Townie (42 page)

And now he wanted to do something for his heart and lungs, too. But what can a man without legs do? There was swimming, but his entire life he’d been afraid of water. There were those racing wheelchairs you could take out on a track somewhere, but Pop and the rest of us still held out hope that he’d walk again one day and the thought of buying another wheelchair was a dark one.

Then I remembered shadowboxing. I told him how it could wind even the fittest boxers, how you could probably do it in a sitting position, and I pulled up a chair beside him and showed him how to throw a few punches. I felt like I was lying to him, though, because these punches were not themselves without pivoting feet and legs and hips to power them. But Pop liked the movement, needed the movement, and he remembered boot camp in the Marine Corps, how much harder the running became when you had to count cadence too, when you had to sing “the D.I.’s fucking song.” So Pop began singing. After his weight workouts, he’d put on some Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald or Peggy Lee, and he’d shadowbox in his chair and sing from his diaphragm,
Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars…,
his left leg sticking out straight from his chair, his right gone, his eyes closed as he hit notes and punched the air.

I’d drive down the hill feeling more joy than sadness. I had never grown anything before, never planted a seed and watered it till something blossomed that had been waiting there all along. At least I thought I hadn’t. But I had. It was me I had built up. And I imagined that helping Pop get his strength back gave the kind of sustained creative satisfaction a gardener must feel, or a coach, or a father.

I
T WAS THREE
years later, and because of what I’d just done, a big man offered me his place in line, another squeezed my shoulder and said, “That’s the way to do it,” and the woman who took my boarding pass glanced at me quickly, her eyes passing over me as if she were trying to memorize something. My heart had finally slowed back down. My legs felt unsteady. I needed water.

It was a big plane, and I took my seat in the center row. Beside me sat a young woman in a Boston College T-shirt. She had long blonde hair, a thin gold bracelet clinging to her tanned wrist, and she was reading
Cultural Literacy,
which I’d just read. She glanced at me. I asked her if she liked the book, told her I thought it was pretty good, my voice still high and reedy from where the adrenaline had put it. She said she’d just started it, and she smiled and stared at my bare arm. She went back to her book.

I reached for both ends of my seat belt. I clicked them together and now saw what she had seen. They were the same size as the fine droplets of paint that come off a roller when working on a ceiling, that winter day Jeb and I painted that closed room, our accidental high, the drinking and driving and more drinking, Devin Wallace knocking my head against the concrete again and again. Covering the backs of both my hands and forearms were hundreds of dots of blood. It was as if I were exposing some shameful part of myself, and I stood and stepped sideways past other passengers and rushed up the aisle and locked myself in the bathroom.

I pulled the faucet lever. The water was warm and I tried to make it hotter than that, as hot as it could possibly get. I began to wash off the man’s blood. When it swirled down the drain I looked into the mirror so close to my face. At first I didn’t see me, only what I’d done, the men’s boom box breaking into pieces, the big one rising up from the floor and swinging at me, a wild hook I’d ducked.

It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving in Miami International Airport, its wide corridors filled with people walking in all directions, every seat in the waiting areas taken, whole families sitting together. Some were tanned or sunburned and heading back north or east. Others were already brown and sat on the floor sharing sandwiches and salads from one of the food stands. Spanish hung in the air, and Southern accents, New York and New England, too. Every few minutes, neutral voices shot out of an invisible sound system calling out departing flights. It was late afternoon, and on the other side of the tinted windows the tarmac and flashing planes were still too bright to look out at.

In Key West I’d bought myself a bolo tie, its center a small TV screen that kept scrolling black-and-white geometric shapes. I didn’t watch TV anymore, hadn’t for years, but I liked the digital patterns that seemed to rise up inside that screen like some positive and innovative future I was part of. I’d just sold my first book, a collection of short stories I’d been working on since Colorado. I’d gotten paid four thousand dollars for it, and now I could afford to go visit my mother where she and Bruce lived in Miami. She’d gone back to school and was studying for her master’s in social work. She and Bruce lived in a carpeted two-story condo in a gated compound of palm trees and aloe vera, live oaks and Spanish moss.

There’d been a plan for all four of us grown kids to go down for the weekend, but only Nicole and I were able to get there, Nicole from California where she, too, was earning a master’s in social work, and me from Boston. Bruce’s drinking years were behind him now, and he was visiting his seven kids and ex-wife up north, his grandkids too. It was the Friday after Thanksgiving and outside my mother’s condominium the Florida sun shone on the live oaks and sable palms of her gated apartment complex, a lime green lizard skittering across the concrete patio. Nicole and Mom and I were sitting around the air-conditioned living room talking about getting out and doing something.

Mom wore shorts and a blouse. She looked tanned and pretty and younger than her forty-nine years. Nicole’s red hair was cut short, and she’d spent the morning studying, her focus still on what she’d been reading though this talk of doing something seemed to jolt her into the present, and she said she’d never been to Key West.

“Let’s go there. We’ll stay in some cheap motel.”

“Oh, I can’t afford that, honey.” Mom’s tone was sweetly matter-of-fact, like she was stating the time of day or what she planned to cook for supper. Not being able to afford things was a condition she and we had always known, and I thought of her Mystery Rides when we were kids, her ability to take nothing and make something fun out of it.

I thought, too, of the book money I still had in the bank, enough to stay in a good hotel and eat well and drink well, which we did for the next two nights in Key West. We found a resort on a beach, swam in its pool, ate all our meals outside in the salt air under thatched umbrellas, and we walked from shop to shop under the sun with other tourists, something we’d never been before.

Mom and Nicole seemed to soak in this idleness as a much-needed break from their graduate work, and I couldn’t remember ever being this happy before. There was the light-shouldered feeling that a kind of darkness was behind us for good, that we’d gotten through it and that from here on out things would be better. But there was this, too: I was finally taking care of my family the way I’d felt called to from the beginning, since I was a boy and Pop had left the five of us in that cottage in the woods.

And how sweet to be able to give my mother a Mystery Ride, to sit with her and Nicole at a linen-covered table overlooking the sea, the sun going down like some gloriously kept promise, to tell her to order whatever she wanted, to eat and drink her fill, how she looked at me once and shook her head, her eyes shining.

On Sunday we drove straight from Key West to the airport in Miami. The sun was brighter than ever, and I sat in the backseat squinting out at marine supply stores and beach shacks and stretches of blue-green salt water. A cormorant swooped off a rotting post and disappeared into a thick stand of mangroves, and my face and arms were sunburned. With my new bolo tie and its digital screen, I felt like some aristocratic bohemian.

I was inside the airport only twenty minutes when I saw a woman crying near one of the shops. She was thirty-five or forty years old. She had curly black hair, and she was short and round, and three young women were comforting her. They wore the same waitressing uniform of a restaurant along the airport’s corridor, a cotton dress the color of peaches, a white apron cinched in at their hips, these pretty Cubana girls asking the woman if she was all right. Did she call the police? Are those men still down there?

I stopped walking. People passed me by. A businessman’s briefcase bumped the backpack over my shoulder, and he turned and apologized, a man in a blue button-down shirt and yellow tie, his cologne lingering in the air. The woman was saying, “No, they’re still there, and I’m afraid to walk to my
gate
.”

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, mother
fucker
!” 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.