Townie (43 page)

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 sergeant 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.

S
UZANNE 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.

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?