Townie

by Andre Dubus III

“No.”

  Maybe he walked off after that, maybe he punched me in the head, I’m not sure, but of all the places we’d lived so far it was clear this was going to be the meanest.

  From our open windows, the inside of the house hot as a box, there was the day-and-night swearing and shouting of men and women fighting; we could hear the lowriders revving their engines out front of the Hog Penny Head Shop down the block; there was the constant rumble of motorcycles two streets over. On the hottest days you could smell the wood from the lumberyard on the other side of Water Street, the piss and shit of the drunks in the weeds, the engine exhaust, the sweet lead of the paint flaking off our clapboards.

  Food was scarce now. Even with our father’s child support payments, only a few hundred a month, my mother just didn’t make enough to keep the fridge and cabinets stocked. It was hard enough keeping the rent paid on time, the electricity on, the phone. It was hard enough just to keep all four of us growing kids in at least one pair of pants, shirts, and underwear, and a pair of shoes that might last a year. It was hard enough to keep her succession of used cars gassed up and running, though I don’t believe she ever filled a tank; so many times she’d pull up to the pumps, dig through her purse for change, smile at the attendant, and say something like, “A dollar and fourteen cents’ worth, please.”

  What money she did have budgeted for food went to meals she could cook quickly after she got home from work: canned soup or stew, macaroni and cheese, or the one we had most often, Frito Pie. Standing there in her earrings and work clothes—ironed pants and a blouse, maybe a bracelet around her wrist—she’d open a bag of Fritos, spread some out on the bottom of a casserole dish, then dump in two cans of Hormel chili, cover it with a layer of raw onions, more Fritos, and grated cheese. She’d bake this for thirty or forty minutes, the smell filling the downstairs like home cooking used to, and then we’d all grab a bowlful and eat on the floor in front of The Waltons or All in the Family. Many nights she’d come home with grease-stained bags from McDonald’s or Burger King, convenient meals she couldn’t afford.

  Once a week, usually a Sunday, Pop would pick us up in his old Lancer and take the four of us to an air-conditioned movie. We’d sit in the cool dark of the theater eating hot buttery popcorn, sipping a cold sweet Coke, the movie stars so handsome and beautiful, and it was like being on furlough from a penal colony, the hug from Pop as he dropped us back off, the smell of Old Spice on his cheek above his beard, his hand patting my back.

  AFTER A few months, we moved to Arlington Street on the North End. It was a street with trees on it and houses that seemed looked after, and there were no more roaming kids or fighting sounds, and we settled in for a year in a whole house with a fenced backyard and grass. Across the street was the hospital, and we could hear the ambulances come and go, their sirens starting up or winding down. Sometimes they’d come back quiet, and I was sure whoever they’d picked up was dead inside.

  The North End was districted to a different school where I was new and the first morning a tall kid asked me what I was looking at and I said nothing and he and his two friends pushed me down and kicked me once or twice and after that I stayed in the dark corners and kept my head down and my mouth shut.

  Maybe we’d moved so much we didn’t know how to make friends, maybe we’d just gotten too used to keeping to ourselves, but on Arlington Street the four of us, no matter the weather, still spent afternoons in front of the TV. Mom would get home after dark and more and more now, her boyfriends were coming over too. One looked like an outlaw; he had long blond hair and a handlebar mustache, and he wore tight jeans and pretended he was interested in us. There was Maurice, a big and kind black man who, when they broke up, gave Mom a 45 record of Charley Pride’s rendition of “For the Good Times.” He asked her to please play it again and again. There was Dick from the South End whom she never liked but who came around all the time anyway. He was tall and had big arm muscles and short hair. Once we all had the flu and he showed up at the door with a bottle of penicillin.

  “Penicillin?” my mother said. “Are you crazy? You don’t just give kids penicillin.”

  He insisted she take it from him, this nearly quart-size brown bottle of antibiotic. It looked stolen from some warehouse.

  He went away, but I think he sat in his car outside a lot, waiting, hoping she’d change her mind and love him. He must’ve been there on a Sunday when Pop came by to get us; for a month we didn’t see Dick. Then late on a weeknight, all five of us in front of the TV, a bearded man knocked on the door. He was tall with Dick’s arm muscles. My mother opened the door partway.

  “It’s me, Patty. It’s Dickie,” and he laughed and ran his fingers through his whiskers. “See? I got a beard, hippie style! Just like your ex. I seen you like that so I grew it. See? Hippie style.”

  I don’t know what she said to that, but she went out to the porch and stood under the light talking to him for a long time and we didn’t see him anymore after that.

  THE FOLLOWING summer the landlord raised the rent and we had to move back to the South End, to Lime Street, a place many people from town called “Slime Street.” It was where Suzanne and I would go to school at the Jackman, three stories of crumbling brick I would learn years later had been condemned by the city but still stayed open for the kids of the South End. We now lived in an old clapboard house so close to the street you had to be careful not to step out too quickly onto the sidewalk or you’d fall into traffic. There was a small dirt yard in back I liked because it had a solid plank fence around it and nobody could see me there. I could be outside but invisible. I was hiding all the time.

  Across the street lived the Whelans. There were always three or four cars and trucks in their side yard, some on blocks, the hoods open or gone, and the father, Larry, worked on the engines every afternoon. He was short and had no front teeth and he drank from cans of Pabst he’d rest on the chassis. I don’t remember how many kids lived there, but a few years later his oldest son would go to prison for raping his twenty-seven-month old niece. Another would go for some other crime. And I assume that’s what happened to Clay.

  At fourteen or fifteen Clay Whelan was over six feet and slope-shouldered and sullen and mean. When he first saw me—flabby, weak, and quiet—he saw a target, and for the next year he’d corner me at school and squeeze my throat till I couldn’t breathe, he’d chase me the two blocks home and punch and kick me to the ground. He’d call Jeb a faggot and Suzanne and Nicole fuckin’ sluts, and I did nothing but run into the house and hide.

  More than ever now, the four of us stayed in every day after school and watched that one-eyed machine that would take us to other worlds. Hours and hours of it. Mom would get home between six and seven and fix us something quick and cheap, usually frozen or from a can, then the five of us would sit in the dark living room only feet from the street and watch more TV. If she looked over and asked me where I’d gotten a bruise or a cut, I’d tell her recess, playing. But recess at the Jackman was a forty-five-minute break on a square of asphalt out back where there were no balls and half the kids stood around taking drags off Marlboros then turning their heads to blow smoke away should one of the teachers see, though I don’t remember many teachers being out there. And these boys were even tougher than Clay Whelan.

  There was Cody Perkins, as short as I was but lean and loud. One morning in the middle of history, Mrs. Hamilton was talking about the Louisiana Purchase and he walked into the class and shouted to the back of the room, “Say it to my face, Sullivan. Say it to my fuckin’ face!”

  Sullivan was the biggest kid in school. In the sixth grade he was as tall as Clay but weighed close to 200 pounds. A month before, a wiry boy in the hallway said something to Sully he didn’t like and he whirled around and punched him in the face and knocked him out. Now he was back from his suspension and Cody Perkins, half his size, was waiting for him in front of class. Mrs. Hamilton started yelling at Perkins to leave, but Perkins was breathing hard like he just ran
here, his eyes on Sullivan who was up and coming for him.

  I was sitting close to this. I knew Sullivan would kill Perkins and I couldn’t understand how such a small kid could be so crazy, so brave.

  Somebody called out, “Kill him, Sully. Beat his head in.”

  Cody threw himself in the air and punched Sully in the chest. It was like watching a building crumble, the way Sullivan’s head dropped and his shoulders slumped and he curled forward into the air he couldn’t breathe anymore, his mouth open, his face gray, and Cody Perkins was punching him in the side of the head, in both eyes, in his nose and still-open mouth. Now there were more teachers in the room, two men who pulled Perkins off and he was kicking and trying to jerk himself away and only when he was gone did I remember he’d been screaming the whole time, not words but an anguished, unrelenting sound that could only come from some raging beast.

  Sully lay curled on the floor. He was bleeding and crying and still trying to breathe. He left school and I never saw him again and though I never spoke to Cody Perkins or he to me, I saw him all the time; I liked how loud he was. I liked how he walked around the Jackman or down the street with his chest out. A decade later he would become a prizefighter whose picture I would see tacked to telephone poles and the doors of barrooms. Sullivan had seemed nice enough, but I liked how Cody Perkins had destroyed him all by himself. Not like me, who hid daily from Clay and was too ashamed to tell my mother about getting chased and beat up three or four days a week, how I’d trip and fall and he would catch up to me, his eyes dark and intent, like this was something he just had to do, and the first punch was a green flash behind my eyes, the second a white shard, the third a dark mist, the fourth a muffled thud. By then I’d have curled up on the sidewalk or whatever backyard he’d found me in and he’d kick my back and head and legs, screaming or silent, breathing hard, walking away only when he was finished.

  ONE NIGHT a drunk walked off Lime Street into our house. It was after ten and we were watching TV, Mom upstairs and asleep for hours already, Nicole too. In the flickering blue light, I heard the man pissing, pissing on the floorboards of our hallway. Suzanne and Jeb and I looked at each other, then we watched him zip up and step back out onto Lime, a shadow stumbling under the streetlights.

  I don’t remember who cleaned it up, but the next night we sat in front of the TV eating food Mom had brought us from Burger King, and Suzanne said, “That kid across the street beats the shit out of Andre every day, you know.”

  “What? Who?”

  “That kid Clay. That fuckin’ moron Clay.”

  IT’D BEEN years since we’d seen Pop on a weeknight. It was a Tuesday or Wednesday in the spring. It was cool and the sun was going down and the last of its light made Larry’s cars look etched in the air, made him look more real standing there in his dirty white T-shirt and his no front teeth talking to my father. Pop looked so out of place. He wore corduroys and a sweater and loafers. Larry hadn’t shaved in two or three days, but Pop’s beard was meticulously trimmed, his cheeks and throat shaved smooth. I watched all this from one of our windows facing the street, my heart pulsing dully in my neck, a sickening sweat breaking out on my chest; part of me was relieved my father was here, but the rest of me hated myself for needing his help, and now I was scared because Clay ran out of his house, his shouting mother behind him, and he went after my father the same way he went after me, his right fist up, ready to throw it, and Larry stiff-armed him in the chest and was yelling so loud I could hear it through the glass, fuckin’ this and fuckin’ that, Larry’s face a dark hole.

  Pop hadn’t taken a step back, but he was pointing his finger at Clay like he was scolding him, trying to reason with him. He was talking to him like he might be a student in that place of rich kids where he taught in that green world that wasn’t ours, and I just knew Clay Whelan was about to beat up my father and any hope I may have felt would be stomped and I’d be forever running and looking over my shoulder and hiding wherever there was a door and a lock and no key.

  But Larry somehow sent Clay back inside. The screen door slammed behind him and his mother stood there in her sweats, her arms crossed under her heavy breasts. She eyed Pop like he was a foreigner.

  Afterward, sitting in our small dusty living room, Pop told me the father had banned his son from ever going near me again.

  “Banned him?”

  “I don’t think he used that word.”

  I knew my dad used words like that. I knew he wrote books and taught English to college kids, and it was strange having him be in our world for even this long and I was ashamed and wanted him to leave. But I was grateful to him for coming, and as he drove down Lime Street in his underpaid professor’s car, Larry back at work on the engine of a Buick, Clay’s house quiet in the lengthening shadows, I knew things had just gotten a lot worse.

  FOR A week I saw him at the Jackman, in the halls, in the asphalt yard, in the street out front, but he stayed away from me. He was like a wolf who’d been caught and defanged and sent back out into the wild a different wolf. But on the afternoon of the fifth day, the sun high over the clustered houses of the South End, George Labelle walked into our house and the living room where I sat with my brother and sisters in front of the TV. He was as big as Sullivan but fat, as mean as Clay but subservient, and he grabbed me by the shirt and yanked me to my feet. He had the beginnings of a mustache and he smelled like B.O. and Pepsi, and I was holding on to his fists as he started dragging me to the front door, making grunting sounds, his body so much larger than mine. I had never spoken to him and knew him only by name and I knew he was going to kill me once he got me onto Lime.

  Labelle’s face jerked forward. His eyes began to water. He let go of me and covered his head, and that’s when I saw Suzanne and the broom she held, its stiff bristles she kept jabbing at his skull. “Get out! Get the fuck out!”

  Labelle turned and she poked him in the face. He blinked and jumped back. “Shit! He paid me! Clay fuckin’ paid me!”

  “I said get out!” Suzanne jabbed him in the ear, the neck, the back of his head. Then he was fumbling with the doorknob and running across Lime Street to Clay waiting there on the sidewalk, his face a mixture of disappointment and amusement, his hit man kicked out of the house by my sister, my big sister Suzanne.

  SOMETIMES I’D have trouble breathing. I’d be standing in our small kitchen, my hands on the sink, and a big, invisible hand would squeeze my chest and rib cage. The room would start to tilt, and I’d sit on the floor awhile and stare straight ahead at the shifting wall. I’d stare at any blemish on my skin. I didn’t have many, but whenever I did I was convinced I’d been bitten by something poisonous—a spider or small snake that had slithered up from the river and into our house. I’d wake in the middle of the night and walk down the creaking stairwell to the bathroom and turn on the buzzing fluorescent light; I’d stare at a small red spot on my arm, convinced since I’d gone to bed that it had moved farther up toward my shoulder where it would soon disappear into my chest and heart and kill me. Sweat would break out on my forehead and the back of my neck. My mouth would be as dry as when Whelan chased me down the street. I didn’t want to give my mother something else to worry about, nor did I want her to see such fear and weakness in me, so I’d wake Suzanne in the tiny room she shared with Nicole. My older sister would climb out of bed and turn on the overhead bulb. She’d rub her eyes and squint down at the spot on my arm. “Andre, that’s a fucking zit. Go to sleep.”

  SUMMER CAME and now windows were open and there was Larry’s yelling, there was a woman yelling back at him or somebody else in another house, there was the canned laughter and commercial jingles of six or seven TVs, there was a bottle breaking, a drunk singing, a motorcycle or lowrider revving its engine, then peeling away from the curb, there were the smells of hot asphalt, the dusty concrete of broken sidewalks, cat shit and dog shit and gasoline, there was the wood baking in the lumberyard near the Merrimack, again the faint smell of sewage and motor oil and mud
, and when the wind blew in from the east you could smell the ocean, dead seaweed and open seashell and wet sand, and it was a Saturday and Jeb and I were running from Clay and Labelle and two others I didn’t even know; they’d come walking down the middle of Lime Street under the sun and seen us sitting on our stoop doing nothing.

  “Get ’em!”

  And we were up and running down Lime and across Water Street. We climbed a rusted chain-link fence and came down on a pallet of plywood and jumped off it to the ground. We ran past a forklift, its driver watching us under his cap, a cigarette between his lips, and my chest hurt and the air was too hot but we couldn’t stop and we ran past stacks of naked two-by-fours and two-by-sixes and two-by-eights, and we climbed onto this last stack and leapt over the fence into high weeds and chunks of broken cinderblock, and we kept running.

  We ended up under a pier on the river. It was cool and shaded under there. We crouched beneath heavy planks and cross timbers, their posts black with creosote, the lower ones near the water covered with white and green barnacles. Half sunk in the mud were broken glass and a couple of tires, and we could see beyond this to the sun glinting off the river. It felt safe.

  Jeb, eleven and thin but taller than I was, started gathering up pieces of colored glass. Even then he was making things: little sculptures made from junk, pictures he drew, watercolors, and he was always taking things apart—fan engines, radios, once the back of our TV just to see how it worked. He needed to know how things worked.

  I was happy to stay down here forever. Go steal some plywood and some nails and tools and build a floor and walls under the pier, make it a place only Jeb and I would know about. It was going to be hard to get back to the house without being seen. We’d have to wait till dark.

  I heard the helicopter before I saw it, the thock-thock-thock of its massive blades, the way the water spread out smooth and rippling as it hovered over the middle of the river. Then there was an orange and white boat there too, the letters COAST GUARD painted on its bow, two men in black wet suits and scuba gear jumping into the Merrimack.