Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [116]
Theresa called from the hallway to hurry up. “Someone needs to look at that, Sam.” Vinny was talking to a cop on the phone, but he wasn’t telling him about the dummy cruiser or the assault, just said he needed help running the tag on an illegally parked car on campus; he needed an address. In seconds Vinny was writing it down on a notepad he stuffed into his jacket pocket. He glanced up at Sam and me and we said nothing and left his office and Academy Hall, Theresa and Liz walking ahead of us.
It was a quiet ride down through Bradford Square, the five of us in Sam’s Duster. I was in the back with Liz and Theresa, and none of us spoke as Sam drove us down empty South Main Street by the Sacred Hearts church, then under the flashing yellow traffic light past Village Square Restaurant and Ronnie D’s, their windows dark, the vacant lots of McDonald’s and Mister Donut and the bank. Now we were crossing the Merrimack, Sam picking up speed, then slowing once we got to the Haverhill side, and that’s when he should’ve turned right for Water Street and Captain Chris’s Restaurant, that’s when he should’ve gone on for another half mile to Buttonwoods and the Hale and the doctor who would stitch him up.
But instead Sam drove straight up Main, and we all stayed quiet. None of us said anything. My heart was a restless old acquaintance in my chest, and I tried to breathe evenly and keep my hands and feet still. There was a new restaurant in Monument Square, a franchise diner called Sambo’s. It was close to four in the morning but its parking lot was full, a white halogen haze cast out over all the Pontiacs and Chryslers, Ford pickups and Chevy vans. Sam accelerated past it and its walls of windows. Inside, nearly every booth was filled with men and women from the barrooms and maybe a dance club down in Lawrence or up at the beach. The counter was filled too. One woman sat there in a silver rayon dress, a smoking cigarette between her fingertips. The man beside her was in jeans and a dark sweatshirt, his back to the street. At his waist was a biker chain and a Buck knife, and she was laughing at something he must’ve just said. Then we were on Main, Sam steering left down one of the avenues.
In a low voice Vinny said something to him, a sentence with numbers in it, but it was as if both my ears were pressed to seashells, the cupped silence that becomes the crash of ocean waves, far away and against your skin.
Liz rested her hand against my leg. We were near Primrose and the lumberyard Jeb and Cleary and I used to steal from. Then we were parked in front of a house, a two-story with asphalt siding made to look like brick. There was no light on over the front stoop, none in the windows, and the aluminum storm frame was empty of glass and hung away from the door and its two dead bolts above a dented knob. To the right of the stoop was a rutted dirt alleyway between this house and the next, but there was nothing there but a motorcycle with no rear tire, its axle on a shopping cart on its side.
Let’s keep looking.
Vinny may have said it, or Sam, these words the first about what we were actually doing, and now we were driving up and down the avenues, Sam’s headlights most of the only light there was. Sometimes there’d be a streetlamp flickering at a corner, or in a window the muted blue of a TV, even this late when there was nothing on, and I pictured a drunk passed out on a couch. In a second-story window there glowed an electric Virgin Mary, her robes as bright as a hundred-watt bulb, her palms clasped in prayer. But I didn’t want her praying for me or the ones I was beginning to fear we wouldn’t find, that they’d get away