Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  He straightened up, blond bristles on his head glistening under the light, and he moved down the aisle, stopping every few seats to kneel and say something quietly to somebody—a middle-aged man, a woman old enough to be the mother he hadn’t seen since he was a kid, two plain young women, both of whom he’d woken to say what he had to say.

  “Isn’t this remarkable?” the lady in the cardigan said. “He’s apologizing to everyone. He’s apologizing.”

  I stepped over and pulled the door shut. It was two or three in the morning, and my fingers were numb as I slid open the outer door, then the inner. Fontaine smiled sleepily at me from her seat. I tiptoed around the brown-haired girl on the floor. She lay curled under covers, her cheek resting on a pillow, her eyes no longer alert but closed. Her teachers were asleep, too, slumped in their seats across from the Irish couple. The wife was snoring slightly, her head leaning against the window, her reading glasses at the tip of her nose, and her husband still had his book open. He was looking over at me. He nodded and winked. I smiled and nodded back and sat down next to my wife who apparently would not be a widow just yet.

  She lay her head on my shoulder. I stared straight ahead for a long while. I couldn’t remember ever feeling this good. Not just about what I’d somehow done by not doing something else, but about people, the stories inside every one of us, the need for them to be known. And the boy in that young man’s eyes; he was all I saw after he began to talk, he was the only one I could hear.

  THE DOORS were opening again and three new young men were stomping into the car. I stood and stopped them just before the pillow of the brown-haired girl. I was met with the same resistance, the same threats, and now there were three, but I heard myself pointing out all the sleeping children, I heard myself appealing to the young boys inside them they used to be. I complimented them on their size and strength and told them I knew they’d be doing the same thing I was doing if this was their car, wouldn’t they?

  Right, mate.

  Right.

  Cheers.

  They turned and were gone, and I was halfway back to my seat when the outer door rattled again and now came two in rugby shirts, later one in a long brown coat, after that three more, drunker than the rest, the tallest one slurring “Ficku, ficku,” trying to slide past me, his breath bile and whiskey, and I was somehow able to talk him and all the rest back to where they’d come from. How was I doing this?

  With the first one, as I’d stood normally between the train cars, there was the vague sense I was being guided by something greater than me and my own fears, a presence that began to flicker inside the man who’d promised to cut off my head and stick it down my throat. It flickered inside him and it flickered inside me, then it was a steadily burning flame, a found warmth I’d been inviting intruder after intruder into, but now, three or four in the morning, my limbs were heavy and my eyes were burning and it began to feel like some cosmic run of good luck was about to go dry: I knew this was still an unreasonable world; I knew I could not keep this train car clear all night long with words alone.

  I sat heavily in my seat. Fontaine lay asleep against the window. I heard the doors slide open once more, and I looked up to where I’d been rising since after midnight, but the rattle and swoosh had come from behind and I turned and he was already at my side.

  “Someone in this car’s not letting me friends through. Now who would do that?”

  He spoke in a full voice, his accent working-class British. He stood in a crouch, must’ve leapt over each girl to get to my seat.

  The girl with the brown hair opened her eyes and looked up at him. He squinted down at her as if she were misbehaving and would now have to be punished.

  The girl pushed her face back into her pillow.

  He was deep into his forties, his dark hair slick and long, his sideburns shaved into a point halfway down his cheek. He wore a tight black shirt open at the chest, the skin there pale and nearly hairless. If his buyers weren’t getting through, how did he know why?

  “That was me.” I tried to state this as evenly as I could. I tried to state this from the larger warmth of the world I’d somehow stumbled into tonight, but my voice sounded defiant to me, and scared, for smiling sideways at me, his teeth gray and yellow, was the death I’d been waiting for.

  “Who are you to keep my friends from visiting me? What gives you the fucking right, mate?” The dealer’s voice was lower now, his face too close to mine, and I could feel him taking me in: I felt young and weak and exposed: Who was I to keep anyone from moving freely up and down this train? What did give me the right? My hatred of cruelty? My nearly pathological need to protect others, one I could follow all the way back to my youth? How was my problem all of a sudden everyone else’s?

  I stood and said, “People are sleeping. Let’s talk somewhere else.”

  “I’m not talking, mate. I’m not here to fucking talk.”

  He said it calmly. He stepped back between the girls so I could walk ahead of him and out the doors.

  He was not large or well-built, but he moved with the cocky ease of the truly dangerous. So it would be a knife then, wouldn’t it? I’d die the way Cleary had six years earlier, his wife stabbing him in the lower back, my friend collapsing into the weeds and slowly bleeding to death.

  I kept my back to the windows. I stepped sideways through both doors out into the perpetual noise between both trains. The air was colder, and in the zipping darkness on the other side of the steel rail a porch light came and went. The dealer had taken a moment longer to follow me through the doors, and I was sure this was to pull the knife he would start jabbing at me very soon. My left hand hovered six inches away from my hip, my weight sinking back onto my right foot, locking me, the way it always had, into what would happen now.

  He stepped in front of me, but he stood in his own fight stance, his hands low and empty, and I began to talk; it was like getting in the first punch without the punch, and I talked more than I wanted to. I told him I hadn’t asked to be put in this train car. I told him I’d rather be sleeping than doing this. I told him I was tired and if there were no children trying to sleep in the aisles, I wouldn’t give a shit who was walking up and down this train. And it wasn’t just so the girls could sleep, it was so they would stop being scared.

  “Because some of your friends are scary-looking to kids.”

  While I talked he’d crossed his arms over his chest. He leaned against the wall and scrutinized me. In the pale fluorescence from the cars, with his long hair and sideburns, the narrow face and deep eyes, he was every street-tough I’d ever known: he was Cody Perkins about to knock out Sully; he was Clay Whelan just before he chased me down; he was Kenny V. punching me while Ricky J. beat on Cleary; he was Dennis Murphy slapping the old lady with the thin branch; he was Tommy J. walking away from my bleeding brother, and he was Steve Lynch the second before I threw my first punch. Except now I wasn’t going to throw a punch, even if the dealer was to step away from the wall and square off to shut me up; I wasn’t going to fight him either, and it was as if, in my explanation to him, I had stood between those trains and taken off all my clothes, then began to pull away every muscle I’d ever built: I ripped off the plate of my pectorals, dropping them at my feet. I reached up to each shoulder and unhooked both deltoids and let them fall, too; then I reached around for the muscles of my upper back, the first to show up years earlier, and dropped them at the feet of the dark dealer, speaking to him all along as if I’d never learned to do anything but talk, as if this armor I’d forged had never been needed because I could trust the humanity of the other to show itself. Trust. I was going to trust this stranger, this man who had entered my train car and not to talk. I was going to trust him to see and to listen and to do the right thing.

  A part of me was watching myself do this, the same part that watched my fictional characters say and do things. And when they did that apart from me and my authorial wishes for them, they were more truly themselves. As I was now, standing
before the dealer in the whisking cold, more truly myself. No armor, no sword.

  He lit a cigarette, the lighter’s flame extinguishing in the wind. He took a deep drag and said, “You’re just protecting the girls then.” The words came sideways out his mouth, slipping through a stream of smoke.

  “That’s all.”

  His eyes were two slits of shadow. He held the cigarette to his lips. He nodded. It was as if he were seeing all the unfolding years that had brought me here with him between these two train cars and it was a story he knew well, one he’d already written and discarded and wasn’t up to being reminded about.

  He blew smoke through both nostrils. “Fuck it, the night’s done anyway, right, mate?” He flicked the smoking butt over my shoulder into the black wind. I knew what this action meant, I knew what he was saying he had chosen not to do to me, but I didn’t care one way or another. A part of me seemed to have died anyway, and what remained watched myself walk behind the dealer through both doors, through the outer and then the inner, into the warm and quiet car of safe and sleeping girls.

  20

  THE LAST TIME I saw my father alive, we were both watching two men fight each other in the ring. It was February, near midnight, and I sat in damp work clothes on his couch in his house on the hill. In the past twelve years, Pop had learned how to live in a wheelchair, and there were signs of him and it all over the house: just weeks after his accident, one of his friends—a professor, Vietnam veteran, and Marine captain—had come over with one of his daughter’s boyfriends and built a ramp spanning the two steps of the dining room down to the living room. Neither men were carpenters, but the pitch was right and the two-by-four railing didn’t shake much, and twelve years later its top rail was worn smooth as bone from my father’s hands.

  Along both walls of the corridor to his bedroom we’d screwed in wood rails and he’d grab one on each side of his chair and pull himself rolling fast into the room where he slept and wrote on a desk he’d hired me to build, one he could roll up to, one that his surviving leg wouldn’t bump underneath. Three years after his accident, Pop had taken out a loan and hired Jeb and me and some mutual friends, Beau Mullen and Jack Herlihy, to remodel his house. If we hadn’t needed the work, we would’ve done it for free, but we did need the work so five days a week for two and a half months, we changed his home from what it was to what he now needed.

  Jeb did the design, and we cut away and hauled off the old deck, we poured new footings then tore out walls and ripped away half the roof. We built a larger living room with a small deck he could wheel out to, one that looked over the wading pool he’d had installed. We built a larger bedroom for Cadence, a brand-new one for little Madeleine. We tore out the wall separating what used to be his and Peggy’s bedroom and their library, and now his bed sat up against a wall of floor-to-ceiling books and there was more natural light streaming in from the windows facing the hill of poplars behind his house.

  Later Jeb and I poured concrete footings for the posts of the long, staggered exterior ramp, and we ripped up the plywood decking and nailed stronger, much longer-lasting pressure-treated two-by-sixes. As the boards aged and bowed slightly, his wheels would make a clacking sound over them not unlike a far-off train’s.

  Pop had made peace with his crippling. Once, sitting straight in his wheelchair, he’d looked over at me in his small dining room and said, “I’d stop on that highway again. Even knowing what I was going to lose, I would.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve learned so much.”

  I couldn’t pretend to know what he’d learned, but I and others had seen a change in him that was not solely physical. When I was a boy, my memory of him then is of a man in constant motion, even when he was sitting. It was there in his eyes, a dark and restless intelligence and a kind of hunger, too. When he wasn’t sitting—which was reserved, it seemed, only for writing and reading and eating—then he was running or mixing a drink or he was talking and talking, carrying books out to his car to drive to a classroom where he would talk some more.

  Then he was gone, and when we saw him once a week, when we four kids sat with him in a restaurant he could not afford, there was still that restlessness, that hunger, his body poised as if he could stay just a little while because there was work to do, so much to get done.

  And he got it done too. Despite three broken marriages, four children from the first, two ex-stepkids from the second, and two daughters from the third, he got it done, and it was art. Whenever I read his work, I was pulled easily into a vision that was both bleak and redemptive, one illuminated with a kind of ancient love and compassion I could only associate with the divine. My father’s work was a deeply compelling blend of the profane and the sacred, like a drunk confessing his sins to a good priest only to go out and commit them once more but this time not as unconsciously, not as cruelly, and not as if that would forever be his fate.

  Off and on throughout the years, my father had said in passing that he’d always saved the best part of himself for his work, that he relaxed with his friends and family. But since getting run over on the highway, that no longer seemed to be the case. He still wrote every morning. He woke, transferred himself to his wheelchair, wheeled himself first to the bathroom, then the kitchen where he put water on the stove for tea. He wheeled himself back down the hall, laid out clothes on his mattress—almost always sweatpants and a cotton shirt—and transferred onto the bed to get dressed lying down. Then he sat up, which wasn’t always easy, and transferred into the chair where he folded the empty right pant leg over his stump and tied a rolled bandanna around it. He wheeled down the long corridor to his tiny kitchen and the boiling water, poured it into a cup over a tea bag and honey, then carried it balanced on his lap back down to the bedroom where he’d sit at his desk and write longhand in pen.

  By midmorning he’d be done. He’d count how many words he’d gotten and record the number. After each total, whether it was fifteen hundred or fifty, he wrote: Thank you.

  My father would then transfer back to his bed. He’d dress in workout clothes he’d tossed there from a drawer, transfer once again down into his chair, an act he did countless times every day and every night, one that required strong upper-body muscles, and he’d put on some Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald or Waylon Jennings and he’d sing and shadowbox the air, he’d lift light dumbbells, he’d strap his surviving leg to his weight bench and do abdominal crunches till his muscles burned.

  Crippled or not, he was still living the rituals he’d established for himself since he was a young man, but what was different was how he was afterward. Gone was that subtle look that his time with you was something to do between writing sessions, that you were a pleasant or unpleasant distraction. Now, when he spoke to me, usually looking up into my face from his chair, his thin hair clean and combed back, his beard nearly white now but trimmed as neatly as it had always been, he looked directly into my eyes, and he did this not just when he was talking, but when I was too, and it made me want to tell him more about myself. It was as if he’d been gone for thirty years and had finally wandered back home, and now was the time to know each other while we could. Now was the time to do things together.

  We did, too; for ten years nearly every other Sunday, Pop would host a family potluck dinner at his house and we grown kids and our girlfriends or boyfriends, later our spouses, and then later our kids, would come share an afternoon together, eating chili or stew or fried fish or something from Pop’s grill out back. Jazz or classical would be playing on his stereo, little children running around our feet. Three of them were mine and Fontaine’s, and at age five our oldest, Austin, liked to push Pop in his wheelchair all the way up and down the hall from his bedroom back to the dining room. Sometimes Jeb would sit in the corner and play a piece on his guitar. Somewhere along the way he’d gotten into the New England Conservatory of Music, and he lived in Boston and had a German girlfriend who sang opera. Then more years passed and he was married to Victoria, a pretty
young woman he’d met while she was babysitting our two half-sisters, Cadence and Madeleine. If it was a weekend when they weren’t with their mother, then the girls would be there too, sitting on the couch reading books to the younger kids or outside on the swing Jeb had built.

  Pop had begun to worry about the possibility of a house fire. If he couldn’t get to the front door and the staggered ramp down to his car, how would he get away? So Jeb and his carpentry partner, Bob, had framed a long deck off the small one in the rear. It ran the entire length of Pop’s wading pool and because of the hill Pop lived on, the end of this new deck was fifteen feet off the ground and they built a square sitting area there with room for a grill. We called it “the Cajun Boardwalk,” a nod to our Louisiana roots we four adult kids had never lived, and every Sunday that we gathered, if the weather was good, just about all of us would end up out there. My mother would come, too. She’d moved up from Florida and now lived with Bruce in the woods of western Massachusetts. Over the years she’d gained a little weight and her hair had begun to go gray, but she was still a beauty, still the kind of woman a man would hit on if she were to sit alone in a bar, which she never did.

  To see her and Pop together was to see a couple. They teased each other and laughed. Sometimes she’d make him a plate of food and bring it to wherever he sat, and he’d smile up at her brightly and squeeze her hand, sometimes lift his face for a peck on the cheek. Whatever had ended their marriage was scar tissue no longer even sensitive to the touch, and Bruce was fine with this; he’d been living with my mother thirty years, three times longer than my father ever had. He’d go get his own plate of food, and some of us would sit at Pop’s small dining room table, others on chairs against the wall or on the couch beside the wheelchair ramp. There’d be Jeb and his wife Victoria. Suzanne and her husband Tom. A few times a year Nicole would fly out from California with her girlfriend, then later her baby son Theo. There would be me and Fontaine, our three kids, Austin, Ariadne, and Elias, who over the years, one at a time, Fontaine would be breast-feeding while she ate. Cadence and Madeleine might be sitting in the laps of one of us older brothers or sisters, and friends would drop by: Lori, Jack and Joe, Sam and Theresa, and their son and daughter too.