Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [100]
But then my cheeks began to burn, this voice in my head: You did that for you. And I saw Cody Perkins back on the streets of the South End, how he walked with his chest out and his head up, how he was always looking for a fight. At eleven and twelve years old, I could only fear and admire him; how could anyone look for a fight? How could anyone want that? But lying there on my mattress in Texas nine years later, my knuckles swelling up, the alley clear and quiet because I had cleared it, I knew why he wanted to find those fights; they were his only chance to get out what was inside him. Like pus from a wound, it was how he expressed what had to be expressed. It gave him the chance to do something for him and him only, and my shame now came from someplace I hadn’t considered before, that maybe inside me there were other ways to get this pus out, other ways to express a wound.
I began to meditate. I skimmed a book on it at the campus bookstore on Guadalupe, and each night after studying at the library, I’d sit cross-legged on the floor in my room with the lights off and my eyes closed. I’d concentrate on my breathing. Every few exhalations I’d think, Om, peace, peace, peace.
I liked having that word in my head. It made me feel I was heading some place higher and more evolved. I’d think of Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, even Jesus, someone I’d rarely thought of; I’d breathe and begin to imagine loving all these people I’d come to hate, these wealthy white kids I was convinced would one day hold the reins of oppressive power.
But then I saw the body of Jesus Christ hanging on the cross, his chest collapsed, those spikes driven through his feet and palms. I saw the bullets shot into Gandhi’s torso, his outsretched hands that could do nothing for him, and I saw Martin Luther King lying dead on that concrete motel balcony in Memphis. Now my heart was beating faster, my breathing more shallow. I thought peace, peace, peace. But I saw my brother’s arms at his sides as Tommy J. punched him in the face, I saw my sister raped by two men who were never caught, and when I was nine and we still lived together in that house in the woods, I lay on the living room floor under the coffee table while my mother and father watched the black-and-white news, a close-up on the X-ray of Robert Kennedy’s brain and the .22 caliber bullet shot into it. And now I knew by whom and why, a young Palestinian angry over Kennedy’s support of Israel, and when would any of this ever end? Would we ever stop doing this to one another?
GRADUATION DAY was hot and cloudless, the Texas sky a deep blue above the terracotta-tiled roofs of campus. The steps of the South Mall were taken up with fathers in ties and mothers in dresses, and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins watching thousands of us in our robes and tasseled mortarboards as we sat in the shade of the main building listening to a speech given by a man in a linen three-piece suit. Somewhere in the crowd were my mother and her mother and sister, both of whom had driven to Austin from central Louisiana where my grandmother lived. My mother had flown in from St. Maarten, the island where she’d been living with Bruce for two years helping him to run a small airfreight company that flew in supplies for hotels and restaurants. My brother and sisters were up North: Suzanne had dropped out of Bradford and gotten a job tending bar at the beach. She’d met a roofer there named Keith, and they planned to get married late in the summer; Nicole was in her last year of high school and living with our father and his third wife, Peggy; and Jeb had gotten a girl pregnant. He was working construction and sharing a small rented house with her in Salem, Massachusetts. She was due to have the baby soon. He was nineteen.
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