinals, my eye on the door. I rinsed my hands and splashed my face, then stepped back into the aquamarine darkness of where I was sure I’d be fighting more than one.

  The bar was more crowded than just a few minutes earlier. More women now, most of them in ladies’ leather jackets, their hair clean and feathered away from their faces like disco dancers. The air was smokier, and I walked through it past Dana Lynch and his friends. At the front door I glanced back at him. The men standing around him were not his normal crew, and he was sitting on a stool, looking at me, a still expression on his face. At his knee was a long wooden cane.

  As I climbed back into Fred’s car, I felt vaguely sorry for Dana Lynch. It was clear he was in no shape to fight anyone, and that he was afraid to fight me. Somebody was afraid of me.

  It’s what I’d wanted, wasn’t it?

  NOW POP and I were at the Tap on Washington Street raising shot glasses of Sauza tequila, toasting his new divorce and his new joy. This place had only been open a few months since Steve Lynch, and I never told my father why it had closed. I was listening to him now as he described his new woman to me, Suzanne’s age exactly, an intern named Peggy he’d met at his publisher’s office, the dinner they had afterward, how she was a writer and a runner.

  Pop was smiling at me over his beer glass. In the smoky dim of the bar, his beard thicker and darker than it was, there was a light in his eyes that looked like pride.

  “Ted told me about the Merrimack boys.”

  I nodded, sipped my beer, tried to hide how happy I felt about where this conversation was going. Only a week before, that fight with the boys from Merrimack College, ten or twelve of them being escorted off campus by just one security guard, Ted, a young married guy I liked because he did a good imitation of John Wayne and always had a joke. He was walking behind the last of them, and he was only armed with a flashlight.

  I had just pulled up to them in Marjan’s mother’s car, sent there by Marjan to pick up her younger sister from a study group at the school. A couple of the men were yelling at Ted, swearing. One, bowlegged as a wrestler, yelled, “This school’s full of bitches and faggots!” I pushed the gear into park, Marjan’s sister saying, “No, Andre, don’t, don’t.”

  My headlights lit up the road, and I stepped into its light, Ted’s voice in the air, telling me to get back in my “vehicle,” then Gene, a slim, muscular swimmer from Indiana was standing beside me, and we were stepping into the darkness of the grass.

  Pop said: “You took on eleven guys?”

  “Gene Brock was there too.”

  “How do you fight eleven guys?”

  “I only fought three. Gene fought the biggest one. The rest took off.”

  The first one ran at me and I let him bury his head in my waist and I ran backwards and dropped and let his own momentum hurl him over me onto his back and I started punching him in the face, then ran after another and got in two shots, then ran after a third and caught him in the side of the head.

  Pop was squeezing my upper arm. “How’d you learn that?”

  I shrugged, began to sip my beer, but I was tiring of my cowboy act and wanted to tell him everything, was aching to tell him. I looked at my father. “I figured some things out.”

  “Like what?” Pop raised two fingers to the bartender. It was a weeknight so there was no band, but the place was loud with human voices, my eyes burning from the cigarette smoke.

  “I used to think butterflies in my stomach meant I was afraid and if I’m afraid it’s because I should be and then I’d get even more butterflies and the adrenaline would back up on me till I couldn’t even move, and I’d just stand there and do nothing.”

  He nodded, his eyes on mine, his eyes somehow on himself.

  “So, Pop, you can’t let it back up on you. You have to move as soon as it comes. No foreplay. No shoving each other. As soon as you know you’re in a fight, you punch him hard in the face and you keep punching.”

  I raised my glass and sipped my beer. A woman down the bar exhaled smoke and looked over at me and my father. I felt like a liar, like I was pretending to know more than I did. And the membrane. I wanted to tell him about that membrane around someone’s eyes and nose and mouth, how you have to smash through it which means you have to smash through your own first, your own compassion for another, your own humanity.

  “But where’d you learn to throw a punch?”

  “Connolly’s Gym.”

  Pop nodded again, his eyes scanning the crowd. “I’ve never been in a fight.”

  I nodded. He’d told me this before, but I said, “Not even in the Marines?”

  “No, I was an officer.”

  “Well, just hit him first and hit him hard, Pop. And don’t let the rush back up on you.”

  TWO OR three nights later, a woman sat alone at the bar. She was blonde and attractive, twenty years older than I was and still in her thirties. Her hair was cut straight at her shoulders and she wore a white sleeveless dress and was smoking a cigarette, a glass of white wine in front of her. She looked close to crying or walking out, and Pop and I had just come in. While we waited for our beers, he went up to her and leaned on the bar.

  My father loved women. I knew that. Especially if they had pretty faces like this one. From the corner of the bar, my back to the wall, I
could see him charming her, getting her to talk. Our beers came and I sipped mine and thought about bringing him his but didn’t want to interrupt him. I knew he was just flirting with her anyway. He and his new girlfriend were planning to move in together, and just that day Pop had found an apartment for them across from the campus.

  It was a quiet night, the place only half full, most of the crowd in the restaurant side. Every few minutes the front door would open and someone would come in, but since going to Lynch’s home turf and seeing him on the stool next to his cane, I wasn’t worried about him or his brother or cousins anymore. That fight was done. It was time to move on, a feeling I’d been getting more and more lately, this pull to get out of this town and go far, far away. I was eighteen, and what was there to do here but go to bars like this where I stood or sat with my back to the wall, scanning the room for trouble, scanning the room for another chance to prove myself to myself. There was the Iranian girl I loved, but I could only see her at her family’s apartment, and she seemed just mildly interested in me anyway. There were more Iranian students on campus now, some of them rich and handsome. They drove sports cars and wore gold bracelets and French cologne, tennis clothes in warm weather, and I could see how comfortable she was with them all in the smoke room or walking across campus or laughing together in the student union, speaking in their mother tongue.

  Pop came around the corner of the bar, his cheeks flushed. “Her fucking husband left her there.”

  “Left who?”

  “Her.” He pointed to the woman in the white dress. “She’s been there for an hour and he’s sitting in the restaurant with his fucking friends. An hour, son.”