Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  Pop shook his head. “A pro will get there faster.”

  The phone rang, and he picked it up. It was as if his friend had hung up and found someone standing right there at his bar.

  “I’ll call you back.” Pop set the phone in its cradle, looked at me. “Five hundred.”

  “For what?”

  “To have his kneecaps broken.”

  “Good, fuck him, I’ll pay for half.”

  Pop still had his hand on the phone. He looked as if he were considering something.

  “Call him back.”

  He was looking at the window. Maybe he saw our reflections in it, or maybe he was thinking of Keith. I knew he liked him. In the months leading up to the wedding, he had spent a lot of time with him, drinking and shooting the shit. Many nights he’d invited him and Suzanne over to share a meal. When I’d called from Austin earlier that spring, he said, “Suzanne’s fallen in love with a red-bearded carpenter. He’s a good man, and he treats her well.”

  And he’d seemed to, calling her honey and listening to her whenever she spoke, his eyes lit with a seeming gratitude at the world for bringing her to him.

  Pop said: “We call him and give him one warning. Just one.”

  “No, no fucking warnings.”

  Pop was dialing their number. My fingertips and toes were buzzing, my mouth dry as paper; this was the time to set my feet and throw a right cross, no talk, no warning, just physical action, the only thing I’d ever found to work.

  I did not want to hear this warning. I opened the kitchen’s back door and stepped out onto the porch. It was small and uncovered and I pissed over the side. There was a thin stand of trees, then the street and houses. Through the branches I could see lighted windows, the numbing flicker of a TV.

  I finished and grasped the doorknob, but it was self-locking, and I had to take the steps and run around to the front. Luke barked once, then I was climbing the stairs back to the kitchen. Pop held the receiver to his ear, his eyes on the floor but not on the floor. His cheeks above his beard were a deep red. I was holding out my hand.

  “You don’t sound like you’re listening, Keith. You’d better be fucking listening.” He pushed the phone at me. The receiver had no weight of any kind and my first words were just sounds coming out of my throat, but I knew what I’d promised him. “You understand, Keith? Six feet under the leaves in some fucking woods somewhere, motherfucker.”

  “That’s cool.” His voice was relaxed, like he was lying in a warm bath with a cold beer talking to good, good friends.

  “Did you hear me, you piece of shit?”

  “Yep, you too. Give our love to everybody. Bye now.”

  In the hum of the dial tone Pop stood in the shadows of their small dining room looking at me. I hung up the phone, felt that old feeling again, that I was small and weak and invisible. His reaction the kind of non-reaction given to a nobody who can and will do nothing.

  Many years later, Suzanne told me she was there with him when we called, that he spoke to us like we were phoning him just to shoot the shit. But for weeks afterward, I imagined shooting him, then digging a deep hole and rolling his body into it, filling it back up with dirt and broken rock and the roots I’d had to sever from any tree close to me.

  THE FOLLOWING morning Pop pushed aside his writing and wrote a short story in one sitting. It was called “Leslie in California.” When he handed it to me and I read the first line, I remembered again how good at this Pop was, that he wrote beautifully every time he tried. I was standing in his kitchen holding the typed manuscript in my hands. He stood there in his tank top and shorts and running shoes, a bandanna tied around his head. Luke was beside him, his tail wagging. But Pop’s face was like I’d rarely seen it, his eyes expectant and hopeful yet mournful, too. As if he were both proud and ashamed. It was a feeling I knew well, and he nodded and left the house for his workout. I sat at his and Peggy’s table and read this story of a young wife the morning after her drunk husband hits her, his remorse, her dawning awareness that she is in a permanently dangerous place.

  I finished reading the last line, and I too felt proud and ashamed. Proud because my father was an artist at this, a man who had just written deeply and poetically from a woman’s point of view. But ashamed because he had done that. It felt like thievery to me. Like he had just stolen Suzanne’s experience and made it his own, and meanwhile Keith was still walking the earth untouched, unpunished, his in-laws’ warnings some distant echo in his head. And now this story for strangers to read.

  How did this help my sister? What good did this do?

  After his run, Pop asked me what I’d thought of the story. His bandanna was drenched. He pulled it off and ran his forearm along his hairline.

  “It’s a good story.”

  “I’m going to send it to her.”

  “Good.” I nodded. It was a Sunday, and it was time to drive back to my apartment in Lynn. I gave Pop a half hug, tapped his sweaty back, and stepped out into the cold. I felt like a liar and a chickenshit.

  MY MOTHER sat across from me at Village Square, a breakfast place in Bradford set into a row of shops between Ronnie D’s and the Sacred Hearts church. It was midwinter on Saturday morning, and in front of us were plates of eggs and bacon, hot weak coffee, and she looked better than she had in years. Gone was the look of constant financial worry. Gone was the look that she was under a great weight she just could not hold much longer. Gone was the look, blue and still surprised, that she’d been left behind.

  Instead, she was tanned, and her hair was nearly blonde again. She’d lost weight and her eyes were bright and if I’d ever seen her happier, I couldn’t remember when. She was talking of their life down in St. Maarten, Bruce’s work for his brother-in-law’s airfreight business, how much she enjoyed helping deliver food to restaurants, the white sand and green sea, the ice-cold Heinekens in the salt breeze.

  I was glad for her. She seemed free of something, and she kept smiling at me. “Are you excited about graduate school?”

  I sipped my coffee, shook my head.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.” The place was crowded, people eating and talking and laughing, the waitresses delivering plates of waffles and sausage, the smell of hot coffee and syrup in the air. “It seemed like a plan for a while, but—I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you write?”

  “Write?”

  “Yes, honey. Go write.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because you were good at it in school.”

  “What good does writing do, Mom? Who cares about making up stories? I want to do something important for people.”

  It was as if I’d reached over and slapped her face with a damp rag. “I can’t believe you just said that, Andre. I won’t tell anyone you just said that.”

  I didn’t say anything. She said more, but I was thinking of my father, of the story he wrote about Suzanne when he should have done something for her in this world, not the one in his head.

  I changed the subject. We talked about Suzanne and her marriage to this man I still wanted to kill. We talked about Jeb and his baby son, Nicole and her last year of high school, the schools out West she was looking into. Our breakfast ended soon after that. I hugged my mother on the sidewalk, thanked her for the eggs. Sam and I were to meet at the Y in an hour, and I climbed into my Subaru and went driving. I drove over the Basilere Bridge and the Merrimack, up the hill of Main Street past the shopping plaza and library, GAR Park and the statue of Hannah Duston and her raised hatchet. I drove through Monument Square past the Exxon station and insurance company and the VFW hall.

  It was a cold bright day, and I headed east past Kenoza Lake where I’d run with my father, then under the highway, the same back road Mom used to drive us on in that Head Start van, those Mystery Rides when joy was something she willed herself to show us, something she raised from deep inside herself as a promise for what could be. Now her life seemed to have opened up into
it as if it had been waiting for her.

  What waited for me? I knew she was right to chastise me for what I’d said, but I did not yet know why she was right: How could art truly help people? Did it feed them? Clothe them? Keep them warm in the winter? Did it put a gun in their hands to fend off their oppressors?

  Up ahead was a roadhouse. It wasn’t even noon yet, but in the gravel lot were parked five or six motorcycles, a neon Miller sign glowing in the sun-streaked window. I downshifted, pulled into the lot, then turned around and headed back to Haverhill and the long workout with Sam that always cleared my head, that always made me feel ready for whatever was coming next.

  TREVOR D. promoted me from laborer to carpenter’s helper and he bumped my pay to five dollars an hour. Instead of hauling debris and fresh lumber and tools all day with Randy, I got to wear a tape measure on my belt and stick a pencil behind my ear. I was made the cut man for all the partition walls they were building.

  It was a cold dry week, the sun heavy and bright in a deep sky, and first thing every morning I set up my cut station in the parking lot down below. I took three eight-foot two-by-fours, set them across two saw-horses, then laid a full sheet of plywood over them and carried over the chop saw and unrolled a cord and plugged it in.

  “Hey, Ratchet.” Doug called down from the second-story window. He stood in the naked wood frame, a big grin on his face. He always wore a dark wool sailor’s cap down around his ears, and in the early morning sun I could see the sawdust in it. “Here’s your list.” He tossed a foot-long section of two-by-six out into the air and Randy ran and caught it over his shoulder, but Doug was already inside, and I said, “Nice catch, Randy.”

  “Nice list, Ratchet.”

  They’d been calling me that ever since Doug and I went up to the new flat roof and started lagging the perimeter joists to four-by-four posts in the corners. We each had a ratchet wrench, something I’d never used before. Doug was on the east side of the frame, I was on the west, and I could hear him cranking the galvanized lag bolts into wood, the clickety-clickety-click his ratchet made, but I couldn’t figure out how he could work his hand so fast; once I pushed the lag bolt into its predrilled hole and set the ratchet head on its end, I could crank it only half a turn before the ratchet handle hit the perimeter joist, then I’d have to pull the ratchet head free and set it on the bolt for another half crank again and again.

  Doug was on his third bolt while I was still on my first. He looked over at me. He stood and walked across the roof. “The fuck you doin’? That’s a ratchet wrench.” He squatted and cranked the ratchet back and forth, the lag bolt sinking all the way into the wood without his once having to pull it away and reset it on the head of the lag. “See, numb-nuts. It fuckin’ ratchets.” He straightened up and laughed. “That’s it, man. When we come to one of your fights, I’m calling you ‘the Ratchet Kid.’” He laughed again and shook his head. “See what college did to you? Unfuckin’ believable, the Ratchet Kid.”

  Jeb had told them I was boxing. The five of us were standing around the vending truck, sipping hot coffee, warming our hands on the Styrofoam cups. Jeb nodded in my direction and said, “Andre’s a boxer.” I could see the pride in my younger brother’s eyes, and it surprised me; what seemed to move and impress him most were artistic pursuits—a perfectly executed painting, a flawlessly played fugue, anything that came from the rosewood guitar of Andrés Segovia.

  “Yeah,” Trevor said, “but can you build a box?”

  The conversation turned to furniture-building, fine-finish work, but when coffee break was over, Doug tossed his cup into the dumpster and said, “We should all get shit-faced and go watch Andre fight.”

  We went back to the job, but it was like hearing they wanted to come watch me read political theory at night, this private thing I was doing to weigh who I was and where I should be going. And my first official fight wouldn’t come until late winter anyway, the Golden Gloves down in Lowell, another milltown on the Merrimack River, the one Jack Kerouac had made famous. I’d been doing well enough in the ring that Tony Pavone handed me an application form, and a few days later I got my AAU number in the mail. At the Gloves you had to have it pinned to your shirt or trunks for each bout, and each one was single-elimination, a term I’d never heard before. Pavone was standing in the fluorescent light of his office doorway when he said it. Behind me the gym was crowded with fighters working out, the place smelling like sweat and mildew.

  “What’s that mean, Tony?”

  “You know, like in playoffs. It means you can’t lose. You do, and you’re out.”

  Playoffs. Another word I barely knew. But I learned a Golden Gloves champion sometimes fought as many as ten fights in two days. And he had to win them all.

  In the ring, even after an hour of shadowboxing and working on the heavy bags and now the speed bag I’d finally learned how to control, I kept coming out ahead. Not in a big way; I never knocked anyone down or out, and I was often too afraid of dropping my guard to plant my feet and throw combinations, so I jabbed and jabbed and jabbed. I never stopped jabbing. These years of consistent workouts hadn’t put much muscle on me, but I had stamina. It’s what seemed to come more naturally to me than power, and I felt as if I could throw jabs for hours, my opponent’s eyes tearing up as I popped him in the forehead, the upper cheek, his nose and mouth.

  Every few jabs I’d let go with a straight right or a cross, and I’d feel the itch to weave and step in close with an uppercut I could follow with a left hook to the ribs or ear, but I was worried about the rain of counterpunches from these fighters, some black, some white or Latino. Most of them were only eighteen or nineteen but had over a hundred fights behind them already. One black kid, an eighteen-year-old welterweight I’d sparred for three rounds, told me he’d been training with Tony Pavone since he was six.

  Tony had big plans for him, said openly, “This kid’s gonna be the welterweight champ at the Gloves. You watch.”

  Tony would sometimes match up fighters from different weight classes. Bigger boxers could learn speed from the smaller ones. Small boxers learned how to evade. The night Tony put me in the ring with the welterweight, I felt sure it was to warm the kid up for a better, more experienced fighter after he was done with me.

  The welterweight had a lean, muscled torso, his skin a burnished brown, and when Tony called “Time!,” the kid and I tapped gloves in the center of the ring, and I chomped down on my mouthpiece and wished for headgear.

  But I never let him get close to me. I jabbed him in the face for most of the three rounds. A few times he weaved away and got off a hook or a right, but his feet weren’t set and his range was off so the punches only glanced my gloves. After three rounds, the kid ducked fast through the ropes and looked frustrated and I felt mildly proud of myself. Tony talked to him awhile in the light of his office. Two heavyweights stepped into the ring, and I ducked between the ropes and unlaced my gloves and started doing incline sit-ups, my feet hooked beneath an iron bar. After a while, Tony came over. “You’re good with that jab but you gotta throw more combinations. You don’t want to win on points, you want to fight.”

  I nodded and thanked him. I knew he was right. I was too careful in the ring, and I wasn’t sure why, but his last word hung between my ears—fight. Is that what I was supposed to be doing? Because a boxing match just did not feel like a real fight to me; something was missing from it, the way maybe love is missing from an act that then becomes fucking. Something was missing, but I wouldn’t know what it was till later that winter close to dawn in a diner in Monument Square.

  WE WERE all in a celebratory mood. Sam and Theresa were now officially engaged. They asked me to be best man, and the wedding was set for late August, just a few days before I’d be driving west to the University of Wisconsin at Madison and their Ph.D. program in Marxist social science. The letter had come in the mail just a few days before. That night Liz was happy too. She’d just written something she was proud of, and now she and Sam and
Theresa and I were in her room, listening to music and telling stories and drinking beer and playing cards. After his shift, Vinny T. came up and joined us, too. Vinny T. was the head of security at Bradford College. He was a short, small-boned ex-Marine with olive skin and a mat of curly black hair, his cheeks and jaw forever darkened by whiskers he kept shaved as close to the skin as possible. Vinny always had a good joke and liked to go drinking after his shift. Partly because he’d been in the Marines, he and Pop hit it off and Vinny spent a lot of time at Pop’s campus house, the two of them drinking till very late. Soon he was sitting on the couch very close to one of Liz’s girlfriends who’d wandered in, his hand on her knee, his handsome Italian face just inches from hers as he told her a dirty joke and she laughed too hard and spilled her drink. There was the feeling that good things were happening, that life wasn’t so directionless anymore and that hard work and focus could bring about something like Sam and Theresa getting married. I still wasn’t sure why I was going back to school, but just knowing I was really going had lifted something off me.

  Liz sat close to Theresa on the couch, the two of them laughing and looking like sisters with their brown hair and wool sweaters and tight jeans. Then it was after three in the morning and Liz’s friend had wandered off and there was a plan to go to Vinny’s house out on Lake Attitash. He was going to cook the five of us omelets. Sam and Theresa wanted to get home, though, and I hugged them at the back door of Academy Hall, quiet now, the red-carpeted floor soft and gritty under our feet. I watched the two of them walk out to the parking lot holding hands, the light from a security lamp shining dully on Sam’s black Duster as they pulled away.

  Vinny had some last-minute paperwork to get done so Liz and I and sat on the couch in Vinny’s office. The only light came from a fluorescent desk lamp, and Vinny sat in it entering something into the shift log, his eyes squinting, the slight static of the dispatch radio in the air. Liz was smoking a cigarette. The couch was wobbly but deep and maybe I dozed a few minutes. Maybe I didn’t. But it was as if Sam and Theresa had never driven off because now they were hurrying through the back door, Theresa looking pale as she held the door for her fiancé, his beard dripping blood.