Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  WE SHOULD’VE gone home. Jeb to his, me to mine. We should’ve eaten something and taken long hot showers and cleared our heads, but it was Friday, the day Trevor D. took his crew to the Hole in the Wall for pitchers of beer. We’d drink and throw darts, what he called arrows.

  Trevor’s pickup pulled to the curb. Tied to the rack was the British flag hanging off a broomstick that’d been there for weeks, ever since a British warship took the Falkland Islands back from Argentina who’d taken it back from them. I climbed into the cab of the truck, wedged between my brother and our imperialist-capitalist boss. He pushed the shifter into gear and said, “That’s alcohol-based paint, mates. Those windows should’ve been cracked all day. Where’s your common sense?”

  And why were we now stumbling into the small, dark Hole in the Wall to drink beer when our brains were already stewed? And was it Doug and me against the rest? Or Randy? And did Trevor D. keep winning, or was he just laughing a lot because he’d sold one of his units and that’s why he was buying us round after round? There was a voice in my head: You should eat something. You should drink some water and eat something. Then Liz’s face, her brown hair and hazel eyes, how far away she’d gotten on me, how we didn’t seem to be an us anymore.

  The back roads were thin ribbons, and if I closed one eye it was easier to keep my balance. On either side were bare trees and black branches and white snow, sometimes the lights of a house or streetlamps, a convenience store, a gas station and sub shop, then darkness again, pierced by lights coming at me I kept my one eye away from, both hands on the steering wheel. You shouldn’t be driving. You shouldn’t be fucking driving. But now I was halfway to Haverhill. If I turned around and drove back, it would be as much driving as continuing on.

  I rolled down the window, the air so cold it was hard, a constant slapping in my face, a constant rebuke. And I must’ve gone to the college first, right? Because I was in Haverhill now, walking in Lafayette Square, the flesh-and-bone memory of having walked earlier. Yes. Into Academy Hall and up to Liz’s room. A kind face, a woman I didn’t know telling me, “She’s at the 104 Club. A bunch of ’em went.”

  The fucking 104 Club. A street bar in Lafayette Square across from the statue of another dead soldier, around him the incessant lights of Store 24, a car dealership and liquor store, a martial arts studio, and beyond that the Little River foamy with industrial waste, black now, too polluted to freeze over. It was a bar where nothing good happened unless you were looking to cop some drugs or get into a brawl or get busted, and it’s where girls from the college liked to go slumming, and how had Jeb gotten here? The two of us were walking side by side away from the car. He was talking, had been for a long time. In the car too, the whole one-eyed ride here, about music, about J. S. Bach and Rodrigo, Mozart and Beethoven and Andrés Segovia, smoking cigarette after cigarette, trying to teach me something, not about the music it seemed, but him. Because how could I know him if I knew nothing of what he cared so much about?

  The plowed lot beside the bar was packed with cars, so we’d parked blocks away near the railroad trestle, beyond that the abandoned brewery we used to sneak into with Cleary, steal cans of beer and drink them right there on dusty wooden steps. There was that conveyor belt Cleary would turn on and we’d ride it drunk to the upper floors, then run back down the steps and do it again and again.

  Jeb and I stepped over an iced-over snowbank and walked in the street back toward the square. My brother lit up another cigarette. I hadn’t been inside a Haverhill bar with him since that night at the Tap, but tonight, instead of hand-knitted slippers, he had on work boots and paint-splattered jeans, a loose sweater with a hole in the elbow. He looked like what he did all day, and I knew we were walking on asphalt gritty with sand and salt from a city truck, but my legs and feet were like cotton, my torso and face some kind of drunken steam. Then we were inside the 104 Club under flat, bright light and a haze of cigarette smoke, men and women ten or twelve deep drinking at the bar or shouting out an order, laughing and talking and smoking. There were the smells of nicotine and damp leather, of denim and perfume and sweat and beer. High in the corner hung a color TV, a Muhammad Ali fight I’d forgotten about, Ali taking a shot to the chin, his head snapping back. From below came a deep masculine roar, blood-joy in the air, a happy happy place, and my eyes burned and I wanted to turn around and leave, but my shoulder was being squeezed, my upper arm too, Liz smiling up at me, drunk. Behind her were six or seven from the college, boys and girls I didn’t know, and now this too-tight hug from her, almost as if she were apologizing, and I knew she was.

  She was saying something, but I wondered which of the guys behind her she’d been fucking. I leaned in close. “You want a beer?”

  She smiled and kissed my lips, her tongue apologizing too. I turned and stepped sideways through people I may have known or once known, and did I even care she was moving on? What did I know about love anyway? Did I even love her? Had she loved me?

  Then I was standing at the bar, my hip against someone’s hip, my shoulder against another’s shoulder. I could see with two eyes now, but barely, and I raised my hand to slow the movement of one of the bartenders behind this long chipped bar covered with bottles and half-full glasses and overflowing ashtrays and peanut shells in spilled beer or wine. Five feet down, a woman’s hand stubbed out a cigarette, a silver ring on each finger.

  I ordered three Buds. Liz preferred Michelob, but I wasn’t sure I could say that many syllables without slurring. I looked over the crowd for my brother. The hip against mine belonged to a blonde woman, a student from the college. I knew her and did not know her. A big man stood behind her talking to the back of her head, but she wasn’t looking at him. Her nose was straight and perfect, her skin clear and unlined, her chin strong, her hair thick and shiny and with no sign of bleach or color or any of the shit girls from around here put in theirs. Her name was Hailey, and she must’ve taken off a sweater or something because she was wearing the dark blue T-shirt she’d had on when Liz had first introduced us on the red-carpeted stairs of Academy Hall. It was tight and showed off her breasts and small waist, her lean swimmer arms. And those small white letters above her left nipple: LAGNAF.

  I drank from my beer, thought about talking to her, didn’t want to talk to her. Didn’t want to be here. Liz was behind me in the crowd somewhere, and she’d laughed on those stairs and told me what those letters meant: Let’s All Get Naked and Fuck. Five or six other girls wore the same T-shirt. I wondered if any of them were here tonight, slumming too.

  “I’m talking to you.” The man behind Hailey put his big hand on her shoulder and she turned, her hair whipping. “I said to fuck off.” Just a string of words instantly swallowed up in the barroom noise. She shrugged her shoulder away from him.

  I’d never seen him before. Twenty-two or -three, over six feet, maybe 230, 240. He had a handsome face, all jaw and cheekbones, but there was a dullness in his eyes, not stupid but predatory, and now maybe a little pissed off too. He put his hand back on her shoulder. I rested my bottle on the bar next to the two I hadn’t delivered yet. Why should I do something? What did Hailey and her friends with their secret T-shirts think they’d find down here anyway? But she was clearly done with him and that should be it. That should always be it.

  “Hey, brother, she’s all set.”

  I was shorter than he was, smaller, two things he took in as he was taking in the main thing: that I was sticking my face into his business.

  “I’m not your fuckin’ brother.”

  “Outside then.” I jerked my head toward the door.

  “Let’s go.” These words the answer to a riddle floating down a river I was also floating down, the crowd parting and moving, the red and gold glow of a neon Miller sign above the door that opened for me on its own. But my heart hadn’t even woken up for this. I could be nodding off somewhere; there was no fear, none of that marrow-electric jolt that put something I needed into my arms and legs, no pounding heart and shallow br
eath, no keen eye on any movement coming my way. There was just the steady forward momentum of having broken through the membrane—because the invitation to fight is a breaking too—and this was the right thing to do, wasn’t it?

  It was school all over again. The crowd sensed the change in the air, and now people were outside and ringed around us under the white light over the door. I had both hands up, but my back foot kept slipping on ice and I couldn’t plant it but jabbed at him anyway, this pathetic move from a boxing ring nobody used in a real fight, and how had I forgotten that? Why all of a sudden did I think there were some rules to this?

  He feinted away from it, his head ramming into my chest, and I was lifted and there was the back-slap of pavement, a weight on my sternum. The first punches were almost a surprise, hard and fast from the right and left, sparks behind my eyes. I opened them, and there he was on my chest. His face was in shadow, and it was hard to breathe and he kept punching and my hands grabbed both his wrists and wouldn’t let go.

  “Kill him, man. Fuckin’ kill ’em.”

  There were more words out there in the air around us, men’s voices, then Jeb’s, “That’s my brother.” His hands on the shoulders of the one on me, but then other hands pulled him away and there was yelling, had been for a long time, from the one on me who had a handful of hair on both sides of my head, my fingers still locked around his wrists, and he began to lift my head and slam it back down, lift it and slam it, the concrete beneath me felt like a betrayal, and I tried to tense the muscles in my neck but that only slowed his momentum and at the corners of my eyes darkness welled and I tried to pull his hands from my hair but he was too strong. I began kneeing him in the back, but that only loosened my neck and he slammed harder, the back of my skull thinner now, more brittle, and I could only see the shadow of his face meeting more shadows, my eyes filling with them, and if I didn’t keep him from this and if no one was going to pull him off, this would be it, this will be it, this is it, this can’t be it, this can’t be it, every muscle I’d ever worked going rigid, my neck a clamp, and maybe he was getting tired, but my fingers were now part of his wrists against the sides of my head and he could no longer move, and he was spitting, hawking and spitting into my face, this warm wet evidence of a street rage I’d either forgotten to bring along, or was too drunk to bring along, or could no longer summon, these thoughts not in my head but in my blood I could feel stiffening on my face beside his phlegm.

  At first I thought it was another brawl. There was a whooshing movement to my right and people parted and were walking away quickly. There was a lightness in my chest, then something jerked from my fingers and I was rolling onto my side as the cruiser pulled in tight to the snowbank inches from my face, the flash of blue lights in the air, my good, good friends, the Haverhill police.

  I MAY have slept at Liz’s that night, or at Sam’s in his second-story bedroom on Eighteenth Avenue. I may have driven back to Salem and Lynn with Jeb. I don’t remember. But these kinds of fights happened in Haverhill all the time, and the cops helped me up and told people to move along. The big one was gone, and there was no talk of pressing charges anyway. They may have asked if I wanted medical attention, and they probably went inside the 104 Club to make their presence known, but all I remember clearly is the next night Pop found out, and now Pop wanted revenge.

  It was close to ten, a Saturday night, and I was standing in the small dining room of his campus house. Theresa sat at the table nursing a beer, and Sam stood with his back to the plate-glass window, outside so dark that we were reflected back at us, a woman and three men. My father stood in the center of the room in his corduroy shirt and leather vest, a drink in his hand. Peggy had gone to bed early, as was her habit, and my baby half-sister was asleep downstairs too.

  Both my cheeks were swollen. My left eyelid was puffy, my lower lip split, and if I’d ever had a worse headache I couldn’t remember it. My neck muscles were stiff and sore. Pop took a long drink off his Stolichnya. He drank it like the Russians, over ice with ground black pepper. He put it on the table and walked up to me and studied my face for the second time in five minutes. It was Vinny who’d told him what happened, Vinny who’d gotten the story from the rich girl Hailey I never saw again.

  In the light from the kitchen Pop touched two fingers under my chin and tilted my face up. I could smell vodka and Old Spice. This gesture of his was new, and it made me feel like a boy, a feeling I both liked and hated.

  “Who was this motherfucker? He’s gotta be pretty tough to beat you.”

  I shook my head and shrugged. There was the earned sense I had reached a dry plateau on some long, steep climb up a mountain in the rain. I was more than happy to stay there now, no need to go to the top; I hadn’t changed myself from what I was to what I’d become for my father, but it was good hearing he thought this of me. I also felt vaguely like a liar and an impostor, though, and he’d shown his street-naïvité for having said it: there were thousands of men tougher than I was, tens of thousands.

  Sam was talking. He knew people who were at the 104 Club the night before, and he’d made a few calls and found out who’d beaten the shit out of me. It was Devin Wallace, someone who brawled in the bars regularly. I knew his older brother Ben. He had a severe underbite and was tall and sinewy and he drank all day, cruising around town in beat-up sedans, burning rubber at traffic lights, giving the finger to anyone who said a thing about it. Years later, he went on to serve multiple sentences at the state prison in Walpole, and he’d be dead of cirrhosis of the liver before he hit forty-five. Now my father wanted something done to his bigger, stronger, handsome brother, but I was through with it. I’d fought and lost, and wouldn’t a movie be a good thing to do right now? Popcorn and cold Coke and a dark room full of strangers turning themselves over to the imaginations of others?

  It was my fault I’d lost so badly anyway. Since when do you invite someone outside? I’m not your fuckin’ brother. That was his invitation, which came first and which I should have followed with a straight right to his predatory face. But since Sambo’s, something had changed in me, and now Pop’s and Sam’s plan was to go back to the 104 Club where the Wallaces and their crew hung out and then get him somehow, Sam and Theresa and my half-drunk and determined writer father, who, with his trimmed professor’s beard, stood at the door and pulled on an insulated Red Sox jacket and one of his Akubra hats. They both reflected things he loved, finely made leather from Down Under, and a team of grown men who played a game called baseball. I’d seen him wearing them many times before, mainly walking his dog within the campus walls, but now I pictured him down at the 104 Club looking for a fight, and I felt protective of him and cowardly all at once for I was doing nothing to stop this; if I did, I would look like the weak little boy I’d been working all these years to kill.

  POP AND Theresa went in his car, Sam and I in the black Duster. We were going to walk in separately and in twos; if Wallace wasn’t there, then we’d stand on opposite sides of the bar and wait. Then what? Jump him? All four of us? Theresa, too?

  Sam drove us out of the sanctuary of campus, my father’s taillights ahead of us. Through the back window of Pop’s car I could see the silhouette of his Akubra, and I was eleven years old again, standing at the window of our old rented house on Lime Street, watching my father admonish and warn Clay Whelan, his father Larry holding him back, this chained dog who would’ve surely killed Pop if he’d gotten free. And I couldn’t let Pop get to Wallace before I did. If he got to him first, my father would begin things with words, with language, the one thing he was so good at, and probably in his Marine captain’s chest-voice like he’d done at the Tap with the husband of the spurned wife, but that would give Wallace too much time and motivation, and he was so much bigger than my father, so much angrier. No, I needed to get there first: no words, no foreplay, no polite invitations. I’d just have to start swinging and hope the first one was hard enough to give me time for the second and the third and the fourth. I was tapping my
foot, my tongue dry as shaved bark. I wanted that cold Coke.

  Sam turned off Main and headed down a side street for the river. We were still in neighborhoods of large, comfortable houses, their shingles or clapboards in no need of paint, their covered porches spacious and level and free of trash and the clutter of discarded kids’ toys. Christmas lights were draped along the fascia, and in the windows stood lighted trees behind wispy curtains. These were Bradford houses, nobody living in them on welfare or food stamps, many of them college-educated, their late-model cars parked neatly in plowed driveways.

  Sam followed Pop’s car over the river. There was the hum of tires on the steel grates, and the black water beneath us flowed east and I could see the dim white of snow on the mudbanks. Then we were on River Street passing lighted sub shops and package stores, a diner in Railroad Square. Soon we were in the dark gauntlet of the closed shoe factories where we passed the brewery and drove under the tracks again. In an abandoned weed lot a shopping cart lay on its side, rags spilling from it, and up ahead was the light of Lafayette Square, the exterior lamp over the door to the 104 Club a white star pulsing in my head.

  The lot was only half full. While Pop parked, Sam did two loops around the statue of the dead hero.

  “We’ll give them time to get in first.”

  “Good.”

  “You all right?”

  “Yep.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll get him.”

  On the second loop I could see Pop and Theresa walking into the bar, Pop holding the door open for her. Theresa was only a year or two younger than his third wife, and they looked like a mismatched couple out on a date. Again there came the feeling this was not my father’s world, that he was having too much fun right now, and that very soon the fun would stop.