Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [122]
At night, when I wasn’t at the gym, I still brewed tea and tried to read Weber and Marx and Engels and all the rest, but their language looked more abstract to me than ever, nearly indecipherable, and worse, irrelevant. What did Weber’s “Theory of Bureaucracy” have to do with how in a restaurant or bar now I always sat against a wall with a view of the door? What did it have to do with how unmotivated I felt in the gym? The Golden Gloves competition was weeks away, and I still trained hard under Tony Pavone; I still shadowboxed and worked the bags and sparred with whoever was around, but every time I threw a punch in the direction of another fighter’s face, I felt myself pull it a bit. I was jabbing less and getting punched more. Pavone would yell, “Set your feet and throw somethin’. Fight.” But it was like someone telling you to kiss your mother and feel excited about it; before, what had kept boxing from feeling like a fight was the absence of rage, but now I feared it would show up uninvited, and I began to wonder why I kept coming back to that dank underground room at all.
LIZ AND I were going to a movie. It was a Saturday night, and I had just driven over the Basilere Bridge and up the hill of Main Street past the statue of Hannah Duston. Liz turned to me and asked if we could stop somewhere for a pack of cigarettes. In Monument Square I pulled in front of a convenience store, left the engine and heater running, and went inside.
The floor was dirty with people’s slush and mud tracks, the overhead light fluorescent and too bright, and I was waiting my turn at the register when I saw him watching me, smiling as he walked up. He carried a carton of ice cream and a quart of Coke. I had on a sweater and a jacket, but he wore only a T-shirt, green Dickies work pants, and sneakers. He was taller than I was, lean, and his black goatee made him look sinister until he started talking in that high voice that hadn’t changed since he’d told us he was hawny in the mawnin’.
“Andre, how ya doin’, man?”
“Good, Cleary. Real good, you?”
He said he was living down in the avenues, that he was getting married soon. I said congratulations, then I was at the counter asking for a pack of Parliaments and he touched my shoulder, said to say hi to Jeb. I said I would. At the door I glanced back at him and watched him dig into his front pocket for crumpled bills. He nodded and smiled at me, winked even, and as I left the store, the cold tightening the skin on my face, I remembered the time his mother went to visit her sister in Nebraska for a whole month. I’d never understand why she went alone, why she’d leave her family like that to go off for a visit. Then someone told me it was detox she went to, some twenty-eight-day program in Boston. When I told him I knew, Cleary laughed and said, “Nah,” but he swallowed twice and walked away to do nothing in particular.
In six months Cleary would send an envelope to our father’s house on campus. Inside it would be two invitations to his wedding, one for me, and one for Jeb. We wouldn’t go.
Four more years and Cleary would be dead.
I’d hear about it after he was buried. They said his wife stabbed him in the back. That was it; she stabbed him. But a year later, I’d be working as a bartender at McMino’s Lounge on Route 110 near the Haverhill-Merrimack line and a customer from Seventh Ave would tell me what had really happened, that Cleary always thought his wife was cheating on him, that he was always beating her up. That final night he ran outside off the porch to go kill the guy he just knew she was fucking. This was down in the avenues, and he took the trail in back of his apartment house. But his wife opened his black-handled Buck knife and chased after him, screaming. She was short and small, barely five feet, and just as he reached the weeds she got to him and drove it in low, sinking the blade into his liver, snipping something called the portal artery. Cleary went down without a sound. He curled up in a heap. But his wife spent four hours at a neighbor