Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [120]
Vinny was in a holding cell, and Theresa and Liz and I were sitting on a long wooden bench. The three cops were behind a half-wall of raised panel, deep scratches along its surface, a gouge in the corner. Sam stood there waiting. The whiskers of his chin were caked with dried blood, and I could see he was nervous about having woken his father for this. Then Mr. Dolan strolled through an office doorway and down the hall, this short Irishman in a hat and coat. He glanced at his son and us, then pushed open the swinging half-door to the police desks and moved easily through the room. He took off his hat and sat down in an oak chair beside a desk.
“Mornin’, Sergeant.”
“Morning to you, Sam.”
Sam’s father nodded in the direction of the other two. “Officers.”
“Inspector.”
“You’ve got a tough kid here, Sam.”
“Oh sure, sure.” There was more small talk, a laugh or two, and I could see Sam relax a bit as his father began to make a case for our friend Vinny and how he could lose his job over this and did any of us want that?
In minutes Vinny was out of his cell signing something at the counter. Then the five of us were thanking Mr. Dolan and climbing back into Sam’s Duster for the short ride to the hospital. While his chin got stitched, I stood outside with Vinny near the ambulance bay. From the hill of Buttonwoods Avenue, we could see out over the river flowing east. The sky had lightened above the trees and houses, and across the water the stacks of the boxboard factory churned out smoke the color of ash. I looked farther up the hill to the middle school where from the asphalt playground I used to watch that smoke rise into the air, the school where I saw Russ Bowman chased and beaten by a grown man, and I could feel the soft thud of the big one’s head against my boot again and again. Maybe to shake it off, I said, “Good fight.”
Vinny lit up a cigarette. He blew smoke out his nose and smiled at me. “Fight? That was a fucking ambush.”
We both laughed, but again there was the feeling I’d just gotten away with something, the cops treating us like rogue colleagues, Mr. D. scolding us not so much for the fight but for letting the police get involved. Vinny was still chuckling under his breath. He looked over at me. “And you are fuckin’ crazy.”
I smiled and shrugged and looked back out at the brown river. I had never hit a baseball with a bat in a game people I loved were watching; I didn’t know what it felt like to slap a puck into a net or catch a football and run with it into a place called the end zone, but standing in the dawn’s early light with Vinny it occurred to me this is what those acts must feel like: earned and glorious and edged with blood.
12
I WAS ALONE IN Liz’s bed. It was late afternoon and winter light lay in a path across the floor. There was laughter out in the hallway, a rich girl’s laugh, chest-deep and ironic, and my right shin was sore from the ankle to the knee. I closed my swollen fingers into a fist, then opened them again. My clothes lay on the floor over my work boots, and stuck to the lower legs of my corduroys were bits of glass in ketchup and blood.
It was eight or nine in the morning when Sam dropped Liz and me off at the campus gate. We’d been up all night. The sky was gray and the air was flat and cold against my skin. It was a Sunday morning, the campus quiet, steam rising from a pipe on the roof of Academy Hall. A car drove slowly down the asphalt lane through the green between the student union and library. It was a European sedan of some kind, silver. Then the rear window rolled down and Pop smiled at me. The car stopped. His father-in-law was behind the wheel, a rich businessman from New York City. He was a handsome man in his fifties or sixties, his hair combed back, and his wife sat beside him, Peggy and Pop in the back. They were going out to breakfast somewhere, and Peggy’s father nodded hello and was polite, but he looked like he wanted to get going and why did his son-in-law have to get out of the car to say hello to his son?
Pop may have seen something different