Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  Pop’s third marriage had ended the winter before. Peggy had moved out with the girls, so now Suzanne was taking care of him full-time and he was paying her enough to live on until she found something else. Suzanne and I had been roommates for a year. I was still working at the Irish pub, and all summer long my older sister had been depressed. When she wasn’t working, she kept playing Mozart’s Requiem over and over again. She’d listen to it curled up on her bed in her shade-darkened room, the revolving fan blowing wherever it blew.

  I thought this was a deep and honest way to be depressed, much deeper and more honest than the novel I’d been working on for over two years. It was called Lie Down and Make Angels, and for months I’d been dreading going to it daily. I told myself this was because the story kept bringing me back to some bleak years from my own life, that’s all, but one bright August morning I couldn’t write another word before reading the entire thing from the start. I had the windows open but no fan. About two hours into my reading, I began to sweat, and it wasn’t just the hot, stale air of my room. Down on the street an occasional car drove by. A delivery truck or van would pull into the Tannery parking lot, its brakes squeaking. There were voices calling to one another, the cry of a gull, the smell of asphalt and the Merrimack and the ocean. Living things and dead things.

  From behind Suzanne’s door came the barely muffled chorus of women, their voices high and strident, then urgent and accusatory, a string section sweeping in like scythes and cutting them down like wheat. Or maybe the women were doing the wielding and the cutting. I didn’t know. What I did know is that this novel was dead and I had killed it. I’d been trying too hard to say something—about poverty, about overwhelmed single mothers, about absent fathers and tough neighborhoods and all the trouble that could be found there, but most of all I’d been trying to make the reader feel sorry for the children, especially the teenage boy I’d based solely on me. I’d been talking and talking but not listening. The result were scenes that did not ring true, characters who felt more like marionettes than people, a story whose rising arc felt contrived and predictable and false.

  The room was a cell, and I pulled off my T-shirt and began to pace. A sick sweat began to roll down my back, and I made myself read more. Scenes I’d thought I’d liked, I now despised. Sentences I had worked and worked and worked were built on a foundation of lies. Why hadn’t I seen this sooner? How could I have not known how rigidly I’d been trying to control this story from its very first line?

  In Suzanne’s room, buffeting violins pushed the chorus of women out onto a precipice; they were calling Rex! Rex! In the heart of it a woman screamed. It was off-key and I hadn’t heard it before, and now the chorus seemed to retreat, calling lower and with less urgency, as if they were losing their resolve, but the woman screamed louder, a shriek this time, and I dropped my notebook and stepped to my window and slid up the screen. At the bottom of the street, across from the antiques dealer’s shop, a man was pulling a woman by her hair onto the sidewalk. She was crying and had both hands around his wrists and he was yelling and swearing, spit flying. He yanked her hard and I lost sight of them around the corner of the house, then I was running through Mozart’s final work, a polyphony of rising and falling voices, both male and female, one wielding a sword that were the slicing notes of a violin, and I was out in the sun and off our deck, taking the wooden stairs barefoot and two at once, running down the hot sidewalk, grit under my feet. In the window of the antiques shop, the owner stood next to a woman, both of them watching something play out around the corner of the building I had not yet reached. The woman’s hand was pressed to her mouth.

  Don’t hurt anyone. Don’t hurt anyone.

  Fifty feet down the sidewalk the woman sat crying on the concrete, her long hair gripped in the yelling man’s fist. He wore frayed cutoff jeans and was shirtless, his arms shadowed with tattoos, and I was still running, calling to him to back off, “Back off!”

  He punched her in the face, her eyes a squint, a whimper coming out of her. Still, there was this voice: Just get him off her. He punched her again, this barefoot woman in a blue T-shirt and white shorts and long, white legs. Her eyes were squeezed shut and blood sprang from her nose and when I finally reached him and grabbed his shoulders and yanked him back, even then came the voice, Just hold him so she can get away. But touching him did something to me, his body healthy and unhurt while hers was not, and so when he swung around to see who had interrupted him, I planted my feet and tore through that membrane that separated us, and he soon became far bloodier than she was and he stumbled away, then ran, his long stringy hair swaying dully under the sun.

  I moved to the woman and helped her up. She was crying softly, blood and snot across her lips. She wiped them with the back of her arm. She tucked her hair behind her ears and started walking in the direction she’d come from. I tried to keep up beside her. I told her to call the cops, to get some help. She screamed, “Get the fuck away from me!” And she ran across Federal Street and past the antiques shop and kept going. In front of the store, the owner was smiling widely. He called out, “Hey, Rocky. Good job. Good job.”

  But I was already walking fast up the sidewalk under the sun. The concrete was an iron under my feet. My shoulder ached. Did it bother the shopkeeper that he had done nothing but watch? Or did he simply tell himself it was none of his business and he could get hurt? Maybe he’d called the cops and was waiting for them. What was wrong with that?

  But no, somebody should have at least kept that man from punching that woman in the face. And why not me? Because you hit him and hit him because you could and because it felt good to let go of all the bad feeling that came from seeing a woman punched in the face, but admit it, your novel is dead and somebody must pay and how sweet to have had a wife beater in the neighborhood today. How fortuitous really.

  From Suzanne’s window drifted a slow-building duet, a conversation between a man and a woman, each of them, it seemed, looking down on me like two disappointed gods wondering where and how this would ever end.

  I WAS back on Columbia Park again. The house had never had more strangers in it. Each room was an ear-ringing, eye-stinging party, drunk men in black leather, brown leather, sleeveless T-shirts that showed puffy muscles. Their loud talk and laughter was a freight train speeding over a trestle over the river and somewhere lost in all this were my sisters and brother and mother. I was yelling harder than I ever had. I was grabbing jacket collars and the fronts of T-shirts. I was yanking men into the front hallway and trying to kick them out the door. But every single one of them was so much bigger than I was, so much older and tougher, so I began punching faces as hard as I could, and this helped a little; they seemed to leave more quickly then, very few of them fighting back, but they didn’t take me seriously either. They left with smirks and a shrug of the shoulders. They left because they were ready to go anyway. I was grown but not grown. They peered down at me over their drinks and bottles of beer like I was an oddity of some kind, a kid who should be put to bed.

  Now I was bellowing at them till the veins in my forehead pulsed and my throat burned. I was in the foyer, my back to the staircase, then I was surrounded by twelve big men. Not one of them was under six feet eight or 300 pounds, and they were all wearing suits and ties, their hair cut short as Marines, but in this dream I thought they played football for the University of Texas at Austin, these giants I would sometimes see on campus. But now they were in my family’s front hallway, backing me against the staircase balusters, and for a second I planted my feet to start throwing punches, to create a hole for myself to slip through, but there was no way through them, these young men who were born stronger than I was, who were far superior physically to me in every way. I began to panic and looked behind me. Maybe I could climb over the stair rail, but sitting on the treads was Fontaine, my wife of nearly two years.

  The first time I saw her, a girlfriend had taken me to a modern dance show at Bradford College. I’d never seen modern dance
before, these athletes who made art with their bodies. My girlfriend and I had sat side by side, neither one of us touching the other, our end within sight down the road like a break in the trees or something burning. Still, I felt guilty for staring at the dark-skinned dancer in the middle of the troupe. But how could anyone not stare at her? And it wasn’t her wildly curly black hair or her muscular thighs, her small waist and large breasts; it was the way she moved through the air like an angry spirit, then a joyful one, then one who will never need anything from anyone, some lone hunter disappearing over a rise, her bow and quiver of arrows slung over her shoulder, her feet leaving no prints.

  Over a year later, I was behind the bar at the Irish pub just before the lunch crowd came in. It was a weekday, an October sun laying coolly out on the street, the pub in shadows, and she walked in with a seat cushion for one of the booths. She nodded at me and said hi and I said hi back, and I tried not to stare at her as she placed the cushion where it went, her wild curly hair pulled back loosely behind her, this dancer who made her living upholstering furniture.

  The following spring Pop invited me to give a reading with him in New York City. He was driving down in his new handicapped-accessible Toyota with the enclosed wheelchair rack on the roof. He was going with friends who would be driving with him, so I went with two of mine, one of whom was close with this Greek dancer named Fontaine. She wanted to come along and take a Luigi class and visit a friend, and when she climbed into the backseat of the car, I was sitting there too. For the five-hour ride south to New York, we talked without a break. After a while, I asked her what she wanted to do with her life.

  “I’m already doing it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Dancing and drawing.”

  She looked at me, her brown eyes seeing not only me but what she’d just said and accepted fully as her life. There was a stillness to her that seemed to come from somewhere other than here, and I had to look away for a recognition was rising up in me from before I was born.

  She’d grown up in Salisbury, the town across the river from Newburyport. It was a cracked asphalt strip of tattoo parlors and gun shops, of country western bars and used truck dealerships and trailer parks under the pines. She’d gotten her first job at thirteen working as a chambermaid for one of the motels on the road to the beach, and she made beds and emptied ashtrays and threw out used condoms and empty beer cans. Her father, who’d lived in Greece as a boy, owned a linen delivery business and a laundromat, though there never seemed to be much money. She lived with her twin sister, her mother and father and widowed grandmother in a small ranch house down a street where some of the kids at the bus stop called Fontaine and her sister niggers.

  When she got older, she spent her summer days at Salisbury Beach, not far from where I’d been arrested for fighting under the Frolics. She dated boys from Haverhill, some of whom I’d fought. Whenever I talked to her about that part of my life, she nodded as if this was normal and to be expected. I’d lived in many houses, but if I’d had a home, I still wasn’t able to locate it; with her I felt I’d found it, this embrace that had nothing to do with walls and windows, a roof or locked door.

  Now she was in my dream, sitting on the stairs behind white balusters. Blocking my way were those giant men in suits, and there was someone new in the middle of them, a black man closer to my size and better dressed than them all. He was in his middle age, just the beginnings of curled gray at his temples. In his right hand he held a Bible to his chest, and I was still struggling to get free and he was saying something to me that I was ignoring and I swung around and shot a look at Fontaine through the balusters in the stairs. Her face was still and accepting of my fate; there was nothing she could do, and I dropped back onto my right foot and scanned these towering Christians for the one I’d have to hit, my last chance. Then the preacher’s voice rose above the masculine noise of the house, his words amplified somehow. I could look nowhere but at his brown face, the dark light of urgency in his eyes as he shook his head and yelled, “You’re gonna die.”

  I opened my eyes to blackness. The preacher’s last words hung in the air like an echo. I peered into the dark for him, for surely he must be here in this room where even coming out of sleep I had heard him.

  You’re gonna die.

  Seconds before, when I was still in the dream, I’d begun to hear these words as a warning that I must change, but no more: this was a predictor of my immediate future; I would die here in England where I lay next to my wife in a soft bed on the second floor of this stone cottage in the country outside Oxford.

  I sat up against the headboard. We were staying in her cousin’s house, and out the second-floor window there was no moon, no streetlights, no stars. I opened my eyes wider but could only begin to see the pale plaster of the wall. With a sick dread opening up in my abdomen and chest, I knew I would probably die today or maybe the next and it would have to be violent, wouldn’t it? Isn’t that what the black preacher’s eyes were telling me? That violence begets violence, no matter who you claim you’re defending or protecting?

  But I didn’t want to die. I was thirty-one years old. I was in love with my wife. We wanted to make a family. We wanted all those things people want before they, too, are cut down.

  If I’d thought I’d felt terror before this I was wrong. The man I’d lived long enough to become fell away and I was a boy again, one who was not going to make it. Beside me, Fontaine slept curled on her side. We’d made love before falling asleep, and now I wanted to wake her, I wanted to tell her my dream, I wanted her to tell me that’s all it was.

  The month we got married, troops in Bejing marched on the peacefully protesting students of Tiananmen Square. They bludgeoned and ran over and shot to death hundreds. In the heart of the crowd was one of the leaders and his girlfriend. She was young and lovely and smart, and she could see now that most of the advancing soldiers were their age, young people from outside the city, the sons of farmers and truck drivers. One of them raised his weapon and shot her boyfriend in the head. She screamed, “Why?! Why?! Why?!,” and the next round tore through her face and out the back of her skull and she collapsed dead across her boyfriend’s body next to the bodies of the others who had tried to change their world.

  This moment was witnessed by a journalist, and long after reading it I kept hearing the young woman scream Why? Why? Why? This was true innocence, wasn’t it? Innocence is asking why to brutality. But when innocence is gone, you don’t ask why anymore; one merely expects it and either fights it or runs from it or does something in between.

  There was no reason to wake Fontaine. Sometimes fate is cruel and clearly mine was to die on this two-week trip to Europe. How could she comfort me? Why ruin her good night’s sleep? There was nothing she could do.

  I’d partly brought it on myself anyway. Earlier that night, Fontaine’s cousin Helena had taken us to a pub. It was small and dark and working-class, and it brought me back to the bars along the Merrimack River three thousand miles east. I sipped my Guinness and told Fontaine’s cousin this. She was older than we were and had grown up south of Boston in a mansion, her father a wealthy businessman, one of the few in Fontaine’s family. She was loving and intelligent and close to getting a graduate degree in Jungian analysis, and maybe that’s why I began to tell her about fighting in places like this. I told her about knocking teeth out, about the time I almost kicked someone to death and the time I nearly had my skull caved in. I told her about these things and more, and a part of me could hear the lie in everything I was saying: I was making it sound too romantic and heroic, the kind of thing some neighborhood boys just learned to do and I was one of them. I left out how small and afraid and passive I’d been for years. I left out my constant fear that I’d become some kind of runaway train, that I was incapable of resolving conflict with another man except through throwing that first clean punch. I left out that I often walked around with the feeling I’d gotten away with something for a long time but that one day I
was going to get caught. I left out that all these stories made me big to the boy but small to the man.

  Before dozing off, Fontaine already asleep beside me, I lay there thinking of fight after fight: a man on a beach in Texas at sundown, how he was chasing his screaming wife and I set my feet and punched him through his beard, his arms at his sides like my little brother years before, blood dripping from his chin into the sand. There was a gray-haired bar customer who drank four hot toddies in one hour and when I shut him off he reached across the bar and yanked my tie till I couldn’t breathe and I hit him with a straight right, this man thirty years older than I who fell to the floor. I dragged him up, hauled him outside, and when he came after me I punched him again. There was a night party in a marshy field in old Newburyport, a gauntlet of cars facing each other, their headlights on, four or five radios going at once, dozens of football players and their girlfriends drinking and laughing and talking loud, and I was drunk with Sam and a few others from Haverhill, walking down the center of that headlit lane, yelling, “I want to fight! Who wants to fuckin’ fight!?” And then I was being tackled and rolled into the weeds, Sam Dolan on top of me throwing punches into the ground near my face. “I’ll fight you!” Then his cheek close to mine, his voice low. “Keep your mouth shut. You want to die here?”

  Now the dream preacher was my black crow on a limb. My time was up, and why shouldn’t it be after all these years of raging and then the glorification I’d practiced the night before? Still, I was terrified of what was coming and how it would come and there was no one to call and nothing to do but wait for it.

  I needed something right then. Anything. A book to read. Other lives to fall into away from my own that would soon end. But the reading light was on Fontaine’s side of the bed, and the only book was a pocket-size New Testament she read briefly most every night. It was another thing about her I admired, her private and necessary faith in something ineffable, though I’d never felt any pull toward it myself. It all seemed man-made and preposterous to me, but now it was the only book in the room, one that had always given my wife solace, and I reached over her shoulder and grabbed it and sat up straight in the darkness and opened it to the middle of the book. I narrowed my eyes at two dim pages, the words on them indecipherable lines of shadow. I flipped the pages over two at a time, stopping every other heartbeat and squinting down at sentences I could not make out as words. I turned over more pages, then started back again from the beginning. Now I held the book inches from my face. I could smell the worn fake leather of its cover, the long-dried sweetness of its ink, then there was a name, Matthew, and beneath it, a short sentence I could see now as if a small door had opened and a thin crack of light shone across just this one line: Love one another.