Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  I was tired and half drunk. Leigh and Jeb and I cleared the table and washed the dishes and got rid of the evidence of our time here together. They poured themselves some more rum and were soon kissing up against the table, and I said good night and went down the stairs to the spare room I had been given readily over the years but not Jeb.

  A WHIMPER, a moan, a woman’s voice calling my name, my arm and shoulder jostled and squeezed. “Andre, you have to come—” Razor panic in it, my eyes open to Leigh crying on her knees beside my bed. “He has a gun. Please, you have to stop him, he has a gun.”

  I was up and following her into the dark hallway, a light on in Pop’s bathroom, the house too quiet. I rushed past her. The bathroom was bright and empty, and its fluorescent light spilled over the floor of our father’s den, the room where he wrote and lifted weights, where he kept all his handguns on a shelf in the closet and now it was open and my brother stood there facing it; he was naked, crying, Pop’s .22 Colt in his right hand, its barrel in the palm of his left. Jeb’s shoulders were jerking up and down, and he was studying the gun as if it were a problem he was not even close to solving. Words were coming out of me, my hand was on his back, his skin warm, the muscles bunching under it. I reached for the pistol, and he let me take it. He turned to me and dropped his head on my shoulder and I was hugging my naked crying brother, one arm around his back, the other heavy at my side with this pistol we’d both given our father.

  LEIGH WRAPPED Jeb in a sheet and the three of us sat on the front stairs. Jeb kept crying. He’d shake his head and take a breath, then tell me how for years he’d taken refuge in thoughts of dying, ever since that first time when he was thirteen years old in the driveway at Columbia Park. When things got really bad, he said, that’s where he went inside his head, to a dark door that immediately opened into a light, airy space, everything over, everything finished with.

  “Have you tried it since then?”

  He wiped his eyes, looked at me as if I’d never known him at all.

  “A bunch of times.” The last just a few months earlier. Pop hadn’t washed his hands of him yet, and Jeb had stayed the night and woke up to find the house empty. For weeks he’d been standing at that door in his head, and now he hurried into Pop’s writing room, took down from his shelf the .38 snub-nose and .380 semiautomatic, loaded both, then climbed the front stairs to the kitchen and walked out onto the small side deck. He pressed one gun up under his chin, the other to the side of his head. He was going to count to three and pull both triggers at once. One, two—

  Sitting two steps below my brother, I could feel the ends of the barrels up under my jaw and against my temple. I held my breath, saw the scalding lead rip through my brother’s passionate, inquisitive brain, and he told us of screaming, of pulling both guns away and emptying them into the trees. The door to the kitchen had been open, and the whole room had smelled of smoking cordite and scorched brass. He became afraid Pop would smell it when he got home. Jeb put the guns back on the closet shelf, then he found bacon in the fridge, put six slices on a skillet on the stove and turned up the heat till the air filled with pig smoke.

  I squeezed my brother’s knee. I stood and stepped past him and his girlfriend to the phone on the wall. I called information. I called Christof in the canyons north of Boulder.

  IT’D BEEN less than twenty-four hours, and Jeb and I were greeting him at the airport in Boston. Christof had gained some weight and had a slight limp I’d forgotten about. The circles beneath his eyes seemed darker too, his mustache thick as ever. We hugged, and when I introduced him to my brother, Christof took his hand in both of his, looked down into his face and eyes the same way he always had with the inmates, as if he was seeing all that needed to be seen and now was the time for Jeb to see it, too.

  It was near midnight. While I drove north up the highway, they talked, Christof turned sideways in the passenger seat, Jeb in the shadows in the back. Christof was asking my brother questions, and I felt like a voyeur listening to the answers. But already Christof’s voice became deeper, more serious, and I could hear him work his way into the darkness my brother lived in.

  Soon enough we were at the Haverhill line, and I was driving over the Merrimack River, the guardrail zipping by in our headlights. Up ahead was the exit for River Street and the Howard Johnson’s where so many late nights Sam and Theresa and I would go for breakfast after last call. Christof had said earlier he needed to eat, so I slowed for the ramp, Jeb talking now, his voice small and high and anguished.

  Down to the right a culvert was overgrown with weeds and beyond it was a new car lot, its sign lighted over what years ago had been a drive-in theater, one of those our mother would take the four of us to on a Friday night Mystery Ride. It’s where I’d first seen Billy Jack, a misty rain spotting the van windows as he punched and kicked and broke bones.

  I pulled into Howard Johnson’s and parked in front of its windows. Most of the tables and booths were empty, a waitress leaning against the counter and talking to a cook in white. I cut off the engine. Christof was turned completely in his seat, one hand holding my brother’s. In less than forty minutes he seemed to have taken Jeb back twenty years. In the rearview mirror I could see his contorted face, and it was as if I were spying on someone’s birth or death.

  I left the car and walked into the bright fluorescence of Howard Johnson’s. The air smelled like hot grease and cigarette smoke and disinfectant, and the waitress glanced over at me. She had short bleached hair and bad skin. I’d seen her around for years but didn’t know her. She walked up to me, and I told her there would be three of us. She grabbed some menus and I followed her to one of the empty booths along the window. It was hard not to think of Sambo’s then, of smashing ceramic cups into human faces, of kicking a boy in the head again and again. I sat in the booth but did not look outside. In the car, Christof was coaxing my brother to name all that had hurt him, a darkness he’d swallowed till it made him want to die. Sitting there waiting for them, I knew it was the same darkness I’d been pushing into the faces of boys and men for years.

  CHRISTOF STAYED with Jeb a few days. Then my friend was back in the canyons two thousand miles west, and already my brother looked different. He walked straighter, his eyes were brighter, and a gray veil seemed to have lifted from him. Twenty-five years later, he’s still free of it.

  I never told my father about that night with Jeb and the .22 Colt. I never told him about that afternoon with the other guns, either. When trouble came, our father just was not the man we’d ever turned to; trouble was simply trouble, and who on this earth had ever escaped it anyway?

  16

  IT WAS AN early morning in July, the phone was ringing, and it was Peggy, her voice tentative. The night before Pop had been driving back from Boston. He’d stopped on the highway to help someone who’d been in an accident, and he’d gotten run over.

  “What?”

  “Your father got run over by a car. He’s at Mass General.”

  My blood seemed to thin out in my veins. The air itself was easy to see. Later I’d learn that Pop had driven into Boston to meet a woman he knew who worked with prostitutes. He wanted to interview one for something he was writing. This was in the Combat Zone, a dusty cluster of massage parlors and peep shows and basement barrooms near the theater district. Before going there, Pop had armed himself; under his white cotton sports jacket he wore his leather side holster and its .380 semiautomatic. Four inches beneath that, he’d clipped to his belt the .38 snub-nose he’d bought Peggy, and into his right front pocket he’d dropped a small, single-shot derringer.

  He met his friend, strolled the dim neon streets of the Combat Zone, talked to a couple of prostitutes on the corner, then walked his friend back to her car and headed home. It was a dry night, the stars out, and on a straight and lighted stretch of highway a car was stopped in the fast lane. Pop slowed down. A young man and woman sat in the front seat, their faces bleeding. Then he saw the motorcycle they’d hit, most of i
t under their car, and he pulled ahead of them and cut left onto the median strip between the northbound and southbound lanes. He helped the young woman out of the car first. She had long dark hair and was crying, her accent Spanish. She told him how she and her younger brother were from Puerto Rico, that he spoke no English and they were passing a big truck, then saw a motorcycle lying in the passing lane and she’d hit it going so fast. Just now. She’d hit it.

  It was after midnight, the highway quiet, and Pop wanted some help before he squatted and looked under the car to see the crushed motorcyclist. Later we found out there was none, that the driver of the bike was drunk and stumbling through the woods off the highway, that his wife had just left him and he’d gone to a bar and drank and drank, then raced up the highway on his motorcycle where he wiped it out, then walked away, this boy and girl plowing into it.

  Now my father was helping the brother out of the car. He was lean and handsome. It looked like he’d broken his nose. Pop walked him around to where the young woman was. He stood there, one foot on the grass of the median, the woman between Pop and her brother, and Pop was trying to comfort them somehow, thinking about what he should do for them before going for help. A hundred yards north was an emergency call box he could see. That’s when he also saw a car coming and he raised his arms to wave it down.

  Maybe the woman driving that car was reaching for a new cassette tape, or maybe there was a glittering piece of debris in the road, we still don’t know, but she swerved and drove straight for Pop and the brother and sister from Puerto Rico, Pop grabbing the woman’s arm and pulling her away, an act which put him where she’d been standing and so she could only watch as the car shot into her brother and my father at fifty-eight miles an hour, a speed we know because a state trooper was driving down the southbound lane at that exact moment, a moment he clocked before switching on his siren and lights and driving across the grassy median where the boy lay dead on the hood of the woman’s car and she was out and running across the highway screaming, “It’s not my fault! It’s not my fault!”

  Pop lay on her trunk. His pants were around his knees. In his left front pocket a quarter was bent in half. The trooper was talking to him, words Pop barely heard because his dead mother was there, too. She was at his side, running her palm along his forehead and hair, telling him it wasn’t his time, that he was going to go through something very difficult, but he had to stay strong because it was not yet his time.

  Then she was gone, and Pop was lying there, not feeling anything, telling the trooper about his guns. He assured him that he was licensed to carry them, and he reached into his side holster and pulled out the semiautomatic. He ejected the magazine and handed it and the pistol to the trooper who rested the gun on the roof of the car and began to cover Pop with a light blanket, but my father was pulling free the .38 snub-nose now. He tried to unload it and the trooper gently took it from him, thanking him. He’d already called an ambulance. In the air were the cries of women, the sister of the dead boy and the woman who’d driven into them. Two or three cars had stopped and pulled over and their drivers were climbing out to investigate. Pop said, “There’s one more in my pocket. I can’t reach it. It’s a derringer.”

  The trooper told Pop to stay still. He reached into my father’s pants pocket for the third gun. Pop wanted him to pull his pants up, but the pain was beginning now, a black tidal wave of it sweeping through the village that once had been my father’s body and his life in it. We learned later that he’d broken thirty-four bones, that both his legs were crushed, his right one so badly it would undergo ten operations before being amputated just below the knee, his left so pulverized he would never use it again.

  When Peggy called me early the next morning and told me what had happened, she said his legs were broken pretty badly. I pictured my father in two casts, lying in bed a few weeks, then walking on crutches, then the casts coming off and having to walk with a cane. Then walking with no cane. Then being his old self again. He was only fifty. He was in good shape. He’d be fine.

  But he wasn’t. He’d broken so many bones that his bloodstream had filled with marrow and entered his lungs. Those first days there was the fear he would drown or that the marrow would drift to his brain and kill him as surely as a bullet. The doctors told us to call his sisters down in Louisiana, to call a priest too.

  But overnight his lungs cleared. One of his doctors said she’d never seen anything like it. She shrugged and called it a miracle.

  They put his shattered left leg in a cast and went to work trying to save his right. After two months of operations, though, it was no use. The day before the amputation I was in his hospital room at Mass General. The writer John Smolens was there. He was an old friend of Pop’s, one of the men he’d shared an apartment with after the divorce. Pop had lost weight, and there seemed to be more gray in his beard, his hair thinner, but that afternoon there was color in his face, and he was cheerful and laughed easily and looked like a man who was just about to leave something terrible behind him.

  It was early September. He was talking about hunting squirrels, how by November he’d be doing that with his new leg. I looked down at his right foot. It was bare, pink and healthy-looking, the toenails clipped, but his shin was pinned and wrapped, still an open wound since the summer, and I joked about all the times that foot had kicked me in the ass, which it never had, and I bent down and kissed his foot goodbye, Pop laughing, his buddy too. But I was thinking of us running together, my father waiting for me at the top of the hill, the mottled light across his smiling and sweaty face.

  17

  I WAS RENTING A trailer on Plum Island. It was a beach town three miles east of Newburyport where I worked as a bartender in an Irish pub, saving each morning, the strongest time of the day, for writing. Five blocks east of the restaurant was Lime Street. Sometimes I’d drive up it and look at the tiny house we four kids had shared with our mother in 1970 and ’71.

  It was even smaller than I remembered it, but the front door still opened right onto the narrow sidewalk and street, the tiny yard in back surrounded by a tall plank fence. This one, though, was straight and plumb and had been treated for the weather, the house too, its old clapboards newly painted an eggplant purple, the trim sage. Fastened to the door casing was a shiny brass mailbox, red flowers spilling over two window boxes screwed under the sills. Across the street, instead of cars sitting on blocks getting worked on by Larry, there was a low white fence and a green lawn and a toddler’s swing set and sandbox. A black Saab was parked in the paved driveway. All the houses on the street looked bigger and brighter, and farther up, where the Jackman School had been and where I’d seen Cody Perkins beat Big Sully down, the condemned brick building was gone and now there were swings and a jungle gym and a long slide down onto fresh chips of cedar. There was a basketball court too, its smooth surface used by men who’d been moving their families into the South End for years—orthodontists and realtors, accountants and software engineers and college teachers. The whole town had changed because of this: Market Square was no longer littered with abandoned cars and sprouting weeds; its brick mill buildings had been completely refurbished, every brick scrubbed and repointed, every window and slate roof made new, and on the street level were clothing boutiques, food and wine shops, a record store, jewelry store, and a bookstore. Restaurants and pubs stood on every half block. Hanging from each lamppost were potted flowers, and tourists would stop and have their picture taken beside one.

  The lumberyard was gone, so was the Hog Penny Head Shop. Big leisurely boats sailed up the river from ports off Maine, Boston, Hilton Head, and Florida, sleek white boats you could live on but docked here long enough for its owners to take a stroll through this town people actually wanted to come to.

  I knew this meant the poor people who’d lived here before had been forced out, that what happened to Newburyport was known as gentrification. Part of me missed the tall weeds on Fair Street the drunks used to live in, a lot that was now the n
ew Salvation Army building, but it was as if what had happened to Newburyport had happened to me too. Instead of fighting guys from those old streets, they kept showing up in my dream world on the page, men up against it who only know one or two ways how to get free, both of which can hurt other people or themselves.

  Some early mornings, after locking up the pub, I’d sit on my trailer’s stoop with a beer and watch the sun rise over the dune across the street, a blooming lip of orange that would send me to bed. I’d sleep, then make coffee, then get to work on the novel I was trying to write. It was set in a milltown, and the main character was a boy living with his single mother, his two sisters and brother. There was no money and the neighborhood was run-down and dangerous, and no grown-up seemed to ever be around or in charge. In one scene, the boy dreams he and his family are in the bed of a pickup truck that’s hurtling down the long hill of Main Street to Basilere Bridge and the Merrimack River. The boy’s father is there in the truck bed with them. He has a dark trimmed beard and his arm is around his young girlfriend and he’s drinking and laughing, and the boy’s mother is back there too, his brother and sisters as well, but the truck’s cab is empty, no one driving it, and no adult seems to notice or care as the truck barrels down the hill for the slow-moving, dirty river. My character wakes up, pulls on his leather, then walks down into the avenues looking for a morning high.

  I knew this was as autobiographical as it could be. I also thought I’d been writing long enough that I was aware of the creative dangers of basing fiction so closely on one’s own life. Wasn’t the biggest danger that I’d confuse the facts with the truth? That I’d feel compelled to put everything into my novel just because it had happened? And if I was aware of this danger, wasn’t that enough to guard against doing this?