Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  There were cops’ voices in the air. Vinny stepped over and flashed his Bradford security badge and started telling our story. I was relieved the big one wasn’t dead. It was good I hadn’t killed him or anyone, but I was also disappointed they were already well enough to be walking, and this weak emptiness in my arms and legs had to go away because Liz said something to the kid who’d pulled the knife and out of his face came, “Fuck you, you fuckin’ cunt.” And Vinny was halfway to him before I even moved, both cops tackling him, and now it was close to sunup and the five of us were at the Haverhill police station waiting for Sam’s father.

  After our arrests at the beach, it’s the one thing he insisted Sam do if he ever got into trouble again: call him. Sam gave his name to the lieutenant on duty and asked if he could use his desk phone. “You the inspector’s son? Sure, be my guest. Give him a call.” He sat back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. He wasn’t the only friendly one. The two cops who arrested Vinny offered us coffee, and one of them kept smiling and shaking his head, “You guys couldn’t’ve picked a better trio to beat on. Believe me, those three are the lowest of the low.”

  Vinny was in a holding cell, and Theresa and Liz and I were sitting on a long wooden bench. The three cops were behind a half-wall of raised panel, deep scratches along its surface, a gouge in the corner. Sam stood there waiting. The whiskers of his chin were caked with dried blood, and I could see he was nervous about having woken his father for this. Then Mr. Dolan strolled through an office doorway and down the hall, this short Irishman in a hat and coat. He glanced at his son and us, then pushed open the swinging half-door to the police desks and moved easily through the room. He took off his hat and sat down in an oak chair beside a desk.

  “Mornin’, Sergeant.”

  “Morning to you, Sam.”

  Sam’s father nodded in the direction of the other two. “Officers.”

  “Inspector.”

  “You’ve got a tough kid here, Sam.”

  “Oh sure, sure.” There was more small talk, a laugh or two, and I could see Sam relax a bit as his father began to make a case for our friend Vinny and how he could lose his job over this and did any of us want that?

  In minutes Vinny was out of his cell signing something at the counter. Then the five of us were thanking Mr. Dolan and climbing back into Sam’s Duster for the short ride to the hospital. While his chin got stitched, I stood outside with Vinny near the ambulance bay. From the hill of Buttonwoods Avenue, we could see out over the river flowing east. The sky had lightened above the trees and houses, and across the water the stacks of the boxboard factory churned out smoke the color of ash. I looked farther up the hill to the middle school where from the asphalt playground I used to watch that smoke rise into the air, the school where I saw Russ Bowman chased and beaten by a grown man, and I could feel the soft thud of the big one’s head against my boot again and again. Maybe to shake it off, I said, “Good fight.”

  Vinny lit up a cigarette. He blew smoke out his nose and smiled at me. “Fight? That was a fucking ambush.”

  We both laughed, but again there was the feeling I’d just gotten away with something, the cops treating us like rogue colleagues, Mr. D. scolding us not so much for the fight but for letting the police get involved. Vinny was still chuckling under his breath. He looked over at me. “And you are fuckin’ crazy.”

  I smiled and shrugged and looked back out at the brown river. I had never hit a baseball with a bat in a game people I loved were watching; I didn’t know what it felt like to slap a puck into a net or catch a football and run with it into a place called the end zone, but standing in the dawn’s early light with Vinny it occurred to me this is what those acts must feel like: earned and glorious and edged with blood.

  12

  I WAS ALONE IN Liz’s bed. It was late afternoon and winter light lay in a path across the floor. There was laughter out in the hallway, a rich girl’s laugh, chest-deep and ironic, and my right shin was sore from the ankle to the knee. I closed my swollen fingers into a fist, then opened them again. My clothes lay on the floor over my work boots, and stuck to the lower legs of my corduroys were bits of glass in ketchup and blood.

  It was eight or nine in the morning when Sam dropped Liz and me off at the campus gate. We’d been up all night. The sky was gray and the air was flat and cold against my skin. It was a Sunday morning, the campus quiet, steam rising from a pipe on the roof of Academy Hall. A car drove slowly down the asphalt lane through the green between the student union and library. It was a European sedan of some kind, silver. Then the rear window rolled down and Pop smiled at me. The car stopped. His father-in-law was behind the wheel, a rich businessman from New York City. He was a handsome man in his fifties or sixties, his hair combed back, and his wife sat beside him, Peggy and Pop in the back. They were going out to breakfast somewhere, and Peggy’s father nodded hello and was polite, but he looked like he wanted to get going and why did his son-in-law have to get out of the car to say hello to his son?

  Pop may have seen something different about us, or felt it, but he gave Liz a hug and stood there waiting like he knew I had something to tell him. Then it came out of me, Sam and Theresa getting pulled over, the sucker punch, the knife, then the five of us finding them, and now my heart was knocking against my ribs and all over again I was breaking the cup in the kid’s face, pushing it into the other’s, elbowing the big one in the chin—I was aware of my voice being louder now, of my steel toe kicking the air, of pointing out to my father the blood and ketchup and bits of glass on my lower pant legs, of Liz having gone inside Academy Hall. He studied me as I kept talking. His beard was perfectly trimmed as always, and I knew I had a good story for him, one he seemed to be taking in as just that.

  “Wow,” Pop said. He hugged me, said he wanted to hear more later, then he opened the rear door of his father-in-law’s expensive sedan and said, “My boy just beat the shit out of three punks downtown.”

  The pride in his voice was unmistakable. And isn’t that why I’d told him? To get just that back from him? But in the side view mirror I could see his father-in-law’s expression—startled, then disapproving, then concerned: What kind of family had his daughter married into anyway? Who were these people?

  Then they were gone and I was walking to Academy Hall. What did I care what this capitalist from Manhattan thought of me? My father was proud and even the cops who showed up couldn’t be happier about what we did and who we’d done it to.

  Only Liz treated me differently. In the days and weeks that followed, she was still affectionate but in a guarded way, as if she’d just discovered I had a serious defect of some kind, and she wasn’t sure how much of herself she would allow to get close—not to me—but to it.

  It was the wrong word, though, because it was nothing, a non-space inside me I moved through without restraints of any kind; I’d learned how to break through that invisible membrane around another’s face and head, but now there was no more barrier inside me either. It was nothing. And Liz knew what I wasn’t letting myself think about too much, that without her that night I had come so very close to kicking a man to death, a boy it turned out, a teenager like the other two, kids from the avenues where I’d roamed myself only five years earlier.

  And there was revenge to think about. I’d knocked out Steve Lynch’s teeth and gotten a carload of men at our door the same night. What would come of this one? Now the story was going around campus and Ronnie D’s. Somebody started calling us “the Sambo Slayers.” It was a kind of fame.

  AS THE winter deepened, I began to feel far away from myself, as if I had somehow stumbled into someone else’s life. Nothing I did from Sunday to Saturday seemed to have anything to do with me.

  On the job, after months of work, we were close to finishing Trevor D.’s three-decker of new condominiums. All the finish carpentry was done, and he’d sent Doug and Jeb on to a new project two towns over while Randy and I stayed behind to paint. Trevor D. didn’t want to
share his profit with a realtor, so for any tour of his property he would change out of his contractor clothes and wear shined loafers, ironed khakis, and a collared shirt under a new wool sweater. He’d be clean-shaven and attentive and charming, leading young couples from one room to the next where Randy and I might be on a stepladder rolling a final coat onto the ceiling, or else on our hands and knees brushing paint in level strokes along a baseboard. They’d walk past us as if we were not there.

  I didn’t know what Randy thought of that, but it felt like the truth to me: I was not there. Or anywhere really; for a while, those early years when I began to change my body, and then later in Texas when my eyes were opened to all the cruelty down through the ages, my feet felt planted on a piece of ground with my name on it, or at least part of my name on it, and then this lengthened into a trail I’d followed, but now I was somehow in the brush, standing there surrounded by thorns I seemed to have agitated as if they were bees.

  At night, when I wasn’t at the gym, I still brewed tea and tried to read Weber and Marx and Engels and all the rest, but their language looked more abstract to me than ever, nearly indecipherable, and worse, irrelevant. What did Weber’s “Theory of Bureaucracy” have to do with how in a restaurant or bar now I always sat against a wall with a view of the door? What did it have to do with how unmotivated I felt in the gym? The Golden Gloves competition was weeks away, and I still trained hard under Tony Pavone; I still shadowboxed and worked the bags and sparred with whoever was around, but every time I threw a punch in the direction of another fighter’s face, I felt myself pull it a bit. I was jabbing less and getting punched more. Pavone would yell, “Set your feet and throw somethin’. Fight.” But it was like someone telling you to kiss your mother and feel excited about it; before, what had kept boxing from feeling like a fight was the absence of rage, but now I feared it would show up uninvited, and I began to wonder why I kept coming back to that dank underground room at all.

  LIZ AND I were going to a movie. It was a Saturday night, and I had just driven over the Basilere Bridge and up the hill of Main Street past the statue of Hannah Duston. Liz turned to me and asked if we could stop somewhere for a pack of cigarettes. In Monument Square I pulled in front of a convenience store, left the engine and heater running, and went inside.

  The floor was dirty with people’s slush and mud tracks, the overhead light fluorescent and too bright, and I was waiting my turn at the register when I saw him watching me, smiling as he walked up. He carried a carton of ice cream and a quart of Coke. I had on a sweater and a jacket, but he wore only a T-shirt, green Dickies work pants, and sneakers. He was taller than I was, lean, and his black goatee made him look sinister until he started talking in that high voice that hadn’t changed since he’d told us he was hawny in the mawnin’.

  “Andre, how ya doin’, man?”

  “Good, Cleary. Real good, you?”

  He said he was living down in the avenues, that he was getting married soon. I said congratulations, then I was at the counter asking for a pack of Parliaments and he touched my shoulder, said to say hi to Jeb. I said I would. At the door I glanced back at him and watched him dig into his front pocket for crumpled bills. He nodded and smiled at me, winked even, and as I left the store, the cold tightening the skin on my face, I remembered the time his mother went to visit her sister in Nebraska for a whole month. I’d never understand why she went alone, why she’d leave her family like that to go off for a visit. Then someone told me it was detox she went to, some twenty-eight-day program in Boston. When I told him I knew, Cleary laughed and said, “Nah,” but he swallowed twice and walked away to do nothing in particular.

  In six months Cleary would send an envelope to our father’s house on campus. Inside it would be two invitations to his wedding, one for me, and one for Jeb. We wouldn’t go.

  Four more years and Cleary would be dead.

  I’d hear about it after he was buried. They said his wife stabbed him in the back. That was it; she stabbed him. But a year later, I’d be working as a bartender at McMino’s Lounge on Route 110 near the Haverhill-Merrimack line and a customer from Seventh Ave would tell me what had really happened, that Cleary always thought his wife was cheating on him, that he was always beating her up. That final night he ran outside off the porch to go kill the guy he just knew she was fucking. This was down in the avenues, and he took the trail in back of his apartment house. But his wife opened his black-handled Buck knife and chased after him, screaming. She was short and small, barely five feet, and just as he reached the weeds she got to him and drove it in low, sinking the blade into his liver, snipping something called the portal artery. Cleary went down without a sound. He curled up in a heap. But his wife spent four hours at a neighbor’s house crying before they called anyone, and then it was the cops, and Cleary was gone.

  I sat back behind the wheel, handed Liz her cigarettes, and drove toward the highway. I didn’t tell her I’d just seen an old friend, or that the farther we got from Monument Square the more I felt I was turning my back on him somehow.

  IT WAS late on a Friday afternoon. Jeb and I had been painting in a closed room for hours. This was a one-day job, and Jeb hadn’t wanted it. He was enjoying the one we were doing with Trevor D. and the crew in Swampscott, framing three new rooms and a roof onto a widow’s house, her long snow-covered yard that sloped down to a stand of pines through which we could see barrier rocks and the ocean. I was the cut man, but under the winter sun I was also learning how to lay out the exterior walls and nail them together on the open plywood deck. Jeb was much faster than I was, especially when it came to the math; he’d pull his tape along the bottom plate of a future wall, marking off studs and the center of rough openings for windows and doorways, going back to mark off where the jack studs would go to hold the headers, then the king studs beside them. A week or so before, Trevor D. had given us each another raise, an extra dollar per hour. He said, “Andre, you focus well but you’re slow. Jeb, you have much more natural talent at this than your brother, but you could use more focus.”

  He was right about both of us, and the only reason I may have had more focus is because I had to just to keep up. I could feel myself gathering more skills, though, ones I wasn’t sure I wanted. What did I care about condos and houses, about walls and windows and clapboards and shingles and paint? These were just material objects, weren’t they? What did they have to do with people in the world? Isn’t that who I was more interested in?

  I didn’t know. And on that Friday afternoon on that one-day job in that empty old house in Swampscott, something strange was happening. It was a white room to be made even whiter with paint that smelled like rubbing alcohol. Jeb and I had already painted the baseboards and walls and window trim, and I felt a little drunk. It occurred to me that lately I’d been taking too many shots to the head. But when I told Jeb this, he said he felt a little drunk, too. For some reason, we left it there and kept working.

  Next came the ceiling; it was ornate with a fluted cornice going around the top of each wall, and in the center of it was a flat four-foot-wide medallion of carved flowers and angels around a hook that once held the chain of a chandelier. It’d been a long time since my brother and I had been alone together, and it was good just talking while we painted. He was a father, something I kept forgetting, and he spoke of his baby son Ethan. How much he loved holding him, feeding him, even changing his diapers. “You can’t believe how much you can love, Andre. You can’t believe it.”

  It was true, I couldn’t; I was many years from having a child myself, and I only saw his young fatherhood through a dark lens; he’d knocked up a girl he hadn’t known and was now living with and trying to love; instead of being in some art or music school, he was working construction, the nails of his picking hand no longer long and filed but short and chipped. And his years up in his room with the teacher had done something to him. He looked like a grown man, but there was something raw and childlike about him, as if some clock had stopped for
him by staying in that room, a clock that would have kept ticking if he’d left it and gone out into the streets and been with people his own age. He was twenty years old. There was the vague and nagging pull of having failed him somehow. My head began to feel like a ball of gas.

  Jeb took the cornice, and I rolled the staging under the chandelier fixture and climbed up there and lay on my back, dipping my brush into the open can of paint, jabbing white into the faces of angels. This made me laugh, but then I’d been laughing for a while, both of us had, and I couldn’t remember when we’d started or why. The brush was heavy in my hand, then light, then heavy again, and when had Trevor D. come into the room? Why was he looking up at us and yelling something, and why did we keep laughing anyway?

  There was the slamming of the door and it seemed so long ago he’d been in the room, but was it?

  I was still on my back only a foot or two from the chubby angels and their flower garlands, but my arm was too short to reach them when it hadn’t been before. Had I pissed them off?

  “Do you think they’re mad?”

  “Who?”

  “The angels. I think I pissed them off.” I was laughing and Jeb laughed back. He was bent over the top of his stepladder, his scraggly hair covering his face. “Fumes, man. It’s these fucking fumes.”

  Then the room was done and we were sitting outside on the front porch steps, waiting for Trevor D. to pick us up in the truck. We were no longer laughing, and I wasn’t sure if what was happening was inside my head or out in the world, and it was like being boys again, tripping together up in my attic bedroom.

  The sky was darkening. The snow on the ground was too white to look at directly, so I sat in the cold sobering air and watched my brother smoke a cigarette. I listened to him talk about his baby who I kept seeing as a pudgy angel in the ceiling I hoped I’d finished painting.