Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  “You gonna talk to him?”

  “You’re damn right I am.”

  I watched him only a second or two before I got up and followed. The woman’s husband sat at a large round table in the middle of the floor. Five or six men and two women sat with him. They looked up at my father, who stood a foot away pointing at the woman’s husband and already yelling in his Marine voice words that got lost in all the bar noise. But they weren’t lost on the husband, his eyes on Pop, his dark hair combed back from his face, his shoulders broad and rounded in his sweater. Even sitting down, he looked a lot bigger than Pop, and now he stood and moved fast around his friends and grabbed Pop’s shirt and vest, and Pop grabbed his sweater and both seemed to pull at once so they pivoted and fell onto the table, flipping it, a woman screaming as she and the others scrambled away from their spilled drinks and broken glass and overturned chairs, the woman’s husband on top of my father now, throwing punches at his head. Then the man’s sweater collar was in my hands and I was yanking, a hand squeezing my shoulder and jerking me backwards, and I turned and shot a right into someone’s mouth, this bearded man in a flannel shirt who dropped to the floor, and now there were other men pulling the woman’s husband off my father, and in seconds he and I were out on Washington Street, laughing and breathing hard, though I wanted to get out of there before the woman’s husband and his many friends came out looking for us.

  We drove slowly down Main Street in my father’s old Lancer. Pop kept laughing and shaking his head. He’d wanted to go to another bar somewhere, maybe Ronnie D’s where some of his students might be, but we ended up buying a six-pack of Molson’s at the package store next to the VFW where that kid had thrown a Molotov cocktail into my mother’s car. From behind the wheel, Pop sipped his beer.

  “I wanted to punch him, but man, it happened so fast.”

  “Yeah, it’s always fast. You just have to be faster.”

  We were passing streetlight after streetlight, the sidewalk empty, the tin-sided houses just blocky shadows on the other side. I drank from my beer and saw again the face of the man I’d punched. He was twenty years older than I was, his beard trimmed like my father’s, and now I wasn’t so sure he’d been coming after me. In that flash of a second before I hit him in the mouth, there was the light of reason in his eyes, a reasonable man trying to break up a fight, that’s all, and I’d hit him so hard he went down.

  Pop reached over and squeezed my shoulder. He laughed again and I laughed too, happy to be the object of his pride, but my knuckles stung and there was the dark, tilting feeling I had added something to myself that each time I used it subtracted more than it gave.

  Pop took the slow right off Main up Columbia Park. I drained my beer and knew he’d tell this story about us for a long while. I knew too that I would not discourage him one bit from doing so.

  DAYS LATER, a warm Saturday morning, I borrowed Jeff Chabot’s flatbed truck to move Pop’s things to his new apartment across the river in Bradford. He was forty-one and his new girlfriend, Peggy, was nineteen and now she stood in our front yard under the sun. She’d driven up from Boston and had thick blonde hair and blue eyes, a dusting of freckles across her upper cheeks. She wore shorts and sandals and looked smart and athletic, her arms crossed under her breasts as she watched Jeb and me tie down Pop’s boxes and bags and weight bench onto Jeff’s flatbed.

  Pop was cheerful and laughed a lot, his eyes darting from his new girl to his sons to his ex-wife’s rented house and back again. My mother was home, and she’d come out and introduced herself to Peggy, who’d looked mildly surprised. Maybe because Mom was being so warm and friendly. Maybe because she was surprised to see such a lovely first ex-wife, my mother barefoot in shorts, her legs lean and smooth. Maybe because she wasn’t sure which ex-wife this was. The one he’d had four kids with? Or the one he’d just left for her?

  Mom teased Pop about how little he owned, about how he didn’t need a truck really, just a decent fucking car. Then she went back inside, and now Pop’s new girlfriend looked a bit bewildered. She kept looking Jeb and me over. The fingernails of Jeb’s right hand were long and tapered for the guitar, his hair wilder than ever, his face shadowed with three or four days of whiskers, and she seemed to take in how Pop and I talked to each other. Not like a father and son, but like pals. Like drinking buddies.

  Suzanne and Nicole had come out to meet her too, but now they were back inside and Peggy seemed happy to be away from there, sitting in the middle of the front seat between me and Pop as I drove Jeff’s flatbed down Main toward the river. Her bare knee was touching mine, and it was hard not to look down at her thighs.

  “So,” I said, “where’re you from?”

  “Where did I grow up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Manhattan.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Manhattan?”

  “Yeah, where is that?”

  “You’re joking, right? New York.”

  “New York City?”

  “Yes, New York City.” She laughed gracefully, as if to spare my feelings.

  “Okay, so you’re from New York City?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I know where that is.”

  She glanced at Pop and rested her hand on his knee. He was smiling, but the ride got quiet as we rode over the Basilere Bridge and the Merrimack River. I downshifted and gave the truck some gas. If I’d ever heard of Manhattan I couldn’t remember the word, and it was like walking through the student union, three or four rich girls pointing me out, Dubus’s son, the townie.

  I was tired of being a townie. I was tired of this town.

  FOR MONTHS I thought about becoming a long-haul truck driver, getting paid to roam the land in a thundering rig. I sent away for a brochure to the Andover Tractor Trailer Driving School, but the long sections on safety and maintenance left me cold, the same way I had felt pumping gas down on Winter Street, bored and far away from myself. Besides, when and where would I work out?

  I began studying other brochures too. Glossy ones from the student services office in Academy Hall. Somewhere I heard you could transfer from one college to another, and I applied to five schools west of the Mississippi River. I’d be as far from everything I knew as I could get and once I got there, it’d be too late to change my mind and come back. These were state universities in Montana, Washington, Nevada, Colorado, and Texas. I made out the applications, sent along my B-average transcripts, and was accepted into all five.

  That fall and winter I was working as a night manager in a fast food restaurant just off Monument Square, Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips. It was owned by a Greek man named Nikos. He was short and stocky and wore thick bifocals, and he always looked distracted and concerned about money. There was Marie, too, a Greek girl who had warm brown eyes and hair as long and dark as Marjan’s. Throughout our shift, we flirted, and she’d smile and ask if she could squeeze my bicep or touch my chest muscles through the polyester uniform we both had to wear. Sometimes I’d let her and feel I was betraying Marjan, but she and I rarely saw each other anymore. She was in study groups with the Iranians and Turks now, and on weekends they’d go to discos together. I was certain she was in love with somebody and it wasn’t me, and I enjoyed this Greek girl’s attention while I was saving the money I needed to get out of town.

  Those years you could buy a two-week train pass on Amtrak and go wherever the train went, which included every state I needed to visit. Within a few months I had enough money for that ticket and then enough to move me to wherever I was going, too. One night late, when Nikos and I were closing out the register, I turned to him and said I was giving him my notice. He squinted up at me from behind his bifocals. He shook his head.

  “Why do you need to do this? You’re smart boy. You can make a lot of money with this business. You don’t need college. I never went for college.”

  I nodded and listened. Then I thanked him for making me night manager and walked home. It was a damp spring nigh
t, and college kept sifting through my brain, Nikos’s Greek accent wrapped around that word. I had to remind myself that that’s where I was going, to some college far away, though I was only thinking about being far away from here, far from the stinking Merrimack River and its abandoned mills and overflowing barrooms and endless opportunities to fight. That, and what kind of gym I’d be working out in.

  My last shift was a warm night in late May. Marie was wearing more makeup than she usually did, her cheeks rosy with blush, her lips too glossy. It was a slow night, just a couple of Puerto Rican or Dominican families coming in for our greasy fish and fries and tall Cokes, and I decided to close a half hour early. The dishwasher was a skinny redheaded kid who lived down in the avenues somewhere, the tattoo of a blue cross on the back of his right hand, and I told him he could go home.

  While I closed out the register, Marie was mopping the floor in quick, hurried strokes, looking back at me every few seconds, hooking her hair behind one ear and smiling, though she looked melancholy and oddly eager.

  I left her out front and carried the night’s cash and receipts to the office, a small room on the other side of the kitchen. I sat at the desk and pushed the money and paperwork into a night deposit bag. My legs were sore. The last few weeks Sam had been coming over every morning at six o’clock to work our calves together, a body part we’d been neglecting too long. But there was no place to fit it into our workouts, so we started the day down in my basement behind the furnace doing Donkey Calf Raises, an exercise where you bend forward at a 90-degree angle and rest your elbows on a table and your partner straddles your lower back, his body weight the only resistance as you rise up and down on your toes. The day before, on my last set, the burn began on the ninth or tenth rep, and I thought, Twenty, I’ll do twenty. Sam’s sneakers were tapping my knees and hot needles were being pushed under the skin of my calves but I went for ten more, then another ten, then another, the pain barrier in my brain a flaming wall I was marching toward one scalding calf raise at a time, then I fell through it into a blue numbness and there were only sounds coming out of me, the number ninety in my head when I finally quit.

  Outside, an engine revved in the parking lot. I smelled perfume and turned to see Marie standing in the doorway.

  “Everything’s done.” She crossed her arms under her breasts and smiled at me, her chin low, one hip resting against the jamb. Now there was a rapping on the back door, loud and close together, then a muffled shouting. “Marie. Get out here. I know what you’re doing. I know what you’re fucking doing, Marie. I got Lee Paquette out here. You hear me, motherfucker. I got Lee Paquette.”

  Motherfucker was clearly me. Paquette was big and cut and rode around town on a Kawasaki motorcycle in short shorts and no shirt, his gym muscles oiled up, his long black hair flapping out the back of his bright red helmet. He had a rep with some for being a badass, though I’d heard more about how he liked young teenage girls, how he’d charm them, then fuck them, then tell everybody all about it.

  “Marie.”

  “That’s just my boyfriend. He thinks something’s going on between us.”

  More rapping. More yelling. I stood and stepped sideways between Marie and the doorjamb and walked through the fluorescent-lit kitchen for the back door. I opened it to see her boyfriend standing there in a white T-shirt and jeans, his hair short, his ears sticking out. Behind him Lee Paquette sat in the passenger seat of a Z-28. His eyes were on me like he was the cowboy and I was the horse, and I looked back at Marie’s boyfriend. “She’s almost done. You’re going to have to wait quietly or I’ll have to call the cops, all right?”

  But he was looking past me into the kitchen, his eyes dark with something I knew nothing about. “Marie?”

  “She’ll be right out.” I closed the door and locked it. Marie rolled her eyes at me, took her time card and punched out. She pulled her pocketbook strap over her shoulder, then slid it back off and rested it on the stainless steel counter. She looked at me.

  “Marie.” His voice sounded farther away now, and I pictured him sitting behind the wheel of his car, Lee beside him, ready to come after me, the hired gun, which meant Marie’s boyfriend was another one afraid of me, but I felt nothing about this. It was as if I’d been dropped into a story that had little to do with me.

  “You have to let me kiss you.” She walked closer. “C’mon, it’s your last night. One kiss.” She smiled, but there was a sadness in her eyes, a need of some kind I hadn’t seen before, and then her lips were against mine and she parted them and flicked her tongue into my mouth and I pulled back and gave her a hug and walked to the door and opened it.

  She left quickly, her pocketbook over her shoulder, her long hair swaying against her back.

  “What took so fuckin’ long, Marie?”

  I watched her climb into the backseat. Paquette’s eyes were on me. “You got a problem?”

  I smiled and waved like I was in a parade. I closed the door, Marie’s boyfriend firing all six cylinders. Then came the rubber-whine of his spinning tires as he laid a patch across the lot onto Main, Big Lee beside him, Marie in the back seat.

  A few years later, Lee Paquette would be in a sub shop on Primrose sitting with a teenage girl when her father would walk in with a shotgun, point it behind the counter at the man who’d been fucking his wife, and pull the trigger, the man’s body flying backwards into the smoking peppers and mushrooms and onions on the stove, a fist-sized hole in his chest.

  The father would then look over at his daughter and Paquette, raise the shotgun and tell Lee to get on his knees. He’d press the hot barrel to Lee’s forehead, and Lee would begin to cry and beg for his life. Then he’d shit his pants and maybe the man didn’t shoot because of that or because his daughter was crying there beside him, too, and she’d already seen her father do enough for one afternoon. Whatever his reasons were, he lowered the shotgun and walked out the door and people still talk about Lee and how down on Primrose that day he cried and shit his pants.

  THE MORNING of my train trip, Mom and Bruce drove me to South Station in Boston where Bruce insisted I borrow a navy blue sports coat for my interviews with college officials. I was nearly twenty and had hardly ever worn one before. It was tight in the upper back, but I felt like somebody in it, and I hugged Bruce and my mother goodbye, watching them pull into Boston traffic, Mom leaning out the window to wave at me, wiping under her eye and waving again. There was the feeling I was doing something more important than I’d realized.

  I climbed onto the train with my duffel bag of underwear and a second pair of jeans, a sweater and socks and clothes to work out in. That’s all this trip was for me anyway. I had no intention of talking to any college officials. All I needed to see were the gyms at each school or in each town where the school was. And I had enough money on me to buy one meal a day plus a high-protein snack of some kind, nuts and seeds, maybe a hard-boiled egg, but that first night, rolling fast over the rails through New York State for the Great Lakes and Chicago, I blew fifty bucks buying beer for me and a young woman who’d been sitting beside me reading a novel. We drank too much, and she ended up crying against my chest under a train blanket over us both. In the morning I slept as we pulled into the station and she left me a note with her address in Boston for “when you ever leave that Arab girl,” and I couldn’t remember talking about Marjan at all.

  Nearly two weeks later, no one place had pulled me toward it, not the mountainous ravines of Montana nor the wet, rolling green of Washington State, not the neon shine of Reno or the flat gray plains of Greeley, Colorado. But the last stop was Austin, Texas, and when I got off the train it was late afternoon and the air smelled like creosote and barbecue smoke. Rising up out of weeds beside the tracks was a billboard of a young Mexican woman, her long black hair falling over her white blouse, and she held a platter of enchiladas and a pitcher of Lone Star Beer. She was smiling, a red flower tucked behind one ear, and that was enough. I was going to school here. Surely there’d be a de
cent gym in the capital of Texas.

  I LEFT home in September, a few days before my twentieth birthday. I’d bought a one-way Greyhound ticket South, and the bus departed from Railroad Square, not far from the Tap and the Lido and Ray and Arlene’s, their doors open, the jukebox already playing in one, “Bennie and the Jets.” It was a warm morning, the sun shining on the iron trestle and its hand-painted peace sign and Fuck U and neon-orange cross. Cars drove by as I carried Pop’s wooden Marine trunk to the side of the bus. Once he’d heard I was leaving town, he gave it to me, the trunk he’d used as a young lieutenant on the USS Ranger off the coast of Japan. Inside it were my clothes and Dingo boots, a dictionary and a few back issues of Muscle Builder magazine. I set it on the sidewalk and the driver heaved it into the belly of the bus, and I was surprised at how many people had come to see me off—Pop and Peggy, Mom and Bruce and Sam Dolan, Marjan and her mother and brother and sister. Two days before, because I was moving away, her mother allowed us time alone together. Marjan and I held each other most of the afternoon, and she kept saying she couldn’t believe I was leaving, why was I leaving? And holding her, I didn’t know why but I was. It was the expression the others seemed to have too, surprise that I was leaving, or maybe not that, but that I’d found a way to leave without really involving anyone else, or even telling anyone about it. It was like working out, how I found it or it found me, a private thing that saved me, something I did alone under the ongoing lives of my own family.

  My mother had tears in her eyes again. It was a weekend, and she wore jeans and a light blouse and she looked young and beautiful as she stood beside her boyfriend of nine years. She wiped under both eyes with her forefinger and Sam hugged me hard and patted me on the back, and my father’s girlfriend Peggy held me and kissed my cheek, then Pop said into my ear, “I’ll miss you, man.”