Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [106]
Pop had brought up a few handguns, and soon he and Thomas Williams and I were taking turns shooting at a playing card Williams had clamped to some brush with a clothespin. We were using the .380, a semiautomatic with a hair trigger that allowed you to empty the clip in seconds, your hand kicking back, the smell of cordite in the air. But when it was my turn I didn’t want to look young and impulsive, so I shot it slowly and deliberately. I aimed it with one arm and sighted down its short barrel, the playing card a white rectangle in green, and I held my breath, then squeezed the trigger, the card fluttering.
“He could’ve been a Marine, too,” Williams said. He and Pop were behind me, Williams sitting on a homemade picnic table smoking a pipe. The sun on the trees had darkened, and I felt pride from what Williams had said. I took my time with my next five shots, hitting the card with three of them.
I lowered the .380, released the magazine, then pulled back on the slide and checked the chamber to make sure it was empty. I handed it to Pop handle-first, the safe way he’d taught me when I was a boy, and I could see the pride in his eyes too, but it was as if there was a fishhook lodged in my skin somewhere: Williams’s words, could’ve been a Marine. They echoed up against something inside me I hadn’t been aware of, that even though I had plans for graduate school in less than a year, there was the feeling I had done very little with my life so far and still wasn’t doing much. Could’ve been. Like it was too late. Like I’d been letting chances to do things slip by.
My father reloaded the .380, stepped past me, and said, “Rape who, motherfucker?” Then he raised the weapon and fired six rounds in seconds, the reports echoing out over the field of wild grass into the trees.
“Hello? Hello?” A man in hiking boots and shorts was waving at us thirty feet to the right, our target just on the other side of what was a trail. Pop lowered the pistol and Williams apologized to the man and we gathered up our guns and ammo and went inside.
We ate at a weathered oak table on a small deck overlooking the field and mountain ridge, black now against a red sky. Dinner was grilled steaks and French bread and tossed green salad. I sat beside Pop and Peggy, who sat across from the Williamses. The conversation was warm and relaxed, though a lot of it was between Peggy and Elizabeth, and Williams and Pop, and there were glasses of red wine, and we passed around the bread and broke it off with our hands. I kept looking at Elizabeth and Tom Williams. They were a good-looking couple, their kids grown already, and I thought about them building this cabin together one summer, the sharing of all that work, the joy in it. I ate the tender meat and sipped my wine; so many of the writers from my parents’ early days in Iowa City had gone on to sleep with other people, their marriages cooling piles of ash they left behind. It was something my father had been writing about for years. But the Williamses were obviously different, and I did not know till that moment that I had assumed writers just could not stay married, that something inside them—maybe the dark side of their creativity—simply made them unstable.
Before dessert I thanked Thomas and Elizabeth Williams for dinner and excused myself to go sleep outside somewhere. Elizabeth insisted I take their guest room and Tom said something about bears, but I said good night, borrowed one of their flashlights, and carried my rolled sleeping bag down the path into the trees.
The trail descended alongside the field for a while, then cut south and rose steeply into the pines. The beam from the flashlight bounced ahead of me, and I was breathing hard and had no idea why I was doing this. The trail began to level off onto a small clearing of flat rocks. Between two of them was a patch of dirt. A young pine sprouted there, and it looked as good a place as I would find in the dark, and I set my flashlight on one of the rocks, unrolled my sleeping bag, untied my work boots, and climbed in. I lay back, but when