Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  Then I was going back to the joint with him, living through being new in the prison yard, having to fight to save myself, even making a name as one not to fuck with, looking out for a smaller man in my cell block, all while counting the days till I’m free.

  It took five weeks to write a beginning, a middle, and an end. When I wrote that final passage it was raining outside and my breath was high in my chest and I was tapping my foot under the desk, my hand and pencil joined together. The room was quiet. There was just my breathing and the ticking of rain against the glass.

  OVER THE next few days, I typed the story on a black Royal typewriter I’d bought from a woman in Loveland. I’d found her through the classified ads of the newspaper and drove out to where she lived in an Airstream trailer in a brown valley in the shadow of a mountain. She had two typewriters to sell, both of them her father’s. He’d been a journalist and war correspondent and had just died. She told me this almost cheerfully, this kind-faced woman in a smock and jeans, but when I pointed to the one I wanted, she began to cry. She shook her head and covered her mouth and apologized. She asked if fifty dollars was too much, and I paid her and we hugged each other as if we had both lost him, and now I was typing the last line of my story on her father’s black Royal.

  It was only seven pages long. I called it “Forky” and drove to a copy center across from campus, made six copies, then mailed five to magazines, one in Boston, three in New York City, and one in Chicago. It was the first time I’d done that. It was like throwing a rock over a cliff and waiting to see if it would make a sound.

  The sixth copy I mailed to the only writers I knew, my father and his wife back East. Three days later, there was a knock on my door, a skinny drunk who lived across from the phone booth telling me I had a call.

  It was Pop. “Son?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re a writer, man.”

  He’d told me that once before and I’d deflected it, deflected the word itself, but hearing it now was different for I felt tied only to what gave birth to that word, the writing, the sweet labor of it, and now he was talking about this new story, praising it far more than I thought it deserved. But hanging up, I was grateful for the call, for my far more experienced father to take the time to see what I was doing and say something about it. This was something he had never done much of, and as I walked back down the hall to my room, there was the feeling I’d stepped into a river whose current was taking me to someplace good.

  IT WAS night and I was back on Columbia Park again. The house was full of men drinking and smoking, trash-talking and yelling, laughing across rooms to one another through the noise from our stereo they’d cranked too loud. I was sick and weak, my mouth dust and ash, and my hands were unable to grasp anything though I was trying to yank men out of chairs and off our wicker couch. I was screaming to get out, get the fuck out, and I was kicking and throwing wispy punches that missed. I got only one or two men out the front door and off the porch, my face burning, my stomach rising up, then I was on my knees, my head resting against the cool seat of the toilet. I was in my bathroom in Boulder, and I’d been this way for days. It was some microscopic bug, but it felt like punishment. For everything. For keeping over fifty men in line with my clipboard and red pen. For never clearing anybody dangerous out of my house. For all the faces I’d punched.

  I was tired of living alone a mile above sea level and so far from a beach or anyone who’d known me for a long time. I was tired of the inmates, of being one of the men who stood between them and freedom. And something had changed in me. I no longer wanted to be proving myself to myself over and over again. It was time to go back East. It was time to go home.

  THREE WEEKS later I’d gotten back in the mail four of the stamped self-addressed envelopes I’d sent to Boston and New York City. Each of them came with a form letter, a note really, no more than three lines long. Thank you for your interest in our magazine, but unfortunately this piece is not right for us. Sincerely Yours. Only one of them had a name beneath that, and it came from an inked stamp, a scrawl of letters I couldn’t read.

  When the fifth one came I didn’t open it right away. It was a manila envelope with my story in it, and I felt little about this, which told me I hadn’t expected much in the first place. But I knew I’d send it out again. Why not? I was done with it.

  I was checking my savings passbook. I had enough to gas up and drive two thousand miles east, to stay at a cheap place along the way if I had to, but there wasn’t enough for first and last month’s rent once I got there, and I didn’t want to crash at Pop’s place, or Jeb’s, or Sam and Theresa’s. It was late spring, early summer. I saw myself in Boston, maybe working in a halfway house, doing some kind of good while I lived alone and taught myself to write more honestly. I wanted to find a job at night so I could write all day.

  Before I could leave, though, I’d have to work here longer. There were more jobs I could do for Christof. I’d trailed a diamond thief for him once, a tall black man in a brown suit I followed through the streets of Denver for two days. I watched him walk into one jewelry store after another, trying to switch real diamonds for zircons. I’d logged what I’d seen, passed it on to Christof and got paid three hundred dollars.

  I picked up the fifth manila envelope and opened it. Clipped to my manuscript was a long typewritten letter. At first I thought it was a detailed criticism of why they wouldn’t even think of publishing my story. But there were adjectives of praise, a few editing suggestions, and at the bottom of the page what they, Playboy magazine, planned to pay me for this story: two thousand dollars.

  It was hard to imagine having that much money in my pocket, but my fingers were trembling and my feet were air, and I was running down the motel hallway to the pay phone to call someone, but who? Who?

  I pushed a dime into the slot and pressed 0. A woman answered. She had the voice of a lover, and I asked her to make the following call collect to this number, and tell him I’ll pay him back later. Tell my father I can pay every bit of it back.

  15

  I WAS LIVING ACROSS the river in Bradford Square in a one-room apartment above a fish market and a shoe repair shop. My apartment’s heat never seemed to turn off, so I kept my windows open and could smell shoe polish and damp leather, fresh fish and the cool water of the lobster tank, car exhaust and the Merrimack, a smell I now associated with home. Two doors down from me was Ronnie D’s bar, and on Friday and Saturday nights I could hear the bar noise out in the streets. Sometimes they’d keep the door propped open, and there was the din of talk and laughter, the jukebox thumping out a tune, a man shouting at a game on the TV. At last call, just before one in the morning, the regulars stood on the sidewalk out front smoking cigarettes or a joint, drunk and brain-happy and not wanting to go home. Some nights I was down there with them, standing with Sam and Theresa and maybe a woman I’d met. Pop would be down there too, looking for a party to go to next, or breakfast, or the Dunkin’ Donuts across the river that he and one of his friends called “Dizzy Donuts” because they’d walk in there between two and four in the morning to sober up on crullers and coffee, flirt with the waitress under the flat fluorescent light.

  But on this night I’d stayed in, and now it was after last call and I could hear a fight outside. Yeah, mothuhfucka? Then the dulled thump of a fist on flesh, a woman shrieking, Kill him, Bryan! Fuckin’ kill him!

  I looked out my window and there in the middle of Main under the dim flicker of the streetlights, one man lay curled on his side and another man was on one knee punching him in the face, but the man kept covering up with his arms and hands so the other stood and began kicking him in the chest and shoulders and head.

  I told you, Joey! I fuckin’ told you!

  The kicker was my age. He wore jeans and work boots and a denim jacket that Big Pat Cahill grabbed and jerked backwards, the man pivoting to throw a punch till he saw it was Pat and dropped his hands. He was breathing hard. I knew him. It was Bryan F. He’d been
one of the kids from the bus stop at the corner of Seventh and Main, one of the kids who’d sat on the steps beside Pleasant Spa toking on a joint from Nicky G., taking a hit off the Southern Comfort bottle from Glenn P.

  Bryan’s hair was shorter now and even from my second-story window I could see his three-day beard, a blue-black shadow of whiskers covering the same square jaw he’d had as a kid twelve years earlier. Cahill was telling him to get going, somebody had called the cops. The man Bryan had beat on was rising to his feet. He was a tall bundle of rags, a stoop-shouldered long-hair who slunk back into the bar crowd in front of Ronnie D’s. Pat yelled at everyone to go the hell home, and Bryan was walking under my window now with someone I couldn’t see.

  “I just had to do that, man. I’ve been in a mood to fight all fuckin’ day.”

  I moved away from my window and lay back down on my mat. My heart was twitching like a dreaming dog. In the mood. Fuck him. His day or life wasn’t going well in one way or another, so now he wanted to pound on somebody. And despite what writing was doing to me, I wanted to pound him. I stared at the ceiling. Headlights swept across it in a flash, and it was like getting punched in the head. The light that shot into your brain, how it made you want to do the same to another.

  PHOENIX EAST was a rambling halfway house in the lot behind the Haverhill police station and town hall, and I worked the overnight shift there two or three times a week. Afternoons I worked for a lady cleaning houses, and sometimes Sam Dolan’s father, still the health inspector, would pay me twenty-five dollars to dig perk holes for him with a pick and shovel. It was enough to pay my bills and every morning I wrote.

  Most of the residents of Phoenix East were recovering alcoholics and drug addicts, and most of them were between eighteen and twenty-five. They were the kids of broken families, the kids of single mothers who did what they could and often it just wasn’t enough. Some of the residents drank too much coffee and were scrawny and smoked one cigarette after another. Others were heavy or obese and moved glumly through the day attending AA and NA meetings, working a day job in a fast food restaurant or for a cleaning company, getting rides to and from work in the house van. At the end of the week they signed their checks over to their counselor who then deposited it into the account that went to their court-ordered restitution, the payback for their crimes: shoplifting, burglary, writing bad checks, and there were always people on the other end who’d been made victims and wanted theirs.

  There was one young woman in the house who kept having panic attacks and would carry a folded paper bag in her back pocket in case she hyperventilated. On the third floor, in a converted attic that smelled like horsehair plaster and old socks, lived three schizophrenics who rarely left the house. They were older, in their thirties and forties, and one of them was bald and all three had beards and wore glasses. Every few hours, the day counselors would climb the creaking stairs and hand each of them a cocktail of psychotropic drugs they washed down with a Dixie cup of water or weak Kool-Aid. There was a TV up there that never seemed to be off, and along the knee wall beneath the rafters were stacked dozens of paperbacks beside magazines and newspapers and notebooks one of them wrote in every day and night. We called them “the three wise men.”

  One early morning after my shift I was sitting on the steps of Phoenix East when I saw Crazy Jack walking across the lot from Main Street. For years he had been roaming the streets, walking up and down the sidewalks talking to himself, yelling and swearing. He had long brown hair and a beard and wore dark T-shirts and old jeans. In the winter I’d sometimes see him in a parka, the sleeves too short, or he’d be in a camouflaged hunting jacket, the sleeves too long, and all four seasons he wore a navy wool cap on his head.

  One afternoon years before, I was walking through the parking lot of DeMoulas grocery. It was a weekend and mothers and their little kids were going into the place or leaving it, pushing their loaded carts ahead of them, the kids running beside it or jumping on it, and Crazy Jack stood in an empty parking space, his dark eyes on me. “How’s it feel to be a chickenshit!? Huh?! How’s it fuckin’ feel?!”

  I kept walking. That was the only way to deal with Crazy Jack, to ignore him, something the town had been doing for so long.

  MY NIGHT shift started at eleven when all the residents were in bed and it was lights-out. The second-shift counselor would brief me on anything I needed to know, if one of them had “acted out” that day, or if there were any new issues in the air. The counselors I relieved were college-educated, well-meaning, young and white, and whenever I took the house log and shut the front door behind them, locking it twice, I felt between two planes: theirs, which I shared, and the young men and women lying in the dark upstairs.

  Donny C. was twenty-two, clean and sober, and living by court order in Phoenix East. With his olive skin and thick black hair, he would’ve been handsome if it weren’t for his flattened nose and that he smoked cigarette after cigarette and called people stinkbums. He’d grown up in South Boston and knew his father only from sporadic visits to the state prison in Walpole. His mother didn’t have a car so Donny didn’t see much of him. He said to a counselor once that it was his brother who raised him, his big brother Francis whom everybody called Frankie C.

  When Donny was little, Frankie C. read him picture books at night. Walked him to and from school so nobody would mess with him. Taught him how to shoot a basketball and later how to smoke a cigarette and drink a few beers, though that’s where he drew the line. Nothing harder was allowed. No liquor. No dope. But then Frankie C. got busted and sent to the same prison their old man had been paroled from.

  Donny C. was thirteen and lived alone with his mother. She smoked too much and lived off government checks and hardly ever left their apartment she kept spotless, everything in place. Donny C. fell in with the gangs, started dealing, starting drinking liquor and snorting lines. He stopped going to school and was high all the time. Sometimes he wouldn’t come home for over a week or more. After being up for days he’d crash on somebody’s couch in the projects, or in a car or van parked on Mission Hill where he woke up worried about getting shot for being white. His mother never called the cops because she knew what he was doing and couldn’t bear him being taken away from her, too, but when he’d finally stumble into their apartment she’d yell at him, tell him how worried she was and what if you die out there and nobody ever tells me?

  Donny told his counselor he knew he was fucking up his life, and that he better fly right soon because Frankie was up for parole. Frankie would be coming home, and Donny didn’t want to let him down. He was seventeen.

  The day Frankie C. was granted parole, he called home to tell his mother and brother himself. Their mother cried and apologized to Frankie for not being at the hearing, said she couldn’t find a ride out there and her breathing hadn’t been too good lately. Donny got on the phone. He told his counselor how Frankie’s voice was “like God” to him, the way He always knows what you’re up to. He said to Donny, “I want to shoot hoops with you soon as I get home.”

  Donny hung up and kissed his mother and went out and partied one last time. He found his boys and drank vodka shots and cold forties. They smoked blunts and snorted lines and washed it down with more vodka and beer. They did this in an empty warehouse down by the water. They were celebrating. But that night, Donny told his counselor, he knew when to stop. That night he was going home, and then he was going to clean up. From the inside out. For Frankie C. For their mother. For himself.

  When he stumbled home, his mother was crying on the sofa. Her hands were over her face, and the phone receiver was still in her lap. The TV was on. Donny turned it off. “What, Ma? What? What happened?”

  And it was like your whole life laughing at you, Donny said. “Like I had no right to be happy for one fuckin’ night, just one night.”

  She told him the news and he was screaming, pulling over the bookcase of her knickknacks, kicking them across the floor and stomping on them. He kicked the TV, the
stereo, ripped it off its stand and threw it across the room. Her screams were in the air with his now and so was the recliner he heaved onto its side and began kicking till its legs broke off, and he picked one up and whipped it at the glass window his brother would never stand at ever again; he wouldn’t sit here with him and Ma smoking and watching a show; he wouldn’t sleep in the back room; and he wouldn’t be shooting hoops with his little brother for God had been shanked, and now Donny’s mother was quiet, her face gray, and she was pressing her palms against her chest, and she was dead before Donny was even finished breaking all he needed to break. She was gone and he’d done it to her, and why wouldn’t he live in the streets after that? Sleeping under bridges and in dumpsters. Hustling his body. Dealing in whatever could be dealt. Getting drunk or high whenever he possibly could.

  The night I found Donny C., I was sitting in the front room sipping weak coffee. The overhead light was kept on twenty-four hours a day and it shone on donated furniture and a linoleum parquet floor that was dusty and needed to be swept and mopped. I’d just made a round of the rooms upstairs and everyone was asleep, the boys and men in rooms facing Main Street, the girls and women in the back. The main job of the overnight counselor seemed to be to keep residents from walking off, and to keep them from fucking. Three of the five women upstairs were gay. A week earlier, one of them, a pale, dead-eyed girl from Lawrence, told me she probably wasn’t gay but after all that had happened to her, well, she was now.

  There were no shades or curtains over the windows in the front room. Across the empty asphalt lot was the back of the police station, a security lamp shining down on three cruisers. I’d brought a book with me and was looking for a place to sit when I heard out in the kitchen the tink of metal on metal. I put down my book and coffee and listened. There was the sound of a stifled giggle, like a man laughing with two hands pressed over his mouth. Somebody must’ve crept down the rear staircase and was stealing food from the fridge or cabinet, maybe one of the three wise men, and that’s what I expected to see when I stepped into the kitchen.