Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  “Pop’s here. He brought a friend.”

  “What?”

  But then Pop was behind me, his buddy too, and her face produced a smile, her eyes still wary, and Pop said, “Pat, this is Lou. Lou, Pat. He’s sharing Thanksgiving with us.”

  Lou was taller than Pop, but his cheeks were jaundiced and under his eyes hung gray bags above a withered mustache. He moved swiftly to my mother, nearly stumbling, and he took her hand in both of his, apologized for the intrusion, said he’d brought some wine. Pop leaned close to me and whispered thickly, “He’s dying, son. And, his wife just kicked him out.”

  I nodded. Pop took the bag from me and pulled out the bottles and soon we were all sitting in candlelight at the table, Pop at the head, me to his right, then Lou to mine. Mom sat at the opposite end, my brother and sisters across from me. The Brubeck was playing a little too loudly, the piano rhythm too fast for eating, but we’d been waiting and were hungry and we passed each other plates to fill with whatever dish was in front of us, and though a lot of the food had cooled the smells were still in the room—the celery and liver in the dirty rice, the sweet squash, the savory turkey meat and salt-drippings gravy. We all seemed to be talking at once, and Lou was drunker than I’d thought. He had a hard time holding up his plate and he kept mumbling how pretty we were, how pretty all of Andre’s daughters were.

  I’d seen him before, too. I’d seen him in church, and I’d seen him standing in the doorway of the framing shop he owned in Bradford Square. Pop had probably met him at Ronnie D’s bar, the place he went to drink after all his work was done. And even this drunk and sick, it was clear how much he respected Pop. He kept glancing over at him with reverence and affection and gratitude. It’s how so many people treated our father, as if he was not like other men, as if there was something about him that made them somehow more themselves when they were around him.

  Part of it seemed to be the stories he wrote; people put him in a higher place after having read them. But Pop had always been deeply curious about people too, from the man pumping gas into his car, to a waitress serving us on a Sunday, to the priest standing at the church door in his robes, Pop always lingered and asked people questions about their work, their days and nights, questions nobody else ever seemed to ask.

  This drew people to him, people like this dying man Lou, whose hand was now on my knee under the table.

  “Yurall sech pretty girlz. So pretty.”

  My face was hot iron. Pop was talking loudly over the jazz about the cornbread stuffing, how it was one of the only things he missed about Louisiana. Suzanne was talking, too, her lips moving and her eyes pointed at Pop. Mom was laughing, and Nicole was chewing, Jeb too, and now Lou’s hand moved farther up my leg and I turned to him to tell him I’m no girl, and his lips pressed against mine, his whiskers poking my skin, his tongue pushing into my mouth. It was like getting stabbed. I jerked back, Pop’s voice louder than ever now, “Uh-oh, uh-oh,” he said. And I was up and moving past my mother out the back door to the porch, the air a cold slap I wanted more of. I spit over the railing. I wiped my mouth and spit again.

  Pretty girls. How could he think, even shit-faced, that I was a girl? My hair was cut to my shoulders now, still long but not even long enough to tie back, and I had changed. I had a chest and shoulders. I had a flaring upper back. I had learned how to throw punches. How could he even think that? And in front of everyone, too. In front of my father, who was now out on the porch with me, nearly yelling, “Andre, he doesn’t want to suck your cock. Lou doesn’t want your cock, son, he wants your health.” Pop slapped my chest with the back of his hand. “He wants your youth and your muscles and all those years ahead of you. He’s dying, son, he’s fucking dying. He’s got fucking leukemia and his wife kicked him out on Thanksgiving Day. You hear me?”

  My father was clearly as drunk as his friend, and he kept slapping my chest, and I was crying for the first time in years, my father’s reddened face, his trimmed beard and thinning brown hair getting all blurry. Did he think I was building muscles for my health? And now he wanted me to go back in and sit down next to his friend.

  I wiped my eyes and followed my father back inside. There was candlelight and Brubeck’s piano, there were the smells of hot wax and this holiday feast, but the table wasn’t as loud and raucous as it had been earlier, and Lou was staring at his plate and seemed to be carrying on a conversation with himself. I sat down beside him. I did not look at my family. I lifted my fork, and I would use it if I had to, I would; I’d stick it into his dying face, for it was clear once again that nobody in this world was going to take care of you but you.

  SUZANNE AND I discovered something called accelerated admission, where you could skip your senior year and go straight to college. I didn’t want to leave my friends, but the thought of leaving the high school was cool mountain water after a long, hot run, and I took a test and somehow got into Bradford College. Suzanne was already a student there. She’d stopped wearing hip-huggers and heavy black eyeliner. She spent most of her nights studying in her room, and she began to make friends over there with the kids of doctors and bankers, and sometimes she’d spend the night in one of their dorm rooms. Because our father was a professor she just had to pay for her books, one more thing our mother had to worry about.

  Bradford College was a small green campus behind stone walls and iron fences, and it held over three hundred students from around the country and the world, many of them rich. The men were only a year or two older than I was, but they drove BMWs and sports cars with names I’d never heard of. They wore khaki pants and button-down shirts and spoke ironically in classes. “Yes, Professor, but does Aristotle speak to dramaturgy in that way? It seems to me he does not.”

  “Yes, but how?”

  “You see, Professor, that’s the question, isn’t it?”

  There would be some appreciative laughter, a few sardonic smiles, the professor moving on to someone else.

  For nearly two hundred years Bradford had been a women’s college, and now it had just begun to admit men and there were far more women, roughly ten to one. So many of them were tall and slim. They had long straight hair and straight teeth and straight postures from what I imagined were childhoods spent riding horses and swimming and playing tennis. They drove convertible coupes and laughed often. Very few of them wore bras and on cool mornings I could see their nipples under their sweaters and turtlenecks. I tried not to look, but I couldn’t not look. The first week of the first semester, I was sixteen. I walked around campus in a leather jacket, my hair shorter now, books under my arm I was actually reading, but around these women, who were eighteen, nineteen, and twenty, I felt like a poor and uncultured boy.

  One morning between classes I cut through the student union building, its pool table and soft chairs, its serving counter where you could order a cheeseburger and coffee or hot chocolate. A group of them were over by the picture window which looked out onto the raked lawn. I heard one of them say, “That’s Dubus’s son. Look at him. He’s such a townie.”

  I’d heard the word before. They used it for the men they’d see at Ronnie D’s bar down in Bradford Square, the place where my father drank with students and his friends. It’s where some men from the town drank, too—plumbers and electricians and millworkers, Sheetrock hangers and housepainters and off-duty cops: townies.

  I enjoyed reading the books—even the biology and economics—and usually I enjoyed the class discussions and tried to be prepared for them, but I was surrounded by people who seemed reared from comfort, most of whom knew where they were headed, too: law school, medical school, business school, a few even to New York City where they would sing, dance, and act. In the smoke room in Academy Hall, a place I walked by often, I’d hear of their aims for the future, and I didn’t have any. All I wanted to do was bench-press 300 pounds and get so big I scared people, bad people, people who could hurt you.

  The following May, instead of going to my sociology final, I shot pool in the s
tudent union with Sa’eed, a soft-spoken black kid who’d grown up in the slums of Philadelphia where people shot each other regularly. I’d just set up for the break when my sociology professor walked in for a Coke before class. He was heavyset with a beard and glasses, and I liked him. From the counter he smiled over at me. “That’s a good way to prepare for a final. Keeps you relaxed.”

  I smiled back. “Yep. I’ll be right there.”

  But I didn’t go and got an F in the course. The next fall I didn’t go back. I told my mother I was just taking a year off, but I didn’t know if that was true. I couldn’t imagine going back to that tiny campus that felt so foreign to me, so protected.

  LAMSON’S SPA was on Winter Street, a convenience store with cardboard in the windows, some of them cracked, duct tape holding them together. Inside, the shelves were largely empty and half the ceiling lights were out and everybody knew the place was a front for bookies and drug dealers. South of it was a sub shop and American Ace Hardware, the Greek church on one side, a Catholic church on the other, and farther down the hill were Mediterranean Pizza and Dunkin’ Donuts, their fluorescent light spilling out the windows onto the parking lot next to the gas station where five days a week I worked from seven to four pumping gasoline into the trucks and vans of tradesmen. I’d take their cash and go into the tiny glass booth and make change. I’d hand it to them, then slide the booth door shut to keep out the cold. There was an electric space heater under the plywood shelf the register sat on, and it was like the one we had back in the tree hut, the one we kept going with extension cords we’d snuck into our basement, our mother always confused as to why the electric bill had gone up so much, and now, as I worked forty hours a week and knew how much of my day and week and life I had to put into just making money, I felt badly about that bill, about stealing from my hardworking mother like that.

  The man who hired me was older than my father and drove a late-model Cadillac Seville. He had dark skin and wore polyester pants, shining shoes, an overcoat, and sweet-smelling cologne. Every afternoon at exactly four o’clock he’d drive up to the pumps to lock up and take my deposit bag and credit card receipts. When he first hired me, he looked me over and said, “This place gets robbed sometimes. If they got a gun, don’t try nothin’. But, there’s this, too.” On the booth’s metal windowsill was a homemade club. He picked it up and held it out to me. It was some kind of hardwood, about three feet long, the length of it covered with carved initials and ink markings. Late into my first day, tired of looking straight out the window at the brick machine shop there, or to my left at the black iron trestle above Winter Street, or to my right at the repossessed cars in the lot, I picked up the club and began to read who loved whom 4-ever, who sucked, what number to call for great head, then, in black ink, the letters neat and perfectly aligned, Life is like a dick. If it’s hard, you get fucked. If it’s soft, you can’t beat it.

  Just before Connolly’s closed down, Ray Duffy walked up to me and asked if I wanted to buy two 50-pound plates. They were spray-painted silver and fit right onto my barbell at home and that’s where Sam and I worked out together now three days a week, Sam back on the weights, his hockey career doubtful. He was so much stronger than I was, and during the bench press we had to strip 80 to 100 pounds off the bar for my sets. Still, I could push close to 250 pounds off my chest, and in the shoulder and back movements, I was almost as strong as Sam. On off days, we drove to Kenoza Lake where you could drive to the top of Kenoza Hill along a winding gravel road, but there was also a steep dirt trail through the trees. It was sixty yards long and nearly 45 degrees, and Sam and I would take turns grabbing 20-pound dumbbells and running up that trail as hard as we could. Just before the top, an invisible hand yanking the air from your lungs and the earth itself trying to pull you down, we’d reach the crest of the hill where there was an incline of open grass and we’d run on for another thirty yards. We worked up to doing this ten times each.

  I’d hung a heavy bag down in the basement, too, and every day after a workout I’d wrap my hands and pull on hitting gloves and hit the bag as hard as I could. The Everlast logo was the height of a man’s face, and I’d jab it, then throw a straight right to the nose, a double left hook to the ribs and temple, a right hook to the chin followed by a right cross to the forehead, that last punch rising up from my back foot and pivoting hip, the bag jerking on its chain. So many times the Everlast was Tommy J.’s face, his shaved head and small MP mustache. Other times it’d be the kid who threw the Molotov cocktail into my mother’s car, or Dennis Murphy right after he slapped the pine into that old woman’s face, or Clay Whelan just before he started pushing me to the ground to whale on my face and head, or Doucette stabbing Jimmy Quinn, or any of the boys and men from the avenues lounging around in our rented house, smoking and drinking and listening to the stereo Bruce bought us, calling Suzanne “Sue” and me a little pussy and Jeb a faggot. And lately, I saw myself punching Suzanne’s new boyfriend, Adam Kench.

  It was after ten o’clock on a weeknight and she was driving Mom’s Toyota back home from Bradford. He was hitchhiking on Main Street in a leather jacket and faded jeans, his hair past his shoulders, sunglasses on at night. She said he’d looked like Neil Young so she stopped and picked him up, but he was wearing sunglasses because the glare of the headlights was too bright for a quaalude-head, a nurse’s aide who was in that line of work to steal drugs from hospitals and rehab.

  He was high all the time, and she was with him for months. When they were at the house, they’d be up in her room, the door closed, Grand Funk Railroad playing, Pink Floyd, Robin Trower, the Stones. Up close you could see how sunken his chest was, how his long hair was thinning, and the skin of his face was more gray than pink, the stubble of his chin like some leveled ruin. I rarely saw his eyes because he never took off his dark sunglasses, and he was always asking Suzanne for a ride: To the hospital where he worked. To the Packy for some wine. To some low-rent neighborhood to cop some downs.

  The night it happened I woke to the sound of arguing. A woman’s voice, then a man’s, Mom and Pop married again and I was nine, lying in my bed next to Jeb in that camp in the woods. But the voices were outside and three stories below, Suzanne and Kench. I was lying under covers in my attic bedroom. I heard the doors of Mom’s Toyota open and shut, Suzanne’s voice as the engine turned over and the gear shifted, the whine of the small motor as they backed out of the driveway. I had an electric clock now, and I sat up and squinted at its glowing numbers: 10:37. Where were they going this late? And why? Something felt wrong about it.

  I lay awake a long time. I had no curtains in the windows, and I could see it was snowing outside, a slight wind blowing the flakes under the streetlamp. So many falling and falling, and I got tired of seeing the falling and closed my eyes.

  IT WAS Suzanne who woke Mom the next morning. She called just after dawn broke. Thirty years later she told me why she waited this long but no longer, because she didn’t want Mom to be awake already, getting ready for work on a Monday morning only to see her driveway empty, her car gone, her oldest daughter still out from the night before, then get angry and be pissed off when the phone rang and start yelling before Suzanne could talk, because she knew Mom would feel guilty for that later, she’d feel guilty about yelling at her daughter on this Monday morning in February, so Suzanne called her early enough to wake her and spare her that feeling later. Save her from at least that.

  She and Kench had driven forty miles to Boston for a drink. After last call, he got in behind the wheel and got them lost. They were somewhere in Dorchester or Roxbury on Blue Hill Avenue. There were row houses and broken streetlights, a few cars abandoned on the sidewalk. This was 1977, the forced busing riots still in the news, white men and women stepping in front of buses of black kids driving into their school yards, yelling, “Niggers, go home!” The previous summer, the bicentennial summer, there was a first-page photo of a white man trying to impale a black man with a pole, the American flag hanging
off it, the black man a lawyer in a three-piece suit, trying to twist away from it. At the high school for a year now, there’d been talk of a race riot, of “niggers” and “spics” coming up from Lawrence and Lowell to cause trouble, so get ready, bring a blade, stick together, kick some ass.

  Kench turned down a dead-end street. It was after two in the morning. He stopped the Toyota to turn around, and a beat-up sedan passed them slowly on the opposite side. Then it did a U-turn and pulled across the road and blocked it, their front bumper not far from the Toyota’s exhaust pipe. Two men stepped out. They were both black and one of them knocked on the window and asked Kench for help because their car had just gotten stuck on the ice behind them.

  Kench got out of the car and left Suzanne there and walked around to the rear of the sedan. One of the men got behind the sedan’s wheel, the other stayed back with Kench, and they both pushed on the trunk as the big engine roared. Suzanne could hear it from inside Mom’s Toyota, but she could also see the red flash of the brake lights every time her boyfriend and the other man pushed. The sedan didn’t move and Kench climbed back into the Toyota and shut the door against the cold.

  “Adam,” she said, “he was stepping on the brakes when you guys were pushing.”

  “Don’t worry, I got it covered. We’re copasetic.”

  “No, we need to leave.”

  One of the men rapped his knuckles against the driver’s window and Kench opened the door and stepped outside again and Suzanne heard the sap thump his forehead, watched him drop to the street. The one who hit him knelt over him and went through his pockets, and Suzanne’s passenger door opened and the other one pulled her from the car and held a knife to her ribs and walked her to the sedan.