Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  “Andre.”

  I thought she was talking to him, but she was looking at me. “I’d like you to leave, please.”

  “No, he can sleep here.”

  “No, he can leave.”

  “It’s okay, Pop. I’ve got a place to stay.” I apologized to Lorraine and thought briefly of leaving the way I came in. She stepped to the side and I stepped past her and out the front door. I thought I could probably drive after all, but in my walk through the snow I saw the kitchen light still on in the international house and I knocked softly on the door and walked in.

  Upstairs Marjan and the Indian girl were making breakfast. They looked neither happy nor unhappy to see me. Marjan said, “These eggs were frozen. We wanted to cook them before they were rooned.” She smiled at me. “Would you like some?”

  “Yes, thank you.” I sat down at the small table. When Pop and I had left, it’d been covered with empty beer and wine bottles, the spent Cuervo, two full ashtrays and four or five squeezed lemon wedges. Now it was cleared away, and the Indian girl was putting on water for tea, and there was nothing for me to do but wait, sit and wait to eat with this lovely girl from so far away.

  WE BEGAN to spend more time together, but she was an Iranian girl so it was always in the presence of someone else, usually her roommate Parvine, and later, in a small apartment a half mile from campus with her mother and younger sister and ten-year-old brother. Her mother spoke very little English and wore designer clothes and tasteful jewelry, and she was shorter than Marjan but warm, so often smiling sincerely at whomever she addressed, and it was from her Marjan got her looks.

  She called me “Andereh” and would invite me to sit and eat with them on the sofreh, a wine-colored Persian carpet she had her daughters unroll onto her apartment floor. She then covered that with a clean sheet and set out dishes of stewing meat and tomatoes, eggplant and rice and saffron, a yogurt dish mixed with cucumbers they would dip bread into, and I would sit on the floor with this family and listen to them speak in their language—Farsi, I later learned. Sometimes Marjan would look at me and smile and I’d feel as if I’d tripped and fallen into some exotic tale.

  After dinners, I would help her little brother or sister with their homework, mainly teaching them standard rules of English I did not know I knew. Marjan’s mother would sit on the sofa with a clear glass of tea and listen to a cassette tape of Persian music, the drums and stringed instruments sounding thousands of years old, a woman or man singing long mournful notes of lovers split apart and never reunited. That’s what it sounded like to me, though I had no idea what they were singing. On the sofa Marjan would curl her feet up under her next to her mother and the two of them would talk in a fast, heated way that in America sounded like fighting, though they would smile often and laugh, sometimes glancing over at me, this new friend of the family.

  I liked spending time with them. I liked how polite they were to each other, how every time one addressed the other by name, it ended with the word jahn, which means dear. So Marjan was Marjan-jahn, her mother was Maman-jahn, and I became Andereh-jahn. But if they really felt affection for you, you’d become Andereh-joon, Andre dearest, which is how they all began to address me, and I began to address them, too, for they had become dear to me and for the first time the idea of becoming some kind of gentleman bloomed inside my head, a man with manners and class and a good upbringing.

  I WAS walking from Academy Hall. It was late on a weekend night and I’d just drunk a beer with Saeed. The air smelled like dead leaves and cashmere. I didn’t own a car and sometimes walked the three miles home down through Bradford Square over the Basilere Bridge and up the long hill of Main Street past the shopping plaza and GAR Park and the statue of Hannah Duston, her long iron dress, her raised hatchet, then up through Monument Square, walking by the sub shops and gas stations, their fluorescent light casting out over the sidewalk.

  I stuck my hands in my pockets and started walking.

  “Ryan, please. I didn’t do nothin’, Ryan. C’mon.”

  In the parking lot, three men stood in the near darkness next to a sedan. One was over six feet, but he was skinny, his shoulders narrow, and now he was backing away from who I thought was his friend, but then his friend stepped forward and slapped him across the face, the tall one’s hair swinging.

  “Please, Ryan.” He hunched his shoulders and took another one to the face, this one a fist, and I was running toward them, could see how much bigger this Ryan was. The air was cool, but he was wearing a T-shirt that showed his rounded shoulders and wide back and thick triceps, a lifter. He punched the tall one in the cheek, the tall one flinching and beginning to cry. “C’mon, Ryan, what did I do?”

  Ryan hit him again, and now I was close enough to hear it, the dulled thud of bone under flesh on bone under flesh. “Hey!” I felt my voice move through my vocal cords, watched myself stand a pace behind them, my weight on my back foot. The tall one was bent over at the waist crying, his hands cupped to his nose, and Ryan turned to me. “Mind your own fuckin’ business.”

  “Why don’t you hit me then? Hit me.”

  He rushed at me and there was a thrust in my shoulder and he fell backwards to the asphalt and lay there and didn’t move.

  The tall one straightened up and sniffled. He looked from me to his friend, then back at me. Someone else had been standing near the hood of the Monte Carlo, and now he ran around the car and squatted on the ground near Ryan. “Shit.”

  Ryan mumbled something. He rolled onto his shoulder, and I turned and walked through the parking lot and out the iron gates into the street for the long walk home.

  TWO DAYS later I was sitting on the granite steps of Academy Hall between classes. It was a cool, gray morning, and I had a biology exam and was trying to remember what a lysosome was when Eric, one of the skinny rockers from Connecticut, sat down next to me. He had long blond hair. His cheeks always looked wind-chapped. He lit up a cigarette.

  “That guy you hit had to go to the hospital.”

  I looked over at him. I hadn’t told anyone about hitting anyone, but I’d done it in the parking lot beneath the dorm windows of Academy Hall.

  “You fractured his forehead.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “’Cause I was there. His buddy’s my friend from back home.”

  I shrugged, though my heart was going a bit faster and I couldn’t deny the warmth of pride opening up in my chest.

  Eric blew smoke out both his nostrils. He nodded his head as if I’d just said something. “Yep, concussion.”

  “And what about his scrawny friend he was beating on? How’s his nose?” I stood and gripped my biology book. Eric nodded again and took a deep drag off his cigarette, and I walked down the steps for Haseltine Hall and my biology exam. I reminded myself how big that Ryan was, that watching him punch his skinny friend was like watching a grown man hit a woman or a child.

  Not far from the door to the hall, a group of girls was sitting in a circle smoking and chatting. One of them, thin and fair-skinned from Michigan, held a dead leaf to the flame of her lighter, the leaf curling away from the heat and becoming a wisp of smoke. She looked at me as I passed. I pulled open the heavy oak door of the hall and stepped inside; it was as if I’d just been warned.

  9

  POP WAS SICK with the flu. It was spring now, and he called me and asked if I wanted his two tickets to the game.

  “What game?”

  “The Red Sox.”

  “Baseball?”

  “Yes, baseball.”

  “I guess so.”

  “They’re playing the Yankees at Fenway.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Boston. Take Dolan. Tell him it’s the Yankees.”

  I’d heard of them but didn’t know they were from New York or that we were supposed to hate them. My father liked Sam Dolan, admired him for his muscles and good manners, and I’d heard them talk sports before, using words and terms and names I’d never heard. It was
like sitting with Marjan’s family when they spoke Persian. Sometimes I listened hard for anything I might recognize, though I didn’t do that the few times Sam and my father talked about sports; I knew there was nothing in it I would know much about, these games with balls in them that men threw at each other or bounced or hit with a bat. I understood training for a goal, and I knew these were athletes who worked hard at what they did. But why? Why were grown men playing games?

  Since I was very young, I’d seen little of them and knew less. Pop had never talked to us about them; maybe if he’d stayed with us he would have. Maybe he would have had more time to, the way he did that afternoon he and I had thrown a ball to each other bare-handed on the sidewalk, the charcoals growing hotter in the hibachi on the half-wall beside us. And if he’d stayed, there may have been more money and less moving from one scrappy neighborhood to another where no one seemed to have much to do with these games either. On the TV we four kids had lived in front of, there were only three or four channels, and we would turn to those that gave us stories of escape—eccentrics stranded on a desert island, a bunch of pranksters in a concentration camp, a family of rock musicians working through all their problems in one half-hour episode every day. If we watched any games at all, it was of a woman sitting on a stool interviewing for a possible date three men she couldn’t see.

  One Sunday back on Lime Street, Pop had picked us up and was driving us north to the beach. Suzanne sat in the front, Jeb, Nicole, and I in the back, the windows down as we passed trailer homes in the pine trees, the smell of sap in the air. Pop turned on the radio to listen to the end of the game he said he’d been watching. His exact words were the game.

  “What game?”

  He glanced at me in the rearview mirror, his face only eyes. “The Red Sox.”

  “Who’s that?”

  He smiled as if I’d just told a joke, and he turned up the radio. But I wasn’t joking. I was almost thirteen years old. It was like listening to TV newscasters talk about politics or the economy, a larger world I couldn’t even begin to understand. Pop’s eyes were on the road, but he was listening intently to these men, to this game, which at that moment, sitting in the back of his car, I began to understand was baseball.

  When we got to our parking spot at the beach, Pop took a while to turn off the radio, and as we walked over the hot sand together he still seemed to be back there in that car and whatever it was those men were describing, their voices calm and soothing, using terms I did not know: balls and strikes and fouls. Fastball, splitter, sinker. Double play.

  Now Sam and I were driving into Boston with Pop’s tickets to a place called Fenway Park. It was a cool September night, and soon Sam and I were sitting up in the stands with thousands of other people—men, women, and kids, almost all of them wearing a Red Sox hat or jacket or sweatshirt or all three. The air smelled like mustard and popcorn and beer, and as I drank mine, I still couldn’t get over how many people had come to this game. Over thirty-three thousand, Sam said, and this was the smallest park in baseball, though it looked pretty big to me, the towering banks of blinding lights that lit up the field, wide and deep green, only three players standing out in it, and there were the other men on this diamond, what Sam called the infield, the dirt path from home plate to first to second to third then back home. There was the mound the pitcher worked from, and I couldn’t believe how hard and fast these men threw the ball past the batter into the catcher’s mitt, another new word Sam taught me. He sat next to me, sipping his beer and patiently explaining everything: what a strike was and a ball and a foul; how the first two foul balls count as strikes, that there are different kinds of pitches and different kinds of pitchers, on and on, and as he did, he leaned close and kept his voice low, as if he didn’t want to draw attention to how little I knew, that this was, in fact, the first baseball game I had ever watched.

  There was a crack in the air and I watched the ball fly over the field and hit what Sam told me was “the Green Monster,” a massive wall the baseball bounced off of into the glove of a Yankee who threw it to another Yankee who threw it to one at second base though our runner was safe, Sam said. That’s how I felt too, safe, my best friend and me sitting deep in the stands with thousands of other people all rooting for the same team. It was like being admitted into one huge, loud and happy family you hadn’t even known about.

  After a while, it was the Yankees’ turn to hit. Every time one of them walked up to home plate with his bat, hundreds of men and boys would yell insults at him I couldn’t quite make out, just the tone, which I knew well, but it wasn’t directed at me or anyone I would have to try to protect, and I felt relieved of everything, part of something far larger than I was, just one of thousands and thousands of people united in wanting the same thing, for these men from our team to beat the men from the other team, and how strange that they did this by playing, that one beat the other by playing a game.

  Sam and I bought and drank a lot of beer. To get to it, we had to walk down a concrete ramp past two Boston police officers, big men with gray hair, their arms crossed over their pale blue shirts and badges, glancing at us like we might be trouble, then concluding we weren’t. On the way back to our seats, we had to scoot by ten or fifteen people and every one of them stood without hesitation as we squeezed by them, trying not to spill any beer, and when we got to our seats we folded them back down and sat and drank and looked out at the bright green field and the big men playing ball in their white uniforms and their gray uniforms, a number on the back of each, and I was sweetly, happily drunk and couldn’t believe I’d never come to this place before, that I’d hardly even known about it. I smiled over at Sam and he smiled over at me, though something happened in the field, and he looked up and stood and so did all the people around us, a foul ball floating fast ten feet above our heads and behind us. I turned partway around and saw the bare hands reaching for it, heard a rustling, then a thunk. In my seat lay the ball. I picked it up and somebody slapped me on the back, Sam too. “You should bring that home to your father.”

  I nodded and smiled and studied the ball in my hand. It was harder than I’d thought it’d be, but it was also just like the one Pop had thrown to me on the sidewalk four years earlier. I liked its red stitching. I stuck it in the side pocket of my jacket, Sam and I tapped our plastic beer cups, and I raised mine to the batter who’d fouled right to me, Jerry Remy, Sam said. Then Remy got a hit and made it to first base without being thrown out and I cheered for him, this man I’d never heard of in this game I’d never played or watched.

  THE NEXT afternoon Sam and I stopped by my father’s house to thank him for the tickets. His young stepkids were at school, and Lorraine was out somewhere, and Pop lay on one of her sofas under a light blanket. He was pale and still had a fever. Sam was telling him about the game, using language I still couldn’t speak from a culture I still didn’t know, but at least now I knew where the country was, had seen some of its people and smelled some of its food. I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out the baseball. I handed it to him. “Here, you can have this.”

  He propped himself up on one elbow. “You got a ball?”

  “Yep,” Sam said. “It landed right in his seat.”

  Pop took it from me, turned it over in his hand, glanced up at me. “I’ve been going to games for thirty years and never got a ball.” He said something else about it, but I kept hearing the last thing he said. Thirty years. He’d been going to games for thirty years? Why didn’t he ever take me before? Or Jeb? Or Suzanne and Nicole? And as Sam and I left him to rest and get over his flu, as we stepped outside and walked past the faculty housing in the clear September air, I thought it must be the money. That’s why he never took us before. It’d be too much money.

  Lorraine was walking toward her house, a ladies’ store shopping bag dangling from her hand. She smiled at us, though she looked tired and distracted and took her time walking back home.

  WEEKS LATER, a cold blue October dawn, my mother’s
voice shot up the stairwell to my attic bedroom. “Andre? Telephone.”

  It was just after six in the morning and it was Lorraine.

  “Andre,” she took a deep breath that seemed to catch in her throat, “your father has left me for a nineteen-year-old child. I need your help moving his things.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yes, he’s with her right now. In Boston.” She took a deep breath, and I pictured her smoking. “Please, Andre. I need your help. Please.”

  IT WAS close to nine when I knocked on my father’s door. I was sweating lightly from the three-mile walk through town, my French textbook in my hand. The air smelled like oak dust and dry rot, and Lorraine answered the door right away. She was in a brown velour pantsuit, barefoot and wearing no makeup, the lines in her face deeper than I’d seen them before. She hugged me to her tightly, smelled like cigarette smoke and coffee and unwashed skin. She pulled away. “Thank you for coming.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  I followed her up the stairs to the second floor and my father’s room. It was clear she hadn’t slept, that she’d been packing his things for most of the night. His closet doors were open, the hangers and shelves bare, as were the walls, his hat collection gone, the top of his desk empty. There were cardboard boxes stacked under the window, and I imagined her driving to some all-night grocery store to get them. But then I saw the writing on the sides, the same professional movers she’d hired to deliver her nine thousand pounds of furniture up North. She’d stacked his albums on his weight bench, some of his books too.

  She was smoking now and talking. Her voice was thin, her Southern accent stronger than ever, as if the fatigue she felt had taken her down to some deeper, truer version of herself.

  “Lorraine?” I was about to tell her I was sorry this was happening to her, but that it was none of my business and I would not be able to help her pack up my father’s possessions. I would not be able to help her kick my father out of his own house. But the phone rang and Lorraine rushed to the other room, a feathering of smoke in the air behind her. I felt bad for her, and I wondered who this nineteen-year-old was Pop had gone to sleep with, but I had no business even standing in this room. I was just about to leave when I saw his gun.