Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  I blinked my eyes and brought the book closer. I wanted to read more. I wanted to read the entire page, but now I could no longer see those words. The page was back in darkness. I turned it toward the window that sliver of light must have come from, but there was no light.

  I closed the book and lay back down and held it to my chest. Was this a possible reprieve? If I worked harder at loving the other, would I live?

  WHEN I woke the next morning Fontaine was downstairs with Helena. I could smell toast and brewing tea. On the other side of the windowpane, through thin leafy branches, was a shock of blue sky and I stared at it like a man with a noose around his neck; the black preacher’s face was as clearly behind my eyes as if he’d always been there, his words too. Since when does a night dream not fade with the morning but grow stronger? Was this my last morning? Or would I get one or two more? I had other questions like this, and I began to feel my family back home like some warm planet I would soon fall away from.

  Sweat broke out along my hairline, my mouth was old paper. Love one another. Of all the words in the New Testament, why was I only able to see those three? Was there some invisible presence guiding us? And if there was, why was I finding it only now, just before it would all end?

  Downstairs Helena laughed. I dressed quickly and hurried barefoot down the dark wooden stairwell to the sunlit kitchen and the comforting voices of my wife and her cousin.

  I TOLD Fontaine and Helena my dream. Fontaine listened as if I had just read to her from a passage of fiction and she was interested to read more on her own. Helena looked concerned, not about the content of the dream but that I had taken it so literally. She made me some tea from herbs she said were calming. She talked to me about symbolic death versus literal death, how the dream was suggesting an old part of me was giving way to something new, that’s all.

  I sipped my tea with two hands and listened. This was a logical and more sophisticated reaction than mine had been. But she hadn’t seen the preacher’s face when he looked at me. She hadn’t seen the urgency in his eyes. She hadn’t heard his voice.

  No, she was wrong. I was going to die soon. It was just a matter of hours now, or days.

  DAYS PASSED and I didn’t die, but sometimes dreams come back like fevers, and you deny that first pricking along the skin just before your eyes ache and your flesh burns once more and you sink back into a malevolence you thought you’d put behind you.

  We were on an overnight ferry crossing the Irish Sea, a ferry of loud, drunk men on their way home from beating a British team in one of those games with a ball in it. The boat smelled like beer and vomit, and there was no place to sit that was not in a crowd of them, laughing and yelling and raising paper cups of ale and calling the Brits a bunch of focking conts. We were on the main deck, an enclosed space with the chairs and tables bolted to the floor, the tops of them strewn with empty cups and cans, sweaters and caps, a spilled pack of cigarettes left behind in a pool of wine.

  It was after two in the morning and Fontaine and I sat up against the wall in a corner. She was one of the only women on the ferry, and every now and then one of the Irish fans would glance over at her, then at me, and I’d stare at him and try to leave enough on my face he would look away without thinking he’d been challenged. There were so many of them and they did not remind me of my dream, they were the dream, and so this is where it would happen, late at night on the black Irish Sea.

  Fontaine’s friend Audrey lived in a farmhouse on twenty acres of land on the west coast of Ireland. Once we got to Dublin, we were going to rent a car, then drive five hours across the country to Audrey in County Kinvara. We were going to spend our last week with her. That was the plan. But sitting in that smoky, pulsing crowd, it was clear to me these things would probably never happen. What mattered then was protecting my wife, and I was relieved when she curled up on the plastic bench seat and lay her head in my lap and now when one or two or three looked over, they saw only me.

  After a while, there was sleep. The bar never closed and the crowd kept drinking, and there was the soft tilt and roll of the boat and all the loud, raucous focking conts, the roaring laughter of young men, the victorious blood in it, and now a shouting match broke out somewhere back near the smudged windows, darkness on the other side, and I woke Fontaine and nudged her under the bolted table where we lay down side by side on the thin carpet between the metal legs. After a while we closed our eyes. Above the din came more shouts, then a muffled thud, then another, and I pulled Fontaine into me, her cheek and ear resting against my arm. I could smell her hair—sweat and Helena’s shampoo—and the musty carpet: seawater, dried vinegar, and dust.

  Then there was the ship’s horn, a long mournful honk, and the room was empty and bright with daylight from the windows. We were up and trudging down the gangplank with all the subdued half-drunk boys, their hair tousled, their cheeks and chins stubbled and pale.

  So I would not die on that boat, but where would it happen then? Maybe the dream had been just that, a dream, and now its afterimages were stranded in another country on the other side of the Irish Sea.

  ON THE return trip, the day was cool and gray, the damp air smelling of peat moss, cow dung, and woodsmoke. In Dún Laoghaire Fontaine and I boarded the ferry back to Holyhead where we would buy tickets for a train to London. The cheapest was for an overnight ride across England, and just before midnight we found our seats in a car of old couples and thirty-five schoolgirls from Germany. They were twelve or thirteen years old. Their teachers were two women in their forties, and one of them sat across the aisle from Fontaine. She told my wife they were on the train because of what had happened over Lockerbie two and a half years earlier. The mothers and fathers of these girls did not want them in the air.

  In the seat across from her sat a retired Irish carpenter and his wife. They both wore white wool sweaters and she was reading a book while he and I talked about the differences between building materials here and in the United States, how a tradesman in the U.K. worked less with wood and more with stone and brick and plaster. The car was new, well-lit, and warm, and as soon as the train pulled away from the station, the two schoolteachers had their students stretch out in the aisles on blankets and pillows they’d brought with them. Soon they were curled up toe to head all along the floor between the seats, and when the conductor came by for tickets he smiled down at them and stepped carefully, punching a hole in our tickets and wishing us all a good sleep. Our car felt as safe as a fairy-tale grandmother’s home, infused with good-hearted warmth, soft edges everywhere, and soon it seemed that only the old carpenter and I were awake. He was reading a book. I was revising a novel I’d just finished. Fontaine dozed beside me, her cheek on my shoulder, and there was the comforting chug and sway of the train, the cool glass of the window to my right. Every few minutes I’d look up to think deeper than the page would allow me, and the old carpenter would nod and smile at me over his book. I’d smile back and keep writing.

  THEY CAME in loudly and all at once. There was the rattle of the outer door, then the jerking slide of the inner door, three men in their twenties walking in and laughing mid-joke. Each of them held a cup of beer from the bar car and one wore black wool, the other two denim. The shortest of them said, “Look, mates, it’s a fuckin’ slumber party.” They laughed and walked down the aisles, stepping between the sleeping girls, grabbing the backs of seats to balance themselves, spilling beer here and there, laughing as they reached the opposite door and jerked it open, the short one draining his cup and tossing it behind him.

  I closed my notebook. My heart was beating in the tips of my fingers. The inner door opened again and two more stood there looking at the schoolgirls blocking their way. Some of them were awake now and lifted their heads from their pillows, blinking at the light.

  These two were tall and scrawny, pierced and tattooed, one of them with a blue Mohawk, the sides of his head newly shaved. His dull eyes were lit with the surprise of the happy drunk who has just stumbled th
rough the wrong door into somebody’s living room, not a drink in sight, but instead of turning around he and the other started forward in their hobnail boots. One of the teachers stood and said, “Please, gentlemen, there are girls sleeping. Can you go to another car?”

  The one with the blue Mohawk raised his hand in a gesture that was both placating and threatening, his fingers long and white, the nail of the middle finger bruised or painted black. “We’re just seeing a friend, luv.” And they lurched forward down the aisle, their hands grabbing the seat backs. Most of the girls were awake now, and one or two were crying softly. It was the sound of children waking from a bad dream, the solitary misery of it, but it was what they had woken to that scared them, and the rear door rattled open as these two left and the first three made their drunken way back over the students. “Hush, girls. Hush now. Be good. Be good.” A laugh, then the dirty fingernails of a hand on Fontaine’s headrest inches from her hair, then they were at the door, sliding it open, a chest-deep whoop as it closed behind them. In it was the joy of the addict about to get just what he craves, the drunk who’s been promised a brand-new tab; there was only one more car behind this one, and it was clear that in it someone was dealing dope, for now the other two were already stepping over the girls, most of them awake, a few of them sitting up and leaning away from the boots and legs of these men who did not speak this time, just seemed intent to get out of this grandmother’s kiddie car to where the party was farther down the train.

  Both teachers stood and spoke in German to the girls. Their tone was consoling and instructional. As the last two men reached the doors, one turned and winked flirtatiously down at the schoolgirls, then they were gone, and something was pressing against my ribs. There were whispered words in my ear.

  “Honey, do something.”

  Ahead of us the outer door was already opening again. Through two sets of glass, I could see it was one man this time. Blond hair and black leather, the dull flash of silver. I glanced past Fontaine to the nearest teacher. Her eyes were on mine, and the old carpenter’s were too, alert beneath white eyebrows. The inner door was jerking open. I was already up and squeezing past my wife, but it was like stepping into a cold, black cave, a final place that had been foretold in my youth. I stepped over a brown-haired girl lying on her side. Her eyes were as alert as the old man’s, and I was struck with a razored dread and a cosmic wonder too; of all the cars in this train, how was it possible that I had chosen one where I was the only young man, the one in front of the dealer’s car, the one filled with old people and frightened children? The preacher knew my fate and had given me time to pack my bags: why hadn’t I? Instead of working on my mediocre novel, why hadn’t I written letters home? To my mother in Miami, to my father in his wheelchair in Haverhill, to my sisters and brother? I would have told them I loved them, that I wished I’d been a better son and brother. I could have written to my friends and to former lovers. I could have written to anyone I’d ever hurt, and I could have apologized. I could have begun to atone for all the harm I’d learned to do. My dream had delivered me the bill, and now was the time to pay up.

  The inner door slid closed and the man’s eyes passed over the school-children in the aisle and he kept walking forward without slowing. He was a parody of street-mean; his head was nearly shaved, his nose and ears pierced with silver. Draped over his beefy torso was a black leather jacket festooned with giant safety pins and hooks, a metal chain hanging across his heart. At the base of his throat was the green tip of a dragon’s tail, the rest down under his T-shirt and across his chest.

  I stood in the aisle, the brown-haired girl directly behind me. The man kept coming and I held up my left hand, my weight on my back foot, my right hanging loosely at my side. “This car’s closed.”

  The man stopped. I could see he was five or six years younger than I was, his face contorting into a mask of instant hatred I’d seen so many times before.

  “You don’t tell me what to do. Fuck you and your fuckin’ closed car, I’ll cut your head off and stick it down your fuckin’ throat.”

  Now was that half second in which to move. Now was that flash of time to tear through the membrane around his yelling face, to drop him where he stood. He stepped closer. My fingertips touched his chest beneath his T-shirt—flesh and muscle and bone—and he was yelling louder, like seeing a chained German shepherd, hearing its chest-croaking bark, sincere and unrepentant, and he smelled like beer and nicotine and the sweat of the unwashed. Why did my right hand stay still? Why was I letting him go on like this in front of all these watching people?

  “You hear me? I’ll fucking kill you.”

  Behind us one of the girls whimpered. There were hoarse whispers from the old.

  “Fine, but this car’s closed.”

  My mouth was dry, my tongue thick. He yelled more words back, every other one fuckin’ or cunt, and I wanted to get him away from the girls. I could hear some of them crying in the aisle behind me, and I nodded at every insult and threat he spit into my face. It was like opening my mouth and swallowing whole the ugliest part of him. He assured me he was going to murder me, how easy it would be to do it, and I nodded and agreed with him. I said, “Let’s continue this outside.”

  “Happy to, motherfucker. Bleedin’ fuckin’ happy to.” And he backed up, his eyes on mine. He reached behind him for the handle and flicked the door open. I could see he was strong, that confrontation was nothing new to him. Under the pale fluorescent light between the two doors, he glanced back at the platform separating the train cars and he flicked open the outer door, his eyes still on me, and I followed him out into the cold roar of speeding air and the train’s wheels clicking over the ties and a deep darkness on both sides of us beyond low steel rails.

  “Who the fuck are you to tell me what to do? No one tells me what to fuckin’ do. You hear that?” His face was inches from mine. In the dim light from both cars I could see his eyes were brown, a life in them somewhere, one he’d lived over here while I’d lived mine over there. I wasn’t going to let him throw me off this train, but I noticed I was standing normally too, my weight even on both feet. And I did not care if he truly believed he could easily beat me up, kill me, make me disappear.

  I leaned one shoulder against the outer wall, felt its shifting sway, and I stared at this man I’d filled so immediately with rage. I stared and I waited.

  It’s what I did every morning. Tried to sit and stare at the page without expectation, without judgment. In order for something true to come, I had to disappear.

  He was still yelling. I was aware of the black English countryside falling away behind his back and behind mine. There was the smell of diesel, the scorched iron of steel wheels zipping along steel rails. His brown eyes, two slits as he yelled, were ringed with moisture, and it was clear how much he needed me to know he was not one to be dominated by anyone else. He was not one to be fucked with, couldn’t I see that? Was I blind?

  He did not say these words, but they were in the dark sheen of his eyes, and they looked to me now like a young boy’s, and I said, “So then you would do the same thing I’m doing, wouldn’t you?”

  “What?”

  “You’d protect those girls, too.”

  “You’re bloody fuckin’ right I would. I wouldn’t let anyone fuck with them girls.”

  “Then we’re on the same side, aren’t we?”

  He didn’t answer. He glanced back at the car of children and old people. He looked at me.

  “D’you know what I’ve fucking seen in my life?”

  “No.”

  It was as if he’d never asked anyone that question before, or maybe he hadn’t quite asked himself. He began to talk. He told me of getting kicked out of his house when he was thirteen. He told me of his father’s drinking, his mother’s “fucking around.” He told me of bumming all over Europe, living homeless in Madrid, Marseille, and Rome. He told me he’d done things he wasn’t proud of, bad things, only because of the bad things done to him.
He told me he hated people who did bad things to little kids. “Bleedin’ fucking hate them.”

  “Me too. I’m just doing what you would’ve done.” He’d been talking a long while. I was shivering.

  “Fuckin’ right.” He looked tired now, the beer fading, the rage dissipated. His shoulders were slumped under his black leather, and he was smiling at me. “Where’re you from anyway, mate?”

  “America.”

  “You’re a fuckin’ Yank? What the Christ you doing in the U.K.?”

  “Talking to you.”

  He nodded slowly, like I’d said more than I just had. The train was hugging a curve and I grabbed the door handle to keep from leaning into him. He squeezed my shoulder. “Look me up in Trafalgar Square, mate. You can’t fuckin’ miss me.”

  There was only one door into the car he’d come from, and he turned and pulled it open and walked down the fluorescent-lit aisle. The door didn’t close, and I watched him move down the length of the car. In that light I could see how dirty his jeans were, a rip in them beneath the hem of his leather jacket. His skin there looked pinkish and vulnerable, then he turned and walked deliberately up the aisle. I thought he might be coming back to talk some more, but he wasn’t even looking ahead and out the door he’d opened that still hadn’t shut. It was colder than before, loud with wind and spinning iron wheels, but in the font row sat two elderly ladies, one in a gray cardigan sweater, the other under a train blanket she’d pulled up to her chin. They were awake and at first looked startled to see him, but soon they were nodding and smiling.