Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  DRIVING THERESA home to where she lived with her mother down in the avenues, Sam had slowed for the right he’d have to take at the corner of Fifth and Cedar, but there was a massive oak tree at the corner, its roots having buckled the sidewalk long ago, and he had to edge up almost into Cedar Street and that’s when a car shot in front of his hood, nearly clipping it. The car slowed immediately and Sam saw the flashing blue light on the dashboard, an unmarked police car. It pulled over, and the cop was sitting there, Sam thought, studying him, the black Duster that almost hit him.

  Instead of turning right for Sixth Avenue, Sam turned left and eased up behind the unmarked car. He was ready to explain himself, to explain the big oak he couldn’t see around. Inside the car, the blue light was still flashing, and Sam waited for the cop to step out first, but when he didn’t, Sam did, and now the cop stepped out too, a young guy in a leather jacket and dark pants and motorcycle boots standing in the path of Sam’s headlights. He had stringy black hair and he just stood there looking at Sam, then past him to the Duster. Maybe he could see Theresa, maybe he couldn’t. Then the front and back passenger doors opened and three more guys climbed out, all of them in denim or leather jackets, and a white light rocked through Sam’s head, his chin a numbing burn, the kid who’d just punched him standing there like it was Sam’s move now.

  “Yeah?” Sam jerked down the zipper of his jacket and yanked it off his shoulders and dropped it to the ground. “I’ll fight all you pieces of shit, let’s go.”

  Sam was wearing a short-sleeve polo shirt, and maybe if he hadn’t worn that one, maybe if he’d worn a loose sweater or work shirt, the kid who’d punched him wouldn’t have seen so clearly Sam’s deeply muscled chest, his impossibly thick shoulders and upper arms, and he wouldn’t have pulled the knife he now waved in front of him, the base of the blade between his thumb and forefinger, the handle in his palm. Like this was something he did all the time, pulled knives on people in fights, people he’d just pulled over in his phony unmarked cruiser.

  “Fine,” Sam said, “fine. We’re going to call this one over, all right?” He could feel his chin bleeding, the liquid itch of it, and he walked backwards to his Duster, the four of them standing there in his headlights. One of them laughed and another stepped closer. The kid’s knife blade glinted dully in his hand, and the blue light still flashed, and Sam climbed in behind his wheel and pulled the door shut after him, and Theresa said, “I got their plate number, Sam.”

  Sam put the Duster in reverse. He rolled his window down and yelled out into the cold air. “Remember this face. You hear me? Remember this face.”

  THE KID with the knife must’ve had a big ring on his hand; behind the black whiskers of Sam’s beard a chunk of flesh was missing from his chin, and somebody—Theresa or Liz—had gotten him a damp paper towel from a bathroom and he was pressing it to the wound. He’d told us their story that way, his hand pressed to his chin in the dim fluorescent light of Vinny’s small office. There were droplets of blood on Sam’s shirt, and I kept thinking of that kid and his sucker punch and his knife. I pictured my best friend stabbed and bleeding to death down in the avenues, his fiancée no longer his fiancée, and then what would they have done to her? What were they hoping to do with their phony police flasher and their knives?

  Vinny had Sam pull the paper towel from his chin. “You’re gonna have to get that stitched up, Sam.”

  Liz and Theresa were already at the door. There were the words hospital and Let’s go, but Theresa had given Vinny the license plate number and Sam and I stood in front of Vinny’s desk as he called the Haverhill police. Sam had left his jacket back on Cedar Street. He stood there in his shirt, blood drops all down his chest, the damp paper towel at his side, and he was looking into my eyes like we’d both just come to the threshold of something. I nodded; the last few years he’d talked about being big, how that had always kept him from ever having to fight or throw that first punch and he wasn’t sure he ever could.

  Theresa called from the hallway to hurry up. “Someone needs to look at that, Sam.” Vinny was talking to a cop on the phone, but he wasn’t telling him about the dummy cruiser or the assault, just said he needed help running the tag on an illegally parked car on campus; he needed an address. In seconds Vinny was writing it down on a notepad he stuffed into his jacket pocket. He glanced up at Sam and me and we said nothing and left his office and Academy Hall, Theresa and Liz walking ahead of us.

  It was a quiet ride down through Bradford Square, the five of us in Sam’s Duster. I was in the back with Liz and Theresa, and none of us spoke as Sam drove us down empty South Main Street by the Sacred Hearts church, then under the flashing yellow traffic light past Village Square Restaurant and Ronnie D’s, their windows dark, the vacant lots of McDonald’s and Mister Donut and the bank. Now we were crossing the Merrimack, Sam picking up speed, then slowing once we got to the Haverhill side, and that’s when he should’ve turned right for Water Street and Captain Chris’s Restaurant, that’s when he should’ve gone on for another half mile to Buttonwoods and the Hale and the doctor who would stitch him up.

  But instead Sam drove straight up Main, and we all stayed quiet. None of us said anything. My heart was a restless old acquaintance in my chest, and I tried to breathe evenly and keep my hands and feet still. There was a new restaurant in Monument Square, a franchise diner called Sambo’s. It was close to four in the morning but its parking lot was full, a white halogen haze cast out over all the Pontiacs and Chryslers, Ford pickups and Chevy vans. Sam accelerated past it and its walls of windows. Inside, nearly every booth was filled with men and women from the barrooms and maybe a dance club down in Lawrence or up at the beach. The counter was filled too. One woman sat there in a silver rayon dress, a smoking cigarette between her fingertips. The man beside her was in jeans and a dark sweatshirt, his back to the street. At his waist was a biker chain and a Buck knife, and she was laughing at something he must’ve just said. Then we were on Main, Sam steering left down one of the avenues.

  In a low voice Vinny said something to him, a sentence with numbers in it, but it was as if both my ears were pressed to seashells, the cupped silence that becomes the crash of ocean waves, far away and against your skin.

  Liz rested her hand against my leg. We were near Primrose and the lumberyard Jeb and Cleary and I used to steal from. Then we were parked in front of a house, a two-story with asphalt siding made to look like brick. There was no light on over the front stoop, none in the windows, and the aluminum storm frame was empty of glass and hung away from the door and its two dead bolts above a dented knob. To the right of the stoop was a rutted dirt alleyway between this house and the next, but there was nothing there but a motorcycle with no rear tire, its axle on a shopping cart on its side.

  Let’s keep looking.

  Vinny may have said it, or Sam, these words the first about what we were actually doing, and now we were driving up and down the avenues, Sam’s headlights most of the only light there was. Sometimes there’d be a streetlamp flickering at a corner, or in a window the muted blue of a TV, even this late when there was nothing on, and I pictured a drunk passed out on a couch. In a second-story window there glowed an electric Virgin Mary, her robes as bright as a hundred-watt bulb, her palms clasped in prayer. But I didn’t want her praying for me or the ones I was beginning to fear we wouldn’t find, that they’d get away like all the worst seemed to—like Clay Whelan and Dennis Murphy and Tommy J., like the two men in Boston who did what they did to my sister and left her where she could have frozen to death, and now these young motherfuckers who had come close to stealing my friend from me, the first person who had seemed to see me as something more than I was.

  But these thoughts were not in my head, they were only mute spaces of air between heartbeats I was trying to calm with steady breathing. If we didn’t find them, what would I do with this nearly gut-sick readiness? Where would it go?

  Sam turned right onto Main, the lights of Sambo’s ahead in
Monument Square. It was an hour before dawn, but as we rode slowly by, the place seemed even more crowded than before, every booth filled now, every counter stool occupied. Beyond the counter, waitresses worked swiftly, pouring coffee, pulling plates of food from the serving shelf to the kitchen where I could see the hurried movement of cooks in white. There was cigarette smoke in the air, a man in a black shirt and thin red tie leaving the bathroom. I looked to my left, past Liz and her friend. In the center of the square, the statue of the Union soldier was a granite silhouette against the fluorescent glare of the gas station on the other side, and I could feel it all begin to back up on me, my arms and legs starting to feel heavy now, Liz’s hand a weight on my knee.

  Theresa’s voice was in the air—That’s them. Sam, that’s them. She sounded as if she’d been holding her breath, her words coming out on released air. They’re in that first booth. Did you see them? They’re right there.

  We were steering fast into the lot of Sambo’s, Sam pulling into a space between a pickup and a small sedan. That’s their car. Under the security light, it was a dull green, like it had been sandblasted and spray-painted that color, and in the backseat a boy and girl were kissing. My body was light again. If my heart had a sound it would be an electronic thumping in the air. I reached for the door handle, but this was a two-door and Vinny wasn’t opening his fast enough—Go, go, go. Then there was cold air and I was pushing the seat against Vinny’s back, his voice a warning, and I had one leg out the door, my hand squeezing Sam’s shoulder; he turned to me, his face as still as a photograph. Just throw that first punch, these words I left behind as I ran across the lot for the glass doors. I could feel how far ahead of everyone I was, but the doors swung open from their centers and grasping the handles were hands that looked like mine, small hands, and there’d been no weight to those doors, no surface to the rust-colored porcelain tiles of the entryway under my boots, no resistance as I pushed open the final doors, thick commercial glass on double hinges that swung back and forth behind me. There were the smells of bacon and eggs and coffee, of maple syrup and dried ketchup and cigarette smoke. There were men and women in their party clothes, their barroom clothes, their dance-club clothes, none of them looking up at me as they smoked and sipped and laughed and talked and chewed; all of this made sounds but none of it was understandable, voices without words lost in wind off the ocean that was my head. I was moving to the first booth, had been along.

  It was a silent, well-lighted island, and it held three men, young I could see now, younger than I was. One of them sat facing the door, the two others across from him, a smear of skin and hair and leather and wool. It was hard to see them clearly, only what was in front of each: a ceramic coffee cup on a white saucer, the cups empty, and now I was standing at their booth, their faces turning slowly my way as words came out of me, friend knife my best friend? My friend? And the one who sat alone, the one with the stringy black hair whose eyes were on mine, he began to smirk, and I knew it was him who’d pulled the knife, and then his cup was in my hand and I was breaking it across his nose and cheeks and I grabbed the next cup and pushed it into the face of the one at the window, my elbow shooting into the chin of the one closest to me, his head snapping back, and I could see it was a big head on a big body that was trying to stand. There was more movement and noise, human shouts and cries, the one near the window being jerked out of the booth, Vinny’s voice, Motherfucker, and Sam’s wide back, then the kid who’d pulled the knife dragged off his bench, and there was the constant thud and jolt of my right hand and shoulder as I kept punching the big one’s wincing face, his head not moving enough, his neck thick, a lifter, much bigger than I was, much stronger than I was, and look what I’d started, this is what will kill me, this is who will do it if I stop hitting him, if I ever stop hitting him he’ll rise up and beat me to death, but look how he falls to the tiled floor, look how he curls up on his side and covers his face and squirms for the door, and I straddle him and keep punching him in the skull, the ear, the temple, his bare hands, his neck. My throat burns from vibration, the wind in my head a sound, my sound, the wind shrieking through barbed wire, Fuck you, you piece of shit you fuckin’ piece of shit. And I’m standing and kicking him in the head, my work boots doing it, the boots with the steel toes that when it’s cold freeze your feet that feel nothing now, and his head keeps bouncing back and rolling forward, bouncing back and rolling forward, but he can still get up and if he does he will kill me, he will kill me, he will kill me.

  Liz’s face there now, so strange to see it. She is kneeling, her hands in the air, and she looks up at me, her eyes shining, and words are coming out, but they’re lost in mine which don’t stop, have never stopped. There is the cry of wind through the wire and now it’s her wind but she seems to be whispering, her eyes so shiny, “You’re killing him. Stop, you’re killing him. Please, stop.”

  His hands have fallen and no part of him moves. The last kicks have gone under Liz’s fingers, but his eyes are closed as if in sleep, his mouth a bloody hole in his face, the wind in my legs now, pulling me to Sam’s voice.

  You pull a knife on me? You pull a knife?

  The kid, the driver, the smirker and sucker puncher, is on his knees and elbows, and Sam’s hand is in his hair and he pulls till the kid’s face shows, his eyes squeezed shut, and Sam punches it, then pushes it back to the floor, then does it again and again. A muffled voice there. “I’m only sixteen. I’m only sixteen.” A wire turning in the wind, my boot toe sinking into his ribs, then off his hip, then into his ribs again, and what are all these people doing here? These seated men and women who stare at us and do not move? At the far end of the counter, there is a flurry of movement, Vinny’s dark hair, his arm punching someone I can’t see, and the wind pushes me through this painting of a diner of people dressed in red and black and denim, this haze of cigarette smoke, these perfumes and colognes and coffees, and my hand reaches behind the lady in the silver rayon dress, a sound from her as I grab a full ketchup bottle, its neck in my fist, and I’m at the end of the counter and my arm swings the bottle down on it, an explosion of glass, but Vinny is on the third one now, punching him over and over again, this face with whiskers, a punch-smudged face I hold the broken bottle to, but my hand throws it down and I punch the face Vinny punches, I kick the man’s hip, his thigh, his knee, the wind louder than it’s ever been, my face burning, and it’s the burning that sends me back to Sam and the two others on the floor, Liz kneeling there by the big one who doesn’t move, and beyond, in the brighter light of the entryway, a woman at the pay phone is punching in numbers, and Theresa is there too, pressing the hang-up button, shaking her head at the woman who is smaller and turns and hurries back through the doors into the wind.

  Fellas, please, fellas. A cook in white, his short mustache, his pink face. He stands behind the counter of still people, his arms half raised as if in surrender, but this is a scrap of paper ripping by in the wind, my work boot kicking again the kid with the knife, and I turn for the big one but he lies there as still as when I left him days ago, Liz standing now, words coming from her mouth, her eyes dry, and my vocal cords are strings about to break, these silent people Vinny walks by, his chest and shoulders rising and falling, and on the floor at the end of the counter, the legs of the other, his pants gray corduroy, his motorcycle boots flat on their sides, his body half behind the counter where there was no protection for him, no movement there or anywhere, just Sam standing in the wind that is my sound that has never stopped, the boy curled at his feet. But there is another sound now, a weeping, a woman’s weeping.

  She stands in front of the cook holding clasped hands to her breasts. Her dark hair is streaked with gray. Eyeliner runs down her cheeks. “Please, please, please.” She is in a white blouse and black skirt, an apron around her waist and hips, and her legs are in black stockings, her waitress shoes white like Sam’s mother’s. “Please.” She keeps shaking her head, and her lower lip trembles and why is she so scared? The ques
tion stops everything, the wind dying to nothing, no more sound coming out of me. I want to say something to her, I want to calm her down, but when I step forward she steps back, her hands tight fists against her throat.

  Is she afraid of me? How can she be afraid of me?

  “Time to go.”

  Vinny’s voice, no others. The only sound is the sizzle of bacon, these men and women watching us from the counter and from the booths, faces I now turn away from. We walk past the kid curled in a ball. We step over the big one who has not moved. Is he gone? The girls are outside already. They stand together under the halogen haze of the security lights, their breaths small clouds in the air, and Vinny and Sam and I are pushing open the first doors, then the second, the restaurant behind us so very crowded, and so very quiet.

  WE SHOULD’VE gone straight to Sam’s Duster. We should’ve all climbed in and driven to the hospital for Sam and his chin. We could have gone to Vinny’s then for coffee and omelets, the sun rising over the tree line and frozen lake, but instead we took our time out in the parking lot. Maybe Theresa and Liz wanted a cigarette first, or maybe we were waiting for one of those shitheads to stagger outside. I felt weak and empty, my knuckles starting to burn. Then two things happened at once: two police cruisers pulled one after the other into the lot, their blue lights flashing, and like dark ghosts, the three we’d left behind drifted out of Sambo’s.

  But it couldn’t be them, could it? Five minutes ago all three lay on the floor, out, or close to it, especially the big one, and how could he be standing there with his blood-streaked face looking at us in the flashing blue of real police lights?