Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  But I wasn’t just going back for my brother and two sisters. As much as I’d loved all that reading and essay-writing and test-taking, there was the instinct to walk away from it for a while, to do some kind of physical work. I could take a year before I went back to school for that Ph.D., then maybe I’d become someone with the credentials to do good, the kind of person to whom people really listened.

  BY LATE fall, Jeb and I were building things together again. Our boss was Trevor D., a lanky British man who wanted to be a millionaire before he turned thirty. He had long dark hair and expected punctuality and efficiency and the consistent execution of our tasks. These were words he used regularly. He also said “excellence” a lot, and once or twice a week he had to unhitch his leather carpenter’s apron and lie down on the ground, his eyes closed tight as one of his migraines passed through his head like a silent storm.

  There was the lead carpenter, Doug, and Jeb, the carpenter’s helper, and Randy the laborer, and me, who’d been demoted from carpenter to laborer once Trevor D. saw I knew very little and could do less. I’d lied to get the job, told him I had all kinds of experience when all I’d done was build forts with Jeb when we were kids.

  We were renovating a three-story house Trevor D. had bought down by the water. It was in a neighborhood of two-hundred-year-old houses, paint flaking off their clapboards, rot in their sills and doors and window frames. There was a barroom a block away called the Hole in the Wall, a few boarded-up shops, but from the roof of Trevor D.’s house you could see the ocean, a gray sliver of it beyond utility poles and shingled gables. His plan was to gut the entire structure down to its frame then rebuild it as three condominiums, the top one a luxury unit because of the “water-view.” He said he hoped to triple or quadruple his investment.

  I saw him as a tawdry capitalist.

  The five of us ripped off all the clapboards, pulled out the windows and any sheathing that may have rotted, wide pine boards nailed to studs by men decades and decades before any of us was born. A lot of the sheathing had to go, the roof too, including the rafters because Trevor D. needed a flat roof for the deck we were going to build up there. It took over a week to strip the house down to its naked frame, a week when we all worked together doing the same thing, but now the long steel dumpster we’d filled was gone and stacks of new lumber sat in the lot, lumber Randy and I constantly hauled to Trevor and Doug and Jeb, the men who knew what they were doing and spoke about it in a language I did not know.

  I kept thinking Jeb shouldn’t know it either. He’d spent his teenage years in his room, practicing guitar and fucking a grown woman and making art; then he found himself at Bradford College, drunk at a party with a cute girl and now he was a father, and the teacher was finally gone and how did he understand what these men were talking about? What did he know about building walls and floors and stairs to rooms with windows that worked? But somehow he did. And if he wasn’t sure, he’d pretend he knew, then go learn on his own what seemed to be already there inside him, an innate knowledge of how things worked.

  So many times during the day, Trevor D. and Doug and Jeb would pause to work out a problem: a support wall is needed here, but that makes the hallway on the other side too narrow; the stairs end here, but now the header’s too low above the last step; if the kitchen window is framed here, there’s no room for a fridge there; and on and on. I’d hear pieces of their conversation while Randy and I hauled new two-by-fours for the walls, sheets of plywood for sheathing, fifty-pound boxes of nails. Randy and I spent days pulling old ones from every stud in the house so that each one was clean and ready for twentieth-century insulation, strapping, and Sheetrock. While new construction started on the first floor, he and I continued demo work on the second and third. We knocked down partition walls. We ripped up old flooring from joists we’d then have to balance ourselves on to keep from falling through. We filled barrels with chunks of plaster and broken lathe, each one weighing well over a hundred pounds, and we’d heave them down steps and outside to the new dumpster where we’d squat on either side of the barrel, then lift it over our heads and dump it in, the plaster dust clouding back into our faces, our hair white, our eyes red-rimmed.

  Randy didn’t talk much, but I knew he’d dropped out of high school, that he was married and had a two-year-old son. I knew his wife had a drinking problem and was in rehab, and that Randy’s mother took care of his son all day while he worked. I knew he liked cars and took pride in the black SS Chevelle he drove to the job site every morning. He kept it clean inside and out and parked it on the far side of the parking lot. Any tools he owned—a framing hammer, a sledge, a few pry bars, and a reciprocating saw—he’d lay on a blanket in the trunk. At coffee break, he and I would sit against the foundation apart from Trevor D., Doug, and Jeb, who usually stood in the middle of the lot looking up at the house, pointing things out to each other. Trevor and Doug were dressed for the weather, heavy jeans and work boots, a fleece vest and wool sweater over more wool over long underwear, the white cotton sleeves you could see at the wrists. But Jeb, his hair shorter now, his stubble catching the morning light, he stood there in jeans with a hole in one knee, his bare leg showing. He wore a T-shirt under a button-down cotton shirt that may have belonged to Bruce once. The shirttails hung out. But he didn’t look cold or unhappy as he stood there and tapped a Marlboro from his pack and lit up, nodding his head at whatever Trevor D. was saying, learning his trade.

  At night, alone in my apartment, I’d heat a can of soup and read Marx or Engels or Weber. The radiator hissed, and I’d read the same sentence over and over, wouldn’t even see it. Later, lying on my mat in the back room, I’d thumb through catalogues for graduate schools, think about all the knowledge that would come with earning a Ph.D. in political thought, how much I would know then.

  But the world didn’t seem so big now, and where were the people who wanted to change it anyway? Somehow in Texas, studying all I’d studied, I’d felt like more than just one. My reading had joined my mind to the thinkers before me, to the millions of people whose lives they indirectly wrote about, these scholars who sat in a tower so high they could see everyone and I could too. But after eight to ten hours of working with my body, I was too tired to look, a capitalist plot, I thought, to keep the prole in his place. But this assumption floated away like steam; if I was a proletarian, who was Trevor D.? He had plans to be a rich bourgeois, but I saw how hard he worked every day, how two or three times a shift, he’d sit somewhere with his calculator and paper and pencil to figure out how much all this was costing, how much was left in the budget, how much would his return be? And what did I care if he made a hundred thousand dollars on this job? As long as what he built was solid and its price was fair, what was wrong with that? Did that make him an oppressor?

  I didn’t know. So I’d brew tea and open one of my books and keep reading, hoping one of these dead intellectuals could tell me.

  FOR THE first time since I was fifteen and began to change my body with weights, I had no place to train. If there was a barbell gym in Lynn I couldn’t find it, and even though I was working with my body all day long all week long, sweating and breathing hard for so much of each shift, it wasn’t enough. My chest muscles felt smaller, my shoulders and arms too, and when I flexed my upper back, it didn’t flare as much as it used to. Despite all my training, I had never become big, just hard and fit, but now whatever muscle I’d built was atrophying. I felt vulnerable, like a knight who has slipped off his steel-plated armor and gone back into the world without it. I was no longer the small, soft boy Clay Whelan and the others had beat up, but a cool irrational fear welled in my gut that if I didn’t find a gym, I would slide back into being that boy all over again, and as soon as I did, that’s when they’d come for me.

  EVERY SATURDAY I’d drive forty minutes northeast to Haverhill. I’d meet Sam Dolan at the Y and he and I would work out together with rusting black iron in a dank concrete room. He was still so much stronger than I was, bench-pre
ssing well over 300 pounds now, but I’d missed my friend, and it was good to be with him again, and for over two hours we’d push and pull and press and curl.

  Sam had graduated from Merrimack College and was working as a reporter for the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, something he saw himself doing for years. He’d always liked reading and writing, and now he got paid to do both. He still had his old room at his parents’ house on Eighteenth Avenue, but he was engaged to marry Theresa the following August, and sometimes he’d stay over at her apartment just off Lafayette Square. Theresa worked at AT&T, which used to be Western Electric. She was kind and quiet, and she had long brown hair and a lovely face and when Sam met her at a house party, he was drawn to her right away and knew early on where they were headed together. They already had plans to one day own a house and have kids.

  After our workouts and a shower, Sam and I would drive across the river on the Basilere Bridge to Ronnie D’s. The winter sun would be down, the sky casting a purple light over the brick mill buildings up the Merrimack, broken ice floes wedged hard against the granite piers beneath us. Upriver was the iron trestle the Boston & Maine would take into Railroad Square, and beyond that the bridge Jeb and I had run across three years ago. My muscles had that pleasantly flushed and tired feeling, and I was looking forward to some cold beer and two or three bar hot dogs, but as we drove into Bradford past its neon-lit fast food shops—Mister Donut, then McDonald’s, the car dealership across the street—there was an emptiness somewhere behind my ribs and sternum, an airless quiet that told me I was standing still when before, in Texas, I’d been running forward.

  But I liked Ronnie D’s. I liked how crowded and dimly lit it always was. The only light came from amber lamps in the walls of the wooden booths and from behind the bar, and that’s where Big Pat Cahill worked slow and steady tapping off glasses of beer, pouring shots of blackberry brandy and peppermint schnapps, ringing up purchases on an old brass cash register beneath the painting of a nude woman reclining on her elbow, her belly and breasts exposed, a blanket draped over her hip. Pat had a long brown beard and hair he tucked behind his ears. His voice was low and stony, and he wore black T-shirts all year long, and at closing when the lights would come up, the bar crammed with drunk men and women in a smoky haze, another bartender would yell, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here!” This was a line people ignored, but then Pat would bellow, “Everyone the fuck out! Now!” And we’d drain our drinks and beers and head for the door.

  By nightfall, the place would be full of people I’d known and not known for years. Faces from high school, or men and women I’d seen in the streets. They stood crowded at the bar or sat at the cocktail tables or in the booths against the wall that Sam and Theresa and I preferred. We’d drink and laugh and talk. Because he’d lived in this town his entire life, Sam knew far more people than I did. Men from his old hockey team, maybe a coworker from the paper, or a friend of his parents or one of his many aunts and uncles and cousins. Now and then, one or two would sit in the booth with us for a while as we drank beer after beer. Every half hour or so, the cocktail waitress would come by to take another order and she’d start to clear the table, but we’d ask her to leave the empty bottles where they were; for some reason we liked to see evidence of all we drank, as if we were measuring just how much fun we were having.

  And it was fun, though back in Texas all that book-learning had seemed to open doors inside me that led to a higher part of myself, one that was more evolved and thoughtful, reasonable and idealistic; in the Northeast again, working construction in Lynn, trying to study at night but losing interest, lifting and drinking with Sam, I was at the mercy of something; every time a man laughed too loudly or yelled above the crowd, I’d sit up and look over there, expecting to see trouble and ready to jump back into the heart of it. Most of the time it was nothing, though; Ronnie D’s was a friendlier bar than those across the river in Haverhill. The customers were regulars who knew each other, and besides, there was Pat to deal with.

  Sometimes I’d go home with a woman. Wake up in an apartment or house I didn’t recognize. Turn to see the sleeping face of someone I did not know, her brown curly hair on the pillow, or red, or straight and blonde, my clothes on the rug, hers too, once a leopard-skin outfit I stepped over on my way out the door.

  But most nights I’d leave with Sam and Theresa, and the three of us would drive down along the river past the closing bars and men and women milling on the sidewalks, smoking cigarettes, laughing, and we’d head under the railroad bridge up River Street past pawnshops and sub shops, a machine shop, a car dealership of repossessed cars, then along the black Merrimack to the highway and Howard Johnson’s where we’d wait for a table and order eggs and home fries, toast and pancakes and coffee.

  One night at Ronnie’s, the last-call lights up and shining on us like a cop’s, Sam and Theresa and I were in a crowd close to the door. Pat had switched off the jukebox and now there were only loud, drunken voices, so much cigarette smoke in the air my eyes burned. Theresa was wearing a short leather jacket and tight jeans, her back to the booth behind her. A man sat there against the wall, one leg up, his arm resting on it, and his eyes were on Theresa’s ass. There was another man sitting across from him, but I was seeing only this one. He had long black hair and wore a black sweater, his sideburns shaved off halfway across his jaw. He reminded me of Kenny V., who years ago had walked me and Cleary out of a pot party on Seventh and started whaling away on my head and rib cage. The waitress had cleared all the bottles away, so now I held a glass of beer and sipped from it. Theresa was talking to somebody, laughing, and the man in the booth said something to the other, then raised his eyebrows and nodded in the direction of Theresa’s ass, and I leaned forward and dumped my beer in his face.

  It was like pushing the button to some rusty old machine whose functions were simple but automatic: the man in the booth was standing up now, yelling, his face dripping, but he was the first moving part that touched the next moving part that touched the next. I don’t remember punching him or his friend, but Sam had gotten into it with a tall man in a light windbreaker at the bar and with one hand under the man’s chin, Sam pushed him up and over it. Then Pat was moving fast and hollering and we were all outside, two cruisers pulling up to move us along, this raucous band of people I only saw when drunk.

  The next morning I lay in bed thinking about it. The shock in the man’s face, then the outrage. And why shouldn’t he feel that? What was so wrong about just looking at Theresa’s ass? As long as he was quiet about it, and she didn’t see him do it and so didn’t feel objectified and violated, what was wrong with that? Didn’t I look at women like that all the damn time? So who was I to do what I did? Again, there was this almost electric hum in my bones that I had somehow gotten myself wired wrong, that now I was stuck with impulses I could not control, ones that could lead to nothing but deeper and deeper trouble.

  SOMETIMES I’D sleep in Pop’s spare bedroom. When I was in Texas, he and Peggy had gotten married, and they moved back into the same campus house Pop had shared with Lorraine. Since marrying Peggy he seemed happier now. He said it was because they lived the same way; they were both writers and readers and runners. Each morning after he attended the 7 a.m. Mass down at the Sacred Hearts church, he would write at the desk in their bedroom, and she would work in the study upstairs. Then they’d each go for a run or fast walk, sometimes alone, sometimes together with their dog, a big golden retriever named Luke. The rest of the day, she worked on her graduate degree in writing and Pop taught his classes. It was like seeing him live with one of his buddies, the ones like Metrakos who wrote or studied, then worked out, but now he had this in his wife, and I was happy for him. It looked like this time he’d be able to stay married.

  Since Suzanne’s rape, my father had begun to acquire an arsenal of handguns. Besides the .38 snub-nose, he now owned a .380 semiautomatic, a .45, a 9-millimeter, and a .22 caliber derringer that easily fit into the front pock
et of his jeans. He even bought Peggy a lady’s-size nickel-plated Saturday Night Special, a revolver he insisted she keep with her whenever she drove up to the University of New Hampshire for her classes. On his birthday the August before, Jeb and I pitched in and bought him a replica of a .22 Colt six-gun. It was silver and had smooth maple handgrips, and he kept it in a leather holster on a closet shelf with the others.

  One weekend that fall, Pop and Peggy were invited by the novelist Thomas Williams and his wife to spend the night at their cabin up in the White Mountains. Pop asked me if I wanted to come along, and I said yes. Maybe that weekend I wanted to get away from the pull of the barrooms and their warm, smoky noise, the beer-by-beer sinking into mindlessness, the naked body I’d sometimes wake up to; maybe I wanted to get away from the possibility of another fight, or perhaps it was just clarity I was looking for, a little distance from the hard physical labor of the week, my distracted efforts at reading abstract political theory at night, my low-down yearnings come Friday and Saturday.

  On the two-hour drive north, I sat in the back of Peggy’s Subaru while Pop drove and she sat beside him, and they talked. I learned more about Thomas Williams, that he won something called a National Book Award for his novel The Hair of Harold Roux, that with his own hands he had built this cabin one summer with his wife of many years.

  After a while we left the highway and drove miles down a rutted dirt road, thick stands of pine and hardwood on either side of it. At the end was the Williamses’ place, a shaved-timber cabin with a steeply pitched gable roofed with cedar shingles, and beyond it a sloping field of wild grass, then deep woods that rose into a mountain ridge. In the last light of the afternoon, it was purple and blue on the horizon, and Thomas and Elizabeth Williams stepped off the porch to greet us. They were warm and welcoming and right away I liked them both. Tom Williams wore a faded work shirt and jeans and work boots. His face was clean-shaven, deeply lined and handsome, and when he shook my hand it was like shaking the hand of Trevor D. or Doug or Jeb, the thick pad of calluses just beneath the base of the fingers, the kind you get from swinging a hammer.