Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  I was stepping toward the women. I said, “What happened? Do you need some help?” All four of them looked me over, a sunburned tourist in jeans and a short-sleeve shirt and electronic bolo tie, a leather book bag over his shoulder. The woman sniffled and told me her story. She’d just hurried here from another gate, and she’d been pulling her suitcase on wheels behind her. Two men were sitting on the floor against the wall, and one of them called out to her, “Hey, lady, quit dragging your ass.” He pointed to her suitcase and the two men laughed, and the woman stopped and told them off.

  “What’d you say to them?”

  “I said they had no business talking to me like that and then one of them stood up and bent my arm behind my back and kicked me—” Her voice broke. She put her hand over her mouth and looked down at the crowded gates and shook her head.

  Two of the other women had drifted back to work. One remained, her hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Wait for security. They should be here soon.”

  But they weren’t here, and I was saying to the woman, “Let’s go. I’ll walk you to your gate.”

  She thanked me, her accent New York City. She sniffled once more and grabbed the handle of her suitcase and pulled it as I walked beside her. Up ahead of us were hundreds of people heading home after sharing Thanksgiving with their families, and most of them seemed to be families, mothers and fathers and grandmothers, little kids dozing in their laps or sitting two to a chair sharing a book or a bag of chips. Most of the kids were in a T-shirt and shorts like their parents, others were dressed up. In the center of the terminal was a decorative dividing wall ten or twelve feet high and built out of glass block. Across from it four young black girls in pink dresses laughed and played some invisible game between two rows of people sitting and waiting.

  Cutting through the din of all this were the jolting electric guitars of ZZ Top. The woman said, “There they are, right there.” She kept her voice low, and she sounded scared, and I looked over and saw where the music was coming from. At the base of the glass wall two men sat against it drinking Heineken from cans. Between them was a blocky silver boom box, their music too loud, an audio fuck you to the rest of us. One was white, the other Latino. The white one wore jeans and a turquoise T-shirt with a blue marlin across the front. His legs were crossed at the ankles, and he wore black cowboy boots, and he was tanned and looked gymhard, and he was nodding his head in time to the beat. He took a long pull off his beer and glanced up at me and the woman. I put my hand on her shoulder and took in his friend and kept walking.

  The woman’s gate was fifty yards beyond the glass wall. There was no seat for her, so she stood by one of the tinted windows near the Jetway, both hands on her suitcase handle. She smiled up at me. I told her to have a safe flight, but I was already walking away, this movement necessary, my body having slipped into a gear it had not been in in a long time. My gate was on the other side of the glass wall. The waiting area, like all the rest, was crowded with people heading north. The digital screen above the gate’s desk said my flight had been delayed fifteen minutes. I took this as a sign, some cosmic green light that I had permission to do what I was now doing.

  I reached up to my bolo tie, loosened it, pulled it over my head, and pushed it into the front pocket of my jeans. Everything that happens began to happen: a light sheen of sweat broke out on my palms and the back of my neck. My breath was shallow and even, my heart a pulsing stone, and I was on the other side of the glass, but the music was loud even here. I walked fast. My arms and legs became the air around me. Just ahead was the long wide corridor where I’d first seen the woman, no sign of security officers or police, and I took this as another sign. There was just no one here to do what had to be done.

  I slipped my backpack off my shoulder and rested it against a chrome trash bin, then I was walking down the other side of the glass wall to the heart of the thumping music. It was a song I happened to like, but not here and not this loud, all these kids, all these old women dressed for the weather they’d be flying to, sweaters around their shoulders or folded in their laps. And did I hate anyone more than a man who would punch or kick a woman?

  I was standing directly in front of the boom box, talking.

  “What?” The white one squinted up at me. He reached over and turned down the music, not all the way, but enough. His friend was long and thin, his hair as dark and curly as the woman they’d assaulted. I said, “Do you like kicking women?”

  Somewhere in the shadows of myself, a small quiet voice said, That’s enough. Just leave it here. Don’t do anything unless they do. Wait for the cops. But the man was sneering up at me, or maybe he wasn’t, maybe it was fear I saw, or appeasement, but I’d forgotten how hard it is to stop the movement once it has started, and I didn’t want to stop anyway, and so let it begin with this searing in my shin, the air finally quiet as the boom box rose up in two pieces, the man jumping to his feet. He swung and I ducked under the wind of it and shot a right into his face, his arms dropping as I hooked him in the cheek, his head snapping sideways into another right, then another, and now he fell to the floor and I was charging his friend, screaming, “Let’s go, motherfucker!” He was taller than I was by a foot, and he had both hands up, saying, “Take it easy, take it easy, take it easy,” and I could see he was afraid of me, this stranger who had just hurt his friend, who was yelling such terrible language in front of all these old women and mothers and fathers and little kids.

  There was the sound of leather soles slapping the polished granite floor, the bounce of holsters against hips, a shout, then another, five or six men in uniform running down the corridor straight for us. Somehow the woman was standing beside me now. I was breathing hard, my knees oil, my breath high in my mouth. Off to my left the tall friend paced and waited. At my feet the other one lay on his back. His lower face was a mask of blood, and I couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or shut, and the police were getting closer so now was the time to stand perfectly still and be very quiet, something the woman seemed to know too, that these men in uniform had no idea what they were running into.

  Just before they got to us, the woman looked up at me. In her eyes I could see guilt and a kind of dark pleasure, too.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome.” But as the cops finally reached us, all of them breathing hard, one of them already on a radio calling for an ambulance, I stood there feeling depleted and ugly and wrong.

  THE POLICE interviewed us separately, the tall friend near the glass wall, and the woman and me close to the entrance of the wide shining corridor. They wore green uniforms and 9-millimeters, and an older one with three yellow stripes stenciled onto his short sleeve was getting the woman’s story, telling her to slow down. The sergeant had a deeply lined face, his skin dry and brown, his voice a chain dragging across gravel. On the other side of the woman, a policeman with no stripes on his sleeve was taking notes.

  The sergeant kept nodding his head. Every few seconds he’d glance down at me. Fifty feet away, the tall friend was gesticulating to another cop taking notes, and then he was pointing at me, and two EMTs had loaded the other man onto a white gurney and were pushing him on wheels past the crowd who’d gone quiet, the four black girls in pink dresses huddled around a woman who could be their grandmother. Moments earlier, they’d looked jubilant; now they looked scared.

  “’Scuse me,” the younger policemen said. He nodded at me. “So that’s when this one started the fight? After he walked you over to your gate?”

  “Well, that’s when the fighting started, yes. But he was helping me.”

  “But ma’am, you’re saying this man was the perpetrator—”

  “He’s no perp,” the sergeant said. “This man’s a witness.”

  “But she just said—”

  “Put him down as a witness. The man’s got a plane to catch.”

  The younger cop looked like he wanted to say more, but he shook his head and crossed something out and kept writing. The ser
geant turned to me. He wasn’t smiling, but his eyes were warm and approving. He rested his hand on my shoulder. “Just give us all your information, and you’re on your way.”

  He squeezed hard, then let go, and the woman thanked me again. The younger cop said nothing. He took my driver’s license and wrote down information, then flipped his notebook shut and followed the sergeant to the others who stood in the center of the corridor waiting for an arrest that wouldn’t come.

  At the chrome trash bin I picked up my book bag and hooked it over my shoulder. Many people were watching me. My plane was boarding, and now a man in line was letting me go before him, another winked and said, “That’s the way to do it.”

  I could see the respect in their faces, though others took me in dubiously. It was the same contradictory look Billy Jack had gotten from some of the townspeople in that film so long ago. It was the look Buford Pusser had gotten in Walking Tall. It was the look Clint Eastwood got aimed at him in the Dirty Harry movies. It was a mix of admiration and fear, revulsion and titillation, and as I sat on the plane next to the pretty student from Boston College, it’s what I’d felt too. That boy who Clay Whelan had chased through the streets of the South End felt proud and vindicated and accomplished and brave. But the young man I was, the one who wrote daily and tried to capture the many conflicting layers of living a life, knew better; when my mother and sister had dropped me off, we’d been talking about Pop, and whatever was being said had opened up old hurts and the bitterness of the semi-abandoned. I don’t know what was said about him or by whom, just that that surprising anger was rising up in me again, that same anger that fired up whenever I’d read whatever I’d just written in this novel I was slowly filling notebooks with in that trailer on the beach only miles from Lime Street where I’d been beaten up daily as a boy. And the anger felt old, as if it had been coiled in some Mason jar on a basement shelf and each scene I wrote turned the jar’s lid another revolution and now the lid was off and it was the boy in me who was screaming, not the twenty-seven-year-old man who loved and admired his father and treasured being one of the ones to help bring him back, but the boy who wanted to know one thing: Where were you when I needed you?

  This was not a conscious question. I’d be too ashamed to know it was there, for I wasn’t the one who’d been run over and crippled trying to help someone. And I knew where he’d been. He’d been living on the other side of that river doing the best he knew how to do. I knew that his monthly child support payments often left him with ten dollars to get him through the last two weeks of the month. I knew he’d lived in small rented apartments and drove that used Lancer he’d bought for a hundred dollars. I knew he sometimes went months between girlfriends and got lonesome. I knew he strove every morning to create art.

  I knew all these things, but I also knew he knew little about us. We children were in our twenties now: Suzanne had left her husband and was thinking about going back to school. Jeb no longer craved death and had weekend custody of his son. He was living in a mill downtown, working as a self-employed carpenter, practicing guitar at night, painting, trying to pay all his bills and go back to school and be the artist he’d always been. Nicole had moved to Santa Cruz for college. She owned a mobile home and was living with a woman and would soon have an advanced degree she’d earned with help from no one. And I was writing and living in the very town I thought I’d never return to; on the skin of things, it looked like we were all doing all right and would continue to do all right.

  There was an afternoon cookout, maybe a birthday celebration for one of us. It was at Pop and Peggy’s before the accident. Mom was there, Bruce too, and most of us grown kids with our girlfriends or boyfriends, our baby half-sister Cadence being passed from one of us to the next. There was a lot of tickling and laughing and cuddling.

  Mom was scanning the room, taking us all in. Brubeck was playing. Behind her was the wall of windows looking out over that rise of field and ridge of trees, and the sun was sinking low beneath their trunks, the sky a low-burning fire. She said: “Oh, I just wish we could have done more for them.”

  Pop smiled over at her. “They had all they needed. What’re you talking about?”

  “Oh, you know, I just—” Somebody jumped in and changed the subject. It may have been me, it may have been Suzanne or Jeb, but what lingered for me was Pop’s surprise at what she’d said. It was the same surprise in his face when he’d thrown a baseball to me for the first time when I was fourteen, when he saw that playing ball, playing at anything, was not part of my boyhood the divorce had taken him from.

  Now I was a grown man, and I wanted to tell him about that boyhood. He and I were close, not like a father and son really, but more like two buddies who work out together, then drink together. That’s how it had been between us. Surely I could sit down with him sometime and tell him how it was. Surely he’d want to know.

  But over the years, one of us would mention not having had something—a belt, a second pair of shoes, a good winter coat—and his cheeks would redden and his voice would become Marine-deep, and he would get loud about having done the best he possibly could. And how could he be anything but right about this? How could this frustration and rage be anything but a signal to us all that he had, in fact, nothing left to give?

  But still, that boy in me needed to tell him how it was.

  Before his accident, there were moments when I came close to doing this. We’d be at Ronnie D’s drinking a beer, or running together along the streets near the campus, and he might bring up something he’d read in the paper, once about some local thug who’d just gotten out of Walpole and was already back in, and I said I knew him and he looked over at me as if I were cracking a joke, and I said, “No, I mean it. He lived a block away down on Seventh.”

  He’d nod, and we’d keep running, sweating together, breathing easily though these things felt uneasy between us. One morning when I stopped by his and Peggy’s house, he had just finished the paper, and he looked up from the column he’d been reading.

  “This black woman in Boston, she’s poor and has no lawn but every day she rakes the dirt in her yard. Isn’t that something? She keeps the dirt neat.” Pop’s eyes were full. This was my favorite part of him, his compassion for others, his love for humanity, his capacity to feel so deeply so quickly about things other people don’t let in or even see.

  I nodded. “I used to rake our dirt yard, too.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “Yeah, I did. On Lime Street.” That tiny yard of dried earth I would sometimes rake clean after sweeping the concrete stoop, the dirt rising against the plank fence I’d nailed shut.

  “You’re exaggerating. You had grass.”

  We were headed to a place where only hurt feelings could surface, both of us misunderstood, a universal human plight, it seemed. I changed the subject. But I told myself that he and I would have to talk openly about this one day. And what was this anyway?

  On one run together, we were talking about his time in the Marines, how much he admired the D.I.’s, how they could stay up all night drinking and playing cards, then kick everyone’s asses out of bed before dawn to hump hills for fifteen miles in full gear under a cruel sun.

  “I needed that. They made a man of me.” He glanced over at me. “Joining the track team was your Marines.”

  I nodded, taking this in, but it felt off to me. He was talking about becoming a man, about severing that cord between the boy you were and the man you must be. I’d studied enough to know that cultures throughout history had devised rites of passage for this, elaborate rituals where the men in the community would take the sons away from the women and girls and younger children, where the boys would be put through physical pain of some sort, a praying of some sort, a joining of sons and fathers and grandfathers back through time. In modern America, there were no rites of passage like this. But there was the Marine Corps, and other arms of the military. There were the team sports I’d mostly had nothing to do with, and there was
stepping into your fear instead of running from it; there was learning to break that membrane around another’s face and head. There was learning how to fight the sons and fathers and grandfathers back through time.

  That scared and crying woman had been the perfect opportunity to take this out on a man, for all I knew, who had a story to tell as well; she had seemed genuinely shaken and frightened, but I never even gave those two men a chance to talk. Who’s to say she wasn’t delusional in some way? Or paranoid? Maybe it hadn’t happened the way she said it had. And even if it had happened just as she’d described, how had my putting a man in the hospital helped anything? If he truly was a woman beater, now he would fly home even angrier than he was before. For I’d learned this much about physical violence: One hurt demanded another.

  I was still in the airplane’s bathroom. The faucet lever had shut off again and I pushed it one more time. I ran hot water along my forearms and hands, clean now, no sign of blood anywhere. I’d been staring at my face the way I’d done years earlier when I was fourteen, my brother bleeding in the kitchen, his teacher girlfriend and our mother tending to him after having been called a fucking whore. I’d told my face what I’d told it, and now I was telling it something else.

  You should’ve just walked her to the gate, that’s it. And don’t think you did any of this for her because you didn’t. You did it for you. And you need to stop. You need to stop doing this.

  19

  SUZANNE AND I were living together back in the South End of Newburyport. It was a hot, dry summer, and we lived at the foot of Federal Street across from the Tannery, an L of mill buildings that had been boarded up when we lived here as kids but was now a thriving plaza of boutiques and shops and a dance studio. Late-model cars filled the parking area, and in the air was the hopeful charge of commerce and innovation and a hard-earned well-being.