Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  IT WAS late October, and the night was cold and wet. Sam’s mother and father were out, and seven or eight of us were drinking beer inside his house. Sam had his record player going in his room, “Locomotive Breath” playing over and over, Jimmy and April making out on the couch. Daley, Kelly, Chabot, and I were playing 45 at the kitchen table, and the twins sat with us drinking and laughing and looking good in their tight sweaters and leather jackets and jeans. Sam and April were up in his room on one of his beds while the music played loud enough it would’ve hurt their ears if they weren’t drunk and preoccupied.

  This went on until Sam came down in his corduroys and white T-shirt, his hair messed up. He said it was getting late. We’d better clean up before his parents got home.

  A while later, we filed outside, one of us carrying a plastic trash bag of our empties we’d stash somewhere. It was after midnight and we were standing around in the street. The air was colder and you could smell snow coming. Far off a train whistle sounded, the Boston & Maine on its last run of the night. I was drunk and didn’t know it till I reached out for Marie’s hand and missed.

  Headlights shone on us from up the hill. The car was moving slow and every few yards the driver stepped on the brakes, his taillights flashing red. We parted for him, a small sedan, two men sitting in the front, the driver looking out at us like we’d done something to him.

  “That’s my neighbor,” Sam said. “Let’s get goin’.”

  April S. said she’d left her pocketbook inside the house, and she and Jimmy went back inside to get it.

  Two houses down, the car jerked to a stop and parked half on the sidewalk. Both doors opened quickly and now the men were coming toward us. The light from Sam’s porch glowed dimly in the street, and I could see they were forty or fifty years old, their hair thinning, one tall, the other short and wearing a parka. “Why you running? You stealing from my street? You the little shits stealing from this street? Get outta here and don’tchoofucking come back.” The man was slurring his words. The tall one behind him was weaving slightly, his eyes on Marie’s breasts beneath her leather jacket.

  “Mr. T., it’s me, Sam Dolan. I live across the street from you.”

  “Don’t give me that shit. It’s you. Now get the hell off my street, you fuckin’ punks.”

  I was standing close to him now, Sam on my left, Greg on my right, the others behind us, and I didn’t like how this tall one kept looking at Marie. I didn’t like how the short one kept insulting us, ignoring Sam, his own neighbor, swearing at us.

  I stepped closer to him. “Fuck you, you ugly motherfucker.”

  A flash of yellow light snaked through my brain and there was black sky, then the streetlamp, then Sam’s porch light again and the man who’d punched me was saying one thing more, a numbing ache in my nose, and there was the sound of running, then a fist slammed into Sam’s neighbor’s face, and he dropped to the street, Jimmy Quinn straddling him, punching and punching. One of the twins was screaming, and Jeff and Kevin began walking the tall man back, and Sam was trying to grab Jimmy, who was yelling, “Motherfucker! Piece of shit motherfucker!” He stood and kicked the man in the chest and back and rolled him to a parked car where he picked him up by his parka and slammed him down, his head thudding against the bumper. He picked him up and did it again, the dull clang of skull on metal. He did it again and was lifting the man to do it once more, but now Sam grabbed Jimmy around the chest and pulled him back and away.

  “That’s enough, Jimmy. Enough.”

  Jimmy’s shirt was ripped at the collar. He was breathing hard. He pointed at the man lying on his side in the street. “Fuck you.”

  A man’s voice called from a window. “I called the cops!”

  We started running down Eighteenth Avenue, Jimmy and April ahead of me, her pocketbook jerking against her hip, her hand in his. I wished it’d been me who’d punched the man back, but as I ran drunk down the street with my friends, it felt as if something had just been revealed: Jimmy Quinn was as dangerous as everybody said he was, and even though I hadn’t hit anyone, I had talked back.

  I had just started something.

  FOR A week or more we waited for the cops to show up at Sam’s door, but nothing happened. Maybe the man woke up hurting and hungover and remembered very little, his friend either. Or, more likely, they’d probably woken to the knowledge they’d been in a fight with teenagers.

  A few Saturdays later, we were back at the Lanes, shooting pool. None of us had any money for beer or even a seven-dollar bottle of Kappy’s screwdriver mix, but we had enough quarters to play Eight Ball. I was no good at it, and when it was my turn to play the winner, I handed my pool cue to Big Jeff Chabot and walked past April S. sitting on Jimmy’s lap, April C. beside them, chewing gum and watching the old people bowl down on the floor. I was thirsty. Earlier in the day I’d worked out in the basement for over two hours, hitting all my body parts at once, something Sam had told me to do to put on size, to work out less, not more. For a month or so now, I was doing only three workouts a week, but I could already feel my T-shirts getting tight in the shoulders and back. There was a porcelain water fountain bolted into the wall near the door, and I leaned over and drank gulp after gulp of tepid city water, every bit of it tasting good. When I straightened up, three men in ice hockey clothes walked in. I didn’t know anything about hockey, but I recognized the oversized nylon shirts, all of them dark purple with orange stripes and big numbers printed on the back. The man in front had long red hair, still wet from sweating under a hockey helmet, and my heart started beating faster.

  Last winter Cleary and I had been waiting outside a package store a block away from Monument Square. It was a convenience store that sold beer, and we’d stood away from the fluorescent light of the windows and waited with the money he or I had stolen from our mothers. Across the street was the used car lot we’d run through tripping so long ago, it seemed, and now all the little white bulbs were fixed again and dangled over rows of repossessed Monte Carlos and Mustangs and LeSabres. A van pulled up beside us, the radio blasting “Bennie and the Jets.” The driver shut it off fast and slammed the door and stepped into the light. He had long red hair and needed a shave. He wore a dungaree jacket and didn’t look like a cop or anybody’s father, and Cleary said, “Hey, man, can you buy us some beers?”

  He looked at us hard. For a second we thought a no was coming, the fourth of the night. But then he walked over with his hand out, and Cleary handed him a ten-dollar bill, “Schlitz Tall Boys, please.”

  The man took the money without a word and disappeared inside the store. A cop car was cruising down the street and we stepped back around the corner and stayed there in the darkness between the cinderblock wall and the dumpster. Behind us was a three-decker house. I could see through the second-story window the pale blue flicker of a TV behind a thin curtain. Cleary was talking about where we should go to drink our Tall Boys, maybe back to the tree hut, maybe down to Railroad Square and the abandoned brewery we knew how to get into to get warm.

  An engine started up and we leapt around the corner to see the van backing fast away from the curb. We ran into the lot, shouting for him, but the redheaded man gave us the finger and stepped on it and was gone.

  Weeks later, Cleary and I were walking down Main Street late on a Friday night. It was after one in the morning and the town was quiet, the boxlike houses we walked beside dark and locked up, the shades drawn. We’d been at a party at the rent collectors’ on Seventh Avenue. They were fresh off a drug run down south, and the three small rooms of the apartment were wedged with people drinking and passing joints of Acapulco gold under the heart-tapping flash of a strobe light, the Stones playing “Brown Sugar.”

  In the bright kitchen, a man with long blond hair and an outlaw mustache sat at a table rolling joint after joint after joint. His chest was bare behind a leather vest, his arm muscles showing, and in a metal baking dish in front of him were hundreds of pot seeds he’d fingered from the dried leaf
. Beside him sat two girls in tight tube tops sharing a bottle of Southern Comfort.

  Cleary and I hadn’t been there since we’d gotten kicked out and beat on, but there were enough people we would get lost in the crowd and the noise and the smoke. It was too crowded, though, too loud, too smoky, the windows open to let in the winter air, the radiators steaming and too hot to touch. Then Billy G., a scrawny, sunken-chested collector who had a room one story below, he took a syringe and drew blood from his thin white arm and started shooting it at whoever was closest. One girl, a frizzy-headed Dominican, ran screaming into the bathroom, Billy G.’s blood dripping off her chin, and that’s when Cleary and I left.

  Close to Pleasant Spa and Columbia Park, beyond the stone steps of the Jewish temple, a man was walking toward us on the sidewalk. We’d been watching him come from a long way off. He had hair that fell past his shoulders, his hands inside the pockets of his jean jacket. He wore heavy work boots and was walking fast, then he was under the streetlamp and I could see his hair was red, scruff on his cheeks and chin.

  Cleary poked me in the arm. “That’s the fuckin’ van guy.” Cleary picked up his pace. “Hey! ’Member us? You owe us ten bucks.”

  Everything always seemed to happen so fast, like a fuse was forever lit and you never knew when a bomb would actually blow. The man had Cleary on his back against the granite steps of the temple, one hand around Cleary’s throat, a big fist raised high over his shoulder. “You want to die? Do you want to fuckin’ die tonight?”

  There was something wrong with his voice, something jagged and wired about it, and I thought he might be high on angel dust or some kind of speed. His raised fist was poised in the air where I could have just reached out and grabbed it, yanked his arm back, done something to him after that, anything. But I did nothing. Cleary said nothing. And soon the man was walking away from us down Main Street, his big hands back in his pockets, Cleary sitting up and rubbing his back.

  Now, a year later, my body changed, my friends shooting pool not far away, the same man was walking in with his friends after hockey and his eyes caught mine, and I said, “Where’s our ten bucks?”

  I could feel my heart against my sternum, but I felt strangely calm, almost confident.

  “Fuck off, kid. I don’t even know you.” And he brushed past me, looking back at me over his shoulder like I had just wronged him deeply. He looked away to order bowling shoes at the counter with his buddies, and I stood there staring at him. I believed he didn’t recognize me, but there was a nagging itch that I should go up to the counter and do more, a slowed-time feeling a fuse was lit inside me, its low flame sparking at its own pace, but this wasn’t the one.

  I walked back to my friends, and I could feel something coming farther down the road I just barely sensed I’d been training myself for all along.

  LIFE IS what happened between workouts. When I wasn’t down in the basement on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons working first my chest, then shoulders, back, and arms, ignoring my legs because I never wore shorts, even in the summer, then I was thinking about workouts, reading Muscle Builder magazine I now subscribed to, eating a lot of eggs and tuna fish, so much my mother began to complain about the cost. I began to think of getting some kind of job.

  By the spring of 1976, I could bench-press just under 200 pounds; I could do deep parallel-bar dips with 40-or 50-pound dumbbells hooked to my training belt. I could do rep after rep of wide-grip chin-ups, pulling myself so high the bar touched my chest. As the weather warmed and the snow melted, the streets smelling like mud and rotting leaves and twigs, I left my leather jacket at home and began to go out in a T-shirt; I had muscles now. They weren’t big, not nearly as big as Sam Dolan’s, or even Jimmy Quinn’s, but enough that people glanced at my chest and upper arms, took in my shoulders. There was the feeling that a good thing was happening to me, that all my hard work was bringing about a good thing.

  And I liked how much energy I had all the time, how I rarely got sick, though one weekday morning in May, I woke up with a fever and stayed in bed, and that morning Jimmy Quinn got stabbed.

  Artie Doucette did it. I didn’t know him well, though I’d seen him out behind the M and L wings smoking on the grates. He wore a brown leather jacket and had long black hair and pale skin. He was stocky-looking and was always talking loud and swearing too much, and he had black sideburns he let grow below his ears. Like a lot of people, he wore a folded Buck knife in a snapped leather case at his belt.

  Since the weekend, word had gotten around about what Doucette had said, that Jimmy’s girlfriend, April S., was a slut. This got back to Jimmy on Monday and for three days he’d been looking all over the school for Doucette, who’d learned of this and stayed home. By Thursday, though, he could hide no longer. He had to get back to school, and that morning he took the bus. When it pulled up behind the M and L wings just before seven-thirty, the sun rising in a blue sky, hundreds of kids standing around or starting to stream inside, Jimmy was waiting. It was Daley who told me what happened next, that Doucette stepped off the bus and scanned the crowd and saw Quinn pushing past people to get to him, that Doucette ran, begging Quinn to leave him alone.

  “I didn’t mean nothin’! Jimmy, I didn’t mean—”

  Quinn grabbed the back of Doucette’s leather jacket with both hands, and Doucette jerked free and spun around, the sun flashing off the five-inch blade just before he drove it into Jimmy’s hip.

  “All the way in,” Daley said. “Right to the fuckin’ handle.”

  Then Artie Doucette was running through the student parking lot, and Jimmy was down, his blood pulsing onto the concrete.

  Daley helped Jimmy stand. His pant leg was soaked, blood running down his leg into his boot, and Quinn pressed his hand to the wound and limped through the crowded corridors all the way to the gym and Mr. Scanlon’s office, the man who coached Jimmy on the baseball team. He called an ambulance and later we learned that Doucette’s knife had just missed one of Jimmy’s kidneys, that Jimmy Quinn, tall handsome crazy Jimmy Quinn, the one who had beaten up that grown man in front of Sam’s house, had almost died.

  For over a week Sam and Kevin Daley and Big Jeff Chabot and I walked the halls looking for any of Doucette’s friends. One afternoon after lunch we found one, a skinny kid with long red hair and buckteeth. Daley backhanded his face and knocked him into a wall of lockers and the kid fell to one knee and Daley leaned close and pointed his finger an inch from his face. “You tell Doucette he’s fucking dead, all right? You fuckin’ tell him.” Then he kicked him in the ribs, and we turned and went looking for more.

  I don’t know if it was having the others beside me, or that we were united in our rage, but I felt little fear, only a heart-thumping, dry-mouthed desire to hurt somebody, really hurt someone.

  JIMMY STAYED home the rest of the school year, and it seemed a long, long time before we saw him again.

  It was June, one of those hot days when you could smell the Merrimack River all over town—the faint smell of sewage and diesel and drying mud, of dead fish and creosote, of rusty iron and the melted plastic of some chemicals we couldn’t name. It was after school, and Sam drove the two of us to Quinn’s big family house on Main Street. His mother answered the door. She looked happy to see us and led us through cool dim rooms to the backyard where Jimmy lay in a lawn chair in the sun.

  His hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, and his skin was tanned a deep brown. He wore a tank top and cutoffs. When he saw us, he smiled and grabbed the walking stick at his side and stood.

  “Hey, Sam. Andre.”

  “Hey, Jimmy,” Sam said. “You look good.”

  He did, and he didn’t. He was handsome as ever, but he’d lost muscle in his chest and shoulders and arms. We stood there awhile. I don’t remember what we talked about, just Jimmy nodding and smiling, his eyes on the sunlit trees of his backyard, the grass, his lawn chair in the middle of it. He had both hands around his walking stick, and I could see where the bark had be
en shaved away with a blade. If Quinn was planning to get Doucette for what he’d done to him, he didn’t look it. Instead, he looked diminished by it, not by what Doucette had done, but that it could happen, that he could actually die before he got out of high school.

  We didn’t stay long. Sam and I had gotten jobs washing dishes, and our shift started soon. Jimmy laughed at something Sam said, then he walked back to his lawn chair, most of his limp gone, but the big stick still in his hand like something he wasn’t quite ready to do without.

  CAPTAIN CHRIS’S was a family restaurant overlooking the Merrimack on Water Street. On Friday and Saturday nights, it was crowded from five till closing, and it was one of the places Pop would take us to on our Sunday visits with him. It was air-conditioned, and the floors were carpeted and the tables were covered with rose-colored linens and heavy silver, Muzak playing over the sound system. From wherever you sat, you could see through the tinted windows the river moving by thirty feet below, and now I worked there in a kitchen that was hot and loud and crowded. Between the flaming stoves and the serving counter were four cooks, men in white who never stopped moving. They called out orders to each other, filled gleaming plates with baked haddock or stuffed lobster or prime rib, dropping a cruet of tomato and lemon onto the side, a sprig of parsley, then shouting for Doris or Ann Marie or Nancy to pick up!

  And these women my mother’s age, professional waitresses like Sam’s mother, were dressed in a uniform of skirt and apron and white soft-soled shoes, and they would whisk the plates from under the warming lights of the counter onto loaded trays they’d heave over one shoulder, then punch open the swinging doors for the muted cool of the restaurant. Busboys would roll in a stainless steel cart, its rubber tub full of dirty dishes they’d quickly scrape, then load onto plastic trays, pushing them onto the conveyor belt for one of us to spray down before it entered the machine and came out steaming clean on the other side for another dishwasher to heave and carry back through the side doors to the busing station where he’d stack plates on a shelf, cups and glasses, sort knives and forks and spoons into the right trays, then push the empty tub into a stack of others in the corner and run back into the kitchen to do it again and again and again.