Townie (44 page)

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
.

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.