Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  For a short time or a long time, I stared at the page. I saw how consistently level the blue lines were from left to right, a quarter of an inch high, maybe five-sixteenths. I kept staring at them. Then a curtain lifted and I began to see a factory somewhere where these notebooks were made, men and women running big machines, cutting and printing and binding, and I saw a man like Randy working some press, his outlaw mustache, sweat in the corners of his eyes, then I was in the woods, woods I called Maine, the place Liz was from, and now a young woman who looked very much like her was half drunk on warm beer and was losing her virginity on the hood of a Pontiac. Then I was her, feeling the metal hood under my skin, the jabs into me that hurt, then didn’t but did.

  The boy she’d given herself to finished quickly, and it was as if I were a mist in the trees watching them sitting now in the front seat. They smoked cigarettes and neither of them spoke. A soft rain began to fall and the boy started the engine and put his car in gear and drove down the rutted road away from what they’d just done together. Away from me.

  I put down my pencil. In front of me were just handwritten words, quite a few crossed out and replaced with others. I raised the cup of tea to my lips and blew on it, but it had cooled to the temperature of the room. Hadn’t it just been steaming? How long had I been sitting here?

  I blinked and looked around my tiny rented kitchen, saw things I’d never seen before: the stove leaning to the left, the handle of the fridge covered with dirty masking tape, the chipped paint of the window casing, a missing square of linoleum on the floor under the radiator.

  I stood and closed the notebook. I picked up the pencil and set it on top like some kind of marker, a reminder to me of something important I shouldn’t lose.

  A FEW days later I was in the ring with someone new. He was my height with a bushy beard, a narrow chest and wide waist, his arms thin, his eyes cloudy above blotchy cheeks. He was too young to look like this, a drunk from one of the neighborhood barrooms, and as I stepped into the ring to spar him, I wondered why he was here.

  Someone hit the bell and we tapped gloves. He kept his hands low like Bobby Schwartz, and I thought I’d just throw some jabs, that’s all, and I threw one, a white canyon opening up in my head. My eyes cleared and there were the ropes wrapped in duct tape, the darkness on the other side where Tony Pavone said, “Good hook. But both a you, keep your hands up.”

  I must’ve dropped my right. I must’ve dropped it when I threw the jab and opened myself up. It was the hardest I’d ever been hit in the ring, and I didn’t want to get hit again. A thousand bees were hovering now, their wings beating dully, and we were moving clockwise, our eyes locked. His still looked cloudy to me, the whites not white, his gaze unfocused. What he’d just thrown was luck, right? Tony yelled at him to hold his hands up, but he wasn’t, so I stepped in and threw a right and a flower flamed up behind my eyes, the bees’ wings hot and buzzing under my skin, and through a maroon haze, he was there again. I wished for headgear. I wanted to stop and ask him how he was getting to me so easily, what was I doing wrong? But a three-minute round was a three-minute round, and you didn’t stop in the middle. You just didn’t.

  I tried to evade him with some footwork, something I was never too swift at. I planted my feet, jabbed, then began to move counterclockwise, a direction from which it was harder for me to throw a strong right. His eyes blinked and his right hand dropped and I shot a hook for his cheek, but a hammer smashed the bees into my skull where they kept drilling on their own and my eyes burned and I could hear a voice, one of the bees talking, its wings explaining something, Finish him off. Throw a combination. These words meant not for me, but for this man who looked like he was just getting started, this drunk who punched hard enough to kill somebody. And he was holding back, too. Each of his hooks had hurt me, and he had to have seen that, but he wasn’t stepping in to end things. He wasn’t doing what I’d learned to do, to hurt even more the one you’ve already hurt.

  In the next two minutes he hit me six or seven more times. When the round ended, I thanked him for the session and ducked between the ropes and untied my gloves and unwrapped my hands. My fingers were clumsy and looked far away. Tony Pavone was saying something to me, his voice close, words of advice, it sounded like. Words I couldn’t quite decipher.

  The headache lasted ten days, a huge hand squeezing my temples between thumb and forefinger. At the edge of my vision was a green world that sometimes turned purple or brown, and whenever I read my tape measure I had to squint, the hand squeezing harder.

  I WAS riding in the back of Peggy’s Subaru. Pop was driving. We were pulling away from Kappy’s liquor store with one of his buddies I didn’t know well. He sat in the passenger side and had a beard as wild-looking as Fidel Castro’s, and he kept talking about Romania and collective farming. It was a warm, gray afternoon. On both sides of Main Street the dirty snowbanks had melted into slush, its runoff sluicing into the drains, some of them clogged with damp leaves, empty cans or cigarette packs, damp sections of newspaper.

  Pop elbowed his friend. “My boy’s a Golden Glove boxer.”

  “What’re you, a middleweight?”

  “Yeah, no.”

  “No? You’re not a middleweight?”

  “I am, but not what he said.”

  Pop’s eyes caught mine in the rearview. He was waiting for me to continue, and I could see that whatever I’d say next would be all right, that he was just curious, that’s all; this was the collateral gift of him having been a father who’d always lived somewhere else, one who had never been part of any decisions we made or did not make about our lives; he’d always been absent, and it made the next thing easy to say. “The Gloves were last week. I didn’t go.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know…”

  “What?”

  I could’ve told him about the beating I’d taken in the ring. I could’ve told him about the headache that wouldn’t go away, or how I’d begun to see my skull as a container for my brains, one that had been designed to protect them so why was I encouraging people to punch it as hard as they could? Weren’t there other things I could learn to do?

  “I think I should be doing something more creative.”

  I did not say artistic, though I was thinking that. I did not say I’d started to write a short story for the first time and that each night after work I looked forward to that tea and to that table, to my pencil I would sharpen with the U-knife from my carpentry apron, the lined notebook I was slowly filling with words and sentences and paragraphs. I did not tell him that just doing this left me feeling pleasantly empty of something after, something I normally would have brought into the ring or the weight room.

  Pop said, “Interesting.” And he downshifted and drove the three of us along Main Street. We were heading off to a Bradford College faculty party somewhere, a dinner with grown men and women like the man beside Pop, people who had Ph.D.’s and taught and wrote, people who danced and painted and sculpted. Pop’s friend was talking about Romania again, and I was looking out the window at this place that had become my hometown, the street Rosie P. had lived on, her sweet smile and naked brown legs. Columbia Park and the house my mother had worked so hard to keep us in, the longest we’d ever been anywhere, the tree house in the back made from stolen lumber, the attic turret I’d exiled myself to, the sidewalk in front where Tommy J. had punched my brother in the face and called my mother a whore. There were the worn apartment stairs beside Pleasant Spa where early in the morning kids from the avenues still waited for the bus and passed joints and drank Pepsis or Cokes. And Cleary’s side street, his loving drunk mother.

  Pop’s friend was talking about Miles Davis now and we were driving through Monument Square, a new restaurant where I had nearly beaten a boy to death. My father was driving and he could keep driving. Then we were on the Basilere Bridge over the Merrimack River, and as I watched the dark water flow east past the concrete floodwall and Captain Chris’s Restaurant and the box
board factory on the opposite bank, there was this recognition of movement, that like the currents below I was being pulled from what I had known to what I did not yet know, that for now I was suspended between two worlds.

  IN MAY I finished writing a short story. It was set in Louisiana and was about a young man caring for his ailing grandmother. Every afternoon the grandmother’s elderly friend brings fresh blackberries she’s picked and the grandson takes them and puts them with the rest, but he’s getting tired of baking blackberry cobbler and blackberry pie and blackberry bread and muffins, and he’s about to throw them all out when one afternoon, as he’s getting ready to serve the women coffee, he overhears the friend crying and telling his grandmother how unhappy she is because she lives with her son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren in their small house and she doesn’t want to be a burden, doesn’t want to be any trouble, and that’s why she leaves the house every day with her empty coffee can to pick blackberries. But now the season’s over, she weeps, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself anymore. In the final scene, the grandson decides to keep all the blackberries she’s picked, and he bakes for days.

  It was an overwritten, sentimental story, something I wouldn’t know till months had passed after finishing it. But as I wrote that last line my heart was thumping against my sternum and my mouth was dry and I felt pulled along by something larger than I was, something not in me but in this story that had come out of me.

  It was a Saturday afternoon, warm enough I didn’t need a jacket. I grabbed my workout clothes and left my apartment. The inside of my car smelled like sawdust and the leather of my carpentry apron on the backseat. For a few miles the day was too bright and real and I blinked at it from the dream I’d cast myself in with the two old ladies and the young man and all those blackberries. Then I was on the back roads heading west. Instead of playing the radio, hunting for that one good song, I drove along in silence. On both sides of the road were woods, but today, for the first time, I saw them as individual trees, each one different from the one beside it or in front of it or behind it. One was as bent with age and weight as an old man, another as thin and straight as a young girl, one pine, the other maple or elm or oak, and the sun seemed to shine on each sprouting leaf, on each needle, on the black telephone lines sweeping from pole to pole, on the veined creosote at their bases, on each pebble at the side of the road, each broken piece of asphalt, each diamond of broken glass from a smashed bottle or cracked mirror or discarded compact from a woman I would never meet. And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I’d lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and writing—even writing badly—had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay this awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.

  SOMETIME LATER I gave Pop and Peggy a copy of my story, “Blackberries.” Pop read it first, then Peggy. She said, “Writing’s hard, isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  Pop said the story started to make him feel something. Then he said, “I had a hunch you were going to do this.”

  “What?”

  “Write.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I know, but I did.”

  I nodded again. There was a change in the air, a shift in winds, and I wasn’t sure any of this was a good thing.

  “You should tend bar.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a great job for a writer. You can write in the morning and work at night.”

  But I wasn’t a writer. He was a writer. I didn’t want to be a writer. I just knew I had to write.

  “It’s a good job for a graduate student, too. You’ll need some pocket money working on that Ph.D.”

  It was strange to hear him offering such fatherly advice, but I knew he was right and I took it.

  That summer he paid my way to the American Academy of Bartending in South Boston. It was in the same neighborhoods where my sister was raped, but I felt at home among the row houses and tin-sided apartment buildings, the overflowing dumpster beside the pool hall across from the barroom and sub shop and gas station where a black man in a greasy winter coat stood all day under the sun beside the shopping cart that held his life.

  The bartending school was on the second floor above an Italian grocery and an Irish pub. It was a long damp room, and it held four bars the students were supposed to practice on. The carpet was a flattened orange shag, the walls fake white paneling between smudged windows looking out over the street. The instructor was from the same generation as Tony Pavone. He had a thick Dorchester accent and wore glasses with black frames, his graying hair combed back with Vitalis. During class, he wore a white shirt and a black bow tie and vest, its worn hem rubbing along the belt of his pants as he talked with his hands. He was from a time and place I knew nothing about, and over the next few days he taught five or six of us how to mix martinis and Manhattans, Brandy Alexanders, sidecars, and Rob Roys. He taught us how to open bottles of wine and how to pull a draft off the tap. He suggested we keep a lighter in our pocket in case a customer wanted to smoke, and he gave us a lecture on doing things right. Especially when it came to watching the till.

  “You people are the money handlers for the whole operation, you understand? So be honest and don’t tell no jokes when you’re makin’ change, all right?”

  He made me think of resorts and casinos, all-night joints where Cadillac convertibles were parked under palm trees in a soft blue light. He made me think vaguely of organized crime.

  At the end of the week I had my certificate proclaiming me a successful graduate of the American Academy of Bartending. That same week Trevor D. handed me my last check. We were standing in the sunlit yard of the widow’s small home, larger now, something I’d always wondered about, this need of hers to expand when her life had gotten smaller and simpler, so why enlarge a house for only one?

  “No jobs coming up, mate. I’ll try to keep your brother working, but you don’t have a kid so good luck to you.” He shook my hand, his larger and more callused. I thanked him for all I’d begun to learn and drove away, the sun still high above the telephone lines and rooftops and trees. I’d started another story, this one set in New Hampshire and told from the point of view of a teenage girl whose family was moving when she didn’t want to. She smoked a lot, often late at night among packed boxes in the dark living room, her family asleep upstairs. In the last writing session, she was drawing deeply on her Kool, its tip a bright ember she was thinking of putting to dry cardboard.

  Rent was due and there was only a month left before I was to drive west for studies I was no longer pulled toward, so I left my apartment in Lynn and moved in with Pop, Peggy, Cadence, and Nicole. He gave me the spare room on the first floor, the same one he and I had broken into when he lived here with his second wife, Lorraine leaning against the doorframe in her nightgown, smoking, waiting for us. Except for those two weeks between women when he’d stayed with us on Columbia Park and slept in my room, I hadn’t lived in the same space with him since I was a boy in the woods of New Hampshire. It was strange to share a house with him; I felt like some hovering ghost of the boy I had been.

  Soon enough I owned a black vest and bow tie, a white shirt and black nylon pants and black shoes, all of which I’d bought in pieces in strip malls. I’d gotten a bartending job working for a small catering company who did private parties for people wealthy enough to cater parties. They were in Boston in neighborhoods where surgeons and bankers and corporate executives lived. Except for some of the bigger houses in Bradford, I had never even seen homes this big and comfortable. They were on wide quiet streets, the unbroken sidewalks shaded by maples and oaks, and many of the houses were behind tall walls of stone and thick green hedges ten feet high. Some had security gates, and my boss—a funny and warm man going bald at thirty-five who referred to himself as a bisexual Jew—would get out of the van and announce us into an intercom. A
metal gate would slide open and we’d be directed to a service area, the place where I learned the cleaning people parked, the cook or nanny, the pool men, the gardener, and any tradesmen who’d come to work on the house.

  It was a dry August and many of the parties were outside under cream-colored tents. We’d carry our bins of food and bags of ice and kegs of beer and cases of wine and liquor out to lawns that usually held a clay tennis court, a pool and pool house, a lush rose garden alongside hedges like those hiding the walls from the street. There would be tables set up under white linens, votive candles floating in glass bowls of water. I’d set up my bar in a corner of the tent or up on a veranda, and while I cut limes into wedges, as I emptied jars of olives and pearl onions and maraschino cherries into their respective dishes, as I cored lemons and sliced the skins into twists, I took in how the owners were usually polite enough but spoke to us all in the clipped and patronizing tones reserved for children or the mentally impaired. It was the same tone I would hear from owners on construction sites, the surprise the widow had shown when Jeb first saw her piano and mentioned he was a classical guitarist. She smiled and looked him up and down, his carpenter’s apron and framing hammer hanging against paint-splattered jeans with the hole in one knee, his scuffed work boots, the two days of whiskers on his cheeks and chin. She clearly did not believe him, something which didn’t seem to bother him the way it was bothering me, and I was glad he began to describe the piece he was teaching himself, something by J. S. Bach, and he was going on long enough about it her face began to soften, and a light came into her eyes that looked less like revelation and more like guilt.

  At one function, I had set up my bar in a high-ceilinged room. There was gleaming furniture laid out on Oriental carpets, and the walls were a raised-panel oak I was admiring, waiting for the party to begin, when a woman five or six years older than I came up to the bar and stared at me. She was lovely, her blonde hair pulled up in a twist, her clavicle tanned above a black cocktail dress. She said, “Aren’t you Andre Dubus’s son?”