Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  Sam parked the Duster in the lot close to the street. I started to get out fast, but Pop and Theresa didn’t know what Wallace looked like and they’d have to wait for us anyway. I glanced over the car at Sam. “Buddy, if he’s there, he’s gonna know why we are, too. I’ll have to go right at him.”

  “We’ll have to go right at him.”

  I didn’t say anything. I wanted Sam’s help and I did not want his help, but more than this, I didn’t want to be here at all. In the cold air, my cheeks stung, my split lip too. It was going to hurt to get punched there again.

  The 104 Club was as empty as it had been crowded the night before. Only one bartender was working, a thin man with a gray ponytail who stood at the far end watching the TV in the corner. Beneath it was a shuffleboard I hadn’t seen the night before, and two couples sat beside it in wooden chairs drinking and smoking and talking. Four or five others stood at the bar, men and women, Pop and Theresa among them. But no Devin Wallace. The air smelled like cigarette smoke and disinfectant and popcorn from the machine.

  Sam called the bartender over and ordered two Buds. Saturday nights always seemed to start slow. It was date night, people going out to dinner or the movies, maybe a dance club somewhere. Around ten they’d come in for a drink that would turn into two, then three, then by last call business would be as good as the night before. But now it was after ten and still this place was quiet. Maybe all the regulars were as hungover as I was and had stayed home. I didn’t know, but I was relieved and took a sip of the Budweiser that tonight was like drinking lighter fluid or chicken grease. I put my bottle down. The door opened and four or five men walked in with the icy air, Ben Wallace one of them. A dark wool cap was pulled down around his ears and his whiskered chin jutted out, and as he walked by me and Sam, he took us in and his eyes changed from expectant of a good time to something darker. I looked down the bar at Pop and Theresa. Both of them were smoking a cigarette, but Pop’s eyes were on mine. I shook my head once, then tapped Sam on the hand. “If Devin shows, we’re way fucking outnumbered. This was a bad idea.”

  “See that tall one with Ben? I played hockey with him. What’s he doing with Wallace?”

  Theresa stood in front of us. Somebody had put a quarter in the jukebox, and Huey Lewis & the News was singing about believing in love. She leaned in close. “Is he one of them?”

  Sam shook his head and drained his beer. “This isn’t going anywhere. Let’s shoot up to Ronnie D’s.”

  Theresa went back for Pop, and maybe that’s what she’d told him, that this wasn’t going anywhere, which really meant it was going somewhere but not where we’d pictured it back in my father’s small campus house full of books, some precise act of revenge on one man, a big man at that, one I was happy to concede to now.

  Pop stood on the sidewalk under the light. His face was shadowed by the brim of his Akubra. “Why’re we leaving?”

  “It’s dead, Pop. Nobody’s in there tonight. We’re heading up to Ronnie D’s. Maybe he’s there.”

  Most likely Pop knew I was lying; bars had their regulars and Ronnie D’s across the river had never had a Wallace as one, but maybe Pop, too, had come to feel this was all a bad idea.

  He smiled at Theresa and held out his arm. “Let’s go, darlin’.”

  Theresa laughed and hooked her arm in his, and Sam and I were heading for the Duster, a strip of ice cracking under my boots, when behind us the door to the bar swung back on its hinges and Ben Wallace and his crew came walking fast into the lot. “Fuck you, Dubis. You’re down here waiting for my brother, you and your fuckin’ friends.” Spit arced out of his mouth, and he was already a few feet away from me, and I never realized how tall he was, taller than his handsome, stronger brother. On both sides of him stood men I did not know, but Sam moved toward them and was calling out the name of his hockey mate, calling it in the warm tone of an old friend glad to see another.

  I said, “I’m just here for a beer, Ben.”

  “Fuck you, you are. My brother kicked the shit out of you last night, that’s why you’re here.” He was closer to me now, a step away from punching range, but my body wasn’t having anything to do with this. My weight was even on both feet, and there was no lightness in my hands, no flames running through my blood. I heard myself talking about Christmas.

  “What?”

  “It’s Christmastime, Ben. Peace on earth, right?”

  “Fuck you, my brother kicked your ass, and I’ll fuckin’ do it again right now.”

  But he wasn’t moving any closer, and now Pop and Theresa were walking across the lot toward us. Pop had both hands in the pockets of his Red Sox jacket, and even with his thick beard and the twenty years he had on us all, there was something boyish about him.

  “You’re backing down ’cause you know I’ll fuckin’ kill you, Dubis.”

  “You’re right, Ben. Merry Christmas.”

  Ben kept swearing at me, and now Sam turned to his hockey friend, a square-faced kid with an Irish name and shoulder-length hair. “Tell your buddy to calm down, Tim.”

  But Ben wasn’t calming down. Our lack of reaction seemed to make him angrier, his chin jutting out, spit flying, and his friends seemed no more interested in a brawl than we did. They stood quietly behind him, looking from me to Sam, then at Pop, who stood a few feet back, his hands still in his pockets. He looked happy and relaxed and so awfully out of place. Wallace was threatening to kill me again and how new it was that I didn’t care what he said, that he could go on and on, and it just did not matter. Because I noticed he still wasn’t stepping any closer, and only when he glanced over at Pop and Theresa did my blood thin out a bit; I’d have to do something if he went after them in any way, especially my father who, it was clear now, had come downtown to see more of this part of my life. I opened the passenger door and waited for Sam whose hockey friend was speaking quietly into Ben’s ear.

  Ben threatened to kill me once more, but in minutes Sam and I were driving over the Merrimack River, Pop and Theresa ahead of us. My face ached, my neck too. I was looking forward to a bed somewhere, a long night’s sleep. I thought we were heading for Ronnie D’s but Pop steered for the campus. Then we were inside his house again, Pop creeping into his downstairs bedroom to hang his Akubra on its hook, Sam and Theresa and I sitting around the small dining room table. Theresa shook her head and laughed. “Your dad had a gun, you know.”

  “What?”

  “When those guys ran into the parking lot, he reached right over me and took it out of the glove compartment. He had it in his pocket the whole time.”

  Sam looked at me and shook his head. Now I knew why Pop had really gone into his bedroom. It’s where he kept his guns, on his closet shelf, and I pictured him swinging open the six-round chamber of the snub-nose and emptying the bullets into his cupped hand. Or he might be releasing the loaded clip of the semiautomatic, pulling back the slide and eyeing the bore for a straggler round. And I had a flash of him standing in the lot of the 104 Club with his hands in his jacket pockets, his relaxed smile, his right fingers cupped around something so lethal. My chest felt squeezed. “Shit.”

  “I asked him if he would’ve really used that. He said he’d just shoot in the air.”

  Like that would’ve stopped anyone. Like there was reason involved here. Like we would’ve all paused at the loud noise and cooled down right away and walked off in opposite directions because this had all gotten so obviously out of hand.

  Pop was walking up the stairs. “Who wants a nightcap?” He was smiling widely, his cheeks flushed above his beard. His dog Luke followed him up to the lighted kitchen, and Pop opened the fridge and pulled out four bottles of beer. He twisted the cap off Theresa’s first and walked over and handed it to her. She smiled up at him. “Put your gun away?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  We all laughed, even me, and it occurred to me I’d gotten so brave in one way but had stayed so cowardly in another. When Pop handed me the bottle, I took it from him and then we
four lifted our drinks to that dish best served cold, a revenge I knew I would never seek.

  THE NEXT morning my father drove to Mass, and I had coffee with Peggy while she fed my baby sister. She was six months old and her name was Cadence and she had a shock of red hair that reminded me of the little bird Woodstock from Charlie Brown cartoons. After Peggy had burped and changed her, she asked if I wouldn’t mind holding her so her mother could squeeze in some writing upstairs. “And your father should be back soon.”

  Cadence was lighter than a book of political theory, her entire bottom resting in my palm. She held her hands out from her sides but had a hard time holding her head up, so I fanned my fingers against the back of her tiny skull, smelled mashed pear and clean cotton and something I couldn’t name. She was looking directly into my eyes, hers the color of a blue planet, her mouth open slightly, and how was it possible to be so young and small and utterly dependent on the love of the people you were born into, their constant care, their good judgment, for years and years?

  I made patronizing baby sounds to make her smile, but she just kept looking into my eyes. It was as if she had me all figured out and wasn’t quite sure she wanted to be held anymore by this man twenty-three years older than she was, her brother.

  I was sitting with her at the dining room table when Pop came home. She’d fallen asleep against my shoulder. The sun shone across the floor and up the stairs where her mother was writing.

  I heard Pop greet Luke downstairs, then he was walking up to where we were. He smiled right away. He was wearing the same corduroy shirt from the night before, that and a pair of jeans and black leather boots he’d ordered from a boot maker in Montreal. He’d gone to church to talk to Jesus. That’s how he usually described prayer, as a personal conversation with Jesus Christ. This was something I had never done or even considered doing. Nor, as far as I knew, had my brother or sisters.

  When Suzanne turned sixteen, she informed Pop she wasn’t going to church anymore and it was like a sandbag fell away, and soon Jeb and Nicole and I were caught up in this lucky current that eventually meant we got to sleep late on Sundays too. But Pop kept going to Mass six or seven days a week, and now he was smiling at his second and fifth children. His beard was newly trimmed, his cheeks and throat shaved clean. He stopped smiling and started scratching Luke behind the ears.

  “That was wrong last night.”

  “What was?”

  “Bringing the gun. That was bad.”

  I nodded, my hand pressed to the warm spine of his sleeping daughter. Peggy came downstairs for more coffee then. She held an empty mug, a big one from which she drank café au lait, a habit she’d picked up during a semester in Paris, and there was a far-off look in her eyes that reminded me of Jeb whenever he used to come downstairs after hours of practicing his guitar. Pop glanced at her as she passed. “Writing?”

  “Yeah.” She filled her cup with coffee and warm milk from a pan, said to me quietly, “You can give her to your dad. He’ll lay her in her crib.”

  She walked back up the stairs to her desk, and I stood and Pop came over. With my palm against the back of his baby’s head, I handed him my sleeping sister. I could smell his hair, the sweet wafer of the Eucharist on his breath, this thing he believed in so strongly and which got him to say things like he’d just did. It was good he had something like that. Maybe people needed something like that. Men in particular.

  13

  LIZ HAD A crush on a guy named Joe Hurka. He was in my father’s fiction writing class with her, and whenever she talked about him, which was quite a lot, her eyes had more light in them, her skin more color, her hair more shine. She talked about how sensitive he was, how beautiful his writing, and that he even wrote songs and played the guitar. One day in class Pop asked him to sing them all something, and Joe did, and now Liz’s crush looked like outright love to me. I hated Joe.

  And I didn’t. All the weeks she pined for him, I never met him. Whenever she talked about something new he’d written or sung, the jealousy I felt was a hot stone in my abdomen, but it was of two parts: the obvious, and that it was possible to be a young man and know what you were supposed to do with your time on earth. This guy Joe seemed to have that, and as much as I wished for him to pack up his guitar and short stories and move away somewhere, there was also a gnawing sense that he was a better man than I was and that I should just stand aside and let what was happening happen.

  One Saturday before my weight workout with Sam, I walked into Liz’s empty dorm room and saw a thin manuscript on her bed. The room smelled like shampoo, and she had probably just gotten dressed and was getting something to eat down in the dining hall. I sat on the mattress and picked up four or five stapled pages. It was a new story by Joe. My fingertips went numb. It was as if I’d found a love letter from him to her, an irrational thought, I knew. I turned the title page over and began to read.

  The words were simple, clear and concrete, and soon I was no longer aware I was reading sentences written by Joe; instead, I became the story’s protagonist, a teenage boy working as a dishwasher in a diner in a small town like Haverhill. I knew these things from the details, the abandoned mill building on the other side of the alley, the flickering light of the streetlamp over the broken sidewalk, the cigarette smoke of the boy’s boss behind the counter. It’s two or three in the morning and the boy is mopping the floor when two middle-aged prostitutes walk in from the cold. They’re wearing too much makeup and not enough clothes and before they can even sit down the boy’s boss yells at them to leave, yells that they’re closed and he doesn’t serve whores anyway. The women go without much of a fight, and the story ends with the boy mopping the floor, shaking his head and thinking, That’s not right, that’s just not right.

  I laid the story back down on the bed. I sat there awhile. I wasn’t thinking of Joe or Liz or me. I wasn’t thinking at all. I was seeing that boy in that diner and even feeling what it might be like to be him in that moment when the world pulled him up against his own conscience, though this word was not yet in my head. It was like hearing a good song on the radio, that place it puts you where you weren’t before. Or the movies, how they did that, too. And now Joe’s story.

  I wanted to read another one. I wanted to read whatever he’d written. But I was running late for my workout with Sam, and as I left Liz’s room and walked down the worn carpet of Academy Hall, dorm room doors open and ten different albums playing on ten different record players, talk and laughter and a vacuum cleaner running somewhere, I felt more here, like water leaking from an ear you hadn’t known was blocked, and then something warm and wet is on your skin and now you can hear.

  THE GOLDEN Gloves were three weeks away. It was a weeknight, probably Wednesday, and all day long Jeb and Randy and I had hung Sheetrock in the rooms we’d built in the widow’s house overlooking the water. The ceilings came first. The day before, we’d started nailing spruce strapping into the joists sixteen inches on center and while Jeb finished that, Randy and I were hauling sheets of plaster board off the truck and stacking them against a wall in each of the three rooms. By coffee break, all the Sheetrock was unloaded and Jeb had finished the strapping. He was faster with measurements and cuts and handling the screw gun, so it fell to Randy and me to do most of the grunt work. We’d squat and lift a full sheet, carry it under where it would go, then we’d count off, “One, two, lift,” and yank the sheet up from our sides and flat onto our heads, our fingertips on its smooth surface to keep it from buckling and cracking. We’d each step up onto a stool or lidded joint compound bucket, and together we’d press the four-foot-wide, twelve-foot-long sheet up against the ceiling strapping and there’d be the electric whine of the screw gun as Jeb went to work sinking black screws through plasterboard into spruce till we could let go and drop our arms and step down to do it again and again.

  Now the day was over, and I was in my small apartment in Lynn pulling on sweats. The only light in my room was a bulb in the ceiling, stark and too brigh
t, and outside the windows was blackness, a cold I was planning to run through on my way to the Boys’ Club and Tony Pavone’s boxing ring. My shoulders were fatigued from all the overhead work of the day, and it would be hard to keep my fists up, hard to throw punches. But I wouldn’t allow this thought to stay in my head. Whatever good had come to me had come from my complete and utter disregard for my body’s need for comfort. If I began to capitulate now, where would it end? In no time I’d be small and soft again, a boy who liked to read books and build tree forts with his brother. A boy easily stomped.

  I pulled a second sweatshirt down over the first. For a moment or two I just stood there in my empty room. No posters or photographs on the walls. No desk or chair or couch or bed. Just my yoga mat on the floorboards under my sleeping bag, the two work boots stuffed into a pillowcase I called a pillow. Beside it was the stack of books I’d been laboring through all year, a composition binder I sometimes took notes in, the glossy brochure of the University of Wisconsin at Madison waiting for me in the fall. In the corner, propped up against the dusty baseboard, was the AAU number I would soon pin to my trunks in the Golden Gloves, and it was time to move, time to get moving.

  But in the kitchen I stopped at the door. I watched myself let go of the knob and turn and put a pan of water on the stove. I opened the flames under it all the way, then watched myself take an empty cup and drop a tea bag into it. I walked back to where I slept for the notebook and a pencil, and why did I set them on the small kitchen table? Why was I sitting there waiting for the water to boil for the tea when I should be running along an icy sidewalk in the night to train?

  I began to feel too warm in my layered sweats, but I didn’t move. I opened the notebook in front of me. The water began to bubble and I stood and poured it steaming into my cup, the tea bag jerking, then rising, and now I watched as I set the cup near the notebook and took my pencil and held it. What was I doing? And why? Why was I doing this?