Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [121]
“Wow,” Pop said. He hugged me, said he wanted to hear more later, then he opened the rear door of his father-in-law’s expensive sedan and said, “My boy just beat the shit out of three punks downtown.”
The pride in his voice was unmistakable. And isn’t that why I’d told him? To get just that back from him? But in the side view mirror I could see his father-in-law’s expression—startled, then disapproving, then concerned: What kind of family had his daughter married into anyway? Who were these people?
Then they were gone and I was walking to Academy Hall. What did I care what this capitalist from Manhattan thought of me? My father was proud and even the cops who showed up couldn’t be happier about what we did and who we’d done it to.
Only Liz treated me differently. In the days and weeks that followed, she was still affectionate but in a guarded way, as if she’d just discovered I had a serious defect of some kind, and she wasn’t sure how much of herself she would allow to get close—not to me—but to it.
It was the wrong word, though, because it was nothing, a non-space inside me I moved through without restraints of any kind; I’d learned how to break through that invisible membrane around another’s face and head, but now there was no more barrier inside me either. It was nothing. And Liz knew what I wasn’t letting myself think about too much, that without her that night I had come so very close to kicking a man to death, a boy it turned out, a teenager like the other two, kids from the avenues where I’d roamed myself only five years earlier.
And there was revenge to think about. I’d knocked out Steve Lynch’s teeth and gotten a carload of men at our door the same night. What would come of this one? Now the story was going around campus and Ronnie D’s. Somebody started calling us “the Sambo Slayers.” It was a kind of fame.
AS THE winter deepened, I began to feel far away from myself, as if I had somehow stumbled into someone else’s life. Nothing I did from Sunday to Saturday seemed to have anything to do with me.
On the job, after months of work, we were close to finishing Trevor D.’s three-decker of new condominiums. All the finish carpentry was done, and he’d sent Doug and Jeb on to a new project two towns over while Randy and I stayed behind to paint. Trevor D. didn’t want to share his profit with a realtor, so for any tour of his property he would change out of his contractor clothes and wear shined loafers, ironed khakis, and a collared shirt under a new wool sweater. He’d be clean-shaven and attentive and charming, leading young couples from one room to the next where Randy and I might be on a stepladder rolling a final coat onto the ceiling, or else on our hands and knees brushing paint in level strokes along a baseboard. They’d walk past us as if we were not there.
I didn’t know what Randy thought of that, but it felt like the truth to me: I was not there. Or anywhere really; for a while, those early years when I began to change my body, and then later in Texas when my eyes were opened to all the cruelty down through the ages, my feet felt planted on a piece of ground with my name on it, or at least part of my name on it, and then this lengthened into a trail I’d followed, but now I was somehow in the brush, standing there surrounded by thorns I seemed to