Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  Only a year earlier it had been easy to see people as members of classes, as groups that could then be influenced, steered, and changed. But I no longer saw them that way, and why was I leaving for the Midwest to continue studying them like this? How could a man aim his M-16 at a young mother and her three boys? What part of himself did he have to kill to kill them? How was it possible for a woman and her children to be gunned down while elsewhere, at that exact moment, people laughed and drank and ate and made love?

  There was a dime in my pocket under my check and bow tie. Soon I was standing in an outdoor phone booth dialing my father’s number. When he answered, I told him I wasn’t coming home.

  Why not?

  I don’t know, I’m just—I’m fucked up.

  You been drinking?

  No. The world’s fucked up, Pop. It’s just so fucked up.

  Come home.

  It was his home, his and his third family’s, but hearing him say that was like feeling his arm reach out and pull me in for a hug.

  No.

  Don’t miss your train, son. Come home.

  No, I can’t. I just—I’ll see you tomorrow.

  Andre?

  Yeah?

  Meet me at Fenway Park. It’s where the Red Sox play. There’s an afternoon game and I’ve got tickets. I’ll give one to you.

  A game. How could people play games?

  Maybe.

  I hung up and began walking away from the noise and bright lights and music and laughter. The night was cooling. Three blocks north was a concrete overpass. It had two levels of traffic coming and going, and on the other side were the brownstone apartments and mansions of the rich. I could see the glow of their windows, the nearly translucent curtains separating the city from their cooled rooms. Then I was standing on the sidewalk under the bridge. It was dark here, the only light coming from passing cars. Across the street a hooded homeless man sat on a guardrail beside a shopping cart. It was stuffed with bundles wrapped tightly in trash-bag plastic, and hanging from the front was a clear sack of empty bottles and cans. Taped to the cart’s handle was a small flag jutting out at an angle, a rally flag of some kind, the soiled logo of a sports team or car racing team or college crew. Behind him and up a dirt embankment just under the overpass, four or five men were passing around a bottle. One of them was yelling about something, his words so slurred they sounded like a foreign tongue.

  I turned and left the sidewalk and walked over matted grass. I climbed a rise to the concrete pad that held the footings that held the steel girders on this end of the bridge. There was broken glass here and old rags, a white sweater balled up beside a square of warped plywood, but no men or women. Down to my right a culvert of water flowed west under Storrow Drive and the jogging park beyond into the Charles River, MIT on the other side, Harvard, the best schools for the finest minds, and I stepped over broken glass and up the concrete incline till I could touch the steel of the girders. I smelled mud and dried urine and the sticky sweetness of cheap wine. In the shadows I could see how the steel plates were bolted into the concrete and between each beam was a six-foot gap. The footing they rested on was chest-high, and I reached out and brushed away a few pebbles, an empty beer can, a rotted sock. The underside of the overpass was sixteen or eighteen inches above where I’d just cleaned and as each car or truck rolled over me, I could feel a slight compression in the air, the tires a muted rumble.

  I pulled myself up and kept my head low and lay down on my back. To the left was a concrete wall, at my feet and head was steel; the only way at me was from where I’d just come, and I turned on my side in that direction and curled my legs up and rested my head against my arm and pushed my fingers between my knees. The drunks sounded closer than before, but I could see them fifty or a hundred yards away huddled in the darkness on the other underside of this bridge. I could still hear the Saturday night noise of Kenmore Square, but it was muted now, and I closed my eyes, and there were the three dead boys, their mother’s body doing all it could not do.

  Then I was a boy again, curled in my bed across from Jeb’s while downstairs Mom and Pop and their friends laughed and drank and argued, and all across the earth wars raged like fires, and not one of us seemed to know how to put them out.

  I WOKE just an hour or two after dawn. Sometime in the night I must’ve rolled to my left because I opened my eyes to concrete, the embedded grain of the plywood forms it had been poured in. I started to roll away, but then remembered the five-foot drop. The traffic above my face was constant now, the roll and bump over the expansion joints of one car after another. My mouth tasted like dry iron and I was hungry and thirsty and turned to see a pale blade of sun shining onto the matted grass beside the culvert. Down the length of the overpass and up the other embankment the drunks were gone. I reached into my pocket for my boss’s check, hoping to see a Boston bank written on it. There was, though it was also Sunday, wasn’t it?

  But I had a bank card in my wallet, and I knew there were bank machines in Harvard Square across from where men played chess under the trees in front of Au Bon Pain. An hour later, after a long walk, I had money and was eating a croissant at a small table there. The orange juice was cold and freshly squeezed and I began to feel grateful for these gifts, small as they were. The despair from the night before hadn’t completely lifted, but was it wrong to feel grateful for the small gifts in my life? Wasn’t I fortunate to have something in the bank? Wasn’t I fortunate to have a plastic card I could push into a machine to get it? Now I was eating in the sunshine, watching men play chess in the shade. I’d played it once but wasn’t good at it. With chess, you had to think ahead and weigh the probability of your opponent’s countermoves. You had to be cool and rational and clear-headed, three qualities I just did not seem to possess.

  I stood and brushed the crumbs off my pants. There was still grit there from sleeping under the overpass, and I slapped off as much as I could. On the sidewalk I stopped two guys my age, both of them in jeans and T-shirts. The taller one held a grocery bag under his arm, and I asked them where the Red Sox play.

  “Today?” the shorter one said. “Home.”

  “Fenway Park, right?”

  He narrowed his eyes at me, trying to decide whether I was fucking with him or not. “Where do they play when they’re at home?”

  “Yeah, I’m supposed to meet someone there.”

  “That’s right, Fenway,” the taller one said, and he started walking again. “It’s right off Kenmore Square.”

  The short one shook his head and kept walking too, and so did I, back in the direction from which I’d come.

  MY BEER was cold and the sun was hot on my face. It was the first baseball game I’d ever watched with my father, and the second I’d ever seen. He sat two seats away from me in the crowd, this living, breathing quilt I felt sewn into. He wore a red short-sleeve shirt and a baseball cap, its visor shadowing the sun, his thick beard lit by it. In one hand he held a plastic cup of beer, in the other a smoking pipe. He’d draw from his pipe, then sip his beer, his eyes intently on the men playing down in the field. Between him and me was Richard. He was a poet who ran the bookstore at Bradford College, and I’d always liked him because he was thoughtful and kind and quiet. I sat beside him in my dusty black pants and white shirt, my black vest stuffed under my seat, my pocket full of cash.

  Then Pop and Richard and I were standing with all the others under the sun, cheering for a player who’d just hit the ball past another player out in the field. It was clear to me the runner was on our side and that’s why we were rooting him on as he made it to the last base before home. We sat back down and Richard and Pop were talking about that player, something about his record for the season, a good word, I thought, though I associated it with falling leaves or snow or rain or heat. Every now and then Pop would glance over at me and take in my face and hair, my whiskers and wrinkled bartending clothes, and I’d catch the concern in his eyes before he winked at me; he must’ve told Richard something, to
o, because they were both treating me with the gentle reverence reserved for someone in trouble.

  But that afternoon, drinking too much beer and sitting in the sun with my father and his friend, trouble was momentarily out there in the streets, away from the thousands of men, women, and kids watching these famous men play this famous game. Maybe the trick was to turn it all off sometimes. To concentrate on something comprehensible, though I knew it would take me years to understand this sport with all of its rules and apparently hidden strategies. I kept glancing over at Pop. He knew baseball and enjoyed every bit of watching it. He also spent his mornings writing deeply about men and women in some kind of pain. What was wrong with taking a break from all that?

  There was the crack of the bat, its splintered echo throughout the sunlit park, then we were all standing again cheering for these men we did not even know, cheering as one of them sprinted home and tapped the plate, dust rising up from beneath it like smoke from some underground fire.

  PART III

  HOLYHEAD

  14

  THE PRE-PAROLE CENTER was three stories of rambling brick for convicts from Canon City Penitentiary. It used to be a sorority house just blocks from the University of Colorado campus. The south windows looked out over the yard and its live oaks, the brick fraternity houses on the other side of the street, the rise of the Flat Irons beyond. The city of Boulder was nestled at the base of them, these naked rock faces hundreds of feet high, left behind by a glacier thousands of years earlier. In their crevices grew aspen and columbine and blue spruce, and there were trails you could hike to the top and look west toward Nederland and the Rocky Mountains or east out over the plains toward Denver. Over a year had passed since I’d watched that baseball game with my father, and now I stood in an inmate’s room, staring at the stars over the ridge of the Flat Irons.

  I was doing a head count. It was long after lights-out, and when I opened the doors to their rooms, the light from the hallway spilled over men in bunks. Some would be curled under blankets like boys, others lying flat on their backs and snoring, a few more facedown, a bare arm hanging off the side of the mattress. It was hard not to think of their victims then.

  There was Harlan G., who’d done five years for armed robbery. He committed most of his crimes in convenience stores during the day, and he wore no disguises. He liked to have security cameras pointing at him, maybe a customer or two in there as well, and the climax was always the same, sticking his loaded .38 in the face of the man or woman behind the counter just to see the terror in their eyes, to feel the absolute power he had over them as they did whatever he asked them to do, which was to empty the register into a paper bag he’d hand them. One time, though, he didn’t even ask for money, just walked into a store on a June afternoon and pressed his pistol under the chin of a man who looked like his father, the man who’d beat him up regularly as a kid.

  It was hard to imagine anyone beating up Harlan G. He was short and a lean 190 pounds of prison weight-room muscle. He had flat gray eyes and a flat crooked nose, and his only tattoos crawled up both forearms, two dragons, the one on the left breathing fire, the one on the right getting its head lopped off. But with Harlan G., who was quiet and kept to himself and who other inmates stayed away from, we never knew which part of him was the slayer or the slain. Was it the old Harlan getting its head lopped off? Or the new one, the man who worked for an HVAC contractor in Boulder and was forced to go to AA meetings and classes in anger management, the one who, as a condition of his parole, was not allowed to travel back to his old neighborhood in East Denver? It’s where the projects were, and it’s where he and a lot of the other inmates had been raised.

  There was Dozer whose real name was Gil, a six-foot, 330-pound biker with the Sons of Silence. He’d done time for weapons violations and for dealing cocaine and crystal meth, and the first time I saw him was on a Friday night. He walked into the office without permission, swearing, two house-rule violations already. His voice was a booming rasp staccato, gun blasts from a rusty barrel. “Those fuckin’ frat boys park in my fuckin’ space one more fuckin’ time I’ll take a fuckin’ bat to their motherfuckin’ heads!” Dozer’s hair was a gray two-foot braid down his back, his jacket black leather he had custom-tailored by an old woman down in Loveland. I later learned the inside pocket was reinforced to carry a 9-millimeter, something the state had forbade him from doing ever again. I was standing behind the desk under the fluorescent light of the office, the only C.T. in the room, the new one he hadn’t met yet, and I was weighing whether or not to write Dozer up right then for walking in like this, for a verbal threat and for profanity, but Dozer’s case manager, Buddy J., stuck his head in the office door and said, “Take a breath, Dozer, and come see me right now, please.” Buddy J. was from New York City. He had long brown hair and a brown mustache and wore black a lot. The inmates respected him.

  “The little motherfuckers.” Dozer wiped his forehead with the back of his tattooed hand. He pulled off his leather and glanced down at me as if I should’ve done something for him by now. He wore a dark T-shirt, his arms an endless scrawl of blue and purple and green, his throat too. As he walked by I read the white lettering across his massive sagging chest: Riding a Honda’s Like Fucking a Faggot. On his back was: It Feels Good Till Somebody Sees You.

  Manny was older than my father, a handsome Latino with thinning hair and a graying mustache who liked to linger in the mess hall over cooling coffee and talk about the old days. It was winter now, a Sunday afternoon, and inmates who’d been denied weekend furloughs were allowed to lounge at the dining tables, playing cards or backgammon or dominoes. One of them was my age, a baby-faced kleptomaniac named Lenny. He’d sit in a corner and strum his guitar and sing mainly old Hank Williams. His favorite was “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and even if he was a bit off-key now and then, the other men never told him to shut up. Instead they’d ask him to sing that one over and over again.

  There were fifty-seven inmates in the house, but no more than a dozen or so would get weekend furloughs. Not because of any infractions weighing against them but because they were from neighborhoods that had forged them into the criminals they’d become. It was where their families lived—their wives and mothers, sons and daughters and brothers and aunts. But it’s also where the inmates had learned the skills that had made them offenders, men and women who offend the rest of us with their stealing and dealing, their scamming and stabbing and shooting, with their rage.

  That afternoon it had been snowing steadily for an hour or two, but now a wind had picked up, and we could see outside the windows of the mess hall the snow blowing sideways at the oak and hedges bordering the street, everything white, and Manny was talking in his smooth voice about Christmas. He sat across from Curtis, another inmate my age, a frizzy-haired, bucktoothed armed robber who liked to read and wanted to go back to school and be a horse doctor. Manny was telling his Christmas story to Curtis, but he kept looking over at me. I had one foot up on the dining table’s bench, my clipboard and red pen resting on my thigh. I’d just finished a head count, and Manny must have known I liked his stories because he raised his voice just enough for me to hear him.

  “It was Christmas Day in Denver, brother.” And Manny told us of sitting at the bar just after noon sipping a V.O. and ginger, the only thing he ever drank. He was drinking alone, thinking about business, about people who owed him money and how hard it was to collect at Christmastime. He’d stepped into the bar because the air in the streets was so cold it “froze my face, brother. You know, it hurt your skin.”

  Curtis nodded and began talking about winters he’d known. In the corner of the mess hall, the kleptomaniac was singing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” his voice high and plaintive, and Dozer was laughing too hard as he won a hand, and Manny cut Curtis off about the ice storm that had sealed a canyon in Curtis’s youth. Manny kept talking: “It’s Christmas, but the bar is full, man, full of sad-assed players like me.” It was warm and dark as a ca
ve, and Freddy Fender was on the jukebox, and the bartender was an older woman with big breasts she didn’t mind showing off in a low-cut sweater, two Santa earrings swinging at each ear. Manny ordered another V.O. and ginger and was fishing in his pocket for some cash when a man behind him jumped up from a table and ran outside. From where he sat, Manny could see the whole scene out the oval window of the front door, as if it had been framed like that just for him. And he knew the man who’d rushed out to the street. It was Little Junior, a punk in the neighborhood who was into everything but his own business. He was small and always packing heat, and now he was pointing his finger an inch from a big man’s face, a black man Manny had seen around for years. Manny turned to the barmaid who’d just finished mixing his drink, setting it on the bar in front of him, when four shots thumped through the air outside and Manny turned to see through the oval frame Little Junior falling away, the black man out of sight.

  “We all went out there. You know, we stood around Little Junior just looking at him ’cause he was gone, brother. You didn’t have to take his pulse or nothing.”

  Little Junior lay flat on his back, his arms and legs spread like he was going to make a snow angel. Only there was no snow, just the frozen air, and all four shots had ripped through his chest and now Manny was getting to the end of his story, the point that made him tell us in the first place.

  “There was steam rising out of them holes, man. You could see it coming out of him.” Manny looked from Curtis to me. He shook his head. “I know that was the heat of his body, but it was Christmas Day, brother, so I seen that as his soul, Little Junior’s dirty little soul, rising up over us all.”