Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [110]
How? I wondered. And why?
Last I’d heard they’d moved from Florida to California, that they’d rented a cabin up in the mountains and she was working in a fast food restaurant while he was roofing houses along the Pacific.
Now he hit her.
“She tell you this?”
“Wrote me a letter.” Pop’s eyes were on me, and it was then I could tell why he was telling me; he wanted to know what we were going to do about it.
My mouth was air, the rest of me too, my heart humming sickly. “In the face?”
Pop nodded. “She thinks he broke her eardrum.”
Now I was moving, my body solid again, stepping sideways between men and women in the loud happy haze to the bathroom, the stall door behind me, its wooden surface covered with inked initials and fucks and shits and dicks and phone numbers and crossed-out hearts. There were the smells of piss and deodorizer, of wet filter tips and varnished wood, and I saw Suzanne standing on the porch smiling up into Keith’s mirrored sunglasses, her bouquet, her clasped hands; then I saw her jabbing the broom straw into George Labelle’s face, kicking my attacker out of our house, and there was a pinch in my vocal cords, my yelling lost in all the barroom noise, my palms pushing against the stall till it pulled from its fasteners, the door wobbling as I hurried back to the bar and my father and the retribution that must now be delivered.
POP AND I stood in his tiny kitchen lit only by the fanlight above the stove. Peggy and Nicole were downstairs asleep. He picked up the phone and called his old friend in San Francisco, a writer and bar owner, and told him the story and asked if he knew anyone there he could hire to break Keith’s legs. His friend said he’d make a few calls and get right back to him. I was pacing back and forth. “Let’s just fly out there and do it ourselves, Pop. Let’s just fuckin’ go out there tonight.”
Pop shook his head. “A pro will get there faster.”
The phone rang, and he picked it up. It was as if his friend had hung up and found someone standing right there at his bar.
“I’ll call you back.” Pop set the phone in its cradle, looked at me. “Five hundred.”
“For what?”
“To have his kneecaps broken.”
“Good, fuck him, I’ll pay for half.”
Pop still had his hand on the phone. He looked as if he were considering something.
“Call him back.”
He was looking at the window. Maybe he saw our reflections in it, or maybe he was thinking of Keith. I knew he liked him. In the months leading up to the wedding, he had spent a lot of time with him, drinking and shooting the shit. Many nights he’d invited him and Suzanne over to share a meal. When I’d called from Austin earlier that spring, he said, “Suzanne’s fallen in love with a red-bearded carpenter. He’s a good man, and he treats her well.”
And he’d seemed to, calling her honey and listening to her whenever she spoke, his eyes lit with a seeming gratitude at the world for bringing her to him.
Pop said: “We call him and give him one warning. Just one.”
“No, no fucking warnings.”
Pop was dialing their number. My fingertips and toes were buzzing, my mouth dry as paper; this was the time to set my feet and throw a right cross, no talk, no warning, just physical action, the only thing I’d ever found to work.
I did not want to hear this warning. I opened the kitchen’s back door and stepped out onto the porch. It was small and uncovered and I pissed over the side. There was a thin stand of trees, then the street and houses. Through the branches I could see lighted windows, the numbing flicker of a TV.
I finished and grasped the doorknob, but it was self-locking, and I had to take the steps and run around to the front. Luke barked once, then I was climbing the stairs back to the kitchen. Pop held the receiver to his ear, his eyes on the floor but not on the floor. His cheeks above his beard were a deep red. I was holding out my hand.
“You don’t sound like you’re listening, Keith. You’d better be fucking listening.” He pushed the phone at me. The receiver had no weight of any kind